Part 7
The feeding therapist was named Carla. She came on Tuesday with a bag of bottles and nipples sorted by size into plastic bins, the way Owen sorted fittings for the milk lines.
The first time she let Owen try, he took the bottle and settled Sam into the crook of his arm without being shown. He tilted the baby upright, touched the nipple to his lower lip, and waited for the mouth to open. Carla raised her eyebrows.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Calves,” Owen said. “About four thousand of them.”
“Okay.” She sat back. “Then I’m going to teach you to do it wrong.”
Carla didn’t need him to explain what he was doing wrong: a calf you pushed. You held the bottle high, let gravity do the work, and kept the calf on it until the milk was gone, because a calf that drank slowly lost its place at the bucket and then lost weight.
Sam couldn’t do that. He would suck three, four, five times, then forget to breathe, and his eyes would go wide and a little gray around the mouth. So you watched. When he stopped breathing to suck, you tipped the bottle down until the milk drained out of the nipple. You let him rest with it still in his mouth and waited for him to start again. You didn’t jiggle it or coax him. You didn’t look at the clock.
“Whose job is it to decide when he’s ready?” Carla asked, the third time Owen tipped the bottle back up too soon.
“His,” Owen said.
“Then let him.”
For a week Jess was faster at it than he was, then slower for a week, and then they were about the same. At some feedings Sam took ten milliliters by mouth and the rest went down the tube. At some he took twenty. One evening, with Owen holding the bottle and Jess holding her breath, he took thirty-one. Carla wrote the number on the whiteboard with three exclamation points and said she’d deny it if anyone asked.
Gil came up on his day off in the third week, in his plow truck, with a bag of maple candy from the sugarhouse on the Bayley road. The hospital had put a letter in his file over the dog. He said he’d been written up for worse once, for parking in the CEO’s spot. He stood by the bassinet with his hands in his jacket pockets for a long time.
“Your heifer,” he said finally. “She’s milking good.”
Sam came home on the nineteenth day, the tube still taped to his cheek, with a feeding schedule in a binder with color-coded tabs. Owen drove. Jess sat in the back beside the car seat the whole way down the interstate and onto Route 5, one finger in Sam’s fist.
Walt had Rudy waiting in the dooryard.
The dog came down the porch steps at a walk, not a run, and stopped at the car door. When Owen lifted the car seat out, Rudy stood up on his hind legs, just once, put his nose to the edge of the blanket, and breathed in. Then he dropped back down and followed them up the steps and into the kitchen, close enough to bump Owen’s legs, past the woodstove and the bassinet with the striped blanket folded in it.
Owen set the car seat on the kitchen table. Rudy circled twice and lay down between the table and the door, his back to the family and his face to the yard, chin up, ears loose. Owen had seen him lie that way in the barn door on calm nights in May, when every cow was down and chewing and nothing was coming that he needed to stop.
In March Walt hired a second man, a quiet fellow from over in Danville who’d milked in New York for ten years, and the two of them took the four o’clock milking. Owen took the four o’clock feeding. Jess had written the schedule out by hand and taped it to the refrigerator right over Gil’s number, and in every four a.m. square she had printed OWEN in block capitals, the way she addressed a package she meant to arrive. He went out to the barn after the feeding, at six, or sometimes seven.
The kitchen was dark except for the light over the stove. Across the dooryard the parlor lights were on. Faintly through the storm windows, Owen could hear the vacuum pump running, the cows shifting in the holding pen, and Walt telling one of them what he thought of her. Jess was upstairs, asleep, working on her first four straight hours in a week. Rudy lay across the doorway with his back to them.
Sam took four swallows, then five, then went still with the nipple in his mouth, his eyes wide and fixed on Owen’s face. Owen tipped the bottle down until the milk drained back out of the nipple. He didn’t look at the clock on the stove. He didn’t look at the barn.
He held the bottle where it was and waited. After a while, on his own, his son began again.