Millie’s hand reached through the blackness of the bedroom,
hit the alarm button after just one buzz and slid off the clock to hang limply
over the edge of the bed. She forced her eyes open to see the only thing
visible in the room, the clock face, its large red numerals indicating 3:00 AM.
With consciousness, came the recognition of every ache her body had accumulated
this far into the lambing season. She groaned audibly as she dragged herself
out from under the covers and sat up with her legs over the edge of the bed
which she’d crawled into only three hours earlier. The first foot of air above
the carpeted floor, where her feet now hung, was the same temperature as the
floor in the adjoining kitchen, which regularly froze the gallon of milk she
set on it overnight when the fridge was full. The furnace, try as it might, was
unable to fend off January cold.
Millie remembered this as she gathered her jeans from the
floor and pulled them up over her legs and butt, gritting her teeth and shivering.
Why can’t I remember to hang them up, for
god sakes? she asked yet again. Her wool socks, already on her feet, were a
small blessing. To get something warm against her belly, she stuffed her long
underwear shirt into her jeans, then added a cotton turtleneck and finally a
heavy wool sweater on top of it all. Her mate slept through her dressing, since
his shifts were midnight and 6:00 AM. She always did the 3:00 AM shift, just
that one, but the one the ewes most favored when it came time to birth their
lambs.
She walked into the kitchen made a smidge lighter by the
yard light seeping through the uncurtained windows, but dimmed by the coating
of ice on the glass panes. Millie unhooked her quilted coveralls from the wooden
wall peg in the kitchen and pulled them on. She forced her heavily stocking-ed
feet in to her snow boots and laced them up. Put a wool toque on her head and
finally pulled on her parka. Her last act of dressing was sliding her hands
into two sets of mittens – wool inners, leather outers. She took a breath,
pulled her hood up over her toque and opened the door, stepping awkwardly out
into the porch reminiscent of an astronaut in his bulky suit stepping into an airlock,
only air wasn’t her problem, cold was. It hit her like a wall.
Sometimes at that hour, she would be treated to the aurora, a
surreal, haunting vision feathering across the sky—glowing lights of various colors
waving curtain-like in the deep darkness of a subarctic night. This night,
however, was just dark and cold. She walked up the driveway, the world about
her completely silent except for the dry snow squeaking with each step. She continued
around the log barn full of month-old lambs not yet weaned and down a path worn
in the grass and dirt from years of taking this same course. It now cradled
snow.
When she entered the lambing barn and pulled the door shut
behind her, pitch darkness possessed the space, stopping her immediately. The
light switch was unusually high up on the wall, and she figured the last owner
of this farm was either a retired basketball player or, more likely, that’s
where he ran out of electrical wire. Since expectant mothers were loose in the
area and could choose anywhere to lamb, Millie never took a next step until the
light was on. With the click of the switch, she, as well as the ewes, blinked
and squinted until everyone adjusted to the brightness. “Ladies, sorry to wake
you,” she half spoke, half sang to them, the consummate concierge.
The ewes that had already lambed were confined with their
babies in small square pens which ringed the exterior wall in orderly
succession, leaving a broad reach of thick straw in the center which she now
scanned for any indication that a ewe might be about to lamb. No sheep was
restless or pawing up a nest of straw. None had broken water. It looked like a
slow night. Music and quiet talking, which played round the clock from a small
radio sitting on a wall shelf, started Millie humming. She left it on during
lambing season convinced it soothed the sheep at night and reassured them
throughout the day. It also boosted her mood, that and the seeming possibility
of getting back to bed soon.
Millie’s habit before leaving the barn each shift was to check
all the lambing pens to ensure the newest arrivals were well-tended and thriving.
It was never a chore. To her sensitivities, lambs were the sweetest creatures
she’d ever encountered. At one pen, she reached down to lift up a day-old lamb,
cradling it, brushing her cheek against its wooly softness. Its scent was that
of clean soapiness. As its tiny lips smooched her face in search of something
that might yield milk, Millie giggled like a young girl. “Precious,” she said
as she kissed its tiny black nose and gave it back to its mum, who accepted
Millie as part of the flock.
The radio’s music program came to an end as the CBC commentator
broke in with, “Ladies and gents, let’s thank Brahms for that bit of musical
beauty. If you’re a trucker out there, I hope it hasn’t made you sleepy.” Then
he gave the regular drill at the half hour, going through all five time zones and
adding a few comments, likely more than anything else, to make him feel as if
someone was listening. His best hope was a trucker on the Mackenzie Highway
heading to or from the Northwest Territories or perhaps a few other shepherds
like Millie.
Though he didn’t normally do news at the half hour, the
commentator began talking about the upcoming Challenger Shuttle Mission scheduled
for later in the morning. The subject appeared to have stirred his curiosity, especially
the details of the many setbacks this mission was experiencing. Millie, rarely drawn
to the enterprises of the world to the south, stopped to listen. Space travel
was more akin to a sci-fi movie for her; the subject so remote from her
concerns. But what the young DJ focused on was not so much science but the setbacks,
and to that subject she could easily relate. The current dilemma, the
commentator informed her, concerned O-rings that could become problematic in
the unusual cold forecast for north Florida later that morning.
“I wonder what unusual cold looks like in Florida,” she chuckled. “But O-rings, they can be a pain, all right. That damned old John Deere’s hydraulics are forever suffering from leaky O-rings.” Millie often talked aloud as hers was a quiet world with few human interactions across the course of a day. In response to the radio story she said to the nearest ewe, “Buttons, do you have any interest in flying into space? Me neither. I’ve heard it’s even colder out there. Who the heck needs that?”
“I wonder what unusual cold looks like in Florida,” she chuckled. “But O-rings, they can be a pain, all right. That damned old John Deere’s hydraulics are forever suffering from leaky O-rings.” Millie often talked aloud as hers was a quiet world with few human interactions across the course of a day. In response to the radio story she said to the nearest ewe, “Buttons, do you have any interest in flying into space? Me neither. I’ve heard it’s even colder out there. Who the heck needs that?”
A sound from across the barn snatched her focus back to
shepherding. It came from a young ewe. This would be her first time to lamb.
But it wasn’t the ordinary maa sound ewes made when “talking” to their yet
unborn lambs as their time draws near. This ewe began to moan. Millie
immediately put her attention on the ewe and walked unobtrusively across the
space between them, so as not to startle her. The ewe was leaning against the
wall rather than lying down and pushing. In Millie’s world of frequent
happenstance, she now accepted two new certainties. She would not be getting
back to bed any time soon, and this ewe was in trouble.
The young woman stood
there mentally checking off what she might need to handle what she suspected
was the problem. First, she’d have to get the ewe down, and then be able to
keep her down. Sometimes Millie and her husband would work together on this
sort of situation, but she remembered how tired he looked at supper and decided
not to wake him. Sleep deprivation was the state in which they lived during the
five months of lambing. Any unexpected sleep you could grab was a gift. Having
made that decision, Millie took a big breath, setting her mind to what lay
ahead of her.
As she walked back across the barn to the supply shelf, the
commentator stopped the music once again, this time to joke about NASA’s
concern with the cold that morning at Cape Canaveral. “Thirty degrees
Fahrenheit, eh? Wow that’s chilly,” he sarcastically added. “It was minus 40
when I got to the station this evening. Heh, you truckers and farmers out
there. What would you give for it to be 30 here this morning?”
Millie, feeling a bit edgy with what was facing her, uncharacteristically
joined the DJ with his scoffing. “Cold, what could they possibly understand
about cold? It’s insidious, ruthless and defeats the best and worst without
prejudice.” Her mind reran the moment cold had taught her that, pared her cockiness
down past humility to despair. Since then, she never let her guard down. She
had seen cold kill people in ways those ignorant of its power would never
suspect.
She shook her head to clear it and get on point. She removed
her parka, washed her hands in the icy water at the spigot, then gathered her
supplies and walked back across the barn. The commentator continued relating
the debates between NASA officials and the Morton Thiokol engineers, suppliers
of the O-rings, which caught her attention once again. She stopped mid-way to
listen. He related that fifty degrees was the coldest condition in which the rings
had ever been employed. “Man, that’s a big gap,” the DJ said to his silent audience.
He continued with the provided text which sank into a more contentious discussion.
Issues involving politics, as well as loss of careers and funding fears were
laced into every facet of the impending decision.
The DJ, a local young man, saw in this nighthawk position
his ticket out of the North. Sometimes he’d weary of talking to his phantom
listeners, wondering in those moments whether his life would ever be grander
than this. But this night, he had another thought, one that unsettled him, rocking
some pillar of decency installed in him as a child. As the issues in the debate
kept coming across the fax, the discussions became increasingly absurd to him.
He turned to his mike, and speaking to his audience with the candor of a
kitchen table get-together, albeit a monologue, he asked almost helplessly, “Is
there really any question here as to how to proceed?”
Millie caught his meaning and understood in that moment there
were worlds she did not want to know. In the dim corner of the lambing barn at
what was now almost 4:00 AM, she answered the commentator, “My god I hope not.”
Millie felt a strange sensation in her gut as she paused momentarily
to see if the commentator had anything further to say, but the barn remained
silent except for the crunch of feeding ewes and an occasional grunt from a
sleeping one.
She turned back to the ewe in front of her, placed the
supplies where she’d be able to reach them once she had the ewe down and quick
as lightning, got a knee against the ewe’s chest leaving her left hand free to
grab its tail. Even as distressed as the sheep was, the ewe’s survival instinct
sent her lurching forward, but Millie’s knee dug into her chest while her right
hand secured a hold under the ewe’s jaw. Pushing the ewe backward over her own
leg, Millie sat the ewe on her bum and gently rolled her onto her side. As the
air huffed out of her various orifices, Millie caught a whiff of something
foul. She placed her hand just inside the opening to the birth canal. It was
dry and scolding hot. The ewe had broken water long before, but no lamb had
been born. Millie sighed and slowly shook her head knowingly. She opened the
tube of lubricant she’d brought and began to grease her left arm and hand, her
right one still beneath the ewe’s jaw to keep her from bolting up and running
off. Splayed out across the ewe, her chest half on the sheep and half in the
straw, her world grounding her in the here-and-now, she dared let herself
imagine that people actually make life-and-death decisions based on the considerations
she’d heard from the DJ.
But no sooner had she slid her hand into the birth canal, her
focus switched to her own troubles. When she located the lamb and gave its leg
a slight tug to get it moving, the leg pulled away from the body. The lamb had been
dead for a while. What would have been a slow but doable delivery were it alive
had now become a crusade to save the ewe’s life.
For thirty minutes, Millie worked with a focus indicative of
the stakes involved. When she was certain she had left nothing behind in the
uterus, she reentered the ewe one final time to drop in two large boluses of
sulfa along with a silent prayer. The young sheep, no doubt in tremendous pain,
lay flat, her head outstretched on the straw between her extended front legs, the
characteristic position of dying. Her eyes were closed and her breath shallow
and blistering hot. “Heh, sweet mama, I’m pulling for you,” Millie whispered in
the ewe’s ear.
She gathered up her unused supplies and wrapped the pieces
of decayed lamb in a plastic bag. Walking back to the far end of the barn, she
replaced the unused supplies on the shelf. She then washed her arm and hand off
in the ice-cold barn water, wiped it dry and pull her three different sleeves
down to cover it. She put her parka back on, leaned against the wall and allowed
herself to slide down it into the deeply bedded straw. She was exhausted. The
cold took advantage and seeped in.
The radio had been silent as if it had gone off the air. Without
forewarning, the commentator spoke. Millie lurched, startled. He sounded hoarse,
and he snuffled back snot against all broadcast etiquette, she imagined. As if
he was completing a thought, he said, “This mission’s payload includes a
teacher, Christa McAuliffe, who has trained for a year alongside the astronauts
she’s accompanying into space. She was selected from 11,500 applicants; a dream
come true.” Awe colored the DJ’s reporting on this woman. It was tinged
unmistakably with longing. “The powers to be are still debating about whether
this mission is a-go. They say it’s sunny in Florida but cold.”
The music returned and Millie rocked in time, pondering. I should get up and go down to the house,
perhaps catch another hour of sleep, she considered, but what to do about the ewe? She blinked her sleepy eyes, then
stretched them open using her entire face. She laughed at what that likely
looked like, but in that tensionless moment, the answer blasted into her mind. She
pushed herself up, took her parka back off and walked over to the orphan pen,
the upshot of ewes who died giving birth or ones that birthed more lambs than
they could feed. One little lamb jumped up and came over maa-ing forlornly like
he always did. He’d been doing that for days since he’d been taken from his mama
to reduce her load. Each day he got increasingly dull and listless, for lambs
need maternal connection as surely as milk. Millie had begun to worry he might
not make it. He was a sorry little thing, and it shook her up every time she
passed that pen and he came running, his big, anxious eyes searching her expectantly.
But he, bless him, just might be the answer for them both if he’d cooperate.
He was already too big, too active and too vocal to fool
most ewes into thinking he was a new born. Ewes aren’t fooled easily. Nor could
Millie scent him with the ewe’s birth fluids as they were long gone, but she
had to do something.
She worked fast, scooping the little guy out of his pen and
wetting him down a bit to mimic newborn wetness. He squalled with the shock of
cold water, but she had to move quickly. She suspected she hadn’t much time.
She talked to him as if he were a wee child, “Heh little one, I think your wish
may have come true.” Tying his feet together hurriedly to keep him temporarily immobile,
she carried the lamb across the barn to what she hoped would prove to be his
new mama. It was tough to tell if the ewe was still alive, but determined, Millie
lay her little friend right under the ewe’s nose. He immediately began to flop about
like a freshly landed fish and maa loudly, not at all like a newborn. “You’re
not helping,” Millie said through her teeth. Life was hanging in the balance on
both ends of the scale.
Millie stood barely breathing. “Come, on, come on, come on,”
was her urgent plea to the little one to behave more like a nursling. She
blinked her tired eyes, now less dependable than several hours ago. Did she see what she thought she saw?
She focused more keenly. It happened again. This time she was sure of it. The
ewe, still not moving, her eyes still shut tight took a lick of the lamb,
almost as if it was merely reflex. But then came another lick. All went quiet.
Millie had stopped breathing, enthralled by what appeared to be happening. This
ewe was virtually returning from the dead. As if the lamb recalled that licked
feeling or knew at some primal level what it meant, he started calling to her.
She licked harder and faster, and he fought the ties with all his might. In his
frantic struggles, he kicked the ewe in her nose, and her eyes blinked open. At
that moment, he broke free from the restraining twine, jumped up, ran to her
side, went down on his knees and bullied his way to a teat on her partially
expose udder. With his first suckle, the new mama came back to life. Even as
sick, hurting and exhausted as she was, she hoisted herself up to nurse her new
baby.
Millie moved back away and leaned against the wall, humbled
by the marvel of this moment. What saved
them? she wondered. She was all too aware of how easily life and death
could change places, though she was rarely certain why. She knew only that calling
them accidents was the least likely explanation. In her experience, life wasn’t
that haphazard. It was now 5:30 AM. Fatigue and cold owned her.
The commentator stopped the music to announce the Challenger
mission was a-go. The launch was scheduled for 11:30 EDT, 9:30 AM for Millie. She
penned up the new family, gave the ewe water and hay and winked at the now dozy
lamb, his belly bulging. As she left the barn and stepped into the deep morning
cold, she thought back to the debating officials. Did the world really work that way, she wondered, with life so far down on the list of what
matters?
Ben, her husband, had gotten up and seeing she wasn’t there,
figured she had an arrival in the lambing barn. He lit the wood cook stove to
pull the chill off the house and started some coffee. She found him in the
shower when she got back to the house and sat down on the toilet seat to catch
him up. She shared her success with the ewe and her night’s education about the
launch and the problems it was having. They rarely listened to the news from
what they referred to as the “outside world” as its concerns seemed far removed
from theirs. Unlike her though, Ben had been “out there.” He had left for
several years when he chose to serve in the military, stationed with
peacekeeping forces in Croatia. He aged in his heart through those several
years, and the first time she saw him on his return, she walked past him
without recognizing this childhood friend. They began to spend time together. As
they got closer, and he was sure she’d never judge him, he gave what was left
of his heart to Millie. She never questioned him about his war experience. She
knew she wouldn’t understand anyway. She loved him, just that, and that was
sufficient. As she related all that she had learned during the night, what stunned
her, was an all too familiar tale to him. She looked at him quizzically, unsure
of what his non-responsiveness meant. He had turned off the water and stood
there naked. His eyes were soft as he looked at her and said, “Babe, if we all
had hearts as stout and honest as yours, I wouldn’t feel so ill at ease about
how this day might end.”
They held off on breakfast and did chores quickly that
morning. Back in the house by 9:00, Millie fried up some bacon and eggs. By
9:20, the TV on, rather than sit in the living room, they stood at the opening
into it, almost like they needed to be invited to see this historic event. As
the countdown started, they each leaned against the opposite door jamb of the
opening, expectant. Having never seen a launch before, they felt like visitors
from another century.
They heard the countdown… “3-2-1 and lift off. Lift off,”
the NASA official said. “The 25th Space Shuttle Mission has cleared
the tower.” The camera panned to the crowd where Crista McAuliffe’s parents,
husband and young children stood with their necks bent back as they peered at
the sky. “Good roll program confirmed,” the official continued, “the engines
beginning to throttle down, now at 94%.”
Millie and Ben stared at the shuttle rising, each taking it
in in their own way. They never shared the thoughts each had during those next
72 seconds. It was like a world they were only visiting. At 9:39 AM their time,
the 73rd second, this marvel of mankind exploded into a ball of
searing light and flame before forking into two plumes of thick, dense, white
smoke, which for all the world, looked like puffy summer clouds. Millie’s hand flew
to her mouth but didn’t keep her, “Oh God,” from sputtering out. Ben
straightened up like a bolt and grabbed hold of the jamb. “She-it,” was all he
said. In the crowd at Cape Canaveral, Christa’s mother and father, her two
children and her husband watched as Christa became a part of history in a way
they never envisioned.
That night on the farm, another dark, cold January evening, Millie
walked up the driveway to do one last check in the lambing barn before supper. The
ewe looked improved. The lamb, snuggled up against her, lay content. Millie
folded her arms and leaned against the wall, reflecting on this strange day.
One decision saved two sheep. Another decision killed seven people. In her
heart, she held the grief of seven families mourning their loss. Had her plan
not worked, she would have done the same for the brave little ewe and a lamb
that would have surely followed. Hers was a practical world, flexible in some
ways, rock solid in others. There was life and death, rain and drought, plenty
and lack, work and ease. She had learned acceptance early on, and her comfort
came from that. She was not asked to judge or blame. As innocent and unworldly
as her view might seem to outsiders, what had happened this day was simple to
explain. People, who wanted to be fooled, would be, and cold was always waiting
for such opportunities.
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