The Week We Sheared Mom’s 140 Ewes

The third crew boss I called that May was Olaf, a man I had known since we rode the same school bus out of St.

Anthony. He did not lie to me, and I will always be grateful for that.

“Kalli, I’m not going to dance around it,” he said. “Cody’s been telling everybody those ewes are too wild to bother with. Says the pens are falling down and you’ll lose a day chasing sheep.”

I was standing in the parking lot of the clinic on my lunch break, still in my scrubs, with a cold sandwich in my other hand.

I set the sandwich on the hood of my car and did not pick it up again.

“Did you go look at them?” I asked him.

“No,” Olaf said, and I could hear that he was a little ashamed of it. “We’re booked solid through the middle of June anyway. I’m sorry. I mean that.”

I told him I knew he did. Then I hung up and sat in my car with the windows down and the smell of cut hay coming across from the field next to the clinic, and I did the math.

The first crew had canceled on a Tuesday, two days before they were supposed to come. The second had simply stopped answering.

Now Olaf. That was every crew that worked our end of Fremont County, and I knew why.

My mother, Signe Jorgen, keeps 140 ewes on forty acres north of town. She has kept sheep her whole married life.

My dad ran them with her until his heart quit on him eleven years ago, out by the loading chute, on a bright morning in October.

Four years ago her MS turned the corner. It took her legs first, a little at a time, and then all at once.

She has been in a wheelchair since the spring after that, and she still runs that flock.

I don’t mean she owns them and somebody else does the work.

I mean she knows every ewe by her face, keeps the lambing book in her own hand, and can tell you which old girl is going to cause trouble at the gate before the gate is even open.

Those sheep are the reason my mother gets up in the morning. Her doctor said so, in almost those words, the year she was diagnosed.

Keep her doing what she loves for as long as she can do it.

So I sat in that parking lot and thought about Cody Raber, who I was married to for twelve years and divorced from for three, and I tried to understand how a grown man could do this to a woman in a wheelchair.

I did understand it, which was the worst part. When we split up, Mom took my side. She did not do it loudly.

She just told him, one Sunday after church, that she loved him and he was not welcome to come for dinner anymore.

Cody never forgave her for that. He forgave me, more or less, because he had to see me every other weekend at the girls’ handoffs.

But Mom was something he could hold on to, and he held on.

He drives a feed route now, all over the valley. He stops at every ranch and every sale barn and every shop that sells shearing combs.

He knows everybody, and everybody knows him, and he is good company over a cup of coffee.

That is how a story like that travels. Not in one big lie, but in a lot of small ones, said friendly, over a tailgate.

Those ewes are wild. The pens are junk. She can’t help you sort them. You’ll be there all day.

I sat in my car until my lunch break was over. Then I went back inside and finished the afternoon, and at five o’clock I asked the doctor I work for if I could take the last week of May off.

She looked at me over her glasses. “All of it?”

“All of it,” I said. “Monday through Friday. I’ll make up whatever I need to.”

“Is your mother all right?”

“She will be,” I said, “if I can get her sheep sheared.”

She did not ask any more questions. She just wrote it on the schedule in red pen and told me to bring her a picture of the first one.