Incident of the Cows in the Night Time

The dairy farm just east of Three Points probably shut down around the time I entered Mrs. Hemingway’s kindergarten at United Day School in 1954.

Before the farm closed though, it had a regular problem with its herd escaping.

Our house on the still-unpaved Garfield Street, two blocks from Lamar Jr. High, was visited more than once by the dairy cows wandering loose.

My parents were not amused.

Mom and Dad both grew up in Port Arthur, but on different sides of the tracks. My mother’s father was a business manager, and the Coleman family’s house was in the better part of town. My other grandfather worked at the Texas Co. refinery, and the Clouse’s lived in a modest place over on the edge of town where they could keep a milk cow, chickens, and feed four sons from a quarter-acre vegetable garden.

As a boy, Dad had to chase “Bossie” the milk cow down Port Arthur streets, when she got off her stake.

Mom was fastidious and hated the smell of farm animals. She avoided imagining the turd-filled barnyards where all those chickens, hams, and roasts she cooked for us came from. The rich organic route from udders, to creamery, to bottles of milk she poured in my glass was not to be imagined. For her, just thinking about the messy details of food provenance made her want to wash her hands.

That’s part of why the wandering cows on our lawn were such a problem.

The other part was that the pasture breaks were at night.

One midnight with a full moon and clear skies, I woke up in my bed next to the screened window open to any night breeze that might keep the room cool enough to sleep in.

There was a noise outside.

A rustle, heavy breathing, chewing sounds. Not scary. Just unidentifiable.

I pushed my face up to the screen to see what it was.

Out there in the bright moonlight was a milk cow pulling up and chewing the grass in Dad’s beautifully maintained lawn. She was looking at me with that big, sad eye, completely indifferent to the sleepy boy on the other side of a screen.

Then the inevitable plop. Plop, plop.

It must have been the methane that woke up Mom in the bedroom down the hall.

I could hear her stirring, “Lester. Lester! Lester, there’s something out there in the yard!”

He knew what it was and, not wanting to lose any more of the precious lawn or having any more cow pies to clean up than there were already, he threw on his bathrobe and dashed out the front door. By that time, the cow had opted for larger open spaces than the narrow one between my bedroom and the Fishers’ garage.

From the front of the house I could see that there were at least five cows in the Garfield St. dirt and on the neighborhood lawns.

The surrealism of the scene was that were also three other men besides Dad out there, all in pajamas, some of them jumping around in the bright moonlight like lunatics. Literally.

No one wanted the damn cows or their mess in his front yard.

Mr. Darnell, the neighbor from across the street, was brandishing a broom and yelling.

My playmate Roberta Pegues’ dad, Scotty, a ranch manager, was cool-headed enough to just stand there staring the cows back out into the street. Maybe it was also the cowboy hat we was wearing with his pajamas, something the other fathers had neither the habit nor presence of mind to grab in the rush to get out the door.

Over on the corner of Garfield and Martin Avenue, Rev. Cecil Harper, the pastor at Heights Baptist Church, was an adept of the whistling arts, and it was ear-splitting.

Dad’s tactic was to lunge at the poor cows with waving arms, growling noises, and a run-amok grimace, whenever they looked likely to head back on to our lawn.

This went on until the cows had been herded off the lawns, down the street, and into the interrupted sleep of other families down the street.

The next morning, I watched Dad shovel up the turds by my window and bury them in the compost pile in the corner of the back yard.

There were several replays of the wandering cows on Garfield, but none was ever again as strange a sight to behold.

Years later, as I watched an old black-and-white Buñuel movie in a college film festival with a surreal scene shot in “day for night” technique, I remembered in crystal clarity that vision of four grown-up men and five cows prancing around in the moonlight.

By then I knew what the word surrealism meant, but I’d experienced it already, one night in a Laredo with unpaved streets that is now long gone, except in an old boy’s memory.