Nop's Hope Read online

  They were on the Grampian downgrade, four hours east of Sterling, when Fly dropped her first pup. So near the town, every hundred yards presented a new lane to tempt the ewes, and Fly raced forward to check escape, raced to the rear to chivvy laggards, and as each pup came, she bruskly cleaned it and laid it in a safe spot, beside a milepost, perhaps or just inside a gorse thicket where it wouldn’t come to harm.

  Jock noted this but his duty was plain: to bring his master’s lambs to Sterling and turn them over to Sir Isaac’s factor. Only after Sir Isaac’s factor closed the gate on the lambs, marked the final tally in his book, and said, “That’ll be right,” did Jock turn to Fly and say, “That’ll do, Lass,” and the bitch shot off, back the way she’d come.

  A half hour later, Jock was having a pint at the Black Bull Arms when the bitch dashed in, dropped a pup at his feet and was gone again. Jock told the other shepherds how she’d had her pups and abandoned them to continue her work and they said, “Aye” and “Ah then.”

  When Fly reappeared with her second pup, Jock was eating a great chunk of cheese. Men smoked their pipes, discussed the terrible price of fat lambs, the progress of British arms and Old Boney. Fly brought her third pup and paused, panting, to let them suck. By the time she returned with the fourth pup, the landlord had found a topless cask and bedded it with rags where the pups could nestle. Each pup she went for was farther back along the road and she dashed through oncoming flocks, ducking the curses and stones of drovers whose animals she afrighted. The next pup was dead and Fly’s feet were bloody from travel. The final pup was dead too, but she laid him beside his dead brother before she clambered into the cask. No shepherd remarked at the time about what he’d seen, but before he left Sterling the next morning, Jock had promised every one of the pups, and Sir Isaac’s factor himself found space behind the seat of his ponycart for the bitch and her brood. Jock, of course, walked.

  THAT IS WHAT Hope was—his ancestors: Fly; Spot; Nell; Corrie, who died trying to bring her flock to shelter in a March blizzard; Wiston Cap, who won the International Sheepdog Trial when he was only two years old; Nop, who’d been the finest sheepdog in America.

  When Penny pulled off her boots and went inside with Hope, her shoulders hurt and her feet were wrinkly from the rubber boots and her hand throbbed where she’d punched a ewe. She picked up Hope’s empty bowl and opened a can of Old El Paso refried beans for herself. Her walls were painted plywood, her floor was concrete, but so long as Hope lay beside her cot, his head on his paws, this room was home.

  “I lost my temper with that spotty-faced ewe,” she confessed.

  “Woolies cannot help what they do,” Hope said.

  “Yeah, but I can’t stand it when a ewe won’t mother her lamb. That poor little lamb don’t want anything but mother’s milk and when the ewe starts butting him away, deliberately starving it …”

  “It is not thy child,” Hope said.

  “I thought I told you not to talk about that!” Sometimes Hope could jolly her out of her grieving by acting the silly pup, but the only sure cure was work. Their work was fulfillment of Hope’s deepest impulses and forgetfulness for her. “Tell me again about the National Finals,” Hope said.

  She squeezed her tea bag into her cup. “Well, Hopey, it’s just the biggest, toughest trial in the whole country, that’s all. You can’t even enter unless you’re in the top ten percent of all the open dogs in the country.…”

  He licked his feet clean. “If I am handled correctly …”

  “I’m not so bad!”

  “Thy commands come late or too soon and thee fail to read thy sheep.”

  Her weariness slipped from her shoulders as Penny allowed herself to be drawn into the dog’s hard Calvinist heritage where, so long as the work made sense, life made sense, and outside the work, everything was death and sorrow and swirling blackness.

  IN THE MORNING Penny drove into Lampasas and returned ten to ten with her washed clothes in a blue plastic bag, cans of beef stew and ravioli, instant coffee, and the soups and spaghetti Oren had requested. “I suppose you couldn’t have found a more expensive dog food.” He inspected the receipt. “Sometimes they have this dog food down at the feed mill, Old Chum Dog Food, they call it.”

  The woman put one hand on her hip. She said, “I figured me and Hope would go out and check the sheep.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Okay.”

  The cowboy, Jerry, came on at ten and stayed until eight at night. He’d been hired to do everything the girl was doing, but Jerry had no knack for the work. Jerry forgot: forgot to check the ewe’s milk so the newborn wouldn’t starve, forgot to make sure the lambs were nursing. Jerry mixed up ewes and lambs so nobody knew who belonged to who. Now Jerry did the simple feeding and cleaned the pens and went for bed straw when they needed it and did any small errands. By week’s end he was following the woman around. “How do you do this? How do you do that?”

  Every morning, Penny checked ewes with lambs and penned those who’d lambed after the morning feeding. About ten o’clock she walked out into the mesquite with Hope and eleven o’clock she’d reappear with ewes and newborns. When Jerry wanted to accompany her, she said, “Not this time, Jerry. This is the only private time Hope and me got.”

  February second, there was a message on the answering machine, “This is Roy Mack in Meridian, your truck is ready, it weren’t nothing but the rings.” Jerry volunteered to drive her but his boss said he’d do it.

  The pistons were alright and the cylinder walls and Roy Mack gave her twenty dollars in change and a list of parts he’d put in. She said she didn’t care about that but he gave her the list anyway.

  Following her back home, Oren prepared a speech in his mind: how he’d started out with nothing, his father dead when he was eight and his mother working as a bookkeeper at the oil company to keep her three kids fed and clothed, how his high school pals had been wild but he hadn’t, he’d stuck to the books, rented a place outside of town, just a shed with ten acres to keep his show flock, how he’d felt when he won his first blue ribbon, how he’d felt when, two months later, a pack of neighboring dogs got into his sheep and killed five outright, crippled three so they had to be destroyed. He’d only made it through two years of college and he knew things didn’t look like much right now, but the sheep were more’n half paid for, and even in a tough year with lambs bringing forty-eight cents, he’d make enough to pay his ground rent and in a good year, he could add to his flock and maybe make a down payment on his own place. Soon as they got home he confronted her. “I was hoping we’d get a chance to talk.”

  She said, “It’s my shift. Me and Hope got to go look at the sheep.”

  “We can wait a minute.”

  “Mr. Wright, you didn’t hire me to talk.” And a minute later she was chewing out Jerry for something or other and Oren went inside his trailer and watched “The Young and the Restless” on TV.

  The lambs came fifty, a hundred a day. When it rained or sleeted or the wind blew, the ewes found hiding places in the mesquite and lambed there. The girl bought a new yellow slicker. Friday mornings she went into town for laundry and groceries. One bitter morning when an icy rain was coating the chapparal with diamonds, Oren Wright said, “You don’t have to go out there today.”

  She tugged her hat down on her head and said, “If I don’t, some’ll die. Hope.”

  Michigan State Number Ninety went into labor, daybreak Tuesday morning. Number Ninety was a big strong ewe, and the contractions racked her, hoof to poll. She grunted and moaned. When Oren stooped to check her vagina, he couldn’t see a thing, neither lamb hoof nor nose nor tail, so he got the surgical soap and the disposable gloves and went inside her.

  Number Ninety’s sire had been champion of the National Ram Show, the ram its owner had turned down four thousand dollars for. The ewe lifted her head off the ground in an arch of pain and bleated protest. She licked her lips, strained again. She was a strong ewe and Oren could give her more time to labor, s
o he returned to the barn and turned lambs and their mothers out into the sunlight. It was a pretty nice day, cool. It had rained last night and the lots were muddy. The tack room door opened and Hope stepped outside, stretched, yawned, looked at Oren and went outside to do his business. The woman was clattering around in there, boiling water for her morning cup of tea. Hope returned and pawed the door, once, politely to be let in.

  After a bit the two of them stepped into the barn, her with her mug of steaming tea. “Mornin’.”

  “Uh, there’s a purebred out there having trouble. Mornin’. Hope you slept well.”

  “That big ewe? Number Ninety? How long?”

  “Sunrise, I figure.” He looked at his watch for no particular reason.

  She frowned. “Don’t you think you better go inside? My daddy used to tell me: two hours then you take a look.”

  “Your daddy never had Rambouillets! I been inside her,” he said. “She’s dilated enough to have a lamb.”

  “Uh-huh.” She slung a dark green rubberized tarp over her arm. Kneeling behind the ewe, the woman went inside, against the ewe’s groans and labors, to her elbow now, grimacing every time the ewe pushed against her. “There’s a single in the canal,” she said. “He’s enormous.”

  Penny managed to tug one lamb foot out, then the nose; and that was that. They rolled the ewe onto her other side, tried to slip one of the lamb’s shoulders past the pelvic girdle. Penny braced her feet against the sheep’s rear and pulled until she couldn’t pull more without pulling the leg off. Despite the tarp, her jeans were wet with blood and amniotic fluid. “Here,” she said, “you try. My hand’s getting cramped up.”

  And so the man tried too, for another half an hour, trying to slip that enormous lamb past the too small cervix. They laid a bale of straw on the mud and propped the ewe’s rear end in the air and by the time that failed, the ewe’s labors had nearly ceased, the lamb’s tongue was turning black, and the rubber tarp was more under the mud than on top of it. The woman peeled off her surgical glove and tossed it with the previously discarded others. “Is there a good sheep vet in Lampasas?”

  “Nope.”

  “Should we do a Caesarian?”

  “This damn ewe cost me five hundred dollars!”

  “Yeah. It’s her dead or her and the lamb dead. You’re the boss.”

  The ewe lay on the tarp, on her side, mouth open, ribs heaving.

  “Okay, damn it.” He went into the trailer and brought a .22 rifle. When Hope saw the gun he took off for the barn and didn’t stop until he’d pawed open the tack room door and scooted under the bed. When the shot came, Hope faced away from the door. At the second shot, he whimpered protest.

  Oren said, “Pull her onto her back, won’t you? I can’t work this way.”

  With the ewe shot, the blood supply stopped surging through the umbilical cord, and unless they moved quickly, the lamb would die. Oren’s knife dented her pale pink belly, slipped under the outer skin, peeled that back, then a quick slash at the grainy white stomach muscles and they parted and inside were glistening separate packages: rumen, the ewe’s seven stomachs, her guts, one big lamb, wrapped in a transparent wrap.

  “Careful, don’t cut the lamb.”

  And he laid the knife against the uterus, cut and dragged the too-big lamb out of the mother’s steaming insides, those marvelous insides now useless. Penny scooped the mucus off the lamb’s face and swung it by the heels, and then she laid it down on a dry patch of tarp beside its mother. The little ribs lifted once, twice.

  The lamb struggled and lifted its long ears and flapped them dry and, squeakily, tried a “baa.”

  At that, the mother lifted her bloody head and looked at her lamb through her golden flecked eyes and nickered once, to welcome it into the world and struggled to sit upright, but couldn’t, and died.

  “I shot her twice,” Oren said. “I would have swore she was dead.”

  “Yeah,” Penny said. The rest of the sheep were eating hay. In the distance a hawk soared over the mesquite searching for prey.

  He went to his trailer and put the gun in the closet and rinsed the blood off the knife and washed his hands and went to the barn feeling weak in the knees and took the tea she handed him, which was Red Rose tea in a chipped mug but tasted pretty good. Hope came out of the tack room and thumped his tail: no more shooting, please?

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” he said.

  Her shirt was muddy and streaked and she had a blood smudge above her left eye. “It’s a mother’s job to die for their young. That’s what mothers do. Mother won’t die for her baby isn’t worth a damn in this world or the next.”

  KERRVILLE MOHAIR FESTIVAL

  February 26, Kerrville, Texas

  Judge: Red Oliver, Caldwell, Texas

  34 Open dogs went to the post

  1. Ransome Barlow

  Bute

  89

  2. Orin Barnes

  Sioux

  88

  3. Herbert Holmes

  Dave

  87

  4. Francis Raley

  Dell

  86

  5. Penny Burkeholder

  Hope

  80

  AS THE PENS EMPTIED of newborns, Penny moved in ewes who were having troubles. Even so, Oren started breaking down pens, one row, then two. After a week, only a dozen ewes remained in the barn and the two shepherds took a few minutes every day to clamber in the pens, palpate udders, give shots. Hope lay in the doorway of the tackroom, bored.

  “How long you been here?”

  “Thirty-five days.”

  “Seems longer than that. Look, I got a ram lamb to deliver over to Kerrville. I know they got some kind of dog trial there, part of the mohair show.”

  The road from Lampasas to Kerrville passes through some of the prettiest country in Texas, and the hills are lush in the winter when the creeks are running and small lakes are full.

  “I thought Texas would be flat,” she said.

  He said in some parts it was, in other parts it wasn’t, how the coast near Galveston was different from the coast near Corpus Christie, how the hill country was where people bought retirement homes and ranches, at least they did during the boom, and he pointed out several closed banks—fine red marble, drive-in teller booths and all for sale. “You ain’t very interested in this,” he said.

  “Sure I am,” she said. “This trial, will any of the big handlers be there?”

  Fredericksburg was settled by a particularly tidy bunch of Germans. Stone houses and neatly mowed lawns. When they stopped for breakfast, Oren ordered sausages and fried eggs. She ate a bowl of cereal. When he went for the check, she said, “I’ll pay for my own. I don’t want to be beholden.”

  He said, “If anything, I’m beholden to you. I never had a lambing go so smooth. You and that dog took the kinks right out of it.”

  The National Mohair Show and Shearing Contest was held outside Kerrsville in the ag expo building—a metal building with a stage inside. Young goats were pushed up to the shearing platform by 4-H boys, who kept them coming for the shearer, whose clippers flashed while another 4-H boy arm-loaded fine silky fleece into a deep burlap bag.

  There were crafts booths and exhibits. One booth sold 100 percent mohair blankets. Another stall had a slick photograph of goats and fashion clothes and advised: MOHAIR: YOUR PROFIT OPPORTUNITY. A photo blowup introduced goat raisers to the 1985 Mohair Queen who grew up right here in Texas and now adorned fashion spreads in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

  Most of the men and women wandering through the displays wore ranch clothing; blue jeans were popular, also Texas hats. Nobody wore mohair.

  The trial field was out back. That’s where Penny met Ethel Harwood. If she’d known Ethel was going to be here, she wouldn’t have come. Ethel was an old family friend. Last thing in the world Penny wanted, right now, was old family friends.

  “Honey,” Ethel said. “I heard. I am so darn sorry.” Penny bent over Hope where she could
squeeze her dripping eyes shut, clamp them tight. She said, “This is my Hope dog.”

  Hope whined.

  Penny touched Hope’s shoulder. His hair was so slick, so coarse, and his hard muscle lay close under the skin. Penny wiped her sleeve across her face. So long as she had Hope to touch, she’d be okay. “I can’t talk about it,” Penny said. “I can’t. This Hope dog is out of Nop. He wants to go to the Finals.

  Ethel didn’t quite touch Penny. “I came down for the winter Olympics, though I didn’t get anything to show for it. Honey, sometimes I wonder about these darn dog trials. Go halfway across the country for ten minutes on a trial course and then don’t do good. I’m getting too old for this racket.”

  Penny had a grip on herself and her breathing had steadied. “Who won the Olympics?” she asked.

  “Young fellow name of Ransome Barlow. This is only his second year on the circuit, but he’s lighting it up. Won Edge-worth last fall, and Tennessee. Second in the Finals. That Bute dog of his is a brute, and I don’t think I could handle him. That’s Ransome over there.”

  Blue jeans, dark shirt buttoned up to the neck, black hair like maybe he had some Indian blood in him. He had one boot perched on a truck bumper as he watched the dogs.

  “He’s not a talkative cuss, and when his run goes bad, you better not come near him, but he does know how to handle a dog. Honey, I got hot water for tea or coffee in my camper. It’s that blue and cream Winnebago. And you’re welcome to go in and use the john or take a nap or …”

  But as she spoke, the girl was drifting away, insubstantial as mist, her and her dog.

  For thirty years Ethel Harwood and her husband, Fred, raised the finest quarterhorses in Colorado. By 1980, when Fred died, they were selling more horses to movie stars and hobbyists than working ranchers. The money was terrific, but most of the fun had gone and Ethel was glad to let her son take over the business while she went on the road with her sheepdogs. She bought her dogs ready trained, never kept more than four, and since she wouldn’t sell the dogs that didn’t win trials, she didn’t win many trials. In her commodious and friendly motor home, she spent nine months of the year on the road and knew everybody. She’d once offered Lewis Burkeholder $5,000 for his Nop dog. When Penny approached Ransome Barlow, Ethel shook her head, Oh dear.