Lambsquarters

by Barbara McLean

  FOX

  SUMMER ON THE FARM makes us lazy and it makes us diligent. The humid heat forces a slow pace yet urges wild growth and lush gardens, pastures and crops. The days are long and light. They begin early with the hoe and end late with the hose, which fills troughs for grazing animals, and baths for parched birds. And in between lie all the tasks of putting up and putting down, from planting in spring to constant harvest in summer as radishes sprout and lettuce ripens, as the first potatoes form on stringy subterranean stems, and early basil starts to shine.

  Repairs seem to top the list for every facet of the farm, from machinery to windows, paint to putty, gates to rooftops. Fences bulge and bind, or give way to the constant worry of the flock and beg for wire, plier and twist.

  It can be difficult to work in summer—too hot, or wet and storming, dangerous with lightning or sodden in mud. Steamy days when everything ripens and I can’t budge myself from the shade or the shelter of the house, its thick walls keeping cool around me.

  Children’s tempers flare. They forget to share. They badger or beg to be taken to the lake, and my work must wait as we pack up and go. I watch with one eye and read with the other as they splash and swim, wear themselves out and abuse me for staying ashore, out of the marl and muck they roll in like puppies.

  The summer of 1990 began with a tense sticky heat. It agitated the sheep; the ewes bleated continuously for different pasture, and the rams turned cocky and belligerent.

  Late on one of those humid nights when the only movement through the window is the springing crash of June bugs against the screen, my friend Malka called. Since the day I’d followed her home years ago we had become close friends. She handspun gifts for my babies, had drawn my portrait. We gardened together. But never before had she called in the middle of the night. Her husband, her partner, the love of her life, had been driving home from the tavern when he misjudged his distance, crashed into a tractor and died.

  In the week that followed, thunderstorms alternated with surreal skies of ochre light; carmine sunsets warred with cobalt clouds, and the air crackled with static. All the clocks in Malka’s house flashed 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 in a neon vermilion glare as the power bounced in and out with the lightning.

  Days passed with baskets of fruit and bouquets of roses and squares and muffins and cakes and casseroles that arrived in armies, like ants on the move. A widow now, Malka ate none of it. She was quiet and alone. A space that everyone silently respected formed around her kitchen chair. People continued to arrive. They set up camp, cooler bars in the trunks of cars. Hot tempers stamped mooselike down the lane. The inevitable senseless lures of “if onlies” and “what ifs.”

  Everything came to a stop. The calendar in Malka’s kitchen, those clocks. The harvest, the planting and thinning and weeding. The thought that we would live forever. That he would.

  There was no body to view, no visitation, no funeral. Just a continuous wake moving from his home farm to the neighbour’s, to the tavern in Murphy’s Mill to the Alderney store. His life is immortalized by the beautiful paintings he left behind, by the memories of those who knew him well or not. My children learned about death then. Real death, of someone they knew, who was familiar and not old. How I wanted not to tell them and draw them from their innocence. The summer slipped by in a cloud.

  Then the grass grew too long and had to be cut, the compost festered in the pail. Time began to move again and everyone carried on with their lives. We returned to the tasks of the season, bounty gathering like booty, needing attention. July was gone. Sand through a sieve.

  IT IS DIFFICULT to harvest second-cut hay. Even without a shadow over your life. The first cut, full of thin grasses and brought in during the initial heat of summer when everything is promise and future, gets baked early in the day by a hot sun that creeps with rosy fingers over the horizon almost before night has settled in. June days shine longest and brightest; with luck they resist rain long enough for us to harvest the whole crop.

  But second-cut is different. The next growth of grasses dwindles and dawdles, playing around on the ground with the worms and bugs. The legumes, however, those meaty masses of clover or alfalfa or bird’s-foot trefoil, relish spreading themselves like a verdant jungle over the field, pushing their way through the cut stubs of weeds, holding each other’s fronds, romancing, waving in swirling patterns with the wind. They grow luscious and thick; they hold the water and the dew. And by August the dew is substantial. It outlines intricate spiderwebs on bushes and fence wires. It lays on the ground until noon or later.

  The sun in August gets tardy; she polishes her nails on the other side of the horizon, putting off her day, and ours. She is less focused on her warming task, her thoughts fixed on other hemispheres, or she mourns under the pall of late summer cloud, which gathers until the crepe sky is too dense, then falls in a shroud of rain over the fields. Drying is difficult.

  The hay can be cut on a clear day, later in the afternoon. Winds are down in August and the sultry air of the hottest days is too saturated to gather much moisture from cut stems on damp ground. The longer the hay is down, the more dew it absorbs. The hay can be raked, turned over to expose its leaves to sun and wind, but there is the risk of thatching, of trapping the water under and inside until mould takes hold and the crop is lost. Rain is deadly once the hay is cut.

  It used to be that hay was cut and dried, forked loose onto wagons and led to barns by heavy horses sleek with sweat. When balers came the hay was packed tightly into rectangular loaves and tied with twine. Now square bales seem to be following the haystack into extinction, for all we see are acres of huge round bales, dotted over fields like enormous cylinders of shredded wheat, bleached blond by sustained sun and thatched over to deflect weather from the precious green gold inside. These bales stay out all summer, sometimes all winter. Certain farmers build sheds for them, others cover them with tarpaulins as silver as spacesuits or sausage them in white plastic tubes. But the bulk of the bales go it alone, piled up in a field or barnyard, moved there individually impaled on an enormous poker that graces the tractor’s front-end loader like an offering to Priapus.

  Only an artist would envision these circular bales being carried like carrion in the mouth of a crow to feed its young. The artist, who died just as the bales were stacking in the fields, left his vision of them as part of his legacy in a mural gracing the main street of Murphy’s Mill.

  Because second-cut hay is so difficult to dry late in the summer, it is not usually baled in large rounds. Farmers are more likely to use second-growth to pasture their livestock or to cut it as haylage, blow it into wagons and pack it down to ferment in big bunker silos. Second-cut, scarce as it is, is the perfect delicacy for sheep after lambing. It is greener and leafier than anything they’ve seen since snowfall.

  THE VIXEN must have been surprised at the appearance of big round bales at the edge of her wood in late summer. The night was warm, damp, but with the sun clinging languidly to fat clouds in the west. The fox was taking advantage of something unusual and had found herself a resting place on top of a bale, where she watched the sunset and pondered whatever foxes ponder.

  Pointy faced, bushy tailed, the fox adapted to the field. Her ancestors were here before mine, but we have learned to live together. She stretched out on that huge round bale like Cleopatra resplendent on her burnished throne, the hay below her perfumed with the sweet smell only second-cut gives off at sunset. Herbs and berries, sweet molasses, clover honey—some combination. The few grass shards shone like silver, and the ground below, bathed in the glory of impending dusk, turned purple.

  A fox prefers not to be seen. Usually it appears as a glorious brush trailing into the woods, startled from some clearing, or as a speck in the distance, gone before it can be reached. In winter snow, fox prints make a continuous, surprisingly straight track, one foot in front of another in front of another in front of another. A straight line to somewhere. But I have followed tracks until I’m tired. The foxe
s always outfox me. The trail goes on and on until it disappears in a windswept field, melts in a muddle in the bushes or dissolves into a thicket. Never have I found the fox. Or the fox den. Or the fox skeleton.

  The vixen on the hay bale was more feline than foxy. She stretched out, inert on her high watch. I expected her pups were weaned, her responsibilities waned. Wildest of animals, she pampered and treated herself to full relaxation. I wondered how many others had spotted her there in that remote field, her legs on pause, her lashes feeling the wind, her nose still, as she soaked up the last of the summer evening sun as if the rays could pierce her heart and carry her warmly through the winter winds.

  How long would she have stayed had I not stopped? Until dark? Until dawn? Foxes are chiefly nocturnal, so my vixen was just starting her day. I can’t know, because she spotted me. The languor left her bones and her muscles tensed. Her ears pricked, her nose twitched. Her position was entirely the same, but her attitude was that of a mother threatened, a wren crossed, a snake cornered. We stood, eyes joined, bodies still, taut. I could win the contest by not moving first. I lost the encounter. For she fled. Into the woods and away. Another mystery in a summer full of confusion.

  Dusk fell.

  BUS HOUSE

  AFTER THE FIASCO of the packing crate, split into its various veneers by the weather, caved in and warped, and looking like nothing better in life than a packing crate to begin with, we dispensed with a hut for a time. I sat in the car in inclement weather, both kids now perched on the edges of the seats, ready to hop out at the sign of the bus, their backpacks trebling the depth of their chests. There are no neighbours close by. We tried not to feel shame.

  Not every farm has a bus house, and few kids seem to seek shelter in those that do exist. You see siblings milling about in the rain or sliding in snowstorms, their backpacks on the roadside, their dogs jumping about, their shelters empty. But for many rural dwellers, bus houses are overt indications of kid care. You need to let the world know you are prepared to provide some space for your children to wait, no matter what the weather.

  Eventually the need to provide for his family got to Thomas. That and the need to build something—anything—so he could go and buy new wood. But like all of his projects, the shelter was not made without salvage. He found an old door (a very old door), tall and made of narrow tongue-and-groove, with a beautiful ancient glass window that distorted everything seen through it, including the school bus, which appeared to swim up the road in a wave of motion, humped like a porpoise in paint. He used old two-by-fours, still fully two by four and mined from the back of the drive shed, and cedar shingles left over from the roof. He salvaged the small mullioned window from the loft, for light from east and west.

  When construction began, the children were still quite small. My daughter was taller than my son, though he was always taller than most kids his age. We’d been marking their heights on the mud-room’s door frame on every birthday and half-birthday since they were steady enough to stand. Pencil lines grew up the bare pine board like the rings in the tree it came from. At first I had to crouch down to make the line.

  It was one of those warm weekends in September when we pretend the days are still long and we ignore the crickets chirping the season out like a warning Greek chorus. One of those Michaelmas daisy weekends, when their magenta and mauve heads hang heavy with late dew, nodding along the fencerow. One of those schadenfreude weekends, which turn on you for no reason, resent your good will and suddenly blow cold and windy. The crickets retreat and the masked chorus takes centre stage, its utterances muted by Aeolus.

  Up early, off to the lumberyard for boards and battens, the kids strapped into the jump seats of the truck. Home, by way of the Alderney Feed Mill, then coffee and the Saturday papers. The work began in earnest when the dew had dried and the chickens finished their egg-laying cackles. Their work done as ours began.

  The kids carried nails in a box and tools. Saw and hammer, and hinges harvested with the Victorian door from some fancy dwelling. They begged to ride in the wheelbarrow, but it held the shingles and window; there was no room for them. Stones formed the foundation, laid flat at the corners, solid as rock to build on. The base was boxed with two-by-eights, and the floor was laid on top. Then the frame rose. And rose. For some reason Thomas built his shelter up into the sky until it blended into the maple tree. No one could say he was negligent now.

  The weather grew cold and the children lagged and whined, bored with the chore of finding and handing, the game of hammering their own nails into useless board bits. They dallied and dithered, moved ever farther from the site until they found themselves in the house, begging for hot drinks and food. But their father soldiered on, framing and siding, battening down the battens, boarding the shed roof. By the end of the day the structure was solid and steady, ready for finish and trim.

  Next day the shingles went on, layer over cedar layer. The door was hung, the window set, and it all smelled wondrous and fine. Sap from the pine, musk from the cedar, must from the Victorian door. Oil in the hinges and the fresh reeking earth dug round the base. Two chairs, pressed back and bent, their seats dubiously split, their paint thickening out their patterns, fit side by side in the house. Marshalled up in neat rows, like the desks in old-fashioned schoolrooms, so the kids could wait in eclectic style, sheltered, dry and safe.

  BEECH

  NATURE HIDES DEATH, conceals its horror under blankets of flaming leaves, thatched grass or feathered snow. Nature lofts ashes skyward or floats them away on liquid currents to dissipate, dissolve, transform. Nature offers refuge too, places that draw us at times of stress, soothe us in any weather, absorb the evil humours and give us back our selves. My solace is the magic beech tree.

  Architects call what can be seen beyond our own borders “borrowed landscape”—that expanse of view over the fence or across the street or beyond the back lane. In the country these boundaries are already blurred. Line fences have no signposts, and we are usually welcome to stray across them.

  Realtors indicate farm boundaries from the road and point to fencelines. A sweep of the arm encompasses forest or field. But no agent walked us over the farm. We owned it before we saw it all. Perhaps we haven’t really seen it all yet. Certainly not learned it all. The Pie-shaped Field, the Hayfield, the Meadow. The Swamp and Bush. The Sidefield.

  The cedar fences that bound the farm are snaked old and tight, their rails weft for geriatric trees that first poked through as sapling warp. They herringbone the underbrush, the elms and maples and chokecherries, the apples and mountain ash and lilac. And the wild grape entwines a triple helix around the twill.

  After carefully walking within our property, we ventured across to the neighbours’ for our first trip over the fence. A rock-pile corner at the high spot, back beyond the Hayfield at the northeast boundary, makes the fence accessible in the tangle. But with no trees for support, the rails slant to the north, pushed by the snowload to tilt down the hill.

  Once we get over the fence and through the trees, we view a scene that resembles a Renaissance painting. Hills and trees frame the space, drawing the eye to the middle distance. Permanent pasture falls away, with no particular paths to follow, but the direction is clear. Forest and hill off and away, water in the middle of the canvas, rolling fields to the left, dipping to flat grain-land, then wafting up to the coagulations of glacial moraine. To the right more valleys and hollows, where the ice lingered then charged, scraping and gauging and leaving granite calling cards. A perfect elm beckons on a height, and a sea of fall colours contrasts with the few white pines still standing. Mystery in the patches of forest beyond. We go that way. To wear a path.

  Down through the field dotted with purple fall asters, thistles and teasels, we climb over a sagging fence in the far corner. Below is a spring, gushing from the bank like Niobe’s tears. It pools, hesitates, narrows and falls to swamp below. Wild watercress still green amidst the dying edge grasses. Water clear and cold as ice wine. />
  A lane levels the rise above the stream and leads upward to the next field. The grand vistas suddenly enclose and become contained spaces bounded with hillside, wood, swampy bush and fencerow. At the gate, scrubby pasture undulates to the south and east, broken rails sharing lichen with carbuncular rock piles and dried raspberry canes. But the lane, the tractor path, the cattle walk, whatever this track is, leads through a wild orchard. Hawthorns, bare-leafed now, expose empty birdnests and vicious thorns, fruit cemented to branches. Long stiff grasses and starched Queen Anne’s lace, burnished goldenrod and faded chicory, its blue flowers clouded by frost. The track leads down towards a wood, then up, to shaded space.

  And without any warning it is there. Off to the side. Magnificent. Alone. Enormous. The magic beech tree.

  The atmosphere instantly changes as we are drawn off the track. The crown is so dense that even leafless, it filigrees the sun. The beech owns the high point. Refuses neighbours. Like royalty, it demands distance as if cordoned off with gold underbrush. Nothing grows under the spread of its boughs. Clad in the palest grey leather, bark without nap, it is elephant, sleek seal. Its knots are elbows, heels and the puckered orifices of breathing things. Its limbs are animate, waving and stepping and fingering the earth.

  High on a natural pedestal, the tree demands the reverence of an upturned eye. Praise almost. Druids may be charmed by oaks, but I am compelled to the beech cult. Beech. In German, Buche, from the word Buch. The tree was named for the books made with slabs of its wood. I see a lifetime’s reading in its leaves, gathered at my feet now, but the beech is poised to bud again with endless new chapters as the seasons turn like pages, faster and faster with time.