The Week We Sheared Mom’s 140 Ewes

Monday

I laid a sheet of three-quarter plywood flat in the barnyard Monday morning, just outside the gate Fenton had built, on a spot where the ground was level and the grass was short.

I wired the handpiece to the motor and hung it from a post Fenton had braced for me. I oiled it.

I put on my old gray tank top, my worst pair of jeans, and braided my hair down my back the way I used to before every shearing day.

My girls came out of the house in their rubber boots. Mae is fourteen and tall for it, in a pink T-shirt.

Lettie is eleven and built like a fence post, in a blue one. Both of them looked at me like I had lost my mind.

“Mom,” Mae said, “do you actually know how to do this?”

“I used to,” I said. “We’re about to find out.”

Mom wheeled herself out last. She had on her green cardigan even though the day was already warming, and she parked her chair right at the edge of the plywood, close enough to touch.

“Start with the old ones,” she told me. “They’ve been sheared enough times to know how it goes. They’ll teach you.”

So I did. Mae and Lettie went into the catch pen together and came out with a gray-faced old ewe Mom called Granny, the two of them walking her by the jaw and the hip the way I showed them.

I set her up on her rump on the plywood, her back against my knees, and for a second I just stood there holding her and breathing.

My hands were shaking. The motor was running. Mom said nothing, which was the kindest thing she could have done.

Then I started on the belly, the way Dad taught me, and my hands remembered.

Not fast. Not pretty. The first ewe took me eleven minutes. Dad could do one in under three without breaking a sweat.

I nicked her once on the flank and said, “I’m sorry, honey,” out loud, to a sheep.

Lettie laughed so hard she had to sit down on the edge of the board.

Then Mae started laughing, and then I did, and Granny just stood there half sheared, looking at all of us like we were the ones who were wild.

When the last of the fleece came away off her back, it came in one piece, the way it is supposed to. I gathered it up, cut side down, and turned around.

I laid that first fleece in my mother’s lap.

She put both hands on it. Then she ran one hand through it, slowly, the way you would read a letter from somebody you had not heard from in a long time.

Her fingers went down to the base of the wool where it was still warm.

“Your daddy’s girl,” she said.

That was all she said. She didn’t have to say any more. I turned back to the board so the girls wouldn’t see my face, and I called for the next one.

We did twenty-four that first day. The girls learned to catch. Mae was gentle and patient. Lettie was quick and fearless and got knocked flat twice and got right back up both times.

By supper my shoulders burned like somebody had poured hot coffee down my back. I could not lift my arms high enough to wash my hair.

I slept in my mother’s recliner that night because I could not make it up the stairs.

Mom sat beside me in her chair with the television off. Sometime after nine I heard her humming a hymn, the one she used to sing when she was canning, very low. I don’t remember falling asleep.