Lambsquarters

by Barbara McLean

  The tree should not seem so remarkable. Virgil gave the beech homage in his Georgics, so I’ve been warned. But the massive trunk, short but thick, gnarled but smooth, sends branches that dance from its body like arms from a Hindu deity. The curve of its bark makes muscle of wood and sinew of twig, and fecund bellies erupt on all sides. The tree demands to be circled, checked for trompe l’oeil. Exotic already, it soon reveals an anomaly.

  One of the largest branches has grown off to the west and then somehow formed an umbilical line back to the trunk. It is a living, growing, connecting thing. Or has the trunk reached out to the branch? It is impossible to tell. The trunk seemed all of a piece until we found this flying buttress of bark stretching like a strut. Or a guy wire. Or a lifeline.

  From that first day to this, the beech remains an enigma. Slate blue, it swims in a sea of its own. Far from a line fence, park, village, or mooncalf with a penknife to enclose initials in a heart, the tree stands alone. Looking out over some private demesne. And I am a supplicant.

  If sometimes, as Frost claimed, life is too much like a pathless wood, where an eye weeps when hit by a twig, there are also rewards for struggles through the bush. There are those who do not care to forge new paths. The magic beech is not for them.

  But this tree is both ore and lore for me. I’ve climbed its branches, stretched on its boughs. I carried my children to see it when their eyes were just newly cracked, then later helped them climb it themselves, small booted feet sure on its silver limbs. Countless picnics, successive dogs, triumphs and sorrows were all marked by the ceremony of this tree. Special friends taken to it alone and severally. In through the wardrobe. Part of the secret. Hidden knowledge, like that of the leaves themselves, which were valued by early settlers for mattress stuffing, prized for their springy comfort so superior to flattened straw.

  Were leaves gathered from this magic tree? And drawn by horse and wagon in burlap bags back to the farm? Did women rake and stuff them into waiting ticking covers, striped blue and white, shyly stained and noticeably bleached? Pack mattresses full to coddle backs stiff with winter milking, sore from recent harvest, flexed with cold? Use them as soft shelter to conceive magic children or sweetly scent a sick bed?

  Each season the path changes, and with it the magic beech. In winter, I glide over the Hayfield, manoeuvre the fence with my skis in the air, or trickily sidle up to the rails, straddle them with one ski over and to the east, one still to the west, make a quick turn of my body with the second ski aloft and I’m across. I telemark down the hill and, in a good snow year, sail over buried barbed wire to the spring, carry on up the rise, pause at the top and search for that snowshoe hare, so well blended and difficult to spot. I ski downhill through the orchard and herringbone up the hill at the end, or skirt around the knoll and along the ridge. The latter gives me a longer view, but the former gives the sudden shock of the tree, white capped, iced, like a Florentine figure released from marble.

  The beech holds my attention each time I visit, but I get chilled and must keep moving. I make a snow-plough turn down the hill to the pond, check on the open water, then set off through meadow lanes two farms over, passing field after field to the forest where I’m under cover of sleeping maples. I get to the road and then home for hot wine or cider or buttered rum. When I’m on skis the magic beech is too close to be the end of the path. The beech is the beginning. It draws. It beckons.

  In February, the first thaw. Rain making mud. Dogs sniff sleepy coons, brown and rank, from their lairs. Crows gather: black on a grey sky. From the slick stride of the ski to the slog of the boot. Black on brown. Field stubble dead and buried. The magic tree looms outwards, its branches fanged. A cartoon tree, haunted, sinister, sleek and black in the wet. Inhospitable tree, too slippery for muddy children to climb, but not to be ignored. Magnetic still.

  Finally spring. The wild leeks take their chances under the beech’s branches. The air is pungent and fresh, warm hints on the wind. Buds furled and bulging are coloured like anachronistic businessmen in polished brown brogues with light grey suits. There’s time to linger. The children hang like lemurs from the branches, each trying to outdare the other. The path’s end. We spread an anorak as ground sheet, unfold a mouse-eaten table cloth, and open the hamper of food. The first picnic of the season, to be followed by feasts among the trilliums, the wild violets, the marsh marigolds and the harvests of hay, then grain.

  Late summer, after the barley is off but before the corn is ready, when the cicadas sing and the jays gather and the geese begin to ka-ronk and fly east and west, west and east, thinking of the trip south (picking their marshals and testing their feathers) we set out again, knowing that the neighbour’s bull is safely in the barn and the grain is in the granary. Our last beech lunch of the year. Sultry day of September, grasses dry and scratchy, crickets looking for scraps. The children, bigger now than I am, still climb to their favourite spots while Thomas and I lie back with our hats on our faces. The old dog sleeps, the puppy waits at the base of the tree. All of us are refreshed by its strength and are drunk on its magic.

  PLOUGH AND HARVEST

  FIELD WALKS COME TO A HALT until after harvest, which drones on well into the autumn. We must keep to the edges of the fields and with summer’s full growth on fencerows there can be little space for travel. Then, before the last cornfields are combined, deer season begins. The hunters herded up from the south don’t know our migrations and peregrinations. I stay inside and watch from a safe distance.

  I was once told by a classmate about a poem by Keats on ploughing, though I can’t find it in any concordance. It could be a rural myth, but rural myths don’t tend to run to Keats. I first heard of the poem in my student days, when I wrote about pigs in James Joyce. “The Boarding House,” a story in Dubliners, is full of swine imagery, and I called on my farming lore to note it. Gilt just means gold-plated to most readers. But every farmer knows that a gilt is a young female pig. A gilt to a sow is what a heifer is to a cow, that saucy teenage stage before the first lying in. So I realized the metaphor of the golden clock on the mantel, the nubile daughter suddenly pregnant, the boar hiding in the ding house. And my rural colleague recalled the Keats poem.

  It hinges, he claimed, on the trajectory of the plough, round and round the field to the centre. But that’s not how the plough—or the harrow or the double disc or the haybine or the corn planter or even the combine—travels. It’s never that simple. Perhaps Keats, if he wrote such a poem at all, dreamed his ploughing picture, watching the nightingale rather than the lark.

  The method of striking into a field, whether to open it up or clear it off, has always been a mystery to me. Fields are ploughed and planted in rows. You can see the furrows between the crowns, thick gullies between clods of rich earth, almost black in November greys. The furrows glisten in frost, are snow-rowed in winter, hard-packed and regular with the turn of the plough. Each share on the plough cuts into the earth and angles down. The mouldboard lifts and turns, flicks over soil the way a spatula folds cake batter, tunnels ahead leaving earthen gullies, running crowns. Still, fully formed, the field is armed from the ground for wintertime, when nothing new grows or feeds. The grasses, stover, weeds or stubble are sent to the underground. They descend into darkness and wither, deracinated, disjointed and dead.

  There is pleasure in making the furrows—practised far from the road by the novice, in fields landlocked and safe from neighbours’ eyes. The patterns are visible only from above, where hawks search the fencerows for mice, or seagulls focus behind the plough, diving for unearthed and bisected worms. Only when the skill is perfected will the plougher move to the roadside field, daring to put the results on display. There is pride in a straight furrow. Pride in all the work of farming. And every fall there are contests. Not just big ones, where implements are drummed and business is done and the whole of agriculture seems to turn into a marqueed mall with muddy floors, but also small matches on individual farms. Heavy horses and single-furrow p
loughs. Reins and harness and rubber boots. Rain and toques and jostled arms as the shares dig and slide, the mouldboards turn the terrain, and the jolts of the horses, the stones, the inclines and declines move up through the hands to the tendons and muscles of well-veined arms, still tanned from summer chores and roughly calloused from constant use. And almost every roadside field is a contest. Every furrow is on view to every pickup truck driving by. For farmers notice, they observe, and they take note.

  I DETERMINED to learn the pattern of fields. The flying Dutchman duly arrived while I was at my desk at the window, overlooking the field so close to my own. The leaves gone, the sky bleak, my work innocuous, I took up my pen and paper and plotted a graph of his route. I took up two pens, a blue and a red, and began to draw the pattern of the field on the page with arrows for direction.

  A pitchfork in hand, he paced an eighth of the way into the field at the top end, stopped, and dug in the fork. Back to the tractor, he paced again from the lower edge of the field with a stake (a broken hockey stick, its telltale tape intact) marking a straight line from start to finish, from stake to fork, fork to stake. Between the road and the first cut into the land he left a space of grassy stubble, wide enough for turning the full length of tractor and plough. “Headlands,” they are called, and they are two-headed beasts, guarding the field at both ends. The plough does not travel round and round to the centre, but manoeuvres the headlands to return to parallel lines, up one side and down the other of the field.

  The first cut appears where the ploughman decides to strike out. Discs ahead of the plough, or iron blades in times past, cut into the earth for the share to enter and the mouldboard to turn. They are called coulters, and they precede every blade of the plough, act as gatekeepers to the earth, keys to its locked thatch of summer vegetation.

  My grandfather’s name was Coulter. Coulter McLean. He was born two generations away from the plough: two after, for his grandfather was a farmer, and two before, as I came back to the land only a county away from the homesteading McLeans. And I wonder if he knew that his name meant more than the relative he was called after.

  My neighbour’s is a five-furrow plough. Five coulters, five mouldboards with five ploughshares: one a piece. The mouldboard is not a board at all anymore, though once it would have been made of oak or elm, the iron share bolted on. The Egyptians developed the plough from a crude hand-held stick into an implement pulled by animals, and the Greeks added wheels. In times of war Hellenic ploughshares were co-opted, their iron shaped into weapons. Ares led the fight while Demeter mourned for her lost daughter. The land was idle, the grain neither sewn nor reaped. The plough just a distant constellation in the peaceful night sky.

  With his Dutch heritage, my neighbour can take pride in his shiny plough; its prototype was conceived in Holland in the Renaissance. With a slimmer shape and lighter coulters and mouldboard plates, the plough was easy to use and inexpensive, making it popular and available. My neighbour, when he came to Canada, brought his history with him, having ploughed with his horse as a boy, the reins tucked under his arm or over his shoulder, the shares skimming through the low nether land devoid of rocks.

  When he arrived in the township he was told the field beside my farm could not be ploughed. Impossible. That first year he marked every rock, every boulder that broke a shear pin on his plough, and the field was dotted with stakes like an apple orchard newly planted with saplings. It took a backhoe to dig the rocks out, one at a time, and they filled a swale in the pond-field beyond. One by one he dug them out and dropped them into the bog, where they sank down through vegetation to disappear forever. Or until the next glacier.

  He pulled the rocks and he ploughed the field. And he’s ploughed it every year since; after seasons of grain, then corn, now grain again, oats and barley mixed, budded or bearded and swaying in June winds, feed for his cattle, bedding for his sheep, golden sheen for my eye on summer mornings when dawn’s rosy fingers reach it first on my eastern horizon.

  HE EXPLAINS it all to me now, how the plough works, where shares meet mouldboards, how the coulters cut through the tangle of twitch and milkweed and stubble of the field floor, and guide the share through the newly sprouted grain, turning it in the furrow. He tells me about the dead furrow, that double gully where divergent directions of the plough meet. One side of the field moulds the furrows to the right, the other side to the left. When they finally meet, the furrow deepens, widens, forms a split in the field with no crown. Crownless, the furrow is dead.

  His plough leaves a sixteen-inch track, more than twice the width horses could manage, their strength limited, finite. Their feet an average seven inches wide, they pulled ploughs with furrow widths of six to nine inches, and when the seed was scattered it fell to the notch and sprouted in rows just far apart enough for the horse to walk through. When the cultivator weeded or the binder harvested, the horse could lead without stepping on the crop.

  Horses are now packed by the hundreds into powerful diesels, their four-foot walk turned into four-wheel drive. Twenty inch rows, on twenty-furrowed ploughs— wider than equine imagination. Monsters you can’t buy new for twenty thousand dollars, and can’t sell used for ten thousand. With new innovations the plough might go the way of the horse, only brought out a few times a year, testament to a past when the land was new, unbroken, resistant, but made to yield to that cutting edge.

  While my Dutch-born neighbour takes pride in the cut of the share, the turn of the mouldboard, the straight furrow laid even from south to north, in easing his plough over the geeren, that triangular section inherent in an uneven field that no English word names, the sixth generation Harris boy wants only to make the earth black. There are no prizes given for fancy ploughmanship in the daily chore, and he is disdainful of what he calls “recreational ploughing.” Like his grandfather before him (an excellent farmer, an infelicitous ploughman), he takes off the coulters, drags cornstalks in a braided rope of bedraggled dross, their gold spent and gone, paid to the combine in dues. The way of the future is to conserve the earth with no-till planting and save fuel with fewer passes of machinery. Yields increase as the years pass. The plough sits rusting in the yard, its shares ironically craving dirt to make them shine.

  A third neighbour, whose ancestors first opened crown land, who farms still on the fields claimed from the forest by his grandfathers, prefers to plough in a tractor with an open cab, needing to hear the sound of the plough, its music. He uses a three-furrow plough, and drops the d in the mould of his boards, visualizing them as moles running through his fields. And he bemoans the destruction of earthworms, regrets their dissection by the shares as he cuts through the field, and indicates his intense connection with the land. Involved. Implicated.

  HARVESTS STRETCH through the season. Winter wheat is planted to root before the dark days underground, spurt in spring and be reaped just after hay, the very first crop to come off the fields. Spring seeding happens early in well-drained land. Tractors ply the furrows or drill the stubble; the weeds are turned under or chemically euthanized, their enzymes inhibited, photosynthesis blocked. The browning of Canada. Haying starts with the first growth spurt, when the grass jumps overnight, the legumes unfold their fronds and the earth allows the forage harvesters to traverse its surface, which is still unstable from deep frosts and spring runoffs, sports stone patterns where none lay in fall. The haylage flies from the spout, augured from below, and sails into covered wagons, small boxcars that trundle up and down the roads, now empty, now full, back to the home farms to bunkers or silos. The herbal tea ferments and condenses, fodder for livestock who lick their chops and salivate at the scent.

  When the fields are dryer, hay is baled, either square or round, thrown or stuck, tossed or piled, tied or sheathed. The sound of the baler each sunny afternoon, chunk-a-chunk-a-clunk-thwap, sings late into light-filled evenings.

  But the grain harvest is somehow best when you can watch the old ways as we did when we first arrived in the area. The binder
and stooker across the road, the sheaves tied and plied, small idols to Demeter, fair bouquets pointing skyward. The grain in a spray on strong straw stalks, waiting to be threshed on the barn floor and winnowed in a wondrous display of grain from chaff.

  LAMBSQUARTERS ISN’T big enough to grow grain. The sheep need our fields for pasture and hay. We can improve our pasture by fertilizing with manure and by rotating the animals from field to field to keep the weeds down and the grasses healthy, but our hay periodically needs to be replenished. Legumes don’t live forever. When we first had the Hayfield ploughed, we seeded it down with alfalfa and timothy, but underseeded with oats and barley, a thin mixture, which would jump ahead of the hay, shelter it from hot sun, nurture it along and crowd out the weeds. It is called a nurse crop. Before the legumes had time to blossom, the grain was grown, tall golden strands, their heads swaying in a progressing wave with each heavy gust of summer wind.

  One of the Harrises came in a combine to harvest our crop. The header cut into the swath, winnowed out the grain, augured it up into the bin and left the straw behind in windrows to be gathered later and baled. And when the gold was gone from the field, the green began. Small plants unfolded, the grass grew straight, and before long the mix of clover and alfalfa blossoms purpled the green like crown jewels. It lay in the field, finding its feet, not to be harvested until the following year.

  The grain filled one side of our granary. But the storehouse’s tin lining was thin and worn, and the rats found their way in, brought their friends, their relatives, and moved beyond the barn and into the house that autumn. I was shocked by the sight of a large brown rodent on the basement wall, and Thomas was horrified at the thought that his home was invaded. He felt lax in his duties. The exterminators were sent for, the rats done in.