I SELDOM THINK ABOUT how young Ben is, because he’s smart and competent and worries at the skill level of a forty-year-old. But he recently made a few days’ holiday of turning twenty-one and getting married to a girl he met in Future Farmers of America. She’s from a cattle family. Then, at the beginning of the week, he called me with a note of urgency in his voice: “I’m back! Come in and help me deworm.” I’m honored by this panicky call from the Real: to be valued as a common worker calms my spirit, agitated by too much abstraction. What Ben tells me daily, though not in words, and what the sheep tell me in their own language is, you are enough.
After our little hiatus, I relish the patient work with animals—patient, if not always perfectly skillful. Leaving the barn, I carry a sense of groundedness and practical focus that seems to improve even my driving. Tending sheep is a more symbiotic relationship than anything except perhaps motherhood. In some odd way I need these sheep to feel wholly myself.
We drenched about forty ewes and rams, quite large ones (eighty to three hundred pounds). I discovered that if I managed them in a small pen, I could control them easily (this being another operation where you sometimes have to sit on them). Drenching is an alternate deworming procedure; you suspend the vermifuge like an IV and slide the nozzle of the drench gun, which resembles a caulking gun, along the animal’s tongue and insert it deep in its throat. Unpleasant as it sounds, the sheep don’t seem to mind this much and it’s a quick procedure. One squirt and off they go. It was relatively easy, and I proudly drenched most of the flock on my own while Ben went about his business.
Then I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing in their journals. Most wore the thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses favored by intellectuals. Their clothes were faded to a precisely fashionable degree: you can buy them that way from catalogs now, new clothes processed to look old. The intellectuals looked at me in my overalls the way such people inevitably look at farmers.
I dumped a lot of sugar in my espresso and sipped it delicately at a corner table near the door. I looked at them the way farmers look at intellectuals.
TODAY I ATTEMPTED my first solo shearing. Rather like the society hostess who broke a teacup to set her clumsy guest at ease, Ben nicked the demonstration animal five or six times before handing me the electric clippers. He told me he had cut the ears off two ewes yesterday and had to suture them back on. My first shearing took about an hour and left half an inch of wool all over the animal.
Next, with light, relentless rain beating on the corrugated iron roof of the barn, we accomplished step one of fixing the prolapsed rectum of ram #5004. First Ben cut the syringe casing with hoof trimmers and wrapped it in surgical tape so it would stick inside the sheep. The sheep’s rectum, when we had him flipped over in the tipping cradle, protruded four inches. Ben slid the casing into the protrusion and banded it with the elastrator, a device we use for castrating. Then he squirted everything in sight with Betadine and gave the sheep 5 cc of penicillin in each glut. (The ram is also on cortisone to impact its coughing; we have to medicate these sheep a lot.)
Ben is going away for the weekend and leaving me in charge of feeding, chores, and ram #5004.
I have just finished reading The Hot Zone, a biomedical thriller about an outbreak of Ebola virus; while Ben, with no gloves on, paws around in the sheep, while rectal tissue flies all over and lands on my favorite overalls, I tell him about how viruses jump species.
“The blood of an infected monkey can be absorbed through the skin,” I report, handing tools like a good surgical nurse.
“If I’d been gonna get it, I’d ’a got it,” Ben drawls. This is his response to most of my hygienic proposals.
As we wash up in our minimalist way, in the same sink where Ben does dinner dishes and tosses the syringes to soak, I evoke rolling hills and farms, villages, and little cities of viruses all living on the head of a pin. Rolling around in an intricate dance. Choirs of microscopic seraphim.
I can see that my exhortation has gotten to him. “That God would allow that,” he mutters. “It makes me wonder why I go to church.”
I GOT TO THE BARN at eight-fifteen this morning, but Ben’s new wife, Marge, had already done chores. She was waiting for me, the big sheep specialist, to inoculate #5004 with cortisone and penicillin. So I did. As we were herding the rams back into their pens, Marge picked up a revolting object. “What’s this?”
“Whoops. That’s #5004’s butt plug.” Obviously, he had coughed out the syringe casing.
“Ben will have to fix it on Sunday,” Marge said.
A dangerous possibility loomed, however, which Ben had warned me about: that the ram could shuck his casing without getting rid of the elastrator band. The band would then strangulate the rectum and allow no egress for fecal material. “I’m afraid we’ll have to fix it now, otherwise he’ll be impacted by Sunday,” I bravely told her.
Before he left, Ben had given me a lecture on retrieving the green rubber band by snicking it on the prongs of the elastrator and cutting it with a bandage scissors. (A blunt crochet hook would be the ideal instrument for this, and from now on, I’ll never leave home without one.) I had listened to Ben’s instructions with the attention one gives to stewardesses on transcontinental flights who drone about the remote possibility of a loss of cabin pressure: surely I will not be called upon to deal with this.
Ram #5004 is so vexed with us that he has thrown himself full tilt at the slats of the feeding bunk and wedged his head. This turns out to be a fine position for us to work on his bum. Marge bends down to look at the black fringe of necrotic tissue and says hopefully, “I think the band has slipped off.”
“Marge, you are in denial.” The laws of physics dictate, I believe, that the band—wound tight around the rectum—will have been sucked up inside the ram.
I slip my sensitive violinist’s fingers into the sheep’s anus (naturally we are out of surgical gloves), whisper a charm against anthrax, and feel for a tight rubber band. It’s there, and it’s easy to catch with the elastrator, easy to snip. I have, in effect, reversed Ben’s earlier procedure but assured #5004 a comfortable weekend. We squirt the anus with bright yellow Furazolidone and leave behind a happy sheep.
Then we go into the kitchen and wash up. “I could never do what you just did,” Marge tells me. Then the farm bravado kicks in. “I could if I had to.”
“Sure you could.” I wash in the kitchen sink for five minutes, then wash in the bathroom for five more. Then I go home and scrub my hands with bleach.
I have heard Ben say he fantasizes the stink of necrotic tissue all day. I believe it is not an hallucination but some mechanism of the biology of smell: pheromones or something remain on your body. All the bleach of Araby will not sweeten these little hands.
But at least these hands have been useful, for a change.
BEN CAME IN this morning after being away since Friday to find one of the ram lambs dead—not the one we had been fussing over all weekend but one that had seemed perfectly healthy. We loaded it onto the pickup and Ben drove away to dispose of it at the medical waste facility, leaving me to feed the stock.
I double-check my work and tend to move slowly with the feeding, so by the time I was halfway down the barn the hungry old rams were in a snit. The biggest, whom we call Butthead, a three hundred fifty-pound ram with the face of a camel, managed to push through a wired gate and get out. I hurried to secure the doors so he wouldn’t