Lambsquarters (9 page)

I take my baby daughter with me. Mobile and toddling by her first winter, she heads out to the barn encased in her snowsuit, a complicated braid of knitted cables in grey handspun. Wonderfully warm, it allows her to move freely, where nylon or Gor-Tex or whatever would not. She stands among the ewes, or sits in their midst on the snow, and they mill around her sniffing, recognizing, protecting. She is a part of their lives, and they of hers.

There is a courtyard by the barn, a sort of sheep
esplanade. Stone walls cut deep into the bank-barn on the north and also mark the eastern edge. The sheep have access to the stable on the other side, but throughout winter they choose to be out. To dot themselves inside the stone walls. Small white humps in a bleached land. Flakes of snow on fleece on snow.

Before feeding them, I pick my daughter up, a fresh bundle of giggling wool, and place her in the playpen made from hay bales or hurdles or whatever’s handy. Keep her safe and happy and warm near the lambs, if there are any yet, the chickens if there aren’t. I toss sheaves of hay from the mow out to the courtyard, where they punctuate the white with green wind-scattered dots as individual leaves escape the bale. Late harvested timothy sticks like velcro to wool, so each year I hope the grass was cut and baled before it headed up. If I try to pull the timothy heads out of the fleece, a million seeds scurry deep within it for survival. To protect the fleece from chaff, I use square wooden feeders that prevent the sheep from climbing right into the hay and garlanding themselves like Florizel in
The Winter’s Tale
. Small bites will dangle from mutton chops, though, and the odd ewe will drag her dinner across another’s back.

A tangle of protection: I guard the fleece from contamination while the fleece shields the sheep from the elements. The snow is the best indicator of success, for in the worst storms my ewes will lie snug
under their thick snowy blankets. Their fleece insulates them completely; not a ray of warmth escapes to melt a flake. With their feet tucked under their bulging bodies, they silently ruminate, growing lambs and wool.

Wool is the guiltless crop. Nothing dies in its harvest. If left on the sheep, the fleece would eventually shed, pull off in patches on brambles and briars. The sheep would go bald in patches, trip over its own tresses. A sick sheep will shear itself. Illness causes a break across the fibre, which loosens it until the wool falls away in hanks. Left to grow too long, the fleece fills with chaff and dirt, parts along the back with rain, weighs the animal down. If a woolly sheep turns turtle, it will die. A sheep stuck on its back is “cast.” Lying upended, legs flailing, it is a comical sight, but if unaided, its rumen fills with gas that cannot escape. The cud cannot move. The animal suffocates.

Shorn sheep trade their wool for new freedom, give up the weight of their world. Cool, sleek, clean and trim. But it’s always a risk, shearing. First it’s important to pick the right day. March can be spring or winter, lion or lamb itself. The risk of inclemency. In wet weather, wool will soak like a sponge, absorbing a third of its weight in water, and clog the shears. If it’s too cold, naked sheep shiver, huddle up together with their backs hunched, their heads down, their backsides bright pink with embarrassment.

My itinerant shearer is small, child-size. Her feet
are as tiny as those of an ancient Chinese aristocrat, though they symbolize anything but leisure. When she glides the long blows, those smooth strokes that guide the shears from the sheep’s flank to its head, her body is spread tight against the animal, stretched to the same length. Although her craft is placeless, her method is local, learned from an ambidextrous man who travelled all over the county. With one hand she shears half the beast. Then, with the sheep flashing fleece like a flourish of white-lined cape, she switches hands to complete the other side. It’s not the scientific method of the Antipodes, but she wins prizes at the local fairs.

Belly wool and bits go in the bin with the tags or dags, those locks clogged with unmentionables. The rest of the fleece, held together by its own architecture, is thrown high in the air to parachute down to the sorting table, a slatted grid made of wooden strips that rests on portable gates for shearing day and is stored in the mow for the rest of the year. Small bits of second-cut wool, telltale evidence that the shears have shaved twice to cover a mistake in a previous blow, separate and drop through the slats of the open sorting table to the floor. No good for spinning, they sift through. Dross.

The table is large, four feet by eight, but only just holds the freshly shorn sheepcoat stretched like a crucifixion. I circle round it, honouring, pulling off daggy hind bits, hairy leg tops, matted neck wool, and back-chaff.
Always I stretch a lock between my hands and tug. If rarely it breaks, I discard it. Not a spinning fleece. If sound and lustrous, with good crimp—regular shiny waves throughout the fibre—I set it aside. One to send to the mill or to keep and spin at home.

The bellies and bits skirted from the edges go into the dag bag and then the fleece is rolled. Lying right side up on the table, its weathered tips are what I see. But as I turn it inwards, folding the sides up to the centre, one at a time, I reveal its inner secret beauty. Then I roll it tightly like a spring roll, (like a tent, my son will say years later) from tail to tip into a springy sphere. Pure wool close to the bone, the heart. Rolled and sometimes tied with paper twine, the fleece is packed in massive burlap wool bags by hand or the small feet of my jumping child. The cuffed sacking unrolls like a lisle stocking as it fills, and is sewn shut with binder twine when bulging.

FOR MANY YEARS
we timed our lambs for winter birthing, when it was too cold to shear, so we missed the bodily changes of the pregnant ewes, hidden as they were under heavy woollen coats. By the time their fleece came off, they had returned to their svelte selves, only their swollen udders revealing their fecundity. The early black-faced crosses gave way to woollier breeds, a finely crimped Corriedale influx for a while, and finally the noble Border Leicester, with its Roman
nose and wondrous long wool. To relieve the fleece from the stresses of birth, we planned all our lambing for April and our shearing for March.

Ewes can be shorn before lambing, but they mustn’t be upended or jostled in the final stages of pregnancy. If shorn too soon, the ewes’ new-growth wool will tempt them away from warm shelter, and they could give birth under crisp moons, their lambs weak with hypothermia, wet birth wool dripping amniotic icicles.

Shearing risks revelations. Like gifts, the sheep are decked in seductive packages, the contents known only when the wrapping is off, like Muslim women out of the chador. The gift can be a wonderful surprise, an expected relief or a disappointment. The ewes are unveiled, but unprotected from the elements or from the ram, who sniffs them like new arrivals in the harem. Unfamiliar, beautiful, pristine, paradoxically mysterious in their exposure.

Auspicious surprises are yearling ewes radiant in first pregnancy, their udders tense, teats shiny, their round bellies pushing against the shears. They had been put with the ram in the hope they might conceive, but they are not strictly required to bear offspring in their adolescence. Older ewes, coming to the end of their breeding careers, emerge bony over the hips but rounded below, carrying lambs under stretched tendons, muscles sagging from years of birthing. They too are revealed in their fertile matriarchy, waddling like the aging mothers
they are, bellies bulging, their flock-daughters ranging down in age from nearly a decade to a year.

The wool gives up other secrets as it is spread open like a rug on the sorting table. It chronicles a history of the year, marks fever or illness in a narrowing of the fibre, tells tales of breakouts into burdock or rubbings on a rusty fence. Each fleece thrown, skirted, tested, rolled and packed is as personal as a child’s blanket. And one is selected for that future honour.

Now naked, the sheep suddenly have space at what were crowded feeders only hours ago. Each animal is miraculously narrowed by six to eight inches on either side. And they reacquaint with renewed friendliness, snuggle close to stay warm. The saved fleece transfers warmth to sweaters, mitts and scarves for my daughter, socks for my man. The daggy ends fertilize and mulch the garden, and the bellies and bits insulate around a window or over a door.

Spring plants sprout dyestuffs to colour the woolly crop: greens from alfalfa, milkweed, and apple bark carefully peeled from prunings as my young one sleeps on warm afternoons. Summer yellows and oranges, tans and purples from the flowers and berries we gather, filling our baskets in the fields, mother and daughter together. The spun skeins of wool are submerged and swirled around like fish waving their tails in vats of colour. They change hue like chameleons, chased by a little girl on a chair, a wooden spoon in her hands.

By summer the sheep have their coats back—they are two inches deep by July. The sheep don’t notice their old wool hanging in coils to dry, magically transformed by a mysterious prism. They can’t know the magic of green jewelweed chopped into the pot, releasing orange dye like blood from a wound. Surely they don’t recognize themselves as clothing on their keepers the next winter, my daughter now bigger, my son stretching my sweaters, almost ready to be born.

They do know the cycle, though, and rarely resist being flipped on their backsides on the shearing board to be pinked-up each year. They relinquish their wool, shake off immaculate bodies, waltz back to the pen like young women in their backyard bikinis on the first hot day in April. All white and shy, but delighted to shed the fat blankets of cold-weather wear. By the time they lamb they have enough wool for baby rugs. As the dams lie in the straw and ruminate, the lambs will perch on their resting backs like loons.

SHEARING EXPOSES
bounty and beauty—except for the year of the lice, when the skin revealed was bitten and raw and fleeces were worn and damaged. Like pediculosis in the fair-haired child, sheep lice are invisible in the fleece. They are discreet and tenacious. There had been suggestions. Clues. The new ram, beautifully groomed when he arrived, began biting at his body before he met the ewes. Loneliness, I thought.
Then a general uneasiness in the flock, some wool loss, some rubbing, some scratching. I considered mineral deficiencies, nutritional problems, wool diseases. I sent away fleece and skin scrapings for analysis. Nothing.

But on shearing day, all became clear. Small patches of skin in distress from the biting, large quantities of fleece worried with the scratching. The crop was in ruin and my flock was infested.

We bought powder made from dried tropical plants, donned gloves and masks. A pen of fresh straw was bedded for the treated. Then, one by one, we powdered each animal, raked their backs, rubbed their legs, patted the dust into their bellies. Doom dust. Doom to the lice and boon to the sheep. The air was as white as the swamp in a fog, but the sheep didn’t mind. They loved it. Finally the itch was scratched.

One by one they pranced to the new pen, powdered like ladies-in-waiting for Marie Antoinette. In a court dance they went, regal and noble, their noses high and proud. Their lousy wool gone, their fruitful bellies swaying, their tiny tormentors gagging on minute particles of poison plants. We were all white together. And I felt I knew every aspect of every one of my sheep’s bodies intimately. Like a lover—no, more like a mother.

SHOVEL

I DON’T RECALL WHO
noticed the shape of the shovel. A visitor, not a farmer. Someone who knows antiques perhaps. Knows what city people will pay for the unusual, the rustic, the curious and the absurd. I use it, scrape manure with it, edge its rusty blade into corners, haul its excessive weight up to the wheelbarrow. I could get another. A smaller blade, a plastic handle, a lighter model better suited to my frame.