Vanishing Fleece

by Clara Parkes

  One of the shearers, Emily, brought her young daughter, who spent the day singing songs to the ewes and swinging on anything she could find. She’d accompanied her mom to shearings since she was a baby, so this was home to her. When the skirting table was not in use, she put her teddy bear on it and spun it around and around. Change was afoot at the skirting table, too. A helper they’d seen as a man last year returned, this year, as a radiant woman. All taken in stride.

  When we weren’t warming up in the truck, Eugene stood in the background, hands in pockets, observing. He wasn’t one for idle chatter. Occasionally he’d grab a broom and sweep the board around a shearer who’d just released a sheep. Other times, he’d dip his fingers into a freshly shorn fleece on the skirting table, like a chef checking the work of one of his line cooks. Or he’d sneak off to puff on his pipe. Then I’d find him back on the shearing floor, lying awkwardly on his side, snapping artful pictures with his iPhone. He was nearing seventy, and his Twitter game was sterling.

  It seemed surreal. I’d been led to believe that shearing was prime season for man-against-beast testosterone, for nicks and blood, machismo and cursing. I’d been dreading this part of my schooling, being around animals who were traumatized and men who were thriving on traumatizing them. I saw none of that. Instead, the mood was calm, quiet, and orderly, with the same amount of respect for both the people and the sheep. In fact, I might’ve been the most nervous one there.

  I began to suspect that the shearing was just slyly orchestrated propaganda for the purpose of making me go home and start a flock of my own. I’d have to check the back of my car to make sure they hadn’t tucked a ewe or two in there. How much of this vibe was pure luck, I wondered, and how much was a direct reflection of Eugene?

  I finally mentioned this to one of the women at the shearing table. “Oh, he’s much nicer with you here to distract him,” she whispered. “It’s making everything go so much more smoothly.”

  I wasn’t sure I could claim all the credit, though. This was a year for firsts. Not only was it the first time they’d had women shearers, but it was also the first time they’d ever had music playing, or had a young child hanging around, or been visited by an interviewer with a camera. Whatever the combination, it worked.

  Tending a flock of more than five hundred sheep is an ironic pursuit for a man who’d never wanted to have children. “I don’t have a job,” he liked to say. “I have responsibilities.”

  Though a bachelor now, Eugene had been married once. He wed his college sweetheart, Bettina. They lived in New York City; she was a successful fashion designer in the Garment District. In 1988, they did what a lot of people in their circles were doing: They bought a forty-acre farm in Sullivan County. It was gorgeous, but something was missing. Attracted by the notion of big beasts with impressive horns, Eugene suggested they raise cattle. Bettina talked him into Merino sheep. Cows scared her, whereas she could use the Merino wool in her garments.

  Off they flew to a big livestock show in Louisville. “I didn’t even know what a sheep looked like,” Eugene said. “But I saw that it had horns, so I said let’s get them!”

  They connected with an American Delaine Merino breeder in Nevada, loaded five pregnant ewes into the back of a truck, drove them home, and, in Eugene’s words, “we sat on them, like Easter eggs, until they hatched.” The plan was to let the ewes and their offspring mow the lawn and keep the weeds under control. But the minute the lambs arrived, Eugene was hooked.

  Two years later, he flew to Australia, toured several top sheep stations with an agent, and bid on five prize-winning Saxon Merino stud rams. He won the bid, flew the rams back to the United States, and began his Saxon Merino flock in earnest.

  Eugene is the first to admit that he knew absolutely nothing. “Every time a sheep coughed,” he said, “we called the vet.” But he was humble enough to know how little he knew, to hire those who did know more, and to learn from them. “Employees are your teachers,” he said. He also read everything he could find.

  When Eugene first showed his sheep at the American Delaine Merino Association show, he took home a trophy but with a warning about size. Standards in the United States are skewed, as is everything else, toward bigger being better. “We breed for big,” he said. “It’s the culture of the carny. They’ve got Ferris wheels right outside the show ring.”

  Instead of embracing those standards and bulking up his flock, Eugene pulled out of the association. He stuck to his principles, breeding to true Australian Saxon Merino standards, which still reward small and fine.

  In the world of sheep, there is a generally acknowledged correlation between animal size and fiber fineness. The larger the animal’s overall frame, the larger the diameter of fiber it grows (and the larger the diameter, the more you’ll feel it against your skin). The smaller the frame, the smaller the fiber diameter.

  While a larger frame means more meat, which equals greater revenue per animal, Eugene was not willing to compromise on fiber quality—despite the fact that meat represented more than 80 percent of his weekly farm revenue. He told me he doesn’t want millions (“Well, who doesn’t want millions?”); he’d just like to be able to keep doing this and find a broader market for his yarn. “I don’t have much Social Security,” he said, “but I’m content.”

  After an amicable divorce, Eugene moved his flock a few times before finally settling in Goshen, where he now rents a stylish bachelor pad in a converted barn not too far away.

  If I’ve given you the impression that Eugene works alone, let me correct that right now. He has Dominique Herman, the yin to his yang, the nurturing female to his stern, father-like figure. Perhaps a decade or two younger than Eugene, Dominique is short and wiry, with strong hands and intense eyes. The trusting ewes follow her everywhere, lovestruck and hopeful for treats.

  I didn’t dare ask if they were more than co-shepherds, and it didn’t really matter. Theirs was a partnership in the purest sense. Dominique is an insomniac, and the sheep fill those early dark hours, especially in winter. By 4 a.m. she’s on the farm to check on them. Later in the day, as she’s suppressing yawns, Eugene arrives to see the sheep through to dusk, making sure they’re returned to the safer, more protected parts of the farm. Predators are a constant worry.

  Dominique helps oversee lambing, stepping in to assist when necessary. She’s been known to bring home the occasional semi-frozen lamb and nurse it back to health, cutting up old sweater sleeves to keep the tiny creature warm until it can take care of itself.

  When several of the sheep contracted a deer-born virus that causes paralysis, Dominique didn’t give up. She researched the virus and came up with a sling-like contraption that allowed the affected sheep to stand outside, assisted, in the sun. Her voice wavered when she told me how, just that morning, one sheep stood up on her own. “She still has a weird little limp.” She pointed her out from the group. “But can you believe it? She’s walking. It’s a miracle.”

  While Dominique nurtures and nurses, Eugene has the ultimate authority: He decides which lambs will live and which will die. At least that’s the illusion he wants to give. In fact, he’s been swayed on multiple occasions to spare at least one or two of Dominique’s favorites. But when it’s time to see the unfortunates onto that truck, it’s Eugene who leads them on, puts the keys in the ignition, and drives away.

  “I drop them off at the slaughterhouse,” he said, “where these ghoulish men thank me and wish me a nice day. An hour later, the animals have been dispatched, and they come back to the farm in a box in the back of my truck.” Death is an essential part of any large-scale, financially viable sheep farm, though I sensed that it was a hard reality even for Eugene.

  “I realized early on,” he said, “that this was either a really expensive hobby or a poorly paying business. You have to be clever.”

  For Eugene, that cleverness is rooted in offering the highest-end products—the gold standard of wool yarn, gourmet sausages, and plump garlic cloves grown
in fields that have been fertilized by his flock—at one of the finest farmers’ markets in the country. Every week at the Union Square Greenmarket in New York City, people pay a premium for the very best.

  Just as the quality of a garden reflects the quality of the seeds planted, the quality of Eugene’s flock begins with its rams. While the ladies were getting coiffed uphill, these prized royal beasts had been sequestered in a pasture by the main barn, the road to which was deeply rutted by the recent spring thaw.

  We drove down to see them in Eugene’s truck. A small cluster of rams lazed about, their heads crowned with majestic swirls of horns. They were surprisingly docile. A few got up and sauntered over to greet me and see if I had a snack. Others stayed put, eyes closed, blissed out by the warmth of the sun.

  One ram sat alone in a separate fenced-in area. “That’s our Dishley Merino,” Eugene explained. He was kept separate because the other rams beat up on him. Dishley Merino is the early name for a breed now known as Île-de-France—which explains how this guy got the nickname “the Frenchman.” Dominique insisted he was a love, Ferdinand the Bull in ovine form. She’d convinced Eugene to keep him, although Eugene still insisted he’d like to drive over him with his truck.

  The nearby outdoor dye studio was a cluster of propane burners and metal pots on a concrete slab by the barn. They dye all the yarn that goes to the market, often experimenting with natural dyeing. “We’re in the process of training a new hand-dyer,” Eugene said, standing back to study orange and turquoise skeins swaying in the breeze.

  “Those are too garish,” he said.

  His art-critic demeanor hinted at Eugene’s other past. After ditching chemistry and pre-med at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, he landed a series of jobs at art galleries in San Francisco. He had no idea what he was doing at first, so he went to all the museums and galleries he could find. He read, and he studied. Eventually he worked his way up to managing a gallery on Geary Boulevard. When that business partnership went south, he followed a goldsmith’s advice and moved to Paris. Again, he had no idea what he was doing—“I didn’t even know how to say ‘fuck’ in French”—but after four years of bouncing from girlfriend to girlfriend, he was fluent. “Whenever I had nothing to do,” he said, “I went to the museum.”

  Which is exactly what he does most Saturdays after finishing up at the Greenmarket. Eugene’s blog is just as likely to have an analysis of a show at the Met, or of a single painting or poem or film, as it is to include mention of the farm or the sheep. He’s especially passionate about Proust.

  As we walked toward the barn, a small cat darted by. Another perched on a stone. We passed through an old door whose screen was kicked open at foot level. I saw more cats. One was in the windowsill; another peeked out from a box on a shelf. A black-and-white one peered at us through a doorway, his head tilted in a way I thought signaled inquisitiveness.

  “That’s our five-hundred-dollar cat,” Eugene said, referring to the cat’s remarkably high vet bills. “We call him Sideways because his head has always been crooked like that.”

  Neighbors have gotten wise to the presence of cat lovers on the farm and are always dropping off stray cats and kittens. Dominique may be soft on the sheep, but that’s nothing compared to Eugene’s devotion to these cats. Those who get along live a good life here. They keep the place free of rats and mice. The broken screen door allows them freedom of movement that, in turn, keeps them from using the inside of the barn as their litterbox.

  In another room, a long row of empty coolers stood at attention, freshly washed and waiting for the next market day. In a dark back room, sheep skins were heaped with salt to cure. The smell was faintly unsettling, or maybe it was just the sight of the skins that did it. This barn was where the sheep ultimately came to rest.

  As already mentioned, the bulk of Eugene’s farm revenue doesn’t come from wool. It comes from the lamb and sausages. Until a few years ago, the sausages were all made by a man in Pennsylvania. But his operation was shut down by the USDA soon after he turned eighty-two, presumably because he could or would not conform to new regulations. Dominique suggested Robert (“Bobby”) Matuszewski, a Culinary Institute of America–trained chef nearby who’d been gaining acclaim for his smoked meats and sausages.

  “How far away is he?” I asked.

  “He’s just over . . . well . . . let’s go there,” Eugene said. “Want to?”

  Into his truck we piled again, and soon we were careening over ruts and potholes that explained all the coffee stains in his truck. A tiny plastic lamb was jammed in the dashboard air vents (“I can’t resist picking one up every time I go to the feed store,” Dominique told me earlier). Eugene is a slow, ponderous driver, the kind who takes so long to look both ways before turning that a car inevitably appears out of the first place he looked, forcing him to jam on the brakes. Which had already happened to us twice. He also doesn’t seem inclined to wear his seat belt.

  After all this time, Eugene has become deeply attuned to his flock’s nuances and needs. “You have to be,” he said. “Sheep won’t tell you if they’re sick.” He has developed a keen instinct for all animal behavior, including that of other people. I felt that when we first met at the New York Sheep and Wool Festival. He’d studied me for quite a while at a polite distance before coming up and introducing himself. Only years later did he offer me his wool.

  He must’ve known I would eventually say yes, and that I was the right person for his fibers. While I spent months dithering about the decision, he patiently watched and waited and never pushed. When I finally agreed, he wrote back, “I like working with you at the speed you work, when you’re ready.” It was the first time anyone had praised the often ponderous (some might say “pain in the ass”) nature of my process, and I liked him even more for it.

  Still bouncing along in his truck, we headed over to Pulaski Highway toward the tiny community of Pine Island. The whole area had once been a glacial lakebed that left behind rich, dark soil. Repeated floodings of the Wallkill River have enhanced the soil’s fertility to the point where you could almost stick a shovel in the ground and it would sprout. Called the Black Dirt Region, it spans 26,000 acres that have been spared from development largely because the soil, though fertile beyond belief, is too poor for building. Dominique farms a plot nearby in the summer, selling her products at local farmers’ markets.

  We pulled into the parking lot of what appeared to be a convenience store. Inside, it looked like any small-town market except for the long, gleaming deli case packed with every shape, color, and texture of smoked meat. And not in plastic packages carrying other people’s logos, either. This was all homemade.

  Quaker Creek Store embodies the American dream. In 1939, just four years before Eugene was born, a man named Stanley Sobkowiak came to the United States from Poland to work as a garde-manger at the New York World’s Fair. After Hitler invaded Poland he couldn’t go home. He landed a job as a cook in a hotel in Atlantic City. Eventually, his wife and daughter managed to join him.

  His wife, Irena, soon grew homesick, so Stanley asked around and learned about a place in New York that had been settled by Polish immigrants. That was this place, the Black Dirt region. As luck would have it, Pine Island’s general store and tavern was for sale, so he bought it. His dream had been to transform it into a high-end restaurant, but the economics of the region wouldn’t support it. Instead, he built the market’s reputation for the very best home-processed meats.

  When Stanley died, the business passed to his nineteen-year-old grandson, Bobby Mateszewski, who made it his mission to fulfill his grandfather’s dream. He attended the Culinary Institute of America to study the proper art of being a garde-manger himself, namely an expert of everything in the kitchen, but especially in the art of making pâtés, terrines, and smoked and otherwise preserved meats. He plowed a ton of capital into a state-of-the-art basement smoking facility, helped by generous loans from his grandma—who worked at the market every day until she died a
t the ripe age of eighty-eight.

  While they never advertised their business, word of mouth slowly spread, and eventually the store was “discovered” by New York foodies. Folks like Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman and Bobby Flay have all come, camera crews in tow, to talk with Bobby and sample his creations. Eugene, as it turns out, is one of Bobby’s biggest customers. We arrived and were given carte blanche to wander downstairs from room to room.

  Men in uniforms looked up at us from various stations. A gleaming stainless-steel microprocessor-controlled smokehouse had just been opened and emptied of its contents. Another room’s white tile walls were being hosed down, lending a creepy feeling of a morgue between autopsies. Clearly for Eugene it is a point of pride that his lambs should become sausage at the hands of such skilled people, again reinforcing the idea of hiring the very best and learning from them. Quaker Creek makes thirty varieties of lamb sausage for Eugene. I had assumed they were all based on Mateszewski family recipes, but the truth was a little less romantic.

  “I Google sausage recipes,” Eugene said. “I pick ones that sound interesting and just have them swap lamb for pork.” He shrugged and smiled. “There’s no real flavor difference.”

  The sun was already low in the sky as we headed back to the farm. Eugene had even more sheep tucked away in an outer pasture—ones that hadn’t quite lived up to his exacting standards. “You only go forward with the best,” he explained. “This is why Saxons are Saxons.” Those who didn’t measure up were bred with Corriedale or Shropshire “meat” rams to produce big lambs for the market. As dusk approached, it was time to move these sheep back up toward the relative safety of the barn.

  A shrill whistle brought Poem, Eugene’s Australian Kelpie, from the back of the shearing barn, where the dog had been guarding the gate. Her job was to carry out Eugene’s commands in the field. We got in his truck, pulled out onto the road (again, nearly colliding with another car), and quickly turned onto a muddy path along the lower field. He stopped. Just a few days earlier, at this time of day and in this very spot, a coyote had darted across the headlights.