Every Little Scrap and Wonder

by Carla Funk

  Most of the club members came from true farming families. They already knew how to brand a steer, rope a calf, shear a sheep, saddle a horse, and slash a knife into a cow’s belly to let out the bloat. But I was a newcomer, there because the two neighbour girls had decided to join, and when I heard they’d be raising lambs as their 4-H project, I needed a lamb, too.

  “I’ll do all the work,” I promised my parents. “I’ll clean up after it. Feed it. You won’t have to do a thing.”

  After a week of daily begging, pleading my 4-H case at the breakfast table, the dinner table, spouting off facts about lambs and the gentleness of the Suffolk cross breed—good for its wool and its meat!—pointing out that while we had pigs and chickens, a dog and a cat, and a hamster running frantically in its wire wheel, we most certainly did not have a lamb, had never had a lamb, and that seemed wrong. My dad was the one who caved first. A sucker for any animal, he liked the idea of a lamb.

  “Fried chop with some mint and garlic,” he said. “I like that.”

  I helped him clear out the old red shed, hauling rusty truck parts and lumber scraps away to make room for a stall. While my dad sawed and hammered, I handed him nails, the level, the measuring tape, doing what he asked without complaint, a rare state of peace between us as we worked. Like the Lamb Raising Handbook instructed, I raked sawdust over the floorboards and spread bales of fresh straw at one end for bedding. I set out the salt lick, the water bucket, and a trough for the grain and hay.

  As I surveyed the clean, still-empty stall, I believed the true and perfect version of the story, in which I rose every morning to greet and feed my lamb, brush the dirt from its fleece, lead it around the yard in wide circles to simulate the judging ring, and teach it to stand in proper position, all four feet squared and rear legs slightly back, as outlined in the Market Lamb Showmanship Guide. In this version of the story, we won grand champion, and I ended up with money in my hand, a lamb beside me, and a fat blue ribbon that drew the praise and envy of the other 4-H-ers who thronged around me, clapping, wishing they were me.

  ON A SPRING Saturday when the world was in full thaw, the snow in scraps and the ice running into puddles, I stood on the perimeter of the livestock barn with a group of kids, kicking at the packed sawdust and manure. We waited like team captains ready to choose draft picks. A flock of black-faced, white-wooled lambs huddled together, bleating for their mothers. Each Suffolk cross had a number spray-painted in red on its fleece. The 4-H leader, holding his clipboard and pen, read off our names, and each of us in turn stepped forward to select a lamb.

  My dad stood on the other side of the barn gate, and when my turn came to choose, he called out to me.

  “That one,” he said, pointing. “Number 47. He’s a big guy.”

  Number 47 was the loudest in the flock, too, and, as it turned out, hard to catch, but finally, after he slipped my grip, and after a brief chase and gambol, a team of three teenagers corralled the lamb in a corner and slid a collar around his neck. I clipped on a rope leash, and Number 47 was mine.

  I rode home in the back of the pickup box, cold wind in my face and hair, rattling over the gravel road and clutching the lamb that struggled to get away from me, to slip its collar, to choke me with the rope. With every mile, my grip on the kicking creature tightened. My heart cinched, too. The sweet-faced lamb’s whimpering bleat had deepened to a crackly baa that sounded like my gout-struck great-grandfather’s chronic cough. After all the pleading I’d done, the begging, the vowing and pleading—I’ll take care of it, I’ll be responsible, sheep are my favourite animal ever! —I couldn’t admit my gut-sick dread. It was the same feeling I had whenever I got stuck holding a baby and its mother left the room. Come back, I’d plead with my eyes, don’t leave me here alone, in charge.

  Once we were home, my dad popped the tailgate and hauled down the lamb, which was by this point bellowing.

  “He wants his mom,” my dad said.

  I wanted my mom, too. I wanted her to swoop in and tell me she’d take over from here, that I should just go inside and watch cartoons. But instead, she headed for the house, leaving my dad and me alone with Number 47.

  My dad leaned on the stall fence, puffing on a cigarette, looking in. I sat down in the corner of the stall on a clean pile of hay and waited for 47 to come lie down beside me. Instead, he stood at the gate, bawling his gout sound, staring at my dad.

  “What’re you gonna call him?” my dad said.

  The lamb bleated louder. He couldn’t be Number 47 forever. I tried out names on him—Bubba, Bob, Marvin—calling to see which one he answered to.

  “Nope,” said my dad.

  Rocky. The lamb stopped hollering and nosed the grain in the wooden trough, then peed a steaming stream into the sawdust. That was sign enough for me.

  “Rocky,” my dad said, “come here.” He shifted his cigarette to his mouth and held out his hand through the slats of the fence.

  Rocky blinked his long, black eyelashes and nosed my dad’s fingers. From where I sat in the stall, the fresh straw smell had already begun to shift toward stench.

  THOSE FIRST FEW weeks, I wanted him gone. I wanted to rewind my life and put Rocky back in the flock as Number 47, to let someone else choose him. I wanted to undo the thing I’d done, to be the girl who visited the 4-H lambs next door but who didn’t have one of her own. The neighbour girls adored their lambs, Josie and Amy, and gushed about the way they nuzzled their necks and nibbled the cuffs of their jeans.

  Daily, I collared Rocky and led him to the grass to graze, tethering him to a picket line so he could cruise in a circle in the backyard. I brushed the sawdust, bugs, and dirt from his wool. I followed the rules of 4-H animal husbandry, checking his hooves and eyes and rump and teeth for any signs of illness. As the Lamb Raising Handbook suggested, I spent quality time with my livestock, trying to form a bond and earn my animal’s trust and affection. I sat inside the stall on the salt lick with a stack of Archie comics, waiting for Rocky to nuzzle me, but instead, he head-butted my knee and, when I pushed him away, tried to mount my back, his hooves scraping when he reared.

  “He’s lonely,” said my mother.

  “He’s frisky,” said my dad. “Let him go for a run.”

  “He’ll run away,” I said, panicked, and then the bright side of those words flickered. He’ll run away, I thought, and started to imagine how I could blame my dad, say it was his fault—he was the one who opened the stall, he let Rocky go free, and now my lamb was gone, and I had no lamb, and I’m sorry, but I’m not part of 4-H anymore. I already saw myself crying in the empty stall, holding Rocky’s old rope and collar. I loved that lamb.

  My dad unlatched the stall door and let it swing wide. Before I could grab Rocky, he bolted out the gate and frisked up the driveway, across the yard, trotting for the front lawn and through my mother’s flowerbeds, trampling the marigolds and pansies, kicking his hooves in full frolic as he went. I ran to the grass with my rope, calling his name, heart rate rising, expecting a chase and failure, but at my voice, Rocky lifted his head, turned, and trotted back to me. He stopped in front of me, nudged my hand with his nose, then plucked a mouthful of clover and started chewing, his lower jaw working circles to break down the cud. I sat on the lawn and let him sniff me, nibble at my hair with his velvet-bristled lips, his breath like sweetgrass in my face.

  EVERYTHING WE DID in the program, the projects and pledging, demonstration days and educational workshops, was building toward the Fall Fair, our town’s annual agricultural exhibition. There, we’d all show our animals in the judging ring, and on the final day, lead them into the arena for the 4-H auction. I knew in theory what this meant—that Rocky, like every lamb, steer, and hog, would end, but this head-knowledge remained abstract and distant, a paragraph in the club handbook, a far-off date on the calendar.

  At Rally Day, our final club event before the Fair, I stood in gumboots in an outdoor pen with my fellow members, holding my tiny pencil and judging card. We were th
ere to learn how to assess lambs for what our handbook called their “market value.”

  The leader of Rally Day was a short, muscular man named Jim, the dad of one of the other 4-H kids. He wore the uniform of a rancher—blue jeans, a Western shirt, and a cowboy hat cocked to shadow his eyes. When he began to speak, we leaned in to hear his brusque instructional.

  “The ideal lamb.” He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and cleared his throat. “Is deep and wide.” He walked over to one of the demonstration animals tethered to the fence. “Low-set.” He grabbed the lamb around the midsection and squeezed. “Not excessively fat.” The lamb made a sound like a toy with a broken squeaker. “But roomy. The ribs well-sprung.”

  A ram, he explained, needs to show ruggedness, and a ewe should be refined in her features.

  None of what he said made any sense to me. The lambs all looked the same—dirty white bodies, black faces and legs. I liked the ones that stood vacantly chewing their cud, quiet and unfazed by the buzzing flies. On the card I had been handed, bold letters at the top spelled “Cuts of a Market Lamb.” Below the title, an ink drawing showed the lamb’s body sectioned into six main parts, each part divided by a dotted line. My task was to first label the cuts—leg, loin, rib, shoulder, breast, foreshank—and then to rank the four lambs in order of highest market value.

  The other kids appeared to understand what our Rally Day leader meant and set to work scrutinizing the animals, squeezing rib cages, digging their fingers into fleece, peeling back lips, inspecting teeth, palpating rumps. I walked behind and mimicked their actions, but to me, the ideal sheep was the one without any dried manure clumped around its tail. When Jim announced the true ranking, my lowest-ranked lamb—the clumpy-butted one with eye gunk and thick loins—was at the top, and the one I’d chosen as the champion was second from the bottom, substandard, lacking in form and frame. Rocky, it seemed, was somewhere in the middle, not ideal, but good enough, said Jim, to garner a fair price for his poundage.

  LATE AUGUST, THE fairgrounds on the outskirts of the town—normally a scattering of vacant outbuildings and empty riding rings—came to life. In the exhibition hall, long tables held the various offerings of participants. Quilters hung their hand-stitched quilts. Bakers brought their best baked bread, pies, cookies, cakes. Glass jars gleamed with jellies and jams in every flavour—huckleberry, gooseberry, strawberry, saskatoon. Pumpkins, tomatoes, potatoes, cabbage—every vegetable vied for the blue ribbon in garden produce. Kids entered creatures made out of vegetables, pencil-crayoned portraits of indiscernible family members, hand-sewn doll clothes for their Cabbage Patch Kids. Beyond the exhibition hall, every shed, barn, and stall held a horse or steer, a cage of rabbits or clutch of hens, a pink, washed hog.

  After three days on the fairgrounds, with Rocky in his own stall inside the sheep barn, a participation ribbon tacked on the wall above him, I knelt in the dirt and sawdust of the auction arena with my one arm around Rocky’s neck and the other over his back, facing the bleachers full of bidders. Behind me on a small stage stood the auctioneer, a man in a Stetson, leather vest, and bolo tie. He let loose a string of syllables that sounded less like dollar amounts and more like a foreign tongue. In the stands, a cowboy nodded his head, to which the auctioneer responded by pointing, then climbing a notch in pitch and price: I have a dollar ten, wouldyougoadollartwenty, dollartwenty, bidonadollartwenty, I wannadollartwenty.

  My dad, behind the arena fence and at the top of the bleachers, sat hunched with his arms crossed and elbows on his knees. Every time another cowboy or trucker or 4-H father bid on Rocky, he answered with a bid of his own, leapfrogging the winning bidder, then falling behind, then raising the bid again.

  As I held on to Rocky in the auction arena and watched my father tip his ballcap, lift his raised thumb as a signal to take up the bid a notch, and as I heard the price per pound rise in ten-cent increments, then five-cent increments, I felt the truth come on hard. Rocky was stepping into the pattern of every 4-H lamb that came before him. He was a living, bleating version of the pen-and-ink illustration on the Rally Day judging card. I saw in my mind’s eye the stark outline overlaid on him, superimposed in dotted lines marking the loin, the shoulder, the choice cuts of a market lamb.

  “Sold to the man in the blue hat,” Charlie the auctioneer announced, and pointed at my dad in his top-row bleacher seat.

  My world blurred—kneeling beside Rocky in the ring, the winning bid, my dad making his way down the stairs toward me, wallet in hand, ready to fill in the dollars and sign his name on a cheque. He looked pleased, proud to have won the bid. A faint hope flickered in me—the brief thought that he bought Rocky off the auction block so that I might keep him as a pet. I saw the alternate version—the ride home from the fair, the return to the empty stall, the hanging up of the rope leash and collar, the grain spilled out into the trough, and Rocky weathering through autumn, winter, spring, summer, then set free to frolic in the green world.

  “Got you a better price,” said my dad.

  I couldn’t look him in the eye. I knew the story’s end. I’d read it in the plain type of the club handbook. My hands had worked that checklist to code, mucking out the stalls, pitchforking new straw, grooming, pledging myself to clearer thinking, greater loyalty, larger service, better living. All along, my head was telling my heart to keep the gate latched, but ritual had turned somehow to allegiance, to affection, to a vague, shaky version of love.

  It was as if my dad had been planning it all along, standing at both ends of the story, choosing Number 47 as a future freezer full of meat wrapped in brown butcher paper and portioned into stewing cubes, chops, racks, and roasts. What my dad intended for my good—a profit on the price per pound—felt like a hot slap on the cheek.

  I made my way out of the arena, across the trail of sawdust and back to the sheep barn. I climbed into the stall with Rocky and buried my face in his neck. He smelled like a hot wool blanket left out on a bed of wet grass and manure, a scent that those first weeks had turned my stomach. Now, as Rocky chewed his wad of cud, I cried fat tears over what felt like a bad joke with a sorry punchline, a trick ending to my pledge. Soon, I’d join the sad parade of 4-H kids, all of us leading our lambs out of the barn’s back entrance to where the big white truck idled with the ramp down, waiting to haul away the flock. On the other side of the fairground fence, my dad would be watching with the other parents, lifting his cigarette in a half-wave at me, smiling over how it all turned out.

  SUMMER

  Barbecue, Baptism

  ALL OUR BEST stories had blood.

  In the firelight of Grandpa and Grandma Shenk’s living room, where I sat with my cousins at Uncle Glen’s feet, listening to him tell again of the lumber mill accident, I waited for it—the hit, the heat, the rush of blood.

  “I was nineteen years old,” Uncle Glen said, “and working the night shift.” He perched on the hearth and leaned down toward us, his voice low and hushed.

  “My job was tailing the small edger, hey? I was separating the boards as they came down the belt, taking off the scrap wood as it came down my chain and sending the good wood down to the stacker. I was just working away, when—bam—my glove caught.”

  The pain, he said, was like a shot from a nail gun through his hand. He tried to pull his glove free from where it was pinched between the rollers, but that glove was wedged tight. He pulled hard, so hard his hand came out of the glove, but then blood came too—running down his arm and spattering the sawdust-covered concrete.

  Uncle Glen held up his ragged hand and called, “My finger—where’s my finger?”

  One of the guys on the chain hit the emergency stop, and while Uncle Glen sat dizzy on the ground with his bleeding hand raised above his head, the crew searched through the pile of boards. Sure enough, caught in the rollers among the boards was the lost glove, and inside that glove, his little finger curled, pink as a baby shrew.

  The mill’s medic drove him to the hospital, where he lay sweating on a
gurney, staring at the severed and whitening finger in its bowl of ice. Three hours later, when the doctor finally showed up, it was too late for the pinkie to be sewn back on.

  “The doctor sewed me up,” said Uncle Glen, “and threw the torn finger in the trash.”

  And here, like every time he told the story, he held up his left hand with its nub of a pinkie and waggled the remaining fingers.

  Does it still hurt, we wanted to know, and how much.

  “Nope,” he said, “but the itch about drove me crazy for years.” He scratched at the space where his finger used to be. “Phantom finger. Even now I sometimes can feel it.”

  Uncle Glen offered us his hand, and we took turns touching it, feeling the bump of bone and skin, like the start of a finger or its end, rubbing the callus of scar tissue where the doctor had stitched it shut.

  All our best stories had blood, as if the blood was what fuelled them and gave them their heart. Blood was proof of the trouble we had in this world, proof that trouble hurt, and would always find a way to leave its mark on us. Though mortality was a word not yet in my vocabulary, I had the sense that somehow blood told the truth. It flowed from inside the body and held the body’s secrets. Death—and the threat of it—made me lean in, not only with the heart-thud thrill of fear, but with curiosity about what came next. Even the Bible stories I loved most had blood, injury, and danger, like the story of Jael, the woman who snuck into the tent where the enemy soldier slept and drove a tent peg through his skull, or the tale of Samson the strong man with his eyes gouged out, or the one about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the Israelite men thrown into the fiery furnace for refusing to bow to an idol of the king. The magic of their bodies licked by flames and somehow still surviving lured me with its violence, the smoke-singe on their clothes, their hair, their skin.