Lambsquarters (24 page)

THERE WAS NO QUESTION
of not staying here, right from the start. We’d tried the city. We’d tried the country. We liked the country better. I guess I’m prepared to spend time with myself, though I do crave the community of friends. And I never quite fit the mould but am always outside. On the margins. The edges and sedges of life.

When we travelled across Canada we learned about the country’s disdain for Ontario. Prairie dogs resented our privilege, West Coasters chided our weather, Maritimers couldn’t help but be kind, but they branded us still. Ontario seemed the place to stay, as here we have no apologies to make. Home. Where our ancestors—from the eighteenth-century Scots surgeon to the United Empire Loyalists, the nineteenth-century English gentleman to the post-war orphaned babies, the rugged Highlanders cleared from their land to the
powerful Chippewa matron at Michilimackinac—all chose to stay.

When we first came to live on the farm we maintained our city contacts. Symphony tickets and theatre, regular visits from friends from afar, and trips away to see them too. But the work got under our skin. It burrowed in and left its mark, deep lines and brown spots from too much sun. Biceps and bulged veins from too much hefting. Broken nails and dirt stains from arms in the soil, digging and planting and making things grow. Tomato plants staining hands green and walnuts making them brown. Callouses on palms and heels from the fork and the spade. Machinery branding a crescent moon on one arm, breaking bones in the other, raising constant bruises on my body. Wind blowing my hair into tangles and straightening it out, or rain curling it. Sun bleaching and drying and splitting and carving deep lines into my face. And anxiety doing that too, and illness and loss of sleep. For there is much to care for with beasts in the barn, bairns in the house, the worry of wood and of well. The crops from the garden, the hay for the flock, the manure to spread on the land. The manure smells. Reeks. Permeates the house and gets right into my hair. Even the butter picks up its taste.

The power goes out. Or it surges and breaks our equipment, our light bulbs. Lightning hits with regularity. And we wait for repairs in the dark. It’s cold in
the storms, when the wind heaves power lines. Woodstoves are fickle for heat. The logs must be cut, year after year and split and moved and stacked and dried. Then moved once again to the woodshed, restacked inside. Then brought in the house, a few sticks at a time, sloughing bark and chips in a trail. The wood feeds the fire, which is hungry for more, and more and more. And I get tired hauling wood and stoking coals and taking out ashes and tripping over the scuttle in the garage where the cinders cool until we can spread them somewhere safe, where their heavy metals won’t harm.

But it is a real fire heating our home. The sweet smell of apple or lilac follows the cedar kindling that Thomas splits into thin faggots that crackle at the first touch of flame. Then solid maple or elm or the weed smell of ash filters out our chimneys, drifting smoke across the field and into the bush, back where it all began.

The mornings are chill until the fire is lit. My loft is like ice while the embers brew and make up their mind to heat the chimney bricks, which gradually take on the warmth and then release it to radiate and caress. This heat makes me stay.

ISOLATION IS
palpable. I feel it in the great handfuls of nothing sifting through fingers trying desperately to grip. I feel it in the disjunctions between my past and my present. My silver pepper mill at odds with my shitty
boots. I never quite fit in here with the families who have been in the township for centuries.

I GO TO
funerals and weddings. To showers in the village. Every young woman is feted in turn and everyone comes with gifts. Wonderful gifts, sincerely given, and we sit in chairs in rows in one of the two church basements and watch the bride and her bridesmaids. Her mother and her grandmother. Each gift is passed around, row to row, and we read the card and ooh and aah at what others have brought. Afterwards there is a game to be played: we use the bride’s or groom’s name to give bits of advice.

And I find myself unable to play, wanting instead to change these ways, give a reality check.

But I delete before I write. Except about the bank account. Just as a hint.

The funerals are usually in Murphy’s Mill, because the Alderney churches aren’t big enough. But we go back to the village for a lunch, which is served by the ladies. Sandwiches and squares, tea, coffee. There is no chance to mingle as we sit at tables. In rows. We talk, or not, to whoever is beside or across. About the weather. About whatever. And I see, as if through a window, the sense of community here. The layers of family—babies on the floor, toddlers at the table, parents and grandparents—all here to bury the great-grandmother who has lived here all her life, as her mother did before her. And I feel like a stranger. An outsider. And I realize I can never fit. Not really. And still I stay.

I try to understand. To learn about the needs of farming and to accept the progressions and changes. But I abhor it when the farmers bulldoze the rail fences and mow the trees down in a trice so a bigger machine can get into a roadside field just a few times a year. And I walk through the snow to the man across the road with the saw, the fellow on the bulldozer, and I cross my arms as he says good morning. “Just how many of these trees do you need to take down?” I ask. And we compromise on a few and I apologize, not wanting to be one of those city people who replace the For Sale sign with No Trespassing or No Hunting, or both. But I see it differently. Those hand-hewn rail fences are spilt
like toothpicks with one swipe of the dozer; the borrowed landscape is ripped open and scarred for years. And still I stay.

November and February and March. Those are dark months of sleet, wind and mud. The fog. Where weeks on end are grey and greyer in Grey County. Where the ceiling is so low the sun never appears and the blue of the sky is bleached into wisps of memory. Slush on the roads and ruts in the gravel, washboard before all the stops. Nothing is clean or easy, and it seems better to stay right at home; to eat the food in the freezer, the cans in the cupboard, the roots in the cellar and the jars on the shelves. Going to the barn is the biggest trip of the day—and sometimes the most resented too. Hungry animals, baaing their needs, meowing their discontent, clucking their disdain if I’m late. I throw out the hay, fighting the wind, and miss the feeders and sprinkle those precious fleeces. I drop a bale from the mow and graze a moving kitten, who
merowzes
in pain and indignity. The water overflows and floods the stable. And the sheep need rubber boots to keep dry. And I break down before fixing it. Wondering why I’m here. And I stay.

The lives of my children, teenagers now, are complex and intricate and away. Their friends are not close by; they must drive to see them, and that adds hazards of its own. Vehicles crash into icy ditches, are write-offs, yet they walk away. Not all are so lucky and the sorrows
start. Three schoolmates killed with guns. Self-inflicted. And illnesses take two more. A snowboard kills one and carbon monoxide another, and the favourite teacher drops dead of the shock. It’s like war. Sorrow in battalions. The flag is at half-mast most of one year, and how do I comfort my children for that? How do I reconcile living in this place, which makes so many so desperate? And I watch my daughter and son age and mourn and learn from experience way beyond their years. And I grieve. And still I stay.

Just before shearing, as I’m preparing the barn, I fall backwards over the shearing board and bring the heavy sheep scales down on top of me, breaking my arm and trapping my legs. I’m all alone; Thomas is away. I fret I won’t get free, but somehow I do and totter outside to plunge my bent arm in the snow. I pull my watch off my swelling wrist and call for help. And of course it arrives. The flying Dutchman, driving more slowly than I’ve ever seen, carefully delivers me to the hospital after buckling me into the truck like a child. The Harrises send help for the shearing, which goes on without me, and clean up the mess I left of the barn.

The nurses all know me, and the doctor too, who takes time after the X-ray to order me dinner before he heads down the road in an ambulance with trauma so very much worse than my own. I lie in emerg and friends arrive, and then thankfully Thomas. He holds up my arm (my March break) for his colleague to cast
hours later when the ambulance returns from the city through the snow.

Finally spring comes with its thin reeds of hope. Light thickens and lengthens. Lambs arrive and fill the days and nights with work—awkward work with only one hand to help. Earth appears through the snow and finally greens. Healed. And I’m still here to start it all over again for another year. Staying.

HELEN

I NO LONGER SLEEP
in the barn during lambing. I have extra responsibilities in the house and away—my children and my work—and I have tried to breed a flock that can lamb without my help. No longer Hampshire crosses, with their bullish heads and necks, but sleek Border Leicesters, their snow-white Roman noses built for birth canals, their shoulders supple enough to slip through a pelvis, their bones fine and elegant. But still I check on them. I stay up late; I get up early. Some nights I set my clock if a ewe looks imminent. For still I cannot suffer losses, and if I’m there to help, the losses rarely occur.

I never get used to the miracle of birth, though I am so conversant with the process that little phases me. There are variations certainly. If the cord breaks over the lamb when it emerges, blood will spatter on the tight new wool. Rich scarlet spurts over fresh white
hide. I’ve learned that the blood is just the remains from the umbilical cord, thin blood vessels stretched by the journey breaking naturally with the tension. The blood comes from the placenta, not the lamb, and not really from the ewe either, as the cotyledons begin to detach and the afterbirth sloughs away. But it can be frightening for an uninitiated observer. Blood equals danger equals fear.