farm. How disquieting to fight so hard for the life of a lamb and tomorrow meet its cousin tucked up in the crockpot. Namaste: I honor the god in you.
Disquieting, anyway.
SHEEP PROLAPSE THEIR rectums because they cough too much…” Ben, the barn manager, was telling me as we headed into the morning’s task, trimming necrotic tissue from the rectums of five two-hundred-pound Hampshire ram lambs.
I am capable of dithering for years over some foolish decision; but at other times, important shifts come with absolute authority, in the time it takes to sink a basket or fall dead. One day, after I came back to America from Anna’s sheep farm in England, I found myself brooding over a question of lamb nutrition. “Phone Hank,” a farming friend told me. “He’s a professor of sheep science.”
Incredulously: “Sheep science?”
“That’s what they call it at the college.”
A subsequent conversation with Hank about colostrum and intubation fascinated me so much that I blurted, “If I want to find out more about all this, what should I do?”
“Be at the sheep barn, 8:00 tomorrow morning,” he said.
“OK,” I said, and there went my plans for the next year and a half.
Hank put me under Ben’s tutelage. Ben was a senior agriculture student, strong and competent, who had grown up on a sheep farm in western Minnesota. He had white-blond hair and wore a feed cap that said “I Care About My Animals.”
“What makes them cough?” I wanted to know. Anna’s sheep in England rarely coughed.
“If you could tell me that…” Ben’s voice trailed off as the stench of necrotic tissue wafted up from the hind quarters of the ram we were working on. “What I don’t do for you guys,” Ben said to the sheep.
The rectum is a straight tube of intestinal tissue, and when a sheep coughs repeatedly, the tube is pushed out and protrudes from the anus like an angry sausage. When that happens, our task is to wrap a heavy rubber band around the protrusion, cutting off the blood supply and necrotizing the tissue. First we plug the rectum with a syringe casing (there are always a few left over from routine inoculations). Through the casing, open at both ends, the lamb can continue to defecate. After a few days, when the tissue is dead, you cut it off. That’s what we’re doing today.
I hand instruments to Ben and hold the grunting lambs in the metal cradle that flips them with their feet in the air, bum presenting. This procedure does not make the lambs too happy, but they leave in better condition than they arrived, with a walk similar to the postpartum swagger of women on the delivery floor.
Bolting out of bed at six that June morning, I had suffered a fashion crisis. What to wear on a Minnesota farm? The older farmers I know wear brown polyester jumpsuits, like factory workers. The young ones wear jeans, but the forecast was for ninety-five degrees with heavy humidity. The wardrobe of Quaker ladies in their middle years runs to denim skirts and hiking boots. This outfit had worked fine for me in England. But one of my jobs in Minnesota will be to climb onto the industrial cuisinart in the hay barn and mix fifty-pound bags of nutritional supplement and corn into blades as big as my body. Getting a skirt caught in that thing would be bad news for Betty Crocker.
My favorite cotton shirt is printed with sunflowers and celebrates Organic Gardening Week in big green letters. I’ve decided this shirt might be impolitic. Organic gardeners are about as welcome in production farming as bird watchers in logging country. Finally I settled on lightweight cotton pants and one of my son’s V-necked undershirts. This ensemble turns out to be perfect for trimming rectal tissue, and is soon covered in lamb shit.
When Ben gave me my inaugural tour of the barn, he made it clear that his major interest is in lamb production. Our Polypay flock, a mixture of Dorset, Targhee, Finn, and Rambouillet, is bred to bear young almost year-around. He doesn’t encourage dependency. “When I started here,” Ben told me, “the ewes would come up to me and groan and want help with the lambing. I make them lamb on their own. My goal is to make every animal in here independent of me.”
Ben’s hard-ass pose makes me think he would not be sympathetic to organic gardeners and vegetarians. I want to stay anonymous in my affiliations if only to avoid being stereotyped as the lamb-hugger I am. I long to be accepted as a worker among workers.
In return, I try not to stereotype Ben. He works hard, seems to love it, and is a natural, hands-on teacher.
I consort with a lot of liberals who are animal rights activists, and, while I respect their positions, I find they often do not know much about the practical order. In fact, investigating the essential facts of food production is one thing that’s drawn me to the barn. One professorial friend recently scolded me about the “perverse and unnatural” business of breeding animals year-round. I don’t know. Maybe. On the other hand, many third-world people, mostly women, depend on lamb production to make their living. I could count my English friend, Anna, among these marginal women. She runs about twenty sheep and each one is an individual to her, living out a fairly normal ruminant life except, of course, for the lambs, whose sale has put her sons through university.
Yet even slaughter—I do not shrink from the word—can be accomplished with respect. Anna takes the lambs to her local butcher two-by-two in a small van, because she believes the large cattle trucks frighten them. The butcher renders them unconscious with a stun gun and then cuts their throats. They are hung immediately and the meat is perfectly tended. Anna believes it’s a mark of reverence for the animals to take perfect care of their meat and to waste nothing.
I told my friend that if I wanted to have an effect on animal rights, I would be inclined to follow Anna’s reasonable example …
“Mary!” Ben snaps across my line of internal chatter. “Stop thinking. Flip that ram for me, will you? Your body knows how to do it. Don’t try to do it with your mind.”
Ben has, in some cosmic transaction, accepted the position of my Zen master.
I WOULD NOT SAY I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an eighteen-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as—but who cares about my disguises? Or God’s.
In childhood, exiled by rheumatic fever to a back bedroom, I existed for months in boredom so exquisite it approached, as it now seems to me, the threshold of satori. Next to my bed was a table, and on the table lay a thick glass to protect the wood surface beneath. Propped on pillows, a child could stare slantwise into a half-inch angle of refraction that disappeared into infinity. I longed to slip into this world under glass and drift through the dense sea of light where (something told me) no gravity governed the operation of things. Yet sometimes the prospect of liberation terrified me; tumbling into sleep, I would waken in horror at a dream of falling into a void between the glass and the table, drifting forever without even the minimal distractions of my confined life: soap operas on the radio, lunch, arithmetic worksheets, fear of the doctor, the click of my mother’s heels when she came home from work.
When the temptation comes over me to say I am looking for God, this primal scene sometimes returns. Other recollections crowd in as well, many of them from childhood; all of them have in common the sense of brushing (with longing and fear) against a parallel universe. The young exist quite naturally in a liminal world; consider how children’s books retain this intuition of possibility: that in the back of the wardrobe or through a wrinkle in time, down a hole in the garden, on the back of a sparrow, or in the company of Mr. Toad, you can simply chuck the grown-ups and be there, where things count. Plato, I believe, had long periods of indulging a similar whimsy. And so do most poets. “There are things I tell to no one,” writes Galway Kinnell (telling):
Those close to