&uot;Come boss, come boss,&uot; my father would call. The call would echo along the LeSueur River. The cattle had plenty of places to hide on the Batt Ranch with woods, pasture and marsh offering intriguing hiding places for a bovine.

The cows would usually respond to my father’s hollers. That was because my father spoke fluent cow. As a boy, I would try to mimic my father’s calls.

When it came to cow calling, I was loud enough, but not good enough. Calling cows just wasn’t my calling. I guess I never sounded sincere enough. The cows could tell. If only I could have faked sincerity, I would be making big bucks today hawking schlock on TV infomercials. If only I could have fooled those cows, I would be a rich man today.

The cows let me down. The cows ignored me, much preferring my father’s voice to mine.

I have to admit that it did hurt a little. I wanted the cows to respond to my pleadings. I wanted to be an accomplished bovine bellower. The cows wouldn’t listen to me. It was nearly impossible to herd a group of cows that refused to let me be heard. After my father did his &uot;come boss&uot; routine, we would listen and soon we would hear the light tinkling of a cowbell. The cows were coming home. Dad was always much happier to see the cows than I was. Dad enjoyed milking cows. He liked to milk them twice a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. I thought that milking cows once a day was plenty and to do any more than that was just looking for work. We spent a lot of time in the barn.

Sometimes Dad would forget to tell me when chores were over and I would keep right on working. I hated it when that happened. Dad would get a country music station on the old, wooden Philco radio in the barn. Music to milk by.

Then he would remove all of the knobs from the radio and put them into his pocket so that I would be unable to change the station to one offering rock and roll. My father was a farmer. He taught me so much. I figure that he taught me the most when he didn’t even suspect that I was watching or listening. He taught me that I should never eat anywhere where I couldn’t see the cook. He believed that if you had to row the boat, you wouldn’t have the time or energy to rock it.

My father would tell me how poor he was growing up, regaling me with descriptions of delicacies from his childhood such as lard sandwiches. As a member of a large family, Dad said that he was so poor that he didn’t get to celebrate his sixth birthday until he was 18 years old. He depicted his family as being too poor to have clothes, so they put up curtains instead. My father did not answer the telephone in our house. He would use it, but he would not answer it. He didn’t like any contraption that came into his home and then rang anytime it felt like it. My father did a little farming with horses when he was a young man and liked farming with horses because the horses knew when to quit each day. He spoke horse just as well as he spoke cow. My father taught me that it was never too windy to haul rock.

To my father, life was divided into two eras &045; when the Bath Store was open and after the Bath Store had closed. Bath was a tiny village located near us that went away. Its population has bottomed out at zero.

Dad could see the world in a bale of hay or in the web of a spider. He loved the land that he was unable to farm every bit as much as the cultivated acres. My father never went on a vacation. I think that he feared that every plague mentioned in the Bible would descend upon our farm during his absence and level the barn. Dad never traveled. I guess he wanted to make it easy for God to find him when it was time.

&uot;What would I find elsewhere that I don’t have here?&uot; my father would reply when I questioned him about his lack of traveling.

Maybe my father wasn’t meant to travel? Perhaps he was destined to stay at home? Whatever the reason, it was a wise choice. Without him, the cows would never have come home.

Hartland resident Al Batt writes columns for the Wednesday and Sunday editions of the Tribune.