Читать книгу The Barn at the End of the World - Mary Rose O'Reilley - Страница 20

Choirs of Seraphim

TODAY I ATTEMPTED my first solo shearing. Rather like the society hostess who broke a teacup to set her clumsy guest at ease, Ben nicked the demonstration animal five or six times before handing me the electric clippers. He told me he had cut the ears off two ewes yesterday and had to suture them back on. My first shearing took about an hour and left half an inch of wool all over the animal.

Next, with light, relentless rain beating on the corrugated iron roof of the barn, we accomplished step one of fixing the prolapsed rectum of ram #5004. First Ben cut the syringe casing with hoof trimmers and wrapped it in surgical tape so it would stick inside the sheep. The sheep’s rectum, when we had him flipped over in the tipping cradle, protruded four inches. Ben slid the casing into the protrusion and banded it with the elastrator, a device we use for castrating. Then he squirted everything in sight with Betadine and gave the sheep 5 cc of penicillin in each glut. (The ram is also on cortisone to impact its coughing; we have to medicate these sheep a lot.)

Ben is going away for the weekend and leaving me in charge of feeding, chores, and ram #5004.

I have just finished reading The Hot Zone, a biomedical thriller about an outbreak of Ebola virus; while Ben, with no gloves on, paws around in the sheep, while rectal tissue flies all over and lands on my favorite overalls, I tell him about how viruses jump species.

“The blood of an infected monkey can be absorbed through the skin,” I report, handing tools like a good surgical nurse.

“If I’d been gonna get it, I’d ’a got it,” Ben drawls. This is his response to most of my hygienic proposals.

As we wash up in our minimalist way, in the same sink where Ben does dinner dishes and tosses the syringes to soak, I evoke rolling hills and farms, villages, and little cities of viruses all living on the head of a pin. Rolling around in an intricate dance. Choirs of microscopic seraphim.

I can see that my exhortation has gotten to him. “That God would allow that,” he mutters. “It makes me wonder why I go to church.”