The Week We Sheared Mom’s 140 Ewes

Tuesday

I woke up stiff as a board and swore I could not do it again. Then I saw the girls already out at the pens in their boots, and I could.

Tuesday morning, a little after eight, a car pulled into the lane.

It was Greta from down the road, a widow about my mother’s age who has raised chickens and grandkids and never missed a funeral in her life.

She got out with a thermos and a pair of leather gloves. “I heard you were shearing,” she said. “I can’t shear, but I can roll a fleece faster than any woman in this county.”

“Who told you?” I asked her.

“Fenton,” she said. “Who else? He told me in the feed store yesterday. He told a few people, I think.”

She went to work at the tarp without being asked. She rolled each fleece the old way, the tail end folded in, the sides turned under, rolled tight from the back toward the neck, and laid it on the pile like a loaf of bread.

The girls watched her and learned it too. By noon, Lettie was rolling fleeces between catches and Greta was praising her loud enough for the whole barnyard to hear.

We did twenty-seven on Tuesday. My blows were longer. I nicked fewer.

I started to remember the rhythm of it, the way you move your feet so the sheep moves with you instead of against you.

Around three in the afternoon, a pickup slowed down on the county road and just sat there for a minute with the engine running.

I did not look up to see who it was. I kept shearing.

Mae told me later it was one of the men from the second crew, the one that had stopped returning my calls. He watched for about two minutes, she said, and then drove on.

Wednesday

Wednesday was the hard day. Every shearer knows it. The first day you are running on adrenaline, the second day you are running on pride, and the third day you are running on nothing at all.

I sheared the first ewe of the morning and had to stop halfway and set her loose and sit down on the plywood.

My back had locked up somewhere above my belt. I could not straighten it.

Mom wheeled up next to me. She didn’t say anything for a minute.

Then she reached over and put her hand flat between my shoulder blades, the way she used to when I was a little girl with a fever.

“Your dad used to say the third day is when you find out if you’re a shearer,” she said. “He also said there’s no shame in a long lunch.”

So I took a long lunch. I lay flat on my back in the grass for forty minutes while the girls brought me ibuprofen and a jar of iced tea. I stared up at the sky and thought about my father.

When I got up, two more neighbors had come. A young couple who had bought the old place at the bend in the road the year before.

I barely knew them. They had brought a skirting table, the slatted kind, that the husband had built himself out of old pallets.

“We don’t know how to do anything,” the wife said. “But Greta said you needed a table, and he had the wood.”

Nobody made a speech. Nobody said a word about Cody, or about crews, or about anything except wool.

They just showed up after their own chores and stayed until supper, and then they came back the next day.

Mae had started calling out the count every time a fleece hit the tarp. She stood on an upturned bucket by the pile like an auctioneer.

“Fifty-three, Mom.”

“Sixty.”

“Seventy-one.”

We did twenty-nine on Wednesday. My back hurt the whole time. But at the end of the day I could stand up straight, and I knew I was going to finish.