Lambsquarters (13 page)

I GREW UP IN AN OLD HOUSE
with a basement full of tools. I spent my summers in a cottage with three woodsheds (one an old ice house), a pumphouse, a garage and two boathouses full of tools. Tools were always around, strewn about the floor of a workspace, carefully arranged on walls, hanging from ceilings, packed in tool boxes. I’d seen everything performed, from spray-painting a car from black to white, to dynamiting a huge rock deemed too close to a cabin, to cutting an outbuilding in two with a handsaw, pulling it apart and building a new middle section.

When I left home my father’s parting gift was a paper bag with a hammer, a couple of screwdrivers and a metal tape measure. No books, no cash, no philosophy: just tools. I have them still.

On the farm, tools are not just a necessity. They are monumental. Barn tools, house tools, fencing tools.
Shearing tools, lambing tools, glazing, wiring and plumbing tools. Carpentry I knew about. Hammers, squares, saws. Crosscut and rip, mitre and keyhole, coping and hack. Fasteners I could do: Robertson, Phillips, slot; screws, nuts and bolts; nails: ardox and plain, round and square.

I was familiar with the crowbar. My father had several in different sizes, curved, bent up to a spur at one end, slotted as if to pry loose giant nails, but I don’t remember seeing them used. They were around, with the sledges and axes, the big tools with handles, the dangerous ones with sharp edges.

My first crowbar was not really a crowbar at all. It was a wrecking bar, fondly called “Barry’s tool” after its bestower, who was one of our first visitors to the farm. He was big enough to tear just about anything down by hand, but he realized I would need a little help. It was blue rather than black, about as long as a raven, curved, beaked at one end, clawed at both. Iron, strong, it could lever out anything from square nails to bedroom walls. And it did. And it does.

More than most tools, the crowbar is a rearranger. Hammers create, saws shape, wire enlightens and pipes irrigate. But the crowbar pries, levers, moves, pushes or destroys. It can be a mean ugly tool with teeth at both ends—tooth and claw—hungry to deconstruct. It was created to destroy. The crowbar is formed from iron over fire. Whether created by ancient god, from
Hephaestus at his forge to Vulcan at his anvil, or recent humanity, this tool is a brute born to maim.

I had thought all crowbars had beaks. Named for their ornithological namesakes, called simply crows originally, they possess bills, not for tearing carrion or plucking lambs’ eyes, but for destroying nature’s grip or civilization’s detritus. Their heads curve like the pate of the bird, their tails notch like the crossed feathers of folded wing-tips. All crowbars assumed that shape in my mind until I found, at a nearby auction, a tall staff of iron, straight, hand-hammered, blunt-topped from the swing of a thousand sledges, wedged to a running point below. High as a corn stalk, heavy as an anvil itself, it was a barn of a crowbar. A farmer’s crow.

“A corn planter,” said my neighbour, baiting me. “Just stick it in the ground to make a hole, drop in the seed and you’re away.” And he wasn’t all that far wrong. Such straight crowbars were once used to make irrigation holes around saplings. Seed drills and corn planters operate on that ancient principle of making a hole, planting a kernel.

The crowbar came home with me, found a spot in a nook in the feed room, by the door, leaning up against the corner. It can’t hang upright on the wall as it has no curve. It looks light there at its jaunty angle, like a marshmallow toasting stick, or a fishing rod, or a beanpole. But each time I reach for it I am surprised at
the weight of such a solid piece of iron, and I wonder how the Greek god of fire managed to lift such ore in his lameness.

MY TOWNSHIP
is glacial moraine. Good drainage. Groundhog heaven. But with the gravel comes the rock. Billions and billions of rocks. Our best crop. Each year the frost shifts them and raises them like wind on water. Waves of rocks. Usually, just where I want to put a garden, a post, a fence, a tree, is where the rocks will swell and build, collect in an undertow. Fields that fell asleep in the fall under striped loam shag, awake in the spring grey-patterned with stone heaved up from the underworld by angry shades, bleached by snow and sleet, polished by April rains. Defiant, proud, solid, stationary. Or worse, the stones huddle just beneath the surface of the earth, pitting ploughshares, dinging double-discs, havocking harrows. The front-end loader and the backhoe have replaced the stoneboat, the crowbar, the board and the barrow for removing rocks to centre piles, fencerows, low spots. A lone tree or small grove in the middle of a field is never really on its own in this county. It is moated by stone. Small mammals find their own labyrinths, fear their own Minotaurs.

A century of moving rocks, wrestling them out of the way of horses’ hoofs (duly shod with iron), of iron implements, heavy tractors of iron and then steel. Iron
and steel: iron and rock. Alloys but never allies. Metal and rock pitted against each other in a battle for the soil. For crops can’t grow in stone.

Within the farmyard, in places where tractors can’t go, places too narrow for front-end loaders, too soft for heavy horses, the stones do not spare the garden soil but congregate, conglomerate like fireflies over a swamp in July. At Lambsquarters there are few places a shovel will sink without ringing, clanging, jolting your wrists on its handle, the blade starting like a knife through butter, stopping short on Hadrian’s Wall. And no matter how often it happens, it is always a disappointment. The earth fighting back, hindering, defying the planter, laughing. Often the tip of the blade will loosen a garden stone, wiggle it to an edge, tilt and wobble it until there is some purchase and the stone rises, brown and dull and way too small to have caused this annoyance. A pup of a stone, without character. I pitch these over the fence and into the field, knowing I probably shouldn’t, that they could get caught in machinery, but hoping they are too insignificant to cause more harm. The blade goes back in, slides, then clangs again. The jerk travels up my arms, through my carpal tunnels, inflaming the tendons in my elbows. Another small stone, snug beside the first, to be prised, coddled, entreated to the top. Picked and tossed with disrespect.

An afternoon of this is at best burdensome, slow work. The children bored and grizzling in the sandbox.
The waiting plants wilting, crossing their drying roots with impatience, tapping their leaves, nodding their flower heads, wondering if they will ever find their place in the ground. At worst, I’m left with a broken shovel handle. For inevitably there is a rock that seems like a stone, which nudges from an edge, which seduces with smooth moves, but which is pure rock. It could be the size of a fat hen or a small island. It might outcrop on the other side of the world. Or perhaps it is just stuck. It begs to be levered, then breaks the shovel. Just above the metal, the wood cracks and splits. The rock wins.

The crowbar never breaks. It will get the rock out or it won’t, but the rock won’t get the crowbar. For large jobs—deep fence posts, foundations, a geological monster in the vegetable garden—the crowbar is the obvious tool. But yearly I am fooled by shallow jobs, and handles break, trowels are bent beyond use, defeated by rocks, while the crowbar leans against the barn wall in the shade, as if watching me.

THERE ARE TIMES
I want to use the crowbar for something other than digging out stones. It would make a perfect temporary fence post—strong, pointed, easily hammered into this resistant earth. The chickens might stay in an outdoor run all summer with the crowbar as a corner post. Or how many scarlet runner beans would climb it, solid and reliable in the garden,
bashed in and secure? No delphiniums would topple in summer storms if attached to this staff.

But the crowbar is too important for digging and prying to do a locum as an upright. All summer there are cedar posts to replace, to prise out after they’ve broken off just beneath the surface, wedged as they were half a century ago with stones and rocks from the original hole. There are stone walls to build and rebuild from first clearings. And did this bar in those times walk these hills and move these rocks? Did it pry stones from the meadows, tilt them onto stoneboats or barrows and roll them into cairns like centrepieces on the tables of the fields? Does the crowbar feel the same stone it moved eons ago from the nearby field where I bought it? And will it still be here in the hands of my unsuspecting children’s heirs to move rocks from the rock pile to the rock wall and back a hundred years hence?

RAIL FENCE

THE PIE-SHAPED FIELD
is wedged into a hill with the point sloping down into a valley. One side, along the top of the ridge, verges on cedars, and the upper edge is line fence, boundary with the neighbour to the north. At the bottom of the hill, which approaches the forest, the fence is split-rail, made in the century before last from the cedars cleared from the field. The rails snake and angle in a rabbit run, zigging around boulders, zagging through trees. They skew obliquely, defying geometry, and are stacked a full seven rails high.

An excellent material, cedar. Free for the clearing. All that’s needed is the toil to cut and split, stack and sweat them into place. Only that. Born in the swamp, cedars take to water, resist rot and stay strong while the maple leaves mould around them, as the forest turns into earth and the earth turns into trees. Eastern White Cedar is native to the Great Lakes—St. Lawrence
Region, the Acadian forest and the boreal as far north as James Bay. It likes the swamp, which isn’t too acid, not too sharp, with limestone tucked neatly below. It will grow over sphagnum bog, but not as well, preferring moist soil to make it tall and fat. It can reach a full eighty feet high and three feet across, but few grow that big. Its roots are shallow, precarious to wind, which will lift up its feet, toss them over, expose spindly underpinnings to the rodents who burrow beneath.

The tree of life, arborvitae, so named because it treated scurvy in Cartier’s crew.

Its bark is stringy, soft and fibrous. Perfect for squirrels to feather their nests in spring, for kids to pull like ribbons as they race through the woods in the fall when their father takes them to help with the yearly tending and mending of the fence. Thomas carries his swede saw, his axe and a coil of wire in the wheelbarrow, his fence pliers in his pocket. These are all the tools he needs to tighten the fence for the winter to come.