I SEE TURTLES on the road occasionally; sometimes I see them too late, after someone has senselessly mowed them down. They’re not so hard to avoid, these dinner-plate Methuselahs, and it’s not as if they race out on the gravel. Not like hares that zig and zag and choose the rubber rather than the ditch, or foxes or coons, which come out of nowhere at speed into the lights. Turtles plod. Their feet are not in tune with their jaws. They have the wisdom of age to ponder life; they feel no need to rush. They do not climb trees, but I have seen them dead and mysteriously placed on fence posts, legs lax with unopposed gravity.
Once, in the northland, I watched a snapping turtle lay her eggs. She dug in the sandy hollow of a huge granite boulder (a boulder as big as a bus) with her great paddles of feet shaped like serrated table-tennis bats. She worked furiously, scooping the grains with fervour, sending sand showers into the water, making her nest. When finally she pulled in her pinking-shear paws, the hole was deep, untidy, exposed. She turned, stretched out her ovipositor and started to lay. Masses of round eggs—ping pong balls from antiquity. It took her the entire morning to spawn, after which she paused, inanimate, before sliding back into the water and disappearing, leaving her issue to its hatch or hazard.
I thought of turtles and culture. The importance of the Turtle Clan to the Mohawks. The Chinese bronzes I once saw in a Sherbrooke Street gallery: two small rigid beasts, one in the process of climbing onto the back of the other. To breed? To ride? To be carried like a new loon? They struck me as illicit lovers, heavy as clandestine hotel rooms, plodding slowly, getting nowhere, like the progress of a love that stalls on restrictions. Or perhaps they were crafted on a whim to confront star-crossed thinkers, looking for answers to unformed questions. Certainly they spoke of time and endlessness and the unknown.
Lillian Hellman writes of a turtle caught for soup, decapitated and left for the next day’s chores. The trail of turtle gore in the morning led out of the kitchen, down the steps, back to the wild, sans teeth, sans head, sans life, but moving.
THE RIVER TURTLE, the snapper, was intact. Quietly enjoying the sun. It slowly moved its neck, extended to the warmth, exposed Triassic flesh draped loosely over cold blood to the heating rays. I waited for something more. For it to detain me in my reverie, keep me from my role as adult, as mother. For it to turn, expose derrière, slide, swim away. Nothing happened. The turtle had its own time, its own agenda. It did not hurry, had no children to collect, no animals to feed. It may be there still, sunning in the summer sun. Oblivious to the snuffling dogs, the bank combers, the odd aircraft overhead. The turtle’s movements are considered, pondered, careful, conserved. But don’t test them. Snappers have jaws of steel, and if you believe Lillian Hellman, they can walk without heads.
SCHOOL BUS
THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. Kindergarten. Maternelle. All day, every other day. Twenty minutes to eight in the morning until after four o’clock. A long day for a five-year-old. But she was ready. Eager and willing to clamber up the steps of the school bus, sit at the front, ride for over an hour until the school came into sight, then ride the bus again until she arrived back home, clutching paper creations and her lunch box, running up the lane, the dog wagging alongside.
We’d made no preparation for the school bus. Neither Thomas nor I had ridden one. We had always walked to school—in the days when the snowdrifts were half the size they are now and the schools were close by and the school boards were local. We’d gone to schools that had names like Fairbanks and Culloden, Brantwood and Central.
On the first few chilly mornings of September, I walked down the lane hand in hand with my five-year-old and we waited for the bus together. If her brother was still sleeping, I let him lie; if not, he came along, held tight in my arms, as soon as I heard the bus coming up the road over the hill from the east. The red lights would flash, the stop sign swing out by the driver’s window, and the wheels spit to a stop in the gravel, throwing pebbles at the dog if she got too close.
As the weeks went on, my small scholar became more confident, and I let her travel the lane by herself, waving goodbye from the open door at first, and then from the window, and finally from the kitchen table, over my tea, watching her leave for the day from a distance. Zoë kept her company, desperate to join in the journey, and more than once had to be booted off the bus, her tail between her legs, her hanging head full of dejection and woe.
It seemed an inordinately large bus with a ridiculously high first step. My daughter scrambled on all fours to get in.
HAY CUTTER
MUCKING TO THE BARN, the late autumn wet squishing under our rubber boots, dripping off our work clothes, my small son and I head back from his big sister’s bus to feed the animals. He’s rarely clean for long, and farms are dirt: a rich mix for growing, nitrogen for greening. He scurries around teasing the cats or playing with his toy tractors, Lego, or trucks, while I chore.
Spring’s growth of hay is packed tightly in the barn. Nestled shoulder to shoulder, each hay bale lies stacked in the barn, filling the mow with the scent of sweet-grass and dried clover, wildflowers and weeds. Country perfume. We make hay while the sun shines, then feed it in the dark.
It’s always tricky deciding exactly which fall day to supplement the waning pasture with a little hay, and when to bring the sheep right off the fields and start feeding out exclusively. Once I start, the ewes become demanding, forgetting how keen they were to get out of the barn in spring and onto fresh grass, how they begged and baaed as they eyed the green sprigs beyond their courtyard, refusing my argument that the pasture must reach a height of six to eight inches before they could get their first taste. By now they’ve chewed it all down in rotation: the Meadow, the Pie-shaped Field, the Swamp, the regrowth in the Hayfield, the Meadow, and back again around the circle of pastures. The ewes have huddled under each field’s sheltering trees in heat and storm. And they’re bored. They want to give their bottom teeth a rest and use their back molars. Spend their days chewing and ruminating and gestating. Let me be the one to forage for them.
It is routine, perhaps: the need for adventure in the spring and for coddling and a warm stable in the fall when the light grows dim. They cocoon in their thickening fleeces, grow lambs under their skin, eat for two. Or three. Or four. And I feed them, bracketing my family’s feedings, our breakfasts and dinners, with trips to the barn where the menu is invariable: vegan’s choice.
THE FIRST YEAR I wintered animals I had big cumbersome bales to deal with. Bales that were heavy-handed, human-handled from baler to wagon, wagon to elevator, elevator to mow, mow to stable floor. They were over a metre long and too wide to fit easily into the bale feeders we had built from a blueprint designed by a Ministry of Agriculture technician who never imagined the scope of the flying Dutchman’s baler. The feeders have a square platform up off the ground and a hollow top column designed to enclose the hay, upended for gravity feed. The ewes can fit two to a side and munch through the stilts. The hay falls as it’s eaten. But I couldn’t lift the bales up to tip them in, and a square peg won’t fit in a square hole if the bale is bigger than the hole. So I had to undo the strings, pack the feeders by hand.
My neighbours eschew knives for the baler cord. They upend the bale on the floor, push down on one edge, grab the nearest twine and pull it bodyward, to the corner and away. Easier watched than done. Then they snap the hay backwards toward the remaining twine and the bale breaks apart. Undone, it falls into thick sheaves, each compressed stack as big as a bread-box. Twines, now just ellipses of air, are parked on a nail in a beam to accumulate, to dream of a future as fence fastener or flower tie. But most end up in the dump eventually. They rot and return to the earth.
For a while I opened my bales the way my neighbours do, my time extending to fill the chore—there were no babies waiting in their beds or milling at my feet. I hauled the green brutes up to standing, struggled with the near twine, wrenched my shoulder pulling the cord off, got enough purchase to split it backwards, broke n
ails and got hay bites on my hands. The second twine would invariably get lost in the mess and end up in the feeder, posing a danger to the flock if it emerged around a neck or a hoof. Then my brother-in-law gave me a Swiss Army knife and I started cutting.
Over the years the bales have changed. Smaller, less intense, lighter to accommodate the mechanical bale-thrower, they slide easily into the feeders, slip down like a centreboard in a sailboat, like coal in a chute. I can pick these bales up whole, plop them in, cut the strings with my knife and I’m away. It sounds easy, but hefting and carrying even lightweight bales of hay through a hungry flock is not quite so simple. The sheep become a mob. They have no fear. They crowd and stomp on my toes and bunt each other to be first. My children are at risk from the clamber of hoofs, the forest of legs moving at speed. Sheep have no table manners. No table.
Ultimately I had to devise another method. Inside feeders helped. Long sturdy wooden racks hold a bale spread out and offer it through slats on the pen side. An eight-foot-long cribbed manger serves eight shorn sheep, or seven fleecies, or maybe six in both lamb and wool. These feeders are perfect on inclement days, blizzard days when outside hay blows into the next township, joining the odd bit of laundry that flies off the line during a summer gale. The feeders work well before and after lambing, when the sheep are divide d and fed according to their fecundity (whether they are pregnant or not), and then their productivity (whether they have twins or singles) when the lambs are too small to go out. And the feeders protect my son as he runs up and down the gangway between them, or sits on a pile of straw playing with the cats who mill about his snow-suited body and bat his mittens, which hang from their strings, while he ignores the cold.
But these rack feeders are wasteful. The sheep pick out their favourite flowers and strew the stems at their feet. The stable floor gets that high-chair look—a circle of debris within dropping range—once perfected by my kids in the house. The beasts get picky in ways the bale feeders don’t allow. And perhaps the sheep get lazy too when they’re fed inside. They avoid having to walk.
Gravity was the answer. An old door set into the side of the mow over the stone courtyard became the perfect spot from which to pitch hay down into the bale feeders. Standing so high above the ground is treacherous, but a few boards nailed across the bottom of the opening make me feel secure each morning and keep the children from falling as I open the door to the world below and beyond. Sometimes the view is breathtaking. Framed in pine barnboard, weathered grey inside and out, the dark mow opens to a blast of natural light. The winter sun rises more to the south than the east, so is off-centre in the doorway, but the light surges over snow in an explosion of white. Sleet storms coat the trees and stone walls in fairy ice, and rain pours straight down past the opening, as there’s no gutter or sill to stop its fall.
From our perch in the mow I throw cut wedges of hay, and my chubby-mittened boy launches his handfuls. We vary our pitch with the wind, and each time I score a perfect placement in the feeder I award myself two points and we cheer. A perfect score will mean a perfect day. So the bales are cut from above, not lifted, not carried. The force of gravity helps me feed, and the sheep, waiting below, look up to me on high, bestower of manna. The evening feed still takes place inside, away from night noises and dark terrors, but it is a mere snack. A bedtime soother, green tea.
My Swiss Army knife lives in the bottom of my barncoat pocket—the right-hand one—buried in chaff and bent fence staples, marbles, needle caps and sheep-marking crayon stubs. The knife has a screwdriver and a corkscrew, a bottle opener and three knives: a stiletto, and blades small and large. The smaller is my weapon of choice; string-sized, it plunges into the bale, parting stems, attacking the sisal sideways, severing ply after ply until the twine gives, snap-releasing the leaves like a spring.
For years I used this knife. I lost it once in the haystack and was lost without it. Back to woman-handling the bales, wrenching off their ropes until one day it reappeared. My knife: a blood-red spot in a sea of green, steel edge catching the sun like a diamond in a snowbank.
And for years my winter hands blanched white when I removed my mitts to pull out the blade, to snap it back. My thumbnail had a permanent break from prying the knife open. I shivered, I cut, I cursed. My children’s vocabularies grew. And then I complained to a neighbour along the concession. “What you need,” she said, “is a hay cutter.”
Not long after, she presented me with the instrument. A hay cutter, fashioned like a miniature triangular hatchet. Her husband, McKenzie Murray, had made it for me. The handle is flat metal with a rounded end, a hanging hole, and smaller, spaced perforations along its hand-span length. The three-sided blade, as big as an elm leaf, is attached by two metal rivets, their headless ends bashed flat against the cutter, rough-edged like hand-heeled pastry. The point is nebulous, innocuous, dull. But the sides of the blade are scalpel sharp.
The cutter is heavy, and its weight draws to the bale like a magnet. My mitted hand, fat with sueded sheepskin, claws the cold steel in the way a welding glove grips hot iron. Down, like a cleaver, the string-severing blade sinks deep in green grasses, releasing them from the bale. Like breasts unleashed from binders, the bound riches relax, sag, sway and splay freely.
Twine is what wants cutting, not hay. But my cutter is not misnamed. Once, it served to cut a swath in the field. It was a soldier in the army of blades that made up the mower. Two rows of steel triangles, set one above the other, operating at cross purposes, formed formidable teeth on the mower. The cutters rode at right angles to the tractor, ran from the power take-off and felled the standing hay in the field a row at a time. The blades were open to the sun, to small animals and snakes, to unguarded dogs’ legs and fat fingers foolish enough to get too close. Vicious incisors, most of these mowers have been replaced by haybines and implements with covered blades, which are safer for dogs and children, though small rodents must still be at risk, hiding as they do in the standing sections of fields, which get smaller and smaller as the stalks fall.
Most old mowers now rust in back pastures, their sickle-sharp blades flaking and falling off in their decline. So my cutter is all that more valuable. Salvaged by my neighbour McKenzie Murray, cut by his hand from the metal cloth of a larger cloak, it feels hay in its single jaw once again. I hang it on the main barn beam, on a special nail hammered in to hold it high above curious young hands. It rests there all summer, itching, no doubt, to be out in the field mowing at the strong stalks, which are full of the juice of a sunny season. Now the hay cutter opens up bales cut by younger, gayer blades.
BUS BOX
OUR LANE IS NOT LONG, as country lanes go, and affords a clear view of the road. A low cedar hedge runs along the bottom of the garden, and a huge old maple punctuates the gravel. The fence bottom, though rusty and decrepit, is at least transparent, so I could always watch my daughter get on the school bus.
Then one day it poured. Teemed down with rain too vicious for her yellow slicker and sou’wester hat, which was angled like a funnel towards the gaps at the tops of her rubber boots. We got in the car, drove to the bottom of the lane and waited there. Then all in a rush she ran up into the bus, which had arrived just a few feet of mud away. I realized I had not worked this through. We needed a shelter.
The school bus wasn’t always on time. A five- or ten-minute wait is an age for a small child in the rain. And this is the snowbelt, where the promise of blizzards is carried on the wind or found in the rings around the moon. How would we keep her warm and dry through the wait?
Visions returned of mystery gatehouses gracing country lanes. Sentry boxes, telephone booths, octagonal playhouses, shingled shacks and horse stalls. Small constructions created, it seemed, by conscientious parents to keep their children dry and safe.
Friends who had moved to Murphy’s Mill from abroad had brought their possessions across the sea in thin wooden crates. Oversized orange boxes really, but big enough for a child to play in. Big enough for a rainy-
day shelter. We popped the packing crate into the back of the pickup and unloaded it at the end of the lane. It was big enough. Tall enough. Adequate. It saw her through that first winter, when most days we all trotted down the lane together in the morning. Her brother, her dog and I waited beside it in the afternoons to hear her stories of the day as we all walked back to the house together for the cookies and milk that mothers feed their young after school if they can.
But she spent little time in the shelter. It opened to the west, to the prevailing wind, which hurled sleet in the door. The crate filled with snow in a storm, leaving no room to stand.
It was a sad excuse for a bus shelter. Plywood, untreated, unstained, a rude structure, tilted and buckling from March wind and April rain, then abandoned in May as another piece of winter detritus, dragged off and burned in the annual spring pyre. My daughter was happy to sit on the rock that June, or shelter under the maple in late spring showers. During the summer, however, we had to come up with a solution for the following year, when she would wait for the school bus every day of the week, and for the years to come, when her brother would be waiting with her.
BLUEBIRD
THERE ARE BLUEBIRDS OUTSIDE my window. A moving swatch of blue-violet, not quite so purple as the Crayola crayon, but bluer than water, than indigo, than delphiniums. Thoreau wrote that they carry the sky on their backs, but my bluebirds are brighter than even a Kodak sky. Flying sapphires with marmalade breasts, precious and comforting.
Before this land was settled in the nineteenth century, my window, had it been here, would have overlooked wood. Acres and acres (now hectares) of elms and maples, cedars and white pines. With an abundance of trees framing patches of meadow, bluebirds must have dotted the wilderness like wild lupines. The fields were cleared, the cedars formed into posts and rails, the pines into log houses and window frames, the maples into floors and tables, the elms into skeletons. With their nesting sites slaughtered, the bluebirds left.
Lambsquarters Page 9