The Week We Sheared Mom’s 140 Ewes

Thursday

By Thursday the whole thing had a shape. The girls ran the catch pen like they had been doing it all their lives.

Mae would read the ewe, Lettie would get her by the jaw, and they would walk her out to me without a fuss.

They learned to tip a ewe on their own, too. Lettie figured out the trick first: one hand under the chin turning the head back over the shoulder, the other hand on the hip, and a step back. Down she goes, gentle as you please.

By Thursday afternoon the girls could tip a ewe faster than I could. They were proud of that, and they should have been.

Those ewes Cody called too wild to bother with went down for two little girls in rubber boots without a single fight.

That was the thing that kept coming back to me all day. The sheep were not wild.

They were old ewes on a small farm, handled by a woman in a wheelchair who talked to them every morning. They came to the gate when she called.

They had never been wild. The only wild thing in that whole story was what Cody said about them.

More people came Thursday. A rancher from up the bench brought his teenage son to sweep the board between sheep.

A woman from my mother’s church brought a pan of bars and a gallon of lemonade. Somebody I did not even recognize stacked panels after we were done with them.

Nobody asked for anything. Nobody stayed for long. They just did one small thing, nodded to my mother, and went home. That is how it works out here when people decide something matters.

Fenton came by in the afternoon and stood with his arms folded, watching me shear for a long time.

Then he walked over and adjusted the tension on the handpiece with a screwdriver he took out of his shirt pocket.

“Better,” he said. “Your dad would have said your blows are still too short on the last side.”

“He would have,” I said.

“He’d also have said those are the cleanest fleeces he’d seen come off this place in years.” Fenton put the screwdriver back in his pocket. “So I’ll say that instead.”

We did thirty on Thursday. When Mae called the last count of the day, it was one hundred and ten.

That night I called the wool buyer, a man Olaf had sent me to, who bought from the small flocks in our part of the valley.

I told him I would have 140 fleeces ready by Friday afternoon.

“Who’s your crew?” he asked.

“Come see,” I said.