Sylvia's Farm Read online

  I honored my promise to read no books and spent my mornings in the barn staring at the sheep. There was a hole in my heart when I was with them, an empty place that grew larger as the mystery of them and what I was facing became increasingly evident. Slowly, they became accustomed to me. And gradually, one by one, they would approach, tentatively at first, increasingly trusting. Penelope, my see-through ewe, was the most brave. Or wisest. It was she who first allowed herself to be touched and fussed over. Every night I’d try to put them into the barn. At first it took more than an hour every evening. But gradually they began to come in more easily. “Come on,” I’d call. “Come on.”

  One day the sheep were to be brought to the barn for an inspection. We were in the R&DC sheep program and Phil Commings was committed to regular visits. Donald came with his two sons to gather in the flock. Arms flailed. Voices barked commands. The nine sheep were on the run. The boys drove them into the cow path. The sheep broke and leaped over the stone walls into the pasture. Gathering, scattering. Again and again. I moved into the cow path and began to call, “Come on. Come on.” The sheep headed toward me, a stampede. “Get out of the way! They’ll knock you down! They’ll jump the wall!” I didn’t move. I stood absolutely still and called, “Come on, come on.” And they did come to me, swerved, raced past me, and ran into the barn. I laughed. Donald scowled. His sons slapped each other on their shoulders and began to laugh and tease their dad.

  The sheep now come to me whenever I call, “Come on, come on.” Almost always. “Come on” has become, “Cahm ahn, cahm ahn.” Yankee for “come on.” I’ve added commands that I know the sheep all understand. “Don’t knock me down. I’m all you’ve got.” “You’re very bad girls.” “You’re very good girls.” “Go.” “Steele, put them in the barn.” “Enough.” “No good.” And “steady.” Many know their names. They know when we are visited by friends and when we are visited by customers who shall take their lambs. They know when they can get away with mischief and when they can’t. They know when they need me and when they don’t. But “Come on” was the first command they, as a flock, understood.

  Donald and I had gone to the County Clerk’s office in the Norman Rockwell Town Square in Delhi, New York, the county seat, and signed the documents making us legal partners in the sheep business. We were both proud of doing it that way. It made it seem both more serious and more lighthearted. No one but us believed the partnership would last. They were all correct. We were wrong. By November I was told the partnership had come to an end. I very much wanted the tension to end, but I didn’t want to end the partnership. He had a different point of view.

  Suddenly I was facing the first winter alone with the sheep. I was terrified. I had honored my agreement not to read anything about sheep and was, therefore, in total ignorance. By that point there were eighteen ewes and a particularly violent ram on the farm. The ram hated me. The ewes were uncertain. There was no glass in many of the barn windows. No doors that shut properly. No electricity and no running water. I was both out of work and out of money. December came in with a ferocity that has not been equaled since. There was not a day that the thermometer registered above zero. The weathermen said it was the coldest December in recorded history. I borrowed Raising Sheep the Modern Way from the public library, bought some extra flashlight batteries, and found a wooden chair on which to sit in the milk house of the barn. I stacked hay against the cracks of the doors, put plastic on the windows, and installed the ewes, minus the aggressive ram. I had no idea when any of the sheep were bred or when any would freshen. Some were huge. Some were not. Nor did I have any idea of what to do should the event happen. I propped up two flashlights on the milk house pipes and read the book, over and over again, and looked for signs that the sheep were going into labor. When I became too cold I’d run to the house for a while. And then go back down to sit on that chair, staring at the sheep.

  One ewe, Miss Pettigill, was so big she could hardly breathe. I’d sit on the steps of the milk house and let her put her head on my knee. It stretched her body out enough to give her lungs a bit more room. When she freshened, she forgot all about what a kind friend I had been. She decided immediately after her first lamb was born that I was the enemy, again, and ran from it and me until she had to lie down and deliver a second one and, shortly after, a third. She wanted to have nothing to do with them, or me, and ran wildly about the milk house. The floor had been strewn with lime, some straw, sheep droppings, urine, a lot of amniotic fluid, and three slimy placentas. In other words, an incredibly perfect place to begin to learn about lambing. The lambs sensed their dam’s panic and ran. So did she. I grabbed Miss Pettigill by the leg and held on for dear life. She dragged me across the floor. She landed on her back. I landed on mine, but I hung on. She lay still, trapped between the wall and me. I stretched my free arm as far as possible, trying to grab one of the little lambs as it raced around the lambing room. They were in a panic. So was I. I lay absolutely flat and grabbed, caught one, slid on my back to the ewe onto whose foot I was still hanging, and stuck the little lamb onto his mother. He nursed. Thank God.

  This is the story of the life here, written as it is being lived. It is about the rhythm of the days and their attendant nights, the flow of the seasons and their gifts of joy and sorrow. Above all, it is the story of all of us, my flock, my beloved dogs, the marmalade barn cats, the cows, goats, chickens, geese, pigs, and Giuseppe Nunzio Patrick MacGuire, the donkey. We have together created something far more than any of us could alone. This is our story.

  JUNE GRASS ROSE

  A FIELD IS coming back, the southeast corner, bordered by the brook and the cow path. It was my worst. The first year I had sheep, I put them on it to graze, goldenrod- and weed-filled as it was. The second year, the goldenrod and weeds were gone, having been chomped and stamped to death by the small flock of somewhat wild sheep. Instead was June grass, quite uniform and consistent, delicate, pale green at first, changing as the summer wore on to an airy delicate shade of rose, exquisite in the evening light. Underneath was beautiful green moss, and everywhere, spindly strawberry plants, bearing neither blossoms nor fruit. Needless to say, the June grass so pleasing to the eye while on an evening walk, was highly unpalatable to the sheep, hard stems and nose-tickling tops, at that. The sheep didn’t eat it, leaving that pasture as a last resort for the lazy days when they didn’t want to go too far from the barn. Gradually, white clover, the blessing of Delaware County, took over the adjacent field below the barn. Bit by bit the white clover inched forward to invade the field of June grass, grateful that the sheep removed the taller plants and weeds that shaded it from the sun. Please forgive me, June grass. I’m quickly reminded that my neighbor, Ellen Sanford, told me her father made very good hay from it, because, of course, he knew the exact moment when to cut it. But I don’t make hay, and you’re just not right for summer grazing for sheep. This year, however, I’ve found the flock grazing that field more often. Mark Clark helped me and my son, Joachim, clean the barn this year with his efficient little loader. He moved one load to my three wheelbarrows full of black gold to the fields. He spread manure where I couldn’t have. A third of my barn’s output went onto that field. I then spread the piles with a fork. It covered only a modest area, but it is progress.

  This morning I put on a jacket over my flannel shirt, Delaware County summer, and went out to see where the sheep were grazing, and to determine if they were to be moved. They were in the field of June grass, but was it quite June grass? Here and there were timothy, and daisies, and large pads of clover, white, and some dots of red, and sorrel, and mallow in bloom, and even some orchard grass. And there around the piles of bleached straw and the places where they were spread was green. Deep, dark, rich, thick green grass. The sheep are bringing the pasture back.

  I buy hay. From friends and neighbors, and, one year, Mr. Aitkens. I look longingly at the one last hayfield I’ve got left as it stands going to waste. It has not been possible to have it cut these past
few years, but I always hope. I’ve been watching hay wagons being hauled up and down the road and having occasion to ride about evenings along the back roads have looked wistfully at the round bales dotting the hills and the square ones through opened doors of partially filled barns.

  Of the two most exciting days of the year on my farm, one is the day when the first hay wagon is pulled up to my barn and is unloaded into the mow. Feelings of jubilation, gratitude, and humility always fill my heart on that day. I always want to do something special for the people bringing it, but harvest dinners don’t happen anymore. My dear friend Charlotte Kathmann told me about her neighbors cutting corn together, farm to farm, when she was a girl. The women and girls would get together and cook dinner for the noon meal for the men who worked in the fields. It sounded like so much fun.

  I buy hay now from a well-respected farmer two or three hills from here. But yesterday, a neighbor drove in and asked me if I wanted some hay his son had just cut. It would be ready to bale tomorrow. The price and terms of payment were both fair and kind. I still would need a great deal more bales for my flock’s winter needs, but this would be hay in the barn. I said yes. I’d been cleaning and arranging the top level of the barn all day. It needed only a few hours to finish and to create order out of some bedding I’d bought. “You’ve made my day,” I said.

  And so the wagons being hauled up the road today will pull off into my driveway and up the bridgeway into my barn. I won’t be making a haying dinner, not this year, anyway. But I will give my neighbor some flowers for his wife, a loaf of bread each for him and his son, some cash, and offer a prayer of gratitude to Him who made all things grow.

  PASTEL COUNTRY

  WE HAVE been living in pastel country for nearly two months. It started with a pale blue sky outlined in December’s delicate gray trees, and the flat planes of white snow. By January the gray and black outlines changed. Suddenly, its onset imperceptible, the hills became a deep rich rose the moment the sun began to set. Stark white, still pristine, rose-colored hillsides, and the sky in varying shades of blue. One afternoon last week the western sky was lined with blue and white stripes, as clearly defined as one of the woolly blankets we’re all covering ourselves with in winter. The blue was sharp and brilliant, with a faint wash of green.

  Greenleaf is set in Elk Creek Valley. Although it is deep in the mountains, it is bordered by hills on two parallel sides. I have almost never seen a sunset here, at least not the involving kind of sunset I grew up with on the Connecticut shore. So you can imagine the joy I felt knocking on my tenant’s door to tell her that, apparently in the way of welcome for her friend here on his first visit, we were indeed having a sunset. Spokes of rose in all shades broke out from a central hub at the sky’s edge, filling almost half the sky with color. The snow assumed a faint pink cast, and the sheep outside in the snow became tinted a pale rose as well.

  It is February now. A couple of days ago the cocoa brown branches and twigs of the willows bordering my property assumed a faint shade of green. There is a ewe in the barn whose life is leaving her slowly. She went down some weeks ago, still carrying lambs, I thought. There have been sheep in suffering who told me with their eyes to shoot them. This isn’t one of them. When fed and watered she looks content, surrounded by everyone else’s lambs. The look in her eyes says, “Water me, grain me, wrap me with bedding. I’m cold. But never shoot me. Not yet, anyway.” There was a casualty among the twins she had last March. The ram lamb died. The ewe lamb lived. She and her mother became Siamese twins. They moved as one. The lamb ran from me, always hiding behind her mother. It broke my heart. She was ever aware of my presence in the barn and pasture.

  One day, after I had long given up trying to tame her, the ewe lamb walked up to me and rubbed her face against me. She was asking to be petted. After I did, she began to spend less and less time with her mother. She now rarely lets me enter the barn without coming over to be admired and petted. What a lovely gift you’ve given me, my good old friend.

  One night, a week or two ago, I noticed my sick old girl was bagging. The next day, having spent too long in the house trying to get the fire going, I climbed down the ladder once more into the barn. She had just freshened. Her contractions had forced her backward, wedging her into a corner. The lambs were dead.

  The water to the barn has frozen. Water has always been the single most relentless source of discouragement in the barn. Each winter season brought some thin strand of hope, only to break into tiny fragments on the ice or snow or stone steps to the barn. Even a plan formed with energy and ingenuity gained only a few days of respite before failing. I carried water, each day, getting wet as the sheep struggled with me, vying for position, to be first to drink. As winter wore on, the prospect of getting soaking wet in the cold became more and more disheartening, and I’d bring down the water closer and closer to nightfall.

  The day after the first time the water froze, it suddenly thawed. The sheep, the rafters in the barn, and the neighbors, I’m sure, all heard my voice singing the first two lines of the Doxology, sung from the deepest regions of my lungs and my heart. There was no sound yesterday from the hydrant as I counted to three, the time it takes for the water to come both down from the well and up from the “frost-free hydrant.” I carried water from the house to Lady Fettiplace and Olivia and Alice in their respective jugs with their respective lambs, left the door open for the rest to find the snow, and left for my off-the-farm job.

  Despair is a luxury I can no longer afford. And I cannot allow so much as a twinge of discouragement to enter my heart. Not this week, at least. I must take a lesson from the sheep looking up at me at the foot of the barn ladder. She’s not ready to give up. I’m not, either. I think I may be able to adjust the well to restore the water when I get home, but that won’t be for hours. Thank God for the snow.

  The joy in the barn is in the form of a little black ewe lamb that has a white stripe down her nose and a couple more on her ears. She’s been named after her mother Ophelia Too Applebasher, Ophelia Applebasher for short.

  Ophelia is my largest sheep. Chocolate brown, with the most flawlessly beautiful profile of any sheep I’ve ever owned. She freshens too fast, triplets three out of four times, and has neither mother nor sisters in the barn to help, so if I’m not there when she freshens and the day is cold, her lambs are at risk. My timing was off by five minutes this year. All of my efforts to revive the last of the triplets failed. The second one managed to nurse with a little encouragement from his shepherd. His temperature rose rapidly when I put him and his older sister into a lambing jug. She, the firstborn lamb, pretty little Ophelia Applebasher, already had a round full tummy when I arrived.

  My daughter, Justina, anticipating the eventuality of a new metal roof going on the barn, sent me a color card of industrial paints. I dream of the willow green that is the color of some of the farm gates. It will be a subtle contrast of similar tone to the buffs and browns of the hillside pasture beyond it, the rose of the woods in early spring and late fall, the pale green of early summer, and the gray stone walls. It will match for one brief week in April the pastel line of willows bordering the brook beyond the creek. The ever-present snow is still beautiful to my eye. The delicate colors of winter remain pleasing. I’m powdering the top of my freshly baked Shaker Daily Loaf with flour, the white mountain loaf of my childhood. I’ve just realized what a white mountain loaf is. Now that I’m surrounded by them, I enjoy the one sitting on the blue and white plate on the table even more.

  RACING FOR THE GOLD

  HARRY GRACEY shot Lavinia Brandon the other morning in the barn. Lavinia, my oldest ewe, had been down for some time but mothering everyone else’s lambs from her ensconced position in the lamb creep, quite unwilling to die. The morning before, I had gone down the ladder to the sheep level of the barn. Lavinia’s alert and expectant face was not looking up at me. Instead, she was lying on her side, struggling and thrashing in a futile attempt to stand.

  I turned
her over and straightened her out. Blood was oozing down her face from a cut over her eye. I cleaned her up and fed her, but Lavinia was no longer the same. The next morning I found her wedged into the spot in which she had so long lain, her legs raw and bleeding from flailing about. Her eyes had lost the alert, eager, intelligent look I was so accustomed to seeing. They now expressed absolute agony. The moment had arrived.

  I called Robbie Kathmann, a dairy farmer down the road, who suggested that Harry Gracey might help me, and he so kindly did. I fed Lavinia one last bowl of lamb milk replacer—a mixture diluted with water and a shot of molasses is what had kept her going since she went down. Harry and I lifted her to a corner in the sun away from the others, and he shot her. Mercifully.

  There are now four left of that miscellaneous group of sheep, my starter flock Phil Commings drove in with that beautiful day nearly five years ago. Of my original girls, only Lady Fettiplace, Ophelia, Collette du Bac, and Amelia Simpson remain. They had ten lambs between them this year. Collette’s twins died due to a misadventure. Lady Fettiplace’s little ram, Sir Pegasus, will stay on to breed young stock. His sister shall stay as well. Ophelia’s little black ewe, Ophelia Applebasher, and Amelia’s little ewe, yet unnamed, shall stay. Sentiment compromises wisdom in my choices regarding these four.

  I’m not certain what it is that I hate most about being a shepherd. Is it when I am the direct cause of the killing, as in the case of Lavinia, or the indirect cause, as in the instance of a newborn lamb freezing to death because I lingered ten minutes too long over the morning’s coffee and its mother made an unfortunate choice in the dark, vacant, windy corner in which she freshened? Perhaps the worst is when I see my lambs trussed and chucked into the boot of a car or the back of a van, or maybe it is that horrible feeling that never leaves, going to the barn, six, seven, eight times a day and dreading that slow, searching walk around the perimeter, peering into the corners to see if death had climbed down the ladder before me. Sometimes it still feels too hard a thing to do to put that foot on the top rung and climb down.