A lean, swaggering man in his fifties wearing oily work coveralls and gumboots pulled up in front of the youth hostel in a white Ford pick-up truck.
He rolled down his window and asked, “Can you stay for at least a month? I need a head farmhand.”
“I don’t see why not,” I said.
We drove due north into the countryside, a seemingly endless landscape of rolling, green hills dotted with white fluffy sheep, mirror images of the clouds overhead. As we chatted, I wasn’t sure what to make of John. With social conversation, he was very curt, cutting right to the point of what he needed to know without any of the usual niceties. But just when I’d decided he was a man of few words, I asked him about New Zealand’s politics, and he went off on a lengthy, fervent rant that lasted the rest of the forty-five minutes until we arrived at his farm.
“Come on,” he said, jumping out of the truck and onto a dubious looking motorbike with the muffler tied on with a piece of white rope. “Hop on!”
I held on for dear life as we raced through a lumpy paddock full of dozens of sheep.
“You see that one over there?”
“Yeah.”
“Get off and throw it over the fence; it’s not mine.”
“Uhhhh . . .”
He drove off, leaving me in the middle of the field.
I chased that stupid sheep around for a good fifteen minutes before John returned, laughing and shaking his head. “Aw look, you’ve got to grab it around the neck to put it into submission.”
Sure enough, as soon as I managed to get put my hands around its throat in a stranglehold, it dropped to the ground, looking up at me for mercy.
“Good on ya’! Now throw it over.”
I don’t know how much the average sheep weighs, but I couldn’t even lift this one off the ground, never mind toss it over a five-foot fence. Laughing again, John grabbed it with one arm and threw it over the fence. It landed with a thud on its side, then scrambled to its feet.
“Let’s go,” John said, “I want you to meet Marg.”
We drove past several more sheep paddocks, various feed crops, and a few pens of cattle before arriving at the vineyard. Rows of grapevines stretched for acres toward the horizon, looking like leafy lane lines in a giant green swimming pool. A stout woman emerged from the middle of the third row of vines. She was about John’s age with short hair tucked into a bright pink knit cap.
“I’m Marg; g’day mate,” she said with a grunt, extending a dirt-stained hand.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” John said, and left.
He sure wasn’t spending much time showing me the ropes. I didn’t mind. I’d just eaten a big meal a couple of hours ago; it was warm and sunny, and Marg seemed nice enough.
“So what is it we’re doing out here, Marg?”
“Tending the vines,” she said, pointing to the new, wayward shoots not yet attached to the wire. “The trick is, you’ve got to get the twist tie on there just right. Then you’ve got to crouch real low and check each of these irrigation drips at the bottom of the base to make sure a rabbit didn’t chew it off.”
After about twenty minutes, Marg announced, “Time for a cuppa!” She pulled out a thermos and offered me a sip of tea. Then she pulled out a raw onion sandwich from her shirt pocket, took a couple of bites, and let out a tremendous belch.
“More tea?” She extended the thermos toward me, with a piece of onion hanging out of her mouth.
“Uh, no thanks.”
“Well, that’s enough work for today,” she said, taking off her gloves. We couldn’t have been there for more than an hour. On the drive there, John had told me he preferred hiring foreigners because “they work damn harder than the Kiwis.” He seemed to have a point.
The sun was getting lower in the sky, and I was in charge of making dinner. “I’d best be getting to the house, Marg,” I said. “See you tomorrow?”
“You bet, see you bright and early—well, not too early.”
BANG! A shot rang out on the front porch. I was so startled I dropped the cookbook I had been browsing. A moment later, John came into the kitchen, carrying a rabbit by the ears that was dripping with blood.
“Cook ‘er up into a stew,” he said, pushing it toward me.
“Not on your life!” I squealed.
At first he looked angry, then he grinned. “All right, I’ll give it to the dogs. Do you know how to make shortbread?”
“Desserts are my specialty,” I smiled.
When I was a kid, nothing made me happier than whipping up a fresh batch of brownies while belting out show tunes. Although I no longer had aspirations of becoming a singing pastry chef, cooking for John was the next best thing. He went through plates of my shortbread like they were handfuls of peanuts. Each day, I’d come in from the fields or vines an hour early, crank the radio, and sing at the top of my lungs as I prepared dinner and another round of cookies.
John McCaskey was quite a character: A short-tempered yet good-natured fellow who muttered curses under his breath on the tractor and laughed at his own dirty jokes. A lanky, Scottish immigrant, he loved playing the saxophone as much as he loved working the land.
One day, John called me down to the sheep barn. “Can you hold steady under pressure?” he asked.
I must’ve looked worried, because he added, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to castrate any more lambs.”
He escorted me into the main barn, where the temperature was at least 100 degrees. There was a team of husky, sweating men with clippers, shearing the wool off the sheep in record time.
“We got a lot of sheep to get through today, and your job is to keep ‘em moving. Get under the barn and push the sheep up the chute. When you’re done with a round of sheep, run back up here, get the wool from the shearers’ feet, and throw it in that tall burlap bin over there. When the sack is full, stomp it all down and sew it up with that twine. Got all that?”
I must have lost ten pounds that day, slapping sheep on the butt from under the barn, running up to the shearing stage to clear the wool, jumping into the burlap sacks up to my knees, and then hustling back under the barn. The men let me try my hand at shearing during the lunch break, and it was much harder than it looked. By the time we stopped at ten o’clock that night, we were all sweaty and exhausted, but also elated.
“Good work, mates!” John said, clapping the shearers on the back. “Pub time!”
Marge Piercy wrote a powerful poem called, “To Be of Use” about jumping in the trenches and getting done what needs to be done. That’s exactly what I loved about being on John’s farm. “Fence post needs fixing? No problem!”
