I
don't know if it is the southern blood or just an overdeveloped sense
of rage when it comes to the inanimate objects and animals but he is
almost constantly doing very vocal battle with something. Most people
would consider yelling at a cow an exorcize in futility but my dad
loved to engage in some one sided verbal berating tearing down the
cows fragile ego with a flurry of well timed verbal jabs. Every
morning about daybreak he would go out and fight with the cow and get
her untangled from the rope and harness that was used to keep her in
the weeds and out of the road. You would hear him start in with some
'Oh, yes you're tangled up because you always want to be tangled up'
and on an on in a non-stop chatter. One morning we heard the normal
chatter interrupted by a a yelp of pain and rage from my dad and
then in a few seconds a moo of the same meaning. We ran outside to
see what was the matter and my dad and the cow were both bleeding
from their respective heads and my dad was threatening to kill her
and butcher her right then and there. When he calmed down enough to
tell my mom what had happened we learned that he was freeing the
cow's head from entanglement and when she got free she flipped her
head to the side and cut his temple. He then took his normal
non-physical confrontation to the next level of violence with the aid
of a 3/4” steel pipe. He had hit her hard in the head with the pipe
bending it in the middle. The cow had a small cut but looked no worse
for it. My dad's head was bleeding profusely and he was still really
mad. He went in for some doctoring and I was charged with
disentanglement of the cow. Which I did without commentary and with
my head well clear of the action – that is why we have parents so
we can learn from their mistakes.
