Island (26 page)

But then I look at those before me. I look at my parents drawn together before the Christmas tree. My mother has her hand upon my father’s shoulder and he is holding his ever-present handkerchief. I look at my sisters, who have crossed this threshold ahead of me and now each day journey farther from the lives they knew as girls. I look at my magic older brother who has come to us this Christmas from half a continent away, bringing everything he has and is. All of them are captured in the tableau of their care.

“Every man moves on,” says my father quietly, and I think he speaks of Santa Claus, “but there is no need to grieve. He leaves good things behind.”

I
t was the summer after the seventh grade that saw me truly smitten with the calf club wish. It was not, of course, a really dazzlingly new idea because, living on a farm, I had always been surrounded by numerous animals. Not a day went by without my touching them and the insistence of their presence affected the living of my life and the lives of the other members of my family in very real and tangible ways. Their closeness and the manner of their closeness varied with the time of seasons.

In the winter, when they were less plentiful, they crowded together in the shared and dense confinement of their stables; stamping their hooves on the manure-strong planking and tossing their impatient heads and uttering the sounds of their different species. If you ventured into the silent barn at night the wave of their communal warmth rolled out to meet you at the creaking, opened door and the sound of the different rhythms of
their breathing rose and fell in the softened darkness. If the flashlight was flicked on, or the carried lantern raised, the luminous eyes of those who were awakened glowed from their stalls and across their mangers, and then various sounds seemed to respond to the presence of the light; the creak of the wooden stanchion posts rubbed by the necks of restless cattle, the murmured grunts of half-asleep pigs, the nickering snorts of horses, the zing of suddenly tightened rope or leather, the jangle of moving halter chains.

By March conditions were even more overcrowded as the females grew awkward and ponderous with the weight of their unborn young. When they lay down in their expanded heaviness the ripples of movement from deep within their wombs were visible against the drum-tight skin of their extended sides. The promise of the future lay warm and heavy within their deep, dark bodies.

Inside the winter house the dogs and cats lay like scattered rugs beneath the kitchen couches and under dining tables or stretched at length behind the wood-filled stoves. At night my dog Laddie lay across my feet; a warm and living comforter whose heartbeat could be felt through the fabric of the bedclothes. His wet, cold nose was covered by his paws.

By the end of March the birth cycle would begin and would extend sometimes deep into June. First the sheep, then some cattle and later the pigs and finally the wobbly foals with their long, ungainly legs. There would be chickens and kittens and puppies with at-first-unopened eyes. The number of animals would double or almost triple within the allotted weeks and there would be a flurry of activity surrounding the new arrivals
and the rapidity of their growth. New pens would be constructed and, amidst squeals of protest, there would be separations, weanings and brandings and the pulling of teeth and the flashing of knives used for the cutting of testicles, the docking of tails and the notching of ears. They would spill out then, according to their kind, to the larger yards and fields or the mountain-high pastures washed by the blue-white sea.

By July first, which always seemed unbelievably soon, the haying season which would ensure their winter’s survival would begin. During the summer months, while the animals grew sleek and fat and haughty, we, their human owners, would grow thin and burned and irritable; rising often before sunrise and working sometimes until after dark. Only the work horses seemed to share in our drudgery and weight loss; the burns from their collars and the chafings caused by their rubbing traces corresponding to the blisters and calluses upon our hands. Sometimes at night we would rub ourselves with diluted horse liniment to alleviate the sprains and bruises which we accumulated during the day.

Throughout this season, as I said, the animals of summer grew strong and free. Only the milk cows were brought to the barn twice daily for their milking, and even they seemed to take on an air of independence that bordered on arrogance. The others grazed openly and heedlessly through the long days of their summer vacation. From the tops of our hay wagons we could see them, especially on the hottest days, lying on the sandy beaches which separated their pastures from the sea, or dangerously close to the rocky edge of the sea cliffs fall. It was always cooler near the sea and there was always a slight breeze and they
were not bothered there by the flies that tormented inland animals. Throughout the working days of summer we spent little time ourselves beside or within the turquoise sea.

As the summer progressed and as the season’s young became more independent, the mature animals would yearn again to be sexually active. They would demonstrate their needs in various ways, again depending on their species and their sex, and they would continue to do so until they were fulfilled. We, as the humans who depended on them as they did on us, would frequently and of necessity interfere with their needs and desires. We would tether the lusty and often ill-tempered rams to iron stakes driven deep into the earth or isolate them in all-male pens where they frequently took out their frustrations by battering their thick-boned skulls against each other. We would keep them from the ewes until late in the fall, knowing that early matings resulted in the birth of winter lambs who stood little chance of surviving the bitter coldness of the season of their birth. We would keep the young heifers from the heavy bulls, knowing that they were often injured and sometimes permanently maimed in their first sexual encounters, and knowing also that even if they did survive the breeding, great difficulty awaited them in such youthful pregnancies, and that often they would die attempting to give birth. Another year would make a great difference to them as well as to us. In the same manner we would discourage nesting and maternal hens from bringing forth autumnal chickens who would not be matured enough to meet the demands of cold, rain-lashed November and the harsher months to follow. Like highly protective parents we would hover over such lives, hoping that our attempts at control
would result in what was “best” for all. This is for your own good, we would think, as well as for ours, although we would never articulate it in such a manner.

In the fall we would reduce the population that had so flourished through the long, hot summer days. As it had doubled or tripled in the spring, it was reduced by similar numbers in the fall, and reduced in a variety of ways. Livestock buyers came, sometimes walking to the pastures to view their intended victims, offering prices, quoting possibilities, leaving and returning. All of the male lambs would go, and most of the females except a select few singled out to continue the reproductive cycle. When they left, they would be strong and rambunctious, unlike their earlier wobbly-legged selves. They would crowd against one another and jostle as they were ushered up the ramps of the waiting trucks and sometimes they would attempt to leap over the slatted sides of their new confinement. We would hear their indignant bleatings as the trucks took them permanently from the single environment of their one and only summer. Sounds of angered indignation tinged with the very real sound of fear. Later the cheques we had exchanged them for would come and we, in our turn, would enter a phase of rejuvenation and hopeful, though temporary, self-confidence.

Sometimes, depending on different factors, it would be more profitable to butcher animals and sell them locally than to trust to the simpler yet more bureaucratic expedient of the truck or train which would take them to more distant killing stations. There was always butchering in the late fall to supply meat for ourselves and our urban relatives, but in some years there would be more than in others. It would always be a melancholy time
then, especially if there was a lot of it. The night before we would lay out the ceremonial clothes of death, splattered with bloodstains and bearing the distinctive odour which could never be fully washed away. We would sit on chairs in the kitchen, sharpening the various knives and testing the keenness of the blades with the balls of our callused thumbs. We would pay attention to the weather and nearly always kill according to the phases of the moon. From the barn we could hear the protesting moans of the unknowing and condemned animals. Unlike condemned prisoners, they would receive neither food nor water before their executions. This was to reduce the bulk of their weight and their body fluids for the day that was to follow; so that their weight, which would so soon become dead, would be less ponderous and easier to handle.

On the day of the actual butchering we would rise early so that we would get a good start. In the late fall the days would be short, and since we would normally work by natural light, adjustments would have to be made. The animal would be taken to that part of the barn called the threshing floor and stationed beneath the chain pulleys which would soon be used to elevate its carcass. If it were a huge animal, it would be shot. Sometimes we would draw lines on its trusting head with a crayon, from behind each ear and across its forehead. Generally the point of intersection would be the marksman’s target – almost a literal bull’s-eye. If the animal were less huge, it would be merely hit between the eyes by a sledgehammer or the blunt side of an axe wielded by the strongest man. Even as its front legs buckled and its eyes glazed, the knife used for the severing of the jugular would be passed handle-first to the waiting hands which had
tossed aside the sledgehammer or axe – much as the nurse might pass the scalpel. If done well, it would take but ten or twelve seconds to change life into death. The pigs were always the hardest to kill because their skulls slanted backwards and were more difficult to strike than the flattened foreheads of others. As the blood gushed from the slashed throats, we would gather it in pans so that it might later be used for blood puddings –
maragan
, they were called in Gaelic. One person would hold the pan beneath the neck of the fallen animal while another would raise and steady the convulsing and partly severed head so that the blood would be pumped into the pan and not wasted on the barn-planked floor. Later we would take the hind legs and cut the flesh between the hocks and the main tendons and insert a horizontal stick. To this stick we would fasten the now-descended chain pulleys and we would raise the animal by its widespread legs even as we skinned and disembowelled it. Sometimes the flesh would continue to twitch for a long time after the actual death and even after the hide had been removed. The contents of the body would generally spill into a huge washtub and we would sort them out in their steaming warmth with bloodied slippery hands. We would save at least the heart and the liver and the stomach and the strips of marbled fat; sometimes other portions as well. And if there was time, our father would point out and explain the functions of the mysterious and until-now invisible internal organs. “This is the bladder, and this is the spleen and this is the large intestine. This is the windpipe. These are the lungs. This is the passage that the seed follows from the testicles to the end of the penis.” We
would listen and watch intently, like those involved in a formal autopsy or like intense medical students about their still cadaver.

Often there would be surprises. Sometimes shingle nails or fence staples or bits of twisted wire would be found embedded in the stomach, and one time the neck of a beer bottle was found completely surrounded by a strange almost translucent knob of gristle. It seemed to glow like a huge, obscene pearl. We remembered then how more than a year ago the cow had stood for days unable to eat or give milk, and for a while barely able to walk. We had no way of knowing then how the sharp-edged amber glass she had carelessly swallowed in her grazing cut into her stomach’s lining, and we did not know when the gristle began to surround it and isolate it, thus allowing her to move and function once again. Another time we found an unborn calf within the womb of a young cow we had considered sterile. We had tried various matings and solutions, but she had always failed to conceive. In her fourth year of life her sterility became a luxury we could not afford. “We cannot take her through another winter like that,” was the verdict. “She will have to be fattened and killed.” When found within the womb of the slaughtered mother, the embryonic calf continued to move for a brief and borrowed time. Its delicate limbs had begun to form and were folded compactly back upon themselves, while its eyes seemed large and luminous. Its ears were exquisite and fragile and flatly pressed, like the memory of ferns found deep within the darkened earth. No one knew who had fathered the calf, although the time could be roughly estimated. What we had wanted we had found achieved, when it was ironically too late to save the life of either.