Free A Good Day's Work by John Demont Page B

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 cleaningup—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