The day Elsie got down into the cellar.
Getting a Drunken cow out of a cellar is not as easy as you might think,
Pulling and pushing is diffidently not the way. You have to get the right
leverage on a cow to make her do anything. I even went to the public library to
find a book on the subject. What I found, was a book that said: if you have a
cow, and a cellar, be sure you have a plan to keep the two separated.
Back in those days when people had a cellar,
it was for a good reason, A place for keeping canned things that you canned
yourself, a Place to keeping potatoes and apples and such, meats and so
on. They were called preserving. People
with cellars would keep big stone pots “called crocks” where pickles and grains
were fermenting. This stuff was called “mash” used for making a alcoholic
drink. If you are not a drinker of the hard stuff, stop here and read
some-thing else.
This was usually done by the elderly men on
the family. they would gather once a year and hold an un-advertised contest,
when they would sample the product and decide who had the best drink. By the
end of the sampling, no one was able to tell who made the best stuff, so they
would all go home happy and singing.
Now Elsie had sampled this liquid and wanted
to be happy all the time. She could smell the stuff from miles away. You
couldn’t hide the juice anyplace, where she couldn’t find it. Most people had a
cellar built into the ground, under the house with stairs going down from the
outside, cover by a wooden door. It was a place that could protect the family
from bad storms and tornados.
Elsie knew that there were jugs of Home Brew
under the floor in the barn and she would try to break through the floor to get
at it. The farmer was getting pretty tired of replacing the floor boards, so he
moved the stuff up into the hay loft.
But first he took Elsie way out in the pasture, so she didn’t know where the
stuff went too, but Elsie kept searching.
Then one day there was something going on in
the barn that called for the farmer’s attention. He found Elsie had been
bumping against the pillars that held the loft up and part of the loft that had
the jugs had fallen and a few of the jugs were empty. Old Dobbin “the horse” was standing there
like he had been frozen in time. His head was held high and his tail was
standing straight up, three of his legs were stiff as steal bars and a front
leg was sticking out forward and bent down at the knee.
Elsie was just standing there looking at us
with her tail was swishing back and forth. Billy the goat, was bumping the big
wheel on the tractor, with his horns and than backing up and doing it over and
over, A hen was setting on a foot ball and singing. The farmer started to cuss
and said he was going to take Else to the Sale barn or give her away.
One evening, the family had just finished
supper and were settling down to listen to the radio, when disturbing sounds
came from out-side. Everyone went out to see what was going on and there was
Elsie jumping up and down on the cellar door,
before anyone could get to her, she broke through the cellar door and
wiped out the stairs going down. She slid into the big crock of pickles and it
broke and there were pickles everywhere.
They tried everything they could think of, to
get Elsie up and out of the cellar, they even tied a rope around her nick and
tried to pull her out with the tractor, but that didn’t work either. It was getting late, so they decided to go to
bed and try again that next morning, But
Else found the fermenting mash in another crock and decided she was going to
relax and enjoy the situation and she sang all night long.
That morning they called in the fire
department, and little did they know, that the police depart would come along
with them. Then the state police came and along come all the news people.
Crowds of people were gathering and people were every where on the farm and
getting in the way and into everything!
The Farmer was carted off to jail, for making illegal whisky.
The milk that came from Elsie couldn’t be
used, so the farmer’s wife sold Elsie to a butcher shop. The butcher done his
thing and sold the meat to people of the town and a number of old ladies said
it was the best meat they had ever tasted. No one ever knew what happened to
the chicken and the football.
We have a large picture of Elsie, standing
tall and looking very sophisticated, hanging on the wall, in our living room.
Old Dobbin, the horse died peacefully, and Billy the goat has no idea where he
is, he just stands around chewing on things.
By; Ben R.
12/05’2010.
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