The Dogs of Bedlam Farm

by Jon Katz

  Out in the barn, though, his shyness seemed to melt away and we yakked happily about my dogs and his, and the odd treasures—old tools, a rusty cowbell, ancient feed sacks—he found in the loft.

  Because of our age difference, and all the dreadful stories about older men and kids, I kept our initial contacts outside. Friends in New Jersey reacted with horror or concern when I told them about this new friendship. “Are you crazy?” demanded one—a lawyer. “You should never be alone with this kid. You’ve got to protect yourself.” It was probably the same advice I might have given if the shoe were on the other foot, but I wasn’t about to send Jacob away.

  Being around the farm and having this two-dollar-an-hour job seemed important to him. It was to me, as well: I liked having him around. Besides, I needed the help. There aren’t many people who love brushing donkeys and mucking out barns. So Barb dropped him off in the late afternoon, then picked him up an hour or so later.

  But as it got colder and sunset came earlier, it was hard to maintain this arrangement, difficult to relegate Jacob to the barn and the pasture. By November, the temperature dropped sharply by four-thirty. Jacob, who didn’t believe in jackets, insisted on wearing an Old Navy sweatshirt out in the barn. I couldn’t go inside and work, thinking of him out there in the dark and cold.

  So I decided not to yield to the tenor of my time, and I yelled for him to come inside. My own personal referendum: I was voting for the kind of world I’d prefer to live in, the kind of community I wanted to become part of. Oblivious to all of these complications, Jacob sauntered inside and was shortly munching on microwave popcorn and watching the first Lord of the Rings movie on DVD.

  The relationship took on a life of its own after that. Jacob arrived, called out that he was there, grabbed a fistful of donkey cookies, greeted my dogs, and headed for the barns. He stayed outside, working or exploring, then came into the house when he was finished with his chores and forays. He could hardly have been more at home. He named the sheep, rearranged the cans of donkey and sheep feed, and presented me with an ancient pot and bits of crockery.

  We played chess, too. I could usually beat him, but he was good. I bought him a chess book and, unfortunately for me, he read it, and each game got a little tougher.

  Orson particularly loved Jacob, felt intuitively at ease with him, and would plop his head in Jacob’s lap while we played. The ever-busy Rose would pause from her indoor duties—monitoring the sheep through the living room window, chewing rawhide, moving her toys from one end of the house to the other—and leap up to lick Jacob’s face. Homer soon recognized the sound of Jacob’s mother’s car in the driveway and would wriggle delightedly as he walked up.

  I told Barb about the DVDs and chess games and asked her if she felt in any way uncomfortable about them. She and Mary, Jacob’s aunt, had come by several times to check out me and the farm before Jacob started working here and they seemed easy about our arrangement, but this was a new wrinkle. But Barb had no objection; in fact, she was grateful. The last year had been tough on Jacob, and he loved having this job.

  A neighbor later explained that such issues were treated differently in Hebron. “Things like that are never, ever discussed up here,” he said, meaning child abuse. “Besides, if anything happened to a kid, somebody would just shoot the guy on the spot.”

  As the fall turned to winter, I was always happy to see Jacob pop in through the back door, yell “Hey, Jon, it’s Jacob,” and head into the barn. Sometimes we didn’t speak at all during his visits, especially if I was working. He seemed able to tell when I was not in the mood to talk, and I could usually see when he was blue and just wanted to watch TV and relax. Other days we yakked over the chessboard like old geezers at the park. I’d ordered more DVDs online, and as the days shortened, they were considerably brightened by the sight of this kid absorbed in an Indiana Jones movie while I clacked away on my computer at the other end of the house.

  Once, after a period of prolonged quiet, I came out to see what was going on, and found that Jacob had turned off the TV and gone into the adjacent room that would one day be Paula’s office. It looked out over the barnyard, and Jacob was sitting at the little wooden desk, silently sketching one of the barns with a pencil and pad I’d gotten him. The next week, he presented me with a watercolor version: the red barn, an evergreen, a contented-looking donkey. I kept it propped by my computer, right near Anthony’s Three Steps.

  Chapter Five

  THE DONKEY LADY OF BELCHER

  INFORMATION, LIKE COUNTRY BULLSHIT, FLOWS IN AN END LESS loop upstate. At the Agway or at Stewart’s or at the Volunteer Fire Department’s prodigious roast beef dinners, the weather updates get passed around continuously, especially in winter. You hear about traffic accidents, farm failures, marriage failures. Postal workers, the plugged-in staff at Bedlam’s Corner, traveling farriers and vets—everyone has news, stories, and advice.

  If you have a horse, you hear about horses. If you have sheep, you hear about sheep. (“You need to talk to old Bill Watkins over on Chamberlain Mills Road. He had sheep for years.”) And if you have a donkey, which rather few of us do, then sooner or later you’ll hear about the Donkey Lady.

  Cows are common, and there are several local sheep farms; lots of people keep a few goats or chickens. But you rarely hear about donkeys. Although they’ve been domestic animals for thousands of years and were once a mainstay of agricultural life, they’re perceived to have lost their utility.

  Nobody rides a donkey anymore, outside of a petting zoo. Pickups and four-wheelers and ATVs have taken over their farm jobs. You can’t sell donkeys’ meat or their hides. They’re what farmers call “money holes”—they eat a lot, so cash flows down the drain, but nothing comes the other way.

  Mostly, they stare balefully at the world, perhaps reflecting on their diminished place in life. They do take eating seriously and attach themselves to people who carry cookies and carrots. Carol had X-ray eyes that could spot a carrot inside a coat pocket from a hundred yards. She studied hay like an art student touring the Louvre, sniffing deliberately over each blade, munching happily for hours.

  Personally, though, I found the contemporary view of the donkey’s uselessness both unfair and untrue. Carol not only kept watch over the sheep, rushing in the direction of any strange animal that approached, she comforted me as well.

  All the more reason to look up the Donkey Lady of Belcher—she sounded like a character out of Chaucer—a somewhat mysterious figure. People had been telling me about her for weeks, yet few had actually ever met her, a rare thing in a town where everybody knew everybody.

  She was said to be a political activist—another rarity hereabouts—who bred and loved donkeys. Beyond that, nobody in Hebron knew much about her, or even her name. She was just the Donkey Lady of Belcher. (Belcher, one of seven hamlets within greater Hebron, makes West Hebron look like midtown Manhattan.) It was our vet who told me the Donkey Lady’s name: Pat Freund. I looked her up in the phone book and left a message, asking her to call me. I was eager for some donkey talk.

  I’d never expected to care much about donkeys in my life, but I was finding them fascinating. Much like dogs, they form real connections with humans; they’re very loving. But they also possess an almost supernatural calm. They’ve been perfecting this aura—their “donkeyness,” as Pat Freund calls it—for thousands of years, a combination of affection and gravitas they have down pat.

  Carol sometimes reminded me, in fact, of a Labrador: deep, sad eyes; the patient ability to ponder nothing with extraordinary purpose; a love for people. I joked to Paula that Carol was the reincarnated spirit of my departed yellow Lab Julius, his peer in soulfulness. I never walked into the barn or the pasture without Carol making an appearance, nuzzling me, checking my pockets, and then observing the activities at hand. I heard her now-familiar hee-haw greeting me in the morning when I got up, at night when I climbed upstairs to bed. We’d bonded as if by Krazy Glue.

  Yet I didn’t know muc
h about her. She was about sixteen and had come to Raspberry Ridge from a nearby farm. I’d first seen her there while grazing Carolyn’s sheep. At first she’d shared a pen with a few goats, but when they learned how to hop over the fence and escape, Carolyn tethered them elsewhere, leaving Carol alone.

  If it was cold or raining or snowing, she’d huddle under a stand of trees. In the way of many dog lovers, I quickly began to anthropomorphize her: she was needy and sad, Carol the Lonely Donkey. Maybe it was so. She always came trotting over to the fence to say hello, and after a while I brought apples and carrots with me whenever I went herding. She loved my treats; crunching away, swishing her tail as I scratched her ears and neck—she was clearly a social creature. I rarely had much time to spend with her, as I went roaring by with dogs and sheep, but I was always sorry to leave her.

  Nobody likes to speak poorly of their own dogs, and I dearly love mine, but there’s a streak in the border collie breed—bred to work alone or with a solitary herder—that is neither generous nor sociable. Their prickly independence may be one of the reasons I’m so drawn to them, but it also makes them less than empathetic.

  The plight of a lonely donkey stuck out in a pasture with no company, seeking a chunk of apple or a scratch behind the ear, meant nothing to them. They charged at Carol’s fence and barked ferociously when she reached her head over to say hello. My Labs Julius and Stanley, may they rest in peace, would have behaved better.

  Carol accepted such slights philosophically, simply lifting her head when the dogs charged, approaching me again when they moved on. She persevered, accepting these affronts as a part of life.

  Carolyn sent her to me in Hebron because she thought she’d benefit from companionship. And Carol did settle into Bedlam Farm almost immediately, attaching herself to the sheep as if she were one of them, grazing and even sleeping with them.

  I supplemented her diet with oats from Agway, not something a donkey needs, but something a sort-of-farmer feels good about providing. Watching Carol happily munch her oats was one of the day’s sweet spots.

  At first the dogs continued to harry her, but if they aren’t always sweet, border collies aren’t stupid. Homer, who was conflict-averse, kept his distance, while Orson, who never backed away from any cheeky creature, got fresh and nipped her. Carol just flicked her left leg and booted him a good ten feet, bouncing him off of the barn wall. He got up, shook himself off, and never seemed to notice her again. Rose also considered taking her on, but when she got too close, Carol lowered her head and swept it back and forth. Rose got whacked this way once or twice, took the point, and the two have maintained a friendly and respectable association since. I was impressed that Carol had tamed two dominant, strong-willed creatures with a minimum of fuss.

  But I wanted to know more about these creatures, and to make sure I was taking good care of her. I needed some expert advice, and the Donkey Lady seemed the most promising source.

  Pat, it turned out, was indeed a political activist, but also a self-described “Jewish donkey spiritualist” who’d studied and written about the symbolic significance of donkeys, their place in the ancient world, and their profoundly spiritual natures. Both Jewish and Christian religious history is filled with biblical and other references to donkeys, she pointed out. Carol—like Pat’s donkeys—wore a cross on her back, a pattern of dark hair behind the shoulders.

  Pat could cite numerous references from the Old Testament. In ancient times, donkeys were the trucks and tractors, performing myriad agricultural and mercantile tasks, essential to commerce and daily life. “The donkey,” Pat wrote in one of her essays, “remains throughout [history] a symbol of mobility and wealth, an appropriate emblem for wandering peoples.” In the Old Testament, Samson was reported to have killed a thousand Philistines by wielding the jawbone of an ass. In the New, Mary rode a donkey to Bethlehem.

  Pat’s belief about donkeys struck me as powerful and true. I’d never seen more affectionate eyes, or encountered a sweeter, more patient soul. During daily herding lessons, Carol sometimes came up alongside me and put her head on my shoulder.

  And she was crafty, too, with her uncanny ability to distinguish a farrier’s or vet’s pickup truck from anyone else’s—and to take off up the hill the minute the former pulled up the drive. “It happens all the time,” the farrier said with a shrug. “They just know.”

  SADLY, I COULDN’T WORK UP THE SAME ADMIRATION OR affection for my sheep. I liked them best when they were grazing happily, peaceable things, incapable of harm. Otherwise, I couldn’t feel much connection.

  Partly it was their flocking nature. Sheep by definition lack individuality; their survival depends on group behavior. They move like schools of fish, each keeping a wary eye on all the others. This is good news for border collies, who quickly learn they can control the many by intimidating a few. But it doesn’t touch me. Some shepherds I know adore their sheep, giving them names, spotting distinctive personality quirks and traits. I couldn’t tell most of mine apart. The only exceptions were the hefty, rambunctious Nesbitt, an unusually wooly ewe whose curly fleece inspired me to name her Paula, after my curly-haired wife, and Minnie, an elder ewe who moved slowly. Otherwise they seemed interchangeable.

  “Wait till lambing season,” other sheep raisers keep telling me. I hoped they were right, but I doubted it. Unlike Carol, the sheep seemed utterly uninterested in me unless I was carrying food, in which case they’d bowl me over in a second to get to it. I’d come to see them as digestive systems with fleece: stuff went in, stuff came out, the quantities were impressive, but the process wasn’t terribly interesting. Besides, they had lifeless eyes, a contrast to the donkey’s soulful gaze.

  We coexisted. I took as good care of them as I possibly could. They had high-quality feed, the finest second-cut hay in Washington County, shelter in the barn, an artesian well that flowed winter and summer. Not to mention acres of pasture, a solid fence to keep predators out, and a donkey to stand guard.

  But the truth was, I doubted I’d ever love sheep, mine or anybody else’s. One possible explanation came from Carr, a retired farmer who lived nearby and stopped off sometimes to watch Rose herd and to offer advice on the care and maintenance of a small farm. My estrangement from my flock didn’t surprise him one bit.

  “Of course you don’t love the sheep,” he said, chomping on a chunk of Red Man. “Because of the dogs. You see the sheep from their point of view. And they don’t like sheep. They got nothing but contempt for them. So there’s your problem.” Carr was a wise man.

  CAROL, HOWEVER, HAD BECOME VERY IMPORTANT TO ME. ON the phone, I asked Pat if Carol needed anything I wasn’t giving her.

  “Another donkey,” was her prompt reply. Carol had been living alone or with sheep for so long that Pat doubted she even knew she was a donkey. “You have to bring out her donkeyness,” she said. “She doesn’t understand who she is.”

  Her donkeyness. Even for me, this was a strange idea.

  Next morning, the dogs and I headed down Route 30 for Belcher, and Pat’s beautiful old farm. We drove down one dirt road and turned onto another, finally glimpsing a restored red farmhouse. In an adjacent pasture, a dozen gray donkeys, some the size of horses, eyed us silently.

  Pat was waiting for me outside, and we strolled along, looking at her neat, well-kept buildings and talking about donkeyness. Then she steered me across the road to a clean, spacious barn where another score of donkeys, many still babies, were chewing hay. A couple came over to sniff and nuzzle us. One sweet young thing, a miniature in a lovely shade of taupe, with wide brown eyes and long lashes, seemed a bit shy at first, then put her head in my hand. I gave her a cookie and she took it gently and gratefully.

  She seemed the perfect companion—small, well-tempered, nonthreatening—to help Carol rediscover her donkeyness. I bought her on the spot, christened her Fanny after an aunt on my mother’s side, and Pat made arrangements to bring her by.

  But the next day, when we let her trot into the
pasture, she was not welcomed. Carol went nuts, racing around in circles, bucking and kicking a bit, rushing to protect the sheep. A few minutes later, the two of them were standing together way up in the pasture, Carol’s ears back, staring at the newcomer as if she’d fallen from the sky.

  I wasn’t quite sure whether Carol, who’d been either hanging out with sheep or avoiding rampaging border collies, had ever seen another donkey before. Pat said Carol would have a rough few days as she discovered what species she was, and her consciousness changed forever.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of all this donkeyness. Pat sounded like those dog mystics, channelers, and spiritualists who don’t want to see canines as animals but as some sort of magical domestic elves. That wasn’t my view of dogs. Why should I accept it in a donkey?

  Besides, Carol didn’t appear to be having a very spiritual time over the next several days. Rather, she seemed traumatized, kicking and lurching whenever little Fanny came near her or her food. Carol raced to and from the sheep for hours, suddenly confused about where she belonged. Then she disappeared into the barn for forty-eight straight hours. Fanny meekly followed her around, no matter the abuse.

  On the third day, though, when I came out of the house and saw the sheep high up in the pasture grazing, Fanny and Carol were standing by the barnyard gate, hee-hawing for me together. It was a happy sound and a sweet sight. Finally I saw what Pat was talking about: Carol seemed a transformed creature, happy to stand alongside Fanny, completely at peace with herself and—except for the bucket of oats she still jealously guarded—at peace with Fanny. She remained protective of the sheep, but apart from them, not part of the flock. She did, in fact, seem to have discovered her donkeyness, and I had seen it happen.

  Carol and Fanny came from very different places. Carol was a somewhat beat-up old farm donkey, overweight and shaggy-coated, never taking food for granted. Fanny, well bred and used to Pat’s clean, well-appointed barn, was more graceful, with a glossier, more even coat.