Free The Harrows of Spring by James Howard Kunstler

thick when they were new. She loved the animal fragrance that seemed to carry the memory of every horse and cow that ever lived there.
    The back of the barn opened up to a third-of-an-acre fenced paddock that had once been a shady lawn in Denny and Marge’s day, scene of barbecues and children playing ringolevio in the summer twilight. Most of the big maples had since been cut down for firewood and to allow the grass to grow better in the paddock for Cinnamon to graze on. Evenings, Cinnamon also got some hay, which was stored in the loft.
    Robert had made considerable improvements to the building in the year that Sarah and Britney came to dwell with him. He replaced the sill atop the stone foundation on the north side of the structure. He rebuilt the milking stall, replaced the stall gate and the rolling door to the paddock, and removed decades of miscellaneous clutter from the unused stalls and the loft. He put a salvaged three-sash diamond-paned window (to match the one in the door) in the milking stall now that the electricity appeared to be out for good. It admitted more daylight and made milking and caretaking much easier.
    Robert had tricked out one of the other three stalls as a chicken coop, with a small hatch door to an exterior pen covered in salvaged chicken wire to keep the skunks and opossums out. They generally kept four laying hens there along with as many as twenty meat birds, which Britney and Sarah raised for trade as well as for their own table. The barn was on the village water system, gravity fed from a reservoir on the shoulder of Pumpkin Hill. It was the gift that kept on giving, though the purification system no longer operated and had to be bypassed.
    Cinnamon was a 950-pound, fawn-brown, five-year-old Jersey cow. On her diet, she gave about two gallons of milk a day. She had been “freshened”—bred to produce offspring—sixteen months ago and was still milking reliably. Her calf had been weaned and sold. Sarah was told not to name the calf because Robert and Britney did not want her to become too attached to it. But she named it Cleo after a friend who died in the encephalitis epidemic, and it was hard on Sarah when they sold her. They didn’t have the means or the need to keep two cows, and good livestock was in short supply these years directly after the collapse of the old economy.
    This evening, Sarah entered the barn on the Salem Street side and passed through the churchlike interior to the sliding door and the paddock. Cinnamon looked up, seemed to be glad to see her, and began walking toward the barn. Cinnamon knew that it was time to be milked and was eager to feel more comfortable. Sarah gave the chickens some cracked corn while she waited.
    Cinnamon came directly to her stall and turned around facing a manger where Sarah had placed a flake of hay. She put a halter on Cinnamon’s head and clipped the end of the lead line to an iron ring on a nearby post. Then she filled a plastic pail at the standing faucet in the aisle outside the stall and wiped down Cinnamon’s udder with a wet rag, which got specks of manure off and massaged the teats to let the milk down. Next, she squirted each teat twice onto the floor to get any old liquid out of the way. Her three-legged stool was made by Robert, with a heart-shaped seat. Her milking bucket was stainless steel, with a lid, the sort of thing that might never be manufactured again. Cinnamon was an exceptionally calm and gentle cow and cooperated with every step of the procedure. While Sarah milked, squeezing the teats alternately with both hands, she sang a song that Robert had been teaching her called “The Blackest Crow,” a traditional Appalachian ballad in a minor key that was sad and beautiful and grown-up sounding. She sang her harmony part as a shaft of low evening sunlight beamed through the window into the stall.
    The blackest crow that ever flew would surely turn to white
    If ever I prove false to you