Dancing at the Rascal Fair

by Ivan Doig

  I studied Rob. It was a clear economy for the Barclays, to get those wethers shorn free by neighbors instead of the hired crew. But as to how Rob was going to justify this to those neighbors—

  “What it is,” he enlightened me without delay, “I thought maybe Adair would enjoy seeing a real shearing contest. So I challenged George and Allan Frew to one on Leftover Day. They went for that like a pair of fetching pups.”

  I had to hoot. “You’re a generous man, to show your sister how you get the whey beat out of yourself”—and myself too; I didn’t miss that interesting implication—“shearing against the Frews. I can hear Allan crow now.” I could, too. Other shearing times Rob and I had paired to try, Ninian and I had tried, Ninian and Rob had tried, every set of Scotch Heaven men with any contest blood in them had tried and fully failed to tally more sheep than the Frew cousins on Leftover Day. The damn man Allan simply was a wool-making machine and George was almost as bad.

  “This is the year we’ll put a plug in Allan Frew,” maintained Rob. “What do you say to that?”

  “I’ll say the plain fact, which is that we’ve never even managed to come close yet. Rob, the two of us have about as much chance of outshearing the Frew boys as we have of jumping over this sheep shed.”

  He smiled and then shook the smile at me. “This year, we’ve got a card in our hat.”

  “Do we. And what’s that?”

  “These.”

  Rob stepped over to where his coat was hanging, reached under, and with a beam of triumph brought forth two gleaming sets of wool shears.

  I had seen my share of wool shears before. But not these. Each of these shears had a pair of elongated triangular blades which faced each other with sharp expectancy, their bottoms linked in graceful loops of handle.

  “Just listen to these lovelies sing,” Rob urged me. Experimenting dubiously I put my hand around the grip of the shears he’d handed me and squeezed the hafts of metal. The faces of the blades moved across each other like very large scissors that had just been dipped in oil, steel crooning ever so gently against steel. Zzzing zzzing, they chimed a soft chorus with the identical blades Rob was clasping and releasing, zzzing zzzing. Truly, here was a shears that seemed to coax my hand to keep working it, keep discovering the easy buttered whet of the blades as they met. Here was just the thing to make wool fly, right enough. I made my hand stop eliciting the whicker of the blades, so that I could read their tiny incut letters:

  MANUFACTURED IN SHEFFIELD, ENGLAND.

  “Finest steel in the known world,” proclaimed Rob. “Sheffield stuff holds an edge like a razor.”

  “These don’t grow on trees. Where’d you get them?”

  “I had Adair bring them. See now, McAngus, these’re our ticket over the Frew boys.”

  I saw, and then some: saw through Rob here as an open window. The winning shearing team were the heroes of Leftover Day, which was to say, stolid and effacing as George Frew was, Allan Frew was the perpetual hero of Leftover Day. But this time, this time Rob wanted me up there on the woolly cloud of triumph, for Adair to see up at. The damn man was still trying to fan up ardor between her and me, exactly as if Anna did not exist. You had to credit him for persistence, moments when you didn’t want to wring his stubborn Barclay neck. But rather than spend the rest of the day in steaming argument with Rob, I held myself to pointing out the hole in the bottom of his scheme:

  “Rob, it’s a clever notion and all. But I can’t say I’m going to be that much faster a shearer even with blades such as these. Allan came out of his cradle shearing faster than I can even dream about.”

  “Fast isn’t it, man. Come on now, think sharp.” He paused significantly. “The afternoon recess. Do you see the idea now, or am I going to have to paint it red for you?”

  I saw again, this time with my every pore, down to the small of my back. I can swear that there was not a shearing muscle in me not alarmed by what Rob was proposing. Yet it might work. Outlandish enough, it just might. More than that, even. Gazing at Rob there in the shed, as innocently luminous with scheme as he had been when he lured me to the depot and Adair, I had the thought that Allan Frew was not the only one eligible for getting a plug put in him, come Leftover Day.

  • • •

  Life missed a major step in efficiency by putting fleece onto sheep instead of directly onto us. There is no other harvest like shearing, the crop directly from the living animal, panting and squirming, the shearers stooping daylong in sweat and concentration as they reap greasy wool. Everyone had work. Most often I was gate man, scurrying to operate all the waist-high swinging doors in the cutting chute that sluiced the sheep into the shearers’ catch pens six at a time, each penful the pantry the shearer went to for sheep, so to say. Behind me, Rob and Allan Frew customarily were the wranglers, wrangling consisting of steadily shoving the band of sheep to the end of the corral where they funneled single file into my cutting chute, but as Rob and Allan performed it, lengthy wrangles about theories of sheep and sheepdogs and sheepherders also went on between them as if it was coffee-time conversation. If you think of shearing as an hourglass of work, Rob and Allan and I and the unshorn sheep were the supply bell of sand grains at the top. The hired crew of shearers who traveled from job to job of this sort—my back ached to think of their season of stooped-over labor—made the neck of the hourglass: from the shearing floor where twelve or fifteen of them did their clipwork, naked sheep and fleeces of wool steadily trickled. Then on the other side of the shearing crew, the catch-chamber of all this effort of shearing: Archie Findlater the tallyman, Donald Erskine the brander who daubed the sheep owner’s paintmark onto each ewe’s newly naked back, one boy or another as doctor—Davie Erskine had just enough concentration to manage it—who swabbed on disinfectant whenever a sheep was nicked by the blades; and finally, ultimately, Ninian Duff as wooltromper, stomping the fluffy fleeces down into the long woolsack hung like a giant’s Christmas stocking through a hoop in the high little tromping tower. It always seemed to me fittingly festive that as each woolsack filled with its thirty-five or forty fleeces, Ninian within the sack gradually emerged out its top like a slow, slow jack-in-the-box.

  All this to undress a sheep, you may say. But it wasn’t the naked affronted ewe, stark as glass knickers, that was the product of this. No, it was the rich yellow-white coat she had been separated from. Wool. The pelt that grows itself again. I for one could readily believe that when man started harvesting his clothes from tamed animals instead of shopping wild for furs, then true civilization began. The wool of our sheep went off to eastern mills with abracadabra names such as Amoskeag and Assabet and transformed into cloth for shirts, dresses, trousers, everything. You cannot overlook the marvelous in that.

  “Man, this is the year we’ve been looking for under every rock.” Rob was built on springs, this shearing time. A tremendous wool crop at a good price, Adair on hand, the Sheffield shears waiting to trim Allan Frew down to size—every prospect pleased.

  “The sky is about to rain gravy,” I agreed with him, and grinned. I was in great spirits myself, Anna and our future always right there at the front of my mind. Adair I was aware of only at meals, when the entire shearing gang of us trooped into my house to eat off the long plank-and-sawhorse table Rob and I had put up. Odd to see, there in my kitchen, her and Judith—particularly Judith, whose presence there always reminded me that with a small veer of fate those years ago she might be in my kitchen all the time—but odd is part of life, too. Yet I wondered what Adair made of all this, our Two country and its infinity of sheep and its mountains the size of clouds.

  I had my one chance to find out midway through that shearing time. We had just finished with the Erskine band and I was helping Davie drive them west from the shed, toward the start of their summer in the mountains. As we shoved them past my house and buildings, the bare sheep blatting comparisons of indignation to each other and Davie and I and our dogs answering them in full, out from the house came Adair to empty a di
shpan. She stopped to witness the commotion, as who wouldn’t. Once the sheep were past the buildings I called out, “They’re yours, Davie,” and dropped away to return to the shearing shed. But my spirits were so thriving, with how well the shearing was going and, yes, with thoughts of Anna someday standing there in my yard where Adair now stood, that I veered over to Adair to joke: “Whatever you do, don’t count these sheep as they go past or you’ll be asleep a year.”

  “They look so—so forlorn without their wool.”

  “They’ll have a fine fresh coat of it by the end of summer. By the time you go back to Scotland, you won’t recognize these ladies.” Or by the time, Dair Barclay, I am the husband of Anna and you’re married to some Montanian conspicuously not me. One or other. But not that result which Rob dreamed up and still was trying to puff life into, not that result for which he brought you innocent from Nethermuir: not the altar halter tying together Angus and Adair, thank you just the same.

  “Yes, I know they’ll get new wool,” Adair answered. “It’s just that they’re so plucked right now. Like poor old chickens ready for the pot.”

  I noticed she was flinching from the wind trying to find its way into her through her eyes. “What you have to do, girl,” I instructed as I moved around to stand between her and the breeze’s direction, “is learn to get in the lee of it. I make an A Number One windbreak, if I say so myself.”

  “That helps,” Adair concurred. “Thank you.” She took the chance to look past me to the mountains, high and clear in the June air, and then around at my house and outbuildings and down the creek to the sheep shed. While she was at that I did my own bit of inventory. Not so bad a looker, this Adair, actually. Slim and small-breasted, but I had seen less consequential examples. Then those Barclay rosettes in her cheeks, and the auburn crinkle of her hair, like intricately carved ornamentation. Anna of course was an Amazon cavalcade all by herself, but in the rest of womanhood’s rank and file this Adair was no worse than midway. Something I had forgotten from her face when she was a Nethermuir tyke; under each eye she had a single dark freckle, specks that repeated the pupils just an inch above. As if there had been an earlier near-miss try at siting her eyes in her face. Interesting. Odd. Now in that recital way of hers, as if providing information to herself, Adair was saying: “You and Rob have built all this, here and at Breed Butte.”

  “And the others their own places, Ninian there and Donald and Archie.” I thought to scrupulously add, “And the Frew boys, they’re as solid as people come, too. But yes, we had to build ourselves.”

  “For you it must be like being born a second time, is it? Coming into the world again, but already grown.”

  “Something of that sort, I suppose. If you can call me grown.” Standing a foot taller than she did, I meant this to cheer her with a chuckle. She only smiled the minimum and went on, as if still trying to get to the fact of the matter: “I don’t see how you could do all this, you and Rob.”

  “Main strength and ignorance,” I said. “Dair, I hope you’re taking to Scotch Heaven all right.”

  She gave me a glance in which she seemed to be seeing something of herself instead of me, not a Barclay declarative look at all. “Adair is not to be fretted about,” she quietly advised.

  • • •

  Leftover Day. The morning of it was sheer hospital work, George and Allan and Rob and I laboring our way with our clippers through ill and lame sheep, trying to be as tender as they were fragile, poor old dears. Life perked up measurably just before noon, when we reached the first few of Rob and Lucas’s big yearling wethers. It was always the case, that older sheep who had been through the shearing process before knew what lay in store for them and did not like it one least bit. Even that morning’s wheezers and geezers squirmed and writhed to the best of their ability. Yearlings on the other hand, virgin wool on their broad young backs, were greatly easier to shear because of their undefiled ignorance. Even as you held a yearling wether down and began working the shears over his body, he had a dazed disbelief that what was happening could be happening. And being wethers they had on them no hazards of udder and teats for us to be extra careful of; the easy of the easy, these innocent sheep who now were meeting our shearing blades.

  “Those were just enough to get us going,” Rob announced to the world and Frews at large, and with a wink to me, when we halted for noon dinner, “Barclay and McCaskill can hardly wait until we start counting.” I grinned, but only half meant it. Already shearing was taking a toll on my back and whatever other parts of me it could reach. The afternoon ahead looked long.

  Allan Frew of course was as fresh as froth. “You’re ready for the shearing lesson this afternoon, then?” he piped out, with a particular glint my way to remind me I was a schoolteacher. But it wasn’t news to me that Allan had beef where his brains ought to be, and so I let pass everything of that noon hour except the constant thought that my shears were going to have to do a lot of talking the rest of the day.

  “Ay, you’re ready, both pairs?” declaimed Ninian from on high, atop his woolsack platform. “As you know, Archie will tally and call out the totals of each team every hour. Set then, are you, Allan and George? Angus and Robert?”

  Receiving our four nods, Ninian lowered himself into the woolsack until just his head and half his beard showed, and boomed his starting call:

  “MORE WOOL!”

  We dove to the work. Four amazed sheep emerged from the woolsack curtains between our catch pens and the shearing floor, being dragged by us and then before they knew it being half sat up, half held against our bodies, like stunned cats press-ganged into a children’s game. Worse came next, as the suspicious sound of snipping started circling their bodies and did not stop. Here was the moment for each sheep to declare its character. Some bleated in consternation and tried to wriggle free, which earned them only a tighter clamp of the shearer’s legs and a possible gash if they did their worming while the blades were moving to meet them. Others seemed to try to sink through the shearing platform, ooze away from the alarming problem. Either case, the unfleecing relentlessly proceeded to happen to them, and their eyes became like doublesize marbles, hard glaze of fatal acceptance there now. As the yellow-white wool, oily and rich, began to fall away like a slipping gown, you could all but feel the young sheep’s innocence of life sliding off with it.

  Both Allan and George were left-handed. With them opposite that way to Rob and myself, the two pairs of us down in labor must have been like a mirror reflection. Except that the left-side image little by little, inexorably and inevitably, produced a greater number of shorn sheep than did my and Rob’s version. Leave the pairs of us there shearing for centuries and it would go on and on that way, always the left-side Frews manufacturing a few more naked sheep than we ever could. From experience and all else, Rob and I knew this would be the case. I am overtall to be any kind of an ideal shearer, having to get through the endless stoopwork in whatever spurts I could manage. Rob, as a person lower to the ground, could go about it much more ably, and with his deft hands he was a proficient workman with the shears, fine to watch. But George Frew was as relentlessly regular as do-remi-fa-so-la in disposing of a catch pen of six sheep, while the damnable Allan had several rhythms, all of them casually swift, for undoing the fleeces off his animals. Spirited infantry in the attack on wool, Rob and myself; the saber cavalry, those damn Frews.

  As was confirmed by Archie Findlater’s tally at the end of the first hour: “The Frew boys, ahead by two sheep.” Actually, Rob and I could take heart from that. Other times, they outsheared us by twice that in the opening hour.

  “We’ve got them just where we want them,” Rob imparted to me in an undervoice as he dragged his next wool victim past me. Maybe so, but my muscles had elsewhere they wanted to be.

  The next hour Allan and George gained another two sheep on us, again a heartening loss for Rob and me in that it could have been so much greatly worse. By now the women were arriving from the house to watch the fin
ale. Rob tossed a wave to Judith and Adair between finishing one wether and diving into his catch pen for the next. I wasn’t sure I could lift an arm high enough for a wave, so I called out—panted out, really—my greeting. Long since had these big broadbacked wethers, absolute fields of wool, stopped being the easy of the easy of shearing.

  “By Jesus, lads, we could see the wool flying from a mile off,” Lucas called out, now arriving grandly, Nancy’s brown inquisitive face beside his broad bearded one. “Angus and Robbie, a little faster if you can stand it, ay?” Not even Rob could muster the retort that deserved. It had to come instead from the squirmy dismayed sheep between my knees: BLEAGH!

  Half an hour until the momentous mid-afternoon recess. My arm and wrist and hand were becoming a sullen rebel band from the rest of my body. I wondered how many other parts of myself there were to be contended with in the half of an afternoon still ahead.

  At last, it seemed days, Ninian climbed up out of his woolsack and called, “Recess, both pairs. Time to see to your blades.”

  From the corner of my eye I could see Allan and George stretch and arch their backs, then walk over to the grindstone to bring an edge back onto their blades, while Rob and I labored to finish the sheep we were on. A streak of sparks flew as a Frew bladeface met the whirling stone, kzzzkzzzkzzz. Rob released his shorn sheep, straightened for a glance at the Frews in their leisure of shear-sharpening and a quick cocked glint of reassurance at me, then dove to his catch pen and brought out a next sheep. I swallowed hard and followed his example.