The Improbable Shepherd Read online

  Dorothy Hartly, my favorite historian of daily life in the British Isles, wrote that in as early as the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, a quick and clever young man with a gift for math and language could, in his lifetime, dramatically alter his social class if he applied himself to making a living at the great fairs that dotted the country.

  What I think I envy most in Thirkell’s world is the ready availability of people to help one another. Someone to bring one tea in a moment of crisis or exhaustion. How I have grown to hate waiting for hot water to drip through my single-cup coffeemaker that I use seemingly all day long. I’ve started making a whole-wheat Irish soda bread. While whole wheat is nothing I’ve ever developed a liking for, James Beard’s recipe with buttermilk is passable. I just bought raisins to try in the next loaf. It may elevate the bread from passable to acceptable. However if I am to have it this afternoon at tea, I have to bake it myself. Furthermore, I have to wash the bowl I used for the one I made two days ago, clean the wood ashes off my coffee table, and remember to buy more buttermilk if I ever get to the store again. Will the wish to have a cup or two of the Russian Caravan Tea that just arrived in the mail, on some finely sliced soda bread with a thin coat of butter on each slice in front of the fire following afternoon chores prevail over my reticence to make a mess in the kitchen once more? I don’t know. We’ll see.

  MY STORY

  THIS IS A story I wrote for the people who have come to hear me tell stories. And if I am right, it shall have some names of animals in it because people who read these stories love to hear the names, and it shall have some animals in it because people who like these stories also like to hear about animals. And it shall have me in it because I am the one both looking at it as it happens as well as living it.

  And so it shall therefore start with a tree. I have often been tempted to cut down a tree here and there around the yard or in the pastures. But cutting down a tree is a permanent thing, except in the instance of choke cherries or thorn apples. Then it becomes a semipermanent thing. As in the case of the choke cherry tree growing between the stone steps behind my back porch. I cut it down once or twice before the porch was built, a wooden frame over the erratic cement steps leading to the mudroom and summer kitchen. It grew back. The last time it grew back, it became an enchantment of white blossoms in spring and dark, red choke cherries come fall. But even more lovely was the way light fell on it from the kitchen windows, nighttimes. In the rare times I’ve sat in the dining room, evenings, which is at right angles to the porch, the light and motion of the leaves have been enchanting. The year before last, the tree died. Or began to. And I, full of objections to the erratic lines its barren branches made against the night sky, cut it down. It saddened me to see it gone. Opening this door to be outside became being too outside too suddenly. I didn’t like it without that tree. Too abrupt a transition from one place to another. It now grows back, lush green leaves looking like a pretty little bush rather than the tree it will become. There is another choke cherry tree, a nonbearing one (or is it two?) in the perennial border. I’ve often thought to cut them down, and have cut down the runners it sends across the garden that shoot up among the flowers and across the lawn. But summers, I’ve noticed from my bedroom windows, it forms a triangle, light and bright green, against the dark green of the pines across the road. It is a perfect triangle, and forms its reverse, nighttime darkness, dotted beautifully with a sprinkling of stars and planets and airplane lights. I count, sometimes, how long it takes a sliver of moon to make its way from one pane of glass to the next. I’ve lain sick in bed, on occasion, watching the light play across the leaves of the trees, wishing I could hold each moment for just a little bit longer so I could etch it on my memory. But I can’t. Too many leaves. Too quick the passing moment.

  There is a lamb who loves to sit in my lap, I’ve most recently discovered. She has followed me everywhere she could since she was a few days old. A very pretty thing. Tiny. Delicate. A Finn-Landrace eweling, in appearance. Because she’s driven me quite to the end of my patience as I find her in the house, in my room, under my feet, unexpectedly and often, I had not named her. Until yesterday. It has taken me all of her life, which encompasses an intense four months, to realize that what she wants most is to sit in my lap. And so it was not a surprise to me that yesterday, one of the most beautiful mornings I have ever seen here, she escaped through a break in the pasture fences that only she knows of, and made a direct dash across the lawn to where I stood looking at still another tree I had most recently decided to cut down, and was now glad I hadn’t. I sat down on the lawn and she ran up to me. The moment I put my hand out to her, my dog Samantha ran up to me as well. The lamb climbed into my lap. She put her head in the crook of my elbow as she pretended to fall asleep. Her name became Cordelia O’Shaughnessey at that moment.

  The lay of the land was virtually pleasing to my eye. The mock orange in front of that side of the house complemented the round choke cherry growing beside the stone outdoor living room in the far distance. The curve of the garden corresponded with the daylily border I had planted so long ago. I don’t remember doing it anymore. Halfway between them was a sturdy strand of sweet cicely, now in seed, its lovely and delicate white flowers gone. And slightly beyond it, stands an ash, a young ash, only about 25 years old. Round on top with a straight trunk. It has been pruned, over time, by both sheep and goats. It is the last tree to leaf out on this farm, looking stark and dead right through lilac and honeysuckle time. It now boasts of pale bright willow-green leaves, small and delicate. Lace against the deeper, richer greens of the surrounding hills. It is the latest tree I’ve thought to cut down, determined to rid my eye of all that is, or seems to be, both scraggly and dead. I didn’t.

  A lamb died a day ago. And one lived. I’d bought the medicine with which to treat them but it came too late for one, and barely just in time for the other. I held out hopes for the one who died. And had a heart full of despair for the one who lived. I still have a hard time believing that a small amount of clear yellow liquid in a bottle can make a difference in a life. And yet my mind knows it can and does. It is my heart that has trouble believing anymore.

  I brought them both into the house that rainy night. I didn’t want them to get soaked and die alone in the chill of a June night. Mountain air. I bottled them with my special mixture, including the clear yellow liquid that came in a very large, very expensive, very impressive bottle. In the morning, one was dead. It was the smaller of the two, my favorite ram lamb, one who shall stay forever as a breeder, who recovered. And wanted his bottle eagerly for the first time in days.

  How I have loved to see him run to me across the pastures as I open the gate and call to him. Up the porch steps he races to get his two-and-a-half bottles of milk replacer. And then off he runs, tail wagging with equal enthusiasm, back to the gate to return to the pasture. His name has not been chosen yet. In the meantime I call him little boy. “Come here, little boy,” I call. And I try to hold in my mind’s eye forever that one moment when he lifts his face and looks at me and begins to run across the field, tail making circles in the air.

  THE PATTERN

  THE DUCK HAS taken a fondness for goat’s milk. That is not good. She lives most of the time in the carriage house with some lambs who are being weaned and the goats. It means taking the big bucket outside, when she is inside, where it sometimes is augmented by a little rain when I am milking the next one or two. When the duck is outside I can leave the big cow milk pail inside as well and add to it the milk from the container that I put under the goats. Until one of the roosters and it may be the one who is married to the duck, one can see them together most days in my flower garden, then decided he, too, wanted to taste the milk. That became a problem. Milk in or milk out. Duck and rooster in or duck and rooster out. Then Cameron, my very nice and somewhat intimidated by Rebecca Penhaligan doe, decided she too liked goat’s milk. That created a more special kind of problem. Obviously, she is much taller than the duck an
d the rooster and so where to put the milk if I continued to fill the larger bucket from the smaller inside the carriage house. Outside was an option to be considered. However, the barn cat began to get wise to the smell of milk when I milked outside under the bridgeway and I’d offer her some. She rarely went into the carriage house, never to my knowledge; however, she has begun to show up at bottle time and milking time. I don’t really want to have to stop milking and run to the house with it before I’m finished with everything, including bottling the doelings.

  It took awhile before I figured out a routine of sorts and it almost works. When I can find some big hooks so the goats who are waiting their turn can have a lead cord attached to their collar and be attached somewhere away from the milking stand so they are not fighting with each other for grain, there may be a routine that works. Until I move them one and all to the lambing room, then it will start all over again. How to do it? How to do it? My mind doesn’t figure things out well in advance. At least not logistical types of things. I must improve on that score. Perhaps if I arrange to have everything well set up in the lambing room for them to move in the day after shearing it might be more efficient. Gillian MacDouglas is bagging and eating her grain very nicely, thank you. She is the last to freshen. Unless little Pansy Penhaligan is bred, but she doesn’t show any sign of it. Gillian is a sweetheart of a goat and shall live out her life here. Her sister, Glynnis, is skittish and difficult to handle. She won’t stay. Her kid is a buckling, for which I am grateful. Were he a she out of a skittish and unfriendly dam I’d be hard pressed to know what to do with her. A buckling is easy. They are sold. One especially fine Sable buckling is sold for a flock sire. The rest for meat. But I don’t want another temperamental goat in the carriage house. All of the young stock are dehorned. However, Cameron and Rebecca are not. Cameron was born in the summer and my vet cautioned me about the possibility of fly strike in the wound so she wasn’t disbudded. Rebecca came with horns. She is being boarded here, and is a dominant goat on my farm. Adelaide Merriman also came with horns eight years ago or so. The rest are far safer animals for me to take care of, as well as to be around each other. Rebecca harasses Cameron who gets along well with Gillian. I’ll be glad when Rebecca goes to camp this summer. However, Gillian, who shall be in milk by then, may go as well. To camp, that is.

  Spring has, however, reluctantly seemed to arrive. The lilacs are in bud, although I don’t know how they dare, it is that cold. The barn swallows moved in on May 5th per usual. The black, red, and champagne currants are heavily laden with blossoms and surrounded all day long by bees. Last year’s heavy manure application certainly paid off. I fully intend to match it over the next week or two. The manure is well composted; the well-rotted bottom of the pack is on the top of the pile outside the carriage house and well within wheelbarrow range. I have learned that a three-foot radius of manure around the currants is what they like the best; however, some bushes are so big that a three-foot radius from their outer edge would not only be over my carefully laid stone paths but, in some cases, well into the lawn. It has been my custom, as did Thomas Jefferson, to walk mornings, around the farm on this side of the brook. He rode and it took him a bit longer than it takes me. Nonetheless, I saw a spot where some additional black currants were needed to continue a line visually, from the approach to the house by the road. A little while later I came across some branches I had rooted last year which had five or six good-sized shoots and another half-dozen small bushy ones all in a row. Perfect to cut from the main stem I had laid down in the loose composted manure and fastened to the “part” at a bud jointure with a rock. I created about 10 more little bushes that way; however, this one was shaped perfectly to both fill the newly needed spot and create a new line of bushes.

  All of which brings me to the central pattern here. What to do next, or first, or first thing in the morning tomorrow. Because some floors in the house have been insisting on getting washed and I haven’t done laundry in seemingly forever. It is with gratitude that I’ve been coming across some unworn Salvation Army jeans with a price tag still on them or I’d not know what to do. It was impossible this year to dry sheets in the kitchen behind the wood stove as that was rarely lit and so there are probably all of the flannel ones in the dirty laundry and some of the plain ones as well. I buy sheets. This promises to be a rainy week which does not bode well for washing sheets but does bode especially well for washing woolen blankets and letting wind and rain kick out the wrinkles. And, while looking at the currants, jostaberries, and gooseberries, I was reminded of France, which is why my vegetable garden is comprised of rectangular plots bordered by stone paths. Neat stone paths now obscured by last year’s dead weeds. However, these glorious bushes, about 80 of them including small new ones, only about a foot high, all remind me how insulted they’d be were they not bordering neat little plots of vegetables. Just miserable weeds. Except for dandelions, of course, which I leave in because after a number of years crawling around in July and August looking for dandelions for the famous garlic, bacon, potatoes, and cider vinegar salad, it suddenly occurred to me—I am slow—to stop digging them out of the garden. Leave them in one patch as the vegetable that they are here, in this household.

  I started to ready the summer bedroom yesterday, in between all things. I usually move into it at the end of April or first of May. It is late this year. The room is now neat. The door and windows are dirty. My Art Nouveau writing desk is polished beautifully, looking as if an army of housemaids used beeswax on it. But the over-used winter bedroom and studio is also begging for a thorough cleaning. Dust is on the edge of every picture frame and covers all of the pretty little things I’ve arranged in my big desk. Covering it completely by the way, leaving no room on which to sew or draw or write. And accomplishing those three things is what that room was originally intended for.

  It is not hard to see the dilemma. Do I choose my tasks randomly, which, for the very first time in my life here I’ve been doing, or do I choose my roles and demarcate part of each day to them individually? Am I just the goat herd, dairy maid, or am I the gardener, the upper house maid, or the chatelaine of the castle? Do I mow all of the lawn in one day or in sections? Do I move the peonies from the bedding plot to the main perennial border and do the roses as well leaving the vegetables to Mr. Mulner? I’ve never accepted the fact that this house had three servants’ bedrooms plus having people in from East Meredith to work. I have always thought I could do it with proper organization. And money. This is the rub. I am not, no matter how much I want to think I am, those three live-in servants and the dailys from East Meredith and the farmer. However, I did, in between sentences, telling this story, write my order to the seed company for the vegetable garden. France always wins out.

  WEEDING THE WILDFLOWERS AND OTHER STORIES OF ADVENTURE

  JULY IS ACCOMPANIED by an intensity that is unique unto itself. The race is on, it declares. Vehemently. And I am intensely aware of it. June disappeared with reluctance. Some days I write down what I’ve done throughout the day. For some unknown reason, I tend to stop writing things down at about 11:00. Where the time goes remains to mystify me. The chickens take up far too much of it; however, they do reward me with eggs all day long. Yesterday were 21 eggs from 27 chickens, two of whom are broody meaning there were only 25 productive hens. I get two dollars a dozen from a store that I pass every week when I go to town. No extra gas money to deliver them! The price of their grain went up 10¢ per dozen eggs this week. I’m not going to raise the wholesale price yet because it is certain to continue to skyrocket over the next few weeks, and I am reluctant to raise my prices every week.

  Shelling bean seeds planted three days ago are sprouting before my eyes. Some little dark orange winter squashes planted only a few days ago are also sprouting. The black currants are turning color. The gooseberries are still green; however, there is hope. They shall soon turn alizarin crimson. My ancient bushes mildewed badly last year and I hadn’t hopes for their survival; however,
they are bearing heavily at the moment. Gooseberry fool!! One bush managed to set down a long stem a year or two ago which then rooted! Taking a chance, I pulled it up this morning, found it unattached to its parent with a root ball firmly embedded in the composted manure that I surround them with. I’ve only learned this year how essential that is. In a three-foot radius. I’ve been applying it, heavily; however, haven’t achieved the six-foot diameter yet. The currants have been under siege and behave accordingly, punishing me with quiet and remorse. My dog, Glencora MacCluskie, dug up two in an ambitious attempt to shovel out the manure for me. She is in the habit of digging a hole to China in the composted manure pile. It is an efficient way to loosen it up for me to cart it to the gardens so I let her. I’ve been putting buckets full around the jostaberries as well as the black and red currants. So, when she noticed the manure around the two mature bushes, she promptly dug it all up again. One bush was completely defoliated. I was heartbroken, it was three years old, and tucked it back into the ground. Lo and behold, a few weeks later new leaves appeared and are continuing to appear.