My hair was still bristling with tangles and I was literally rubbing the sleep out of my eyes when the phone rang. It was mama. “Mimi, the bull’s out.”
If you know much about cows… if you’ve ever stood next to a cow… if you’ve ever even driven by a cow, you now that they’re large animals. And when any large animal gets out of the fence and onto the highway, the situation can get dangerous pretty quickly. So, when word comes down that “the cows are out,” folks around here move fast.
I come from a long line of cow-chasers. My parents did it. I know my grandparents did it… and I’m fairly certain those that “went before” also engaged in that particular pastime. When we came back to Carrollton in the early ‘70s our family ran a cattle farm. And on a rare occasion, cows got out. We were usually notified by passing neighbors who stopped by the house. Usually in the early morning. I don’t know why, but it seems like cows always get out in the early morning. Guess they like to get a jump on their day.
So, whenever mama heard somebody banging on the front door, yelling, “your cows are out,” she’d jump out of bed and head for the kitchen where the bell hung. It was the “cows are out” bell, only sounded in real cases of emergency. Well, she’d start cranking on that bell and upstairs feet started hitting the floor. All the kids put pants and coats over our PJs and flew down the stairs, hopping into our shoes as we went.
Lastly, we’d grab a stick. Sticks were a very important part of cow chasing. They could make you look a little bigger and scarier when two tons of thundering beef were headed right for you. And it most always worked. I can remember my brother Bill, a little bitty boy, sloshing along in mama’s big black rubber barn boots, carrying a cow stick twice as tall as he was, holding his own against an obstinate old cow. Cows weren’t really that dangerous, they were just clumsy and not very bright. Of course, there was always the crazy cow with the mean streak. Nobody ever stood in front of her. We just sort of let her do her own thing.
But eventually, after much plodding and trotting through the dewy grass, we’d herd the cows together and get them back into the fence. Then we’d settle into a quiet existence as cow-feeders and cow-counters. But mama stood ever at the ready to ring that bell and turn us into cow-chasers again. (Which she did on more that one April 1st occasion, sending us vaulting down the stairs before we remembered what day it was.)
This impulse remained strong, even when we were grown and had moved away. One Christmas we came home with some visiting out-of-town relatives. The cows got out. Mama rang the bell and all her grown kids sprang like greyhounds out of their beds. Our befuddled guests stuck their heads out into the hall, scratching sleepily, wondering where we were going in our pajamas. And we didn’t stick around long enough to tell them.
So, this morning the bell was ringing again. The telephone bell. The neighbor’s bull was out. So I sprang into action, squeezing into my shoes as I pulled out of the driveway. I topped the hill and saw blue lights flashing. Someone had called 911 and the sheriff’s car was there. The whole family showed up, at least the ones that were home, and we all plunged headlong into the fray. The bull ran up the road. We ran up the road. He ran down the road. We ran down the road. He tore through the roadside privet hedge like a freight train. We stood on the bank and waited. Cars slowed, cautioned by the blue lights and puzzled by our strange behavior.
At this point, the bull was running behind the bushes and out of sight of the road. I wonder if any passers-by looked at my frazzled morning hair and baggy sweats and wondered if perhaps I had escaped from a loony bin…and that the rest of the good folks that were trotting along behind me were trying to catch me.
But then the bull burst out of the privet hedge and everybody understood. They knew we were trying to stop a ton of Big Macs before it ran all the way to Villa Rica.
At this point a wise young man in an old red truck recognized our distress signals and moved quickly to help. He pulled into the driveway across the street, creating a barrier in front of the trotting bull. The big beast swung to the right, veering into the yard, away from the road, toward the hole in the fence where he’d made his great escape. He slithered through and then grazed peacefully on the other side while all us humans stood around holding our sides and huffing.
At that moment, we all remembered the bad thing about cow chasing…when the adrenaline stops flowing and the knees started aching, we realized exactly how old we were… and on second thought, it was probably a bad idea to fling ourselves in front of a quick-moving bovine. But that’s what happens when that bell starts ringing.
Mimi Gentry can be read every Thursday in the Times Georgian.