North of Unreal
Leg of Lamb
When you live across the swamp from the Good Shepherd, you get to eat sheep. And that’s what we did, just last month, all the shepherd’s neighbours, sitting around Andy’s oval table in the cozy wooden house by the train tracks, enjoying the last spring lamb to be butchered. “I have a lamb that’s not doing so well,” the Good Shepherd told Andy. “We may as well have a party.”
The table was loaded down with Egyptian mint jelly, hot mustard, garlic mashed potatoes, roasted peppers, green onion salad, German banana bread, farmers’ market apple pie, boxed Santa Isabella wine, and lamb cooked twice — as barbecued ribs and baked legs. My baby, bored of breast milk and rice puffs, bounced up and down in a borrowed high chair, chanting “Mum-Yum” as she devoured bite-size shreds of lamb, the kind of tender young flesh she’d only heard rhymed about in Little Bo-Peep.
Soon enough, Andy’s dad will get heck for feeding lamb bones to the dogs, but for the moment, everyone’s sipping wine and feeling fine. We talk about how tender the lamb is. We talk about teacher strikes and CBC lockouts, about crystal meth and private rail crossings and weed control. How last summer’s burdock got its hooks in my husband’s hair and left him with a modified mullet. We talk about my dog’s knee surgery, and how lots of football players get the same injury, and how the dog operation cost us an arm and a leg.
Then I hear my husband’s muffler pulling into our yard. He’s coming home from a long Sunday shift in his fire-retardant coveralls. And sure enough, he shows up at the dining room door just as soon as he’s splashed the pulp from his face. The rest of us are already halfway to dessert. “A toast to the mutton,” I say, raising my glass to the Good Shepherd. “Tell us about the lamb!”
So she tells us. Remember the night it was forty below? This spring lamb was a twin born too early and rather unexpectedly on that bitterly cold night. The Good Shepherd waded through the snow to save those little lambs. She carried them back inside the house and cuddled them by the wood stove and rubbed them with blankets. And one twin warmed up just fine. But the other one didn’t. That lamb lost her back legs to the cold. “They just sort of fell off,” the Good Shepherd tells us. That’s the lamb we’re eating tonight. The one that took a long time to fatten up. The last one to be butchered.
Around the table, forks pause in mid-air. “Well, it’s very tender, ” insists my husband. “Very tasty,” we agree.
I want to know what the other sheep thought of this poor, two-legged lamb. The Good Shepherd’s husband turns to me and says, “I don’t know. We never asked them,” and everyone roars with laughter at my expense and my husband asks for some more mashed potatoes. And so I ask again.
“Well, the lamb’s mother was very patient, ” said the Good Shepherd. “She had to be. Her little lamb got around, but it got around very slowly.”
There was a moment of silence. Then –
“We’re eating Tiny Tim!” shouts our host.
The night ends with some people telling ghost stories about the haunting of our old, wooden houses, down at the end of a dark, remote road. It ends with me sleeping all night long with my eyes open wide.
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