the childbearing years, my blouse might be soaked with milk. This is a passing, negligible sensation, a product merely of being present. I do not stop working to examine it. A casual dissolution of boundaries body-to-body happens when you work in the barn. With animals, it’s safe, and pertinent, to have no edges. It helps you to manage sheep and them to manage you. If I bother to retrieve my mind, I find it shared out among the ewes, who have made good time with it.
There is deep rest in this loss of self. Peace, which implies stillness, and ecstasy: every hair in motion. Thus lovers and people who read each other’s poems breathe the other, if they love or read well. Thus music. If you play the fiddle, no matter how badly, and you go to hear a great violinist—as last month I went to a concert of Isaac Stern’s—you hear the performance in the hollows of your own body (or has it ceased to be your body?)—that lilt of Stern’s at the tip of the bow is in your fingers. If I am flowing in this moment through one pride of skin and not another, it’s accident. And I test the limits of this bubble as once I tested the limits of the womb.
When you go down to the lambing pens you can tell from the doorway if something’s gone wrong: a ewe whose lamb is dead will have slipped back in the fold with her sisters. Most animals are pragmatic and have little patience with weakness—perhaps you have seen how a mother cat will favor her strong, aggressive kitten and paw aside the runts. Last night Anna struggled till 3 A.M. to save a lamb too short to reach the teats, tubing colostrum into her stomach, then bottle feeding every two hours. This morning the lamb came to me with her tail shaking, a sign of health, and took two ounces of formula. In the barnyard, I try to volunteer a shift with Anna, sparing her the night work since I’m fresher.
But—“I don’t think we will have to stay up tonight,” she says. Her tone is the oblique and respectful one used by my dad and his pilot friends when refusing to pronounce the word crash. Over her shoulder I see four ewes in the fold where three had been standing.
We put the dead lamb in a plastic bucket, later to bury. “Poor little mauser,” says Anna. “Still, she had some good hours.”
Philosophers make distinctions between varieties of dispossession; it cannot be the same, they say, to surrender to love, to music, to animal creation, and to prayer. (But stand with someone you love, palm to palm, eyes closed, and sing a perfect fourth…) Since I experience these slips of consciousness as similar, I can only speak from what I know. Intensity of presence is the common element, though in the next moment one could say, intensity of absence.
Without presence, the violence would be unthinkable: of God, of Zen practice, of lovemaking, and certainly of the farm. How disquieting to fight so hard for the life of a lamb and tomorrow meet its cousin tucked up in the crockpot. Namaste: I honor the god in you.
Disquieting, anyway.
SHEEP PROLAPSE THEIR rectums because they cough too much…” Ben, the barn manager, was telling me as we headed into the morning’s task, trimming necrotic tissue from the rectums of five two-hundred-pound Hampshire ram lambs.
I am capable of dithering for years over some foolish decision; but at other times, important shifts come with absolute authority, in the time it takes to sink a basket or fall dead. One day, after I came back to America from Anna’s sheep farm in England, I found myself brooding over a question of lamb nutrition. “Phone Hank,” a farming friend told me. “He’s a professor of sheep science.”
Incredulously: “Sheep science?”
“That’s what they call it at the college.”
A subsequent conversation with Hank about colostrum and intubation fascinated me so much that I blurted, “If I want to find out more about all this, what should I do?”
“Be at the sheep barn, 8:00 tomorrow morning,” he said.
“OK,” I said, and there went my plans for the next year and a half.
Hank put me under Ben’s tutelage. Ben was a senior agriculture student, strong and competent, who had grown up on a sheep farm in western Minnesota. He had white-blond hair and wore a feed cap that said “I Care About My Animals.”
“What makes them cough?” I wanted to know. Anna’s sheep in England rarely coughed.
“If you could tell me that…” Ben’s voice trailed off as the stench of necrotic tissue wafted up from the hind quarters of the ram we were working on. “What I don’t do for you guys,” Ben said to the sheep.
The rectum is a straight tube of intestinal tissue, and when a sheep coughs repeatedly, the tube is pushed out and protrudes from the anus like an angry sausage. When that happens, our task is to wrap a heavy rubber band around the protrusion, cutting off the blood supply and necrotizing the tissue. First we plug the rectum with a syringe casing (there are always a few left over from routine inoculations). Through the casing, open at both ends, the lamb can continue to defecate. After a few days, when the tissue is dead, you cut it off. That’s what we’re doing today.
I hand instruments to Ben and hold the grunting lambs in the metal cradle that flips them with their feet in the air, bum presenting. This procedure does not make the lambs too happy, but they leave in better condition than they arrived, with a walk similar to the postpartum swagger of women on the delivery floor.
Bolting out of bed at six that June morning, I had suffered a fashion crisis. What to wear on a Minnesota farm? The older farmers I know wear brown polyester jumpsuits, like factory workers. The young ones wear jeans, but the forecast was for ninety-five degrees with heavy humidity. The wardrobe of Quaker ladies in their middle years runs to denim skirts and hiking boots. This outfit had worked fine for me in England. But one of my jobs in Minnesota will be to climb onto the industrial cuisinart in the hay barn and mix fifty-pound bags of nutritional supplement and corn into blades as big as my body. Getting a skirt caught in that thing would be bad news for Betty Crocker.
My favorite cotton shirt is printed with sunflowers and celebrates Organic Gardening Week in big green letters. I’ve decided this shirt might be impolitic. Organic gardeners are about as welcome in production farming as bird watchers in logging country. Finally I settled on lightweight cotton pants and one of my son’s V-necked undershirts. This ensemble turns out to be perfect for trimming rectal tissue, and is soon covered in lamb shit.
When Ben gave me my inaugural tour of the barn, he made it clear that his major interest is in lamb production. Our Polypay flock, a mixture of Dorset, Targhee, Finn, and Rambouillet, is bred to bear young almost year-around. He doesn’t encourage dependency. “When I started here,” Ben told me, “the ewes would come up to me and groan and want help with the lambing. I make them lamb on their own. My goal is to make every animal in here independent of me.”
Ben’s hard-ass pose makes me think he would not be sympathetic to organic gardeners and vegetarians. I want to stay anonymous in my affiliations if only to avoid being stereotyped as the lamb-hugger I am. I long to be accepted as a worker among workers.
In return, I try not to stereotype Ben. He works hard, seems to love it, and is a natural, hands-on teacher.
I consort with a lot of liberals who are animal rights activists, and, while I respect their positions, I find they often do not know much about the practical order. In fact, investigating the essential facts of food production is one thing that’s drawn me to the barn. One professorial friend recently scolded me about the “perverse and unnatural” business of breeding animals year-round. I don’t know. Maybe. On the other hand, many third-world
