straw. As though we were an experiment in the making of black holes.
Worst was the green and loathsome grass. People in those days did not understand the folly of monocropping the fussy gramineae family: how the pesticide washing over temperamental grass would kill not only dandelions and plantain (a handy medicinal plant, called “nature’s bandage” in the old herbals: this is a commercial message) but also the tiger swallowtail and luna moth, the earthworm, and probably my dad who died of cancer in 1991 after fifty years of dusting everything green in sight with a chemical cocktail called 2–4 D. It will probably compromise my sister and me as well, who walked barefoot on that grass, as well as our children, who carry our poison in their veins. But nobody knew, or believed what they had been told by the likes of Rachel Carson—for, tramping around old barns, I often come upon stores of the same chemicals stockpiled (I assume) by guys of my dad’s era. They’ve heard some kind of bad news about this handy chemical mix and—having experienced Prohibition—they instinctively hoard.
I still labor with my city neighbors over the dandelion issue. I’ve caught dear (in other respects) friends sneaking over at night to spray my yellow miscreants. And I have to head for the basement every spring when clouds of vapor drifting across the neighborhood catch me unaware. A tank truck has pulled up next door, a happy golden truck painted with children playing in the poisoned gramineae, eating their dissolution. Once I accosted the sixteen-year-old driver of the golden wagon labelled “Robolawn,” or whatever they call it these days. He had stopped to spray, and to tack out the little signs that warn whichever animals are literate.
“Excuse me, but I’m a mom, and so I have to ask you why the company doesn’t provide you with a respirator and whether you know what you’re breathing in there?”
“I have no idea,” he responds to the latter question. “And they decided it’s bad for business if we go around wearing gas masks while we spray.”
“May you be safe, may your body be well, may your mind be at peace.” This is an ancient Buddhist prayer for sending meta, compassion. May your hormones not be altered. May your children be capable of reproduction. May they see, some sunset, the pale green elegant line of luna moth.
Having survived the war, just about everybody in Roseville was trying to put death behind them, but fortunately I saw enough of it, like the child Siddhartha, to get me thinking.
The crow had been slit by a cat, I guess, and it lay beside the chain-link fence that edged our garage. The contents of its stomach had silted out beside it on the ground, undigested bright corn. I had never before witnessed this particular dialog of assimilation and dissolve. If a huge vulgar bird could simply eat corn and die, the universe seemed to my seven-year-old mind an implacable place.
The bird’s death had occurred a little beyond our property line, where it was not subject to my father’s relentless maintenance. So I could watch through a month of summer, as though at the July Academy of Desire and Longing, its slow decay. First the bright eyes went, then other scavengers plucked the corn from its gullet. Finally, the thing just mummified. I shared the drama with no one, but simply visited this summer school every day and pondered its lessons. It was during that July I began to cart home every bone and skeletal fragment I could find while ranging the neighborhood. I would label these old cow teeth and weasel skulls and put them on shelves in my room, which did not make my parents happy.
Death became a concern of mine. That was the winter I had been knocked out with rheumatic fever and exiled from school. Children do not grasp the whole picture of certain finalities—death, divorce—as quickly as they seem to. A young farmer I know, who niche markets lambs to the upscale restaurant trade, was determined to raise his children with a full and generous understanding of barnyard life and death. He hated to think his children might grow up with the idea that “meat” sprang cleaned, cut, and shrink-wrapped into the supermarket case. In the interests of education, he led his five-year-old to participate in the life cycle of one sturdy wether named Jimmy, from birth to lamb chop. Parturition went fine, gamboling proceeded as usual. From time to time the little boy was reminded that Jimmy would ultimately go to the butcher. The day came, the boy said good-bye, and a week later the family went back to retrieve the packaged frozen lamb. The boy seemed to follow all his dad’s patient explanation till, as they drove the meat from locker to farm, he suddenly exclaimed, “Dad! We forgot Jimmy!”
So children do not always get it. As much as I knew I got from watching a crow decompose in the weeds by a suburban fence, and when it disappeared one day, no doubt in the mouth of a dog, I did not think it had gone to heaven.
Catching and Flipping and Shearing
FLIPPING SHEEP is a major component of barn management. You have to flip them to shear them, to perform any vet work (as we call the inoculations and small surgeries of everyday work), or merely to get their attention and remind them that they’re sheep and we aren’t. Perhaps I should mention what everybody takes for granted: you have to catch them first.
When I say “lambs,” most people think about cute little wooly animals, but in our barn we are moving market lambs and wethers, big castrated male sheep that run two hundred pounds. We also have around a hundred ewes at the moment, our breeding females, and several huge ram sires. Catching any of these animals requires skill and strength.
“Don’t you use a crook?” my friends ask, picturing perhaps a quaint shepherdess on an embroidered field of wildflowers. We don’t, but I don’t know why we don’t. Maybe it’s considered effeminate. Ben, of course, can easily head a sheep out of the flock, grab it under the chin, and get a purchase with the other hand on its tailbone. For my part, I’m slow, a little arthritic, and like to save my hands for sawing pitifully on the violin. I can’t reach from the chin to the tail of a large animal. Mostly I slide around in sheep shit to the delight of anyone in the barn.
“Don’t run around so aimlessly,” Ben sings out, as we pull sheep in for shearing. I’m black and blue all over. My instinct is to sink my fingers into the wool and hold on, at which point the rams just gather steam and pull me over.
We shear constantly, for one reason or another, in the summer simply to keep the animals cool. Our Polypays and Hampshires produce a poor wool staple, so we don’t bother with the classy shearing that might be done for the handspinning trade. Sheared wool is, however, separated by color, bagged, and sold for mattress-stuffing and blankets.
The rules of shearing are (1) keep the skin stretched; (2) don’t cut off the teats or nick a ewe’s vagina or cut off a ram’s sheath; (3) watch out for the Achilles tendon; and (4) hold the clippers flat and clip close. In my first few attempts I did not cut close but neither did I excise any vital organs.
While we shear, Ben, the extrovert, tells me more than I can absorb about genetics, breed characteristics, and the gossip of sheep production: which breeders are well thought of, who are suspected of having “spider” (a genetic malformation) in the DNA of their animals. Much of it goes right by me. At this point, I can authoritatively pick out a Dorset from a Hampshire, but a “classic Texel look” is lost on me. I’m merely happy I’ve reached a point where not all sheep look alike.
But as the summer days go by, I’m growing discouraged. My bones ache; my mind throbs and misfires over calculations about feed ratios. I wonder if I am too old to take this new direction, or if, like so many things, it’s a matter of focus rather than of strength and agility.
DID YOU READ YOUR HANDOUT on sheep parasites, Mary?” Ben asked as he loped from the office to the barn. I trotted behind him like an anxious puppy.
“Yes.”
“Then tell me how we would know to look at them if these sheep were infected?”
“Ummm. They’d be anemic and have diarrhea and be off their feed.”
“How would we know if they’re anemic?”
“The