Patriarch story: Milking Goats



My family, the Medvedev family, has moved around a lot. I do not know where our family originally hailed from, but I do know that we have lived in Irkutsk and Samara, before my parents finally found the city of Sochi on the Black Sea. The Medvedevs are nomads – they always have been, never staying in one city for more than one hundred years. Others may say that one hundred years is a long time to live in a city, but consider our situation – we live in Russia during the early 1800’s – there’s still a Czar, countless people are poor, the weather is unforgiving, and nobody has leftover energy to uproot themselves and –

“Pavlo? Stop your chain of useless thoughts and come help me milk the cows, you big lump!”

That was Olga Alexeyev, my sweet, beautiful wife who speaks the very words of angels.

“Pavlo? You get right down here you swine –”

“Coming,” I called back. I heaved myself out of my office chair – boy, was I getting old – and walked outside. The crisp autumn air hit me like a slap to the face – even a Black Sea resort town could be as cold as St. Petersburg in January.

“Who are we milking today? Kostya, Alonya, or Nadya?” I asked her, finding her standing by the cows’ shack.

 Others may ask why we do not hire servants to do the work, considering how rich we are. The only one who can properly milk a cow died, so we were left to do the milking ourselves.

 “Neither of those, you oaf! We sold Kostya and Alonya at market, and Nadya died a few months back. Geez, you are getting old.” She snorted. “Instead I thought you’d milk Misha and Sasha. Are you alright with that?” she stared at me. It was more a command than a question.

 I sighed inwardly. She knew how much I hated milking the younger cows. They always ran away when I tried to, and their constant snorting and stomping annoyed me. They were rude, they were disgusting, they always spat and –

 “Try not to let them fall on you this time,” said Olga, “I’ve already had to mend 23,432 broken bones, and your leg is still healing from the last time.”

 Just what I was getting to – they always broke a bone (or several bones) of mine whenever I tried to milk them.

 I approached the cow pen, which stank from… dung. We really should put them on diets, but we never do. Plus, or pen cleaner was lazier than I was, and I’m pretty lazy, so the … dung builds up pretty quickly.

 Once I got inside, I found that all the cows were gone and the pens were completely empty – aside from the rapidly growing colony of mutant spiders living at the far end, and a few hundred tons of… dung.

 “Olga, where did the cows go?” I called to her.

 “They should be there,” came her irritated reply, “you probably need glasses and can’t see them. How many times have I told you to see the city’s eye doctor? A million?”

 “Actually you’ve told me 2,308,302,482,304 times, but whatever. They really aren’t here! I would hear them snorting and stomping like the crazed she-demons they are!”

 “I think you need to get a hearing aid, you lazy swine of –” she cut off when she got inside. “Oh my swine of a husband they’re gone!”

 “I told you, but maybe you need to see a counselor about your listening –”

 “Please close your foul swine of a mouth!” Olga raged.

 “What’s with you and –”

 “We need to do something!” she screamed in my ear.

 “… Now I really think I do need a hearing aid,” I said, rubbing my ear in pain.

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> “I don’t care! What should we do?”

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> “…We could always milk the goats,” I said, shrugging.

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> Olga looked like a volcano about to blow her top. She often looked like that. She had that face when I threw all the china her mother gave her into the Black Sea because I was annoyed that her mother drank all my Vodka. Now that was something I could never forget – it was too funny.

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> Olga took a deep breath, and said, “We could milk the goats.” I have to credit her for the amount of self-control it must have taken her to not run me over with her ‘prized’ riding horse Ilikevodka (I – lick- ev – ode – kah). She hates goat milk with a passion similar to her mother’s passion for vodka – did I mention that Ilikevodka originally belonged to her mother?

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> We walked over to the goats, who were grazing in a beautiful meadow far cleaner than the junky cows pen. My wife put down her bucket and began milking Ihatemilk (I- hat – em – ilk), another of her mother’s old pets.

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> I dropped my own under Olga Twin, an old, fat goat that my mother-in-law gave to us, and I guarantee you, she named it, not me.

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> Olga Twin was a pretty fussy goat, and I learned that day that she hated being milked just about as much as Misha and Sasha. When I began to milk, she bellowed like a warrior and kicked the bucket out from under her. She began to attack me with her horns and began screaming what I took as foul words in the tongue of the goat at me. I got up on my feet quickly and darted down the slopes, but I was much slower than that fat old goat. Unfortunately for me, she rammed into my legs, causing me to topple over onto the grass. She gathered her horns under me and threw me into the sky.

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> “Pavlo!” Olga screamed. I was glad to know she cared about me being flung off to who knows where.

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> I flew for quite awhile (five seconds) before I landed in a thorn bush, sore, beaten, and bruised. Today was a pretty bad day for me – I had received twenty broken bones in attempt to milk an animal – a new record!

<p style="text-indent:.5in"> Perhaps I should mention that neither Olga nor I had ever tried to milk Olga Twin before.