Midwifery-wise, your basic job is to stay out of the way. Observe from a quiet remove and let nature take its course. Recede. Wait.
Anneliese is having a rough time of it. She just can’t find her way to sleep. The weariness shows in her eyes every morning, and the best I can come up with is a hopeful “How did you sleep?” This is only forces her to confirm that she didn’t sleep well, while I stand there like a fence post. Tonight when I come in the house Anneliese and Amy are watching a video, which is a sign to me that Anneliese is worn out. We put Amy to bed. She closes her eyes and wriggles happily when I tuck the quilt beneath her chin. She is getting so long, so tall. I follow Anneliese to bed, where I rub her neck and lower back. Then I massage the area over her uterine ligament on the left side, and when my hand crosses over, I feel the little being within hiccup. It makes me chuckle aloud, but it’s also a jolting reminder of how while I meander around thinking of the baby in largely exterior terms, Anneliese lives daily with this life nestled inside her. I kiss her good night and turn to my side of the bed. Our midwife has lately recommended Anneliese drink valerian tea, much revered by the herbal set for its soporific properties. So far it hasn’t helped, but there is a mug of it cooling on the nightstand. This I know: valerian tea smells like bad feet and overheated muskrat.
Lying in the dark, trying to ignore the valerian stench, I wonder how I’ll do when the baby arrives. Whenever people find out we hope to deliver at home, someone invariably brings up the fact that I am a registered nurse and have worked as an emergency medical responder for twenty years. “You’ll be fine!” they say. Then I tell them that in all those years, I have never seen a baby born, let alone delivered one. The only babies I’ve ever caught emerged from a pair of truncated plastic hips strapped to a library table during our biannual emergency responder testing. Those babies are plastic, and their umbilical cords are attached with a metal snap. Anneliese has stacks of beautifully written home birth books she wants me to read, but so far I’ve spent most of my time reviewing the very straightforward illustrations included in the obstetrics chapter of Nancy Caroline’s Emergency Care in the Streets.
I spent four years in a fine nursing school, but my maternity rotation was a bust. Every time I went to the hospital, I got all prepped and ready, but never once was a baby born on my shift. The only significant experience I recall was when my instructor asked a woman who had already given birth if she would agree to allow a student nurse to perform her “five-point checks.” Five-point checks are an examination performed on the mother in the hours following childbirth to detect any abnormalities or problems. Three of the five points qualify as personal and specific, and a uterus massage is included.
“Hi,” I said, walking into the room. “I’m here to do your five-point checks.” The woman’s eyes widened.
“Who are you?”
“I’m your student nurse.”
“Oh. My. God.”
I retreated half a step. “If you’d rather…”
“I said I didn’t mind a student nurse, but I…” She trailed off. Then she took a deep breath and rolled her eyes. “Oh, what the hell,” she said, hiking up her gown. “It’s my third kid. Get it over with.”
These mornings as soon as breakfast is finished and before I head up to the office, Amy and I collect maple sap. It’s a small operation—just six buckets on four trees—and it doesn’t take long to make the rounds. Amy bounds ahead, eager to lift each lid and gauge the overnight accumulation. While I dump the clear sap into buckets, Amy touches her finger to a droplet hanging from the tap, breaking the surface tension so it melts across her fingertip before she licks it clean. We’ve got a pretty good deal going here—a couple named Jan and Gale have all the equipment and do the boiling. They have agreed to give us half the syrup in exchange for allowing them to tap the trees. All we have to do is gather the sap and store it in two plastic barrels. When the barrels are full, it is Amy’s job to call Jan and Gale and tell them so.
We’ve had a good stretch of weather for the sap run—warm, sunny days, freezing at night—and when Amy lifts the galvanized lids she finds most of the hanging buckets are full and capped with a crust of cloudy white ice. Sometimes when we get to the last tree, however, there is only an inch or two of frozen sap at the bottom of the bucket. Amy backs off and shakes her head at the tree sadly, as if it is an underperforming child. Then she scoots ahead to the garage, where she steadies the funnel as I decant the day’s collection. The whole job gives us maybe ten minutes together, but as she skips back toward the house to begin her school day, I am hoping in memory she will recall it as much longer.
As I walk to the office the sun is warm but the wind is cold. This seasonal contrast always evokes memories of my friend Ricky. A neighbor kid who began hanging around our farm one spring when I was five or six years old, Ricky was a dark-eyed boy of about twelve who didn’t seem to have friends his own age. At first, Mom says, that worried her. But Ricky and I struck up a fast friendship, aided by the fact that by country standards Ricky lived right around the corner: two flat miles from his driveway to mine. And blacktop all the way. Nothin’ at all for a boy on a bike.
Not forty yards from Ricky’s mailbox, a pair of corrugated culverts punched north-south through the east-west berm of Beaver Creek Road, carrying Beaver Creek itself beneath it. Two steel tubes and a middling stream might not sound like much, but as far as I was concerned, Ricky was the luckiest boy in the world. My father’s farm was all swamp and flatland. This left me easily bewitched by moving water. Water that flowed—that didn’t just seep, or sit still and fester up mosquitoes—gave me Huck Finn fevers. Those first warm days coming out of winter, my siblings kept our ears cocked for the sound of trickling water. Then we’d track the trickle down and do what we could to speed the flow—kicking snow into the channel, where it melted even as it floated, or widening the channel by stomping the overhanging edges of ice, which snapped beneath our boots with a satisfying crunch. When a true thaw came, rivulets broke loose everywhere, and we spent hours gouging channels from one puddle to the next, delighting in how the dirt crumbled into the clear water, spinning mud clouds downstream to form cream-in-coffee eddies. When the sediment swept clear and again the water ran transparent, miniature rapids sparkled in the sun. If we churned the puddles to mud with our boots beforehand, the drawdown left mocha-foam striations along the shoreline. It seems the urge to control the flow of water is innate—rare is the child not born prequalified for the Army Corps of Engineers. Workable parallels are found in the urge to shovel square corners into freshly fallen snow. A man on a local radio show classifies the snow-handling fetish as a form of “space management.” This is apt, but I propose freelance hydrology as a subcategory.
The water often melted faster than it could dissipate. The low spot in the middle of last year’s cornfield became a pond, complete with paddling ducks; a dip in the road became a flat stretch of water hazard—a mirage that wasn’t a mirage; over where the Keysey Swamp drained, the culverts submerged leaving no trace but a whirlpool that spun narrower and narrower until the gabbling swirl sucked shut and left the swamp water to rise in silence above the hummocks and muskrat houses to the very shoulder of Five Mile Road and sometimes across it so bullfrogs might laze unmolested above the centerline. Children love the idea of transformation and alternate worlds, and the delayed spring runoff transformed our landscape as completely as any fairy-tale Merlin. Once I sat very still against a white pine and watched as an early-returning mallard couple paddled within six feet of me on what in dry times was a deer trail. I was transfixed by the drake’s iridescent head, so close I could see the wet shine of his eyeball. One sodden spring when I was older, the road flooded by Oscar Knipfer’s place and we took the canoe over. We paddled back and forth from one blacktop shore to the other, giddy with the anomaly of it. Every summer we canoed the Red Cedar River, but for some reason it was twice as exciting to paddle above the roadway, as if we had been gifted with a magical boat.
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One surreal spring day my brother John spotted a northern pike in the cow pasture. It was just a snaky little hammer handle—if we had caught it while actually fishing, we would have tossed it back without a thought. But here on the back forty, in a drainage ditch ten navigable miles from the nearest habitable lake, it was an event on par with the birth of a white buffalo. We hatched fantasies of summer afternoons spent casting Daredevils from the hay wagon. John fetched his fishing rod and managed to land the fish. Tiny as it was, he released it immediately. Then the ditchwater receded, and with it the dream of battling lunkers in the clover.
But Ricky—Ricky didn’t have to wait for magic water—when the ice let loose over his way, he had himself a real honest-to-goodness crick, and it lasted all summer long! How I envied him this exotic proximity. During the spring of our friendship I was always eager to pedal over his way when Mom gave the OK. We’d meet at the culverts, choose one, clamber to opposite ends, then hang head-down to whoop back and forth. Our voices echoed flatly before dampening against the corrugations. We tossed pebbles at each other. They fell short and went ploop! or ricocheted off the ribbed steel with a compressed ping! Sometimes we played Poohsticks, simultaneously dropping two different-sized branches in the upstream end of the culvert before running across the road to the downstream end, hoping the stick we picked came through first.
In the first week of his fortieth lambing season my father climbed aboard a tractor (something he has done almost daily all those decades) and the knee of his trailing leg emitted a celeriac crunch, which, as it turned out, was the sound of his meniscus dismantling. He was instantly hobbled with pain, unable to bear weight, and confined to the recliner. We kids—all grown up now—take turns staying at the farm to help out. It is a chance for me to introduce Amy to a ritual that spanned my entire childhood, and I was happy yesterday when she walked with me to the barn and we discovered a sheep ready to deliver. I told her she could name the lamb.
In a practice dating back to the beginning, the lambs are named alphabetically. This was always a fun game—I remember long-gone fuzzballs named Herkimer and Knucklehead and Lillelukelani. Adherence to the alphabetical constraints was jovially strict, and led to fuzzy little creatures named X-ray and Zapata. The ledger of record was a clipboard hung on a nail. The pencil dangled on a string. The system remains unchanged.
In the barn, Amy was eager and attentive, watching closely and asking questions as the lamb emerged. It was stillborn. She cried a little, and we talked about it. I told her that sometimes surprises are sad. Then I told her once we had a lamb born with five legs and six feet, so we named him Spyder. Two hours later another ewe went into labor, and this time Amy saw twin lambs arrive alive. As they shook themselves and tottered to life, she smiled and chattered happily, and while I have attempted a career out of overthinking things, I suspect her smile was all the wider in light of her recently acquired prior knowledge.
I have taken night duty, and when the alarm sounds at 2:00 a.m. (rousing by habit and intuition, Dad rarely requires the uncouth tool), every lazy bone in my body—to say nothing of my cotton-bound brain—assumes a specific gravity designed to drive me deeper abed. I summon the strength to rise only by conjuring the fantasy of how sweet it will feel to drift off upon my return. By the time I am dressed and downstairs, I am reanimating my childhood. On weekend nights, we kids were allowed to accompany Mom or Dad on midnight maternity rounds. There was always a feeling of anticipation in coming down to the dark kitchen and bundling up for the trek to the barn. Beyond the weak pool of the yard light, the farm was socked in darkness. Wisconsin’s March is highly variable. Sometimes a soft wind was soughing in the pines, shushing through the needles and pushing the scent of melt. Sometimes the night was clear and deep-frozen. Sometimes snow was coming down. One night when big flakes were lazing past the yard light like feathers from a burst pillow, I went to check the sheep with Mom. When she held the iron gate open, I stepped through and the top of my head brushed the underside of her outstretched arm. “My goodness,” she said. “Pretty soon you won’t fit under there!” I felt eight feet tall and strode the rest of the path with shoulders squared.
Every trip to the lambing barn was charged with anticipation. As we looked over the flock, we listened for the sounds of labor or a newborn bleat. The animals were settled, resting like woolly boulders with their legs folded and hooves tucked beneath their bodies. If you stood in the quiet, you could hear them working their cud. Audible human mastication drives me nuts in a split second, but for some reason I find the sound of sheep chewing a soothing nocturne. An animal in distress does not bring up a cud, and all that muffled molar work—with regular pauses to swallow one bolus and bring up another—sends a subliminal message of contentment. When I was young I would climb the haystack into the rafters, then curl up and simply listen.
Tonight I hear an infantile bleat before I reach the barn, and when I straddle the fence and cross to the straw, I find a young ewe lying on her side and straining. She has one hind leg in the air like a roast turkey. There is a fresh-born lamb beside her, and as I approach, she presses out another. Arriving in a slithery amniotic gush, it plops wetly to the straw. Encircling its nose with my fingers, I milk its nostrils and mouth clear of fluid, then stand back to watch its ribs bow in and out as the first hacking breaths transpire. By the time it shakes its ears loose (this always reminds me of an accelerated version of the emergent butterfly uncrinkling its wet wings after escaping the chrysalis) I am experiencing the standard moment of marvel at how the whole deal works. The ewe has turned, snuffling and chuckling as she licks the amniotic fluid away, roughing and fluffing the tight wool curls so they can air-dry. As usual, the other sheep ignore the goings-on, with the occasional exception of the yearling ewes. Having never given birth, they sometimes sniff the lambs or the hind end of the laboring ewe curiously, their ears cocked forward in a mixture of curiosity and alarm as they nose the amniotic sac dangling like a water balloon.
Dad keeps a baby food jar filled with iodine in the barn, and I retrieve it now, removing the cap and lifting each lamb so I can thread the umbilicus into the ruby liquid. I do it the way I remember Dad doing it, clapping the jar tightly against the lamb’s belly, then tipping both back simultaneously so the umbilicus gets a good soak, a practice intended to prevent navel ill. The lamb is left with a circular orange stain on its abdomen. In a week or so the umbilicus will turn to jerky and eventually drop unnoticed to the straw.
By the time I have finished with the two lambs, the ewe has gone to pushing again. I ease around behind her. I’m hoping to see a pair of soft hoof tips cradling a little lamb snoot. The hooves are there, sure enough, but they are dewclaws-up, and there is no snoot. Bad sign. These are the back legs. Breech delivery. I hustle back to the house and wake Mom. Dad has always shouldered the bulk of the lambing chores, but defers to my mother for tricky deliveries. She comes armed with delivery-room experience and delicate hands. Dad’s hands are not overlarge, but they have a sausagey thickness brought on by manual labor and are therefore poorly suited for navigating obstetrical tangles.
I get back to the barn before Mom and find the ewe panting with the lamb half out—its head, shoulders and front legs still lodged in the birth canal. It appears there is no time to wait, so I grab the lamb and pull it the rest of the way out. Its head is still inside the amniotic sac. I clear the nostrils and mouth, but there is no breath. I give a couple of pushes on the ribs and dangle the lamb by its back legs, which looks drastic but allows fluid to drain from the air passages. When I place the lamb on the straw, its flanks flutter, and then I hear the familiar crackle of air working into the lungs. Shoot, the little feller’s off and running. Mom arrives. Minutes later the lamb gives a high-pitched bleat, and I am just plumb happy.
We stand and observe. Let the new family get to know one another. Mom kneels behind the sheep, checks inside to rule out quadruplets. Nothing. The ewe’s long push is over. Using another trick my father taught m
e, I guide the sheep to the pen by dangling the third lamb in my hands while slowly backing across the barn and into the small square pen. It takes a while—the mother wants to dart back and forth between lambs, so I carry two and Mom the other—but soon they are ensconced, the two oldest lambs already stumbling about in their jabby-stabby knock-kneed way. The breech lamb is worn out. After watching the first two lambs suckle, we try to help him latch on, but he’s tuckered. Dad says the emerging thinking is that immediate nursing isn’t as necessary as previously thought, so we’ll leave and let the family settle. Over the course of the coming day we’ll keep an eye on the little guy. Make sure he learns how to get his dinner. Mom jots the ewe’s ear tag number and the sex of each lamb on the clipboard, but we leave the name spaces blank. Amy can name them in the morning. We return to the house. The frozen air is bell-jar still. The sky is deep black, the stars pressing down brilliantly all around, and I am reminded that we are not beneath the constellations, but among them.
When I was a young boy and accompanied Dad to do the checks, once the lambs were dipped and penned and the clipboard record updated, and we were back in the house, he would disappear into the cellar and come back up with a mason jar of canned dewberries. We’d have a bowl. The dewberries were sweet, their dark red juice reminding me of the iodine in the baby food jar. Tonight, no dewberries. Mom is off to bed and I cross to the kitchen sink, where I begin to scrub my hands. I am soaping up when I realize my wedding ring is missing. It must have come off during the delivery, when my hands were slick with amniotic fluid. I grab a flashlight, retrace my steps, and spend a good hour diligently searching the straw. Nothing. Later some wisenheimer asks if I checked inside the ewe. Well, no. But perhaps next year we can expect a little miracle lamb born with a golden band around one ear.
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