Dirty Chick (12 page)

But by now I'd developed a tolerance. I couldn't get that cuteness high from just two lambs anymore, and Becca and I started coveting a black one. Sure, the little white fluff balls were adorable, but what if we added a black lamb to the mix? And then they snuggled one another? The image this fixed in my head was almost intolerably cute. Desperate for a brand-new fix, I started calling around to local farmers.

Rumor had it that Jackie's daughter Manda had a black ram in her paddock, so I rang her up, using my most cajoling voice to win her over. It occurred to me that I sounded like the junkies on the New York City subways, the ones who “just need twenty dollars” to get home, fill their prescription, or buy a bag of drugs.

For her part, Manda was skeptical. “I've got a couple of pregnant
ewes still,” she conceded. “They might have black lambs, but you can never tell. Sometimes they're spotty, or they come out all white.”

“Okay. Okay. That's fine.” My voice sounded jittery. “But if you get any cute little black babies, will you give me a call?”

As I hung up, I heard footsteps. Autumn was on our front porch. She gave me a weird look. “Who do you think you are?” she asked. “Angelina Jolie?”

I guess I am just like Angelina Jolie. If you don't count the movie credits, or the beauty, or the humanitarian good works. We both have a crowd of ethnically diverse babies, though at last count she just had six and I was working on twenty-three. Also, she's probably got a team of highly skilled nannies, whereas Rebecca and I were stressing ourselves out just keeping up with the feedings.

Our spiral of addiction went on for weeks, and it surprises me in retrospect that I didn't recognize it for what it was. My children were neglected. My husband wasn't getting laid. My friends thought I was dead, and as for my writing, what was the point? Our lambs were all I needed, my sole source of truth and joy in the world.

Then Cou-Cou terrorized my daughter. I was slapping together dinner one night, tossing leftover pasta in a pan, when Miranda let out an ear-bending scream.

“
Mama!
” she wailed. “Cou-Cou is
dying
!” I turned to see our youngest lamb trotting happily away from her necrotic tail, which lay like a severed limb on the floor.

“Ooo!” Rebecca ran over to pick it up. “Her tail fell off!”

Sitting her on my lap, I tried to explain to Miranda that this was perfectly natural, that dead tails were as common on a farm as chicken leprosy or vampire worms. Tentatively, she reached for the tail, inspecting the dried black blood at the stump and the soft white fleece at the tip. She brushed the fleece against her cheek.

“Can I have it?” she inquired, and when we gave it to her, she tucked it carefully in her little gold handbag. I tried not to think what else she had in there.

I suppose things could have gone on like that. I can easily imagine a future in which I became increasingly obsessed with my lambs, tying bows in Cou-Cou's fleece and licking Ba's anus to cure his constipation. But then, a few weeks in, we both hit rock bottom.

One evening, Rebecca was sitting on the living room floor by the fire, crooning lullabies to her fluffy white babies, when suddenly she stiffened. “What's this?” she asked, gripping Ba's ear.

“What's what?” Peter inquired.

“Oh my God.” She bit down on her lip. “I think they're ticks! What do I do?” She reached for her tablet, frantically typing in a Web search for “baby lamb ticks remove.”

“Uh, put the lambs outside?” Peter spoke softly, as you would to a crazy person. “They're sheep. They get ticks. Ticks aren't a health problem in New Zealand. Having a sheep inside my house is the problem.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” I snapped. “We don't have a problem.”

“
You're
the problem,” Rebecca scowled, not looking up from her tablet. “Tweezers. I need tweezers. And a jar.”

“I can get that.” I hopped up from my chair to fetch her tools.

“But how will I kill them?”

“I'll put some bleach in the jar.” I brought her the implements and sat back on the couch, prepared to defend our babies from Peter's boring logic. Rebecca commenced picking black specks off Ba's ears and dropping them one by one in the jarful of bleach.

“Okay, can we just consider this scene?” Peter's voice was straining to stay calm. “You're picking ticks off a sheep
in my living room.
This is no way to live. It's a health hazard.”

Rebecca didn't seem to hear. She picked up the jar, peering at its contents. “You . . .
monsters
,”
she hissed. “How
dare you
hurt my baby?” Then she swirled the jar, giggling merrily as she watched them all die.

And that was the moment of truth. In a split second of clarity, I saw my gentle niece squatting on the floor like an animal, shrieking at a jarful of ticks.

“Okay,” I conceded. “Maybe things have gone a little far. It's not that cold out tonight. Rebecca, maybe it's time for Ba and Cou-Cou to sleep outside.”

She glared at me as if I'd just ordered her to eat an unhappy steak. “Fine.” She clutched her babies to her chest, getting to her feet and pulling on her moccasins. “They can snuggle with me in my sleep-out. You guys are the
worst
.”

But that's how it goes with addiction. Some people snap out of it; some never do. After a couple of months, Ba just didn't look cute to me. To begin with, his balls were enormous. Two huge, furry sheep testicles hung down from his hindquarters, the whole sack the size of an overripe grapefruit. His horns started coming in, and I guess these felt itchy, because he rubbed them on the trees of our property, dislodging his horn buds until his head was a bloody mess. As for Cou-Cou, she developed an unpleasantly high-pitched bleat, and whenever she saw me, she shrieked for more food.

“It sounds like she's yelling at me,” I complained to Rebecca. “Like she's screaming at me in sheep language.”

“Don't be silly,” Rebecca swooned, her eyes glassy with lamb lust. “She saying ‘I loooooove you. MaaaMaaaa, I looove you.”

But those bleats didn't sound like love. They sounded like verbal abuse.

Then Cou-Cou started scouring, which meant I had to clean her
soiled backside every morning. Despite Rebecca's research, I chose to use a washcloth. And really, that sealed the deal. Ba and Cou-cou were no longer my fluffy young babies, but instead large and unpleasant livestock.

And I knew something else. Pretty soon, we'd have to deal with the dags.

I knew about dags from Invercargill. While we were living there, I'd had the chance to chat with a sheep farmer named Spencer, and it was he who revealed the darker side of sheep care.

“Aw, sheep farming's easy, really,” he told me. “Long as you drench 'em, and crutch 'em in the winter. Else they'll get daggy, and you could lose 'em to flystrike.”

“I'm sorry, what?” New Zealand is supposed to be an English-speaking country, but sometimes I wondered.

“Crutch 'em,” Spencer repeated.

“And that's . . . giving them medicine?”

“Nah.” He looked impatient. “That's drenching. Crutching is shearing round the backside and clearing off any dags.”

I couldn't quite process what he was saying. “You're telling me you have to shave a sheep's ass?”

Spencer smiled. “Got to. It's a health thing. Else the maggots get in, and they'll eat the body of the sheep. Got to take all that wool off. It's a bit uncomfortable round the dags, because the maggots can be quite large.”

I swallowed. “And what are . . . dags?”

“The stray bits of shit that get stuck in the fleece.”

That was a lot of reality. And back then, I didn't even own a sheep. But now I was facing an imminent need to crutch and de-dag. After all our farming traumas, I thought I could handle anything. But I wasn't ready for ass maggots. Or the regular ovine Brazilian.

That night I climbed back into bed with Peter. “Is it finished?” he asked, snuggling into me. “No more lamb licking?”

The thought made me physically ill. “No more lamb licking.”

“And we can kill them for food?”

“Absolutely.” The spell was broken. “No more glass pipes under a bridge for me.”

Peter drew back. “What?”

“Nothing,” I reassured him, pulling his arm around my waist. “Go to sleep.”

The next morning, I was covered in pee. This was not a withdrawal symptom. Sometime in the night, Miranda had slipped into our bed, fallen into a deep sleep, and peed all over us.

The trick when this happens is to lie perfectly still. As long as you don't move, the pee remains at body temperature and you can almost pretend it never happened. The moment you stir, you've blown it. The pee cools down, the illusion breaks, and you realize you've slept in a toilet.

I rolled over and winced. “
Miranda!
”
I hissed. “Did you have an accident?”

“I'm sorry, Mama,” she whimpered, beginning to cry. “It wasn't on
purpose.
I want to be your
friend
!”

Which made me feel like a cruel mother, and then Peter and I had to get up, strip the bed, change our clothes, and clean up the pee, all the while saying sorry to
her.
Which is a great metaphor for parenting, I think: you do the work, they pee all over you, and then you have to apologize.

Then Silas wandered into the room. “Good morning, son!” Peter opened his arms wide for a cuddle. “Did you sleep well?”

“Bus,” Silas replied, with utmost seriousness. His eyes are so dark and thoughtful, and he gets a look of such profound intelligence on
his face, that sometimes I'd swear it was me who was limited and Silas who was way ahead of the rest of us.

“Would you like some breakfast?” I ventured, but he turned and strode out of the room.

“Bus,” he reiterated from the hallway.

“That kid's an alien.” I sighed and slouched back on the pillows.

“Yes, but he's
our
alien,” Peter reminded me. Then we gathered the pee-soaked linens and went out to check on the cows.

I didn't spend much time mourning my love affair with the lamb, because in the next few weeks Pearl took up most of our focus. By now the pregnancy was obvious. Pearl was most definitely with kid.

We knew our goat was either pregnant or psychotic because now she'd do anything to get at the good food. First she managed to slip her chain and circummasticate the lemon tree, denuding it of bark and dooming it to an untimely demise. She developed a taste for hydrangeas and began rearing up on her hind legs to reach the tallest blossoms, clattering her hooves on the windowsill by my office and freaking me out while I was trying to write. And one night, when we'd shut her up in the chicken pen, making a soft bed of hay so she could curl up out of the rain, she smashed her way through a plywood wall to get to the grass outside.

Now, I've been pregnant. Twice. I've had my share of cravings. I once ate an entire jar of cornichon pickles, then drank all the brine, because I was just that crazy with baby hormones. But you didn't see me breaking down walls with my face. That's a step beyond. That's goat crazy.

And goat crazy seemed to work for Pearl. After she splintered a hole in her pen, she ate her fill until returning, plump and self-satisfied, to our front porch for the night. She grew sleek and glossy,
swollen with the promise of new life growing within. I found myself forgetting all about my fever dream of lamb lust and I encouraged Rebecca to spend more time with Pearl, to stroke her and make her little salads from the garden.

All that changed when I started reading about goat birth, or “kidding,” which is what they must have been doing when they described what to do if a baby goat gets stuck in its mother. Margaret Hathaway, in her book
Living with Goats
,
isn't afraid to get explicit: “If the goat appears to be having difficulty expelling the kid,” she suggests, “it is a good idea to help the kid out with a gloved, well-lubricated hand.” She continues: “Gently inserting two fingers into the doe's vagina . . .”

“Oh,
hell
no,” I told Autumn and Patrice. “I'm not going anywhere near a goat vagina, glove or no glove.”

Our friends exchanged a look. Autumn grew up in rural New Zealand, and while Patrice was learning how to sear foie gras
in fine restaurants, Autumn was helping her parents around the dairy farm. Patrice shot me a meaningful look. “I have seen Autumn with her arm up to
here
”—he pointed to a place halfway up his bicep—“inside a cow's vagina.”

“No gloves, either.” Autumn giggled, clearly enjoying my horror. “Just slipped right in.”

Chastened, I looked down at Hathaway's goat book, which listed a number of “kidding kit essentials.”

Lubricant.
I now knew what that was for, though I wished I didn't.

Shoulder-length gloves.
Shudder.

Obstetric leg snare.
Please God, don't tell me.

Shot glass.

“Ha!” I pointed to that last one in triumph. “Something's finally making sense!”

Autumn raised an eyebrow. “I think that's for iodine,” she corrected me. “You know, so you can clean the umbilical area after the birth.”

The way things were looking, I'd be happy to do a shot of iodine. Right now. But luckily, the kidding was still four months away.

Meanwhile, the injured chicken seemed well enough to join the flock. Her wings were fairly even, and she was moving around without too much trouble. One day, I let her out of her cage to stroll around the garden.

“I think she's getting better,” I observed, watching her peck at the grass. “Look at that. I think the Chicken Hospital really worked.”