The Lamb Check She Gave Away

The Next Spring

The next March, Juanita picked out her new lamb at a sheep farm up near the county line, another white Dorset cross wether, with a cowlick of wool on his forehead that would not lie flat no matter how much she brushed it.

She named him Pancake. Finn said that was a breakfast theme, and we were going to run out of breakfast eventually.

Garth came over the first Sunday after we brought Pancake home. He did not call ahead.

He just pulled his old Chevy into our lane after church, got out in his brown vest, and stood at the side yard fence with his arms folded on the top rail.

“Mind if I watch?” he asked Juanita.

She looked at me. I looked at her. That was her call to make, not mine, and I had decided that the morning in the parking lot.

She thought about it the way she thinks about everything, chin tucked, and then she said, “You can watch. You can’t hold him.”

“Fair,” Garth said.

He watched for three Sundays. He did not say a word except “Good,” once in a while, when she got Pancake’s front legs square.

The fourth Sunday, Juanita set the back legs too far under and Pancake hunched up like a cat, and she got frustrated and threw her show stick in the grass.

Garth came through the gate then, slow. He did not reach for the halter.

He knelt down in the grass next to her, his knees cracking like kindling, and he said, “Can I show you a thing my daddy showed me? You do it. I’ll just talk.”

“Okay,” Juanita said.

“Put your hand flat on his hock,” Garth said. “Right there, the back of the leg. Don’t pull it. Push it, gentle, straight back, till it’s under his hip bone. Look at the line from his hip to his heel. You want that line to drop straight down like a plumb bob.”

Juanita did it. Pancake fussed and then stood. Garth said, “Now the other one,” and she did the other one, and the lamb stood square for the first time all spring, like a table, like a picture in an old sheep magazine.

“There,” Garth said. His voice was very quiet. “That’s a Kessler lamb. That’s how they used to say you could tell from the bleachers.”

He looked at her. “And you’re the one who set him. Nobody else.”

They worked like that every Sunday through the spring and into the summer. Him on his knees in the grass talking, her with her hands on the lamb.

He never once touched the halter. I sat on the porch steps and counted out loud when she wanted me to, the same as the year before.

Some Sundays Finn came out and leaned on the fence next to me. One evening in early summer he said, low, “I haven’t seen him like this since Mom.”

I said I knew. We watched the two of them in the yard until the light went orange over the bean field.