Fig (39 page)

Gran crosses herself, and then she reaches for my hand like this is something she has always done, like we are always intimate. Her rings press into my fingers: The sharp diamond is for engagement, while the soft gold is for marriage—solid, but also malleable.

Green tendrils of new life shoot off the rosebush like strange stars. This comes from pruning. Come fall, I will cut the branches back. It will feel unnatural to interfere with nature, but after another winter I will see what comes from cutting. This wound will heal; it will become a bouquet of pink hearts amid the yellow stars inside the blue aura of forget-me-nots.

hereafter:
adv.
1. After this; from here or now on

2. In a future time or state.

hereafter:
n.
1. The afterlife.

April 10, 1993

Daddy needs my help with the lambing. Uncle Billy is available only on call. He's still working for the Wallaces, but now he's saving money to go to Idaho and Montana to fight forest fires.

I stand around holding a light so my father can see. He pulls the babies out of the ewes, and they are long and skinny like wet greyhounds. The lambs are all legs: There is no meat or wool.

My other job is to keep the stables clean. Blue sticks close. This is what I've come to call her, my new dog; according to Uncle Billy, I was right—she is a blue heeler. It is her nature to be good with animals, and through the lambing we've grown even closer. She sleeps on the rug beside my bed, and sometimes she curls up beside me, her body next to mine. Blue is indeed my healer.

Betty is the last pregnant ewe to go. She is the youngest, and she's never lambed before. We know she's ready. Her belly dropped yesterday, and through the static of the baby monitor Daddy woke to the sound of her bleating growing lower. Betty has been restless for hours now, pawing at the ground, trying to dig herself a nest, but as soon as she lies down she gets back up and starts the process all over again.

We talk even less than we did before Mama died. He doesn't ask about my future anymore, or my plans. Asking me to help with the lambing is the most he's talked to me in months, and I know he must be desperate to do so. When he took me to the different nurseries, he didn't talk, and he didn't say anything when we buried Mama's ashes. It's like he lost his voice.

The days are getting warmer, but the nights are still cold. The snowdrops are blooming for the first time, and the three white petals droop from each flower like lambs' ears. With midnight behind us, today is Easter and later we are going to my grandmother's house so everyone else can eat ham.

Daddy works on Betty for an hour, but her lamb won't come. Daddy has me call Uncle Billy from the telephone in the barn. Billy doesn't have a phone, and I know my father hates to call there, especially late at night, because it means waking up the Wallaces.

I repeat everything Daddy tells me to say.

I ask Mrs. Wallace to tell Billy to come right away. “Ask her to tell him to come prepared,” my father says. And I do. I say all of this, and then I apologize for waking her. There is something wrong with the connection, and every time I talk my voice echoes back and I flinch to hear myself.

“That's all right,” Mrs. Wallace says in her shaky voice. “We farm girls know the drill, don't we, dear?” Rumor is, Mrs. Wallace always wanted a little girl but there were complications with Trent's birth. After he came along, the doctors told Mrs. Wallace she was done having babies. Once upon another time, Mama said Mrs. Wallace's shaky voice came from drinking all the time. Trent and I were cut out of our mothers by the same surgeon.

Daddy sends me to the house to make coffee and fetch a bag of frozen colostrum from the deep freeze. Blue chooses to stay with Betty. Outside, the cusp of sky and earth to the east burns a fire orange, and I think of Emily Dickinson, who favored this direction in her poetry because it was thought to point toward eternity. The sun is ready to rise as my legs scissor across the pasture, and I am tired; my body moves of its own accord.

I come upon the cottonwoods, and through the circle of trees I can see the yellow glow of the kitchen. As I step forward a screech owl comes tearing out of the treetops and dips so low, I can feel the wind it makes from having wings, and flying. The bird screams at me as it ascends into the sky for one last hunt before the day.

*  *  *  *

Neither Daddy nor Uncle Billy drinks the coffee I made for them. They are too busy, preoccupied. Daddy holds the lamp now because the job is suddenly important. I pour myself a cup of the coffee and it is black and hot and unsweetened. I've never had coffee before without milk and sugar, and the bitterness is jolting as it shivers through my bloodstream. I am waking up. As the caffeine electrifies my nervous system Uncle Billy gives Betty a shot that puts her to sleep.

I should have known what they had to do. What the directions meant:
Come prepared.
But I didn't, and it isn't until my uncle makes the long incision that I really do begin to understand. And this is not the neat and tidy procedure I've always told myself it was. This is not God carving Eve from a rib. It is not simple or easy like Daddy pulling out the lambs and life beginning as life continues. I keep telling myself, this is a sheep, in a barn with a vet. This is not Mama in a hospital, with a surgeon, where everything is clean and in perfect order.

Daddy shines the light on the hole Uncle Billy made, and the cut is big and wet. The hole yawns, filling with blood and other liquids that look like blood. The wet shines, and it sparkles like something precious in the harshness of the light. When Uncle Billy reaches into Betty, the gesture is not at all tender. He reaches into her the way he does to gut and clean a dead chicken. He goes deep, and the hole gapes wider to allow room for his big hands and his thick wrists. And I can hear the wetness. It must be hot and slippery inside, difficult to grip the lamb.

“There's only one,” Uncle Billy says, and not only are his hands amputated by the wet red hole, but his forearms disappear as well. Her womb is an underworld, and it seems like he will never find the lamb, let alone get a hold on her, but then he does. He brings her head to the surface, and I can see her. Her eyes are closed and she is peaceful. She is still dreaming. I think of Mama and all the reasons she used to list why natural childbirth is better. The drugs administered to the mothers pass into the bodies of the babies; I don't remember being born, but I do remember being drugged, just before I was pulled into this life by the hands of a stranger.

Uncle Billy has the head, and then he doesn't. She slips back in, under, and this is when my soul vacates my body. It feels like rubber bands—really big and really long—my spirit is being pulled out of me, and from the tugging the rubber bands are growing longer and longer. I don't know what is pulling them or where the other end might end, but now I know where the soul attaches to a body. It attaches to the spot below my ribs where the meat of me is soft and unprotected. Where there are no ribs or other bone. Leashed by the invisible rubber heaviness, I rise into the rafters. The sky is a milky blue, with the incredible brightness of early morning, and I realize it is the body that can hear and feel and taste and smell—all a soul can do is see.

I can't hear the birdsong that always accompanies the dawn, or the rooster who must be crowing. I can't hear the insistent bleating of the sheep all around or the suckling of the anxious offspring who didn't have to be cut out. The world is mute. It mouths the words to me—a silent film, there is no narrator, no subtitles to tell the story. I have no mouth to taste the aftertaste of coffee, or nose to smell the ripe ammonia of the barn. I am senseless, except I can still see, but if I was to continue to rise any higher? To flap my arms into wings and let the rubber bands stretch until they broke? There would be nothing left to see but the nothing shade of blue above waiting for us all.

Uncle Billy takes the head again, and this time he does not let go. I study the expression on my face as he tries to find a way to handle all four of the long lamb legs. Some are tangled, others stuck inside impossible caverns. The spindly legs point in nonsensical directions like the straw man in
The Wizard of Oz
pointing all the ways at once Dorothy could choose to go. The expression on my face is no expression. My face is blank. Eyes wide and open, I can see myself: I'm wearing pinstriped Oshkosh overalls over my nightgown, and my feet are stuffed into a pair of black galoshes. I've got Daddy's large Cornell sweatshirt zipped up, and the gray hood hides my big ears and short hair.

I am nothing but a face without an expression stuck inside a lot of clothing. I don't like looking at myself like this; it is worse than any mirror. I look at Daddy instead. He looks tired the way he always does, his jaw set hard and in need of a shave, and he holds the lamp the way he does everything in life: with determination.

Uncle Billy tosses the lamb into the straw the way he'd cast off a jacket because he got too warm. He focuses on the empty hole that is the body of the mother. The crater is impossible—a sinkhole, and I know he can't make her live again. This was why I was ordered to get the Ziploc bag of frozen sheep colostrum and set it under the heat lamp to defrost. And the heat lamp is not only here to melt colostrum, it is here to mimic the warmth of a missing mother.

Daddy yells for me to hold the lamp, and I do, but only my body reacts. The rest of me still hovers somewhere above, watching: My body has two arms, and these arms hold the light on the lamb while my father buries her with straw. He buries her with straw, and then he rubs the straw all over her with his cold hands. He rubs hard, and his touch is heavy. He has to move her body to teach her to move it on her own. He brushes away the straw to see if she is moving.

Daddy covers her with straw again and rubs even harder than before. As he forces life into the lamb I see how he is creating her just as much, if not more, than her mother ever did. When my father lifts his hands from her body once more to look, I snap back into my body like a whip recoiling.

I am drenched in sound. I am drowning in the sound of crying sheep and impatient hooves; and life is deafening. Uncle Billy curses the dead mother while Daddy coos to the baby in her bed of straw. There is the nagging sound of everyone, and every animal around: breathing, and my own breath, nagging. Inside, there is the sound of my heart: It is no longer ticking but it is beating. It beats hard like someone knocking on a door.

The blood smells like copper. Then it smells like cold steak on the hot surface of a cast-iron skillet. There is also the sweetness of the straw—the sugary scent of early rot—and the sourness of the coffee on my breath, the need to brush my teeth. I'm shaking, but I don't feel cold. The sense of touch is the last to return. When it comes, I find myself uncomfortable: My clothes are scratchy, I need to pee, and the muscles in my neck are burning ropes.

The lamb pulls herself up, front legs followed by hind legs. She is wobbly, and then she is steady, just like that. She goes right for Daddy to nuzzle him. She wants his body heat, his milk, and his love, and I know what this is called.

This is called imprinting.

epilogue:
n.
1. A short poem or speech spoken directly to the audience at the end of a play 2. A short section at the end of a literary or dramatic work  , often discussing the future of its characters; an afterword.

April 11, Easter Sunday, 1993

There are all kinds of tricks to get a ewe to take on an orphaned lamb, and Billy has tried them all in the course of his career. If a ewe has a stillborn, you can skin it and wrap the skin around the orphan to make the mother think the living lamb is hers. The orphaned lamb can also be rubbed in the afterbirth of another lamb and presented to the ewe, and again, she will think it's her own, that she had twins, or triplets, depending.

In extreme cases, you can make the ewe think she's giving birth when she's not. If the orphan lamb is presented right away, the ewe will believe it belongs to her. Sometimes a ewe will take an orphan without any tricks; more often, she will not, and sometimes rejection is violent.

We don't try any of these methods. Instead, Daddy gives the motherless lamb to me and Blue to nurse and care for. I name her Esther because today is Easter. I give her a baby bottle full of colostrum we take from other mothers and save for situations like this, and then I give her milk. As Daddy watches he tells me I was once wet nursed too.

“We needed the money,” he says, “so we decided to sell the land where your grandparent's house had been—we just didn't expect it to sell so fast. You were just a newborn, and it seemed easiest for you to stay with me while Annie went to take care of the loose ends in Connecticut. It was only for a day or two, but you refused to take a bottle, so I called one of the women from the home-birth group and she came and stayed with us until your mama came home.”

I feel weird knowing I had such an intimate exchange with someone I wouldn't recognize today. I wonder how it made Mama feel.

Daddy makes a nest in the kitchen where Blue and I can sleep with the lamb. It's either here or in the barn. Esther sleeps a lot, but when she's awake she is nothing but energy and spindly legs slipping across the kitchen tile.

We can't leave Esther alone, so Gran comes to the farm for Easter supper. She comes early to clean before she cooks the feast. She doesn't like Esther or Blue in the kitchen, and I don't help matters by falling asleep and not always minding the lamb when I should. Esther slips out of my arms to nibble on Gran's skirt while Blue tries to pull her away. I startle awake to the barking and bleating and Gran looking angry. Billy comes inside and tells me to go take a nap. He promises to watch Esther, assuring Gran he will do this outside and out of her way.