Five Deacons and a Cow on the Fourth of July

From Stories from Jones Farm
Copyright July 1993

[Part 2]

                “Your dad is out in the fields with the wrecker again looking for Max,” Mom announced.  “The kids might as well start setting the table, but there’s no point in putting ice in his glass yet.”

We gazed out the kitchen window to try to spot Dad.  He had stopped the wrecker beside a crumpled mass about two hundred yards from the pond closest our house.  Mom took over the stove, while I ran down into the field to Dad.  I ran back as fast as I could.  

“It isn’t Max,” I gasped, “but it’s a cow due to have a calf in the fall.  She’s probably had a heat stroke.  We need Doug and Ed.” 

Campbell hurried to the phone to call our vet, Doug Woolsey, and to apologize profusely for bothering him again on a holiday—the cows seemed to never have emergencies on regular weekdays.  Also, he called my cousin Ed Sensabaugh, who always helped Dad on the farm.  When Ed arrived, he “brought the Cavalry.”  Ed and Dad were volunteer firemen whose fire truck was always parked in Dad’s Texaco garage, Jones Bros., in front of Baileyton Elementary School.  Ed also brought another fireman, Bobby Tweed.  Soon they were hosing down the cow with water from the fire truck and trying to revive her by pumping water through a hose into her mouth.

While our two older kids, Alice at 13 and Nick at 12, stood close by Mom’s elbows as she dropped the corn-on-the-cob into boiling water, Erin, our youngest at eleven, begged to go back to the field with me.  By the time I got back to Dad, all three kids had run ahead of me to see what was going on.  Doug arrived only minutes later.  He and his family had been celebrating the Fourth with his parents, whose farm was only a few miles away.  I remember that Doug gave the cow five different medicines that day.  One was an antibiotic and one was an antipyretic—something to put out the “fire.”  The cow’s fever had gone to an impossible 109.3 degrees, and Doug warned us that neither she nor the calf were likely to survive.  Also, if she survived, she might never be “right in the head” again.  The temperature of 109 sounded more like the position of the mercury on the thermometer in our carport or, unfortunately, like the serving temperature of hamburgers. 

While Nick and Alice stayed with Dad, Erin and I walked back towards the house to tell Mom how the cow was doing.  We looked back at the scene as we reached the gate. 

“Look, Mom,” Erin said.  “The trucks even look like the Fourth of July!”  Sure enough, the fire truck was red, of course; Dad’s wrecker was white, and Doug’s truck was dark blue.