Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

‘Don’t be so damn silly,’ he said. ‘Of course I believe it. Facts is facts.’

‘What do you mean facts is facts?’

‘I mean what I say, mister. It’s a certainty. That’s right, ain’t it Bert?’

Bert swivelled his misty eye around in its socket and said, ‘Too bloody true it’s right.’

‘And if you face her away from the sun does it get you a male?’

‘Every single time,’ Rummins said. I smiled and he saw it. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘And when you see what I’m going to show you, you’ll bloody well have to believe me. You two stay here and watch that cow,’ he said to Claud and Bert. Then he led me into the farmhouse. The room we went into was dark and small and dirty. From a drawer in the sideboard he produced a whole stack of thin exercise books. They were the kind children use at school. ‘These is calving books,’ he announced. ‘And in here is a record of every mating that’s ever been done on this farm since I first started thirty-two years ago.’

He opened a book at random and allowed me to look. There were four columns on each page: COW’S NAME, DATE OF MATING, DATE OF BIRTH, SEX OF CALF.

I glanced down the sex column. Heifer, it said. Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer.

‘We don’t want no bull calves here,’ Rummins said. ‘Bull calves is a dead loss on a dairy farm.’

I turned over a page. Heifer, it said. Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Here’s a bull calf.’

‘That’s quite right,’ Rummins said. ‘Now take a look at what I wrote opposite that one at the time of the mating.’ I glanced at column two. Cow jumped round, it said.

‘Some of them gets fractious and you can’t hold ’em steady,’ Rummins said. ‘So they finish up facing the other way. That’s the only time I ever get a bull.’

‘This is fantastic,’ I said, leafing through the book.

‘Of course it’s fantastic,’ Rummins said. ‘It’s one of the most fantastic things in the whole world. Do you actually know what I average on this farm? I average ninety-eight per cent heifers year in year out! Check it for yourself. Go on and check it. I’m not stopping you.’

‘I’d like very much to check it,’ I said. ‘May I sit down?’

‘Help yourself,’ Rummins said. ‘I’ve got work to do.’ I found a pencil and paper and I proceeded to go through each one of the thirty-two little books with great care. There was one book for each year, from 1915 to 1946. There were approximately eighty calves a year born on the farm, and my final results over the thirty-two-year period were as follows:

Heifer calves…..............................2,516

Bull calves….......................................56

Total calves b

orn, including stillborn…........2,572

I went outside to look for Rummins. Claud had disappeared. He’d probably taken my cow home. I found Rummins in the dairy pouring milk into the separator. ‘Haven’t you ever told anyone about this?’ I asked him.

‘Never have,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘I reckon it ain’t nobody else’s business.’

‘But my dear man, this could transform the entire milk industry the world over.’

‘It might,’ he said. ‘It might easily do that. It wouldn’t do the beef business no harm either if they could get bulls every time.’

‘How did you hear about it in the first place?’