WHILE ROBIN AND I were in England, Ben got the results of the ram lamb’s postmortem, which showed hemophilus pneumonia, and, now that I am back, we are puzzling over what, if anything, to treat the others with.
The last two days I’ve been doing morning barn chores by myself. I love to be outside in the early light, the pasture covered in mist. This morning as I brought corn out to the ewe lambs behind the shed, two big sheep bashed me from behind and pushed me against the feeder, then stuck their heads into the metal interstices, pinning me by the leg. I had to lean on them and push with all my might. Then I climbed to freedom by crawling across a shelf of wooly backs. These animals try all kinds of things with me they wouldn’t try with Ben. It’s hard to boss the big lambs while carrying two buckets, seventeen pounds of corn each, and keeping noses out of it till I get across the pasture to the feeding station.
We have twelve skinny white-faced Polypay ewes in the barn setting up a racket, running their thin pale tongues out and bleating madly. They’re being weaned from their lambs. They get nothing but hay for forty-eight hours—no corn, no water. Tears rise to my eyes as I deal with these animals, caught in the ordinary suffering of life. Sentimental? Yes, but you see, my youngest daughter, Julian, is going away to college next week, and I feel all too keenly the plight of these bereft ewes. Ben and I call them “the church ladies.” With their fringe of white perms and incessant vocalization, they remind us of a certain stalwart type of Lutheran woman.
This morning when I came in, I was surprised to discover two Simmental heifers, a cow and her calf (the kind of French-looking beef stock painted by Rosa Bonheur) grazing behind the barn. And several handsome Suffolks as well as a beautiful Dorset ram, just washed. Today’s job was to “show shear” and wash these animals for a judging up north.
As I was feeding, a sudden violent storm came up, the barn lights went on, and rain crashed on the tin roof. The cows with their deep low seemed to be trying to pacify the ewes, still running skinny tongues out over their perfectly spaced and false-looking teeth in a panic of bleating. The wall of rain slid between us and the city; we had become the barn at the end of the world. All the animals, myself included, quieted down like a congregation hearing bells.
In the lambing barn, where at this season we usually park our cars, Ben had the beautiful Dorset ram lamb up on the fit stand, currying it. With their white poll, short ears, and stocky bodies, Dorsets look like the lambs Polish people mold out of butter: the kind depicted in church windows with a victory flag under the right front hoof, the kind of which D. H. Lawrence wrote, “I like lambs too much to have them stand for something.”
I HAD DRIVEN THROUGH another thunderstorm blown up out of the relentless humidity, sheets of water flooding into the north end of the barn as I arrived. The outdoor sheep were lurking in their sheds, looking like extras from a Christmas crèche. Even Butthead, even the ever starving Polypay ewes, seemed subdued as I rationed out corn and soybean mix and freshened the hay. The ewe lambs in the pasture get thirty-two pounds of corn divided between two metal feeders, but the feeders were full of water. I couldn’t dump it all out; I wasn’t strong enough to lift the bunks, so the sheep had to tough each other out at one feeder.
Frost, the barn cat, came along for a ride on the hay cart as I worked inside. She is a focused killer who regularly swipes birds out of the air.
Sweeping the floor is one of my chores.
This is how it went: first, the broom annoyed me and I began to analyze and comment to myself on its nasty plastic American uselessness. Next, I began to fantasize how a good old-fashioned broom would sweep that barn clean. I carefully considered the possibility of getting psittacosis from the dust of pigeon shit. I lamented that seventy feet of the barn remained to be swept. A third of the way into the task, as about a third of the way into a Zen session, I thought I would have to quit or snap: that is the edge you always have to lean against. Then I began to get into a rhythm and a swish of sound that pleased me, and at the same time I became more efficient. Halfway down the barn rose another temptation to get off the zafu: I’m tired, fifty feet is enough, my shoulders ache, it doesn’t look any cleaner than when I started, why am I doing this? I could be cooking dinner, playing music. Does this even need to be done?
I lean on my rotten broom and think: I am paying good money to sweep this barn with a lousy broom. I have paid eighty dollars in tuition for an independent study in animal science, much as I might pay eighty dollars at the Zen Center to experience the discipline of silence and manual work, to clear my mind of ideas, most of them wrong. The silence, now the rain has stopped, is worth the tuition. Pacified by hay, water, and corn, the animals are lying down and breathing as calmly as bodhisattvas.
I go back to my broom. How Ben would laugh at my inexorable patient sweeping. I have not earned much in my life, but I have earned this work, the right to sweep patiently.
Thus I thought while trying to let go of thought, and then for one sweep of the broom I was not thinking.
Is It Necessary to Have a Plow?
THIS MORNING I sheared a Suffolk ewe with a bad attitude. I still have a hard time catching sheep, never mind shearing them. I chased four ewes around the pen for half an hour until suddenly one went down on its knees in the corner, terrified not by me but by the sound of Ben on his Bobcat cleaning out the pens at the north end of the barn. Even at that, I could not get her onto the stand. Ben had to strap her in for me. But I managed to shear her without taking off any body parts. I few weeks ago Ben asked me to paint a sign for the sheep barn at the state fair and I have been working at that back home on my kitchen table. Today I discovered that hours spent drawing sheep paid off in practical knowledge of what curves lay under the wool: it improved my shearing.
I took her off the stand and she booked away, jumped the fence, and tore off down the pasture. I spent the next hour trying to head her out and pen her again. A huge Simmental bull residing in the barn for the state fair watched us with an expression of vast disdain.
Ben, interested in all trades, wants to know why I’m a writer. “What do you write about?” he asks as we curry another lovely Dorset.
What did Montaigne say? “Myself.” Writing essays, writing poetry, is a solipsistic occupation, much harder to justify than sheep farming. But I wanted to answer Ben’s question as conscientiously as he answers mine. Our lives and backgrounds have brought us to different choices, but we’re transacting the same private business, he and I. At the beginning of Terre des Hommes, Antoine de Saint-Exupery says, “A man discovers himself when he measures himself against an obstacle. But, in order to pay attention, he has to have a tool, a plow or…” a Bobcat or a pen. “Just now, I’m writing about work, and how people experience their lives spiritually,” I said.
“Why?”
“Well, in a way, to get a grip on what I feel and know. It’s only after I’ve written about something that I see patterns, bring things to light.” In one of her poems, “The Chance to Love Everything,” Mary Oliver speaks of something outside her tent, “pressing inward at eye level.” Strange and mysterious things press on the tent of consciousness. I want to bring them in where I can love them, or at least acknowledge them mine.
Comb. Comb. Comb. Farming is one of the few remaining reflective occupations. It’s inward, solitary, and yet social. “If they don’t do chores together, how does a man talk to his boys?” wondered my friend Conor, a dairy farmer
