Lambsquarters

by Barbara McLean

  So my barn is not all that old. Although the property was cleared well back in the century before the last, and the earliest house—now in ruins—was made of local logs, the first barn did not survive. Old Mr. Meads, a patient of Thomas’s, remembers when it burned. He lives in Murphy’s Mill now, but he grew up around the corner from our farm. He had been driving cattle down the concession to the railway in Alderney. A sudden storm, thunder, lightning, and the barn was struck. No doubt the fire-reels came, and the neighbours set up a bucket brigade, but only the foundation was saved. The firefighters brag they’ve never lost a foundation yet. The foundation had been built from the Canadian Shield. Solid as granite.

  The smoke from a burning barn carries for miles. Clouds of flames burst through the boards as old hay and straw catch. Buckets of water, or hoses from pumpers filled at nearby streams only wet down the other outbuildings, the house, the nearby wooden fences. A barn fire rarely gets put out. It rages like Hera in a temper, sacrificing heifers, then smoulders in its rocky enclosure, cowed by great hot stones that are impervious to flame and testament to the cold that brought them here.

  The township arrives, bringing pies, casseroles, fresh bread and eggs. Farmers take cattle home with them, milk them in their own barns, tether horses in their sheds, pile pigs into their pens for sleepovers. The sheep are on pasture, safely grazing, their wool inflammable, their winter shelter gone but not yet mourned. Dogs sniff and worry and burn their paws in the rubble. They dig and uncover, expose the losses, find the bones.

  At one time, there would have been a bee to rebuild. We only see barn raisings now when a local Mennonite barn burns. At the last one, the children were sent from school to watch the raising—it’s that rare. But in the twenties, bees were common. In the days before the tin men and the Quonset hut, all the farms were smaller, had more men, more hands, more immediate skills.

  Having only a quarter of a farm now, the farmer had no use for a large barn. He couldn’t grow enough hay or grain on this land to fill the mows, or sustain a full quota of stock. But he had to rebuild something. Using two sides of the stone foundation and old timber already notched from some derelict barn, he sunk in posts to hold up the south and east sides, laid new mud-sills, created a skeleton, mortised and tenoned. He had help with the frame.

  A neighbour up the road had a portable sawmill that ran off the tractor and cut hemlocks from the bush for siding. There was a shingle mill in Alderney where the farmer could take cedar logs from the swamp for the roof. Nails came by the pound then and were square cut and heavy. The preparations were legion and long, but the process reacquainted him with his land and reassured him of his mission. He belonged on this place. His forefathers built the first house, the first barn. He would replace what was lost.

  On the day of a raising, folks would arrive early. The men at the barnyard, the women at the house and yard. Boys would set up tables and unload benches and chairs from the wagons. Dogs would bark. Babies would sleep under nets beneath maples or nurse in the upstairs rooms. Cats would emerge from their hiding spots, hunker down at a distance and watch. Milk came in cans fresh from the cold house, produce came from the gardens, berries directly from the bushes, bread from twenty ovens. Woodstoves in surrounding kitchens would roast meat, making the women sweat into their bib aprons, their hair escaping from pins and flattened against red faces. Women with names like Bertha and Beulah, Clover and Cavelle. Rubys and Olives and Ferns, their last names carried on by brothers. Little girls would draw out the cloths, set the tables, place the forks, the knives, the cups. Cauldrons of water would be set to boil for tea, hams sliced, eggs hard-cooked, peeled and devilled.

  Preserved herbal vinegars, pickles, relishes. Salt, pepper, sugar. And pies. The pies would be competitive—practice pieces for the fall fair. Rhubarb, raspberry, apple and cherry, elderberry from last year’s canning—the elderberries not yet ripe in midsummer— perhaps the odd peach from someone who had been down-country and was showing off. The elevation won’t tolerate peaches here. They die off in frosts.

  Days of preparation for this feast. Two feasts, for after the noon dinner the men and bigger boys would be back at the barn, would work until supper, would need to eat again before going back to their own chores, their own barns. So the women would scurry and sweat and worry and fuss and work as hard as they did then. The food had to be beautiful, had to be nourishing, and it was.

  Tom McNeil’s father was the barn wizard before him, and he would lead the team, organize the men into what they did best. The sure-footers to the roof, the land-lovers to the foundation. The reckless in tandem with those with a good sense of self-preservation. The doctor on standby, ready to deal with concussion, splinter and gash. No one wore protective equipment. And, as the pies were contested in the house, skill and speed were winning elements at the barn. Who could lay more shingles? Who could carry more boards, hammer more nails, set in the best windows?

  The men would bring their own tools. Some in leather aprons. Hammers hooked to overalls. Ladders and squares, levels and plumb lines, cloth tapes in leather cases, saws, planes and chisels. A neighbour needed a barn. Lightning strikes. It might happen to you someday.

  It might have been Aaron Wilson who brought the shovel. He mixed cement, poured the sidewalks in Alderney. The shovel’s blade can hold a heavy dollop of muck and the shaft has the ghost of concrete in its cracks. But the tool must predate him too, that split wooden handle, carefully steamed to bend, chosen from the lathe for its strength and resilience both. Whoever brought it, forgot it. Or left it as a talisman, like the branch of evergreen on the ridge, spirit of safety for those who must not fall.

  ZOË

  THE STABLE FLOOR is indelibly marked, not only with the named and dated sneakered footprints of my toddling daughter, but with a trail of errant paw prints angling across one corner, hidden all year by bedding and sheep. Each summer, on the day the barn is cleaned out and the manure is spread on the hayfield, the paw prints resurface. They are the lasting marks of a sappy dog who started and ended her days here.

  Zoë was born right in the middle of the back kitchen early in our first spring, before the renovations, when the floorboards were broken and the wind howled through. Her mother was a city mongrel, probably a mix of hound and shepherd, though Thomas’s grandmother said she was “a bit big for a Heinz.”

  I’d never had a dog before, though I’d longed and begged for one, even brought puppies home when I was a child, trying to break down my parents’ resolve. Zoë’s mother, Jessie, just a stray pup, was injured at the side of a city road. A vet wrapped her broken leg to her body until it healed, and found her a home with us before we came here. She began a three-legged race (the fractured leg never touched the ground at speed) that lasted for fourteen years.

  Zoë’s father was a Grey County local, a daily visitor who had a reputation for being the best groundhogger in the township. His title was undisputed by any of the neighbours. A crucial task, dispatching groundhogs is a prized skill because groundhog holes are killers. A cow can break a leg if it drops in a hole. A farmer can fall from his tractor and die if a wheel goes in. When they aren’t in their burrows, groundhogs spend most of the daylight hours eating vegetation that has been planted for other uses. Pasture, hay and gardens are all at risk from the woodchuck, Marmota monax. So Zoë’s sire was legendary. His owner, who lives across the way, was born in this house years ago in one of the upstairs rooms, so it seemed appropriate for the dog to colonize the farm with his pups. Pure white, he had upstanding perky ears and a curly tail, which made a rather odd mix in the offspring. Some had floppy hound ears, others had ears that stuck right up, but Zoë’s were that fetching combination that begin by sitting up straight, but turn over at the edges, limp-eared, as if the starch ran out at the laundry.

  As a newborn she was almost totally black, but over the months her markings changed. The dark hair remained over her head and back, but formed a wide symmetrical band around her face, detailed with tan. H
er legs and belly turned beige and she grew a white ruff. The older she got, the more her white father surfaced in her fur, eventually making her Snowy Zoë and Snowface.

  She was the runt of six pups, the last born, and she retained a bit of the underdog in her demeanour. Her effective bark did little to ward off strangers, for as soon as anyone approached her she’d turn turtle and submit. Zoë shadowed her mother sideways through fences, trailed behind her over the hills, and lost all their games of bite-throat, throwing herself down on her back, her mother’s teeth pointed at her neck. Never could she get enough attention.

  At thirty-five pounds, she made a rather cumbersome lapdog, but she was determined to live on the couch, snuggle up and settle into quiet adoration. She turned into a rag doll then. We would gently clutch the tendon in the crook of her front leg to make the relaxed paw rise and fall in a wave. She would be on her back, her chin high in pleasure, her eyes half closed.

  Zoë loved to sing. When she was on her back, on my lap, I’d rub her chest and hit a note, and she’d start in on an uninhibited aria. Tremulous, melodic, Zoë’s operatic numbers far surpassed the baying of hounds at moons. My guess is she’d have loved the costumes of formal performance as well. But Zoë was a farm dog.

  She inherited her father’s skill at groundhogging. Her mother was a natural killer as well, but Zoë was a pro, an Artemis, eagle-eyed and fast. Her aim was perfect and her method, which was to attack and shake, broke the groundhog’s neck in an instant. Sweet singer, she turned vicious when a woodchuck showed its yellow teeth.

  Groundhog bodies would lie in state for a few days, depending on the heat, before Zoë would drag them home for a final ripening on the lawn. When they were really rank, she would alternately chew away on them and roll in them, spreading the scent of rotting flesh all along her coat before begging for an evening lap-sit. She got to sleep outside in the summers.

  It seemed incongruous to breed Zoë, a perpetual pup, so we took her into Murphy’s Mill to be spayed after her first groundhogging season. It was autumn, the vermin were gone to ground for the winter, and she’d begun to smell more like a dog than a charnel house. She would be able to convalesce inside.

  Because Zoë had a hidden infection, something went wrong during the anaesthetic. She lost vital signs, went into cardiac arrest, turned flat. The vet jumped all over her, administered life-saving drugs, did CPR, bagged her, got her breathing again. Whatever was wrong was beyond his scope and equipment. Guelph, he said. We had to rush her to the animal hospital at the agricultural college. It was the only way to save her.

  Thomas drove the pickup. Zoë lay unconscious on my lap in the passenger seat, her reflexes too shallow now for even a wave. I cradled her in one arm and held up the IV bottle with my other. An hour’s drive down the highway, ambulance speed, taking our dying dog to the best veterinary care in the country. Thomas, used to tending emergencies along the same route on code 4 trips to the hospital, was reduced to relative and driver.

  We left her at the college in the care of the vets. They called us in the middle of the night and I heard Thomas try, through the fog of sleep, to make sense of what they were saying, try to translate dog-owner talk into medical language so he could really understand. “You mean she has peritonitis?” he asked and pressed for details. It was touch and go. She was infected, was in grave condition. They had removed what damaged tissue they could, cleaned up the rest, put her on drugs and were waiting for improvement. She was stable.

  Such a sad face she had when we arrived to take her home. Hound eyes turned down, great pools of liquid beseechment. We’d abandoned her, she was broken and rent, but we were back. She rode home on my lap, gazing up at me with longing, with promise, with submissive adoration. A quiet dog for the moment, the hunter asleep inside.

  It wasn’t long before her spark returned and she got back outside, firing herself through the fences on tilt. She ran the ski routes all winter chasing rabbits and foxes, flushing birds out of the bush. And after running the trails she’d come inside, chew the ice from her paws and loll on her back, waving, singing, dreaming and running on the spot.

  We had a rabbit in the house by then. Thlayli, an angora with a furry head. I’d won him in a handspinning competition. His hair was long, blueish-grey and fine, and he’d sit on my lap to be combed and plucked. When he wasn’t in his cage in the front hall, he had the run of the house, and Zoë tolerated him the way she did everything else.

  In the summer, Thlayli lived outside. I made a wooden house for him, which I put inside a moveable wire-mesh enclosure. Every few days I moved it to a new place on the lawn so he could graze. Of course he’d inevitably get out of his enclosure by burrowing under it, or by hopping around during the move. He was tame and always returned to his hutch. His first summer passed without incident, Zoë nosing him when he escaped.

  During his second spring, Thlayli was shifted once again to his outside home. But his first free hop along the grass was his last. Zoë must have seen a moving blur, and she pounced. She grabbed, shook and broke his neck. Just like that. A pile of dead angora lay limp on the lawn.

  It was clear that Zoë knew what she’d done. Contrition is evident in a dog. The eyes, both avoiding connection and begging forgiveness. The tail dragging, the ears off their semi-perk. Zoë never killed the wrong thing again. The chickens were safe; the cats untouched. For the rest of her life she killed groundhogs until they all but disappeared from the farm, but nothing else.

  She’d been a digger through the years. There was a spot by the house, under the lilacs, that she’d hollowed out on the hottest days each summer, trying to find a cool den. We gave up trying to stop her. If caught in the act she just showed her belly and exposed her neck. Old age crept up too soon, seven years at a time, and Zoë finally sang her last song. Thomas dug down into the spot under the lilacs she was always trying to reach, deep enough so she’d be cool forever. As I mourned, he laid her to rest just a few feet away from where she was born. She’s there by the house, but her footprints still sprint through the barn each summer, and her memory lives in the generations of groundhogs whose ancestors moved to safer terrain.

  DARK DAYS

  THE BARN WAS TRANSFORMED by the renovation Zoë had witnessed. The floor was smooth and flat but for the paw- and footprints; the walls were straight. We installed heated water bowls in the chicken coop, and on both sides of the stable floor to provide access to the greatest number of pens. The main beam was replaced, the mud-sills renewed.

  Almost nothing was built in, just the centre posts and troughs. The space was immense, wide open and clean. Tobacco tins, sunk in the floor when the cement was being poured, left post holes when dry for arranging our pens. We drew up plans at the kitchen table, Thomas and I, with cement-king Arthur’s help. Formations for feeding, for lambing, for mothering up. Sick pens and ram pens and pens for fattening late lambs. Pens for yearlings and new stock and creep-feeding—where lambs can squeeze through a small opening for feed, their greedy but frustrated mothers left behind. All possible arrangements with portable housing. The stable stanchions and mangers now mutable gates and hurdles, feeders and pens.

  THE WINTER WE SPENT before the renovation was worse than the state of the barn. The ram had got out the previous summer, had bred some of the ewes before the prime time. This increased my workload because I had to feed the imminent ewes differently from those more recently bred. It all might have worked if I’d stayed to conduct the proceedings. But I got sick. Really sick. Hospital sick. Out of town sick. A terrible infection. And there was nothing I could do but lie in bed, fight for my health and fuss for my family, my farm, my still-nursing daughter, my unborn lambs.

  I was filled with drugs, and I thinned and weakened and despaired more each day. My milk almost went, but I would not force a weaning on my daughter. It was for her to choose when to stop.

  The hospital was in the city, two hours away. Thomas, so busy at work, on call so much, so many needing him, did everything. He broug
ht me the baby, looked after the barn, tended his patients and worried like crazy, his knowledge a curse. And one full-moonlit night, one of the ewes wandered out into the light and gave birth in front of the barn. Triplets. Dropped in the snow during a frostbitten night, left to freeze in their sacs with no one to help.

  It went on all winter, day after day, recovery and relapse, trips down the road to the hospital. Once, Thomas was on call—the emerg full of carnage and crises—and had to see me himself. I needed more care, but the ambulance was taken by a patient of his, and there was no room for me. So I waited until the neighbouring town sent theirs, which was more primitive than ours and without trained staff. The attendants did not know my illness, couldn’t have helped if they did. They asked me directions to the city, to the health centre, to an all-night gas station along the way. Panic set in and added to my pain. How did Thomas manage to care for others—his duty clear and unflinching—while I was so ill?

  We were still newcomers (as we always will be) and we kept to ourselves. We were given distance perhaps, and we took it too. We didn’t ask for help; we didn’t make it known that we couldn’t manage. But help came along—food at the door, childcare and cleaning, barn work too—until my surgery in March brought a slow return to health. From being vibrant and strong, I turned weak and inept, hardly able to care for any of my charges or do any of the chores or contribute to the life we were making. Dark days, dependent days. The whole point of being here was to cope on our own, to do it ourselves, to turn knowledge and skill into self-reliance and autonomy.