they drove the meat from locker to farm, he suddenly exclaimed, “Dad! We forgot Jimmy!”
So children do not always get it. As much as I knew I got from watching a crow decompose in the weeds by a suburban fence, and when it disappeared one day, no doubt in the mouth of a dog, I did not think it had gone to heaven.
Catching and Flipping and Shearing
FLIPPING SHEEP is a major component of barn management. You have to flip them to shear them, to perform any vet work (as we call the inoculations and small surgeries of everyday work), or merely to get their attention and remind them that they’re sheep and we aren’t. Perhaps I should mention what everybody takes for granted: you have to catch them first.
When I say “lambs,” most people think about cute little wooly animals, but in our barn we are moving market lambs and wethers, big castrated male sheep that run two hundred pounds. We also have around a hundred ewes at the moment, our breeding females, and several huge ram sires. Catching any of these animals requires skill and strength.
“Don’t you use a crook?” my friends ask, picturing perhaps a quaint shepherdess on an embroidered field of wildflowers. We don’t, but I don’t know why we don’t. Maybe it’s considered effeminate. Ben, of course, can easily head a sheep out of the flock, grab it under the chin, and get a purchase with the other hand on its tailbone. For my part, I’m slow, a little arthritic, and like to save my hands for sawing pitifully on the violin. I can’t reach from the chin to the tail of a large animal. Mostly I slide around in sheep shit to the delight of anyone in the barn.
“Don’t run around so aimlessly,” Ben sings out, as we pull sheep in for shearing. I’m black and blue all over. My instinct is to sink my fingers into the wool and hold on, at which point the rams just gather steam and pull me over.
We shear constantly, for one reason or another, in the summer simply to keep the animals cool. Our Polypays and Hampshires produce a poor wool staple, so we don’t bother with the classy shearing that might be done for the handspinning trade. Sheared wool is, however, separated by color, bagged, and sold for mattress-stuffing and blankets.
The rules of shearing are (1) keep the skin stretched; (2) don’t cut off the teats or nick a ewe’s vagina or cut off a ram’s sheath; (3) watch out for the Achilles tendon; and (4) hold the clippers flat and clip close. In my first few attempts I did not cut close but neither did I excise any vital organs.
While we shear, Ben, the extrovert, tells me more than I can absorb about genetics, breed characteristics, and the gossip of sheep production: which breeders are well thought of, who are suspected of having “spider” (a genetic malformation) in the DNA of their animals. Much of it goes right by me. At this point, I can authoritatively pick out a Dorset from a Hampshire, but a “classic Texel look” is lost on me. I’m merely happy I’ve reached a point where not all sheep look alike.
But as the summer days go by, I’m growing discouraged. My bones ache; my mind throbs and misfires over calculations about feed ratios. I wonder if I am too old to take this new direction, or if, like so many things, it’s a matter of focus rather than of strength and agility.
DID YOU READ YOUR HANDOUT on sheep parasites, Mary?” Ben asked as he loped from the office to the barn. I trotted behind him like an anxious puppy.
“Yes.”
“Then tell me how we would know to look at them if these sheep were infected?”
“Ummm. They’d be anemic and have diarrhea and be off their feed.”
“How would we know if they’re anemic?”
“The pink part under their eyes would be more white? …” I ventured. This is how moms know that children are anemic.
“Their gums,” said Ben, “would stay white when you push on them.”
Without pressing on any gums, we could see that these sheep were infected. They were scraggly looking and their backsides scoury (that is, covered in shit). First we shaved bottoms, a charming job. Then we caught and inoculated them with vermifuge. Last night I practiced flipping my border collie, Shep, so I have the moves down and can trip these feisty little fifty-pound Texel bucks without too much trouble. I easily flipped and inoculated fifteen without being inoculated back.
The sheep have parasites because they have been on pasture. We are conducting an experiment to compare sheep raised on pasture with sheep who have access only to the barn and its neighboring yards. One pastured sheep is blind from eating milk vetch.
“Factory farming”—often defined in terms of keeping the animals more confined—is a major political issue in Minnesota. Huge pig farms, in particular, with holding tanks of manure that sometimes leak and pollute the water table, are especially controversial. Observing this experiment, however, I see that some degree of confinement may be more comfortable and healthy for the animal.
I BEGAN MEDITATION PRACTICE at eighteen when I entered religious community. We were taught a lot about prayer and given hours a day to work on it, but much of my best instruction came from a book passed on to me by a senior novice. In those days, we postulants (as young women in their first year were called), slept three to a room under the eye of a senior novice (women in their third year of religious life). The senior novices were exotic figures to us aspirants; while we wore knee-length black skirts and blouses, black capes and stockings, they wore the full religious habit, which in those days meant a floor-length serge dress, white wimple, and long veil. We retained our “civilian” hairstyles, pixie or flip: their hair was cut short and, even at bedtime, tucked in a white cap. We were called Jean Hanson or Susie Smith; each of them had disappeared into the identity of Sister Macaria or Sister Paul Joseph—gender and family erased as cleanly as possible. “If you ask my name,” wrote Appolonius of Tyre, “say that I lost it on the sea. If you ask my family, say that I am shipwrecked. …”
The senior novices represented what we postulants most longed for and feared. We watched them covertly and constantly, collecting little bits of data about each one, speculating, mourning when one or another left the community before profession, occasionally falling into austere, wordless love.
For we were not, in the ordinary course of things, allowed to speak to them. Merely by presence, the senior novice monitored behavior in each little room, but the rule forbade interaction between nuns and postulants. Indeed, in the bedrooms, postulants were not allowed to speak to other postulants, even their roommates, excluding illness, emergency, or the vocal prayer that signaled dawn: “Let us bless the Lord!” the novice would intone. “Thanks be to God!” each postulant responded, unless she had gone into a coma.
Denied normal concourse, we grew as clever as dogs at interpreting a frown or tilt of the head. We could pick out each novice sitting in chapel merely by the way she pinned her veil; we knew who came late to refectory by her footsteps. How extraordinary, in this environment of perfervid observation, to come upon Sister Michael Ann sitting like a Buddha, cross-legged in the middle of her bed. At first I saw only her shadow—for each bed was curtained—felt her peculiar stillness. Then, as days passed, I would flounce in from late study in the postulate, throw myself on the bed, and catch a glimpse of her as the bed curtains danced in the breeze of my unrecollected passage. She would be sitting there cross-legged in her black night robe and white cap, eyes
