Trauma Farm (45 page)
SINCE HE HAS WORKING
herd dogs, a livestock hauler, and a classic case of public spirit, Mike usually volunteered to haul people’s livestock to the fall fair. While he was hauling one year—on the other end of the island—a pair of pigs escaped from their owner. Mike and his dogs were called. He soon had the rogue pigs herded into his truck, but because he was so busy and had no idea who the owner was, he left them in a spare pen at the fairground until everything was sorted out. Upon returning to the fair he discovered he’d won second prize for them.
THE VARIETY OF LIFE
is what we live for; it’s all here, even more than at the market—the good, and a little of the bad. There’s the apple grower with 120 kinds of apples, offering everyone a taste. The seed savers. The salmon stream keepers. The woman who makes dolls like angels, basket weavers and wine makers, and the lonely politicians at their booths. The scarecrow that wouldn’t scare a mouse. The cute rabbit with immense ears. The little girl crying beside the road after she scraped her knee. Famous islanders—rock stars, lawyers, artists, writers, politicians—cheerfully washing dishes in the recycling booth. Hidden away upstairs a clan of women elders count the fair’s proceeds with a moral accuracy that’s daunting.
The market and the fair and the miraculous movement of gifts flowing through us like water in a creek are what make me love my local culture. Real communities are held together by just that, the community. The hand-crafters, the artists, and the skilled tradespeople—from cabinetmakers to clothes makers to backhoe drivers—are the core that attracts and civilizes the rest of the rural community. Sometimes it’s merely everyone meandering down to the park beside the bay, wearing silly Halloween costumes and eating junk food while the children run ragged among us, and we sip hot chocolates sneakily laced with a touch of rum. Later, the fireworks fall in cascading fountains over the blue-black waters of the bay and all of us go “Awwwwwwwww . . . .”
D
YING IS THE
way we live, and as night approaches I often find myself recalling our losses—the dimming of light can do that. Without death, the world wouldn’t be alive. Some years ago I was at an Ontario farm with a young farmer who happened to glance over my shoulder and see that one of his ewes was dead under an apple tree, a half-eaten apple in her jaws. She had choked on it. The unhappy farmer gazed at his once-prime ewe and remarked dryly, “If you’ve got livestock, you’ve also got dead stock.”
“
IT’S ONLY AN ANIMAL
,” my father said as I stood on the deck, weeping—hard words I’ve replayed in my head for fifty years. I’d been scouting in the bush like any good kid on the edge of the urban world when, in a thicket of salmonberry branches, I glimpsed the corpse of our white cat, its jaws drawn back in the grimace of a hard death. It was ancient in cat years, and it had crawled into the bushes to die. I began wailing like a child with a hammered hand. Everyone who’s had a dog or a cat knows what I’m talking about.
My thesaurus tells me that the antonym of
human
is
animal.
Whoever came up with that definition did not grow up with a dog or a horse or a cat. If you’ve got a nervous system, you’ve got a personality, and we’re suckers for personality. A biographer once claimed a literary friend had a pet clam when she was a child—which she denied. However, I can understand how the rumour began. She has a mind capable of seeing the beauty in a clam’s life. Whenever a creature we know dies, animal or human, we weep for it, and, greedily, we weep for ourselves—the lost possibilities of a golden future with our companions, the way I wept for my cat.
There are numerous reasons why a child should grow up with animals. For companionship, of course, and the discipline their care entails, but also to learn about loss when the creature dies—a crucial moment in childhood, yet one we never totally comprehend, as I discovered the day Stonewall Jackson, our proud, ancient gelding, had a stroke and died in my arms. If you can picture a horse dying in your arms, that was exactly what it was like. How outlandish to live with a creature so big and handsome, a real dancer in his prime, then watch him grow old and die.
It happens fast with animals, the descent from glory to the rag-and-bone shop. He looked ancient the last few months. People walking down the road beside the pasture would stop and stare at him. I wondered if they suspected we were mistreating him. Perhaps we were by not putting him down. Yet he had nothing but heart and a stubborn desire to live, checking our pockets for sugar cubes or ripping open a bag of feed as soon as I wasn’t looking. He had an unyielding righteousness that would bring him shambling to the deck every afternoon, demanding his daily carrot.
We knew it was coming for a long time, but we were never expecting it. Denial and death are companions. We were lucky enough to go for a walk in the lower field at the right moment. Did we sense the moment? As soon as I saw Jack down, I knew this was no rolling scratch of an itchy back. It was a stroke. As he tried to rise I grabbed him around the shoulders and somehow heaved him, almost supernaturally, to his feet. It was a stupid thing to do, but once a horse can’t get up that’s the end; their digestive systems will kill them if they go down for too long. He was so scared, leaning into me, shivering, sweaty, losing muscle control. I managed to hold him upright for about five minutes while he glanced, forlorn and knowingly, over his shoulder at me.
Then he collapsed. I had to leap out of the way as he had a second stroke. We could only brush his head while he shivered and gasped. We told him it was okay to go, but he wasn’t buying that. Not ever. Despite being paralyzed on one side he kept trying to get up, and it became a terrifying, slow, repetitive dance.
Sharon ran back to the house and started phoning. Mike took the call as he was halfway out the door of his house. She asked him to bring his gun. Though I’ve killed many animals in my life, I knew I couldn’t shoot Jack. Then she managed to find Malcolm—the vet with “the touch.” He must have roared down the island, because he arrived a few minutes before Mike. I suppose he’d encountered enough anguished horse owners to understand the necessity for speed if a horse is dying. He gave Jack a needle to relax him before the killing injection, while I cradled Jack’s head in my arms and Sharon stroked his neck.
Since we had to bring a backhoe in to bury Jack, we made sure he got the biggest headstone under the willow tree. The stone gives the farm the patina of an old western film, an island version of Tombstone, and I often smile wistfully when I glance out the window at his stone. I buried him with my favourite raku tea bowl. I always give our companions pottery I’ve made, offering a fragment of myself to their grave. There’s a growing collection of ceramics buried under that willow tree now, an archaeological record of our lives together here at the farm. We almost need a bigger cemetery. Two old dogs, two cats, one ancient canary, four geese, and two peafowl murdered by raccoons. They are Stonewall Jackson’s bedmates. Since then they’ve been joined by the Arabian grey, LaBarisha, and Samantha. Sharon scattered yellow rose petals around the grave after we covered Jack, so it was luxurious for a few hours. Then the sheep ate the rose petals.
Some days I go down there and sit on his headstone for a few minutes.
SEVERAL YEARS LATER LABARISHA
died, and I had to make the same round of choked-up phone calls to the answering machines of backhoe operators. Almost all our original machine operators on the island have small farms or were raised on them. They understand the tragedy of a dead horse and consider it a civic duty to temporarily abandon a big-paying job to bury a family horse. Ken Byron had one of his boys down at the farm by lunchtime and we buried her next to Stonewall Jackson, under a large sandstone fossil rock a good friend had discovered behind the house. Another one of my pots went beside her beneath the willows, and a vase that contained some of Sharon’s father’s ashes so that he could also become part of the farm. Because of the growing number of graves under the willow tree, we had to lay her facing the field, her ass end to the house, which is the way she often treated us in her vain and beautiful arrogance. The kindness of the young backhoe operator made me recall the elaborate rituals that tribal cultures, and even some organized religions, have conjured to describe the birth of death and how we must treat it.
Our two sons were surprised upon learing Sharon had put her portion of her dad’s ashes with LaBarisha. She just told Chris, our older boy, that her dad wanted to be near us, and besides, she thought her dad would like the company of the horse. I could see the boys were a little confused by the unorthodox burial, but I admired its wonderful gesture.
It strikes me that in the early days of our species death was usually immediate, often brutal, and always magical. If you study tribal societies, it’s apparent that a thread of reverence toward death, human or animal, inhabits the majority, as it generally does on small farms, though a vein of mistreatment also runs like a cancer in all communities. Most small farmers are gentle with their animals, and while slaughter might appear grim, they tend to respect livestock and pets. As in tribal cultures, rogue practices have continued since history began, whether it is the cruelty of Native buffalo jumps or mean farmers beating stubborn livestock.
Our species, fortunately, has empathy, one of the qualities that make us human—the ability to inhabit another mind. Our imagination takes us there in an eye-blink. Imagination can save us from cruelty. To be cruel we have to break the imaginative bond, distancing ourselves from our victim—thus, we refer to the slaughter of animals as “harvesting,” and the animals become “products” or, worse yet, “units.” Then we can tuck into our platefull of pork spareribs and not feel the pain of the pig. This is also why writers tend to sanitize farm life, glossing over gruesome deaths, and why it’s difficult for so many to read or watch documentary accounts of slaughter or accidental deaths of livestock. We are living amid modern myths, whether they’re the free-enterprise propaganda of agribusiness products basking in glowing fields, or the sunshine vision of small farms extolled by eco-urbanite enthusiasts blind to the dirt, mindless labour, gore, and dangers of a real mixed farm.
While urban people tend to hold a bucolic view of rural life, but the idyllic farm of children’s tales has also had a long history of barbarity and ugly practices; the difference is that the small farm never had the mechanistic qualities and plant-endagering scale of corporate agriculture.
Still, even eras of small farming have affected world climate, mostly because of population explosions but also because of foolish practices. Burn-and-plant periods of civilization around the world often accelerated climate change, followed by cooling periods after plagues and famines. Ice-core samples show that the epic worldwide slash-and-burn farming era that peaked around 1000 bc denuded most of China, India, the Mediterranean region, the lowlands of Central America, and the highlands of Peru, leading to population explosions and gradual world warming that was counteracted only by what scholars now believe was a volcanic eruption, an atmospheric veil of dust that caused sudden global cooling. Mayan corn culture suffered its first major crash, and in the sixth century ad the already overstressed European population encountered the Justinian plague, which led to further global cooling when deforestation and burning decreased. The Roman priests might have dragged a lot of entrails out of living roosters and owls, but their divinations still couldn’t predict their culture was its own worst enemy.