My Gentle Barn (9 page)

So of course I ended up back at the petting zoo.

This time I was not going there to show the owner how well I had healed her sick animals. Neither was I going merely to check whether the zoo had brought up its standards or been shut down; I knew in my gut it had not. This time, when I went back to the zoo, I was on a mission. Ever since my first visit to that dreadful place, I’d been haunted by images of those miserable animals and I hadn’t been able to get the ache out of my heart. How could I sit idly by when so many animals were suffering and I had the space to take them in and the ability to make them well? If Animal Control and the SPCA couldn’t get it together to shut the place down, I had to do what I could to help relieve some of the suffering.

“Do you have any other animals that need healing?” I asked when I’d found the owner. “I know you’re overwhelmed. No questions asked. I’ll take the sick ones off your hands.”

It was even hotter out than that first time I’d shown up at the zoo.
There were still mountains of poop and lots of flies. Still there was no drinking water out for the animals. And more tourists than ever were looking but not seeing the suffering right in front of them. Why on earth had the authorities not shut this place down yet?

To my surprise there was no fight in the owner’s response. In fact, the woman didn’t say a word. She simply went to the back of the zoo, behind a closed gate, and she brought out one animal after another. First, Nonie the sheep and her son, Josh, both terrified of humans. Then Katie, an elderly horse who whinnied and tossed her head, pulling against her lead—clearly no longer willing to be a pony-ride horse. Then came the goat Zena, who—the owner explained—had begun ramming the visitors, and she was followed by her baby, Amy. And finally there was Grandpa Goat, who could not even get up because his legs were so deformed. The goats and sheep all had overgrown hooves, and all of the animals were filthy. It was the saddest parade I had ever seen.

This group of animals was larger than I’d expected, and I certainly wasn’t going to fit a horse in my car. So I went home and called around until I found a trailer I could borrow.

I returned later that day with the trailer, ready to take my new babies home. With Jesse on my back, I led or carried each animal out to the parking lot and walked them slowly into the trailer. At one point two men who worked at the zoo came out to help me. To my dismay, they each grabbed a terrified sheep by the wool and threw them into the trailer.

“That’s OK,” I said, wincing. “Thanks for your help, but I can do this on my own.”

When all the goats and sheep were in the trailer, I went back into the zoo and slowly approached Katie, the old pony-ride horse, and saw that she had scar tissue on her face that directly outlined the shape of the halter. Clearly her halter was too tight and had never been removed. I gently took hold of her lead, and she raised her head and bared her
big teeth, and instinctively I took a step back and looked down. Not looking at her but still holding her lead, I turned my back and slowly walked out toward the parking lot, and she followed me the whole way, right up into the trailer.

When I got home, I opened my big side gate and backed the trailer right up to it. I let the animals walk down into the yard at their own pace, except for Grandpa Goat, who had to be carried. Once they were all in the barnyard and the gate was closed, I let the dogs out and they lined up at their usual post along the dividing fence, wagging their tails, but this time they didn’t bark. By now they understood the setup; the farm animals were for show, not for touch (or chase).

Before I called Dr. Geissen out, there was one thing I needed to do. I wanted to take Katie’s halter off. I approached her slowly, not looking at her directly. “We’re going to take that thing off,” I said. Mostly looking down, I reached for her halter, and she went for my hand, trying to bite me.

“OK,” I said, taking a step back. “I get it. You’re really angry.”

I had to walk away several times, and finally, moving slowly with my feet but quickly with my hands, I managed to get the halter off without getting bitten.

“You don’t have to wear that awful thing ever again,” I told her.

I understood why Katie didn’t want attention, or even to be looked at. Throughout her life she had carried thousands of crying kids on her back, making hundreds of thousands of trips around a metal post.

“I don’t want a thing from you,” I promised her. I knew it would take some time, but I figured if I didn’t pay any attention to Katie—other than feeding her without looking at her—she’d slowly come to believe that my promise was true.

When Dr. Geissen arrived, he examined all of the goats and sheep, and we started the process of wound washing, deworming, and ear cleaning. He prescribed anti-inflammatories for Grandpa, who he said had severe arthritis. When Dr. Geissen left I made a run to the feed
store, set up more stalls in the barn with loads of straw, trimmed the goats’ and sheep’s overgrown hooves, and of course started all of the animals on the miracle algae.

When I finally was finished in the barnyard, my back was aching, I was utterly exhausted, and I had straw fibers in every imaginable nook and cranny. But I scrubbed myself and Jesse clean, fed Jesse and put him to bed, and then set to work on cooking up Scott’s favorite meal—fettuccini Alfredo with nondairy cream sauce and portobello mushrooms. I even put wineglasses on the table.

When Scott returned from work, he came into the dining room and smiled. “Mm,” he said. “That smells good.” But a moment later the smile dropped and he rolled his eyes.

“What did you bring home this time, Ellie?”

Maybe he was starting to get it that I couldn’t help myself, that this was just the way I was wired. Not that he was happy; it was more like quiet resignation. Back in the days when he was helping out with the dog adoptions, he might have been excited to engage with farm animals too. But he’d long ago shifted away from the world of animals that we had shared and was concerned only with providing for our family—of humans. He seemed like a different person from the Scott who had sat up half the night with me giving sick puppies injections. I wished he would join me, at least a little, in the excitement of saving these poor creatures, or at least be happy for me that I was doing something I loved. But instead he seemed to grow grumpier by the day.

One night, about a week after this last visit to the petting zoo, I came in from the barnyard later than usual. Scott had already arrived home and was waiting for me on the couch. “Come sit down,” he said.

“Let me just wash my hands.”

When I finally sat down next to him, he said, “I feel like I have to stand in line just to get a little attention from you.”

“I’m sorry, Scott. It’ll settle down. It’s just that these new animals are still healing.”

“And when they get healthy, you’ll go get more.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to lie.

“Why can’t you just be a normal, available wife?” he said.

“I’m trying,” I said. But at that moment I realized I’d completely lost sight of my goal to maintain the normalcy I’d found after Jesse’s birth. Normalcy had escaped me once again. “I
tried
,” I corrected myself. “But I’m not normal, Scott. I’m just not.”

Scott seemed to have joined my parents’ camp, the people who wanted me to act like a normal person. And although I now knew that this was just never going to be possible, the last thing I wanted was to ruin my marriage. So I vowed to put my rescuing on pause for a while, to just take care of the animals I had. I made it my priority to show up for Scott and Jesse. But with nine farm animals, eight dogs, twenty cats, a toddler, and a husband, I was beginning to feel more than a little strain handling it all on my own. I had a barnyard to clean up daily, a baby’s diapers to change (several times a day), and a husband who needed some attention after a very long day of work. I finally broke down and hired a Mommy’s Helper for part of the day; she could at least watch Jesse while I took care of the rest of the crew. But I could see myself starting to slip. When I played with Jesse, I felt like I was neglecting the new sickly animals in the barnyard. When I tended to the animals a bit too long, Jesse threw a fit. And sometimes I forgot to get dinner on the table. I had forty-nine mouths to feed—fifty if I remembered to eat, myself.

As best I could, I ignored the old familiar pull to help any and all animals who needed me. But the whispers I’d felt deep inside me as a child were in full force once again. And despite my best efforts to block them out, a few weeks after the final petting zoo rescue, the whispers led me down a side road to a woman who’d lost her house and was living in her car with her collection of pets. Two dogs, several cats, a handful of ducks, a goose, and thirty chickens all had taken up residence with her in her white sedan.
I’m sorry, Scott
, I thought.
You’re
just going to have to understand
. I told the woman about my place, and she broke into tears and handed over all but her two dogs.

By July, three potbellied pigs, a big farm pig, and another horse had made their way into the mix. The place began to look like Old MacDonald’s Farm. My days were spent running back and forth from the barnyard to the phone to ask the vet a question or driving to the library to do research or to a feed store to gather information from the people who worked there. I was learning much faster than I would have had I gone to vet school or a master’s program. I was on fire and loving every minute of it.

But every ounce of joy and aliveness that I was experiencing was matched by equal amounts of disgruntlement in Scott. With each new pig or horse I rescued, he would groan that now we had one more mouth to feed. Although I’d begun dipping into a trust fund that had been granted to me in my parents’ divorce settlement, Scott’s income was still covering much of the barnyard costs. Each month, I was buying two dozen bales of hay, six bales of straw, six bags of grain, and five bags of potbellied-pig feed. And the vet visits had grown in direct proportion to the number of animals in the barnyard.

But in truth, Scott cared much less about the money than about my waning attentiveness. I tried hard to wrap up my chores in the barnyard and make dinner before he got home from work. But a barnyard is not always a predictable operation, and the chores can’t always be squeezed into a preordained block of time, especially for someone like me, who reaches for perfection in everything I do. Add to that a toddler’s needs, and you’ve got the antithesis of predictability and punctuality.

One afternoon, Jesse needed my undivided attention on into the evening. By the time Scott got home, I hadn’t had a minute to get dinner ready for anyone—neither for the animals nor for the humans.

I gave Scott a kiss and said, “Do you mind watching Jesse while I run out and feed the animals? I’ll be really quick.”

“Sure,” he said.

Just fifteen minutes
, I told myself as I rushed out into the barnyard, and I had every intention of sticking to that. Then I’d be back in to give Jesse a bath and put him to bed before making dinner for Scott and me.

In the tack room, I mixed up the pigs’ dinner—pig feed pellets, bran, and superfood algae mixed with water until it turned into a kind of porridge. As usual, our big white farm pig, Duncan, was right outside the door to the tack room, squealing and grunting and trying to get the door open. But his big pig efforts resulted only in him blocking my exit with his dinner.

“Duncan, back up,” I called through the door.

Duncan, as was the case every night, did not back up. All twelve hundred pounds of him kept pushing up against the door trying to get it open. The door, of course, opened out, not in. I turned my back, the pigs’ bowls stacked in my arms, and tried to push the door open with my back. After two minutes of this—and waiting for just the right moment, between Duncan’s assaults on the door—I managed to get out the door with the pigs’ food.

“If you just waited, it would actually go a lot faster,” I told Duncan as I set the four bowls down in the yard for the pigs. But of course he was far too busy with his dinner to hear me.

My next task was to keep the goats away from the pigs’ dinner with scattered grain and a push broom. “You guys are next,” I told the goats. “I promise.”

And so it went, feeding one group of animals at a time, cleaning up along the way, sweeping off the barn’s patio or cleaning up the mess in the chickens’ area of the barn. Each time I was back in the tack room, I’d wipe down the counters or turn all the trash bins in the same direction so that everything looked neat and tidy, sparkling and orderly.

Once everyone had been fed, and every last surface was raked or swept or wiped down, I could stop and take a breath. I inhaled the wonderful, sweet smell of hay, listened to the pigs snoring in their pig
pile, and looked up at the stars, knowing there was no better, richer life for me.

“Um, can we talk?” Scott said as soon as I walked back into the living room, and I was jarred back into my other reality. An hour had passed. It was past Jesse’s bedtime, and he hadn’t even had his bath. Scott hadn’t eaten, and he was hungry. No one was smiling.

“Yes,” I said. “Just let me give Jesse his bath and get him to bed first. OK?”

When Jesse was bathed, I put him in his jammies, nursed him, and sang him to sleep. By the time I walked back into the living room, another hour had passed.

“This is crazy,” Scott said, looking at his watch. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“I’m sorry. I’m here now.”

“Now,”
he said.

“I’m trying to be a good wife and mother. It’s a lot—”

“Well, why don’t you stop all this crazy stuff with the animals, then? Just look at you.”

I looked down at my jeans and T-shirt, caked with mud and manure, and realized my face must be just as dirty. “Scott,” I said, “that”—I motioned toward the back door and the barnyard beyond it—“that crazy yard full of sick and sad animals on the mend. That’s what I live for. Telling me to stop … that’d be like me telling
you
to stop eating food or drinking water. It feeds me more deeply than anything else in the world.”