The Week We Sheared Mom’s 140 Ewes

Friday

Friday morning, I was out at the board before the sun had cleared the hills. The grass was wet with dew, so I waited for it to burn off.

You do not shear wet sheep if you can help it. Wet wool will heat up in the bag.

At nine, the ewes were dry and the sky was clear, a bright late-spring blue with not one cloud in it. We started. Thirty to go.

I don’t remember most of that morning. I remember the hum of the motor and the sound of Mae counting and Lettie singing something from the radio under her breath while she held the next ewe for me.

I remember Greta bringing out sandwiches at noon and making me eat one standing up. I remember the green hills behind the barn, so bright they almost hurt to look at.

And I remember the last ewe. Mom had saved her on purpose.

She was Granny’s daughter, a big white ewe Mom had named Pearl, and Mom had asked the girls on Monday to hold her back in a corner of the pen until the very end.

“She’s the best fleece on the place,” Mom said. “I want to see her come off.”

Mae and Lettie brought Pearl out together, one at the jaw and one at the hip, and set her down on the board for me as neat as any crew I have ever seen.

I sheared her slow and careful, every blow as long as I could make it.

When the fleece came away whole, Mae did not call a number. She just looked at the pile and then at me. Then Lettie said, very quietly, “That’s all of them, Mom.”

One hundred and forty.

Greta clapped her hands once. The young couple from the bend in the road stood by the skirting table grinning.

Fenton, who had come by again at noon and never left, took his hat off and put it back on again.

And my mother sat in her wheelchair in her green cardigan with Pearl’s fleece in her lap and both hands buried in it, and she did not say anything at all, and she did not have to.

The fleeces sat piled on the tarp in the barnyard, white and rolled and stacked like loaves, right out where anybody driving the county road could see them.

More than one truck slowed down that afternoon. Word gets around a valley.

At two o’clock, the wool buyer pulled into the lane with an empty trailer and a stack of wool bags.

He was a heavy man in his sixties with a sunburned neck. He got out, shook my mother’s hand first, and walked straight to the tarp without saying much.

He pulled a fleece off the top of the pile and opened it up across his arms.

He looked at the staple. He pulled a lock and stretched it between his fingers, listening for it to snap, the way the old buyers still do to check the soundness.

It did not snap. He looked at the cut side for second cuts.

There weren’t many. I had made sure.

He picked up another one from the middle of the pile, then another from near the bottom. Each time he opened it, looked, and nodded to himself.

“Who sheared these?” he asked.

Before I could answer, I heard another truck on the gravel behind us.

I knew that engine. I was married to it for twelve years.

It is a diesel with a lifter that ticks when it is cold, and it had been ticking in my driveway every other Friday for three years at the girls’ handoffs.

Cody parked by the gate and got out slowly.

He was in his work clothes, his feed company cap pulled down low. I don’t know who told him. Maybe nobody.

Maybe he had just driven by every day that week, like the man from the second crew, and seen the pile get bigger.

He looked at the pens Fenton had built. He looked at the tarp.

Then he looked at his daughters, standing in the catch pen in their rubber boots, each of them holding a ewe by the jaw out of pure habit.

Mae let hers go and stood up straight.

The buyer looked from Cody to me, still holding a fleece open across his arms, still waiting for an answer.

Cody opened his mouth.