The Week We Sheared Mom’s 140 Ewes

The price

The buyer finished going through the pile. He opened eight or nine fleeces, top to bottom.

Then he stood up, took a folded sheet of paper out of his shirt pocket, and looked at it for a long time.

“I’ll pay top of my sheet for these,” he said to my mother. “Best farm-flock clip I’ve bought this spring. They’re clean, they’re sound, and they’re skirted right.”

Mom nodded to him like she had expected nothing less. But her hand was still in Pearl’s fleece, and I saw it tighten.

Wool doesn’t make anybody rich anymore. Those 140 fleeces were not going to buy a new truck.

But they would pay for the ewes’ winter hay and some of the vet bills, and more than that, they were hers. Her flock. Her clip. Her name on the check.

The buyer started setting up his bagging frame next to the trailer. And here is the part I did not expect.

Cody walked over to the tarp, took off his feed company cap, and set it on a fence post.

He picked up an armload of fleeces and carried them to the wool bag without asking anybody.

Nobody told him to. Nobody stopped him. He climbed into that bag and tramped the fleeces down the way we used to when we were young and newly married and helping Dad, back when Dad still called him son.

The buyer looked at me. I shrugged. Greta raised her eyebrows at me across the tarp. Fenton just kept watching.

Cody tramped wool for an hour and a half in the hot afternoon sun. He did not talk. He did not look at anybody.

He filled four bags, and when the last fleece was in, he climbed out, sweating through his shirt, and helped the buyer lift the bags onto the trailer.

Then he walked over to my mother’s wheelchair.

The barnyard went quiet. Even the sheep, I swear.

Cody stood in front of her with his cap in his hand. “Signe,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said what I said about your sheep.”

My mother looked up at him. She has known him since he was nineteen. She sat at his wedding and held his babies and fed him Sunday dinner for twelve years before she stopped.

“No,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.”

He nodded. He waited, I think, for her to say something else. She didn’t.

She let it sit there, plain and true, in front of every neighbor who had given up a day of their own work to fix what he had broken.

Then she said, “There’s coffee in the house. There always was.”

He stood there a minute longer. Then he said, “Not today. Thank you.” And he put his cap back on, kissed both girls on the top of the head, and drove away.