of feeding, chores, and ram #5004.
I have just finished reading The Hot Zone, a biomedical thriller about an outbreak of Ebola virus; while Ben, with no gloves on, paws around in the sheep, while rectal tissue flies all over and lands on my favorite overalls, I tell him about how viruses jump species.
“The blood of an infected monkey can be absorbed through the skin,” I report, handing tools like a good surgical nurse.
“If I’d been gonna get it, I’d ’a got it,” Ben drawls. This is his response to most of my hygienic proposals.
As we wash up in our minimalist way, in the same sink where Ben does dinner dishes and tosses the syringes to soak, I evoke rolling hills and farms, villages, and little cities of viruses all living on the head of a pin. Rolling around in an intricate dance. Choirs of microscopic seraphim.
I can see that my exhortation has gotten to him. “That God would allow that,” he mutters. “It makes me wonder why I go to church.”
I GOT TO THE BARN at eight-fifteen this morning, but Ben’s new wife, Marge, had already done chores. She was waiting for me, the big sheep specialist, to inoculate #5004 with cortisone and penicillin. So I did. As we were herding the rams back into their pens, Marge picked up a revolting object. “What’s this?”
“Whoops. That’s #5004’s butt plug.” Obviously, he had coughed out the syringe casing.
“Ben will have to fix it on Sunday,” Marge said.
A dangerous possibility loomed, however, which Ben had warned me about: that the ram could shuck his casing without getting rid of the elastrator band. The band would then strangulate the rectum and allow no egress for fecal material. “I’m afraid we’ll have to fix it now, otherwise he’ll be impacted by Sunday,” I bravely told her.
Before he left, Ben had given me a lecture on retrieving the green rubber band by snicking it on the prongs of the elastrator and cutting it with a bandage scissors. (A blunt crochet hook would be the ideal instrument for this, and from now on, I’ll never leave home without one.) I had listened to Ben’s instructions with the attention one gives to stewardesses on transcontinental flights who drone about the remote possibility of a loss of cabin pressure: surely I will not be called upon to deal with this.
Ram #5004 is so vexed with us that he has thrown himself full tilt at the slats of the feeding bunk and wedged his head. This turns out to be a fine position for us to work on his bum. Marge bends down to look at the black fringe of necrotic tissue and says hopefully, “I think the band has slipped off.”
“Marge, you are in denial.” The laws of physics dictate, I believe, that the band—wound tight around the rectum—will have been sucked up inside the ram.
I slip my sensitive violinist’s fingers into the sheep’s anus (naturally we are out of surgical gloves), whisper a charm against anthrax, and feel for a tight rubber band. It’s there, and it’s easy to catch with the elastrator, easy to snip. I have, in effect, reversed Ben’s earlier procedure but assured #5004 a comfortable weekend. We squirt the anus with bright yellow Furazolidone and leave behind a happy sheep.
Then we go into the kitchen and wash up. “I could never do what you just did,” Marge tells me. Then the farm bravado kicks in. “I could if I had to.”
“Sure you could.” I wash in the kitchen sink for five minutes, then wash in the bathroom for five more. Then I go home and scrub my hands with bleach.
I have heard Ben say he fantasizes the stink of necrotic tissue all day. I believe it is not an hallucination but some mechanism of the biology of smell: pheromones or something remain on your body. All the bleach of Araby will not sweeten these little hands.
But at least these hands have been useful, for a change.
BEN CAME IN this morning after being away since Friday to find one of the ram lambs dead—not the one we had been fussing over all weekend but one that had seemed perfectly healthy. We loaded it onto the pickup and Ben drove away to dispose of it at the medical waste facility, leaving me to feed the stock.
I double-check my work and tend to move slowly with the feeding, so by the time I was halfway down the barn the hungry old rams were in a snit. The biggest, whom we call Butthead, a three hundred fifty-pound ram with the face of a camel, managed to push through a wired gate and get out. I hurried to secure the doors so he wouldn’t head down a freeway, or worse, turn over our huge delectable tank of molasses—then tried to get him back in the pen. By then, the other big rams were making their way out. I stuck my knee into the wedge they were coming through and got a painful compression bruise out of it as a big vasectomized ram pushed through. He got out and among the young rams, where a butting contest ensued. Bloody and panting, the old ram, who has bad lungs, had to cede.
By this time, Butthead had his face in the corn and was hard to deflect. Finally I maneuvered him into an unoccupied pen.
Ben’s truck on the gravel. “Mary, can’t I leave you alone for a minute?”
With one sheep dead, I have become more than usually observant of the actions of the rest. One of the rams was hunched over, moving convulsively. “Ben! Is that ram sick?”
“He’s ejaculating, Mary.”
I think I spent too much time in graduate school.
Buddhist tradition tells of a monk bathing in a river, where he comes upon a drowning scorpion. Tenderly he lifts the scorpion out of the water and the scorpion stings him savagely. The cycle of rescue and attack repeats itself as the monk tries to get the scorpion to shore before it kills him. The other monks try to intervene but, “He is acting according to his dharma,” the monk tells them, “and so am I.” The word dharma here means a kind of internal wisdom: what Quakers call the Light, or sometimes the Inner Teacher. There is an old saying, “Live up to the Light that thou hast and more will be given.”
Last night when I checked the animals around dusk, two men were walking an unleashed husky near the pens. I hate huskies. Half the time a child or a small animal is attacked by a dog you’ll find a husky in it: this is part of the rural Minnesota belief system.
“Last year,” Ben told me, “a husky chased a ewe lamb straight to the end of the paddock, tore off her udder and ripped her vagina.”
The owner refused to accept any responsibility, saying, “It’s just her nature.”
Ben went on, “If I see that owner around here again I’m going to rip his ass. It’s my nature.”
IT WAS LAST APRIL in the north of England, one of those moments when it felt like I’d been traveling for about thirteen years, jazzed on homeopathic fright pills. I was telling myself that yoga is at root a practice of acceptance: acceptance of the body from moment to moment, day to day; people, situations, and events as they occur. Softening to whatever comes. I was having these thoughts while trying to surrender to a chilly bed in Birmingham, at a community where I was doing research. The mattress was the kind of penitential hump with
