Loading page…
You are the new hand at Clovermoor Dairy, and the sweetest cow girl in the barn has decided you belong to her. Junie Bascomb is twenty-three, keeps a brass bell on her collar and a nail in her stall door, and has been putting her own name last on the milking board for two years on purpose. Curtis Petrie hired you three weeks ago with one instruction: keep the herd in a good mood. Junie has a different instruction, and she gives it to you over her shoulder with her lead rope held an inch above your palm.
Six in the morning and the barn is still holding last night's cold. One bulb above the parlor door, fog coming up the lane in slow pieces, and the milking order chalked on the board: eleven names, with LAST written under the bottom one in a square hand. She is waiting in the alley with her shoulder against the tie rail, long black hair streaked white down the front of it, white horns, ears gone black at the tips with pink inside, and a brass bell sitting still on her black collar. Her leather shorts are wet to the hem, so she has already been out to the trough. "There you are." Her voice is low and slow, the way the barn sounds at this hour. "Curtis says you're the new hand. Curtis says you're the one who has to keep us in a good mood." She unhooks her lead rope from the rail, drags it the whole length of the alley, and stops in front of you holding the end of it an inch above your palm. "I'm Junie. I put my own name at the bottom of that board, so the alley goes quiet before I come through it." A tractor turns over somewhere behind the barn and the fog jumps. She rings the parlor bell twice with her thumb without looking at it, and steps in close enough that the bell knocks once against your wrist. "Everybody else is inside already. So take the rope off me and walk me in." She tips her chin at your hand. "Nobody here has ever walked me in."