Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [51]
We stand and observe. Let the new family get to know one another. Mom kneels behind the sheep, checks inside to rule out quadruplets. Nothing. The ewe’s long push is over. Using another trick my father taught me, I guide the sheep to the pen by dangling the third lamb in my hands while slowly backing across the barn and into the small square pen. It takes a while—the mother wants to dart back and forth between lambs, so I carry two and Mom the other—but soon they are ensconced, the two oldest lambs already stumbling about in their jabby-stabby knock-kneed way. The breech lamb is worn out. After watching the first two lambs suckle, we try to help him latch on, but he’s tuckered. Dad says the emerging thinking is that immediate nursing isn’t as necessary as previously thought, so we’ll leave and let the family settle. Over the course of the coming day we’ll keep an eye on the little guy. Make sure he learns how to get his dinner. Mom jots the ewe’s ear tag number and the sex of each lamb on the clipboard, but we leave the name spaces blank. Amy can name them in the morning. We return to the house. The frozen air is bell-jar still. The sky is deep black, the stars pressing down brilliantly all around, and I am reminded that we are not beneath the constellations, but among them.
When I was a young boy and accompanied Dad to do the checks, once the lambs were dipped and penned and the clipboard record updated, and we were back in the house, he would disappear into the cellar and come back up with a mason jar of canned dewberries. We’d have a bowl. The dewberries were sweet, their dark red juice reminding me of the iodine in the baby food jar. Tonight, no dewberries. Mom is off to bed and I cross to the kitchen sink, where I begin to scrub my hands. I am soaping up when I realize my wedding ring is missing. It must have come off during the delivery, when my hands were slick with amniotic fluid. I grab a flashlight, retrace my steps, and spend a good hour diligently searching the straw. Nothing. Later some wisenheimer asks if I checked inside the ewe. Well, no. But perhaps next year we can expect a little miracle lamb born with a golden band around one ear.
When Dad hurt his knee, he went to the doctor’s office using his shepherd’s crook as a cane. The crook came to his shoulder so he kinda hung off it with both hands and hobbled along. If I was a twelve-year-old I would have been mortified at the image. In my forties I shake my head but feel secretly happy that unusual fellow is my father. He’s not sure if he’s going to lamb another year. If he does sell the sheep, it will be a big deal. He was gentle with all of his animals, but I suspect the sheep speak to him on a level the cows never did.
One day I asked him if he had sheep because of their biblical significance. “I’ve had people ask that before,” he said. “That’s part of it…” But then he doesn’t elaborate. He is quiet for a minute, apparently reflecting on forty years gone by. “The sheep were always good to us,” he says, finally. “We couldn’t make a living on them, but we made a quarter, or a half. A lot of years, they were the difference.”
Late March, and out of nowhere, we get an eighty-degree day. The winter has been low on snow in the first place, but with this absurd burst of heat, even the holdout patches are draining away. I take advantage of the temperature to begin establishing a pigpen in the overgrowth just downhill from my office. Somewhere in the wooded slash of valley below, a murder of crows calls as if spring is full-blown, but all the caw-cawing ricochets through leafless trees with an extra layer of reverberation that betrays the true season.
I’ll scub the pigpen together as best I can. Until a few decades ago this was a working dairy farm, and the patch I’ve chosen for the