Free Lambsquarters by Barbara McLean

at the barn, would work until supper, would need to eat again before going back to their own chores, their own barns. So the women would scurry and sweat and worry and fuss and work as hard as they did then. The food had to be beautiful, had to be nourishing, and it was.
    Tom M c Neil’s father was the barn wizard before him, and he would lead the team, organize the men into what they did best. The sure-footers to the roof, the land-lovers to the foundation. The reckless in tandem with those with a good sense of self-preservation. The doctor on standby, ready to deal with concussion, splinter and gash. No one wore protective equipment. And, as the pies were contested in the house, skill and speed were winning elements at the barn. Who could lay more shingles? Who could carry more boards, hammer more nails, set in the best windows?
    The men would bring their own tools. Some in leather aprons. Hammers hooked to overalls. Ladders and squares, levels and plumb lines, cloth tapes in leather cases, saws, planes and chisels. A neighbour needed a barn. Lightning strikes. It might happen to you someday.
    It might have been Aaron Wilson who brought the shovel. He mixed cement, poured the sidewalks in Alderney. The shovel’s blade can hold a heavy dollop of muck and the shaft has the ghost of concrete in its cracks. But the tool must predate him too, that split wooden handle, carefully steamed to bend, chosen from the lathe for its strength and resilience both. Whoever brought it, forgot it. Or left it as a talisman, like the branch of evergreen on the ridge, spirit of safety for those who must not fall.

ZOË
    THE STABLE FLOOR is indelibly marked, not only with the named and dated sneakered footprints of my toddling daughter, but with a trail of errant paw prints angling across one corner, hidden all year by bedding and sheep. Each summer, on the day the barn is cleaned out and the manure is spread on the hayfield, the paw prints resurface. They are the lasting marks of a sappy dog who started and ended her days here.
    Zoë was born right in the middle of the back kitchen early in our first spring, before the renovations, when the floorboards were broken and the wind howled through. Her mother was a city mongrel, probably a mix of hound and shepherd, though Thomas’s grandmother said she was “a bit big for a Heinz.”
    I’d never had a dog before, though I’d longed and begged for one, even brought puppies home when I was a child, trying to break down my parents’ resolve. Zoë’smother, Jessie, just a stray pup, was injured at the side of a city road. A vet wrapped her broken leg to her body until it healed, and found her a home with us before we came here. She began a three-legged race (the fractured leg never touched the ground at speed) that lasted for fourteen years.
    Zoë’s father was a Grey County local, a daily visitor who had a reputation for being the best groundhogger in the township. His title was undisputed by any of the neighbours. A crucial task, dispatching groundhogs is a prized skill because groundhog holes are killers. A cow can break a leg if it drops in a hole. A farmer can fall from his tractor and die if a wheel goes in. When they aren’t in their burrows, groundhogs spend most of the daylight hours eating vegetation that has been planted for other uses. Pasture, hay and gardens are all at risk from the woodchuck,
Marmota monax
. So Zoë’s sire was legendary. His owner, who lives across the way, was born in this house years ago in one of the upstairs rooms, so it seemed appropriate for the dog to colonize the farm with his pups. Pure white, he had upstanding perky ears and a curly tail, which made a rather odd mix in the offspring. Some had floppy hound ears, others had ears that stuck right up, but Zoë’s were that fetching combination that begin by sitting up straight, but turn over at the edges, limp-eared, as if the starch ran out at the laundry.
    As a newborn she was almost totally black, but