The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online

collars our old workhorses used to wear. They’d been retired back when I was very little, but my father always said they deserved to live out their days in the home they started out in and the pastures they knew.
    First off we headed to the feed supplies. This would be when my father might at last look up at me and nod. “You want to lend a hand here, Ruthie?” he said.
    One by one then, we fed the animals—my father up ahead, and me, his eager helper following behind. Wordlessly, my father forked the silage into a wheelbarrow, then worked his way down the rows, making sure every cow got her share. I followed along, trying to whistle the way he did. I’d use my hoe to gather up the manure and then scrape it into the gutter, which ran the length of the barn, where we collected it.
    As I worked I loved to think about how connected everything was on our farm—that the hay and silage our cows were munching had been grown here on our land, and that the manure the cows would create, from eating it, would ripen and be returned to that same land come spring, to fertilize the soil and start the process all over again.
    While the cows were eating my father did the milking. My job: filling a bucket with a mix of water and disinfectant for wiping down the udders of each of our four cows—two Guernseys, two Holsteins—to keep them healthy. And sometimes, if I finished before my father, I climbed up into the prized Model T Ford he kept in the barn, and sat behind the steering wheel, pretending to drive.
    My father said we didn’t need a fancy milking setup. The old-fashioned way was good enough. He’d lower his long frame onto a three-legged stool, with his forehead leaned against the cow’s flank and his fingers rhythmically working the teats, with a bucket below to catch the warm stream of milk and our old barn cat, Susan, waiting expectantly for her share. Her reward, my father said, for keeping the mouse population in check.
    After we finished in the barn, we headed out to the truck and began our rounds of the farm. From his silence, you would have thought he didn’t even know I was there, except he’d never start the ignition until I’d climbed up beside him and Sadie, on the seat of his old Dodge truck. On the dashboard he kept his farm log, in which he recorded every day’s observations of rainfall and weather conditions and planting data—with comments like “Poor resistance to bottom rot. Plant in drier ground next time” or “Too much leaf, not enough yield. Don’t use again.”
    We made our stops like milkmen—checking in on the cabbages in one field, the carrots next, to see what rows needed weeding or thinning that day, and what crops were ready for harvest. My father always kept a bucket of clippers and knives on the floor for cutting broccoli or cabbage or lettuce when they were ready. Sometimes I’d munch on a carrot he pulled for me as we worked.
    We hardly ever talked on those mornings, or if we did, it was just a few words. Mostly he worked in silence, or whistled. But I loved those times withmy father, when I had him all to myself. I waited for the end of his long workday to come, when we’d head to the irrigation pond and take a swim—my father in his shorts, me in my underwear, our two pairs of shoes (his heavy boots and my Keds) lined up along the shore, side by side.
    My sisters never liked the water, but I was a fish, he said. So he taught me how to hold my breath underwater, and do the crawl, and then, the summer I turned seven or eight, how to dive off the big granite boulder at the far end of the pond. He said I had the build of a diver, meaning the same build as him.
    After, we’d head up to the house for dinner with the family. My mother must have noticed our wet hair, but she never made a comment, though I sensed a certain edge of disapproval. She was afraid of the water and kept her distance from the pond, same as my sisters did. Swimming belonged to my father and me alone. The