The Cow War

by prettybluebirds

Neighbor from Hell Contest Winner

I'm not saying my husband, Desmer (Desi), was lily white, but our neighbor, Bob, was a genuine lunatic. Wouldn't one think the guys could get along with only two families living on a half-mile stretch of a dirt road in the country? Not so.

There were several incidents over the years, but there was one in particular that started the feud. It began in 1968 when Desi bought the farm across the road from Bob and Dorothy's place. I wasn't there at the time because Desi and I didn't marry until 1979 after he and his first wife divorced, but Desi filled me in on the details.

"Things started going bad after Bob asked me to take my backhoe and dig some marl for him around the lake on his property," Desi said. (Marl is a whitish, heavy sand with beneficial minerals that is often spread on farmland). Desi continued, "I was to get all the marl I wanted after I completed the work for Bob; that turned out to be a joke. I got one load of marl, but when I returned for another, Bob kicked me off his property and told me to stay off." It pissed me off, but I decided to let it go and continued setting up my dairy. I decided that as far as I was concerned, Bob could go to hell, and I would never do anything for him again."

By the time I entered the picture, Desi had a large dairy operation with over two-hundred cows. Bob's wife, Dorothy, had recently purchased a small herd of around twenty milk cows to increase their income. Bob worked at a factory in town. And although they had been neighbors for eleven years, Desi and Bob still circled one another like a pair of tomcats vying for territory. Dorothy and I got along fine after we agreed if our husbands wanted to act like assholes, that didn't mean we couldn't be friends. It was the cows that escalated the war again.

Bob had a single strand of hot wire around his pasture, while we had four strands of barbed wire around our entire four-hundred acres. You don't have to do the math to figure out what happened. Their cows were forever getting loose. I can't recall how many times Desi, Reo (our hired man), and I helped Dorothy round up the animals.

One spring, in particular, was dreadful. Bob and Dorothy's cattle found their way to our farm, broke into the shed where Desi stored seed corn and fertilizer, and destroyed several bags of expensive planting supplies. (Fertilizer was bought in bags at that time). We tried to get ahold of Dorothy with no success, so we drove the cows back to their place and locked them in the barn. You won't believe what happened next.

The following day, while Desi was out working in the fields, I received an angry phone call from Bob that went something like this: "You tell that bastard husband of yours that I'm going to sue him for poisoning my cows. I might lose five of them; the veterinarian says it looks like someone deliberately poisoned them. That son-of-a-bitch is going to pay for this." I tried to tell Bob what happened but couldn't get a word in edge-wise.

And Bob did sue us. A letter came from Bob's lawyer son, Mark, who had recently graduated from law school. Of course, it amounted to nothing in the end. I had taken pictures of the damage caused by the cattle, and it certainly wasn't our fault the cows ingested fertilizer along with the corn they ate. The animals shouldn't have been running loose in the first place.

Later the same year, Bob's cows got loose and found their way into our cornfield. The critters trampled over two acres of corn before we spotted them and drove them home--again. It surprised me when Desi did nothing. He said, "The last thing I want is a war with my neighbor. Bob's an asshole, and I hate the bastard, but all I want is to live in peace."

Bob never quit. It must have been a year or so later when I started to milk in the morning and realized one of our best cows was missing. It wasn't long before we found out where she was.

Animal Control pulled into our driveway a short time later and said Bob discovered our cow wandering on his property and locked the animal in his barn. He also claimed the cow had knocked over some crates of apples his wife intended to can; if we wanted our cow, we had to pay Bob a thousand dollars in damages. For apples?

To say Desi was furious would be an understatement. There was a gate in our fence only a short way past Bob's house, and it didn't take a genius to piece together what had occurred. In the first place, it was implausible that only one cow somehow found its way out of our pasture. Bob must have spotted the herd by the gate, opened it, and herded the cow to his place. Milk cows are gentle and used to being handled, so it would have been easy to accomplish. The tracks were still on the road, Bob's and the cow's, where he drove the animal to his barn. A couple of crates of apples lay scattered across the lawn but appeared undamaged. Obviously, it was a poorly planned setup.

This time Bob had gone too far. No one wanted to mess with my husband when he decided he had had enough. "I'm going after my cow, and that son-of-a- bitch better not get in my way," Desi said.

"You can't do that, sir, the animal control officer said. "You have to wait for the law to come and settle this dispute, or you could be arrested for trespassing."

"So tell them to arrest me, but make sure they take Bob too. The bastard stole my cow; the last I knew, they hang cattle rustlers." Des and the hired man walked to Bob's barn, got our cow, and drove her up the road to our place. For once, Bob was smart enough to stay out of sight and shut his mouth.

Dorothy called me the following day and apologized for Bob's behavior. She said, "I'm so sorry. I had to go to my daughter's yesterday, so Bob decided to get even with Desi for whatever he imagined Desi had done to him. I can guarantee it won't happen again. I told Bob one more incident like that, and he would find his skivvies hanging on the doorknob after I kicked his ass out. Enough is enough."

Dorothy was true to her word. Bob got his butt around and built better fences to keep their cattle home. From then on, an uneasy truce existed except for some name-calling if they got too close. The two men still hated each other and would go out of their way to irritate one another, but the war of the cows ended forever. Bob was, beyond any doubt, a neighbor from hell.

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