Lambsquarters (10 page)

Who first used my cumbersome square shovel? It came with the place, was tossed in a corner of the barn with the junkyard collection of cattle chains, torn rabbit cages, rusty metal sheeting and the silent memories of a thousand animal ghosts. The barn is different now, cleared of rubble, with new floors, new walls, new pens and the tilt put right.

When we first arrived, the barn “was heading south for the winter,” said old Tom M
^c
Neil, the spitting,
farting, flashing-eyed barn fixer we eventually hired. The pressure of the earth against the foundation, banked up to allow the horses, now tractors, to drive up into the mow, slowly edged the whole structure to a lean, the way a horse will tilt a favourite fence post by continually pushing against it, rubbing its flank on the wood, polishing it to a shine, but setting it off the perfect angle.

Just as someone came up with the idea of building barns on a bank, or of building banks up to a barn, some old farmer devised the method of repair when these banks pressured their barns into a lean. Like parasites who take over the host, a bank unchecked can surpass its symbiotic relationship and kill its partner. It can push the whole barn off its foundations, shake the roof alignment, cause an opening here, a loose board there, and before the animals have had a chance to meet their grandlambs, the barn is all in a heap with the first serious windstorm.

The tilt required attention, but everything else in the barn did too. The old separate cattle stalls were hopeless for gregarious sheep who like to huddle together, the cattle chains were superfluous hanging down on broken frames, and the floor was a treacherous maze of various levels and materials. Until I was pregnant the floor hadn’t bothered me; I’d climb over the partitions with full pails of water. But a cumbersome belly made me realize how awkward and dangerous
the work was with its many pails, many gates and many nails.

The animals’ water froze overnight and each morning I pulled out my crowbar, that heavy beast, and pounded the ice, broke through the top, emptied out pails and started again. More than once it resisted my knocks then gave way all at once, sending showers of shards and drops, debris or worse all over us. A chicken-shit facial some days.

New mother ewes, parched from lactating, greedily drank up all I could give. Pails and pails, gallons and gallons, carried one by one, over the gates, through the pens, around the corner of the warren we’d bought. All while I focused one eye on my toddler. The eye in the back of my head, which mothers develop, but never quite trust.

So after a few years of hauling water and tripping on broken concrete, of mucking out the barn by hand because a tractor couldn’t negotiate the pens, we hired Tom M
^c
Neil, and he came with his jacks, winches, chains and pulleys. He tore out the foundations on two sides, left no post in the corner: the barn was open to wind and light, staying aloft by some magic of angles. The beams in place, the jacks set up, he started to winch. Inch by inch. The barn groaned. It heaved. It sighed and grumbled. “We got her talkin’ now,” said Tom, his hand-rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Then he left for the weekend, with our barn floating in air, just a mow with a beam and a chain holding fast.

Overnight, a spring storm took out a tree near the house. Flattened it for good. But the barn stood. Held. The wisdom of the barn fixer setting her strong. On Monday Arthur Erwin, the king of concrete in our area, came to pour cement like ambrosia, spread it like molten gold into solid foundations, walls and floors. And my daughter, now strong on her feet, took it all in, stooped for the stones and drew in the muck and made her mark—two tiny footsteps—on this place she calls home. We rebuilt the foundation around her, to buttress her up and make her feel safe. Her sibling was just quickening when we began. I needed a better barn. Where I could walk without tripping, water without pails, feed without shoving. Spend less time on the chores as my family took more.

WHEN THAT PILE
of stone and earth had first been bevelled beneath the mow doors, the original barn was big enough to service a full hundred acres, all the grain, straw and hay the farm would grow, as well as the animals it could pasture. Likely the farmers had a cow or two for milk, a few beef cattle, some pigs, sheep and chickens. The barn was built with timber from the forests and stone from the fields. Stones are legion in this township—it sits on glacial moraine. No matter how many stones you pick, the yearly frost always heaves up more. Stone piles are monumental.

The local hemlock, roughly sawn for barnboard, is
no longer available. My good friend and neighbour Harrow, reluctant to replace such boards with pine, which would only last a hundred years or so, clad his barn in steel. I can’t help wondering how that will look in a hundred years. Wood is pleasing in a state of decay.

After the first barn burned in the twenties, the owner retired and sold the farm to the next-door neighbour, who was happy to get it—his rocky land was too marginal to support a family well. No doubt the house stood empty for a while, and the barn may have been vacant too. But not for long. The original farmer couldn’t cope with town. It must have felt like the city to him—buggies everywhere, telegraph poles and electric lights going in, hustle and bustle as the trains pulled up, groups of people tripping over each other, noisy drunks on a Saturday night. He couldn’t take it. He returned, bought back the corner of the farm, the house, the barn, twenty-three acres. And it was then that the barn burned.

So my barn is not all that old. Although the property was cleared well back in the century before the last, and the earliest house—now in ruins—was made of local logs, the first barn did not survive. Old Mr. Meads, a patient of Thomas’s, remembers when it burned. He lives in Murphy’s Mill now, but he grew up around the corner from our farm. He had been driving cattle down the concession to the railway in Alderney. A sudden storm, thunder, lightning, and the barn was struck. No
doubt the fire-reels came, and the neighbours set up a bucket brigade, but only the foundation was saved. The firefighters brag they’ve never lost a foundation yet. The foundation had been built from the Canadian Shield. Solid as granite.

The smoke from a burning barn carries for miles. Clouds of flames burst through the boards as old hay and straw catch. Buckets of water, or hoses from pumpers filled at nearby streams only wet down the other outbuildings, the house, the nearby wooden fences. A barn fire rarely gets put out. It rages like Hera in a temper, sacrificing heifers, then smoulders in its rocky enclosure, cowed by great hot stones that are impervious to flame and testament to the cold that brought them here.

The township arrives, bringing pies, casseroles, fresh bread and eggs. Farmers take cattle home with them, milk them in their own barns, tether horses in their sheds, pile pigs into their pens for sleepovers. The sheep are on pasture, safely grazing, their wool inflammable, their winter shelter gone but not yet mourned. Dogs sniff and worry and burn their paws in the rubble. They dig and uncover, expose the losses, find the bones.

At one time, there would have been a bee to rebuild. We only see barn raisings now when a local Mennonite barn burns. At the last one, the children were sent from school to watch the raising—it’s that rare. But in the twenties, bees were common. In the
days before the tin men and the Quonset hut, all the farms were smaller, had more men, more hands, more immediate skills.

Having only a quarter of a farm now, the farmer had no use for a large barn. He couldn’t grow enough hay or grain on this land to fill the mows, or sustain a full quota of stock. But he had to rebuild something. Using two sides of the stone foundation and old timber already notched from some derelict barn, he sunk in posts to hold up the south and east sides, laid new mud-sills, created a skeleton, mortised and tenoned. He had help with the frame.

A neighbour up the road had a portable sawmill that ran off the tractor and cut hemlocks from the bush for siding. There was a shingle mill in Alderney where the farmer could take cedar logs from the swamp for the roof. Nails came by the pound then and were square cut and heavy. The preparations were legion and long, but the process reacquainted him with his land and reassured him of his mission. He belonged on this place. His forefathers built the first house, the first barn. He would replace what was lost.

On the day of a raising, folks would arrive early. The men at the barnyard, the women at the house and yard. Boys would set up tables and unload benches and chairs from the wagons. Dogs would bark. Babies would sleep under nets beneath maples or nurse in the upstairs rooms. Cats would emerge from their hiding spots,
hunker down at a distance and watch. Milk came in cans fresh from the cold house, produce came from the gardens, berries directly from the bushes, bread from twenty ovens. Woodstoves in surrounding kitchens would roast meat, making the women sweat into their bib aprons, their hair escaping from pins and flattened against red faces. Women with names like Bertha and Beulah, Clover and Cavelle. Rubys and Olives and Ferns, their last names carried on by brothers. Little girls would draw out the cloths, set the tables, place the forks, the knives, the cups. Cauldrons of water would be set to boil for tea, hams sliced, eggs hard-cooked, peeled and devilled.

Preserved herbal vinegars, pickles, relishes. Salt, pepper, sugar. And pies. The pies would be competitive—practice pieces for the fall fair. Rhubarb, raspberry, apple and cherry, elderberry from last year’s canning—the elderberries not yet ripe in midsummer— perhaps the odd peach from someone who had been down-country and was showing off. The elevation won’t tolerate peaches here. They die off in frosts.

Days of preparation for this feast. Two feasts, for after the noon dinner the men and bigger boys would be back at the barn, would work until supper, would need to eat again before going back to their own chores, their own barns. So the women would scurry and sweat and worry and fuss and work as hard as they did then. The food had to be beautiful, had to be nourishing, and it was.

Tom M
^c
Neil’s father was the barn wizard before him, and he would lead the team, organize the men into what they did best. The sure-footers to the roof, the land-lovers to the foundation. The reckless in tandem with those with a good sense of self-preservation. The doctor on standby, ready to deal with concussion, splinter and gash. No one wore protective equipment. And, as the pies were contested in the house, skill and speed were winning elements at the barn. Who could lay more shingles? Who could carry more boards, hammer more nails, set in the best windows?

The men would bring their own tools. Some in leather aprons. Hammers hooked to overalls. Ladders and squares, levels and plumb lines, cloth tapes in leather cases, saws, planes and chisels. A neighbour needed a barn. Lightning strikes. It might happen to you someday.

It might have been Aaron Wilson who brought the shovel. He mixed cement, poured the sidewalks in Alderney. The shovel’s blade can hold a heavy dollop of muck and the shaft has the ghost of concrete in its cracks. But the tool must predate him too, that split wooden handle, carefully steamed to bend, chosen from the lathe for its strength and resilience both. Whoever brought it, forgot it. Or left it as a talisman, like the branch of evergreen on the ridge, spirit of safety for those who must not fall.

ZOË

THE STABLE FLOOR
is indelibly marked, not only with the named and dated sneakered footprints of my toddling daughter, but with a trail of errant paw prints angling across one corner, hidden all year by bedding and sheep. Each summer, on the day the barn is cleaned out and the manure is spread on the hayfield, the paw prints resurface. They are the lasting marks of a sappy dog who started and ended her days here.