They were into the lambing, up late.
Talking and smoking around their lantern,
they squatted in the barn door, left open
so the quiet of the winter night
diminished what they said. The chill
had begun to sink into their clothes.
Now and then they raised their hands
to breathe on them. The youngest one
yawned and shivered.
“Damn,” he said,
“I’d like to be asleep. I’d like to be
curled up in a warm nest like an old
groundhog, and sleep till spring.”
“When I was your age, Billy, it wasn’t
sleep I thought about,” Uncle Stanley said.
“Last few years here I’ve took to sleeping.”
And Raymond said: “To sleep till spring
you’d have to have a trust in things
the way animals do. Been a long time,
I reckon, since people felt safe enough
to sleep more than a night. You might
wake up someplace you didn’t go to sleep at.”
They hushed a while, as if to let the dark
brood on what they had said. Behind them
a sheep stirred in the bedding and coughed.
It was getting close to midnight.
Later they would move back along the row
of penned ewes, making sure the newborn
lambs were well dried, and had sucked,
and then they would go home cold to bed.
The barn stood between the ridgetop
and the woods along the bluff. Below
was the valley floor and the river
they could not see. They could hear
the wind dragging its underside
through the bare branches of the woods.
And suddenly the wind began to carry
a low singing. They looked across
the lantern at each other’s eyes
and saw they all had heard. They stood,
their huge shadows rising up around them.
The night had changed. They were already
on their way—dry leaves underfoot
and mud under the leaves—to another barn
on down along the woods’ edge,
an old stripping room, where by the light
of the open stove door they saw the man,
and then the woman and the child
lying on a bed of straw on the dirt floor.
“Well, look a there,” the old man said.
“First time this ever happened here.”
And Billy, looking, and looking away,
said: “Howdy. Howdy. Bad night.”
And Raymond said: “There’s a first
time, they say, for everything.”
And that
he thought, was as reassuring as anything
was likely to be, and as he needed it to be.
They did what they could. Not much.
They brought a piece of rug and some sacks
to ease the hard bed a little, and one
wedged three dollar bills into a crack
in the wall in a noticeable place.
And they stayed on, looking, looking away,
until finally the man said they were well
enough off, and should be left alone.
They went back to their sheep. For a while
longer they squatted by their lantern
and talked, tired, wanting sleep, yet stirred
by wonder—old Stanley too, though he would not
say so.
“Don’t make no difference,” he said.
“They’ll have ‘em anywhere. Looks like a man
would have a right to be born in bed, if not
die there, but he don’t.”
“But you heard
that singing in the wind,” Billy said.
“What about that?”
“Ghosts. They do that way.”
“Not that way.”
“Scared him, it did.”
The old man laughed. “We’ll have to hold
his damn hand for him, and lead him home.”
“It don’t even bother you,” Billy said.
“You go right on just the same. But you heard.”
“Now that I’m old I sleep in the dark.
That ain’t what I used to do in it. I heard
something.”
than you’ll understand,” Raymond said,
“or him or me either.”
They looked at him.
He had, they knew, a talent for unreasonable
belief. He could believe in tomorrow
before it became today—a human enough
failing, and they were tolerant.
He said:
“It’s the old ground trying it again.
Solstice, seeding and birth—it never
gets enough. It wants the birth of a man
to bring together sky and earth, like a stalk
of corn. It’s not death that makes the dead
rise out of the ground, but something alive
straining up, rooted in darkness, like a vine.
That’s what you heard. If you’re in the right mind
when it happens, it can come on you strong;
you might hear music passing on the wind,
or see a light where there wasn’t one before.”
“Well, how do you know if it amounts to anything?”
“You don’t. It usually don’t. It would take
a long time to ever know.”
But that night
and other nights afterwards, up late,
there was a feeling in them—familiar
to them, but always startling in its strength—
like the thought, on a winter night,
of the lambing ewes dry-bedded and fed,
and the thought of the wild creatures warm
asleep in their nests, deep underground.