Lambsquarters

by Barbara McLean

  On snowy days the bus is difficult to hear. Its hard wheels roll on soft roads, often making the first track of the day. I would know it was coming only by seeing the children emerge from their house, stop to latch the door so it wouldn’t blow open and away, then turn to meet the bus pulling up, its lights flashing, its rat-trap colour glowing.

  At the end of the day I would await its return and watch the children jump off or sometimes trail off, dragging their stuff. They would run or saunter, heads up or down, depending on their day. My daughter would chatter to her brother, who tended to be taciturn. She was energized by the ride while he was subdued. Or sometimes the reverse. They’d bring me the news of their lives. Or not.

  They avoided the bus house after school, though occasionally I saw them stow something inside, stash it for later retrieval perhaps. Or for protection from censure. The building soon became a fixture, stained pale green, blending with the grass and the trees, its greyish-brown door in tone with the shingles, camouflaged with the stone wall that went up beside it, the gate built behind it, the gravel of the road it bordered, the lane.

  At first incongruous, the house’s height eventually made sense as my son grew and grew to six foot six. And how, I wonder, did Thomas know he would get so tall? Perhaps through the formula of prediction that doubles the height of a two-year-old, or is it a three-year-old? That code could have been a hint, but we live by science here, not tales. Or do we?

  Science and nature and nurture and history. Community and wisdom and education and knowledge. Skill and intuition. Earth in the blood, like bagpipes. You have it or you don’t. Precognition and synesthesia. And just plain knowing. Or guessing. Or acting on a hunch. These are all things we garner while living here. And the outsized bus house, which reached farther into the atmosphere than anyone could expect a child to grow, proved perfect in the end. When I checked the door frame in the mudroom with my metal tape, I was astonished to find it exactly right. At three he was exactly half of six-and-a-half-feet high.

  Before he grew so tall the bus house provided him with a step on the way into the maple tree beside it. He’d climb from the fence to the roof of the bus house to the thick branch and on up to the trunk of the tree and beyond, as high as high. It was his solitary place above us all, where he got ready to suffer heights for the rest of his life. One day he went farther, higher perhaps, and he could not get down. His father got the extension ladder and went up after him. Never, Thomas told him, is it wrong to ask for help, to accept rescue, to admit your limits. There is no cowardice in safety. A lesson I hope he will always retain.

  Over the years the bus house weathered. The glass was broken when boys made a swift exit from the roof; the paint on the door peeled. The mice moved in. The chairs disappeared. They were stripped and refinished, repaired and reglued and taken to live in the city with my daughter.

  One spring, during the final final exams, the bus made its last stop, its last pause since its first all those years ago for a swimming lesson. And shortly after, my son and Thomas, men together, decided to take the bus house away, move it on to a different spot, a different life. They took off the door, put the house on tilt, tried to perch it on the trailer to move it, but it defeated them. Too big, too heavy, too stubborn to leave, it lay stuck in the lane, upended, rugged, determined and stationary.

  It wasn’t long before the flying Dutchman—de vliegende Hollander—arrived, by fate, by luck, by his innate skill at knowing when he’s needed most. With the front-end loader at the ready, and skill and daring ever present, he gently tipped the house into the bucket, tilted it just so, and took it down through the Meadow, along by the Swamp, through Knock-down Corner and into the sugar bush. Together they set it back up, put stones beneath the corners, turned it at an angle and settled it in to its new work in the woods. It no longer harbours children each morning, stores their treasures at night or witnesses the to-ing and fro-ing of the bus. Retired as a bus house, it awaits rebirth in March, when the sap begins to run and the fires start to burn under the kettle. It will keep our equipment safe and dry, give us shelter in the sugar bush, remind us of the shifting stages of our lives here in this place.

  So I look out my kitchen window and see the stone wall, the gate beside it, see the cedar hedge, the gravel lane and the maple tree. The bus house is gone, as if it had never been there. But like the children it sheltered, it lives on in a new place with a new life. Its future lies before it like a well-loved carpet that has been gathered up gently and freshly rolled.

  DAGS

  THE WINTER HAS BEEN BITTER this year. We’ve had storm after storm, grey upon grey, snow and sleet and treacherous conditions. The roads have been closed, the winds cruel and the sun scarce. The days are creeping longer, but spring is hiding in a maze, not perching around a corner.

  I think about endings. About my children leaving home, about my book’s last pages, about my youth paid out and spent here on the farm. All the disjunctions and connections, trajectories bleeding off into the distance and circles meeting up. Continua humming like cicadas, which sound like singing wires, taut and vibrating. Intersecting lines travelling at their own speeds and following divergent courses, but meeting for a moment. A brief kiss in one place, a small dot of focus.

  So much of what I do here is contradictory. Sheltering and slaughtering. Planting and harvesting. Conservation and consumption. Solitude and community. But perhaps that’s exactly what this life is, a delicate balance of disparate and warring concepts, brief moments of harmony in the dissonance of nature and culture.

  Lambsquarters is a snug harbour for its animals. The sick and the wounded are sheltered within its gates. Helen, daft lamb that she was, wouldn’t have survived in other barns. But here she was cherished, nurtured and coddled into her limited life. Her enthusiasm and tenacity carried her along after our hand-rearing was finished. Eventually I did get to the fleece that we carefully removed from her cooling skin the day she died in the barnyard. It took me some time. But for the last Christmas of the century I carded and spun it and formed the necks of sweaters for my children and their father. Like the Victorians who wore jewellery woven with the hair of the dearly departed, my beloveds wear Helen’s wool around their necks. Helen was knit into their lives first as a lamb and then into their sweaters. And on my needles is a cardigan whose collar will be Helen as well. That lamb who warmed my heart will warm me again. A mourning cloak. She’s a legend, my Helen, living still in a poem by a friend. There’s a good chance she would be in the flock still, had she not been afflicted. But her brother went for slaughter, as do most of the rams. And how can I justify that contradiction? The ways of the farm. The lives of animals who would never exist but for their value as meat and wool.

  I PLANT MY GARDENS with tender touch, urge seeds along in the house, transplant them on dusky days, protect them from too much sun, from predators, from drought. But just when they reach adulthood I rip them down, steal their fruit, bouquet their blossoms, dig their roots. I am self-serving with my gardens, hacking out what doesn’t blend, what doesn’t taste, what doesn’t suit my current design. I train ground lovers to entwine upwards, prune tomatoes to increase production, pinch flowers to amass their blooms. And the weeds better watch out. I show no mercy.

  I conserve my land, keep it growing, but consume it as well. There is little summer fallow around here anymore. Every acre grows every year. I love the wild but hate the burdock. I appreciate the brilliant Scotch thistle but hack it down as inedible, prickly, insidious. How does that fit with conservation? I save my deadhead flower seeds every year, sprinkle them on the roadsides that someone else trims. They proclaim their survival with glorious bloom, yet are weeds to the crops if they slip from the ditch.

  Trying to be conscious of the needs of the farmers, the constant push to increase production and make the life pay, I acquiesce to the stockpiling of manure across the road, to the widening of the lane for access. But I ask for the plan, question the practice. We compromise. Some trees go
, but not all. I still have my view, my borrowed landscape, my precious cedars that house all manner of songbirds. But I will never know how this places me with my neighbours. Their concerns are so different from mine.

  I LOVE the solitude of life without houses in sight, yet I crave community at times and feel blessed with the village down the road, the way dotted with barns and houses containing lives connected to each other and my own. The sparse winter necklace of scarce and precious lights spread out on an invisible thread into the distance of the night. There is freedom in the space here, the open vistas and expanses, the tight forests and arcades. I can go for days without seeing anyone else, just the faint view of the odd vehicle on the snowy road, a vision that summer leaves obscure.

  But the isolation can be frightening at times. On my first summer night alone in the house there were thunking noises repeated over and over near the window. The fear of investigating fought with the need to know. Who was out there? What was happening? I crept closer, lights out, and watched small apples, one after another, drop from the tree to the ground, bounce and roll away on the grass.

  I remember the night when a tractor from the barren east drove into the lane, pulled up by the barn, turned off and stayed in the dark. Nothing else happened. No knock on the door. Nothing. We had puppies for sale, Zoë’s litter mates. We had put up a crude sign at the road, and a gentle neighbour (developmentally delayed) had come to pick one out. He always stayed outside until greeted, yet how was I to know that then? The longer he remained out in the dark, the fiercer my imagination. I envisioned phone wires cut, weapons glistening. I telephoned the flying Dutchman, who chuckled, and rushed over while I stood in an upstairs window waiting and watching for him. And still I fretted, for after he had arrived no one came to the house. Only when the tractor left did I hear the story of the man. He returned the next day to pick his pup, and both of us were happy with the transaction.

  I’ve been worried by visiting evangelists, who catch me in the garden where I have no escape. I’ve given eggs to tramps who’ve walked in from nowhere. I’ve held tight to my hoe in the presence of an aggressive salesman and followed my intuition more than once. I listen to my body when it bristles. And I’ve been known to hide in the barn or to bring the axe inside the house on occasion.

  Countering these moments of fear with strangers are the moments of care from the community. The door-to-door collections when someone dies. The cards of thanks. The inevitable help that follows trouble. The gifts of food and flowers, eggs and vegetables. The rides to the hospital, tows from the ditch, boosts of batteries, help with chores and the sharing of all the knowledge there is. As constant as cream rising. Alderney cream.

  IN GREY COUNTY there is brutality and gentleness, side by side. There are constant binaries of black and white. Bluebirds and cardinals, siskins and finches. Chickadees sleeping with their heads perched under wing and phoebes nesting in doorways. Crows kidnapping robins’ fledglings. Cowbird cuckoos pushing eggs out of nests. Blue jays ravishing hatchlings. The predators and the prey, side by side, all within view.

  A sharp-shinned hawk, splendid, slate-backed, with rufous breast in bars, accipiter striatus velox (Blue Darter to those who know it well) spent a day on the apple tree this late winter. Right beside the house. Right over the bird feeder. Not interested in seeds, it froze on its perch, its feathers impervious to the winds whipping by. Its red eyes were wide and nothing moved but its neck, which seemed to swing completely round, keeping its prey in view. I was struck by its majesty, that Hughesian conceit, creation in its foot. I was mesmerized by its presence, by its purpose and plan.

  I could have frightened it, made noise, opened the door. But I watched, transfixed, as it eyed the small oblivious herbivores below. I was implicated in its crime, for I knew and did nothing. The hawk took its time, sized up the perfect kill, the perfect meal. Just when I thought nothing would happen it swooped, clasped a sparrow in its talons and held the bug-eyed birdlet to the ground, smothering in the grasp. Too late I banged the door, hoping it would drop its prey, fly away. Hoping I could be witness and judge both, view the catch and prevent the kill. But there is no such power here. I thwart or I watch.

  The hawk heard me. It spread its wings and rose, leaving angel patterns in the snow, holding the sparrow firmly in those thin feet on shapely legs. The hawk took its prey to the cedars beside the house, balanced on a crotch in a branch and tore off its head. Eating it whole. Down through the body it hooked the flesh and ate, small feathers flying in the wind. Not a bone dropped. Not a drop of blood. It took an hour for the hawk, its feet and beak red, to finish. Nothing was wasted, nothing left.

  IT SEEMS spring will never come, that the snow will never go as the children, who are no longer children, go back to their lives in separate cities after their holiday. We return from the bus stop, the airport, and Sydney runs up to lick our hands. The sheep call from the barn to be fed. Frontenac and Lanark purr their pleasure when we reach the feed room.

  Chores done, we stroll back together to an empty house. Now calm and still, the bustle of a full family stretched out behind us. The house we had never meant to fill. We enter the warm yellow light of the kitchen, fighting the emptiness, the empty nest, and something stirs on the floor. I look closely and find a butterfly. In winter.

  Attenuating then slowly draping its wings, it sits on the maple floorboard, bewildered. Some chrysalis somewhere, on a plant I brought in months before, must be shrivelling and falling apart, breaking to dust. The female lepidopterous Artogeia rapae, small white, is out of its cocoon too soon. It’s a sign of spring, of hope, of rebirth. A sign of metamorphosis in brilliant yellow and white with velvet black spots.

  OUR METHODS are different and our resources more varied, but the vision that spirited us here carries ghosts from the past. Our ancestors, like those of our neighbours, pioneered the land, just not in this place. Their lives course through our veins from pre-memory. The first moment we saw this property that dreams are made on, we knew it was the place we would steward and carefully guard. Made up of woods and fields, hills and valleys, swamp and dry land, its history is a vast effort of human hope, labour, tenacity, frustration and love, and would be protected and nurtured in our still learning hands. We are growing old here.

  The wind freshens. A gust shivers across the loose snow and scatters a handful of flakes. They land in a flower bed, are caught by a crinkled leaf wintered brown and rotting. With another rush the leaf shifts, flakes flicking, and lifts, falters, waves farewell and sails away. A single flower, a nodding snowdrop, shelters there pushing its way up from the bulb in the depths, announcing spring.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  To Annie Garton, Cathy Huntley, Don Mason and Anna Sonser for helping me reread the farm so I could write it; to Denise Bukowski and Anne Collins for spinning the text into type; to Esta Spalding, Janice Kulyk Keefer and the late Libby Scheier for literary guidance; to the van Zoelens, the Lewises and the Aitkens for their generosity and their wisdom; and to Connie and Leon Rooke, my first readers, my enthusiasts, my mentors.

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION 2003

  Copyright © 2002 Barbara McLean

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2003. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House of Canada Limited..

  www.randomhouse.ca

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  McLean, Barbara, 1949—

  Lambsquarters: scenes from a handmade life

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37044-0


  1. McLean, Barbara, 1949— 2. Farm life—Ontario—Grey (County)—

  Anecdotes. 3. Grey (Ont. : County)—Anecdotes.

  I. Title.

  S522.C3M38 2003 C818’.603 C2002-903413-2

  v3.0