As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (8 page)

Throughout this season, as I said, the animals of summer grew strong and free. Only the milk cows were brought to the barn twice daily for their milking and even they seemed to take on an air of independence that bordered close to arrogance. The others grazed openly and heedlessly through the long days of their summer vacation. From the tops of our hay wagons we could see them, especially on the hottest days, lying on the sandy beaches which separated their pastures from the sea or dangerously close to the rocky edge of the sea cliff’s fall. It was always cooler near the sea and there was always a slight breeze and they were not bothered there by the flies that tormented inland animals. Throughout the working days of summer we spent little time ourselves beside or within the turquoise sea.

As the summer progressed and as the season’s young became more independent, the mature animals would yearn again to be sexually active. They would demonstrate their needs in various ways, again depending on their species and their sex, and they would continue to do so until they were fulfilled. We, as the humans who depended on them as they did on us, would frequently and of necessity interfere with their needs and desires. We would tether the lusty and often ill-tempered rams to iron stakes driven deep into the earth or isolate them in all-male pens where they frequently took out their frustrations by battering their thick-boned skulls against each other. We would keep them from the ewes until late in the fall, knowing that early matings resulted in the birth of winter
lambs who stood little chance of surviving the bitter coldness of the season of their birth. We would keep the young heifers from the heavy bulls, knowing that they were often injured and sometimes permanently maimed in their first sexual encounters and knowing also that even if they did survive the breeding, great difficulty awaited them in such youthful pregnancies and that often they would die attempting to give birth. Another year would make a great difference to them as well as to us. In the same manner we would discourage nesting and maternal hens from bringing forth autumnal chickens who would not be matured enough to meet the demands of cold, rain-lashed November and the harsher months to follow. Like highly protective parents we would hover over such lives, hoping that our attempts at control would result in what was “best” for all. This is for your own good, we would think, as well as for ours, although we would never articulate it in such a manner.

In the fall we would reduce the population that had so flourished through the long, hot summer days. As it had doubled or tripled in the spring, it was reduced by similar numbers in the fall, and reduced in a variety of ways. Livestock buyers came, sometimes walking to the pastures to view their intended victims, offering prices, quoting possibilities, leaving and returning. All of the male lambs would go, and most of the females except a select few singled out to continue the reproductive cycle. When they left, they would be strong and rambunctious, unlike their earlier wobbly-legged selves. They would crowd against one another and jostle as they were ushered up the ramps of the waiting trucks and sometimes they would attempt to leap over the slatted sides of their new confinement. We would hear their indignant bleatings as the trucks took them permanently from the single environment of their one and only summer. Sounds of angered indignation tinged with the very real sound of fear. Later the cheques we
had exchanged them for would come and we, in our turn, would enter a phase of rejuvenation and hopeful, though temporary, self-confidence.

Sometimes, depending on different factors, it would be more profitable to butcher animals and sell them locally than to trust to the simpler yet more bureaucratic expedient of the truck or train which would take them to more distant killing stations. There was always butchering in the late fall to supply meat for ourselves and our urban relatives, but in some years there would be more than in others. It would always be a melancholy time then, especially if there was a lot of it. The night before we would lay out the ceremonial clothes of death, splattered with bloodstains and bearing the distinctive odour which could never be fully washed away. We would sit on chairs in the kitchen, sharpening the various knives and testing the keenness of the blades with the balls of our callused thumbs. We would pay attention to the weather and nearly always kill according to the phases of the moon. From the barn we could hear the protesting moans of the unknowing and condemned animals. Unlike condemned prisoners, they would receive neither food nor water before their executions. This was to reduce the bulk of their weight and their body fluids for the day that was to follow; so that their weight, which would so soon become dead, would be less ponderous and easier to handle.

On the day of the actual butchering we would rise early so that we would get a good start. In the late fall the days would be short and since we would normally work by natural light, adjustments would have to be made. The animal would be taken to that part of the barn called the threshing floor and stationed beneath the chain pulleys which would soon be used to elevate its carcass. If it were a huge animal, it would be shot. Sometimes we would draw lines on its trusting head with a crayon, from behind each ear and across its forehead. Generally the point of intersection would be the marksman’s target –
almost a literal bull’s-eye. If the animal were less huge, it would be merely hit between the eyes by a sledgehammer or the blunt side of an axe wielded by the strongest man. Even as its front legs buckled and its eyes glazed, the knife used for the severing of the jugular would be passed handle-first to the waiting hands which had tossed aside the sledgehammer or axe – much as the nurse might pass the scalpel. If done well, it would take but ten or twelve seconds to change life into death. The pigs were always the hardest to kill because their skulls slanted backwards and were more difficult to strike than the flattened foreheads of others. As the blood gushed from the slashed throats, we would gather it in pans so that it might later be used for blood puddings –
maragan
, they were called in Gaelic. One person would hold the pan beneath the neck of the fallen animal while another would raise and steady the convulsing and partly severed head so that the blood would be pumped into the pan and not wasted on the barn-planked floor. Later we would take the hind legs and cut the flesh between the hocks and the main tendons and insert a horizontal stick. To this stick we would fasten the now-descended chain pulleys and we would raise the animal by its widespread legs even as we skinned and disembowelled it. Sometimes the flesh would continue to twitch for a long time after the actual death and even after the hide had been removed. The contents of the body would generally spill into a huge washtub and we would sort them out in their steaming warmth with bloodied slippery hands. We would save at least the heart and the liver and the stomach and the strips of marbled fat; sometimes other portions as well. And if there was time, our father would point out and explain the functions of the mysterious and until-now invisible internal organs. “This is the bladder, and this is the spleen and this is the large intestine. This is the windpipe. These are the lungs. This is the passage that the seed follows from the testicles to the end of the penis.” We would listen and watch intently, like those involved in a formal
autopsy or like intense medical students about their still cadaver.

Often there would be surprises. Sometimes shingle nails or fence staples or bits of twisted wire would be found imbedded in the stomach, and one time the neck of a beer bottle was found completely surrounded by a strange almost translucent knob of gristle. It seemed to glow like a huge, obscene pearl. We remembered then how more than a year ago the cow had stood for days unable to eat or give milk and for a while barely able to walk. We had no way of knowing then how the sharp-edged amber glass she had carelessly swallowed in her grazing cut into her stomach’s lining, and we did not know when the gristle began to surround it and isolate it, thus allowing her to move and function once again. Another time we found an unborn calf within the womb of a young cow we had considered sterile. We had tried various matings and solutions but she had always failed to conceive. In her fourth year of life her sterility became a luxury we could not afford. “We cannot take her through another winter like that,” was the verdict. “She will have to be fattened and killed.” When found within the womb of the slaughtered mother, the embryonic calf continued to move for a brief and borrowed time. Its delicate limbs had begun to form and were folded compactly back upon themselves while its eyes seemed large and luminous. Its ears were exquisite and fragile and flatly pressed like the memory of ferns found deep within the darkened earth. No one knew who had fathered the calf, although the time could be roughly estimated. What we had wanted we had found achieved, when it was ironically too late to save the life of either.

Such scenes of selling and butchering would repeat themselves until a rough balance between livestock and available hay was achieved. In dry seasons when the hay crop was less lush there would have to be a corresponding reduction in animal numbers. In years that were more bountiful we could
afford to winter individuals who would not have survived the more rigorous selectivity of leaner years. The selection of those who would remain and those who would “go” was always a tight and careful process. Like shrewd and thoughtful managers of athletic teams preparing their lists of protected players, we would go over the strengths and weaknesses of each individual. Age was always a factor, as was general strength; fertility, as I mentioned, another and sometimes even what might be called “personality.” Animals who were particularly ill-tempered or high-strung or who had developed bad habits, like leaping fences or raiding summer vegetable gardens, received thoughtful scrutiny as the deadline approached. And as always, if the troublesome individuals had outstanding positive traits, they would be given additional leeway and allowed to make it for another year. Sheep who produced “weighty” lambs or a high proportion of twins were forgiven balancing weaknesses and the cows who were the leading milk producers were generally grudgingly indulged, regardless of how unpleasant they actually might be. They were often the “stars” on not overly strong teams and were catered to accordingly.

I say all of this now so that you might understand the environment in which the calf club wish was born, and also so that you might see the situation in which it existed for a while -wobbly and uncertain but grounded in a kind of realism similar to the animals and the people who were its basic source.

The idea itself, however, came from a new person in our midst. In the late winter and early spring of the seventh grade a new and dynamic agricultural representative began to visit our two-room school. He was young and athletic and brimming with vigour. He was one year away from the completion of his degree and had interrupted his formal studies for a year of “in-the-field” practical experience; and we were to be part of his field. He was almost contagious. We had
always had visits from agricultural representatives but they were for the most part men who were older and gave the impression of wishing they were somewhere else. One used to wear a suede jacket and a pair of grey trousers covered with cigarette ashes and other interesting stains. He would sit at the desk in the front of the room and ask if there were any questions. There would seldom be any, so he would ask one: “Well, then what will we talk about?” Then he would look out the window rather longingly, as would we, hoping for, if not a discussion topic, a sort of mutual deliverance. Another used to show slides of “common North American weeds.” He seemed to come later in the year, in May or June, and always in the afternoon. Each slide bore the name of the weed which was illustrated, and he would read the label aloud to us in a ritual which we came to call weed parade. “Common Ragwort,” he would say, or “Scottish Thistle” or “Wild Onion” or “Broad-leaved Dock.” He would always glance surreptitiously at his watch and drink from a thermos bottle of coffee laced with whiskey. In the drowsy hot afternoons as weed followed weed and their names became more slurred and the vapours from the whiskied coffee rose around us, we would find it almost impossible to stay awake. But our new man changed all that.

First he said that in addition to our present vegetable garden clubs we should start a calf club. He had been doing research, he said, and all we needed was a minimum of ten heifer calves produced by a pure-bred sire. These would be born the following spring so it was not too early to begin thinking of their conception. The mothers could be “any cow of high quality.” Such quality would hopefully be transferred to her daughter. We would need a paper signed by the keeper of the pure-bred sire, indicating the breeding date and the hopeful conception of the desired calf. We were to check our cattle at home and speak with our parents. We were interested in dairy cattle so we should not select a beef-type mother. Neither should we “cross” breeds if we could help it. We should
not breed a cow with heavy Holstein characteristics to an Ayrshire bull, for example, because the breed characteristics would become confused. His research had shown that the predominant strain in the area was Ayrshire and there were two Ayrshire bulls approximately ten miles apart and subsidized by the Department of Agriculture. These bulls, he said, were not being “utilized to their full potential.” We copied it all down in our scribblers to refer to at a later time.

On our way home I considered all the cattle that we owned, thinking of their backgrounds and their breeding and when they were due to give birth that spring. I was already a year ahead of myself in searching for my candidate for mother of the year. I settled mentally on a large and consistently gentle cow whom we called Morag. She was basically white with cherry-red markings and long and sweeping elegant Ayrshire horns. She possessed almost all of the “high-quality” requirements which had been mentioned and she would deliver her current “ordinary” calf quite early in the spring. She had always conceived quickly and easily following the births of her other calves, and I could not believe my good fortune.