Coop_ A Year Of Poultry, Pigs, And Parenting Part 4

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 fuzzb.a.l.l.s 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-a.s.sumes 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 night when big flakes were lazing past the yard light like feathers from a burst pillow, I went to check the sheep with Mom. When she held the iron gate open, I stepped through and the top of my head brushed the underside of her outstretched arm. "My goodness," she said. "Pretty soon you won't fit under there!" I felt eight feet tall and strode the rest of the path with shoulders squared.

Every trip to the lambing barn was charged with antic.i.p.ation. As we looked over the flock, we listened for the sounds of labor or a newborn bleat. The animals were settled, resting like woolly boulders with their legs folded and hooves tucked beneath their bodies. If you stood in the quiet, you could hear them working their cud. Audible human mastication drives me nuts in a split second, but for some reason I find the sound of sheep chewing a soothing nocturne. An animal in distress does not bring up a cud, and all that m.u.f.fled molar work-with regular pauses to swallow one bolus and bring up another-sends a subliminal message of contentment. When I was young I would climb the haystack into the rafters, then curl up and simply listen.

Tonight I hear an infantile bleat before I reach the barn, and when I straddle the fence and cross to the straw, I find a young ewe lying on her side and straining. She has one hind leg in the air like a roast turkey. There is a fresh-born lamb beside her, and as I approach, she presses out another. Arriving in a slithery amniotic gush, it plops wetly to the straw. Encircling its nose with my fingers, I milk its nostrils and mouth clear of fluid, then stand back to watch its ribs bow in and out as the first hacking breaths transpire. By the time it shakes its ears loose (this always reminds me of an accelerated version of the emergent b.u.t.terfly uncrinkling its wet wings after escaping the chrysalis) I am experiencing the standard moment of marvel at how the whole deal works. The ewe has turned, snuffling and chuckling as she licks the amniotic fluid away, roughing and fluffing the tight wool curls so they can air-dry. As usual, the other sheep ignore the goings-on, with the occasional exception of the yearling ewes. Having never given birth, they sometimes sniff the lambs or the hind end of the laboring ewe curiously, their ears c.o.c.ked forward in a mixture of curiosity and alarm as they nose the amniotic sac dangling like a water balloon.

Dad keeps a baby food jar filled with iodine in the barn, and I retrieve it now, removing the cap and lifting each lamb so I can thread the umbilicus into the ruby liquid. I do it the way I remember Dad doing it, clapping the jar tightly against the lamb's belly, then tipping both back simultaneously so the umbilicus gets a good soak, a practice intended to prevent navel ill. The lamb is left with a circular orange stain on its abdomen. In a week or so the umbilicus will turn to jerky and eventually drop unnoticed to the straw.

By the time I have finished with the two lambs, the ewe has gone to pushing again. I ease around behind her. I'm hoping to see a pair of soft hoof tips cradling a little lamb snoot. The hooves are there, sure enough, but they are dewclaws-up, and there is no snoot. Bad sign. These are the back legs. Breech delivery. I hustle back to the house and wake Mom. Dad has always shouldered the bulk of the lambing ch.o.r.es, but defers to my mother for tricky deliveries. She comes armed with delivery-room experience and delicate hands. Dad's hands are not overlarge, but they have a sausagey thickness brought on by manual labor and are therefore poorly suited for navigating obstetrical tangles.

I get back to the barn before Mom and find the ewe panting with the lamb half out-its head, shoulders and front legs still lodged in the birth ca.n.a.l. It appears there is no time to wait, so I grab the lamb and pull it the rest of the way out. Its head is still inside the amniotic sac. I clear the nostrils and mouth, but there is no breath. I give a couple of pushes on the ribs and dangle the lamb by its back legs, which looks drastic but allows fluid to drain from the air pa.s.sages. When I place the lamb on the straw, its flanks flutter, and then I hear the familiar crackle of air working into the lungs. Shoot, the little feller's off and running. Mom arrives. Minutes later the lamb gives a high-pitched bleat, and I am just plumb happy.

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 s.e.x of each lamb on the clipboard, but we leave the name s.p.a.ces 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 pigs seems to be roughly where the barn once stood. The remnants of a paddock-weathered planks spiked to railroad ties sunk vertically in the earth-still stand along one edge of a long concrete slab that appears to have functioned as a feed bunk. The rest of the fencing is mostly teetering or collapsed. Several of the wooden posts are rotted off at ground level. But enough of one corner remains intact that I believe I can close it off and create s.p.a.ce adequate to contain a pair of pigs.

One little farmstead, and there is so much to learn. In the odd available moment, I make explorations. On a previous nose-around I discovered several steel cattle panels in the brush, and today I go about extracting them. It's a sweat-making, itchy task. This early in the year there are no nettles or poison ivy, but the panels are trapped in skeins of wild cuc.u.mber and woody twists of grapevine deep within six-foot-tall banks of burdock. Furthermore, a few tenacious staples still hold fast to the posts. Diving in with my fencing pliers, I cut and yank and tug. I have always regarded brute force as an acceptable first option. Eventually I free the first panel. When I drag it out into the open I'm speckled with dirt and duff, and my shirt is so gnarled with burdock burrs it looks as if I've been swarmed by a horde of miniature hedgehogs. I dump the panel on the dead gra.s.s and burrow in after the next one. Once I get off my lard and rolling, I am a sucker for grunt work, where the most difficult problems are solved by getting a better grip and putting more heave in your ho. While the bones and meat wra.s.sle, the mind is free to sort and ponder.

The project goes well. In just under sixty minutes I have six panels flat on the dead gra.s.s of the paddock. Brand-new, these panels tally up around sixteen bucks apiece at Farm & Fleet. I congratulate myself on being self-employed at right around a hundred bucks an hour. Sadly, this fiscal spike is what your statisticians call an "outlier" and is unlikely to skew long-term results.

With the panels at hand, I set about fashioning the pen. In the corner I have chosen, several panels are still upright and attached to relatively st.u.r.dy posts. A twist of wire here, a staple driven there, and they're pig-worthy. In another spot a gaping hole has been torn in the panel-they are made from heavy-gauge welded wire, so it must have been someone careless with a front-end loader. Back in the brush I find a short section of panel that covers the gap to near perfection. I wire it in place with short lengths of electric-fence wire snipped from a tangle I found twisted around a decrepit plastic insulator tacked to one of the railroad ties. When the patch is in place, there is still a small vertical gap about the width of a piglet. Following another rusty strand of electric-fence wire into a patch of blackberry stalks, I find a deformed electric-fence post. It is bent in such a manner that I am able to weave it in and out of the panel on either side of the gap to form a rebar suture obstructing the hole. As much as I would like to have a spotless, squared-up operation, I need only look around the rest of my life to know it ain't likely, and furthermore, having recently priced fencing supplies while resting in the bathroom with the latest Farm & Fleet catalog, I am getting hooked on the idea of salvage in terms of budget enhancement. I wiggle-waggle a steel post ($3.25 new) loose from the old fence line and drive it to extend the reach of the pen, the thaw having been such that the earth here is soft.

I work well into the afternoon. By the time I decide to hang it up, I have formed a three-quarters-sided enclosure and am surprised to find my shoulders sunburned. I am snugging the last twist of wire down tight when a fly buzzes past. The sound is out of place for the season. Perhaps the world is changing. But there could be snow tomorrow. The fly should not get his hopes up.

The culverts where Ricky and I played still remain. The tubes are sunk deep and solid. Should you run that stretch of Beaver Creek Road, you will detect no change in the hum of your tires as you pa.s.s across the blacktop above. Depending how fast you're flying, you may fail to even note you've crossed the eponymous creek. When Ricky and I heard cars coming we would scramble off the culverts and hunker in the ditch, below the sight line and hidden in the gra.s.s. No driver ever spotted us.

In winter the ditches that fed into Beaver Creek were frozen solid, and in the summer they clogged and went to sluggardly soup, but during the melt the water moved with a pristine chuckle. Once while we were down out of the wind and the sun grew hot on our backs, Ricky knelt and drank deeply from the ditchwater, telling me to do the same. "Go ahead," he said. "This is how you survive." The water ran so clear above the tan sand, you could spot the individual grains. It's pure pure, Ricky said of the water. You can see see it's pure. And so I drank too, and deeply. Later, when my mother heard, she told me about giardia and protozoa. To say nothing of dead skunks and Atrazine. it's pure. And so I drank too, and deeply. Later, when my mother heard, she told me about giardia and protozoa. To say nothing of dead skunks and Atrazine.

Ricky had an army surplus shovel. He carried it everywhere. It had a stocky wooden handle like a billy club, and you could fold the spade back flat to make it even more compact. On the opposite side of the spade was a pick that folded out at a right angle. Ricky and I were forever digging forts and hideouts. I recall a buried culvert with a trapdoor, but surely this was one of Ricky's dreams and not a reality. Although the memory is precise enough-I see it somewhere near the machine shed and up against a row of Norway pines-that if Ricky were here, perhaps he could tell me that indeed it was so.

Once Ricky invited me to lunch. I called Mom and she said it was OK. I remember two things: there was a partially a.s.sembled large-block engine on the floor in the living room, and we had runny eggs. The runny eggs were a novelty for me. No offense to my mother, but I had never seen a fried egg presented in any manner deviating very far from vulcanized. I remember now that Ricky's brother Alan was at the table with us. Alan wore old army jackets. Several years later, he killed a man. I read about it in the Chippewa Herald-Telegram Chippewa Herald-Telegram. There was trouble involving Alan's and Ricky's sister. Alan put four bullets in the man's chest and went to prison.

I have always thought of my friendship with Ricky as spanning several years, but having gone back to look at photographs and having spoken with my mom, I realize the friendship was at its peak that single spring and was probably over by autumn. We never had a falling-out, and Ricky never told me to get lost. There was just a slow dissolve to other arrangements. I think it probably had to do with our age difference. Once the summer ended and we returned to school, Ricky was headed around the bend to high school, while I remained in the grade school wing. From his perspective I suspect the social gap was insupportable. My last memory of the young Ricky is sad. We were on the school bus, headed home. I was in the seat ahead of Ricky, sitting sideways so I could talk to him. One of the rough boys, a stocky football player, barged up the aisle and demanded that Ricky move from the window. When he didn't move fast enough, the bigger boy dove into the seat and landed on him, heavily. Ricky was holding that army shovel on his lap, and when the lunkhead dropped on him, the metal edge of the blade drove into Ricky's thigh. It didn't break the skin, but it hurt terribly. So terribly that Ricky burst into tears, and the big boy laughed at him. I remember trembling angrily at the big boy but being too small to do anything about it, and ashamed that Ricky-my older friend, my hero from the ditches-should have to cry in front of me.

I work on the pigpen two days in a row. My brother John said I could have his old hog feeder, so I run up north to retrieve it, using the trip as an excuse to swing by Farm & Fleet, which, as a guy likes to say, is "right on the way."

It usually is.

My favorite thing about Farm & Fleet has always been the smell of fresh tires, but the livestock corner holds its own with a potpourri of alfalfa cubes, Terramycin crumbles, horse vitamins, and the malty sweet scent of milk replacer mix. When I pa.s.s the stacks of rough paper sacks containing calf starter, the smell of moist grain and mola.s.ses reminds me that we ate it by the handful when we were kids. Dad called it "calf candy," and it wasn't bad. Most of it was fortified with antibiotics, so we rarely got the scours. Over in the feeder section, where the galvanized grain scoops and hay racks are for sale, I pick up a heavy rubber pan for feeding slop. Then, with a rough idea in mind of how I might construct a watering system for the pigs, I also load the cart with an adjustable spring-loaded spigot, some tubing, and a bagful of pipe clamps and plastic reducers. As I head for the checkout I pa.s.s a rampart of salt blocks piled on pallets just the way Dad used to store them. Each cube is roughly the size of a car battery. We used to drape ourselves over the stack side by side and lick the blocks. The salt was coa.r.s.e against our tongues, like licking fine-grain sandpaper. If we kept at it too long, our tongues got raw. Dad always got the reddish brown blocks with trace minerals-there were no goiters in this family. I'd give the blocks a lick now, but I don't want to freak out the guy watching the security cameras.

Back home, I rig the waterer, using a plastic barrel I got from my friend Mills. I mount the waterer on a hastily arranged tripod, and the elevation is sufficient so that the water runs down the hose and out the spigot. I am not much of a talent toolwise, but this has gone well, so when I am done I stand back and give it the cla.s.sic male postproject lookover and am satisfied. After two days shirtless in the freak March sun, I am deeply burned. This is medically foolish, but here up north we worship the sun in big gulps.

A week later, and it is a gray, mist-spitting day. The warm weather has continued, with a moderation from ridiculous to mildly unseasonable. Amy and I are stacking firewood. She is expected to pitch in as standard procedure, but this time it's a bit of a shanghai, as she is being compelled to stay home and work while Anneliese runs errands in town. This is the promised consequence of a recent in-store meltdown. She is weepy at the get-go, but then as so often happens if one maintains one's parental resolve and resists either cave-in or eruption, about twenty minutes in we are happily chatting, and by the time we stack a half-cord, she is flat-out jabbering. "I'm glad I didn't go to town!" she exuberates at one point, and it briefly strikes me that this calls into question the very efficacy of the punishment, but I abandon this train of thought as unproductive. Sweating as I always do when I do anything more physical than lift a pen, I tell her about my friend Frank, whose father taught him that firewood warms you twice-once when you split and stack it, and once when you burn it. I predict by the time Amy is nine, "Firewood warms you twice" will make her list of Top Five Phrases Most Likely to Make Me Roll My Eyes at the Old Guy. Somewhere from the piney draw below us comes a pheasant's sore-throated squawk. Of course we cannot know, but we wink at each other, a.s.suming it's Mister Big Shot in hot pursuit.

We work for two hours. Then we spend a little time picking up the usual bits of yard garbage revealed when the snow retreats. All the bare ground reminds me that I have promised Anneliese I will make a cold frame for the garden, so I wander around the sheds rustling up sc.r.a.p lumber and an old storm window, a box of drywall screws, and two rusty hinges. In about twenty minutes I clatter together what could pa.s.s for the junior high shop project of a three-fingered monkey, but then I cut myself some slack and declare it evocative of a sculpture I once stumbled across in a stairwell at the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York City. Amy and I scratch up a patch of ground near the spot where Anneliese's mother had last year's garden, and then we plant lettuce, radishes, carrots, and some parsley. It's a rush job, and we'll see how it goes. The ground is heavily threaded with earthworms, and we discover a stand of garlic shoots already four inches tall.

I set Amy free then. She runs off to play with Fritz the Dog, a German shepherd and one of two dogs we are sitting for friends. I walk across the yard to store my tools in the old granary. The day is still misty, and twinkling beads of precipitation hang from the underside of the apple tree's slenderest branches. Down in the valley the pheasant is still squawking. In the yard, a male mourning dove drops groundward and lands just behind his female companion. He hops toward her tail, then flutters just above her until she flits briefly ahead. He follows, hops, and flutters again. A lighter-than-air tumbling act, they hopscotch each other all across the lawn until I come too near and they spook into a wing-whistling takeoff. At first burst, white bars flash from beneath their gray-brown wings; then they swoop to roost atop the granary, settling nervously atop the ridge cap, dipping their heads and side-glancing my approach.

Inside the disused wire-frame corncrib just beyond the granary door, two juncos are chasing each other in abbreviated figure eights. Between flights the juncos drop to the circular concrete floor of the crib and scamper their own fluttery do-si-do, the rain-slick slab an impressionist mirror reflecting their jitterbug. Inside the granary I see barn swallows daubing a nest in the rafters. We live in a time when earth cycles are in question. I look at the yard-frost-free and soaked, already with an undertone of green-and the trees with their buds preternaturally frayed, and I think there is certainly evidence for discussion, but then I look at the evidence of all the birds this morning, and it is clear some cycles remain resolutely intact. Gray and wet it may be, but the birds are sunny in love.

There are the usual deadlines, so I climb the path back to the office. I am squeezing all the pig-penning, wood-splitting, cold-framing, and daughter-consequencing in between the desk and road time that pays the bills, and looking around me at all the relentless evidence of time and seasons pa.s.sing, I hear the little voice telling me that a guy ought to pare down. We are a breathless society. I love what I do and am grateful to do it, but I am hooked into short-winded cycles of my own, and a simple move to the country does not stop the clocks. It strikes me that this morning's ch.o.r.es should have ended not with me checking the time and switching the computer on but with Amy and me taking a long stroll into the valley, to learn the land together. This room above the garage gives me a wide view of the place, and I can see her in the yard beside the granary, squatting in her pink rubber boots with her arms wrapped around her shins, nose to nose with Fritz the Dog, who is currently chewing on a dead rabbit. As I wait for the computer to boot, I watch Amy lean in for a better look as Fritz gnaws away at the rabbit's hind leg. She turns her head this way and that, studying the carca.s.s from every angle as the dog grinds through hide and muscle, working the skull back to his molars so he can crack it and taste the brains. When he curls his lip and pulls at the guts, Amy leans in so close I expect her to topple. With no other dog to compete, Fritz is eating leisurely. A good fifteen minutes pa.s.s before he is nosing the final morsel-a front paw-around in the gra.s.s between his own front paws, and Amy is still squatted there, transfixed. Anneliese and I constantly second-guess ourselves as parents. We wonder if we are sometimes too strict regarding issues such as the enforced wood-stacking. We wonder about the effects of me being on the road as much as I am. We wonder if we are projecting our idea of country living too heavily on her childhood. We wonder whether we are cheating her of our own happy public school experiences by homeschooling her. Whatever the case, I look at that little girl out there, now on all fours to watch the unlucky rabbit's foot disappear down the dog's gullet, and I think, well, it's not like there's nothing to do.

Ricky died not so long ago. His obituary was a surprise, even thirty years down the road. There had been no contact, although I saw him a couple times in his truck, an old L-model International he had converted to four-wheel drive. I was in college at the time, and Ricky was helping Dad with odd jobs and logging. We said h.e.l.lo, but he was whip-thin and furtive, and the conversation didn't go anywhere. Later I read in the local weekly that there was trouble at the grocery store and when the cops found Ricky walking afterward he had a gun, but he gave up quiet and went to jail. And then he was dead-not young, but too soon, and alone in a small apartment. I never asked how. I made it graveside and stood in the cold wind while one of his friends put a boom box on the headstone and played a song I should have written down because now I can't remember. His daughter was there, with the same dark eyes I remembered from Ricky the boy. Hers were reddened with mourning, but she was wearing an army dress uniform, and you could see her standing tall because she knew it would have made her daddy proud. Afterward we went to the McDonald's right across the street from the cemetery and we all had some coffee like Ricky had in that same McDonald's every day for the last several years. Maybe he'd seen it coming clear back when we were kids. He had some sadness on him. It came built in.

My friends Andy and Wendy helped me put together a video essay about Ricky and the culverts for Wisconsin Public Television. Then a magazine asked me to write about my favorite place in the world. The question is unanswerable (there is a mountain in Carbon County, Wyoming, that pulls at me like the moon; there is a pine tree near here that fits the curve of my back; once I stood in a ruined Welsh castle and felt a thousand years old), but I chose the culverts for that, too. Ricky's daughter saw the television piece and wrote me a letter. When I started the magazine essay, I wanted to reread the letter, so I dug through the piles on my desk until I found it. When I pulled the folded paper sheets from the envelope, a pair of photographs fell out. They were of Ricky-when I opened the letter the first time they had stuck inside and I hadn't seen them. In rough notes toward the essay I had mentioned Ricky's dark eyes but wondered if I was recalling them accurately, as memories have a way of conforming to our stories the more we tell them. But there in those photos-one of Ricky as a young man and one of him older, from the years I didn't know him-were the very eyes memory conjured. I must restrain my speculation; there was so much more to this man than my few stories predicated on our childhood days, the odd newspaper clipping, and a funeral. But looking at those eyes now, I think Ricky knew early on he wasn't suited for this world. I think he carried that army shovel figuring if worse came to worst he could at the very least dig in. Thing is, we never did finish any of our hideouts. I think Ricky died still digging.

You learn not to pretty these things up. You learn to take them as they are. I go to the culverts one day and just sit quiet. Two steel tubes and a halfhearted creek: I guess I could do better for a favorite place. But grandeur is for postcard trips. For the long haul, I want the click and trickle of flat water moving, the shelter of the gra.s.s, a road close to home. The chance to slip from sight at the sound of motors. I throw a pebble for Ricky, but I'm not looking for angels in the tag alders. I just watch the creek flow from beneath me and out of sight around the bend. When I was a kid I yearned to follow that water-on a raft, in a canoe, maybe simply barefoot with a stick. Now I just dangle my boots and let the cold spring air make my nose run, and I watch Beaver Creek slide smooth and quiet until it reoccurs to me that the world is constantly trying to bring everything level.

I have gone in to Eau Claire to hang out with some of my firefighter pals (including my friend Mills) at Station #5 when I get the call from Anneliese. "I'm having contractions," she says. "I'm not sure this is it, but they seem to be getting stronger."

"Are you saying I should come home?" I ask. Specific instructions work best.

"Yes."

The crew is just making supper, so they send me on my way with a tin of homemade lasagna. Someone wrote "Good Luck!" on the container. I thought that was nice. Driving home through the lowering light, I don't know what to think. In fact I am numb to the idea of what's happening. When I get home, I stow the car in the garage and walk in to find Anneliese. She's on the couch. I hug her, ask her how she's feeling. The contractions are steady, she says. Cripes, I think, here we go. I get a watch and time a few. Then I call my mom. And then Leah, the midwife.

Leah arrives around 8:00 p.m. Her student and a.s.sistant arrive shortly after. When Mom and Anneliese's friend Jaci join us, I look around at all the women and I'm grateful, but I'm also wishing my buddy Mills was available. We have a twenty-year history now, having met when he was a medical first responder and I was a freshly minted nurse and EMT. These days he is a full-time firefighter and paramedic and I am a medical first responder. Now that I am back down in this area, we occasionally respond to the same emergency calls again. Only now, when we meet on scene, he is the one in charge. It's not the first time I've experienced responsibility role reversal-truth is, I enjoy it. In his career, Mills has delivered six babies, so a while back when I realized the home delivery team was trending all-female I asked Mills if he would be my doula. "Y'wha-wha?" he said. Only partially tongue in cheek, I explained that a doula provides physical and emotional support through the birth process. He beamed and accepted. Unfortunately, tonight he's pulling a twenty-four-hour shift back at Station #5 and won't be off until tomorrow morning.

We move upstairs to the bedroom so Leah can examine Anneliese. For the first time I notice Anneliese is trembling. I've never seen her so vulnerable. I hold her hand and she squeezes back and it hits me how powerful this is going to be, and then Leah says, "You're only two centimeters." Quite a ways to go yet, then. Antic.i.p.ating the long night ahead, Leah and her helpers go into a back bedroom to sleep. Leah recommends that Anneliese try to do the same, but Anneliese is too nerved up, so we go back downstairs. I stoke the woodstove, and we time some more contractions. Then Jaci takes some goofy pictures, including one of me staring at Anneliese's bare belly with a look of bewilderment. I really don't have to dig too deep for motivation.

Many years ago when we burned the old feed mill in New Auburn, I was allowed to rescue the blackboard where the managers used to update feed prices. It's made of enameled steel and reads CO-OP FEED-ANIMAL HEALTH CO-OP FEED-ANIMAL HEALTH across the top. It hung in my New Auburn kitchen for years. When we moved into the Fall Creek farmhouse, I hung it from a nail in the kitchen here. Jaci has been using the blackboard to log contractions. Beneath the times you can still make out faint renderings of the price of cracked corn and sunflower seeds. It's nice, sitting there on our old couch with a good fire going in the stove and my mother off to the side knitting, her aluminum needles clicking softly in the yarn as Jaci keeps time. across the top. It hung in my New Auburn kitchen for years. When we moved into the Fall Creek farmhouse, I hung it from a nail in the kitchen here. Jaci has been using the blackboard to log contractions. Beneath the times you can still make out faint renderings of the price of cracked corn and sunflower seeds. It's nice, sitting there on our old couch with a good fire going in the stove and my mother off to the side knitting, her aluminum needles clicking softly in the yarn as Jaci keeps time.

And then it all stops. The contractions fade, then cease. Hoping for a kick-start, Anneliese and I go for a walk. Outside, the wind is wintry cold, and oak leaves skitter across the driveway. The warm spate is over, and it feels more like autumn than spring. We walk out the drive and down to the mailbox, then back up the drive and out the ridge, where we stand quiet for a while. The moon glows behind a thin veil of clouds, shedding just enough glow so that we may see the general shape of the land. I hold Anneliese close, her cheek cool against mine. I can feel her trembling still, but I don't feel very sheltering or strong. Sometimes I don't make much of a grown-up. I'm a little boy who prefers to shape his stories just so.

It is nearly midnight when we head back inside. Leah rises to check Anneliese again. Still two centimeters, and the contractions haven't returned. "Get some sleep," says Leah. "Rest, in case things start again." She goes back upstairs to sleep some more herself. Anneliese and I climb the stairs. Lying in bed in the dark, I remember the Friday night in high school when we got all revved up for kickoff and then the ball blew off the tee. I admit the a.n.a.logy has limitations and may not translate across the gender divide. In any case, I have the rare good sense to keep it to myself. I can feel the disappointment and frustration in the way Anneliese lays beside me. Eventually we sleep.

In the morning everyone is gone.

On the chalkboard Jaci has erased the contraction times and written:

THURSDAY EVENING.

SHOW.

POSTPONED.

Due to Stage Fright

There we were with that stretch of glorious and fraudulent weather, and now we are back to stinging ears and snow on the ground and foolish jump-start robins shivering in the maple trees. Many of the early-breaking buds are frost-burned black. One of the maples flanking the path to my office has a broken limb, and an icicle of sap hangs from the fractured wood. The run of warm weather brought an abrupt end to the sap run, and we pulled the taps. Once the trees bud out, the clear sap turns faint red and bitter-professional sugarers say the sap has "gone buddy." Amy and Anneliese went to observe the boil-down with Jan and Gale, and now we have a gallon and a half of maple syrup in the pantry as well as a few maple sugar candies in the freezer-technically the first food from our new patch of land.

So it's cold again, but the earth is turning. Nighttimes it's been dropping to the teens, and the muddy spot on the office footpath is coated with ice, but it fractures easily when I step on it, and mud oozes up through the cracks. Down on the woodpile sits a mason jar. The day we stacked wood Amy noticed me sweating, and, unbidden, filled the jar with water and brought it to me. I drank it down to an inch from the bottom and set it atop the stack, where it sat at such an angle that now the base is filled by a lopsided puck of ice. I see the gla.s.s there on the split oak and turn immediately maudlin, blind-sided by the idea that the jar and the water are representative of how the most fluid, workaday moments become fixed in sweet irretrievable history in the very instant of their occurring.

I have promised Anneliese that when the baby comes I will spend an entire week with her and the new child, returning no phone calls, answering no e-mails, working toward no deadlines. In the meantime, I am churning away as usual, constantly rearranging the days into an endless chain of last-minutes. I see that gla.s.s as an emblem of placidity surrounded by the snarl of my subsequent overbooked peregrinations and hustle. Long ago, I think, my daughter drew water and brought it to me. A grand thing in its simplicity. I lift the jar, then replace it, suddenly convinced that it covers a hole where all the time drains away.

Later in the day Mister Big Shot appears in the yard. At his side, a girl bird. He struts beside her as if a tail ain't nothin' but a drag. I think of me beside my wife, and then I think, even us bald guys get lucky sometimes.

Just as when Anneliese had her spate of Braxton-Hicks contractions nearly three months ago, I kept obsessively checking the baby's heartbeat after the night she thought she was giving birth. And every now and then for the next several days I keep asking Anneliese if the baby is still kicking as before. She a.s.sures me it is. After all the ramp-up with no payoff, we've been left a bit adrift. The bright blue birthing tub stands at the top of the stairs, the water perfectly still. We walk around it.

A few days after the fact, I talk to Albert Frost, an old-timer from up by the home farm. Albert is in his nineties, his wife dead some ten years now, but still lives on his farm within sight of the culverts where Ricky and I used to play. Albert was always skinny as a crow's leg (my brothers call him "Fat Albert" and grin) and nowadays he uses a cane, but he has stayed on the home place and stubbornly fends for himself. I tell him we are waiting on a baby. Tell him about the false start. He chuckles. "When my first boy was born, there was a storm coming," he says. "They claim a big storm will bring it on.

"They had seven babies at the hospital that day. My kid was born at eight in the morning. By noon I still hadn't seen him. So I asked the nurse, and she held him up behind the gla.s.s.

"Homeliest little fart you've ever seen. I was pretty disappointed. But I thought, 'Well, he's healthy. I better not complain.'

"Then I heard the nurse saying, 'What's your name?' I told her, and she said, 'This one isn't yours,' and she held up another one." He laughs. Like it was yesterday.

"Yeah, but Albert," I say, "did that one look any better?"

He's still chuckling. "Well, I I thought so," he says, "but I suppose I was prejudiced." thought so," he says, "but I suppose I was prejudiced."

CHAPTER 5.

Across the valley, the bare-bone tree line is thickening. The maple leaves are fit to bust but holding fast, this year's greenery still clasped in a tight fetal furl. The bud scales are dark red, infusing the canopy with a rubrous blush, shrouding the hills all smoky maroon. It is mid-afternoon, sunny, and still. I hear sparrows. tree line is thickening. The maple leaves are fit to bust but holding fast, this year's greenery still clasped in a tight fetal furl. The bud scales are dark red, infusing the canopy with a rubrous blush, shrouding the hills all smoky maroon. It is mid-afternoon, sunny, and still. I hear sparrows.

There is a baby on my lap.

Ten days have pa.s.sed since the false alarm. It has been tough on Anneliese, going right to the precipice only to have her body shut down and scuttle the whole production. The sleeplessness returned tenfold, and with it the doubt, the brittle emotions, and the desperate weariness. She is occupied above all with the desire to get the baby born.

The morning after Easter I am at my desk above the garage when I see her pa.s.s by the window. She comes through the door and sits wide-legged and heavy in the saggy green chair. "I think maybe it's happening," she says. Apparently she had been up at 2:00 a.m., timing contractions while lying on the floor beside our bed. At some point they faded and she climbed back in bed and went to sleep. Ever helpful, I slept through the whole thing. Now the contractions have returned. "They're strong enough that I have to stop and wait them out," said Anneliese. We chat a while. A handful of contractions come and go. Then, as Anneliese stands to leave, a big one hits. She bends over, cradling her belly with one arm. She grimaces and blows through pursed lips. When the contraction pa.s.ses, she returns to the house, and I phone Leah the midwife. We talk it around a while, me not wanting to pull the alarm early again, but Leah says it sounds like she should head our way, especially since she has a ways to drive. When I get to the house I find Anneliese on the sofa, gripped by another contraction. Her mother, Donna-who has been visiting more or less on standby-is at her side.

Shortly, Jaci arrives. She and Donna take Anneliese for a walk along the ridge. When the three of them return, the contractions are coming apace and Anneliese has to stop whatever she is doing to breathe through them. She says it helps if I rub her back, and while I am doing this, I notice Amy hovering around the edge of everything. She is beginning to look apprehensive. Since the time we began to plan for a home birth, Anneliese and I have talked with Amy several times about whether or not she would like to be present for the delivery. I've been torn about it from the beginning. I'm all for it if she wishes, but I also can't see any reason she should be compelled to stay if she is disturbed at the sight of her mother in distress. All along she has been saying yes, but right now her eyes are a little too wide. We talk it over again now, and Amy says she wants to come upstairs with us when it is time, but I also discuss it with Donna and she agrees to take Amy out of sight and earshot if she so requests. For now Anneliese and Amy go outside together and sit in the hot tub beside the deck.

When Leah arrives she goes to the deck and visits with Anneliese. I'm off muddling around, checking the water in the birthing tub, looking for my swimsuit, wondering if I should sneak one more high-speed cram session with Emergency Care in the Streets Emergency Care in the Streets. Out on the deck, Leah tells Anneliese, "Well, we might as well check you."