Lambsquarters (8 page)

The low walls were plastered, as were the wide sloping ceilings and angular dormers. And though he cursed the angles, the pargeter found time to help me dress the loom, to grip bundles of taut woolen threads in his dusty hands as I wound them evenly round the beam for a warp. I worked my wool all over the farm while the loft progressed that summer. I harvested dye-plants in the meadow, spun under the trees, wove sawdust into my kitchen fabric. Endless days of creativity followed by painting and varnishing. Smells of boiling greens for dyeing mixed with the scent of freshly cut pine, of plaster, latex, lanolin and turps.

YEARS LATER
the smells have changed. There’s the wool still, and recently the pungency of a new coat of paint. Fresh pine in the new railing, and the musts and moulds from aging books gathered second-hand for shelves that grow like spiderwebs along the walls. The sounds of shuttles and spindles, clacking of treadles and whirring of wheels have submitted to clatter of keyboard and ruffling of paper. The loom has crept to a corner, and the wheels surround a guest bed. But I do use them still between chapters, and I write my life in spinning, plying, webbing. I write sweaters and shawls from my sheep and scarves from my dogs with the same hands that weave words in the bookish end of the loft.

I climb stairs covered in catalogne, rag carpet created from old curtains and sheets from my youth. And
as I rise up above the house, away from the chores and the others, I look out to the trees, the sky, the endless fields and fencerows. The sun on my right in the morning, on my left late in the day, clouds to the north, the grey of November, the snows of winter and the trapped heat in July. It’s often too hot or too cold, too bright or too dark, but this loft of my design, roofed from my bush and floored from my loom is my upper region, my air, my sky. It is as close as I get to the heavens.

FIRST BORN

BABIES HAD NEVER BEEN PART
of the plan—at least not our babies. Fur and feathers, and tightly curled wool intrigued me. Animals who grew to maturity in short months, who went on their way, who walked at birth.

I became accomplished as a midwife to my flock. I learned to disentangle twins locked in a fatal embrace, turn breeches, retract tails and find hind hocks. I put back prolapses and treated mastitis; I urged weak lambs to suck.

A young chick, curious about the water pail, tipped over the edge and lay floating one day, eyes open and staring, body slack. I scooped him out, felt no pulse, but breathed into his body, pumped his wings in some slapstick Holger Nielsen, dried him with the hair dryer, and he came alive. Lazarus. I seemed to have a knack.

BEFORE WE CAME
here, back in our nomadic days of youth hostels and backpacks, when so many of us seemed to be on the road, we met an American who’d fled his homeland and its military draft. I don’t know if we ever really knew who he was or where he was going, but one night in a faraway place, we shared his wisdom, perhaps gave ours. He believed that the only things that couldn’t be taken away from us were what we had in our heads and our hands. Knowledge and skill. And that advice shaped us and helped to bring us here, where we learned the minute changes of weather that govern our crops, the moment before the timothy heads up, the imminence of labour for a ewe. I learned to spin and weave, to dye with wild plants, to sow and harvest. And Thomas learned to build, with wood and stone, with logs and fence wire. Each project brought new skills and packed new knowledge into our heads.

We took courses at the agricultural and community colleges down the highway. Carpentry and plumbing, apiculture and sheep, meat production and wool, restoration architecture and woodlot management. We took things apart and learned how they worked. We attempted to put them back together. We watched our neighbours, rode their seed drills, drove their tractors, packed their hay, killed their chickens (well, only once did I do that, but I know I can). We watched calves being born, wrenched out of their mothers with block and tackle. We fed them milk from galvanized calf pails
furnished with wide rubber nipples. We helped castrate piglets. Thomas witnessed the butchering of a pig and turned the neighbour’s stomach when he rummaged in the hot entrails, searching for an appendix, ever eager over anatomy. Our hands grew calloused and our minds overflowed with information. We trialed and erred and eventually came to understand many different things crucial to life in the country, to life itself, to recognition of our place here.

After five years on the farm, I was just beginning to feel I understood, had mastered some basics, could survive. There was no place for children in my plan. No courses to take, no degrees to be done in parenting.

Then on a night in February, during one of those wintery winters when the snow circles the county like Orion’s belt, Thomas got a call. A patient at a farm nearby was in labour. Her husband was blowing the snow from the lane, getting ready to head to the hospital. As Thomas dressed to go, another call came. There wouldn’t be time, could he go to the farm? It was two in the morning, pitch dark but for the blizzard, and I nuzzled the pillow while he moved about. “Come with me,” he said. “I might need help.”

We got in the truck, busted through the snow in our lane and headed east, then north. The drifts made dunes on the road, hillocks from one side, fingering deeper and deeper over the iced gravel, but we bounded through at speed. Thomas is a madman in a storm, can drive
through anything. The laneway was clear when we arrived, and we made our way into the house, the only one lit on the line.

I remember daffodils, armfuls of them, brought from Holland by a relative who came to help the family. How could that be? But I remember them, smell them still. The scent hit me at the door, that pungent yellow elixir of spring cutting through the harsh crisp night. And then somehow we were up the stairs, in the bedroom, at the most beautiful scene in the world. Mother and newborn, already come, beaming and perfect and calm. Propped on pillows, the babe wrapped in a blanket on her chest, the mother and her child were still attached by the cord neatly tied twice with clean string. The father, a dairy farmer, was acquainted with birth, knowledgable and strong, delighted with himself and his loved ones.

Thomas cut the cord, separated the two and put the baby in my arms while he checked her mother. The baby in my arms. I was not a holder of babies. This tiny life, only minutes old, in my arms. Her calm warmth, her beautiful skin, her searching eyes. Born at home in her parents’ bed. In my arms until her mother was ready to take her, to put her to the breast, to dissolve into the love affair of the nursing couple.

NOT LONG AFTER,
I was pregnant. Awaiting my own February birthing, my own beautiful scene. My fear of
this change in my life was stiff and persistent, and I laboured throughout the pregnancy to ward it off. I planted daffodils by the dozens, hoping they would cheer me in my postpartum depression in the spring. I put my ram in early, to give me lambs before my baby. I swam through the summer and ran through the fall, and as soon as the snow came, I skied, staying fit, training for the marathon to come, trying to preserve some part of the body I knew so well.

I grew awkward in my chores, lumbered over gates with pails of water. My balance askew, I got knocked down by the ram. I wore coveralls with the buttons undone through the middle; I bent with care. I picked out the stitches in my barncoat zipper, added a triangle of fabric so the coat would fit over my belly, sewed the zipper in place. When lambing began, I felt each of the ewes’ contractions, breathed with each push, wondered how on earth my baby would come without small hoofs to pull on, small legs to grasp. And when the time came for docking the lambs’ tails and tagging their ears, I stood holding each animal while Thomas performed the surgery, tears pouring down my face with the pain of it all, and determined never to circumcise a son.

In the house my wheel whirred with the sound of spinning lambswool, which I knit into bootees and sweaters and shawls. Tiny clothes from our farmstuffs, all ready and waiting. Bags woven for diapers, blankets shaped on the loom. Dark greens and deep browns,
natural greys and pure whites. Not a pink or a blue to be seen. Deep colours, for the depth of my commitment, the well of my hope.

AND SHE FILLED
them all, my beautiful daughter. So pink and round and perfect at birth. Too big already for some of the clothes I’d made. She filled our arms, our lives, our home. This country baby, homegrown baby, created without skill or knowledge, who came with love of her own. And the daffodils bloomed for themselves that spring, for there was no depression.

SHEARING

THE WINTERS IN GREY COUNTY
beg for heavy wool. Snow drifts right over the fence tops, piling pompoms on the posts when the wind is down. Gates disappear under crisp white hills. Just getting to the barn can be a chore, with fresh powder thigh deep. Only snowshoes keep me aloft. But except during the worst blizzards, I feed the animals outside.