Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [49]
But Ricky—Ricky didn’t have to wait for magic water—when the ice let loose over his way, he had himself a real honest-to-goodness crick, and it lasted all summer long! How I envied him this exotic proximity. During the spring of our friendship I was always eager to pedal over his way when Mom gave the OK. We’d meet at the culverts, choose one, clamber to opposite ends, then hang head-down to whoop back and forth. Our voices echoed flatly before dampening against the corrugations. We tossed pebbles at each other. They fell short and went ploop! or ricocheted off the ribbed steel with a compressed ping! Sometimes we played Poohsticks, simultaneously dropping two different-sized branches in the upstream end of the culvert before running across the road to the downstream end, hoping the stick we picked came through first.
In the first week of his fortieth lambing season my father climbed aboard a tractor (something he has done almost daily all those decades) and the knee of his trailing leg emitted a celeriac crunch, which, as it turned out, was the sound of his meniscus dismantling. He was instantly hobbled with pain, unable to bear weight, and confined to the recliner. We kids—all grown up now—take turns staying at the farm to help out. It is a chance for me to introduce Amy to a ritual that spanned my entire childhood, and I was happy yesterday when she walked with me to the barn and we discovered a sheep ready to deliver. I told her she could name the lamb.
In a practice dating back to the beginning, the lambs are named alphabetically. This was always a fun game—I remember long-gone fuzzballs named Herkimer and Knucklehead and Lillelukelani. Adherence to the alphabetical constraints was jovially strict, and led to fuzzy little creatures named X-ray and Zapata. The ledger of record was a clipboard hung on a nail. The pencil dangled on a string. The system remains unchanged.
In the barn, Amy was eager and attentive, watching closely and asking questions as the lamb emerged. It was stillborn. She cried a little, and we talked about it. I told her that sometimes surprises are sad. Then I told her once we had a lamb born with five legs and six feet, so we named him Spyder. Two hours later another ewe went into labor, and this time Amy saw twin lambs arrive alive. As they shook themselves and tottered to life, she smiled and chattered happily, and while I have attempted a career out of overthinking things, I suspect her smile was all the wider in light of her recently acquired prior knowledge.
I have taken night duty, and when the alarm sounds at 2:00 a.m. (rousing by habit and intuition, Dad rarely requires the uncouth tool), every lazy bone in my body—to say nothing of my cotton-bound brain—assumes a specific gravity designed to drive me deeper abed. I summon the strength to rise only by conjuring the fantasy of how sweet it will feel to drift off upon my return. By the time I am dressed and downstairs, I am reanimating my childhood. On weekend nights, we kids were allowed to accompany Mom or Dad on midnight maternity rounds. There was always a feeling of anticipation in coming down to the dark kitchen and bundling up for the trek to the barn. Beyond the weak pool of the yard light, the farm was socked in darkness. Wisconsin’s March is highly variable. Sometimes a soft wind was soughing in the pines, shushing through the needles and pushing the scent of melt. Sometimes the night was clear and deep-frozen. Sometimes snow was coming down. One