A Good Day's Work (10 page)

JESSICA does not text. She does not look at her watch. She doesn't sneak out to the warmth of the still-running truck to call the office. She just stands there waiting for the contractions to start rippling through the mother. The barn is Jessica's natural habitat. By my calculation, she has spent the equivalent of nearly two years of her life ministering to barn animals since becoming a vet. She just can't escape the agrarian life. Her husband, Les, a Prince Edward Island boy whom she met at vet school in Charlottetown, works for a dairy equipment manufacturer based in nearby Sussex. Lesley, their nineteen-year-old daughter, who's studying to become a licensed practical nurse in Moncton, went through the 4-H ranks. William, the five-year-old, is also following in the family tradition. When Jessica gets home—after dinner, homework and some cleaning
up—she'll walk out onto her twelve-acre spread in Manhurst and head for the barn, where they keep a few head of beef cattle, some horses and sheep. This is Jessica's notion of fun.

Inside the Gauthier barn, therefore, she is calm, she is cool. With Marc's help she ties off the foal's umbilical cord, cuts it, then applies iodine to the horse's “outie.” Once the foal begins to suckle, all attention focuses on Amelia. Oxytocin acts fast, but only for a short time. The first three doses are spaced twenty to thirty minutes apart. The hope is that eventually the mare will kneel in the hay and naturally expel the placenta. Jessica pulls out a bit more of the afterbirth by hand. The pink membrane still only hangs a couple of feet outside the horse. She ties it into a knot in the hope that gravity will drag more of the placenta out. At 4:06 Jessica gives Amelia another shot.

If in an hour's time things haven't moved along, she will hit the horse with another dose. If that doesn't work, Jessica will have to remove the afterbirth manually. Otherwise, Marc's beloved Clydesdale could develop one of several nasty-sounding complications, each ending in “itis,” any one of which could kill the mare.

Thus, here Jessica stands, face unclouded by doubt, as if she has all the time in the world. This isn't just some commercial transaction between strangers. Marc and Maryanne aren't just “clients.” Jessica's home is a couple of minutes away from this place by car. Their daughters went to school together. They're neighbours and therefore are accorded the mutual respect that such a relationship deserves.

This was how it once was in this country. Don't you remember when we all had that sense of community and connection? I don't just mean in a business-employment sense,
although before the Net and the global marketplace everything was local: if you made something, chances were that you sold it to someone you went to elementary school with. The parents of the kid who centred your peewee hockey line hired you to fix their toilet, balance their books and rotate their tires. The guy who had lunch once a week with your dad's first cousin hired you for a job you had no right getting because, well, you were the son of the first cousin of the guy he lunched with four times a month, fifty-two weeks a year.

It was, for better or worse, as though we all lived in this same small village in which we each had a shared urgent responsibility for the other residents. When good deeds were done, people didn't tweet about it or demand to have their names put on a building. I thought for a second about K.C. Irving on the way to becoming the third-richest non-monarch in the world, who spent a Christmas Eve driving through a blizzard with a couple of bags of road salt to help a stranger stranded in this same neck of rural New Brunswick in which we now shivered. He was seventy at the time. But he lived in a place and time where corner stores still let customers buy groceries on credit and delivered free to seniors. Back in the day teachers stayed late of their own free will to coach school sports teams. Doctors made house calls.

Now get sick, go broke or bonkers or otherwise fall by the wayside in a Canadian city and you'll find out who has your back. Sometimes it seems that we may as well be in the wilds of the Arctic. If you suffer the big one while walking down the street in broad daylight, I hope that your old elementary school teacher—not some fresh-faced family physician worried about “liability issues”—is passing by.

So it does my heart good to know that in certain places in this country the “we're all in this together” spirit still lives. Make no mistake, standing here and waiting is part of Jessica's occupation, for which she is decently compensated. But there are easier ways to make a buck than being a country vet. She never wanted just a “job,” she says. Jessica wanted something more than a mere exchange of labour for lucre. “It is a combination of things,” she says when I ask her what it is about this work that appeals to her. “I grew up on a dairy farm so I like cows and horses and find working with them rewarding. I like helping farmers. It's a symbiotic relationship. I need the farmer and the farmer needs me and we need the cows and horses. It's an important industry. I wanted to be part of it and this is how it worked out.”

We're back in the truck now. Amelia has received her last dose of oxytocin. There's nothing to do but see if it kicks in. Jessica is going to pick up her son, William, at his babysitter's and then drive me back to Moncton, where my rental is parked. William comes out of the house wearing a big furry hat with earflaps. “I think I know him,” he says of me to his mom as he climbs into the back seat. “That can't be the case,” Jessica starts to say. But it's been a long day and the little guy's out already. And so we drive, K94.5 filling the car, through this country where she knows not just the people but the cows and horses by sight.

Delirious from hunger, I'm imagining an artery-narrowing Angus Burger at the McDonald's I know is just a few minutes from where I parked my car. Jessica, who has already put in a day that's as physical as a stevedore's, hasn't had a full meal since breakfast. A half an hour from now, when she returns to
the Gauthiers', she hopes to discover that Amelia has dropped her placenta. Otherwise, this woman has miles to go before she eats, let alone sleeps.

It's not like there are really options. Somebody has to do it. Somebody has to slide open that barn door with frozen fingers and keep watch until these folks she knows so well are in the clear. That she might say the hell with it and head for home is out of the question. It has never entered Jessica's mind. She has been training, in one way or other, for this moment her whole life. These are her people. This is her world. It will take as long as it takes.

CHAPTER
THREE

THE MILKMAN COMETH

B
ILL
was fretting. If his neurons seemed hyperactive, they had reason to be. In his mind, he pictured hangdog kids gazing at empty cereal bowls. He saw seniors, their porous bones softening on the spot. He visualized bakers, feet up, reading the day's
Chronicle Herald
as their mixing bowls sat idle. He imagined coffee drinkers at Tim Hortons drive-throughs, gape-mouthed upon learning that a medium double-double was suddenly as accessible as lasting peace in the Middle East. “Oh man I'm late,” whispered Bill. “I'm late.” And so he arrowed east, his white van careering forlornly through the gathering dawn, his eyes scratchy with fatigue, his gut clenched with worry.

He had been on the job for six hours by now. The workday began at midnight at the Farmer's Co-Operative Dairy at the
dead end of a country road outside of Halifax. The day was meant to end in the early afternoon, twenty kilometres from where he'd started, after presenting his last cases of milk, yogourt, cheese and cream to a restaurant readying for the suppertime rush. But halfway through the workday things had gone sideways: the chef at a retirement home slept in; when Bill Bennett Jr. finally pulled into the parking lot and unlocked the door leading to the kitchen, he was a full sixty minutes behind schedule.

A milkman's enemies are legion: blizzards, gridlock, meter maids, leaky fridges. Time is the ultimate foe when you have somewhere around two hundred stops a day to make and a route that reaches from the newest suburb to the oldest corner of one of the country's longest-lived cities. “You think you're okay and then there you go,” Bill moans. “Oh my, oh my. I knew this was going to be a bad day soon as I got up. You know what? I was right.” Lose a couple of minutes on each stop and the interminable day extends even longer. What's worse, the problems grow exponentially. When Bill is late, his customers—the stores, restaurants, nursing homes and other wholesale stops that make up 90 percent of his income—start looking at the clock. If he simply didn't show up—well, you never know, the entire Halifax Regional Municipality might just clank and hiss to a halt.

Today all Bill had to do was conjure up 3,600 mislaid seconds from thin air. Hard to do when your timetable is already as tight as a Hank Williams lyric. When you are sixty-one years old, operating on six hours' sleep, beset by tennis elbow and carpal tunnel syndrome along with a host of other physical maladies. So, you hunch a little lower over the
steering wheel. You narrow your eyes. You crank 101.9 FM a little louder on the dial, listening to announcers who sound like they've had the same kind of life experiences you've had. Then you blow through town as the streets unfold before you, and you search for slices of lost time.