A Good Day's Work

by John Demont

  BACK in the truck she tells me that she’s probably at this farm once a month, about average for her “clients.” Sometimes farmers think they can handle whatever has happened by themselves or with a little advice over the phone. Other times it’s “better get over here fast because all hell is breaking loose.” Breached deliveries. Colic. Gashed-up legs. Pneumonia. A host of maladies can befall a farm animal. “Take your prolapsed uterus,” Jessica says, a term with which I am not familiar. It means that while calving, a cow has somehow pushed her uterus outside of her body. In January, when there are lots of beef cattle calving in the area, Jessica runs into a fair number of prolapsed uteruses. “Some are easy—some are hard. It’s got to go back in. So I give the cow an epidural and I start pushing. It’s this big bag that has carried a calf. It can take forty minutes of pushing; my arms ache for days after. The whole thing is a bloody wet mess. I put a calving suit over top of the coveralls. But I still get wet. There’s a lot of blood from the afterbirth. I’m covered in blood and water, and it’s all happening at the back end, so I’m covered in that too.”

  C-sections, another regular procedure, sound like no walk in the park either. Jessica describes the circumstances of her most recent one: a farm that had lost its power during a big windstorm and a cow trying to calve, with a twisted uterus preventing the birth from taking place. Jessica used a local anaesthetic to numb the “surgery site.” She sedated the cow and then cut a fifteen-inch-long hole in the animal’s side. “I reached into the abdomen, pulled the uterus out and made an incision. Then the farmer and I pulled the calf out.” That understates the process a little. The calf weighed about a hundred pounds, which explained why Jessica couldn’t untwist things. By the time she stitched up the uterus and incision ninety minutes had elapsed. A “difficult” C-section can take two and a half hours.

  We pull into an Irving Big Stop, where she has arranged to hand off some medication to a farmer. Jessica punches the office number into her cell phone. “Hi, I’m all done at Dykstra’s,” she says. When Jessica hangs up, she explains that a while ago her colleague André stitched up a high-spirited filly with considerable difficulty. Now those stitches need to come out. Carl, who is already out at the stable, thinks that this is more than a one-person job. Jessica, lucky her, is closest.

  A car finally pulls up. A window rolls down. The farmer’s two-month-old calf isn’t drinking much water and just lies there. Jessica asks a few questions. They settle on a treatment that is about sixty dollars less than the medicine he was originally scheduled to pick up. “If things get worse, call me ASAP,” she says. Then she slaps the truck into drive and is back on the road again, bound for the Maritime Saddle and Tack Shop a few kilometres east.

  Inside the barn, the horse’s owner, Michelle Bourque, leans up against the stall. Styletto—shiny chestnut coat with a white-patched forehead and dabs of snow on two legs—has quite the lineage: sired by a dressage world champ whose daughter sold for a cool 2.5 million euros at an auction, she’s on the market for twelve thousand dollars. But even to my untutored eye Styletto—chest heaving, nostrils pulsing—looks skittish. She’s a hoity-toity show horse that spends her time cantering around exhibition rings. Nonetheless, when Carl tries to pick up the stitched right front leg, she rears up, smashing her head on the barn roof and making a sound like someone chopping wood. “Whoa,” says Carl. “Whoa,” says Michelle. “Whoa,” says Jessica.

  Injuries are unavoidable for big-animal vets. Horses kick. So do cows. Mostly it’s just bruises and bangs. But André has never quite recovered from being bitten in the face by an ornery mare on what should have been a routine call. Horses will try to stomp you with their hooves, as Styletto aspires to do to Carl at this very moment. If your arm gets wedged in between a wild horse and the sides of the stall—as seems to be on the verge of happening to Jessica, now also inside the stall with Styletto—it could get fractured. Styletto, it is decided, needs a little sedation. Jessica heads for the truck. She returns minutes later carrying a black case with silver latches and hinges that snap open.

  Inside her emergency kit are needles, syringes and IV catheters. Rompun, an injectable sedative, is in a 50 ml bottle, about half the size of the ampoules of Flunazine, a painkiller. The Dormosedan is in a clear bottle with labels on either side. Because Styletto is so jumpy, Jessica puts a little of it together with a little Torbugesic, another sedative. She flicks the syringe a couple of times with her index finger to get the medicine flowing. Then she steps inside the stall.

  The horse isn’t big. Even so, Carl clenches Styletto’s halter for control. Amid beams of light from a flashlight, Jessica, making calming noises, searches for the horse’s jugular vein with her left hand while the syringe stands ready in her right. Inside an eight-foot-square stall a wrestling match ensues. A chorus of “whoas” fills the barn. The vets muscle the horse. Styletto, moving counter-clockwise, muscles back. Somehow Jessica gets the needle in, plunges the sedation into the horse’s circulatory system, then backs off to let it work.

  The drug combo, under normal circumstances, should take the fight out of a horse. Styletto just stands there. “It’s the animal’s temperament that’s the issue,” says Jessica. “Taking out the stitches isn’t that painful. It’s just that nothing we were doing was to her liking. It’s just her personality. She’s very stubborn.” The vets look at Michelle. Michelle looks at them. Carl tries to grab the filly’s right leg and then just gives up. In her mind, Jessica is already mixing Dormosedan and Rompun, a more potent sedative combination, and reaching for another syringe.

  BACK in the office half an hour later Jessica plucks a doughnut from a Tim Hortons box. If she doesn’t eat something now, she might have to go the entire workday with nothing more than a few handfuls of trail mix from the plastic bag in the cab of her truck. She’s had half an hour of downtime. Now a horse is about to foal. Dairy cattle tend to calve all year. Horses tend to foal in the spring. This, for example, will be the first equine birth Jessica has seen this season. Normally when horses foal, a farmer doesn’t reach for the phone to call the vet. But this couple raises show horses.

  Maryanne Gauthier, who also works for the local John Deere dealer, focuses on paints, so called because of their distinctive markings. Her husband, Marc, raises Clydesdales, just like in the Budweiser ads. Marc is a farrier, which means he shoes horses for a living. He’s also a bit of a worrier. He’s spent a lot of time and money on a mare named Amelia Earhart. So when the mare’s water broke, Marc hit Jessica’s cell phone number and told her that, if possible, her presence would be appreciated.

  “There’s a good chance it will all be done by the time we get there,” says Jessica, back behind the wheel. A cow can take two hours. Horses are a lot faster. That her water has broken implies that she will foal in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. “But there’s no happy medium with foals,” Jessica says. “They’re either really easy going, or it’s really, really hard.”

  We’re heading southwest from Moncton, down an unremarkable stretch of Trans-Canada Highway before turning off onto a country road. The Arctic temperature seems to give everything outside a hard, metallic look. Jessica’s cell rings: “Have you seen any signs of heat … I can book something for next week in the morning … Oh, I know Lola. What’s her due date again … I’ll call you later when I have my book and we’ll make an appointment.”

  The community we’re bound for, Havelock, sits at the junction of Route 880 and the Hicks Settlement Road. When I look on my iPhone, I note that the settlement—along with towns in Nebraska and New Zealand and streets in Singapore and Kanpur—is named after a British general famous for putting down an uprising in Raj-era India. The Internet also tells me that Havelock’s most famous citizen is an evangelist named George McCready Price, known for his creationist thinking.

  I personally believe in evolution. However life comes to be, there is no mistaking the wondrous yet messy path of the natural world inside the barn where Maryanne, dressed in ladylike pi
nk, leads us. Paints in stalls line either side of the barn. Amelia’s space is the last one on the left. She’s not alone: kneeling in the hay, a fifteen-minute-old Clydesdale foal blinks from the shock of entering this here world.

  I may have gasped. I may have thrown my hands up in the air like a three-year-old coming down the stairs on Christmas morning. I can’t really recall. All I can relay for certain is my abiding sense that city folks don’t often get the opportunity to see such things, and recall the way that foal looked—eyes barely open, white forehead, muzzle twitching, I imagine, in confusion—and how his mother, covered in blankets to keep her warm after the exertion of birth, just stood there obliviously munching hay.

  A horse like Amelia is probably worth fifteen to twenty thousand dollars. So I understand why Marc, kneeling by the foal’s side, is so excited. He reaches up to shake my hand, then goes back to cleaning the foal’s coat and whispering encouraging words. Jessica, at this point, just stands by the entrance to the stall watching things unfold. Marc and Maryanne try to get the foal to rise, fail, then try again. Finally, on the shakiest of legs, it gets to its feet. “Holy sweet mother, look at the size,” says Maryanne. The horse, now about forty minutes old, reaches almost to her shoulders. Marc looks like he may weep with joy. Jessica makes an appreciative noise and notes the time: 3:06 p.m.

  Foalings are supposed to follow what she calls the “one-two-three principle.” If all goes well, the foal is supposed to be upright within an hour. Within two hours of being born it is supposed to be feeding. An hour later the mare is supposed to clear the placenta, which at this moment hangs a foot or so out of Amelia’s rear end. If the placenta doesn’t clear by this time, the danger of infection increases. Jessica watches Maryanne and Marc try to get the foal to latch onto its mother to feed. Then, after a while, she opens the metallic case.

  She lifts out a vial of oxytocin, the hormone responsible for producing the uterine contractions that birth the foal and push out the afterbirth. She pops the needle of a hypodermic syringe into the centre of the ampoule and draws out the medicine. As Marc calms the horse, she hits the jugular with the needle, plunging the medicine into the Clydesdale’s bloodstream. Then there’s nothing for her to do but watch and wait.

  JESSICA does not text. She does not look at her watch. She doesn’t sneak out to the warmth of the still-running truck to call the office. She just stands there waiting for the contractions to start rippling through the mother. The barn is Jessica’s natural habitat. By my calculation, she has spent the equivalent of nearly two years of her life ministering to barn animals since becoming a vet. She just can’t escape the agrarian life. Her husband, Les, a Prince Edward Island boy whom she met at vet school in Charlottetown, works for a dairy equipment manufacturer based in nearby Sussex. Lesley, their nineteen-year-old daughter, who’s studying to become a licensed practical nurse in Moncton, went through the 4-H ranks. William, the five-year-old, is also following in the family tradition. When Jessica gets home—after dinner, homework and some cleaning up—she’ll walk out onto her twelve-acre spread in Manhurst and head for the barn, where they keep a few head of beef cattle, some horses and sheep. This is Jessica’s notion of fun.

  Inside the Gauthier barn, therefore, she is calm, she is cool. With Marc’s help she ties off the foal’s umbilical cord, cuts it, then applies iodine to the horse’s “outie.” Once the foal begins to suckle, all attention focuses on Amelia. Oxytocin acts fast, but only for a short time. The first three doses are spaced twenty to thirty minutes apart. The hope is that eventually the mare will kneel in the hay and naturally expel the placenta. Jessica pulls out a bit more of the afterbirth by hand. The pink membrane still only hangs a couple of feet outside the horse. She ties it into a knot in the hope that gravity will drag more of the placenta out. At 4:06 Jessica gives Amelia another shot.

  If in an hour’s time things haven’t moved along, she will hit the horse with another dose. If that doesn’t work, Jessica will have to remove the afterbirth manually. Otherwise, Marc’s beloved Clydesdale could develop one of several nasty-sounding complications, each ending in “itis,” any one of which could kill the mare.

  Thus, here Jessica stands, face unclouded by doubt, as if she has all the time in the world. This isn’t just some commercial transaction between strangers. Marc and Maryanne aren’t just “clients.” Jessica’s home is a couple of minutes away from this place by car. Their daughters went to school together. They’re neighbours and therefore are accorded the mutual respect that such a relationship deserves.

  This was how it once was in this country. Don’t you remember when we all had that sense of community and connection? I don’t just mean in a business-employment sense, although before the Net and the global marketplace everything was local: if you made something, chances were that you sold it to someone you went to elementary school with. The parents of the kid who centred your peewee hockey line hired you to fix their toilet, balance their books and rotate their tires. The guy who had lunch once a week with your dad’s first cousin hired you for a job you had no right getting because, well, you were the son of the first cousin of the guy he lunched with four times a month, fifty-two weeks a year.

  It was, for better or worse, as though we all lived in this same small village in which we each had a shared urgent responsibility for the other residents. When good deeds were done, people didn’t tweet about it or demand to have their names put on a building. I thought for a second about K.C. Irving on the way to becoming the third-richest non-monarch in the world, who spent a Christmas Eve driving through a blizzard with a couple of bags of road salt to help a stranger stranded in this same neck of rural New Brunswick in which we now shivered. He was seventy at the time. But he lived in a place and time where corner stores still let customers buy groceries on credit and delivered free to seniors. Back in the day teachers stayed late of their own free will to coach school sports teams. Doctors made house calls.

  Now get sick, go broke or bonkers or otherwise fall by the wayside in a Canadian city and you’ll find out who has your back. Sometimes it seems that we may as well be in the wilds of the Arctic. If you suffer the big one while walking down the street in broad daylight, I hope that your old elementary school teacher—not some fresh-faced family physician worried about “liability issues”—is passing by.

  So it does my heart good to know that in certain places in this country the “we’re all in this together” spirit still lives. Make no mistake, standing here and waiting is part of Jessica’s occupation, for which she is decently compensated. But there are easier ways to make a buck than being a country vet. She never wanted just a “job,” she says. Jessica wanted something more than a mere exchange of labour for lucre. “It is a combination of things,” she says when I ask her what it is about this work that appeals to her. “I grew up on a dairy farm so I like cows and horses and find working with them rewarding. I like helping farmers. It’s a symbiotic relationship. I need the farmer and the farmer needs me and we need the cows and horses. It’s an important industry. I wanted to be part of it and this is how it worked out.”

  We’re back in the truck now. Amelia has received her last dose of oxytocin. There’s nothing to do but see if it kicks in. Jessica is going to pick up her son, William, at his babysitter’s and then drive me back to Moncton, where my rental is parked. William comes out of the house wearing a big furry hat with earflaps. “I think I know him,” he says of me to his mom as he climbs into the back seat. “That can’t be the case,” Jessica starts to say. But it’s been a long day and the little guy’s out already. And so we drive, K94.5 filling the car, through this country where she knows not just the people but the cows and horses by sight.

  Delirious from hunger, I’m imagining an artery-narrowing Angus Burger at the McDonald’s I know is just a few minutes from where I parked my car. Jessica, who has already put in a day that’s as physical as a stevedore’s, hasn’t had a full meal since breakfast. A half an hour from now, when she returns
to the Gauthiers’, she hopes to discover that Amelia has dropped her placenta. Otherwise, this woman has miles to go before she eats, let alone sleeps.

  It’s not like there are really options. Somebody has to do it. Somebody has to slide open that barn door with frozen fingers and keep watch until these folks she knows so well are in the clear. That she might say the hell with it and head for home is out of the question. It has never entered Jessica’s mind. She has been training, in one way or other, for this moment her whole life. These are her people. This is her world. It will take as long as it takes.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  THE MILKMAN COMETH

  BILL was fretting. If his neurons seemed hyperactive, they had reason to be. In his mind, he pictured hangdog kids gazing at empty cereal bowls. He saw seniors, their porous bones softening on the spot. He visualized bakers, feet up, reading the day’s Chronicle Herald as their mixing bowls sat idle. He imagined coffee drinkers at Tim Hortons drive-throughs, gape-mouthed upon learning that a medium double-double was suddenly as accessible as lasting peace in the Middle East. “Oh man I’m late,” whispered Bill. “I’m late.” And so he arrowed east, his white van careering forlornly through the gathering dawn, his eyes scratchy with fatigue, his gut clenched with worry.

  He had been on the job for six hours by now. The workday began at midnight at the Farmer’s Co-Operative Dairy at the dead end of a country road outside of Halifax. The day was meant to end in the early afternoon, twenty kilometres from where he’d started, after presenting his last cases of milk, yogourt, cheese and cream to a restaurant readying for the suppertime rush. But halfway through the workday things had gone sideways: the chef at a retirement home slept in; when Bill Bennett Jr. finally pulled into the parking lot and unlocked the door leading to the kitchen, he was a full sixty minutes behind schedule.