The truck cab was green and the back was a flatbed with an oak slat floor with small pieces of oak formed together like a butcher block. The wood floor of the flatbed was polished smooth and shiny from the burlap bags of feed. The bags were piled four feet high in the center of the bed and strapped down with ratchet straps and the bags were pulled across the oak bed to the metal edge to be unloaded. The wood was smooth as silk and had no splinters to rip a bag of cow feed.

There was a boy and the farm lane was long, like miles, and it was a playground to work in the runoff from a big rain, drain puddles, shovel snow, have a catch, shoot baskets into the hoop hung on the tool shed, or catch grounders from tennis balls thrown against the milk-house block wall. When a truck came down it might be the only visitor for that day, but the boy had to pay attention and get out of the way. The feed truck was a rare event, as a delivery was meant to stock up, and, in the days before bulk shipments, the driver of the truck had to be a weight-lifter with legs of iron and a back of Gumby because the work was all by hand and back and leg. The bags themselves were brown burlap and had printed in red, a beacon like a beam of light from a lighthouse, as the company was called Beacon Feeds. But sometimes, there was Blue Seal Feeds and a blue bag. It didn’t matter the name of the feed, the weight of each bag was 100 pounds. When you are a kid of around 100 pounds and the bag is exactly one hundred pounds, it’s a significant obstacle.

The driver backed the truck down to the milk house where an over-sized door allowed easy access to the rest of the barn. Everything wants to eat feed, that’s why it is called feed. Rats, mice, the cows, birds, everything wanted a piece of the action, so, feed had to be squirreled away in a safe and secure location. To this end the farmer built a large “feed box.” Like the floor of the truck bed, the feed box was made of oak for its durability and anti-gnawing toughness. The box was divided into two sections, with a plank wall separating the two sections. The box had a lid; big, heavy, and with a slant towards the front.

For years a knife was stuck in the lid, stuck straight in like an ice pick. The knife lived in the lid of the feedbox and was used to slice open the feedbags which were dumped into one of the two compartments below. The knife was sharp as a butcher’s. The farmer kept his tools sharp to reduce work. Jab in, slice across the end of the bag and out pours the molasses coated grain, the real deal, the taste a cow would die for.

The feed man had shoulders like an I-Beam and once he got the bags to the edge of the flatbed he slung the one hundred pounds up onto his shoulder and carried it through the barn, down the central aisle of the barn. The cows watched him from both sides as they lolled in their stanchions, head to head, and smelling the newly arrived candy. The feed man opened the heavy lid of the feedbox with his free hand and slipped the bag off his shoulder down onto the side of the box where it hung half in, half out, like a dead body in a war movie. The feed man took the knife, the fillet knife sharp as a barber shop razor, and he sliced open the bag and pumped the feed into the box, lifting the outside section of the drooping feedbag expertly, losing not a pellet nor grain.

And he lifted the bag up in the air by the bottom and two shakes and folded the bag in half in one motion and back to the truck for the next one. Sometimes the bags were too valuable to cut, an early recyclable, and, in that case, the string was pulled and the same pattern followed.

Dozens and dozens of bags, a ton, a couple ton, and the boy watched the feed man in awe as he never missed a stride, never got tired, never dropped a thing. I can’t even drag the bag, the boy thought.

After the last bag was dumped, the lid to the feedbox was shut and the knife stuck back in the wood of the top. The wood top had carvings in it. The farmer liked to carve and the knife was always handy. Some of the cravings were old and filled-in with whitewash, and, of some, the whitewash was worn off from the motion of the feed bags and from general use and from the barn cat jumping up to sit on the top to look out the window at the river and the birds in the barnyard. The farmer carved his symbol, a cross like the Star in the East. He carved the names of his favorite cows, now dead, and the days they died, and he carved birds and leaf patterns, and four-leaf clovers, and all this was lost when the barn burned down to the ground, but, by then, the feed man was a thing of the past.