Dirty Chick (15 page)

“Really?” I whined. “But what about making our own bacon? And sausage?”

“They are disgusting, loud, and horrible. I'm glad I went out there. I wanted to come to terms with my own hypocrisy around food.”

He took a swig of his beer. “And now I'm fine with it. We are buying bacon at the store.”

SPINNING AND SPITTING

A
nimals need simple things. You feed them, you water them, you give them fresh grass and shade from the sun. Each day, when I woke up, I did my rounds on the farm: putting out biscuits for the dogs and cats, bringing kitchen scraps and pellets to the chickens. Rebecca took care of the big animals, checking in with the alpacas and cows. Ba and Cou-cou had been weaned by now, but she still visited them each day, keeping them company and singing them songs. I was even starting to enjoy Jabberwocky. We kept the chicken feed in a garbage bin, and when I went down to feed him, I brandished the lid like a shield.

“You want a piece of me?” I'd growl, wielding my red plastic armor. “Try it, rooster. I'll pull your guts right out your ass.” I meant it, too. Now that we were starting to learn some skills on the farm, I wasn't so scared of that eighteen-inch punk.

Weeks passed, and soon we were all on baby watch. Pearl's belly was heavy now, her sides plumped out and her attitude atrocious.
Far from letting anyone have a fondle, she wouldn't let us even approach. Peter tried to pet her, and she reared up, her ears on high alert, as though he were a dog and he'd tried to bite her.

The problem with this was that we actually needed to examine her, to figure out when she'd give birth. The most reliable method is to feel for the ligaments at the base of the spine; when these soften to the point where it seems they've disappeared, her kid will be born in a few hours.

But no one was touching those ligaments. Get within five feet of Pearl, and she'd edge away, her udders and giant penis-teats swaying painfully between her legs.

“She looks so uncomfortable,” I told Peter. “It's got to be soon.”

“Did you get all the stuff for the birth?” he asked.

“Of course,” I assured him. “We have everything.”

This was a blatant lie. The truth was that the only obstetrical tools I had on hand were a half-used jar of Vaseline and a bottle of iodine. The Vaseline was for greasing my hands if I had to, and I still wasn't exactly sure what to do with the shot glass of iodine. I'd looked at some specialized birthing gear in the farm store, but there was no way I would know how to use it. Pearl would enjoy a natural birth. With a couple of amateurs in charge and not a veterinarian in sight, she didn't have another choice.

Since she wouldn't let us touch her, we had only one other way of estimating the delivery date. We had to examine her hindquarters for the clear, viscous discharge that signals the start of labor. This became something of a game in our household.

“Well, I'm off to look at Pearl's vagina,” Rebecca sang out one evening while I sautéed some onions and garlic for supper.

“Any mucus?” I asked when she returned.

“Not yet,” she reported. Then, amazingly, we all sat down to eat.

Of course, the reason the animals' needs consumed us was that they were all so easy. I could feed a hungry dog. I could fight an irrational rooster. I could even see myself pulling babies out of a goat's vagina, if it came to that. What I couldn't understand was my son.

Over the past few weeks, Silas's world had constricted. His vocabulary had shrunk down to
iPad
and
bus
, and he chanted these words like an incantation. He lost interest in building towers or playing with cars and now spent his time arranging strange items: the empty tin cans from recycling or stray bits of dried macaroni. He placed these in mysterious patterns, making cryptic crop circles that no one understood. And if anything went wrong—a macaroni out of place or a cabinet door he couldn't pry open—he'd pant, taking deep, labored breaths that made him sound as if he were gasping for air.

I asked Nick about it, because he'd worked with Silas as a therapist. Nick took a few moments to watch him one night after supper, while Silas arranged plastic sippy cups on the kitchen counter. They weren't arranged by size or color, but he was careful to turn each one so the cartoon character was facing the same way. As he reached to adjust one, it tipped over and fell, sending Silas into a full-blown panting attack. He bent to pick up the cup and replaced it, breathing heavily the entire time.

“I've never seen anything like it,” Nick said finally. “I'd guess it's just mood regulation. When you and I are frustrated we just take a deep breath and carry on. But maybe Silas needs more sighs to get the same soothed feeling.”

He paused. “I'm guessing, really. Actually, I don't know.”

“I don't know” was the opinion experts usually gave on Silas, whether they were doctors, geneticists, or shrinks, so eventually we just stopped asking. Instead, we distracted ourselves with other
things. The flood of alpaca porn in my e-mail, it turned out, was a lead-up to the annual alpaca shearing, and I'd been looking forward to this day for months. Alpaca fleece is the payback for all the creatures' attitude and slime. It's extravagant and sought-after because it's so soft: touch a handful of fleece and it seems you're holding nothing at all.

So I threw myself into shearing preparations. I still wanted to knit an elegant pashmina with McTavish's chocolate-brown fleece, and to do that, I'd need some new skills.

“Will you show me how to, uh, spin?” I finally asked Rebecca one morning.

“Of course! I just thought you weren't interested.” That was a reasonable assumption, since I hadn't dared touch a handful of fleece since the Day of the Indian Chili Bomb. But I was hopeful the spinning would go better than the picking. At any rate, it could hardly go worse.

Before I met Rebecca, I thought spinning wheels existed only in Disney cartoons. But Rebecca's wheel was an actual tool made from wood and metal parts. Though it looked like it could turn straw into gold, she used it to produce yarn.

Rebecca dragged her wheel into the living room and started the lesson. First, she pointed to a wooden stick-thingy. “This is the Mother of All,” she explained.

“The Mother of Who?”

“The Mother of All.” She smiled sentimentally. “I love those old-fashioned names, don't you? Now, the Mother of All mounts the Maidens—”

“You're kidding, right?”

“—and they lead the yarn to the Orifice—”

“I thought this was wholesome!”

Rebecca flushed. “I don't know. I never really thought of it like a sex thing. They're just the traditional names for all the parts. Should I continue?”

“Well, I don't know. I'm a little offended. I feel like I should wash out my ears or something. Where's the prick?”

“The what?”

“You know, the prick. The one Sleeping Beauty pricked herself with and passed out for like a hundred years?”

Rebecca shook her head. “There is no prick. That's totally made up.”

“So you're telling me there's all these Mothers mounting Maidens and their Orifices with no prick?”

“Um. There's a knob. Does that help?”

“Whatever,” I sniffed. “I don't know about this spinning thing. Maybe I'll just concentrate on shearing.”

I'd been to a sheep shearing once before, so I was looking forward to seeing how they did it with alpacas. Unlike that filthy spinning business, sheep shearing is athletic and beautiful—even poetic, if you're in the right mood. When a skilled shearer grabs hold, the beast goes limp in his arms, as though it's helping the shearer get the job done. When they do it right, shearing almost looks like a dance, a sort of ancient embrace between shepherd and sheep. You can really imagine people doing this work for thousands of years.

But we wouldn't just be watching the alpaca shearing. Gay and Mike made it clear that this was a hands-on, team event. They would fly up an expert alpaca shearer from Christchurch, pick up all their customers' alpacas, and bring them back to the central farm. They'd charge us a very reasonable price for the shearing, but in exchange, we had to volunteer an entire day's work. Apparently, each
alpaca took four people to subdue. That was our first clue: this would not be an ancient embrace.

Gay and Mike picked the boys up on a Wednesday, while we were running errands in town. I don't know how they subdued them. It's possible they forced black hoods over their heads and hustled them into a waiting van, because when we got home that evening, the alpacas had disappeared. We took the opportunity to stroll peaceably through our paddock, admiring the lily pads in the pond and the tiny green frogs chirping on the bank. We'd never seen those details before. When our alpacas were around, we were always too busy dodging slime.

The big day was Sunday, and the three of us dropped the kids off with Autumn and Patrice before driving out to the alpaca farm with a creeping sense of dread. There were eighty alpacas to shear and only ten humans signed up for the day. If anything went wrong, we were dangerously outnumbered. But I tried to recall the sheep shearing and how peaceful the sheep looked when shorn.

We arrived at the farm with hopeful smiles, and Peter got his camera out to record the memories. Some man put his hand up. “No filming, bro, sorry,” he said.

Peter lowered the camera. “No? Why not?”

“Eh. We've had some problems with the animal rights people.” He picked up his shearing tools and abruptly turned his back.

Rebecca seemed nervous. “The sheep were very peaceful,” I whispered. “I'm sure it'll be fine.”

His tools assembled, the shearer turned back and introduced himself as Scott. Brisk and no-nonsense, Scott had a shaved head and a sharply trimmed goatee. He clapped his hands to get our attention.

“Right, you lot, this is how it goes. We bring the first beast out
here. You and you”—he pointed to Peter and another man, a middle-aged guy fiddling with his smartphone—“are on the front legs. You secure the legs with these.” He held up a pair of heavy ropes locked to a post in the ground with a steel carabiner. I recognized the lines, because we had them on our sailboat. You could use them to tow a large car.

“Then you and you”—he pointed to me and Rebecca—“you get the hind legs. On my mark, the four of you haul your lines, and I mean
hard out.
If you can't pull hard enough, put the bloody thing over your shoulder and walk away with it. That'll take the bugger down.”

Shearing an alpaca was beginning to sound like subduing a dangerous psychopath. I shot Peter a look of concern.

The first animal they led out was a black alpaca named Odysseus. Despite his noble name, he had a scrappy look in his eye. Scott smiled grimly. “Know this bugger,” he informed us. “He's a spitter.”

Odysseus did not look at all pleased. We hauled on our lines, and his legs splayed out. Once Odysseus's face was level with mine, he shot a gob of green goo right at my head. I couldn't wipe it off without dropping a line, so I kept on pulling, feeling the warm slime slither through my hair and soak into my scalp. When Odysseus was subdued, Scott dove in and bound his head to his leg with a bungee cord.

I don't think this hurts the alpaca so much as insults his dignity. By this point the fleece is so thick and wooly that it must be a relief to have it removed. But that didn't stop Odysseus from complaining. He protested with a high-pitched scream that sounded a lot like a car's squeaky fan belt. The shearer straddled him hard, clenching him in powerful legs, and shaved fleece off his back and belly.
Odysseus just lay there and howled. At one point, Scott leaned in close so he could check the animal's teeth. Odysseus shot out a geyser of slime, tossing his head for maximum impact. Thrashing his head in a foul-smelling puddle, Odysseus looked like a belligerent drunk throwing up at the end of a bar fight.

The shearing was finished in a couple of minutes, and we released Odysseus unharmed, though clearly humiliated. Shorn of his magnificent fleece, he now resembled a skinny giraffe. He slunk back to his pen, chastened and nude.

We spent the morning shaving alpacas, watching them vomit and writhe, until Gay had us break for tea.

“You see?” she sang out. “Isn't it wonderful? They look so cute when they're shorn!”

Rebecca and Peter nodded politely, shoveling scones in their mouths so they wouldn't have to respond.

“Definitely,” I told her. “They're great.” To Peter, I whispered, “I've changed my mind.”

He raised his eyebrows, his mouth full of scone.

“I don't want a pashmina. This whole thing is stressing me out.”

Peter swallowed, taking my hand. “I'm so glad you said that. I'll buy you one myself. Let's get the hell out of here.” Rebecca nodded vigorously, already reaching for her handwoven scarf.

Over the course of the morning, more farmers had arrived to help out, so we didn't feel too guilty about leaving early. I grabbed one last scone off the table. “Gay? Mike? We're gonna call it a day. See you later!”

The alpaca crew, oblivious to our discomfiture, waved a cheerful good-bye, promising to deliver our animals later in the week. We beat a hasty retreat.

“Maybe we're just too sensitive,” I reasoned as we all drove home.
“Sometimes you have to
subdue
an animal to make it do what you want. Sometimes you have to squeeze its boob, or shave its ass, or—”

“Bag its face and strap it to the ground?” Peter asked. “Maybe we're not cut out to be farmers.”

“You guys are doing fine!” Rebecca protested. “You're just learning. No one's an expert at first.”

“See?” I backed her up. “Farm girl says we're doing fine. Who'd be more cut out for this than we are?”

“Axe murderers,” Peter suggested. “Sex perverts. People who enjoy a nice goat vagina.”

“Yeah,” I conceded. “I see your point. But I wanted to leave early anyway. Now I have time to start a cheese.”

This was getting more urgent now that Pearl was about to give birth. Soon we'd be flooded with gallons of raw goat milk, and I wanted to start practicing cheese making. I'd coaxed Hamish into giving me some fresh cow's milk—the kind without any dirt or snails in it—and I was thinking I'd start with a Camembert.