Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [29]
When the last milk was poured, Dad rinsed the milkers and hung them for the morning while I busted hay bales and kicked flakes the length of the mangers. After feeding the calves, I shook out fresh forkfuls of straw beneath each cow. Then I killed the lights and listened for a moment as the cows nosed through the hay and prepared to bed down.
We left the barn together then, pausing a moment to turn and check Orion’s progress. He was above the barn now, just clearing the roofline, halfway through another all-night cosmic hurdle. Satisfied by the sight, we turned for the lights of the house.
Down here at our new place, I work in an office above the garage. While stumping the short distance across the yard to the house after writing late into the night, I often stop and study the silent structure, knowing my wife and daughter and the unknown unborn one are in there slumbering under the assumption that I have somehow been using the time to provide. Spinning a living from typing and talking and traveling is all well and good, but I can tell you the project does not bear up under scrutiny at 2:00 a.m. and ten below. Especially if you’ve just burned six hours and two pots of coffee tweaking a sentence fragment that holds together like cheese crumbles. Calvin Coolidge notwithstanding, sometimes persistence is just a batty cat slapping at a mirror.
I’m not trying to become the farmer my father was. I’m not even trying to become my father, although the parallels are lately multiplying. But I reconnoiter with his example constantly. Tonight I stand in the cold and study Orion for a long time. The first day I set foot on this place, I became one quarter-twist discombobulated and got it in my head that west was north. I know better now, but still encounter a fuzzy two-second delay when verifying my bearings. So it’s good to see something familiar in the firmament. From Orion I pivot to locate the Big Dipper, which never leaves the sky. This too is a comfort. Tracing a line from the base of the dipper to the lip and beyond, I locate the North Star. Dropping straight down to the horizon, I shift my gaze a few degrees west, where forty miles north my father is asleep, his children gone about their business in the world.
CHAPTER 3
I am in the office working after supper when Anneliese calls. She is having contractions. “I think they’re just Braxton-Hicks,” she says, using the term coined for the nineteenth-century physician who left his name to false labor, “but they’re coming pretty steadily.” She is just over six months along, and I am immediately light in the chest. When I get to the house she is breathing through a contraction that has lasted over a minute. I go into full Evelyn Woods mode on the stack of birthing books I was supposed to have read months ago, fingertipping the indexes and speed-scanning everything I can on premature labor. Ten quiet minutes pass, then Anneliese says, “Here’s another one.” Another follows five minutes later. And yet another forty-five seconds later. Then another five-minute gap. Even as I’m reading pertinent sections aloud to Anneliese, I’m trying to convince myself that it is nothing, but I am not feeling brave at all. Then the cycles slowly subside. By bedtime nothing is happening. I am a worry champ, and pull the stethoscope from my emergency medical kit to double-check the baby’s heartbeat. It’s there, but I check it three more times before we are asleep.