Growing Up Grandpa

Grandfather and the Cheese Factory Grandfather was dead in his coffin. I saw him. He wore a white shirt and his big beard spread out all over it. His eyes were closed like he was asleep. But everyone said he was dead. I knew that dead was like a bird that my brother had shot, first warm and soft then later cold and stiff. But it didn’t seem like that with Grandfather. It looked like he was asleep. I remember seeing him only one other time. We were driving to the cheese factory in Dad’s 1936 Chev utility with a load of milk in cans. Dad let me ride with him sometimes, not often, but sometimes. I don’t know why Grandfather was there. He never came before. He didn’t live with us. He had an old house just across from the school about a mile and a half away. I didn’t know what a mile and a half was, but that’s what everyone said. I had never been in Grandfather’s house, but I saw it from the school when I went there for the picnic day when my brother and sister ran in the school races. I was too small to run much and sometimes I had asthma and couldn’t breathe too good. This day when Grandfather came to the cheese factory I stood in the middle of the seat with the gear lever sticking up out of the floor in front of me. Dad was a big man and he squeezed in behind the steering wheel smelling of cows and fresh milk from the morning’s milking. Grandfather was old and breathing heavily as he climbed in next to me on the other side. Mum had dressed me in my blue overalls and combed my long curly hair before she sent me up from the house to the cow bails to go to the cheese factory with Dad and Grandfather. Grandfather looked at me through his round wet eyes above his long shaggy grey beard and said to Dad, “Is it a boy or a girl?” I don’t ever remember Grandfather Berghofer saying anything else in my life. Now he was dead in his coffin and he seemed to be asleep. It was hot and stuffy in that room where he was and there were a lot of other people there, mostly my aunts and uncles. Dad told me there were fourteen children in his family. That’s more than ten, so it’s a big number. He was number seven, I think. Grandfather must have had a lot of grandchildren so maybe that was why he didn’t know who I was and whether I was a boy or a girl. I liked going to the cheese factory. There were always a few other farmers there unloading their milk cans and pouring the frothy white milk into the big vat inside, then getting their cans back and filling some of them with smelly whitish green whey for their pigs. I would get out of the ute and watch everything going on. The other farmers were always cheerful at that time in the morning. They grinned at me out of sunburnt faces and sometimes poked me and ruffled my curly hair with their rough hands. I was usually the only kid around. I suppose all the others had gone to school, like my brother, Gordon, and sister, Gloria – except for my younger sister, Val, who was too small and stayed home with Mum. I would wander around inside the factory. I didn’t really know how things worked. There were big paddles moving the milk around and somehow white lumps of curds would collect in another big vat. I suppose it was something like the way we made butter at home. That was my job. Mum would pour fresh cream into the butter churn. Dad had skimmed the cream off the top of the milk in the milk cans that morning from last night’s milking. The butter churn was round and silver coloured and made of steel like a space ship. There was a paddle inside for the cream to slosh against as the churn went round and round. I would put the churn onto its stand where there was a handle that I could turn and make the churn spin round and round. I would pretend it was a spaceship taking off from Earth and traveling through space. I could make it go faster and faster the harder I turned and we would whiz crazily past the moon and all the stars in the sky until my arms were about to fall off from the turning. Then suddenly would come the slosh, slosh, slosh of the lumps of butter that had somehow come out of the cream and left behind the thin watery butter milk. That was the end of the space travel and I would take the churn inside to Mum who would put the butter into a bowl and squeeze all of the butter milk out of it with a wooden spoon. I suppose it was something like that for the cheese, too, except they must have done something different to get cheese curds instead of lumps of butter. And they didn’t have any spinning churns that I remember. That would really have been something to see – a giant spinning churn like a real space ship. But that wasn’t how they did it. The man who knew all the secrets was the manager of the factory. He was a big friendly man with a cheerful face and not much hair. Dad called him Jock. I called him Mr. Rosenberger. He told me they squeezed all the milk and stuff out of the cheese curds and let it go hard inside round molds. Then they would take it out of the molds and set it in blocks of different sizes on racks in the cheese room. All the blocks were covered in red rind and stamped with a special stamp that said Rockview Cheese Factory. We always had a lot of it at home. I didn’t like it much, but Dad said it was the best cheese you could get. The cheese room was cool and dark with all those big blocks of cheese on the racks. I think it would have been a better place for Grandfather to be lying in his coffin than that other stuffy place. I suppose it would have been a surprise for Mr. Rosenberger to come in and find him there. But it would have been better for Grandfather. Much more peaceful and cool for him to rest.