Lambsquarters (17 page)

From our perch in the mow I throw cut wedges of hay, and my chubby-mittened boy launches his handfuls. We vary our pitch with the wind, and each time I score a perfect placement in the feeder I award myself two points and we cheer. A perfect score will mean a perfect day. So the bales are cut from above, not lifted, not carried. The force of gravity helps me feed, and the sheep, waiting below, look up to me on high, bestower of manna. The evening feed still takes place inside, away from night noises and dark terrors, but it is a mere snack. A bedtime soother, green tea.

My Swiss Army knife lives in the bottom of my barncoat pocket—the right-hand one—buried in chaff and bent fence staples, marbles, needle caps and sheep-marking crayon stubs. The knife has a screwdriver and a corkscrew, a bottle opener and three knives: a stiletto, and blades small and large. The smaller is my weapon of choice; string-sized, it plunges into the bale, parting stems, attacking the sisal sideways, severing ply after ply until the twine gives, snap-releasing the leaves like a spring.

For years I used this knife. I lost it once in the haystack and was lost without it. Back to woman-handling the bales, wrenching off their ropes until one day it reappeared. My knife: a blood-red spot in a sea
of green, steel edge catching the sun like a diamond in a snowbank.

And for years my winter hands blanched white when I removed my mitts to pull out the blade, to snap it back. My thumbnail had a permanent break from prying the knife open. I shivered, I cut, I cursed. My children’s vocabularies grew. And then I complained to a neighbour along the concession. “What you need,” she said, “is a hay cutter.”

Not long after, she presented me with the instrument. A hay cutter, fashioned like a miniature triangular hatchet. Her husband, M
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Kenzie Murray, had made it for me. The handle is flat metal with a rounded end, a hanging hole, and smaller, spaced perforations along its hand-span length. The three-sided blade, as big as an elm leaf, is attached by two metal rivets, their headless ends bashed flat against the cutter, rough-edged like hand-heeled pastry. The point is nebulous, innocuous, dull. But the sides of the blade are scalpel sharp.

The cutter is heavy, and its weight draws to the bale like a magnet. My mitted hand, fat with sueded sheepskin, claws the cold steel in the way a welding glove grips hot iron. Down, like a cleaver, the string-severing blade sinks deep in green grasses, releasing them from the bale. Like breasts unleashed from binders, the bound riches relax, sag, sway and splay freely.

Twine is what wants cutting, not hay. But my cutter
is not misnamed. Once, it served to cut a swath in the field. It was a soldier in the army of blades that made up the mower. Two rows of steel triangles, set one above the other, operating at cross purposes, formed formidable teeth on the mower. The cutters rode at right angles to the tractor, ran from the power take-off and felled the standing hay in the field a row at a time. The blades were open to the sun, to small animals and snakes, to unguarded dogs’ legs and fat fingers foolish enough to get too close. Vicious incisors, most of these mowers have been replaced by haybines and implements with covered blades, which are safer for dogs and children, though small rodents must still be at risk, hiding as they do in the standing sections of fields, which get smaller and smaller as the stalks fall.

Most old mowers now rust in back pastures, their sickle-sharp blades flaking and falling off in their decline. So my cutter is all that more valuable. Salvaged by my neighbour M
^c
Kenzie Murray, cut by his hand from the metal cloth of a larger cloak, it feels hay in its single jaw once again. I hang it on the main barn beam, on a special nail hammered in to hold it high above curious young hands. It rests there all summer, itching, no doubt, to be out in the field mowing at the strong stalks, which are full of the juice of a sunny season. Now the hay cutter opens up bales cut by younger, gayer blades.

BUS BOX

OUR LANE IS NOT LONG,
as country lanes go, and affords a clear view of the road. A low cedar hedge runs along the bottom of the garden, and a huge old maple punctuates the gravel. The fence bottom, though rusty and decrepit, is at least transparent, so I could always watch my daughter get on the school bus.

Then one day it poured. Teemed down with rain too vicious for her yellow slicker and sou’wester hat, which was angled like a funnel towards the gaps at the tops of her rubber boots. We got in the car, drove to the bottom of the lane and waited there. Then all in a rush she ran up into the bus, which had arrived just a few feet of mud away. I realized I had not worked this through. We needed a shelter.

The school bus wasn’t always on time. A five- or ten-minute wait is an age for a small child in the rain. And this is the snowbelt, where the promise of blizzards
is carried on the wind or found in the rings around the moon. How would we keep her warm and dry through the wait?

Visions returned of mystery gatehouses gracing country lanes. Sentry boxes, telephone booths, octagonal playhouses, shingled shacks and horse stalls. Small constructions created, it seemed, by conscientious parents to keep their children dry and safe.

Friends who had moved to Murphy’s Mill from abroad had brought their possessions across the sea in thin wooden crates. Oversized orange boxes really, but big enough for a child to play in. Big enough for a rainy-day shelter. We popped the packing crate into the back of the pickup and unloaded it at the end of the lane. It was big enough. Tall enough. Adequate. It saw her through that first winter, when most days we all trotted down the lane together in the morning. Her brother, her dog and I waited beside it in the afternoons to hear her stories of the day as we all walked back to the house together for the cookies and milk that mothers feed their young after school if they can.

But she spent little time in the shelter. It opened to the west, to the prevailing wind, which hurled sleet in the door. The crate filled with snow in a storm, leaving no room to stand.

It was a sad excuse for a bus shelter. Plywood, untreated, unstained, a rude structure, tilted and buckling from March wind and April rain, then abandoned
in May as another piece of winter detritus, dragged off and burned in the annual spring pyre. My daughter was happy to sit on the rock that June, or shelter under the maple in late spring showers. During the summer, however, we had to come up with a solution for the following year, when she would wait for the school bus every day of the week, and for the years to come, when her brother would be waiting with her.

BLUEBIRD

THERE ARE BLUEBIRDS OUTSIDE
my window. A moving swatch of blue-violet, not quite so purple as the Crayola crayon, but bluer than water, than indigo, than delphiniums. Thoreau wrote that they carry the sky on their backs, but my bluebirds are brighter than even a Kodak sky. Flying sapphires with marmalade breasts, precious and comforting.

Before this land was settled in the nineteenth century, my window, had it been here, would have overlooked wood. Acres and acres (now hectares) of elms and maples, cedars and white pines. With an abundance of trees framing patches of meadow, bluebirds must have dotted the wilderness like wild lupines. The fields were cleared, the cedars formed into posts and rails, the pines into log houses and window frames, the maples into floors and tables, the elms into skeletons. With their nesting sites slaughtered, the bluebirds left.

Perhaps the dying elms, rotting from inside out, first brought them back. The woodpeckers made the holes; the bluebirds moved in. They increased, migrated and returned. So now they are here, right out my window, in a nesting box planted just for them in the middle of the small side field. I can look up from my desk, replace my reading glasses with binoculars and frame them through the layers of glass. Take comfort in their presence, perhaps because it is so tenuous.

The first year, they nested in an old bird box on the fence along the sheep track. I’ll never forget the afternoon I spotted the male swooping for an insect, the sun bouncing off feathers alive with colour. I remember, because my father-in-law was here lazing with us under the maple, grandfathering the kids. He did not share my excitement. Not everyone is willing to give up time to watch, discuss and worry about bluebirds.