Starting at the tail
Ernest Withers, in one of his final sunbeams
I keep considering why I want to start this story at its end. The story I want to tell is a sliver of my story, but it’s the sliver that glides through some stories much bigger than me, and stories that I keep coming back to in my art and in the art I want to make.
Knowing the ending does make a narrative tidier. I can gather up the experience and box it away. I want to box it away.
Daniel Defoe ends his Journal of the Plague Year with a couplet:
A dreadful Plague in London was
In the Year Sixty-Five
Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls
Away; yet I Alive!
I am alive, but my friends have lost uncles, uncles-in-law, great-grand-parents, grandparents, income, and businesses. I intend to stay alive, and the odds are in my favor. At the beginning of our plague, we were told it was a Choose Your Own Adventure narrative. 6 months in, it feels more like we're in a game of Oregon Trail. Except no one wants to make it to Oregon because it's on fire. And you can’t hunt bison, you can only vote. (If you’re not gerrymandered or wrongly disenfranchised or tricked into believing conspiracies by nefarious bots.) When I write this in September of 2020, the US has confirmed 197,000 deaths and worldwide deaths total 943,000. [When the CDC quit tallying Covid deaths in May 2023, they had surpassed 1.1 Million in the Uniter STates alone.]
Recent deaths on my farm total 7 sheep, around 20 young chickens, 3 frogs, and half a dozen mice. Also 34 Tomato Horn Worms. Also many, many insects, killed by “organic” insecticide so that I can grow some sweet potatoes I could easy purchase at the grocery, and some beautiful squash and gourds that I can't, but that are more likely to end up in a still-life than on a plate. And many seedlings in my vegetable garden, which didn't get precisely the cocktail of nutrients and sun and rain that they wanted, and so subsided to the earth.
There is so much death on a farm. I have killed so many things in my eight years here. I want to account for those deaths. I want to post the weekly bills of death on my hands. I want to paint a large canvas of the body of each mouse I've dropped from the trap and flung over the paddock fence for hens to eat. I want a reckoning. But first I want to finish the narrative that kills my sheep.
When we left Virginia in late February on our annual pilgrimage to suburban California, which is the American opposite of our normal life, I knew my shepherding project was closing, though I didn't know the timetable. Disease has forced me to imagine the end. What happened when we returned home sped up the timetable.
You don't box away deaths on the farm. They're never neat or tidy. You hurl the dead chicken as far as possible from the coop. You drag the corpse deep into the woods for the wood creatures to eat. If its heavy, you load it on you children's plastic sled, enlist a friend, and drag it together. Large farms have a hot compost pile that a tractor turns to keep the bacteria fed and creating enough heat to quickly dispose of an animal's corpse. Homesteaders fly by the seat of their pants, and don't post the picture to the social media feed. (Some of them do post heartfelt paragraphs of a gilded sort of mourning, the sort of mourning that encourages city dwellers to buy a hand-carved wooden spoon. The American soul, once moved by the plight of poor Charlotte Temple, has never lost is pleasure in collective mourning over things and people with whom they have no real connection. Mourning is yet another form of American acquisition.)
And so my social currency for a while was death stories-- The last-ditch bottle lambs friends gave me, lambs who didn't make it, and so I wrapped them in plastic and snuck them in the garbage at the dump, where disposing dead animals is forbidden. The predators I trapped in Have-a-heart traps, not to relocate and release (which isn't legal in my state, anyway), but rather to drown in my ornamental fish pond. Goodbye raccoon, goodnight possum. Telling stores about death to friends in the city was a way of negating how tremendously better life outside the city was-- No one really wanted to hear that yes, I am gloriously happy not living in your city, though I do miss and love you. That life feels peaceful and beautiful. That I sit on a hill with the love of my life and drink wine and watch the sunset over the mountains while my children cavort in the grass with baby lambs. No one wants to hear it. My mother reported that her friends viewed my social media posts with deep suspicion. Stories about the things I accidentally killed were better received. (That's why I'm starting with this story here, now).
While we were in California in March, friends who’d been keeping an eye on our animals texted to say we had a sheep down. They moved him into a barn and left him overnight with fresh hay and clean water. The next day he was up again and fine, which surprised me. Usually when a sheep goes down, they stay down. They’re not robust, and Johnes disease isn’t forgiving. But he made it through, so I had one of the “new” lambs left, along with Pepper and Ernest, who were beloved family pets who’d been with us for 5 and 4 years, respectively.
Humans kill. We are at the top of the food chain. We stupidly kill, we accidentally kill, we inadvertently kill. And we purposefully kill, we vengefully kill, we kill without remorse. We kill by transmitting disease. We kill through our children. We kill through policy, we kill through inaction. One of the reason I vastly prefer rural to urban life is that the filter is thinner. Death is here. The cemetery is on your farm. You can't work the land, you can't even just live in the woods without facing the animal process. It's not romantic. It's not horrible. It just is.
But I'm still glad it took eight years for the coyotes to find us.
