Well, we had done all we could that afternoon although I was still wondering about the bobwhite whistle and the turtledove call. We talked that over while we were still at the spring and decided that maybe it was the way the man and his wife had of calling to each other—a sort of code or something—like we ourselves had. Whenever he wanted to call her, he could use the quail call and she could answer it by cooing like a turtledove. If that was the meaning of it, it was kinda nice and it showed that even married people could have fun together like my own mom and pop do a lot of times, in fact almost every day.
8
AT the supper table at our house that night I think I had never heard Mom and Pop laugh so hard as they did. I was still thinking about the warble flies that had scared the living daylights out of Dragonfly’s pop’s cows, I having told them all about it, crowding my words out between bites, and I was sorta crowding the bites in too fast and shouldn’t have, when Pop said, “The heel flies are pretty bad this year. Nearly every farmer in Sugar Creek has been complaining about them. They have been tormenting Old Brindle something fierce today. I don’t dare turn her out into the pasture without leaving the gate into the barnyard open so she can come rushing back in for the protection of the shade anytime she wants to.”
“Speaking of cows,” Mom said, and her voice sorta lit up like her face does when she has thought of something very interesting or funny. “I read something in a farm magazine today that was about the funniest thing I ever read in my life.”
“What was it?” Pop said.
“Yes, what was it?” I said.
Pop and Mom were always reading things in magazines and telling them to each other and I didn’t always get in on their jokes. Sometimes I had to ask them what they were laughing about and it didn’t always seem as funny to me as it did to them. They also talk to each other about things that are not funny—things they have just that day learned about something in the Bible or something they have studied for next Sunday’s Sunday School lesson.
“I’ll get it and read it for you,” Mom said. She excused herself, left the table, went into the other room and came back with a small magazine. “It’s a ten-year-old school girl’s essay on a cow,” Mom said.
Even before she started reading it I wasn’t sure I was going to like it because I am kinda close to being a ten-year-old boy myself and I could imagine what a ten-year-old girl would write on a cow.