Lambs of God

Everything was coming to life, Helene said. Did the girls see how green the willows were? She pointed to a watery fissure between mounded fields. If Leonard wouldn’t drive so fast—she looked sidelong past little George to her husband—they would all enjoy the scenery more. She lowered her sewing to her knees and winced as the car plunged down a hill and dipped up to the next rise. It wasn’t even pleasant driving that way, she said. Why was he in such a hurry? Why couldn’t he just relax and enjoy the trip? They were only going down to the farm, after all.

Sixty was a good speed, he said. Didn’t she want to get there before dark?

Not if it meant making everyone sick and missing all the spring sights besides. The new lambs were out, and the baby pigs, she said. It was important for the children to see all that. There, look. Had they missed it? They had passed a pungent-smelling barnyard turned to choppy brown sea by the footprints of animals. In the muck had been sows weighted down in their own eating by suckling farrows. She sighed. The burdens were great; sometimes it seemed to her that she was fighting all alone, that to her only it now seemed unbearable, altogether wrong that they should be going sixty miles an hour through Iowa farm land which at no other time of day, at no other time of year would look exactly this way—opened by the plow, misted by the evening, gauzed in hollows and on distant ridges by palest green. Had they seen it? Baba? Sarah?


Sarah pressed into her comer of the back seat, her head against the jolting window, and tried to protect her trance-like abstraction of wires and flying telephone poles from the intolerable bombardment of her mother’s words. She put up a finger. the better to upset rows of birds along the swooping wires, and left the encumbrance of answering on Baba, whose duty it was anyway, being the eldest. Yes, said Baba, she had seen it. But she was so miserable, she added: her eyes watered, her nose itched; couldn’t anything be done for her?

Sarah only pressed harder to the window when her sister’s body, slumping fretfully against the seat, gave in to its restless discomfort, and mother said, poor Baba.

Sarah must close up her window—right away, said mother. Poor Baba Where on earth had she gotten these allergies? All from his father, no doubt, she said to daddy; and Sarah envisioned the red face of grandpa and the way he would look that night, standing with grandma on the yellow-lighted back porch of the farm house to welcome their arrival.

“All that hurry was for nothing then,” said mother; for it was already so dark as they lurched up the lane past the garden that the car lights threw beams on swarms of insects while daddy stopped to open the wide white gate, and as the car curved around the pump house, the startled eyes of cats glowed and vanished in the unfathomable dark spaces beneath the slatted corncrib. They were waiting on the porch as Sarah had imagined them; grandpa came forward; the engine was shut off. It was necessary now to rouse herself and carry in the picnic basket, the empty egg crate, to accept a kiss from grandpa’s stubbled cheek, an embrace against grandma’s pillowed bosom. She shivered from a sense of open space and unlit night beyond their small illumined circle, out there space vast enough, or so it seemed to her, shivering, her arm crooked inside the old wooden egg crate, to surround the farm with the entire dome of moon and stars.

“No, you’re going right upstairs to bed,” said mother to little George. “You’ll have time for all that tomorrow.”

“Here, my fine friend,” said daddy, lugging his son beneath one arm to the hand pump beside the stoop, “we’ll give you one squirt,” and Sarah, hearing the wheeze and clank of the straining pump, remembered her old joy in the gushing water, so that she shouted, urgently, for the water had not yet rounded the crook, “I will—let me,” while she dropped the basket and the loose-jointed crate and ran to put her full weight on the clammy handle that brought out the first rush of brown water into George’s hands. Again and again she threw herself on the handle until mother’s voice was saying, “All right, all right! Leonard, you’ve let them get all wet.”

Beneath the nursery window as she fell asleep she heard the soft bells of sheep, and her hand beside her face was perfumed with the earthbound scent of iron rust.

Sarah woke in the night to the wind, throwing itself against the loose nursery windows. In its troughs of quiet she heard the chime of a clock from some lower hollow of the drafty house and the sonorous push and pull of heavy people sleeping: she was at the farm. The room had its own smell. She lay high up on the hard, humped bed, exposed to the air, to the dark spaces around the radiator, to the light that seemed to come from inside the vanity mirror itself. On the ceiling the circle of stars and moons and animals still faintly glowed. Grandpa had put them up for George. They were magic, he said. She stared until she wasn’t even sure she saw them any more.

The windows rattled, and a glide of white passed through the doorway and took the shape of mother over George’s bed. Then the form came to her; she saw a limp bit of ribbon at a nightgown’s neck.

“Mom?”

“Sarah, are you awake?”

“Where are the sheep?”

“The sheep? Somewhere safe, I’m sure. Did the wind wake you up?”  

“Where is Baba sleeping?”

“In with grandma. Are you warm enough?” Mother tucked the covers around her face, and Sarah felt eased into a cave of muffled sound.

“Then where is grandpa?”

“He’s in his own room, of course. Now you must go back to sleep. Are you warm enough?”

“When does the clock go?” “Did you hear it just now? In another fifteen minutes it will strike three times for 3.00 o’clock. But you’ll be asleep by then,” said mother.

“Why are you up?”

“Well, you know I don’t sleep too well when daddy snores. But someone has to get up to cover you children. Why, if I didn’t, our George-boy would sleep all night without a single cover on.” Mother stood up.

“Do I need covering?”

“There now, you’re sleepy. Do you hear how sleepy you sound?” Sarah listened, and she heard the wind. An extra blanket, smelling like the closets, was pulled up.

“Mom, put the lights on once more so the stars shine. Please.”

“It will wake George.”

“Please.”

“All right. Close your eyes.” Sarah felt the body coming closer and the lips touching her forehead. Then she was alone; beyond her eyes the light flared a moment and was gone, and the voice whispered from the doorway, “Now. Open.”

She opened her eyes and saw shining animals swimming in space; especially she stared at a round moon within a ring that grandpa said was a planet. “Good night,” said the voice. The new blanket was tucked all around her ears. And though she waited for another chime, trying to keep her eyes on the glowing circle above, she didn’t hear again the clock that would still go off every fifteen minutes, even in the middle of the night.