The Harvest
We butchered two lambs today.
In the old days our record was thirteen. Justifiably proud of ourselves back then, we reveled in our stamina and competence. Today, I give silent thanks that my back and knees hold out for two. At the successful conclusion of our labors, Chuck and I congratulate one another. We have successfully surmounted another round of butchery. We can still call ourselves sheep farmers.
If our physical stature has altered, some things have not. Butchering remains a fulfilling retrospective to a season of labor—and a challenge to marital harmony.
In our early days of raising sheep, fall butchering signaled the culmination of a year’s work. A year begun the previous autumn, in air pungent with mingled scents of second-cutting alfalfa stacked in the hay yard and crisp cottonwood leaves crunching underfoot as we open the gates for enthusiastic bucks to join receptive ewes.
Not even romance halts the march of seasons. Golden Indian summer days shorten; freezing nights proliferate. Snow floats, first in lilting patterns of lazy lace, then in a fury of gusts and shifting drifts.
We endure the winter feeding of our small band of gravid ewes. For interminable frigid months our battered red pickup, chained on its rear tires and jammed into granny gear, jerks the hay wagon in spine-jarring jolts over frozen corrugates and iced clods of old feed mixed with manure. I drive; Chuck pitches slabs of hay to hungry ewes. Nostril hairs freeze to one another until nares pinch shut; glove fingers stick to the handle of the pitchfork.
Winter has yet to die as the struggles of lambing loom. Caprices of spring weather welcome tender lambs with soft sun or leave them stiffly dead in a whirling snow squall. Warmed in sunshine, wet newborns suckle quickly and thrive; in cold and darkness both lamb and ewe require assistance. I take night shift; Chuck early morning; we share afternoon duties—fill feed bunks, freshen water tubs, clean pens, sort thriving mommas and babies from lambing shed to mixing pens, snatch a hasty slurp of soup or bite of casserole that has been in the fridge for days, go on working. Days lengthen; we turn ewes to pasture accompanied by healthy lambs who leap and bounce into freshly greened grass. Our two-month vigil of sleep-deprived midwifery fades into a dimly remembered nightmare.
As do eye-swelling nose-running marathons of summer haying interspersed with never ceasing attention to the needs of ungrateful sheep. Clipping, tagging, drenching, nursing, lying sleepless at night listening to the howls of circling coyotes and hoping the guard dog is doing his job. We grudgingly accept a fall price for our lambs that insults the value of our months of labor, and worse, demeans the optimism of our hopes for financial profit this year. All travails we forget with the commencement of the slaughter.
Slaughter is not a word of positive connotation—except in its application to harvest butchering. We gloat over the condition of the lambs we have set aside as the year’s meat. What the lamb buyer failed to properly appreciate, we hungrily admire. We see roast leg of lamb, lamb stew, and lamb chops. We see ribs baked crisp with onions and round steak fried tender with gravy and biscuits. We see the fruits of our labors gracing our table and strengthening our offspring. We are providers.
The prospective satisfactions of providing, however, await the bloody mechanics of the slaughter.
My father was a chef in the prestigious Lodge Dining Room of Sun Valley. He was drafted and served as a butcher in the Solomon Islands during World War II. Throughout his life, he hunted the deer and elk of Idaho and skillfully cared for his kill. He fed his family wild game until my mother pleaded for a simple hamburger of beef. But, until Chuck and I became sheep farmers, I had never seen a living animal—wild or domestic—dispatched and prepared for storage in the family freezer. From childhood, I was better acquainted with the elaborate funeral for a household pet, complete with flower petals and handcrafted cross of twigs, than the gore of slaughter for the family table.
Providing food for my children from the efforts of my labor felt good, but I had much to learn about butchering.
Chuck already knew. He knew many things, practical things, that inspired my admiration, things I had no idea even had to be done. I was a sometimes reluctant learner.
Vaccinate the sheep against disease? I saw the wisdom of that precaution. Clean out and re-straw the pens in the lambing shed? Sure, new mommas and babies need clean beds. Chop wagonloads of hay bales into pulverized bits to fork into feed bunks? Well, OK, but I dread that choking miasmic fog of green particles that swells my nasal passages into pinhole openings and still manages to permeate the deepest alveoli of my lungs. Tackle that nasty-tempered ewe and wrestle her to the ground so that her wooly rear end can be shorn of its poop tags? It’s a ninety degree summer day and I’m hot and sweaty and the dust is turning to mud right on my face—this isn’t much fun anymore.
I had always been the student, the reader, the brainy kid whose nickname was Webster— after the dictionary. I helped Chuck with his papers as he sweated through his college literature courses; he breezed through his biology classes, aced zoology, whizzed through botany, discovered a previously unidentified species of mountain grass on a picnic. I knew all about the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution and the Industrial Revolution and the Russian Revolution. I knew how to needlepoint. Nice, not much use in raising sheep.
Chuck was raised on a farm. From primary school, he drove a team of work horses until he graduated to a tractor. He operated farm equipment whose names and function I did not recognize. In the early years of our marriage, when he and a neighbor began to tell old stories and roar in tear-inducing belly laughs about operating a cultipacker, I thought they were being mildly obscene in the manner of men enjoying a moment of male camaraderie. I still suspect that might be true.
Chuck knew how to pull a lamb from a young ewe struggling with her first birth. He knew how to snag a fleeing sheep with a long sheep hook. He knew how to tip and hold a ewe to clip the tags from her rear. He knew when to put the bucks in for breeding and when to call the shearers to relieve the ewes of their shaggy wool and when to treat for liver fluke. He knew how to move a band of sheep from pasture to pasture without frightening them into a scattering leaping mob. He knew how to butcher a lamb.
At lamb butchering time he was at his micromanaging, overtly directive, and patience-challenged best. He owned the operation. Water buckets and gut tubs appropriately placed. His beloved tractor positioned, sturdy gambols suspended from its front lift ready to raise each carcass for final cleaning. Sharpened knives carefully aligned, skinning platform hosed of debris, empty-bellied lambs penned in the shade. We are ready.
More accurately, Chuck is ready. He surveys, again, his preparations. He wrestles a kicking lamb from the pen, pins it to the freshly cleaned butchering board, slits its throat, and breaks its neck. He skins the carcass, guts it of innards, keeps it clean and free of contaminating particles. I hold its legs.
That’s my job. I hold the legs of the carcass, applying sufficient counterpressure to the skinning knife to permit easier removal of the hide. Not difficult. Even though, in the interest of micromanagement, I receive frequent reminders to shift a bit forward, a bit back, a bit to the side, or to scratch the nose of the skinner.
My more important task is not physical. I’m also the audience, the appreciative butchering booster.
In earlier days, I often chafed beneath this expectation. About the time we reached the third or fourth lamb, my back, permanently folded into leg-holding position, began to hurt; my attention span flagged, and my temper grew edgy—at best. When Chuck’s direction to hold a leg more to the front inevitably came, my one word response, “Fine,” more resembled a snarl than an acquiescence, even as my marital brain recognized that his request was not really for a minor leg adjustment. His need was for affirmation of his competence, a recognition of the difficulty of his task. His back hurt too.
I confess that my attitude occasionally resulted in full-scale warfare. I have never been good at accepting direction. Chuck has never been good at tactful suggestion. Cursing occurred. Often on a personal level. Resentful silence sometimes marred our opportunity for shared pride in our achievements—for days. My reflection on those times is more romantic, and more humorous, than their reality.
I’m better at my role now. Chuck’s tummy is bigger, much bigger. Bending it over the carcass of a lamb is a challenge. His right shoulder aches. His knees flex and straighten with an extra forty pounds of weight to bear. I watch his hands, older, more deeply scarred, still square and strong. I know which fingers are sometimes numb, which are irreparably twisted from old athletic injuries. I see how skillfully and methodically they still move to extricate the lamb from its skin, every movement pridefully preserving the quality of his winter’s provision of meat. I hear his groan, “God, I’m getting old,” as he rises from his crouch to change his skinning position, and know that no matter his physical pains, and my objections, he will persist in his stubborn perfectionism.
My voice is softer. I try to anticipate the moves that will make his job easier. I get tired—I’m older too. If my patience has not noticeably increased, my breadth of vision has. I know the fingers expertly slitting the lamb’s abdomen while avoiding contamination by the gut are the same fingers that gently guide a forkful of food, shared from his own plate, into the waiting mouth of a grandchild. I know that the hands that split the breastbone and are raked by the rough edges of the sternum are the hands that swoop a giggling toddler onto a kitchen stool. The belly that shortens his breath as he stoops over the carcass is the cushion for a drowsy child watching Disney with Grampa. His attention to detail that makes the skinning process interminable is the same patient commitment that results in hours dedicated to helping each grandchild fish until even the smallest lands a prize. Each, of course, all by themselves.
I verbalize none of these thoughts. Instead I observe, “We’re going to get finished before dark.”
Chuck instructs, “The clean water is in the bucket over there.”
We take turns appraising the quality of the animal we’re butchering. “Look at the fat on this thing,” I marvel and murmur in agreement as Chuck proclaims, “It’ll eat good this winter!” Our words are not important. What we communicate is our partnership, our pleasure in where we are.
Dusk approaches as I hold lamb legs and watch Chuck work. Memories, karmic images of our lives together, permeate the killing ground. Odors, musky and fetid, mingle with the briskness of cooling air. Strangely, in the midst of the tendrils of death, I feel intensely alive. We butcher for ourselves now. Our children are long departed, established in successful lives of their own. The principles remain the same. We’ve worked; we’ve paid our dues; we’ve earned our harvest.
