Lambsquarters

by Barbara McLean

  In the house my wheel whirred with the sound of spinning lambswool, which I knit into bootees and sweaters and shawls. Tiny clothes from our farmstuffs, all ready and waiting. Bags woven for diapers, blankets shaped on the loom. Dark greens and deep browns, natural greys and pure whites. Not a pink or a blue to be seen. Deep colours, for the depth of my commitment, the well of my hope.

  AND SHE FILLED them all, my beautiful daughter. So pink and round and perfect at birth. Too big already for some of the clothes I’d made. She filled our arms, our lives, our home. This country baby, homegrown baby, created without skill or knowledge, who came with love of her own. And the daffodils bloomed for themselves that spring, for there was no depression.

  SHEARING

  THE WINTERS IN GREY COUNTY beg for heavy wool. Snow drifts right over the fence tops, piling pompoms on the posts when the wind is down. Gates disappear under crisp white hills. Just getting to the barn can be a chore, with fresh powder thigh deep. Only snowshoes keep me aloft. But except during the worst blizzards, I feed the animals outside.

  I take my baby daughter with me. Mobile and toddling by her first winter, she heads out to the barn encased in her snowsuit, a complicated braid of knitted cables in grey handspun. Wonderfully warm, it allows her to move freely, where nylon or Gor-Tex or whatever would not. She stands among the ewes, or sits in their midst on the snow, and they mill around her sniffing, recognizing, protecting. She is a part of their lives, and they of hers.

  There is a courtyard by the barn, a sort of sheep esplanade. Stone walls cut deep into the bank-barn on the north and also mark the eastern edge. The sheep have access to the stable on the other side, but throughout winter they choose to be out. To dot themselves inside the stone walls. Small white humps in a bleached land. Flakes of snow on fleece on snow.

  Before feeding them, I pick my daughter up, a fresh bundle of giggling wool, and place her in the playpen made from hay bales or hurdles or whatever’s handy. Keep her safe and happy and warm near the lambs, if there are any yet, the chickens if there aren’t. I toss sheaves of hay from the mow out to the courtyard, where they punctuate the white with green wind-scattered dots as individual leaves escape the bale. Late harvested timothy sticks like velcro to wool, so each year I hope the grass was cut and baled before it headed up. If I try to pull the timothy heads out of the fleece, a million seeds scurry deep within it for survival. To protect the fleece from chaff, I use square wooden feeders that prevent the sheep from climbing right into the hay and garlanding themselves like Florizel in The Winter’s Tale. Small bites will dangle from mutton chops, though, and the odd ewe will drag her dinner across another’s back.

  A tangle of protection: I guard the fleece from contamination while the fleece shields the sheep from the elements. The snow is the best indicator of success, for in the worst storms my ewes will lie snug under their thick snowy blankets. Their fleece insulates them completely; not a ray of warmth escapes to melt a flake. With their feet tucked under their bulging bodies, they silently ruminate, growing lambs and wool.

  Wool is the guiltless crop. Nothing dies in its harvest. If left on the sheep, the fleece would eventually shed, pull off in patches on brambles and briars. The sheep would go bald in patches, trip over its own tresses. A sick sheep will shear itself. Illness causes a break across the fibre, which loosens it until the wool falls away in hanks. Left to grow too long, the fleece fills with chaff and dirt, parts along the back with rain, weighs the animal down. If a woolly sheep turns turtle, it will die. A sheep stuck on its back is “cast.” Lying upended, legs flailing, it is a comical sight, but if unaided, its rumen fills with gas that cannot escape. The cud cannot move. The animal suffocates.

  Shorn sheep trade their wool for new freedom, give up the weight of their world. Cool, sleek, clean and trim. But it’s always a risk, shearing. First it’s important to pick the right day. March can be spring or winter, lion or lamb itself. The risk of inclemency. In wet weather, wool will soak like a sponge, absorbing a third of its weight in water, and clog the shears. If it’s too cold, naked sheep shiver, huddle up together with their backs hunched, their heads down, their backsides bright pink with embarrassment.

  My itinerant shearer is small, child-size. Her feet are as tiny as those of an ancient Chinese aristocrat, though they symbolize anything but leisure. When she glides the long blows, those smooth strokes that guide the shears from the sheep’s flank to its head, her body is spread tight against the animal, stretched to the same length. Although her craft is placeless, her method is local, learned from an ambidextrous man who travelled all over the county. With one hand she shears half the beast. Then, with the sheep flashing fleece like a flourish of white-lined cape, she switches hands to complete the other side. It’s not the scientific method of the Antipodes, but she wins prizes at the local fairs.

  Belly wool and bits go in the bin with the tags or dags, those locks clogged with unmentionables. The rest of the fleece, held together by its own architecture, is thrown high in the air to parachute down to the sorting table, a slatted grid made of wooden strips that rests on portable gates for shearing day and is stored in the mow for the rest of the year. Small bits of second-cut wool, telltale evidence that the shears have shaved twice to cover a mistake in a previous blow, separate and drop through the slats of the open sorting table to the floor. No good for spinning, they sift through. Dross.

  The table is large, four feet by eight, but only just holds the freshly shorn sheepcoat stretched like a crucifixion. I circle round it, honouring, pulling off daggy hind bits, hairy leg tops, matted neck wool, and back-chaff. Always I stretch a lock between my hands and tug. If rarely it breaks, I discard it. Not a spinning fleece. If sound and lustrous, with good crimp—regular shiny waves throughout the fibre—I set it aside. One to send to the mill or to keep and spin at home.

  The bellies and bits skirted from the edges go into the dag bag and then the fleece is rolled. Lying right side up on the table, its weathered tips are what I see. But as I turn it inwards, folding the sides up to the centre, one at a time, I reveal its inner secret beauty. Then I roll it tightly like a spring roll, (like a tent, my son will say years later) from tail to tip into a springy sphere. Pure wool close to the bone, the heart. Rolled and sometimes tied with paper twine, the fleece is packed in massive burlap wool bags by hand or the small feet of my jumping child. The cuffed sacking unrolls like a lisle stocking as it fills, and is sewn shut with binder twine when bulging.

  FOR MANY YEARS we timed our lambs for winter birthing, when it was too cold to shear, so we missed the bodily changes of the pregnant ewes, hidden as they were under heavy woollen coats. By the time their fleece came off, they had returned to their svelte selves, only their swollen udders revealing their fecundity. The early black-faced crosses gave way to woollier breeds, a finely crimped Corriedale influx for a while, and finally the noble Border Leicester, with its Roman nose and wondrous long wool. To relieve the fleece from the stresses of birth, we planned all our lambing for April and our shearing for March.

  Ewes can be shorn before lambing, but they mustn’t be upended or jostled in the final stages of pregnancy. If shorn too soon, the ewes’ new-growth wool will tempt them away from warm shelter, and they could give birth under crisp moons, their lambs weak with hypothermia, wet birth wool dripping amniotic icicles.

  Shearing risks revelations. Like gifts, the sheep are decked in seductive packages, the contents known only when the wrapping is off, like Muslim women out of the chador. The gift can be a wonderful surprise, an expected relief or a disappointment. The ewes are unveiled, but unprotected from the elements or from the ram, who sniffs them like new arrivals in the harem. Unfamiliar, beautiful, pristine, paradoxically mysterious in their exposure.

  Auspicious surprises are yearling ewes radiant in first pregnancy, their udders tense, teats shiny, their round bellies pushing against the shears. They had been put with the ram in the hope they might conceive, but they are not strictly required to b
ear offspring in their adolescence. Older ewes, coming to the end of their breeding careers, emerge bony over the hips but rounded below, carrying lambs under stretched tendons, muscles sagging from years of birthing. They too are revealed in their fertile matriarchy, waddling like the aging mothers they are, bellies bulging, their flock-daughters ranging down in age from nearly a decade to a year.

  The wool gives up other secrets as it is spread open like a rug on the sorting table. It chronicles a history of the year, marks fever or illness in a narrowing of the fibre, tells tales of breakouts into burdock or rubbings on a rusty fence. Each fleece thrown, skirted, tested, rolled and packed is as personal as a child’s blanket. And one is selected for that future honour.

  Now naked, the sheep suddenly have space at what were crowded feeders only hours ago. Each animal is miraculously narrowed by six to eight inches on either side. And they reacquaint with renewed friendliness, snuggle close to stay warm. The saved fleece transfers warmth to sweaters, mitts and scarves for my daughter, socks for my man. The daggy ends fertilize and mulch the garden, and the bellies and bits insulate around a window or over a door.

  Spring plants sprout dyestuffs to colour the woolly crop: greens from alfalfa, milkweed, and apple bark carefully peeled from prunings as my young one sleeps on warm afternoons. Summer yellows and oranges, tans and purples from the flowers and berries we gather, filling our baskets in the fields, mother and daughter together. The spun skeins of wool are submerged and swirled around like fish waving their tails in vats of colour. They change hue like chameleons, chased by a little girl on a chair, a wooden spoon in her hands.

  By summer the sheep have their coats back—they are two inches deep by July. The sheep don’t notice their old wool hanging in coils to dry, magically transformed by a mysterious prism. They can’t know the magic of green jewelweed chopped into the pot, releasing orange dye like blood from a wound. Surely they don’t recognize themselves as clothing on their keepers the next winter, my daughter now bigger, my son stretching my sweaters, almost ready to be born.

  They do know the cycle, though, and rarely resist being flipped on their backsides on the shearing board to be pinked-up each year. They relinquish their wool, shake off immaculate bodies, waltz back to the pen like young women in their backyard bikinis on the first hot day in April. All white and shy, but delighted to shed the fat blankets of cold-weather wear. By the time they lamb they have enough wool for baby rugs. As the dams lie in the straw and ruminate, the lambs will perch on their resting backs like loons.

  SHEARING EXPOSES bounty and beauty—except for the year of the lice, when the skin revealed was bitten and raw and fleeces were worn and damaged. Like pediculosis in the fair-haired child, sheep lice are invisible in the fleece. They are discreet and tenacious. There had been suggestions. Clues. The new ram, beautifully groomed when he arrived, began biting at his body before he met the ewes. Loneliness, I thought. Then a general uneasiness in the flock, some wool loss, some rubbing, some scratching. I considered mineral deficiencies, nutritional problems, wool diseases. I sent away fleece and skin scrapings for analysis. Nothing.

  But on shearing day, all became clear. Small patches of skin in distress from the biting, large quantities of fleece worried with the scratching. The crop was in ruin and my flock was infested.

  We bought powder made from dried tropical plants, donned gloves and masks. A pen of fresh straw was bedded for the treated. Then, one by one, we powdered each animal, raked their backs, rubbed their legs, patted the dust into their bellies. Doom dust. Doom to the lice and boon to the sheep. The air was as white as the swamp in a fog, but the sheep didn’t mind. They loved it. Finally the itch was scratched.

  One by one they pranced to the new pen, powdered like ladies-in-waiting for Marie Antoinette. In a court dance they went, regal and noble, their noses high and proud. Their lousy wool gone, their fruitful bellies swaying, their tiny tormentors gagging on minute particles of poison plants. We were all white together. And I felt I knew every aspect of every one of my sheep’s bodies intimately. Like a lover—no, more like a mother.

  SHOVEL

  I DON’T RECALL WHO noticed the shape of the shovel. A visitor, not a farmer. Someone who knows antiques perhaps. Knows what city people will pay for the unusual, the rustic, the curious and the absurd. I use it, scrape manure with it, edge its rusty blade into corners, haul its excessive weight up to the wheelbarrow. I could get another. A smaller blade, a plastic handle, a lighter model better suited to my frame.

  Who first used my cumbersome square shovel? It came with the place, was tossed in a corner of the barn with the junkyard collection of cattle chains, torn rabbit cages, rusty metal sheeting and the silent memories of a thousand animal ghosts. The barn is different now, cleared of rubble, with new floors, new walls, new pens and the tilt put right.

  When we first arrived, the barn “was heading south for the winter,” said old Tom McNeil, the spitting, farting, flashing-eyed barn fixer we eventually hired. The pressure of the earth against the foundation, banked up to allow the horses, now tractors, to drive up into the mow, slowly edged the whole structure to a lean, the way a horse will tilt a favourite fence post by continually pushing against it, rubbing its flank on the wood, polishing it to a shine, but setting it off the perfect angle.

  Just as someone came up with the idea of building barns on a bank, or of building banks up to a barn, some old farmer devised the method of repair when these banks pressured their barns into a lean. Like parasites who take over the host, a bank unchecked can surpass its symbiotic relationship and kill its partner. It can push the whole barn off its foundations, shake the roof alignment, cause an opening here, a loose board there, and before the animals have had a chance to meet their grandlambs, the barn is all in a heap with the first serious windstorm.

  The tilt required attention, but everything else in the barn did too. The old separate cattle stalls were hopeless for gregarious sheep who like to huddle together, the cattle chains were superfluous hanging down on broken frames, and the floor was a treacherous maze of various levels and materials. Until I was pregnant the floor hadn’t bothered me; I’d climb over the partitions with full pails of water. But a cumbersome belly made me realize how awkward and dangerous the work was with its many pails, many gates and many nails.

  The animals’ water froze overnight and each morning I pulled out my crowbar, that heavy beast, and pounded the ice, broke through the top, emptied out pails and started again. More than once it resisted my knocks then gave way all at once, sending showers of shards and drops, debris or worse all over us. A chicken-shit facial some days.

  New mother ewes, parched from lactating, greedily drank up all I could give. Pails and pails, gallons and gallons, carried one by one, over the gates, through the pens, around the corner of the warren we’d bought. All while I focused one eye on my toddler. The eye in the back of my head, which mothers develop, but never quite trust.

  So after a few years of hauling water and tripping on broken concrete, of mucking out the barn by hand because a tractor couldn’t negotiate the pens, we hired Tom McNeil, and he came with his jacks, winches, chains and pulleys. He tore out the foundations on two sides, left no post in the corner: the barn was open to wind and light, staying aloft by some magic of angles. The beams in place, the jacks set up, he started to winch. Inch by inch. The barn groaned. It heaved. It sighed and grumbled. “We got her talkin’ now,” said Tom, his hand-rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Then he left for the weekend, with our barn floating in air, just a mow with a beam and a chain holding fast.

  Overnight, a spring storm took out a tree near the house. Flattened it for good. But the barn stood. Held. The wisdom of the barn fixer setting her strong. On Monday Arthur Erwin, the king of concrete in our area, came to pour cement like ambrosia, spread it like molten gold into solid foundations, walls and floors. And my daughter, now strong on her feet, took it all in, stooped for the stones and drew in the muck and made her m
ark—two tiny footsteps—on this place she calls home. We rebuilt the foundation around her, to buttress her up and make her feel safe. Her sibling was just quickening when we began. I needed a better barn. Where I could walk without tripping, water without pails, feed without shoving. Spend less time on the chores as my family took more.

  WHEN THAT PILE of stone and earth had first been bevelled beneath the mow doors, the original barn was big enough to service a full hundred acres, all the grain, straw and hay the farm would grow, as well as the animals it could pasture. Likely the farmers had a cow or two for milk, a few beef cattle, some pigs, sheep and chickens. The barn was built with timber from the forests and stone from the fields. Stones are legion in this township—it sits on glacial moraine. No matter how many stones you pick, the yearly frost always heaves up more. Stone piles are monumental.

  The local hemlock, roughly sawn for barnboard, is no longer available. My good friend and neighbour Harrow, reluctant to replace such boards with pine, which would only last a hundred years or so, clad his barn in steel. I can’t help wondering how that will look in a hundred years. Wood is pleasing in a state of decay.

  After the first barn burned in the twenties, the owner retired and sold the farm to the next-door neighbour, who was happy to get it—his rocky land was too marginal to support a family well. No doubt the house stood empty for a while, and the barn may have been vacant too. But not for long. The original farmer couldn’t cope with town. It must have felt like the city to him—buggies everywhere, telegraph poles and electric lights going in, hustle and bustle as the trains pulled up, groups of people tripping over each other, noisy drunks on a Saturday night. He couldn’t take it. He returned, bought back the corner of the farm, the house, the barn, twenty-three acres. And it was then that the barn burned.