Two shakes of a lambs ta.., p.4
Two Shakes of a Lamb's Tail, page 4
I returned to the clinic to pick up Sophie, and we set out to vasectomise ten bulls. There were twenty-three in the yard when we got there. ‘Just do as many as you can,’ the farmer said. We got pretty efficient – five bulls into the race, vaccinate, blood test and sedate all five, let them through one by one into the head bail, vasectomise one testicle and castrate the other, move on to the next. We did fifteen in three hours, by which time we were well and truly over it. One of the first bulls we did worried us by dripping blood in a thin but relentless trickle from his castration wound – we watched him for an hour in the hope it would stop and then got him back in and sewed his scrotum tightly shut. Then we watched for another hour as the scrotum grew bigger and tighter and fuller of blood, hoping that the pressure would stop the bleeding rather than grow so great that the stitches burst and the bull collapsed in a lake of blood. That’s the sort of thing that really keeps you alert and interested in your work. (It stopped. Thank God.)
We finished the Vasectomy Marathon in time for me to meet the school bus – but there were several urgent calls backed up. I rang James, who said he could meet the bus, and went to see a sick cow.
The sick cow had a displaced stomach and needed surgery. It was three forty-five and my surgery kit was soaking in a bucket at the clinic. Returned to get it and found Sophie and Bill embarking on de-constipating a badly constipated dog (constipated dogs always arrive after four; it’s an unalterable constant in an ever-changing world). I scrubbed my kit at lightning speed, rushed back to the side of the cow, sedated her, roped her down, rolled her onto her back, made a hole in her abdomen, deflated the offending bit of stomach, stitched it to the body wall so it couldn’t go astray again, sewed her up, woke her up again and left.
Got home at quarter to seven. The smell of rotting venison greeted me as I climbed out of my ute. I replied to my husband’s cheerful greeting by snarling, ‘Either that bloody deer’s head goes or I do.’
James did not respond, as he might have, by pointing out that I was four hours late home and had entirely stuffed up his afternoon. Instead he said, ‘I promise I’ll take it away in the morning,’ and handed me a glass of wine. Decided my mother is right; he is a Delight.
Thursday 12 September
I DIDN’T HAVE TO GO TO WORK TODAY! And it was a beautiful, warm spring day, the sort where everything is lush and green and you can practically see the grass growing.
James left early, and I fed the lambs by myself. This consists, on the new ad lib system, of mixing up two ten-litre buckets of milk, wandering outside and tipping one into either feeder. This time last year we would have been filling individual bottles and feeding a dozen lambs at a time, in shifts. I love the new system.
I paused on the way back in to note that my pink tulips with electric blue middles are flowering their little hearts out, and that there were fourteen tuis feeding in the kowhai tree. Mrs George Huthnance, an especially luscious rhododendron, is just coming into creamy peach-tipped bloom.
Inside I found Blake up and making his lunch. Should he wake Ellie? I agreed, and almost immediately heard loud wails from Ellie’s room. It turns out she doesn’t like to be woken by being shot in the head with a Nerf gun. Who would have thought? Blake’s defence: he wasn’t there at all, he missed her completely and he only shot her very gently anyway.
Having decided that today was a wonderful opportunity to write, I instead spent two hours reupholstering a chair with red-and-gold-striped brocade. It would look amazing if Bean the cat hadn’t immediately decided I’d done it just for her to use as a scratching post. The chair is now covered with a blanket, which we’ll be able to remove when Bean dies. This may be quite soon.
Friday 13 September
This morning at the bus stop Jaide told me all about her sister (not the one whose boyfriend drove through our fence; the other one) and her problems. The sister has four children with four different fathers. She left the father of the smallest one (who is nine months old) in July, after hooking up with his friend at a party. The friend has several children himself but isn’t allowed to see them unsupervised due to a history of family violence. Two weeks after the sister moved in with him, he beat her up. Now she and the children are staying with Jaide, and the sister is very unhappy, because although her partner hit her, he’s actually the love of her life and he didn’t really mean it. Came home feeling very, very privileged and middle class and clueless.
Saturday 14 September
I’ve been looking through an old cookbook Mum found at a book sale. It is endearingly titled Mary Bought a Little Lamb and This Is How She Cooked It. It’s fascinating. It contains not one but two recipes for liver paste (a tasty sandwich filling, apparently – who knew?), suggests creamed lamb with sautéed cucumbers for a dinner party and makes multiple references to adding a teaspoon of MSG for flavour. I made the mutton hash for dinner, because it contained neither sautéed cucumber nor MSG and because mutton hash features in Dear Enemy, which is one of my favourite books of all time. It was delicious. Perhaps I should be brave and try the liver paste. (But I won’t.)
Sunday 15 September
Our wonderful neighbours arrived this afternoon with two calves on a trailer, one each for Ellie and Blake. They used Speckle Park bulls over their herd this year, and the calves are extremely cute: white with black noses, thick black eyeliner around their eyes and black teddy-bear ears. They’d never been let out before, and they ran excited laps around the little paddock below the yards with their tails straight up in the air. The neighbours are going to leave a bucket of milk for them at the end of the driveway every morning, asking only that we leave yesterday’s empty bucket as a swap. They are far, far too generous, but they were so happy, and so obviously delighted at the kids’ delight, that we couldn’t refuse.
The lambs are now just despicable little woolly white things in Ellie and Blake’s eyes. They spent all afternoon with the calves and would have slept with them if we’d let them. I anticipate this fervour to last about three days, after which they will return to their normal state of grumbling and muttering when asked to feed their pets.
Monday 16 September
I’ve been invited to speak at a literary festival in Wellington in November. Just like a real writer! The festival organisers will pay for my flights and hotel room, and I’ll have all day Sunday free to hang out with my friend Kelly, who lives in Wellington. How wonderful.
Or so I thought until I received a summary of the events in which I would be participating.
The first is a high tea, during which another author and I will discuss our latest novels. The other author is really nice and really funny and has a regular radio slot, so the audience is bound to be entertained even if I can’t manage to say anything useful. But the second event! It’s entitled ‘Women’s Bodies: Conflict Zone’, and the clarifying email from the woman chairing it explains that the aim will be to explore what it means to be in a woman’s body these days, with reference to the ‘invasions of privacy, abuse, claustrophobic attention, readings and misreadings, clamps on how we feel we’re allowed to exist, think and behave’, and so on, that we are subjected to as women. Each author on the panel is to interpret the broad idea in a way that works for her and her writing.
Bloody hell.
That is so not my cup of tea.
I know that women – some women – are subjected to all sorts of horrible things, but I haven’t been. I don’t feel that my body is a conflict zone, or that being in a woman’s body subjects me to any particular invasions or misconceptions. (That’s not to say that I think sexism and the gender pay gap and magazines telling girls they should be slim and beautiful aren’t real issues – they are real, and they suck.) But all this Conflict Zone stuff just strikes me as melodramatic and whiney.
I wrote back to the organisers suggesting that perhaps I wasn’t a good fit for this event, since their whole approach kind of put my back up. To which they replied very graciously, saying that was fine and I was welcome to approach the subject from a positive point of view.
What on earth am I going to say?
Thursday 19 September
It was raining steadily at breakfast time. The cold that’s been circling all week launched a full-on offensive overnight and I woke up feeling like I’d been beaten all over with a stick. After getting the kids onto the bus I took two Panadols and shuffled back to bed. Then I lay there for half an hour wondering why my heart was racing and my eyes wouldn’t stay shut. Got up again and tottered out to the kitchen, where I discovered that I had taken Panadol Extra, which is laced with caffeine, instead of normal Panadol.
I retired sourly to the couch with my laptop, where I found an email from my publishers informing me that the audiobook people have given my voice ‘the thumbs down’ and will be using an actress instead. Ouch. I don’t know what’s wrong with my voice, and suspect that enquiring would only depress me further.
Got up off the couch and started scrubbing the laundry floor, on the grounds that I might as well wallow in misery while I was at it. A year ago, we replaced the ancient and horrible lino in the laundry with new stuff, selecting a hard-wearing, black-and-white check. It did not occur to me at the time to make sure that the new lino was non-absorbent. In fact, had I thought about it, I would have assumed that all lino was non-absorbent by definition, seeing as the whole point of lino is that you can just wipe it clean. But this stuff is porous, and cleaning it requires scrubbing on your knees with Jif and a stiff brush.
I was halfway across the floor when someone knocked on the back door just behind me and scared me out of my few remaining wits. I struggled to my feet and opened the door to find our friendly neighbourhood Jehovah’s Witness, Mrs Simonson. She was beautifully turned out, with her silver hair immaculately set and a pale-green silk scarf around her neck. I was in flannelette pyjamas with uncombed hair and a red nose, clutching a scrubbing brush. (I suppose it could have been worse; I could have been clutching a bottle of gin.)
She greeted me with her usual sweet smile, opened this month’s Watchtower and read me an article assuring me that Hell is Real. I had no trouble at all believing it. Then we chatted about farming for a little while, and she told me how pleased she and her husband were to sell the rest of their silage last week. Apparently, it’s dreadful silage – it was rained on twice before being baled – so they were thrilled to sell it for a top price to some lifestyle-blockers who know no better. I said I didn’t think that was a very Christian thing to do (which was tactless, but I was feeling pretty lousy), and she looked at me with a sort of amused pity. ‘That’s business, dear,’ she said. Oh. Right. That’s okay, then.
Friday 20 September
My cold had loosened its death grip on my sinuses by this morning, and the sun was shining. The tui count in the big kowhai outside the kitchen window was 43.
James and I docked two paddocks of ewes and lambs before lunch, and it went surprisingly well. I find performing farm jobs under James’s direction somewhat stressful – he’s so bad at giving instructions. I never know what the plan is, and if I ask he either says he told me already but I didn’t listen (there may be a grain of truth in this), or he looks at me with withering scorn and says it should be obvious. Which might also be true, but is hardly helpful.
Last year I came across an article in Countrywide magazine that I found very reassuring. It was written by a charming and immensely capable woman who said that her husband, although otherwise quite satisfactory, has on occasion been such a dick in the yards that she’s downed tools and walked home, taking the dogs with her. Thank heaven it’s not just me.
My idea of a happy marriage has changed quite a lot in thirteen and a half years. I started off thinking that ideally your husband should be your soul mate, your lover, your best friend and your sounding board, that he should understand everything about you and love your every flaw.
Rubbish. Complete crap. One person will never fulfil your every need and want and desire for the rest of your life. The thing to do, I have come to realise, is just accept that my husband feels that $100 is too much to spend on a pair of shoes, thinks Dumb and Dumber is the funniest movie ever filmed and can’t see why his standard response to any apology (‘That’s okay, but [insert detailed reiteration of whatever it was I did wrong, just to make really sure I get it]’) is annoying at all, and move on. Better to remember that he’s a wonderful father, he makes me a coffee every morning and he buys me a Pixie Caramel every time he does the grocery shopping.
But I digress. Today was reasonably harmonious, although James did feel the need to give me a few tips on how to improve my lamb-vaccination technique. I have, after all, only been a large-animal vet for nineteen years. He picked up the lambs and vaccinated them for scabby mouth, and I jabbed them with 5 in 1, castrated and cut off tails.
I don’t mind cutting the tails so much – of course it hurts them, but the pain doesn’t seem to last very long and the docking iron cauterises as it cuts – but I hate putting rubber rings on scrotums. You go out to muster them away and see the poor little things lying down and rolling in agony. I’d roll in agony too, if someone put a rubber band around my finger and waited for it to fall off. But this year a lovely drug rep has given me two big bottles of pain relief gel specially formulated to use at docking, in the hope I’ll be so impressed with it that I’ll recommend it to every farmer I meet. I will, I think. Today’s lambs didn’t look entirely happy, but it must be an improvement.
In the afternoon I stayed home and wrote, and James went out to move heifers. He met Dan – our dairy farming neighbour whose girlfriend recently left him – on the road, and invited him to dinner. Unfortunately, dinner was lentil bolognaise, which is not really the sort of food one wants to offer a guest (at least not a guest one wishes to return).
To give him credit, Dan tackled the lentil bolognaise gamely. He even had seconds. Then, when the conversation touched for some reason on Jehovah’s Witnesses, he told us that they haven’t been to his place for two years. On their last visit they came to his front door while he was having lunch, and on the way to open it, he noticed he’d left his shotgun leaning against the wall. He picked it up in one hand and gave the door, which sticks in damp weather, a mighty tug with the other. The Witnesses took one look at him, turned tail and fled. He said he tried to call after them and explain, but they were having none of it. He actually smiled while recounting this story. The smile transformed him from sulky and nondescript to boy-next-door charming.
Goodness, he’s nice. I wonder if I could organise for him to meet Sophie at work, who is feeling, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, as if she’s the only single person in the world and she’s going to die alone, eaten by her many cats. She only has two cats – but, as she says grimly, they’re a start.
Sunday 22 September
On call this weekend. It’s been fairly quiet – which is a blessing because on Friday night I gouged a hole in my hand with my eye hook.
Eye hooks are smallish (about the size of a bent finger) and bluntish, and are designed to fit securely into the eye socket of a dead calf so you can apply traction to the head. I don’t use mine very often, but Friday night’s calving was the sort where every instrument gets dragged out of my calving bucket in turn.
The cow had a twisted uterus; a complete twist, so I had to rope her down and roll her. The twist unrolled alright, but the calf was still upside down and I could only just reach it with my arm at full stretch.
I put ropes around the front legs and then managed, barely, to get a rope around the lower jaw. (Calving textbooks tell you that the lower jaw isn’t a good anchor for a rope, and you should place your head rope around the back of the calf’s head behind the ears. Well, yes. You should. And you would, if you could reach that far.) The rope slipped off when I pulled it, as jaw ropes mostly do, but at least it brought the head ten centimetres closer, so I could just reach an eye socket.
I placed the eye hook and connected it to my calving pulley. Mistake number one. And because the damn head was still upside down, wanting nothing more than to bury itself inextricably beneath the brim of the cow’s pelvis, I kept my arm in the cow to try to turn it as the farmer applied traction. Mistake number two. As the farmer hauled the rope tight the hook pulled free of the calf’s eye socket and embedded itself in the palm of my hand.
I couldn’t see the wound properly, but there was a lot of blood welling up from under the torn edges of my glove. The farmer showed no interest in my injury – I wasn’t expecting him to kiss it better, but he could have said, ‘Are you alright?’ and given me the chance to be impressively brave. But he just stood there waiting for me to do something useful, so I put my hand back in – trying not to dwell on the fact that the calf had been dead for a couple of days and I was bathing my open wound in a bacterial soup – and found that the head was now close enough to put a proper head rope on.
Once the calf was out, I left my gear in a pile on the yard and inspected the wound. It was quite impressive: deep and jagged and four centimetres long. I poured neat iodine all over it, on the grounds that gangrene would be no fun at all. The iodine wasn’t much fun either, just quietly.
I’d rather hoped that the farmer might have started washing my gear, since I only had one working hand. But no; he was just standing there looking at his phone. In desperation I asked him to hose off my casting rope, a soft, thick, eight-metre-long cotton rope and he said, ‘Oh. Sure,’ and dribbled some water on it. Jeez.
