The Good son

On the day he was supposed to leave the farm and go to college, Bobby's mother came into his room at 4 a.m. and turned on the light.

Bobby knew what the white glare meant. It was a bugle call, his mother's way of saying something bad had happened, she needed help, time for the new man of the house to get up.

He didn't wash his face or mess with his hair or even look at himself in the mirror. Bobby Stiles wasn't that kind of teen-ager. He kept his hair stubble-short, and he owned only one nice pair of tennis shoes for the nights he drove into town to hang out with friends. He saved his money for a gleaming Dodge Ram and for college.

Bobby found his work shoes by the door, where he left them when he came in from the milking parlor. They were big shoes, bigger than his father's, and like all the pairs parked around the door mat, they smelled of manure. He stepped into them without a second thought.

The sky overhead was black, and there was only the familiar light of a halogen moon above the barn to guide him across the carport toward the field.

If his father had not been so sick, Bobby would have still been in bed. Bobby's mother had seen the calves on her way to the morning milki ng, when she'd stopped at the fence and searched with a flashlight. She'd come back inside and told Bobby, but he'd been so groggy that only a piece of what she said had stayed with him: " ... we got a cow calf having troubles."

He was a toddler the first time he helped birth a calf, and over the years he had helped birth so many that the details swam together into a pool of knowledge uncommon for a boy of 17. Twins, he knew, were a problem. Carrying two and delivering two were hard on the mother cow, and the calves were often deformed. Some might appear OK, but inside they lacked necessary parts, or the parts they had did not work. Other farmers might put them out of their misery with the broad end of a shovel, but Bobby could never do that. His parents taught him to value life, any life, and above all, to treat the cows with respect, as if they were kindly aunts. His mother Janet often said: "We're cow people. Cows are about the second most important thing around here."

Family, of course, was the first.

In the field, when the flashlight found the twins a second time, Bobby could see one was upright and standing, but the other lay flat on the ground.

He had raised enough hogs for the 4-H auctions that he knew how a healthy animal should look. He had seen enough of life and death to understand that one sometimes looked like the other.

Bobby thought one calf was dead. From the look of them - their mother had not yet licked off the pearly sheen that glistened in the flashlight's glare - he knew they were no more than a few hours old. One calf moved, but not the other.

Up close, Bobby studied the animal. Then he saw it, life rising and falling in its chest, steady and unmistakable.

Bobby helped his mother load the twins into the six-wheel Ranger they had bought after his father became too weak to climb onto the old four-wheeler. In Bobby's arms the sick calf felt as limp as cloth. Back across the field they drove, over the gravel driveway, into the barn.

Soon, the healthy calf would be taken to the stockyard and sold. A part of Bobby wanted to set the other calf out with a sign around its neck: "Free if you'll take me." Or: "Free if you'll put up with me until I die." For now, he left it in the barn.

Like most of the farm's buildings, the barn was old. To compete with the big commercial milking operations, Bobby's family needed to renovate, and they talked about ceiling fans, overhead sprinklers and a new pond for manure. They had many plans until May 1998, when the corner of his father's jaw froze. The doctor said it wasn't Bell's Palsy as they suspected. It was worse than that. Tracy Stiles had colon cancer, and it had spread to his brain. Somewhere along the way to the hospital, or coming back, all their visions of a better-ventilated barn and a grooved cement floor to prevent the cows from slipping were set aside.

The choice was Bobby's.

Even after his dad needed surgery and a year of chemotherapy and radiation, even after the treatments made him so tired he didn't get up for the morning milking, Bobby's parents said he could go. They would hire someone to do the work.

The plan had been for Bobby to go to Hagerstown Community College. Then he would transfer to Virginia Tech's dairy science program and come home to the farm in Boonsboro with a bachelor's degree. If he chose to stay, the education would prepare him for whatever lies ahead: genetically engineered cows, faster milking machines, fickle consumers, stricter waste regulations, encroaching development, the fluctuating price of milk. If he chose to leave, the diploma would be his passport into the other world.

The world Bobby knew was bordered by a distant tree-line, a loping ridge, a stalwart fence, a narrow road. He could see a part of it from any window in the house. The way it looked, his 127 acres in western Maryland was not so different from the farm where he was born, in Virginia. The silo was gray, the barn blue, the tractor orange, the milking parlor white. Everything was rain-washed and sun-scorched, faded from life outdoors. There were cows up to his chest, kittens at his ankles, hogs knee-high, lapping up milk and being fattened for auction.

Even inside the house, there were cows: cow figurines, cow paintings, cow pictures, cow pillows, cow trophies, cow ribbons. Some were serious-looking, photographed at milking competitions. Some were laid-back, sitting on a wooden shelf with their legs crossed. Some were silly, above the toilet proclaiming: "Welcome Family, Friends & All Udders."

Bobby heard it said so often that he said it himself: "We're cow people." And: "We're big on the cows as opposed to just doing the work."

The farm in Virginia was where Bobby was given his first calf. His parents bought him a registered heifer from a line of national champions. Her name was "Buttercup," and she was the start of his college savings. From then on, the money Bobby made selling hogs at the 4-H auctions was put in the bank or spent on a registered heifer. When "Buttercup" gave birth to "Beth," he understood that when the time came she would be sold to pay for textbooks and tuition. It was the same when "Beth" gave birth to "Bubbles," when "Bubbles" gave birth to another "Buttercup," and so on.

By the time he graduated from Boonsboro High School last spring, Bobby had a herd of 30 jerseys. They were not as big as the black-and-white Holsteins, but their milk was rich in fat and protein and valued for making butter and cheese.

Jerseys were the only breed Bobby had known. His father and three of Bobby's uncles had milked a herd of 250 on the farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, and that's where Bobby learned, on pastureland once owned by his Grandfather Stiles.

There were not many family farms like theirs left, and Bobby's mom predicted even fewer in the future. "What with less than 2 percent of the American population involved in agriculture production," he'd heard her say.

The four families grew in number until Bobby's parents decided to sell their share, move to Maryland, buy a cousin's farm and thus be certain that if Bobby or his sister Jess chose to stay, there would be a farm to give them.

The choice, though, was Bobby's.

He once thought about becoming an astronaut, a pilot, a spy. The spy video game was his favorite, and he played it when he wasn't so tired that he fell asleep watching TV. In the game, he was not a boy in a baggy T-shirt and oversized shorts whose face broke out, whose mom corrected his grammar - in the game, he was the guy who defused one national security crisis after another.

Bobby recently thought about becoming a lawyer. Then he thought about becoming a farm lawyer. Other times, his thoughts circled back over the farm like a hawk, without any career in between.

Like his father, his mother, his sister, Bobby felt affection for the cows and the work, though the attraction was hard to explain. As Bobby would say: "I don't know why that is. It's just one of the things that is."

On the farm, there was always work to be done. There was the morning milking, the evening milking. There were silo chutes to be climbed, hay bales to be mixed with grain, feed buckets to be filled, cows to be fed, stalls to be cleaned, problems - scours, pneumonia, mastitis, heat, calcium deficiencies - to be watched for and addressed.

One thing Bobby liked was the way the work allowed him to think. He was not the kind of person to talk out his problems, but when he was in the parlor with the wick, wick, wick of the machines, decisions were made.

Time away from the work was rare and appreciated. So Bobby fondly remembered South Carolina, California, Kentucky, Missouri, Wisconsin, Vermont; national conventions, milking competitions, Future Farmers of America field trips. And yet when he came back to Washington County and saw the sign on Interstate 70 for Boonsboro, when his Dodge Ram turned south onto Route 65, when he drove up their lane and saw the words "The Shenandoah Jerseys Farm," a part of Bobby was always glad to be home.

If there were cows he missed, they were "Buttercup" and "Slugger." "Buttercup" was his fitting-and-showing cow; "Slugger" had the second highest record on the farm for the 31,800 pounds of milk she gave in a single year.

Bobby's sister Jess, who was four years younger, had more favorites, but she was a softie.

That's why he climbed out of bed without hesitating when his mother came into his room at 4 a.m. a second day in a row, turned on the light, and told him about his sister's cow."`Goodness' is dead."

Bobby hadn't cried for a cow since he was little. He had sold hogs and steers at auction for years, so he understood a farmer's need to exchange life for death.

But it was not the same with Jess. The first steer she raised for auction was "Milton," and she'd loved him so much she persuaded her grandfather to buy him, to spare his execution.

Outside in the dark, Bobby found "Goodness" in a puddle near the water trough, on the slippery cement between the barn and silo. "Goodness" was not an old cow, so either it was something sudden, or something she'd been carrying inside.

"Probably a heart attack," Bobby's mother said.

The other cows would be coming out soon, and although they would step over the corpse to get to the field beyond, Bobby's mother wanted the body moved so Jess wouldn't see it.

The sky was as black as a hearse, and Bobby had to use the tractor's headlights to help him see. He roped chains around the animal's legs before dragging it behind the parlor.

It used to be that a farmer was paid for his loss, that the company processing the remains into dog food gave money for the carcass. But times changed, and no life or death on the farm was exactly the same.

It cost $35 to have "Goodness" hauled away.

* * *

Tracy Stiles was diagnosed with cancer when he was just 43. After it happened, he retraced his footsteps the way people with cancer do, looking for a cause.

Was it heredity? (Probably.) Was it farm chemicals? (Probably not.) Could it have been prevented? (Who ever knew the answer to that?)

The first surgeries and treatments swept the family from the spring of 1998 into the spring of 1999.

Until this past spring, Bobby thought his father had it licked.

The checkup in February found nothing.

The MRI came back clean.

On the farm, Bobby did chores without asking his mother what needed to be done. She was busy. So was Jess. With all of them pitching in, the farm chugged on like a motor.

Until the end of March, when Bobby's father had problems with his balance.

Tracy explained to Bobby: "It was like being drunk 24 hours without having had a drop of alcohol."

When the doctors ruled out everything else, they did another MRI, and the MRI revealed something worse than they imagined: Where the surgeons had removed one tumor from his brain, now there were four.

The bad news drove them east to Baltimore and the University of Maryland Medical Center, for more surgeries, for advanced treatments, for 201 beams of gamma radiation shot like thunder bolts into his brain.

On the farm, they moved a hospital bed into the house and set it up beside a window overlooking the porch. From there he could see them, see the carport, the driveway, the parlor, the barn, the silo, the fields, the cows fanning flies with the sun on their backs.

The motor chugged on through summer, into August, time for the county fair.

Bobby had bought three hogs from his aunt and uncle. He'd named them "Ford," "Chevy" and "Dodge," but "Ford" was born deformed, so Bobby wouldn't be able to show him. Bobby was fattening a dairy steer to sell, too, because steers were good money for college.

The way the auction worked, 4-H'ers were supposed to line up a buyer before the sale. Bobby was too shy for that. In years past, a friend of the family bought one of his hogs, and The Feed Bin, where he got his grain, purchased the other. This year, he had too much on his mind to give either hog a second thought.

Bobby's father was scheduled to have a lung biopsy the day the Ag Expo opened early to allow contestants to bring their baked goods, garden vegetables, crafts and animals to be judged in the week ahead.

Bobby's mother had taken his father to have the test, but the nurses had come out to the waiting room and said he wasn't able to finish it. They'd given him a sedative, and he'd fallen asleep, so Janet took him home.

By Saturday, when the fair opened, he hadn't really woken up. His speech was slurred, he didn't make sense, he couldn't stay awake. Bobby and his mother took their animals into town, but when they returned to the farm, his dad was no better.

By Sunday, his condition had not changed.

Bobby thought about the choice he had to make: "I don't want to look back and say I spent his last months me doing nothing but homework for college and not spending time with him."

And he thought: "And that way, I can help mom so she doesn't wear herself down trying to do it all."

By Monday, when Bobby didn't appear to wash his hogs and present them for weighing and judging, his friends knew something was seriously wrong. Bobby knew the rules: If you didn't show Monday, you couldn't sell Friday.

The adults in the hog barn knew where he was - back at the hospital with his dad.

Many of them had known Janet for years, because she'd grown up in Boonsboro. She was the first with a pan of lasagna if there was trouble on a neighboring farm. They came to know Tracy through his work and through Benevola United Methodist Church. They all thought he was a fine man, a good farmer.

The Ag Expo superintendent allowed a teen-age girl who knew Bobby through Sunday School to show one hog and a 9-year-old whose hog was judged the Grand Champion to show the other.

That done, the adults wondered what they could do.

How could they say they were sorry about what was happening?

How could they show they were proud of Bobby?

Someone had an idea, but for the idea to work, it would have to be kept secret.

That night, home from the hospital for the evening milking, Bobby made his decision: He would postpone college. It would only be for a semester. After that, he would see where things stood on the farm. None of the adults in the hog barn knew of Bobby's decision when they started collecting money Monday morning. By Monday night, when the Barnyard Olympics began, the collection had grown.

It continued to grow, at Tuesday's quilting demonstration, at Wednesday's tractor and semi-truck pull, at Thursday's turtle races. Friends gave, neighbors gave, even strangers who overheard gave. Money poured in, a shower of $10s and $20s, and it kept coming, even after the auction started.

Bobby's father had come home from the hospital earlier in the week, but he arrived too late Friday night to see Bobby sell his first hog for $1.50 a pound. If he'd been there for the beginning, he would have seen the Grand Champion go for $3 a pound. He knew from his own 4-H days that every hog auctioned after the Grand Champion was supposed to sell for less.

Janet had driven the van up to the show ring, close enough that Tracy would be able to see Bobby without having to get out. When she slid the door open, the scene that rushed in was familiar: the smell of the livestock and sawdust, the sight of their neighbors on bleachers, the sound of their son's name broadcast over the loudspeaker.

"Coming into the ring is Bobby Stiles. He has a hog weighing 285 pounds."

Bobby had shown so many hogs he wasn't nervous. He knew it would all be over soon if he could keep "Dodge" in line.

But Bobby didn't know the secret.

The bidding started fast.

"2, 2 ... 2-and-a-half, 2-and-a- half ... 3, 3."

Bobby didn't hear it climb.

"6, 6 ... 6-and-a-half, 6-and-a- half ... 7, 7."

He didn't see the bidders. Here. There.

"10, 10 ... 11, 11."

They were coming from all over.

"13, 13 ... 14, 14."

Then the numbers caught his attention.

"Going once ..."

They were higher than he'd ever heard.

"Going twice ..."

Could it be?

"Sold!

"For $16 a pound!"

The bleachers erupted when the clerk revealed the secret: "Bought by the friends of Bobby and Tracy Stiles."

Some people stood and cheered. Some wiped their eyes. Bobby's mother ran behind the cows and cried.

Bobby was ushered to an area beside the show ring, where he had his picture taken with his hog, with the Ag Expo Queen, with the adults who had collected $4,560.

He had done the math in his head and he was shocked by the amount, embarrassed by the attention, and it wasn't until later that night that he understood how humbling it felt to have his entire town standing behind him and his dad.

Though he didn't see his father in the van, Bobby knew he'd been watching. He knew without looking that he was embarrassed, too, and in that way, if not in many others, Bobby had already stepped into his father's shoes.

Larry Bingham grew up in the coalfields of southwestern Virginia and was the first of four generations not to become a miner.

Since graduating college in 1989 he has worked at newspapers in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Maryland. He gradually moved from news reporting to feature writing and he works today in the features department of The (Baltimore) Sun.

Larry was a 1999 finalist for the Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Reporting, a first-place winner in the National Headliners Foundation competition, and a 1998 AASFE first-place winner in the short features category.

He and wife Karen have two sons, 5-year-old Wilson and 2-year-old Cole.