Trauma Farm

by Brian Brett

  Rats and farmers can beget far-fetched stories. A tenderhearted artist long ago witnessed a brutal farmer kicking his sheepdog. After that, for years, this gentle artist, with impish glee, would release his live-trapped rats at night in the farmer’s barn.

  In her young years Sam moved so fast she could snatch a leaping rat out of the air and break its back. I’m relentless when it comes to rats and mice, especially after someone I knew died from hantavirus—probably contracted from mouse droppings.

  Traditionally, farmers deal with mice by filling a wooden-handled bucket half full of water. Then you tie a strip of bacon around the loose handle. The mouse will run up the metal handle and touch the wooden grip, which rotates, tossing the mouse into the water, where it drowns. I tried a variant for rats with a garbage can in the feed shed, filling the bottom third with water and floating a tiny dish of feed in it. The method worked too horrifyingly well. I found whole families of drowned rats. One would fall in, and the others would bravely, suicidally leap to its rescue. This was too cruel for me. But then I’d also seen rats that had mutilated themselves when caught in traps. The whole business turns my stomach, yet to surrender would have worse consequences.

  ALTHOUGH I’M NOT A Christian, the traditional Christmas with its carolling, gaudy tree, goodwill, rum-and-eggnogs— all of it—is nearly enough to convert me every year. Despite the ugly shopping orgy it’s also become, Christmas remains a warm tradition we celebrate with gusto. Every year on Christmas Day we declare a truce at Trauma Farm, disarm the traps, and throw feed and grain to every animal and predator in sight, pests included. The next day the wars begin again.

  One year I couldn’t kick myself into the mood. Sharon wanted me to find our Christmas tree, and our gift making and purchasing had fallen behind. I was too busy and too broke to worry about Christmas trees. Then we had an early morning power failure. Without the refrigerator running, we heard a squeaking. We searched everywhere but couldn’t discover its source. After the power returned and I was cooking breakfast I heard it again and realized it was behind the stove. Crawling around on the floor, I noticed a little tail sticking up behind an electrical box attached to the adobe wall. A mouse! His tail wagged ferociously before he jumped out from behind the box and rubbed his face with his paws. He repeated these actions several times.

  “He’s hurt,” I said to Sharon. “There’s something wrong with him. Pass me the goldfish net from beside the pond.” Sharon fetched the long-handled little net and handed it to me where I lay semi-trapped between the stove and the counter. I floundered after the mouse, while Sharon supervised over my shoulder, releasing the occasional squeal of support or fright—I couldn’t tell which.

  The mouse continued this obsessive behaviour while I struggled to reach him. Suddenly, an enormous furry, red-bellied wolf spider, at least half the size of the mouse, darted from behind the outlet, straight for my head. Both Sharon and I shouted as I whipped the net around and whacked the spider with the handle. Gimped up, it kept crawling aggressively toward me, so I beat it to death. It was him or me. I’ve encountered some large spiders in my life, including a tarantula on a Texas gravestone, but this was the biggest, scariest, most aggressive spider I’ve ever met in a house, let alone while wedged alongside a stove. It died three inches from my face. The attack was so scary I almost felt like moving back to the city.

  The mouse stood beside the outlet, stunned. That’s when I understood we’d been overhearing an epic battle between the mouse and the spider, and I’d just flattened the mouse’s breakfast into hairy juice on the floor. Worse, the disappointed, spider-bit mouse wasn’t going anywhere, so I said to Sharon, “Hand me a rubber glove, and I’ll grab him.”

  Gloved, I dug in again behind the counter, stretching toward the mouse, then he lunged for me. This was one Schwarzenegger of a mouse! I scooted backwards, banging my head. Sharon was now standing on a chair, shrieking.

  “He got away!” I exclaimed. “He made a run for it.”

  “He didn’t get away!” Sharon screamed. “He ran up your sleeve.”

  “Oh posh! He didn’t run up my sleeve.” That’s when I felt something wriggling around in my armpit between my shirt and the light flannel shirt-jacket I wear in cool weather. It was the first time in my life a mouse made me scream. “Arggh!” I ripped my flannel overshirt off faster than you could say “cheese.”

  I managed to trap him in the sleeve and ran for the door with the bundle. Sharon flung it open, and I bolted down the walkway to the road. The mouse was still squirming as I went out the gate. By now I was full of admiration for this valiant mouse. I didn’t have the heart to kill him, so I decided to release him in the feed shed. If he was as smart as he was intrepid, he could survive the cats and me and never have to worry about dinner again. I shook out my overshirt.

  No mouse. Nowhere. I was so terrified I started checking my pockets and my crotch. I didn’t say anything to Sharon after I got back, but I left the shirt outside. Later, four of Sharon’s girlfriends arrived for lunch. While the women wined and cheesed away I decide to haul in the week’s firewood. Entering with the second wheelbarrow load I was greeted by five screaming women, and a dog circling the chesterfield. The mouse from hell had returned. Needless to say, after much sofa lifting and furniture rearranging, there was no mouse. The women went back to their wine. I continued with my firewood. When I arrived with the next load all the women were screaming again, and both dogs were barking. Only this time one of the women had snatched the fishnet and in a remarkable feat of dexterity whanged it down on the mouse as he raced across the floor.

  I lunged for the mouse as he attempted to squirm out from beneath the net. I caught it all up, net and mouse, and ran for the door, remarking to Sharon on my way past that maybe she’d have to drive me to Timbuktu this time, to make sure he didn’t come back. Instead, I walked him into the bush so far I practically got lost, and then I held out the net. The mouse clambered up the netting and perched on the rim, staring at me with absolute aplomb. He noticed a stump nearby, and made a graceful leap to a pile of leaves beside the stump, where he busied himself digging and searching, occasionally glancing back.

  Everyone knows that feeling you get when you think you’re being watched. Well, I got it. I slowly lifted my head. Only no one was there—except the forest. I was ringed with trees. Christmas trees! They were perfect!

  They were all around the stump, and while the indomitable mouse gazed up at me with curiosity, munching on a seed, I was finally infused with the spirit of the season.

  16

  GRACE AT WORK

  THE FIRST TIME I showed the grandchildren how to bake our bread for dinner the kitchen looked like it had gone through a snowstorm, but it was a fine loaf that came out on the baking stone. I love kneading bread, because it is so much like kneading clay for pottery. I can knead the dough in the two common patterns that potters use, the more complex Japanese chrysanthemum and the simpler calf-face. The kids love it when I knead the dough into the calf-face because it looks just like a calf ’s face. Then, two years later, we were given a bread-making machine. It makes lousy bread; however, using it to knead the dough works remarkably well, so we use it just for that and then move on to normal baking on a stone, braiding loaves, and so on. It’s a hell of a lot less messy. Sharon gratefully assumed I’d hurricaned my last kitchen with my flour-tossing talents. Bread making almost grew boring, so we began making homemade noodles, which really thrilled the grandkids, and I became a happy frog in the flour bag again. If there’s a way to make a mess, I will find it.

  Later, I initiated them into the mysteries of honey. They were soon spinning the stainless steel gears of the extractor, the honey oozing out of the combs. This made them feel important, and after we had cleaned our sticky hands and the machinery I treated them to honey toast and they each got a little chunk of honeycomb to chew, and we were soon all sticky-handed again, blessed with the magic of honey.

  Traditions survive only if they are taugh
t to children, and we’ve done our best with our two sons, who both ended up being landscape gardeners; so now we have the thrilling grandchildren to corrupt with my anti-authoritarian, see-for-yourself attitude, despite the rolling eyes of their parents. We thought we’d start them in the kitchen and move on to the gardening and firewood later. That’s also why Sharon taught them the gentle arts of the cookie and the pie before I was allowed to lead them into my messier world of bread.

  I LIVE TO WORK and work to live. The blessing of a small farm is that it’s not a job—like food or poetry, it’s a calling. It’s a thousand jobs, most of them intermingled, often culminating in the afternoon when, like the average farmer, you find yourself trying to complete everything simultaneously. Work inherited our suspicions only when it became a commodity. True, in any endeavour there’s inevitable drudgery. Hand weeding five thousand bulbs of garlic can translate into drudgery fast, yet I’ve learned to love the multitude of tasks on a small farm, though Sharon will testify she’s seen her share of incidents where I’ve gone hysterical while repeating a mindless job for the thousandth time.

  On the farm everything is continuous, and few tasks are completed. Construction projects like barns and sheds are never-ending. Training to be a potter years ago is how I learned that a pot never finishes firing. Even porcelain glazes—and window glass, a glaze in another form—continue changing after leaving the kiln. Over the centuries the glass in the windows of Europe’s ancient cathedrals has flowed down, displaying visible changes in thickness and colour. The miracle of ancient potters is that they used traditional knowledge to create for the future. The famed Chinese “crab claw” crackle glazes would barely begin to crackle during the lifetime of the potter. They were designed to achieve their finest form long after the potter was in his grave and had passed his secrets on to his apprentice. A well-maintained small farm has that kind of continuity, passing its traditional knowledge from generation to generation.

  Whenever we take on a new farm helper, I remind myself it is the duty of the young to be thoughtless. I know this because in my younger years I stomped off my share of job sites in frenzies that, in retrospect, were undeserved, and I’ve also lazily inflicted too much bad craftsmanship on a number of employers. Since then our hired hands have exacted revenge on me for my own years of idiocy. Hired help definitely ain’t what it used to be, though I’m betting farmers have been saying that since Babylon. Here, in the lotus land of the Gulf Islands, we get them all—the boys with bones through their noses and women with so much face metal they tinkle. Because of a lack of affordable housing there’s a constant labour shortage on the islands, and farmers like me go begging for labourers in unlikely places, snatching whatever wandering but work-willing hippie goes by—a hiring practice that can lead to encounters with fabulously interesting people, along with the occasional scary or ludicrous consequence.

  Butterfly, a Maori-painted spokesperson for the new “Freedom Camp” in Fulford Harbour, announced to our local paper that she and her fellow squatters were protesting an ugly subdivision many miles up-island and would only abandon the public beach they’d squatted if greedy islanders would donate a mere thousand acres of land so they could live in harmony with nature. One of this sharp-witted gang of ecologists had discovered a loophole in the law that allowed them to camp below the legal high-tide line, which is higher than the physical tide line—in a comfortably dry squatters’ lawful limbo where they set up their tarps, tents, and driftwood structures, polluting the fragile eel-grass ecosystem of our bay. These are the kind of eco-urbanites who ruin the hard work of real ecologists.

  Naturally, farming being what it is, I had to swallow my pride and offer work to the Freedom Campers, one at a time. Usually, they didn’t show up before noon, and often they didn’t show at all. Sometimes we wished they hadn’t. Except for one stalwart flat-nosed, nipple-pierced fellow— who turned out to be remarkably nice, hard-working, and intelligent—the Freedom Campers were notably averse to work, and the camp soon turned into an awful mess, which they abandoned as winter came on.

  Then we found a neighbour who was reliable and helpful, a real sweetheart who, when Sharon instructed him to weed the garlic, did just that, snapping off several thousand garlic tops. Fortunately, he was such an inept weeder that the garlic survived, though dwarfed and unsaleable for the year. He was a smart, likeable fellow with a university degree and, apart from this spectacular accident, became a fine worker. Acceptance is an important part of farming. Another helper lasted an hour mowing the lawn before he announced it was too hot to work. That night he carved a bloody cross in his forehead and took to ripping up the saplings on the farm where he was staying. Fortunately, they got him medical attention before he hurt himself further.

  A surprisingly useful helper received instructions from his television set, which made Sharon nervous. He worked like a tornado but soon decided he knew what to do best and when to do it. If you gave him the gas Weed Eater, a tool that thrills all the boys, he’d do the whole farm and the public roads if you didn’t catch him in time and take it away. And there’s nothing like soothing old bones, naked in the hot tub at dawn on a peaceful farm, alone in the woods, and suddenly hearing your lawn mower start up around the corner of the house. But he was a good-hearted fellow and gradually drifted off-island, following his voices . . . .

  For several months a slender young woman, sun-browned and as hard and skinny as an arbutus branch, became an excellent helper. A farm has many duties that tend to drive away female workers, but she had the strength and the fortitude to toss the hay bales, shovel manure, and wield a mean pickaxe, although her first day at work was surprising. Sharon explained the garden tasks that needed doing, and the young woman, surveying the jobs ahead of her, said, “Well, I better get to work, then.” She promptly whipped off her top and started weeding.

  “Uh, we have guests coming shortly,” said Sharon, somewhat taken aback.

  “That’s all right,” the bare-breasted woman replied. “I don’t mind.” I didn’t either, though it was distracting. Sharon thought it was all rather amusing in the end.

  Our all-time favourite helper was a willowy, big-bearded fellow who belonged to a society that advocated “marijuana milk.” The members of this group thrive on the seeds of (legal) hemp, sprouted and blended into a drink which, apparently, like many other rare plants advocated by enthusiasts, is “the most nutritious food in the world.” He looked so frail you feared he would blow away, and he moved so slowly it gave me a nervous breakdown just watching him. Yet this mellow, sluggish helper accomplished an astonishing amount of work and never lost his cool. He usually finished more than what we asked him to do by the end of the day. A perfect combination of natural laziness and high intelligence, he moved more slowly than honey across a piece of toast, and no gesture was wasted. It was like a miracle every day, watching the jobs efficiently eliminated one by one. We practically wept when he and his family were driven off the island because they couldn’t find housing. We still hope to get him back.

  Following his departure, our first interview was with a labourer who, upon arrival, announced he charged more to do construction work, couldn’t do heavy lifting (including wheelbarrowing) because of a bad back, couldn’t distinguish weeds from vegetables, wouldn’t use motorized lawn mowers or tillers because they were detrimental to the environment (even though he arrived in a big pickup truck), and refused to help with the sheep or the chicken coops because he was a vegetarian and livestock were a blight on the planet. Then he was annoyed that I couldn’t provide him any farm work.

  I still have a fondness for our clutch of nineteen-year-olds who spent the first years with us—that hard-partying, sometimes feckless gang of anarchists who taught me a lot, though there were days I couldn’t get them out of bed after a particularly enthusiastic night of partying. Once I grew so pissed I walked into their room and started up the chainsaw. The combination of sour gas fumes and noise soon had them jumping that morning.

 
; They also caused their share of damage.

  My belt sander wore out, and I bought a fancy, expensive replacement because we had a lot of work ahead, since we’d ripped off the roof of our large log house and were erecting a new, intricate, gabled roof. We admired the sander at lunch, after which Joaquin carried it out to the barn, placed it atop the two-by-twelve he was sanding for a windowsill, and plugged it in. Naturally, the trigger had been accidentally locked on during lunch. The belt sander took off at high speed down the board, launched into the air like a ski jumper, and crashed into pieces on the floor. This was so gruesomely hilarious that I threatened to have a T-shirt made up proclaiming Joaquin the world champion “belt-sander racer” as I returned to the store to replace it.

  There were several legendary lunches like that—such as when Jason, a big and strong worker who’d returned from off-island, was delegated to dig the last of the drainage trenches in heavy clay we’d been pickaxing out all week. Once he was through we could finally lay drain rock and Big ‘O’ pipe to drain the soggy lawn. When his morning’s work was done, Jason came in to lunch, collapsed in a chair at the table, covered in mud and dirt, exhausted and proud of himself, and declared, “Well, I got it done. Filled in every trench!” The entire crew looked up from their soup, horrified.

  My favourite incident with this gang was a repeat performance. Once we had the gables framed for the roof, we left a beam hanging out as a handhold for returning because the roof had tricky angles and was dangerous. Unfortunately, the beam was also at perfect head-banging height when you climbed from the deck to the roof. Each day, after breakfast and lunch, every one of us would bonk our heads on that beam, curse our forgetfulness, and carry on. Crossing the tin roof inevitably made us forget the beam, which we needed to return. Within days all of us had bruised foreheads. To entertain lunch guests I would take them to the front lawn and say, “Watch this.” As the crew walked out onto the high roof after lunch, my guests and I would double over, choked with laughter as each of the gang would crack his head, curse himself, and carry on—like a row of sheep stepping into the same hole, one by one, over and over again.