THOUGH THE SUN was increasing, that spring held the hardest days, the longest nights, when I looked at the future and saw only clouds. I lay on the couch, unable to muster the strength to go out. My daughter was being cared for by others. I was caught in some underworld, punished perhaps for unknowingly tasting a seed I’d never noticed. Bitter suffering after sweet fruit.
But slowly the weight went back on, the muscles recovered. The spring daffodils—unnecessary after my daughter’s birth—did their job. The second crop of lambs, whose mothers eschewed the ram’s early caprice, arrived strong in April, and I tended them gently—not without incident, though, as the weather grew cruel and again my barn visits were fewer. There were times when the house was a playpen of bellowing young, all dressed in diapers, all needing care. Sick lambs by the fire, tails emerging from holes in their disposables, stroked and loved by my child, herself still swathed in cloth. And the ache of the deaths, which inevitably occurred, tore at my heart for my neglect.
So we needed the barn. Needed changes and care. Needed simplicity of design and ease of access. Needed to sweep out the ghosts of that horrible year where everything went wrong and fell to chaos. We had no thoughts of quitting, despite all the failure. We forged ahead with new plans. We carried on.
The hope May brought sifted gently through our days, carried us aloft on soft winds. Early planting, careful planning, thinking ahead. And as life all around us settled, the future came clear as I conceived once again.
We spent a glorious summer rebuilding the barn, redoing the nursery and growing our crops. Putting disaster behind us and looking beyond and also back to the dream that brought us here. Staying strong in our need to succeed and our love of the land and each other. But wellness eluded me once winter came; the baby refused to stay still. He rolled and thundered in turmoil inside, trying to emerge ahead of his time. More truck trips and ambulances, rides to the city. Thomas again on call at a delicate moment—an erstwhile brogue-brained colleague refusing to cover the emergency ward—and I found myself alone once more in an ambulance, not knowing if my baby would be born or would live, his father left behind to care for others.
But we stayed symbiotic, my baby and I, and drugs kept him inside and protected from light. Once home, I was back on the couch, my daughter shipped out, my belly threatening to heave and contract whenever I walked to the barn. Stuck once again, unable to work, dependent on others for help. Until my baby was born, all in a flash, his father lovingly guiding him out in the rush. Perfect and tiny and looking like me, though early and slightly underdone. Caught and held first in his father’s arms. Like a kitten, his eyes not quite open, his hands folded up, his attitude lazy and soft. I was instantly better, motherlove strong, and my chores seemed possible, my work looked clear.
Everything flourished in the house and the barn. The setbacks seemed insignificant after all the stress. And the months and the seasons settled into a pattern, changing only with growth and language and skills in my children, my farm children, who knew nothing but this place as home, who took to the animals and chores and rhythms of the day as they did to breathing the air of the country around them.
SNAKE
IN THE YARD, THERE IS A HUMP in the turf, a ridge about half the length of a country laneway, which remembers a time before grass. Previous farmers ploughed in front of the house, grew those dour mangels whose discarded beety corpses were still rotting when we arrived. We seeded our permanent pasture with a mixture of grasses and clover, filling in the furrows and greening the area, but the ridge remains. A reminder that this is not really a lawn, a playground, a croquet pitch, but a reclaimed field.
Before it was a field, it was a forest, or perhaps a small meadow surrounded by forest. What feet walked here before we came? Feet that trod four at a time or that were shod in doeskin. Feet that remain, reflected in their descendants, or remembered only at a remove, on reservations.
What footprints lie in the soil, what tales in the weeds? It is said that burdock and thistle seeds will live for hundreds of years, will lie dormant until the soil is disturbed, until somebody digs, somebody ploughs, somebody plants. Then the weeds come out of the dark. Like Persephone they find the light and have their short season in the sun, send up their flowers, more purple than pomegranate—the colour of kings—to ripen, dry and form snagging seeds, waiting for something unsuspecting to cling to. On four feet or two, they are transported.
The earth knows these stories and a thousand more. Subterranean cities shelter cultures older than Hades’s underworld, cultures where even feet are superfluous. Under the hump in the turf, under the ridge, lives a colony of creatures that may have been there before the glaciers reshaped the landscape, scraped the rocks and ground them up and left behind the gravel pits and stone deposits and bits of fossil and shale that underlie the soil.
It takes a sunny March day to bring these squigglers to ground. One of those days when the sap runs. When it’s cold at night and there’s frost under a clear sky, but sun on the snow at dawn, casting long silver and blue shadows that turn to gold before dusk. These are days when the snow sublimates, misses that melting step and goes directly from solid to vapour, disappearing before your eyes to reveal patches of winter grass, that dead, brown cover thatched over the earth, dormant, dank, but hopeful. Mindful of its possibilities, its past, its future. Such patches will dry out with a few of these days, surrounded still by corn snow, pitted honeycombed white ice. And the snakes will pass from underworld to over.
These are days when melting snow reveals lost treasure. Finding days. In the city, coins and ribbons, buttons and marbles, mittens and toques appear. But in the country, the treasure is more fundamental. We found the snakes one year by accident, by surprise. The children and I were on an expedition. The snakes were not lost, not mislaid. We are the interlopers; this is snakes’ country.
They are garter snakes, fondly called gardener snakes around here. Or gardner ‘nakes on the tongue of my daughter, the ear of my pre-lingual son. We found perhaps a hundred of them, babies, all bunched together like spaghetti in a pot, swirling and wriggling, arcing over one another like porpoises diving, like frogs leaping, like kittens nursing. A living mass of cold-blooded reptiles undeterred by the thinning ozone, warming their bitter blood in the light of day, in the spring of time.
As long as the sun shines, the snakes stay. When it withdraws, they descend out of sight, not on ladders, but by slithering down like fast rain on a windowpane, one fat drop at a time. The earth looks like Swiss cheese. But only if you get close; only if you know where to look. And the season is short before the snake commune disperses: it can be missed.
As spring progresses and the grass greens and grows, the snakes separate, leave home, stake out their own ground. Garter snakes travel alone. Svelte bachelors, they make their own fun. Some even live in the city, cruising backyards and boulevards, making double entendres with forked tongues.
The country snakes, the farm snakes, have their own modes of sophistication. If they can stay off the gravel roads, avoid the fast wheels of passing trucks and tractors, stay out of the mower’s way and evade the teeth of the hay baler, country snakes have a good chance of survival. When things get tight, they can always change their skins, discard them on the grass and slide into something more comfortable. Like gossamer sent soaring by a breeze, the shimmering, empty body stocking is too fragile to hold. A fine serpent mould, it defies refilling, and despite its stunning segments, it disappoints. Mere nail clippings.
THERE IS A GARTER SNAKE lying out on the sunbaked stones of the house foundation where I keep the summer hose. A large, thick, powerful snake in new skin. The area around the window well is dug up, exposed. In the fresh dirt hops a toad, oblivious to everything but mud and earth and new scenery. He has his toad thoughts from his toad day. A sudden strike and the toad turns turtle. The snake snaps his huge jaw and bites down hard on the toad’s belly. The toad thrashes his legs, screams. The snake gyrates until he is almost vertical
, and the toad flails one foreleg, not waving. Then, inexplicably, the toad is free and it lopes off into the dirt. Surely the snake can see him and attack again?
With freshly dug potatoes resting in my gathered-up shirt-tail, I stand open-mouthed, mesmerized, relieved the toad is free, but unable to find a role for myself in this scene, which is as strange as it is Homeric, Biblical, Miltonic.
Unimpressed by the high drama, the snake slithers between the stones of the usually subterranean foundation and disappears. I dump my potatoes on the grass and turn the hose on them, converting the encounter to dailiness, washing away the taste. But from his hiding place, the toad reappears and for some incomprehensible reason jumps back into the window well. Like lightning the snake strikes and clamps his jaws on the toad’s back.
I can no longer watch passively. I grab a stick and prod the snake. My need to protect the weak, foster the homely. The toad escapes and the snake goes back into the dark, a guilty underworld he inhabits alone. I place the toad in the impatiens, across the grass from the window well.
Inside, I find a bowl for the wet potatoes, hear my babies begin to stir from their nap, and ache with fierce protection. I try not to think about what snakes eat for dinner. Or toads.
CROWBAR
I GREW UP IN AN OLD HOUSE with a basement full of tools. I spent my summers in a cottage with three woodsheds (one an old ice house), a pumphouse, a garage and two boathouses full of tools. Tools were always around, strewn about the floor of a workspace, carefully arranged on walls, hanging from ceilings, packed in tool boxes. I’d seen everything performed, from spray-painting a car from black to white, to dynamiting a huge rock deemed too close to a cabin, to cutting an outbuilding in two with a handsaw, pulling it apart and building a new middle section.
When I left home my father’s parting gift was a paper bag with a hammer, a couple of screwdrivers and a metal tape measure. No books, no cash, no philosophy: just tools. I have them still.
On the farm, tools are not just a necessity. They are monumental. Barn tools, house tools, fencing tools. Shearing tools, lambing tools, glazing, wiring and plumbing tools. Carpentry I knew about. Hammers, squares, saws. Crosscut and rip, mitre and keyhole, coping and hack. Fasteners I could do: Robertson, Phillips, slot; screws, nuts and bolts; nails: ardox and plain, round and square.
I was familiar with the crowbar. My father had several in different sizes, curved, bent up to a spur at one end, slotted as if to pry loose giant nails, but I don’t remember seeing them used. They were around, with the sledges and axes, the big tools with handles, the dangerous ones with sharp edges.
My first crowbar was not really a crowbar at all. It was a wrecking bar, fondly called “Barry’s tool” after its bestower, who was one of our first visitors to the farm. He was big enough to tear just about anything down by hand, but he realized I would need a little help. It was blue rather than black, about as long as a raven, curved, beaked at one end, clawed at both. Iron, strong, it could lever out anything from square nails to bedroom walls. And it did. And it does.
More than most tools, the crowbar is a rearranger. Hammers create, saws shape, wire enlightens and pipes irrigate. But the crowbar pries, levers, moves, pushes or destroys. It can be a mean ugly tool with teeth at both ends—tooth and claw—hungry to deconstruct. It was created to destroy. The crowbar is formed from iron over fire. Whether created by ancient god, from Hephaestus at his forge to Vulcan at his anvil, or recent humanity, this tool is a brute born to maim.
I had thought all crowbars had beaks. Named for their ornithological namesakes, called simply crows originally, they possess bills, not for tearing carrion or plucking lambs’ eyes, but for destroying nature’s grip or civilization’s detritus. Their heads curve like the pate of the bird, their tails notch like the crossed feathers of folded wing-tips. All crowbars assumed that shape in my mind until I found, at a nearby auction, a tall staff of iron, straight, hand-hammered, blunt-topped from the swing of a thousand sledges, wedged to a running point below. High as a corn stalk, heavy as an anvil itself, it was a barn of a crowbar. A farmer’s crow.
“A corn planter,” said my neighbour, baiting me. “Just stick it in the ground to make a hole, drop in the seed and you’re away.” And he wasn’t all that far wrong. Such straight crowbars were once used to make irrigation holes around saplings. Seed drills and corn planters operate on that ancient principle of making a hole, planting a kernel.
The crowbar came home with me, found a spot in a nook in the feed room, by the door, leaning up against the corner. It can’t hang upright on the wall as it has no curve. It looks light there at its jaunty angle, like a marshmallow toasting stick, or a fishing rod, or a beanpole. But each time I reach for it I am surprised at the weight of such a solid piece of iron, and I wonder how the Greek god of fire managed to lift such ore in his lameness.
MY TOWNSHIP is glacial moraine. Good drainage. Groundhog heaven. But with the gravel comes the rock. Billions and billions of rocks. Our best crop. Each year the frost shifts them and raises them like wind on water. Waves of rocks. Usually, just where I want to put a garden, a post, a fence, a tree, is where the rocks will swell and build, collect in an undertow. Fields that fell asleep in the fall under striped loam shag, awake in the spring grey-patterned with stone heaved up from the underworld by angry shades, bleached by snow and sleet, polished by April rains. Defiant, proud, solid, stationary. Or worse, the stones huddle just beneath the surface of the earth, pitting ploughshares, dinging double-discs, havocking harrows. The front-end loader and the backhoe have replaced the stoneboat, the crowbar, the board and the barrow for removing rocks to centre piles, fencerows, low spots. A lone tree or small grove in the middle of a field is never really on its own in this county. It is moated by stone. Small mammals find their own labyrinths, fear their own Minotaurs.
A century of moving rocks, wrestling them out of the way of horses’ hoofs (duly shod with iron), of iron implements, heavy tractors of iron and then steel. Iron and steel: iron and rock. Alloys but never allies. Metal and rock pitted against each other in a battle for the soil. For crops can’t grow in stone.
Within the farmyard, in places where tractors can’t go, places too narrow for front-end loaders, too soft for heavy horses, the stones do not spare the garden soil but congregate, conglomerate like fireflies over a swamp in July. At Lambsquarters there are few places a shovel will sink without ringing, clanging, jolting your wrists on its handle, the blade starting like a knife through butter, stopping short on Hadrian’s Wall. And no matter how often it happens, it is always a disappointment. The earth fighting back, hindering, defying the planter, laughing. Often the tip of the blade will loosen a garden stone, wiggle it to an edge, tilt and wobble it until there is some purchase and the stone rises, brown and dull and way too small to have caused this annoyance. A pup of a stone, without character. I pitch these over the fence and into the field, knowing I probably shouldn’t, that they could get caught in machinery, but hoping they are too insignificant to cause more harm. The blade goes back in, slides, then clangs again. The jerk travels up my arms, through my carpal tunnels, inflaming the tendons in my elbows. Another small stone, snug beside the first, to be prised, coddled, entreated to the top. Picked and tossed with disrespect.
An afternoon of this is at best burdensome, slow work. The children bored and grizzling in the sandbox. The waiting plants wilting, crossing their drying roots with impatience, tapping their leaves, nodding their flower heads, wondering if they will ever find their place in the ground. At worst, I’m left with a broken shovel handle. For inevitably there is a rock that seems like a stone, which nudges from an edge, which seduces with smooth moves, but which is pure rock. It could be the size of a fat hen or a small island. It might outcrop on the other side of the world. Or perhaps it is just stuck. It begs to be levered, then breaks the shovel. Just above the metal, the wood cracks and splits. The rock wins.
The crowbar never breaks. It will get the rock out or it won’t,
but the rock won’t get the crowbar. For large jobs—deep fence posts, foundations, a geological monster in the vegetable garden—the crowbar is the obvious tool. But yearly I am fooled by shallow jobs, and handles break, trowels are bent beyond use, defeated by rocks, while the crowbar leans against the barn wall in the shade, as if watching me.
THERE ARE TIMES I want to use the crowbar for something other than digging out stones. It would make a perfect temporary fence post—strong, pointed, easily hammered into this resistant earth. The chickens might stay in an outdoor run all summer with the crowbar as a corner post. Or how many scarlet runner beans would climb it, solid and reliable in the garden, bashed in and secure? No delphiniums would topple in summer storms if attached to this staff.
But the crowbar is too important for digging and prying to do a locum as an upright. All summer there are cedar posts to replace, to prise out after they’ve broken off just beneath the surface, wedged as they were half a century ago with stones and rocks from the original hole. There are stone walls to build and rebuild from first clearings. And did this bar in those times walk these hills and move these rocks? Did it pry stones from the meadows, tilt them onto stoneboats or barrows and roll them into cairns like centrepieces on the tables of the fields? Does the crowbar feel the same stone it moved eons ago from the nearby field where I bought it? And will it still be here in the hands of my unsuspecting children’s heirs to move rocks from the rock pile to the rock wall and back a hundred years hence?
Lambsquarters Page 7