The Week We Sheared Mom’s 140 Ewes

After

The buyer left a little before four with a full trailer. The neighbors drifted home to their own chores, one at a time, each of them stopping at my mother’s chair before they went. Greta hugged me so hard my sore back popped.

Fenton was the last to go. He packed the handpiece back into its coffee can, wrapped in the rag, and then he looked at it for a minute and set the can down in my mother’s lap instead of taking it to his truck.

“Keep it,” he said. “She’ll want it again next year.”

“Fenton, you’ve had that handpiece longer than I’ve been alive.”

“And now it’s yours,” he said. “Your dad would have wanted you to have a good one.”

Then he got in his truck and drove off before either of us could argue.

That evening, the girls and I sat out on the porch with my mother.

The sun was going down behind the hills and the shorn ewes were grazing in the near pasture, looking skinny and white and about ten pounds lighter on their feet.

Nobody said much. Lettie fell asleep against my shoulder. Mae sat on the step and counted the ewes in the pasture out loud, just to hear herself say it, and when she got to the end she said, “Still 140.”

“Still 140,” Mom said.

I sent the doctor a picture of the first one, like she had asked.

It was a picture Greta had taken on Monday morning, with her phone held out at arm’s length: me on the plywood with the old ewe, my girls in their rubber boots, my mother with that first fleece in her lap.

She printed it out and pinned it up behind the front desk at the clinic. It is still there. People ask about it. I tell them it was a good week.

The next spring

Cody still drives the feed route. He still stops at every ranch in the valley.

But I am told he does not talk about my mother’s sheep anymore, and when somebody else brings it up, he changes the subject.

He comes to Sunday dinner at my mother’s now, every so often. Not every week.

He sits at the end of the table and he is polite, and he helps clear the dishes, and he always asks about the flock. Mom always tells him.

It is not what it was. It never will be. But it is something, and my mother says something is a good deal more than nothing, and she would know.

The girls talk about that week like it was the best week of their lives. Mae wants to learn to shear.

She has already asked Fenton to teach her, and he said he would, as soon as she is strong enough to hold the handpiece for a whole ewe.

Lettie wants to be a wool buyer. She has a folded sheet of paper in her pocket, just like the man had, and she practices pulling locks on the cat.

And my mother still runs that flock from her chair. She still knows every ewe by her face.

When the weather turns warm, she still sits at the edge of the plywood and waits for the first fleece to land in her lap.

The crews all called the next spring. Every one of them. Olaf called first and apologized again, and I told him there was nothing to apologize for, because there wasn’t. He was the only one who told me the truth.

I thanked every one of them for calling. Then I told them I was booked.