Lambsquarters (12 page)

We were still newcomers (as we always will be) and we kept to ourselves. We were given distance perhaps, and we took it too. We didn’t ask for help; we didn’t make it known that we couldn’t manage. But help came along—food at the door, childcare and cleaning, barn work too—until my surgery in March brought a slow return to health. From being vibrant and strong, I turned weak and inept, hardly able to care for any of my charges or do any of the chores or contribute to the life we were making. Dark days, dependent days. The whole point of being here was to cope on our own, to do it ourselves, to turn knowledge and skill into self-reliance and autonomy.

THOUGH THE SUN
was increasing, that spring held the hardest days, the longest nights, when I looked at the future and saw only clouds. I lay on the couch, unable to muster the strength to go out. My daughter was being cared for by others. I was caught in some underworld, punished perhaps for unknowingly tasting a seed I’d never noticed. Bitter suffering after sweet fruit.

But slowly the weight went back on, the muscles recovered. The spring daffodils—unnecessary after my daughter’s birth—did their job. The second crop of lambs, whose mothers eschewed the ram’s early caprice, arrived strong in April, and I tended them gently—not without incident, though, as the weather grew cruel and again my barn visits were fewer. There were times when the house was a playpen of bellowing young, all dressed in diapers, all needing care. Sick lambs by the fire, tails emerging from holes in their disposables, stroked and loved by my child, herself still swathed in cloth. And the ache of the deaths, which inevitably occurred, tore at my heart for my neglect.

So we needed the barn. Needed changes and care. Needed simplicity of design and ease of access. Needed to sweep out the ghosts of that horrible year where everything went wrong and fell to chaos. We had no thoughts of quitting, despite all the failure. We forged ahead with new plans. We carried on.

The hope May brought sifted gently through our days, carried us aloft on soft winds. Early planting,
careful planning, thinking ahead. And as life all around us settled, the future came clear as I conceived once again.

We spent a glorious summer rebuilding the barn, redoing the nursery and growing our crops. Putting disaster behind us and looking beyond and also back to the dream that brought us here. Staying strong in our need to succeed and our love of the land and each other. But wellness eluded me once winter came; the baby refused to stay still. He rolled and thundered in turmoil inside, trying to emerge ahead of his time. More truck trips and ambulances, rides to the city. Thomas again on call at a delicate moment—an erstwhile brogue-brained colleague refusing to cover the emergency ward—and I found myself alone once more in an ambulance, not knowing if my baby would be born or would live, his father left behind to care for others.

But we stayed symbiotic, my baby and I, and drugs kept him inside and protected from light. Once home, I was back on the couch, my daughter shipped out, my belly threatening to heave and contract whenever I walked to the barn. Stuck once again, unable to work, dependent on others for help. Until my baby was born, all in a flash, his father lovingly guiding him out in the rush. Perfect and tiny and looking like me, though early and slightly underdone. Caught and held first in his father’s arms. Like a kitten, his eyes not quite open, his hands folded up, his attitude lazy and soft. I was
instantly better, motherlove strong, and my chores seemed possible, my work looked clear.

Everything flourished in the house and the barn. The setbacks seemed insignificant after all the stress. And the months and the seasons settled into a pattern, changing only with growth and language and skills in my children, my farm children, who knew nothing but this place as home, who took to the animals and chores and rhythms of the day as they did to breathing the air of the country around them.

SNAKE

IN THE YARD, THERE IS A HUMP
in the turf, a ridge about half the length of a country laneway, which remembers a time before grass. Previous farmers ploughed in front of the house, grew those dour mangels whose discarded beety corpses were still rotting when we arrived. We seeded our permanent pasture with a mixture of grasses and clover, filling in the furrows and greening the area, but the ridge remains. A reminder that this is not really a lawn, a playground, a croquet pitch, but a reclaimed field.

Before it was a field, it was a forest, or perhaps a small meadow surrounded by forest. What feet walked here before we came? Feet that trod four at a time or that were shod in doeskin. Feet that remain, reflected in their descendants, or remembered only at a remove, on reservations.

What footprints lie in the soil, what tales in the weeds? It is said that burdock and thistle seeds will live
for hundreds of years, will lie dormant until the soil is disturbed, until somebody digs, somebody ploughs, somebody plants. Then the weeds come out of the dark. Like Persephone they find the light and have their short season in the sun, send up their flowers, more purple than pomegranate—the colour of kings—to ripen, dry and form snagging seeds, waiting for something unsuspecting to cling to. On four feet or two, they are transported.

The earth knows these stories and a thousand more. Subterranean cities shelter cultures older than Hades’s underworld, cultures where even feet are superfluous. Under the hump in the turf, under the ridge, lives a colony of creatures that may have been there before the glaciers reshaped the landscape, scraped the rocks and ground them up and left behind the gravel pits and stone deposits and bits of fossil and shale that underlie the soil.

It takes a sunny March day to bring these squigglers to ground. One of those days when the sap runs. When it’s cold at night and there’s frost under a clear sky, but sun on the snow at dawn, casting long silver and blue shadows that turn to gold before dusk. These are days when the snow sublimates, misses that melting step and goes directly from solid to vapour, disappearing before your eyes to reveal patches of winter grass, that dead, brown cover thatched over the earth, dormant, dank, but hopeful. Mindful of its possibilities, its past, its
future. Such patches will dry out with a few of these days, surrounded still by corn snow, pitted honeycombed white ice. And the snakes will pass from underworld to over.

These are days when melting snow reveals lost treasure. Finding days. In the city, coins and ribbons, buttons and marbles, mittens and toques appear. But in the country, the treasure is more fundamental. We found the snakes one year by accident, by surprise. The children and I were on an expedition. The snakes were not lost, not mislaid. We are the interlopers; this is snakes’ country.

They are garter snakes, fondly called gardener snakes around here. Or gardner ‘nakes on the tongue of my daughter, the ear of my pre-lingual son. We found perhaps a hundred of them, babies, all bunched together like spaghetti in a pot, swirling and wriggling, arcing over one another like porpoises diving, like frogs leaping, like kittens nursing. A living mass of cold-blooded reptiles undeterred by the thinning ozone, warming their bitter blood in the light of day, in the spring of time.

As long as the sun shines, the snakes stay. When it withdraws, they descend out of sight, not on ladders, but by slithering down like fast rain on a windowpane, one fat drop at a time. The earth looks like Swiss cheese. But only if you get close; only if you know where to look. And the season is short before the snake commune disperses: it can be missed.

As spring progresses and the grass greens and grows, the snakes separate, leave home, stake out their own ground. Garter snakes travel alone. Svelte bachelors, they make their own fun. Some even live in the city, cruising backyards and boulevards, making double entendres with forked tongues.

The country snakes, the farm snakes, have their own modes of sophistication. If they can stay off the gravel roads, avoid the fast wheels of passing trucks and tractors, stay out of the mower’s way and evade the teeth of the hay baler, country snakes have a good chance of survival. When things get tight, they can always change their skins, discard them on the grass and slide into something more comfortable. Like gossamer sent soaring by a breeze, the shimmering, empty body stocking is too fragile to hold. A fine serpent mould, it defies refilling, and despite its stunning segments, it disappoints. Mere nail clippings.

THERE IS A GARTER SNAKE
lying out on the sunbaked stones of the house foundation where I keep the summer hose. A large, thick, powerful snake in new skin. The area around the window well is dug up, exposed. In the fresh dirt hops a toad, oblivious to everything but mud and earth and new scenery. He has his toad thoughts from his toad day. A sudden strike and the toad turns turtle. The snake snaps his huge jaw and bites down hard on the toad’s belly. The toad
thrashes his legs, screams. The snake gyrates until he is almost vertical, and the toad flails one foreleg, not waving. Then, inexplicably, the toad is free and it lopes off into the dirt. Surely the snake can see him and attack again?

With freshly dug potatoes resting in my gathered-up shirt-tail, I stand open-mouthed, mesmerized, relieved the toad is free, but unable to find a role for myself in this scene, which is as strange as it is Homeric, Biblical, Miltonic.

Unimpressed by the high drama, the snake slithers between the stones of the usually subterranean foundation and disappears. I dump my potatoes on the grass and turn the hose on them, converting the encounter to dailiness, washing away the taste. But from his hiding place, the toad reappears and for some incomprehensible reason jumps back into the window well. Like lightning the snake strikes and clamps his jaws on the toad’s back.

I can no longer watch passively. I grab a stick and prod the snake. My need to protect the weak, foster the homely. The toad escapes and the snake goes back into the dark, a guilty underworld he inhabits alone. I place the toad in the impatiens, across the grass from the window well.

Inside, I find a bowl for the wet potatoes, hear my babies begin to stir from their nap, and ache with fierce protection. I try not to think about what snakes eat for dinner. Or toads.

CROWBAR