Luther nodded at Dellarobia as he kicked a cloud of belly wool from his mat to be discarded, a nod meaning “Howdy Mrs. Turnbow” or “Sweep up!” or both. She grabbed the broom and swept the waste-wool into a rising pile in the corner of the stall. Having removed the unusable portion, Luther flipped over the ewe to shear the rest of her coat all in one piece, from neck to tail and shank to shank, moving himself and his paired opponent through what looked like a series of wrestling moves. That forward-bent posture would make ordinary men weep, but he did this all day, and made it look easy.
A woman’s place, however, was not standing in her barn shoes gawking at Luther. Dellarobia gathered up the armload of waste wool and carried it out of Luther’s way, dumping it in the big wooden crate she’d set up for Cordie. “Hey baby girl, here you go,” she sang, sifting bits of fleece over her daughter like snow. She remembered as a child thinking this was what snow should be: soft and lovely, instead of the cold, wet truth. Cordie was thrilled, grasping handfuls of fuzz and tossing them in the air with such force she fell on her bottom, over and over.
Dellarobia hustled back to the shearing stall to get the fleece Luther had finished, which she rolled up like a big bath mat to carry to the skirting table. Before this day’s end they would pick over some two hundred fleeces, pulling out bits of straw and the tag ends left from second cuts. The women flew through the work, flinging out each new fleece on the table and falling on it like worried animals grooming their young for fleas. They threw the waste onto the barn floor, a parti-colored fall accumulating in drifts around their legs. This was the second shearing of the year. Luther also came in the springtime after lambing to relieve the ewes of their coats that had grown felted and filthy over the winter months, so the precious summer fleece would grow in clean. This one, the late fall wool crop, gave the payoff. Once these fleeces were skirted clean, bagged, and stacked in great piles in the front of the barn, Cub and Bear would crate them to be shipped off to the spinning mill.
She knew it would take only minutes for Luther to finish the lamb he’d taken next, ahead of its mother, so she ran back to fetch that soft dove-gray fleece and was careful to keep it separate. The wool from these lambs’ first and only shearing was finer and more valuable than regular wool. Hester could get an astounding fifty bucks apiece for virgin fleeces on the Internet, selling to hand spinners, and last year recouped the cost of her new computer in one season. The lambs’ flesh was already contracted to a grocery chain and would be consumed by Christmas, but their wool would go on keeping people warm for years.
Dellarobia slid back into her place at the skirting table in time to hear the end of one of the world’s unnumbered tales that share the same conclusion: Can you believe the nerve? The guilty party was evidently some friend of Crystal’s, but the details were hazy. The friend had come to visit and somehow suffered damage from Crystal’s kids.
“They’re just horsing around like always, right?” Crystal’s voice rose to a question mark at the end of every declarative sentence. “Shooting water pistols? So Jazon’s trying to get away from his brother? And she’s trying to get away from both of them I guess? So that’s when Mical slams it. She’s all, like, You boys are going to wreck my coat! And then wham, boo-hoo. She was worried about the water on her silk jacket, which she should not have wore to my house, I mean, hello, I have children?”
Dellarobia was accustomed to Crystal’s question-mark oratory and her everlasting train wreck of the past and present tense, but couldn’t quite pick up the thread. She looked from Crystal to the two Norwoods, slightly overripe ladies whose dyed-black hair was identically parted down the middle by a stripe of white roots.
“Slammed what?” she asked, when none present offered to pony it up.
“The car door on her hand,” Crystal replied tiredly in a descending singsong. She seemed weary of the tale, yet told it with such enthusiasm.
“Oh. Ouch.”
“The thing of it is,” Crystal maintained, “I am sorry Brenda broke her fingers. But accidents happen. The same could have happened without my kids being there.”
“Brenda’s asking Crystal to pay her doctor bills, and Crystal don’t want to,” one of the Norwoods explained in a lowered voice, filling in Dellarobia on the plot as if she were a moviegoer who’d slipped in late.
“You know Brenda, her and her mother does the Sunday school,” said the other. One of these Norwoods was married to Peanut and the other was his sister, so how did they look just alike? It was that half-grown-out dye job, a weirdly permanent fixture. Secretly Dellarobia thought of them as the Skunkwoods.
“Let me get this straight, Crystal,” she said. “You’re thinking if Mical hadn’t been there, Brenda would have slammed the door on her own hand?”
“Accidents happen,” Crystal repeated with a more strenuous intonation.
“Oh, they do. And many among us have got the kids to prove it.”
Hester threw Dellarobia a look, still simmering from the earlier exchange. The ponytail-yank was impending. “You ought to be looking after your own,” she said.
Dellarobia was indignant. Her daughter was perfectly content, throwing herself around in the crate of belly wool like a tiny insane person in a padded cell, and Preston was circling nearby making the whooshing noises boys make to imply they are going fast. It was Crystal’s pair running wild all over the barn, two freckled, big-for-their-age elementary boys in buzz cuts and tight T-shirts just a little past expired. Jazon and Mical. What kind of mother misspelled her kids’ names on purpose? Dellarobia had last seen them jumping off the loft stairs with empty feed bags over their shoulders like superhero capes. Now they were nowhere in sight, not a good sign. Roy, the collie, tended to keep tabs on the kids and now wore a long-nosed look of concern.
“Preston, come here a minute,” Dellarobia called. “Where’s your buddies?”
He arrived dramatically panting, his straight-cut bangs stuck to his forehead and his little wire glasses askew. “Outside. They wanted to step on poops but Mr. Norwood said they couldn’t. Look!” Preston in one vigorous hop turned his back to them, revealing that over his shoulders he wore a full white fleece for a cape.
“You’re going to wreck that fleece,” said Hester.
He turned back around and said in a cartoon growl, “I’m Wool Man!”