Lambsquarters

by Barbara McLean

  The neighbour advised permanent pasture for the front, and though I was skeptical at first, I now perceive its merits. The mix of legume and grass, clover and fescue, timothy and rye thrive together when the weather is fair, but divide the responsibility to be green when it’s not. Some plants suffer in drought but relish the floods, while others wither with insects but fight off the weeds.

  The area challenged my rake and hoe. Clods from the plough lay furrowed like forks in a drawer. Hillocks of hardpan were sprinkled with stone. I did get through it, arms aching and filthy. I hacked and I trampled, smoothed and spread, then set my pace, seed bag slung over my shoulder, walking that walk I’d seen only in a Millet painting of a peasant seeding the land. I found my rhythm.

  Green grew, and grows, mixed with all the flowers that flew in at the time and have since. Taraxacum officinale, the lowly dandelion, competed with newly feathered goldfinches for brightness on the ground, and white clover globes shone through the green like miniature bulbs of light. Purple charlies crept.

  Perennials dotted the edges. Plants I had no names for then, but slowly learned to read, to tend, to anticipate from year to year. When the grass grew I cut around them, leaving clumps on the lawn like relief on a painting, like lumps in gravy, sadly neglected flowers, left to live by their wits. I wonder how many I missed, clipped with the grass and lost forever in the days before order was established and beauty could be cultivated.

  I tackled the raspberries growing in a tangle behind the house. Just a couple of rows filled with leaves, trellised on grass, rusting away from neglect. It took gloves and boots, thick denim and canvas to enter their slum. Wool sweaters stuck to the canes like fleece to barbed wire, and thorns penetrated every soft surface. The canes thwacked my face when I got them loose, and scraped my wrists, the only flesh exposed. I looked like the loser in a cat fight when it was over and the patch was no winner. With great spaces of void, then massed clumps of cane, the patch was a wild mess that spring.

  I learned about speed. About the slow pace of late spring, when work was delayed by rain and mud, when the ground could not be worked or even traversed. Then the sudden sun and the rush to plant, to dig out the clods and rake and scatter in a fury, the soil drying by the minute, threatening to harden to stone. Work unceasing, bones weary at the end of long light-filled days, muscles stiffening, skin browning, my face weathering and taking on the look of the land itself, early hints of furrows to come.

  We planted little at first. A few potatoes, bought from a bin at the general store in Alderney, and peas, beans, carrots and lettuce. They paralleled the raspberries in sickly rows, shadowed by the giant maple to the west. I learned from books or neighbours’ nudges: soak the beans overnight; cut the potatoes with three eyes in each piece for planting; use apple tree prunings to support the peas; sow lettuce every two weeks.

  Though our crop grew slowly, our pasture jumped. Waves of orchard grass beyond the sagging fence headed up too soon. The timothy lagged behind, and the thistle and burdock awaited their chance, hovering at the fencerow, intent to invade. The pasture was out of control in a flash, beyond the level we could mow or maintain, and we were not ready for livestock of our own to chew it into submission.

  The neighbour brought cattle, steers and heifers, I believe. Crossed Hereford on Holstein, black with white faces, roast beef on the hoof. They lapped sheaves of grass with raspy tongues, cut the field into tussock and turf. They ruminated at dusk, lowed at night, high-kicked at dawn, frisky for another day of grazing away from home. In moonlight their faces shone from the field like disembodied ghosts, their jaws circling, their eyes half-closed in bovine thought. They brought manure and flies, great plops of cow pies, and I found these cattlebeasts immense and frightening, their playful curiosity overshadowed by their drooling tongues, their manure-flicking tails, their great cleft hoofs.

  They spurred us to clean out the barn and find flocks of our own. We filled truckloads with rubbish, fed bonfires with junk, forked barrows full of dung from decades of stock. Board by board we heaved and sorted, cutting our bare arms on wire and mesh, bruising our bodies with trips over stanchions, with wrenching square nails from their homes in thick beams. I coated rusty steel with bright white and painted the barn doors red from my childhood dreams, where all barns glowed red and white. We discovered the windows, scraped off the grime, replaced the lights and illuminated even more debris. Rolling up our sleeves we kept digging and ripping, dragging and hauling until we had a space, some pens, some possibility of use.

  In our early days we had travelled through Scotland, Ireland and Greece. We had swept spots of moor clean of droppings for our tent, heard the odd bleating of a sleeping lamb, the snore of its dam, the rustle of fleecy bodies shifting and succumbing to sleep. Sheep entered our dreams then and we had stored them away, fluffy gauze, in woolen moments of meditation. They were clouds, drifting between rational thoughts, but they surfaced now as solid matter, as the text to write a life on.

  We put the word out. We wanted sheep.

  BUS RECRUITS

  A KNOCK AT THE DOOR. A strange woman, smiling. “Will you have any kids on the bus this September?” Kids? Me? Us? I wonder now about that visit. I have no idea who she was or whether she really went from door to door to find filling for the great cheese-coloured bus that ran down our road each day. But no, no kids for the bus. Not this year. Likely not ever.

  PAGE WIRE

  BEFORE WE PLANTED GRASS, we fenced in the mangel field. Or fenced out. It was difficult to know whether the clods of earth, menacing and dark, were a danger or a lure. Wire loops, rusting with age, creaking with dry, hobbled and loped against failing posts, waved in winds and leaned with snow. The raspberries twisted through their own wire mess, which blended into the barnyard’s tall untended herbage, camouflage for ground-loving beasts.

  Barbed wire sagged at the top of the meadow, three useless strands for the itinerate cattle to tease. The fence worked for our first summer, but we hated the thought of its cruel pricks and spent hours that fall rolling it up into rusty balls, like huge medieval weapons, and carrying them off to the dump. The side field in front of the barn had no fence at all, was just lumped in together with the lane, the barnyard, anywhere the farm’s former animals had wanted to roam. So Thomas learned to fence. As he got to know the back roads and lanes throughout the townships while on house calls, he watched the neighbours, took mental notes, made patterns in his head. He asked questions, gathered advice.

  The mill keeper in Alderney sold us the materials and lent us the fence stretcher. We learned about rods, those units of measurement that had disappeared from our lives after elementary school, and from everywhere else in the world but the local mill, as far as we knew. One rod equals 5½ yards, or 5.03 metres, and the plural isn’t used around here, so we needed twenty rod of fence. Page wire, they call it, a mesh of rectangles, each about the size of a salt block, smaller sections at the bottom to keep lambs in, predators out.

  I watched Thomas measure the distance. Some unconscious knowledge overtook his body as he walked with giant strides; intuitively he knew each to be a yard. Playing grown-up Mother May I. He also knew how to dig. I’d never seen him dig before. We’d never owned a spade. But the work came to him brilliantly. A natural digger. And I’ve hardly seen him without a shovel nearby since. He carries one in the back of the truck for roadside raids—discount trees and shrubs, ditch lilies.

  We didn’t have a truck that first summer, so we used the car, a little black Vauxhall of pre-seatbelt vintage, to try to stretch the fence. The posts were all in. We had cut them all to length from the cedar in the bush and gently placed them in three-foot holes. Three-foot holes. I can write that in a second, but the effort it took to dig even one of those holes would take pages.

  The page wire was attached at the north end, a few staples held it along the way, and the fence stretcher waited at the roadside, joined by a chain to the back of the car. I might have done it the other way round, pulled
from south to north unobserved, but gravity defied the magnet. We were soon discovered, and the flying Dutchman was there in a flash. Why didn’t we call him? Why did we think we could do this alone? He wheeled in the tractor (reverse his best gear), attached the fence and stretched it effortlessly. The mesh, trapped like Aphrodite by Hephaestus, was suddenly wanton and weak to its iron strength.

  We pounded in staples, ten to a post, posts placed every eight feet. And the corners braced. An angled post, notched to the ends in one direction, reinforced in the other with twisted number nine wire, the farmer’s friend. And the corner post was a bully, a thick tough beast, engineered to last, to hold its own and others. The field lay fenced, from barn to road, shiny and sprightly and straight. Only the post-tops stood askew, and, in those days before the chainsaw, needed personal attention. They were hand-sawn on an angle to deflect the snow and sheer off the rain. The tips lined up in the sights in a near perfect trail down the paddock for birds to perch on until the sheep arrived to claim the space.

  LAMBING

  I WAS ROOTING AROUND, busy at some task one morning late that first summer, when I sensed a sleek navy Volvo glide in the lane. We knew a few neighbours by then, had put out the word, had asked for sheep. Willis Harris, limping from arthritic knees that predated arthroscopy and replacement, unpacked himself from the passenger seat of the strange car, his red hair vying with his red face for brilliance, his lips split from too much sun, his hands gnarled like yellow birches growing on granite. He probably hadn’t ridden in anything but a truck or tractor for years, maybe for ever.

  He wore green, the farmer’s uniform, dirty and mussed from the morning’s chores, but no doubt well clean hours before. He kept his hat on. We’d asked him about sheep, had seen his flock by the road, but no, he had said, they were just old yoes from the west, just to keep the grass down at the far farm, there’s nothing we’d want from them. R.F. Harrow, he said, was our man.

  And now here they were together in Mr. Harrow’s car, to look at the farm and suss me out as a potential shepherd. A gentle man, cultured, Mr. Harrow wore neat khaki pants, pleat-pressed, and a cap with a peak. His eyes made his denim shirt look blue. He shook my hand firmly, his own uncalloused. He wore Wallabees, not work boots. Not a speck of dirt on him or the car. I showed them my hen, Mrs. Chicken, and her chicks, cooped in the yard in a makeshift house. And I remember feeling foolish, playing at animals around these serious men who made farming their life.

  But my sincerity must have shown, for Mr. Harrow sold us some sheep. The last of his Hampshire cross Suffolk flock, a black-faced breed on strong black legs, with wool springy and dense and short. We put the sheep in pens and found them a ram and learned everything we could about how to keep them.

  I read widely, from the TV Vet, which I still hide behind the door frame of my grandmother’s glassed-in bookshelf (the book’s spine is a garish orange and turquoise), to academic veterinary texts, to farmer’s manuals and magazines. I apprenticed in neighbours’ barns for births and shearings; I sat in on agricultural courses at college and learned to manage my small flock well.

  There were only five ewes that first year, all pre-named. Old Spot, Hampy, Blackie, Susie and Maggie. Ramsey was the first ram, a thrifty Suffolk lamb, and though he was inexperienced, he performed like a professional and every dam “caught.”

  I remember the first year’s lambing. It began during the biggest snowstorm of the season, on April 3rd, back when we measured in inches—we got a full twenty-one. The age-of-majority snowstorm. There wasn’t just snow, which can be moved, but wind, which moves for you. The snow was light—too light to walk on. I sank to my hips in the path from house to barn. And I walked that path day and night, watching and waiting for a first new breath. I had seen lambs born in other barns, had read of their birth, knew what to expect. But I had not been responsible.

  Each time I inspected the barn, the wind took my tracks. I thought of farmers lost between barn and house, found when the storm was over. I thought of stringing a rope. But this is Ontario, not the prairies, and my journey was short. Nevertheless, I was alone for three days. Thomas, caught in town when the storm hit, was warm at the hospital, tending the sick. Three frightening days when no one could move, either in or out. I read of multiple births, retained placentas, prolapses, breaches, head-out-and-swollen presentations, head-back presentations, tail presentations, disasters. For three days I had no human contact as I awaited my first delivery. I was a nervous midwife.

  It took bulldozers to dig out the road that year. In April. Cruel indeed. But the first lamb, when it came, neither malpresented nor worried. It was born in twenty minutes, was up and sucking in seconds. A perfect male, and I called him Virgil and sing of him now.

  A ewe in labour wants to be alone. Garbo. This one found a corner in the barn, walked around in circles like a dog remembering long grass, then began to paw the straw, making a nest. She arched her back a few times, circled a little more, pawed, and finally got down on her side. A few pushes, her neck stretched with the strain, and a small balloon appeared, full of fluid. Two feet, tiny points of hoofs, one slightly ahead of the other, white on the tips, shiny black further up.

  A little furry wet nose appeared between the feet, the tongue out at the side and blue. Another push and the shape of the forehead was visible under the ewe’s stretched skin, then through. The neck was so long, a swan emerging, followed by slowing shoulders, and the body slipped out with a small heave, a rush, a deluge of the sea it swam in.

  Virgil, born to an elastic experienced ewe, came all of a sudden. Not precipitously, but predictably. Before he had a chance to cry, his mother chuckled to him. A low soft laughing bleat, like a short purr from an enormous cat, the communication of love from ewe to lamb. A lamb learns its mother’s chuckle and answers. Out in the world now, covered in thick hot fluid and membrane, Virgil struggled to stand up, to find food. His mother licked him off, fluffed his wool, trimmed his navel cord. He staggered, he splayed and finally he sucked.

  I sat on the stable fence. An accoucheur.

  IN THE EARLY YEARS, I was meticulous. I built little feeders for the nursery pens, wrote detailed descriptions of each lambing, stripped the dams’ teats of their waxy plugs before the lambs got settled nursing, named each animal as it was born. Before a birth, in years without late snow, I would set up my chair in the barnyard and let the ewes mill around me. I’d put my hands on their bellies and feel the kicks, trace the outlines of the lives within them, burrowed deep beneath the wool. I’d live among them, frequently lying in the straw and sleeping with exhaustion after a long labour (Thomas off tending a human birth in Murphy’s Mill), waking with the ewes’ bleats in the middle of the night, helping when they needed help, watching when they did not.

  I scrubbed empty pens with lye, brushed down every surface for every germ. I suffered losses as if they were my own; they were my own. They are still.

  SHEEP HAVE A MOON of their own—estrus every eighteen or nineteen days of their season—but really they follow the sun. Only when the days get shorter do they ovulate. Their evolution has not caught up with their domestication. If they breed on short days, they lamb on long ones. And longer days are warmer days, and warmer days give stronger lambs.

  In the last spring of the century, the barnyard was full of snow, the compost completely covered, the gates frozen open. The kitchen garden, moved now to a space south of the barn, was fast asleep, awaiting the runoff from the dark gold mine of manure, which was buried under its white duvet like a child in a dream, nescient to the life stirring within it, within the barn.

  The first lamb is always a surprise. Some years it comes early, before I have a chance to fret; more often it is late, wearing me out before the event. I trudge to the barn to watch, to help, to marvel.

  ONE BIRTH, on day four or five, could have been disastrous. The first lamb was born easily, the mother attentive. She was so attuned to the first, she wouldn’t go down to deliver the second. While she stood, it
slipped out, supple and slinky in its thick wet membrane, and dropped to the ground encased in its caul like a sleek cabbage roll. I don’t know how long a lamb can lie lifeless. I didn’t stay on the fence to see. I cleared the membrane from its nose and mouth, encouraged it to breathe the clear air of the new world on this side of its bubble. It breathed. It shook. It started to life.

  WHEN NEW, their ears are plastered back, stuck to the sides of their heads. As they dry off, the ears move forward, drooping from the weight of the birth fluids, the weight of the world. Sometimes it takes a day or so for the ears to perk, although lambs hear well, responding to their mothers’ chuckles. Marking tags, small brass brads with numbers, tend to pull down the left ears for a few days, making them look a tad risqué. They are fin de siècle creatures, with body piercings, tattoos.

  After an overnight with their dams in a mothering-up pen (a portable crib of hinged gates, four feet square) the new lambs meet in a central space. Then the bleating begins. Oh brave new world. And space. They can run, play, chase. But who are the other ewes? Are you my mother? Are you? Misrecognitions are met with bunts.

  It is a fearful time, the move. A cacophony of chuckling mothers, bleating lambs, claiming calls. But the lambs learn their mums, their mates, new connections. This year, one has learned to steal. I recognize the thievery by the greasy wool on his forehead. Clearly he was grabbing a furtive suck from behind whenever he could and the wax from the udders was rubbing off on his head. A forensic certainty.