I didn’t grow up on a farm, though we were out in the country. We didn’t have animals outside of our dogs, and at one point, some guinea fowl and chickens (another story altogether). But that didn’t mean we could escape the occasional cattle drive with Papa and MarMar.
Mom would drag all of us kids out of bed at 6:30 in the morning on a Saturday and pack us into the car to help Papa move the cows from the pasture around his house down around the mile section to another homestead that had been in the family since before Oklahoma was a state. I always got stuck on the corner and was told to keep the cows from going into the front yard of the family that lived there. How they expected a teen girl to do this, I’ll never know. But luckily, I never had to do more than stand there with my arms spread out and watch as the cows lazily turned the corner.
My mother, bless her, was not so lucky the first time she was stuck there. I wasn’t there, but this is how the story was told to me.
Mom was standing in the front yard, waiting for the cows to come around the corner following Papa in his white pickup truck. Most likely in a pair of jean shorts and a t-shirt. I’m sure her dark brown hair would have been held back in a low ponytail. She probably had makeup. Anyone who knew my mother knew she never left the house without being completely put together.
She stood there for awhile waiting for the cows, until finally there was the crunching of hooves on gravel just under the engine of a pick-up truck.
Mom said that when they turned the corner, she was suddenly faced with almost a hundred cows (I’m a bit dubious). They were starting to head to the yard. Frantic, Mom shouted out the first thing that came to her mind.
“Soo cow! Soo cow!” There was jumping and waving of her arms as she shouted. She had heard Papa yell it at the cows when out in the pasture and assumed it meant something along the lines of “Don’t come here!” Instead of turning the cows away, they all started moving straight at her.
Freaking out would be putting it lightly. Mom began jumping more frantically and yelling “Soo cow!” more loudly, which made them come more quickly. At that moment, it was my tiny mother staring down a horde of hungry cows. I’m sure she probably saw her life flash before her eyes, even though she was never the dramatic type.
Her savior came in the form of my grandmother, MarMar, on a four-wheeler. She started yelling at the cows and got them out of the yard back on the dirt road towards the other pasture, quietly falling back in line behind the pick-up.
“What did you think you were doing, yelling ‘Soo cow’at them?” she said as she pulled up next to Mom.
“I heard Lee Roy say it in the pasture and thought it would get them to move away.”
“Shelly, that’s what he says when he feeds the cows to get them to come up to the feeder.”
Mom stood there dumbstruck as MarMar laughed. “Wait until I tell Lee Roy and Pete.” I tend to think that’s why I got stuck on corner duty from that point on, instead of my mother. Bless her, she would try, but Mom was never really a farm girl. She could do amazing things in our garden and her flowerbeds, but cows?
Not Mom’s forte, that’s for sure.