Lambsquarters (5 page)

It took bulldozers to dig out the road that year. In
April. Cruel indeed. But the first lamb, when it came, neither malpresented nor worried. It was born in twenty minutes, was up and sucking in seconds. A perfect male, and I called him Virgil and sing of him now.

A ewe in labour wants to be alone. Garbo. This one found a corner in the barn, walked around in circles like a dog remembering long grass, then began to paw the straw, making a nest. She arched her back a few times, circled a little more, pawed, and finally got down on her side. A few pushes, her neck stretched with the strain, and a small balloon appeared, full of fluid. Two feet, tiny points of hoofs, one slightly ahead of the other, white on the tips, shiny black further up.

A little furry wet nose appeared between the feet, the tongue out at the side and blue. Another push and the shape of the forehead was visible under the ewe’s stretched skin, then through. The neck was so long, a swan emerging, followed by slowing shoulders, and the body slipped out with a small heave, a rush, a deluge of the sea it swam in.

Virgil, born to an elastic experienced ewe, came all of a sudden. Not precipitously, but predictably. Before he had a chance to cry, his mother chuckled to him. A low soft laughing bleat, like a short purr from an enormous cat, the communication of love from ewe to lamb. A lamb learns its mother’s chuckle and answers. Out in the world now, covered in thick hot fluid and membrane, Virgil struggled to stand up, to find food.
His mother licked him off, fluffed his wool, trimmed his navel cord. He staggered, he splayed and finally he sucked.

I sat on the stable fence. An
accoucheur
.

IN THE EARLY YEARS,
I was meticulous. I built little feeders for the nursery pens, wrote detailed descriptions of each lambing, stripped the dams’ teats of their waxy plugs before the lambs got settled nursing, named each animal as it was born. Before a birth, in years without late snow, I would set up my chair in the barnyard and let the ewes mill around me. I’d put my hands on their bellies and feel the kicks, trace the outlines of the lives within them, burrowed deep beneath the wool. I’d live among them, frequently lying in the straw and sleeping with exhaustion after a long labour (Thomas off tending a human birth in Murphy’s Mill), waking with the ewes’ bleats in the middle of the night, helping when they needed help, watching when they did not.

I scrubbed empty pens with lye, brushed down every surface for every germ. I suffered losses as if they were my own; they were my own. They are still.

SHEEP HAVE A MOON
of their own—estrus every eighteen or nineteen days of their season—but really they follow the sun. Only when the days get shorter do they ovulate. Their evolution has not caught up with
their domestication. If they breed on short days, they lamb on long ones. And longer days are warmer days, and warmer days give stronger lambs.

In the last spring of the century, the barnyard was full of snow, the compost completely covered, the gates frozen open. The kitchen garden, moved now to a space south of the barn, was fast asleep, awaiting the runoff from the dark gold mine of manure, which was buried under its white duvet like a child in a dream, nescient to the life stirring within it, within the barn.

The first lamb is always a surprise. Some years it comes early, before I have a chance to fret; more often it is late, wearing me out before the event. I trudge to the barn to watch, to help, to marvel.

ONE BIRTH,
on day four or five, could have been disastrous. The first lamb was born easily, the mother attentive. She was so attuned to the first, she wouldn’t go down to deliver the second. While she stood, it slipped out, supple and slinky in its thick wet membrane, and dropped to the ground encased in its caul like a sleek cabbage roll. I don’t know how long a lamb can lie lifeless. I didn’t stay on the fence to see. I cleared the membrane from its nose and mouth, encouraged it to breathe the clear air of the new world on this side of its bubble. It breathed. It shook. It started to life.

WHEN NEW,
their ears are plastered back, stuck to the sides of their heads. As they dry off, the ears move forward, drooping from the weight of the birth fluids, the weight of the world. Sometimes it takes a day or so for the ears to perk, although lambs hear well, responding to their mothers’ chuckles. Marking tags, small brass brads with numbers, tend to pull down the left ears for a few days, making them look a tad risqué. They are
fin de siècle
creatures, with body piercings, tattoos.

After an overnight with their dams in a mothering-up pen (a portable crib of hinged gates, four feet square) the new lambs meet in a central space. Then the bleating begins. Oh brave new world. And space. They can run, play, chase. But who are the other ewes? Are you my mother? Are you? Misrecognitions are met with bunts.

It is a fearful time, the move. A cacophony of chuckling mothers, bleating lambs, claiming calls. But the lambs learn their mums, their mates, new connections. This year, one has learned to steal. I recognize the thievery by the greasy wool on his forehead. Clearly he was grabbing a furtive suck from behind whenever he could and the wax from the udders was rubbing off on his head. A forensic certainty.

A ewe noses her lamb’s backside when it sucks. If attentive, she will lift her body, arch her back to show the teat, offering it to the lamb. By sniffing, she identifies and encourages at the same time. If she has twins, she moves her head back and forth from one to the
other, and if she has triplets, she will sometimes move away from a larger lamb and nose a smaller one in for a feed.

I remember Alfie, who was born to a reluctant mother in the late seventies. He was runty, only five or six pounds at birth, but he had a cocky constitution. When the ewes were lined up at the feeders, Alfie would go down the queue, sneaking a suck from each sheep in the row. The ewes would stamp their feet to detach him, but he’d get a bellyful by the end of the line.

THE END-OF-CENTURY TWINS,
who to me were identical, were sorted and separated by their mother: one favoured, one a foundling. For five days I kept them penned in a tight space, waiting for the ewe to accept, to concede, to acquiesce to both. I was afraid she would reject and batter her ram lamb, who would grow up motherless in a barn full of mothers. He would have to rely on food from my bottle and would develop the barrel belly of the artificially fed. And I wondered about the scapegoat. The child who is not favoured. The distant part of the self pushed aside as too ugly, too frightening, too horrible to confront. The lamb of innocence thrust into the world of experience. The song of dissonance, its bleats unanswered.

NAMING

IT TOOK SOME TIME
to name the farm. “Hi Lo,” painted in dripping letters on the mailbox when we arrived, aptly described the terrain from corner to corner, but failed to capture our connection to the land. Perhaps we needed time to perfect our attachment, to meld with the dirt, rock and plants that were here and the animals and commitment we were to add.

A quarter of a farm, with lambs and weeds.

Pigweed? Goosefoot? Lamb’s quarters? This plant is a veritable menagerie of ovine, avian and swine. Lamb’s quarters is a garden variety weed. So why did I name my farm after it? It was here, on disturbed ground. Ground that once felt the weight of soft moccasins, before being gouged by settlers in a past century, cleared and tilled into fat furrows. Shiny ploughshares followed faithful horses. Gee and haw over virgin terrain. The land grew complacent over the years. Fields were rotated and renewed, stooked with grain, planted in pasture, cut for hay. Gardens were tilled and tended. Roses, peonies, delphiniums, lilies. The bicolours of monkshood, and the vining sweet pea, emerging pink and white, but turning mauve then blue with age.

The vegetable patch fought against the sugar maple in the back yard, a garden edged with raspberries, asparagus and rhubarb planted in the full afternoon shade of the biggest tree on the land.

Lamb’s quarters sprouted among the raspberry canes, sheltered by the tangle of fallen leaves, went to seed late and proliferated. The canes trapped weeds in a leghold and produced more prickles than fruit. Finally I cut them down, dug up the rhubarb, moved the asparagus and started a new kitchen patch just south of the barn. In the spring the lamb’s quarters reappeared on
the grave of the berries. Smaller, less bold, pale against the yellow green of new grass. Their seeds hitched a ride on the east wind and moved closer to the maple, between its gnarled feet where the blade can’t go, around the doghouse in a palisade, against the fence.

You’d expect lamb’s quarters to move in different circles, be a little exotic and frequent outdoor cafés. Cosmopolitan, erect, slender and lance-shaped, the mundane weed does a little goose step or a lamb gambol or a pigtail turn, holds its leaves at an angle, wears violet leafstick, and sports purple leaf-spots in spring. Like birthmarks on the newborn growing cycle, the spots harbinge the season and predict its mortality all at once. Liver spots of youth suggesting age. Irregular, deep hued or pale, these marks reflect the stalk lines, which feather the stem in subtle shading, mauve through purple to red. The lowly lamb’s quarters has a natural variegation, a May blush for the picking.

THE LAND HERE
was destined for sheep. And from sheep, lambs. Rolling, rocky, the fields and bog make perfect pasture, the cedar fencerows bountiful browse. When the grass thins and the sun wanes and the frost thickens on morning dew, the ewes gather around the ram pen, one or two or even three at a time, and make sheep eyes. The ram calls his throaty greeting, climbs front feet up the fence, schemes to get over, dreams like a ground-set lover with a mistress on a balcony. His hind
legs are strong from dancing under the apple trees—the early Macs, the late Russets and York Imperials. Unable to wait for windfalls, he harvests the trees himself, reaching up on his back legs in a comic dress rehearsal for the real legwork of breeding in November.

His chance comes, the gates open and he pulls back his upper lip in a toothless grin, which serves, along with a chuckle and a sly ear nibble from behind, as his pickup line. He has little imagination or discrimination. The line is always the same. He is not subject to youth and beauty, coquetry and a down-turned lash. The ewes are all beautiful to him. He dances with them in turn, wanting each one to mother his babies.

And five months later they do. The barn, housing mothers and babes in a giant nursery, fills with the sweet bleats of lambkins. Mothering-up pens range in perfect order against the walls. A woolly barracks. Lamb’s
quarters
.