The Week We Sheared Mom’s 140 Ewes

What he said

I have thought a lot about what he was going to say.

I think he was going to say something easy, something friendly, the way he talks over a tailgate. Something like, “Well, look at this,” with a laugh in it.

He never got the chance.

“We did,” Mae said.

She did not say it loud. She said it the way you would tell somebody the time.

She walked over to the buyer in her pink T-shirt and her rubber boots and stood next to him.

“Mom sheared,” she said. “Lettie and I caught. Grandma did the book. Mrs. Greta and the neighbors rolled them. All 140. Monday to today.”

The buyer looked at her, and then he looked at me. “You sheared 140 head this week? By yourself?”

“Not by myself,” I said. “You just heard who helped.”

He looked back down at the fleece in his arms, and something in his face changed. “Well,” he said, “I was told this flock was too wild to bother with.”

He did not say it to me. He said it out into the air, flat, like he was reading the weather.

But everybody in that barnyard knew where he had heard it. And everybody in that barnyard turned and looked at Cody.

Cody stood by the gate with his hands in his pockets. I watched his face go red from the neck up.

He looked at Mae. Mae looked right back at him. She did not look away.

I want to be fair to him. Cody is not a stupid man and he is not a cruel father. He loves those girls.

I watched him understand, right there in front of the neighbors, that his own daughters had caught every one of the sheep he said nobody could catch.

“I didn’t know you’d do it yourself,” he said finally. He said it to me, but it came out quiet, and he was looking at the ground.

“I know you didn’t,” I said.

That was all I said. I did not add anything to it. I could have.

There was a lot I could have added, and every person in that barnyard knew it, and I think that was worse for him than anything I could have said out loud.

Fenton did not say anything either. He just stood with his arms folded and looked at Cody the way an old man looks at a young one who has done something he knew better than to do.

Then Lettie walked over to her father. She is eleven and she does not have a mean bone in her body.

She had straw in her braids and dirt up to her elbows, and she took his hand.

“Dad,” she said, “I can tip a ewe now. Want to see?”

Cody looked at her for a long time. Then he said, “Yeah, Lettie. I’d like to see that.”

So she showed him. She went in the pen and picked one of the shorn ewes and set her down on her rump on the plywood, gentle as anything, and looked up at him to see if he was watching.

He was. I saw his jaw work. He did not say anything for a minute. Then he said, “That’s real good, honey,” and his voice was not quite steady.