He threw a Bible sheathed in olive suede at me when I pitched at him a dictionary with a spine broken past all healing. He missed my head, but I hit him square between the eyebrows while he lay limp against a sheaf of pillows, sipping cranberry juice through a straw. His colostomy bag had burst an hour ago, embossing his strawberry-print sheets with the starry flatulence of an elliptical ocher galaxy. Overlaid with the cranberry juice he spilled when he coughed, the galaxy became an afterbirth, that of a lamb with headlights for eyes anyone might crack with a baseball bat if they only had the impulse. Then rubbing his bald spot while his pupils yellowed from a fresh leakage of bile, he sank deeper into his pillows when I squawked, “Aren’t you dead yet?” Because I was tired of standing at the foot of his bed dodging Bibles all day long.
The summer I left for college, he tucked a $100 bill in a King James bound in imitation leather looking like the rind of a rotted orange, telling me all the answers were in there if I needed them. Then that some boys would want to have sex with me and the answer to that was in there too. The Bible being a longwinded way of saying “no thank you” when my body said “yes please and how are you?” The Bible, only another hard book to hurl at another caisson of air once your father dies with an empty bottle of cranberry juice at his bedside table. When all the strawberries are stained fecal brown.
Left to their own devices, animals shirk the burial ritual. But their corpses still stink, putrefying into fertilizer for lilies the bees soon suck dry of nectar. When one of our sheep sank into breathlessness among a cradle of golden grasses tipped with arrows, my father would heft her body onto the back of his pickup truck then drive to the southwest corner of a soybean field. A field with edges that blurred into the firmament, a field that straddled a creek that became a river where the land grew happier and hillier. Unlocking the truck bed’s door, he would stand a moment on the steel bumper, curling and uncurling his fists, before rolling the carcass to its edge, where the sheep’s legs hung low and limp, awaiting the final fall against an agate sky.
He wrapped his arms snug around the corpse, gripping its integument with fingernails flat at their cuticles, before dropping the dead ewe beneath a canopy of maple branches. He wiped his hands against his jeans then dug his hands deep inside his pockets, feeling for a piece of string to wrap around his fingers until they grew white as bone, denied all blood’s bruit. The string found and then let go of, together we would scatter a skein of broken tree limbs over the slackened jaw. But we carried no shovel and we dug no dirt. The wild dogs would come soon enough.
I refer to this as a process, one regular and predictable in occurrence, but in truth I remember putting a sheep to rest with him no more than two or three times. Nor do I recollect the birth of as many animals as I ought, abundantly supplied as our farm was with livestock. Only stumbling across an occasional afterbirth, streaked like red seaweed and laced with brown worms that stained my pants’ knees. The soles of my shoes trailed fibrous sinews across the barn lot, where our sheep traced our small crop of silos with foundered toes. They had nothing better to do, from experience I knew.
Jesus is a lamb, any Bible will tell you. A lamb but not a sheep, because Jesus never budded horns to bash into another ram for fucking rights to the nearest ewe, though he could have if he’d wanted to. So his voice stayed high as he mewled among pollarded catalpa trees and leapt round cockerels with feathers rusting atop their weather vanes. Jesus always a little too lamblike even for lambs themselves, who all bring money for their wool come a year or two.
In New Zealand, you see more sheep than people, the guidebooks all agree. Which was as good a reason to go there as any, people being features of the landscape you find easily at home. So you take the $100 from the Bible still with its rotted rind to buy a bathing suit with a red bow tied between its breast cups, hoping your Queenstown hotel pool will be a heated one. The Bible you leave beside a scree of Harlequin paperbacks in your building’s laundry room.
A glowing blue pupa at night, the pool was flush with children hurling themselves from the diving board, airborne lambs from a plush hummock. So my husband and I folded ourselves onto umber couches and drank red wine after we had done riding the funicular to mountain’s top then steering a luge to its bottom. Seven or more times in a day, just to occupy ourselves. The horns of the rams tracing the tracks looped tight as snail shells around their ears, though they darted back into a copse of pine trees if we came too near rounding a turn. But then everyone who mounts a sled wears a helmet, and helmets are only another species of horn, manufactured from fiberglass. So the rams soon conceded us their harem, not knowing everyone riding the luge only fucks another person farther down the track.
In New Zealand’s April autumn, even the lambs have grown large as sheep, males’ horns sprouting into stunted shafts of light. Were their horns not quite so short and their wool not quite so white, I would have thought them ready to drop to the ground beneath an awning of maple branches at any time, as all full-grown creatures always might. Jesus the only one I have ever heard to rise from his sepulcher yet. Jesus nothing like a real sheep at all.
With sheep come sheep dogs more often than not, but we never trained our dogs to herd. Just gave them lavender-scented baths in the sink on our back porch enclosed with stained glass windows, raising our sponges above our heads while watching soap suds drain between our fingers and circle down the coils of their ear canals. Baptizing them as best we could while muting their coats’ manure smell. But as our dogs were crushed by tractors or stolen by teenagers who mutilated our scarecrows into a skeletal crucifix of straw, our sheep began disappearing as well.
Wild dogs encroached our land from earliest days. They attacked our flock at night, bounding with feral adroitness over the arroyo that became a rapid where the hills morphed into mountains hundreds of miles in the distance, then slipped beneath the barn door where they slept on hay scattered over cement. The new dogs we bought to replace the old, either abducted or slain, also began craving the taste of sheep blood flowing fresh from a wound. They became half wild themselves, even as we bathed them. Visiting home my first college spring break, I watched as Riley, a spaniel, cleaved a hind leg off a feeding lamb while I sat working a crossword puzzle at our kitchen table. I ran outside, beating Riley with a stick from our lilac tree, flaccid and fragrant. But his mouth only dripped with the blood of the lamb that could no longer stand to suckle teats tumid with the milk that seeped onto the gravel, mixing with blood runnels like strawberries and cream. Food for only feral things.
The lamb’s left hind leg hung from a single sinew as I carried her back inside our yard, placing her beneath our badminton net. My father stalked outside with his boot laces still slack when I asked, “What do we do now, Daddy?” Because you cannot bury a living thing, not one with a tongue as pink as this. And though I was as grown then as I thought that I would get, I collapsed to the ground and cried into the half-eaten neck when he told me I should go back to the kitchen. Which I did, asking no further questions. Because I’m the one who threw the dictionary, while the word of God was his to hurtle when he needed. Shooting three-legged lambs beneath the badminton net being the province of Bible thumpers, I conceded, while I finished my puzzle. Later I washed Riley in the sink, submerging my arms in bath water made rosy as bubble gum with blood, pulling his ears back against his head and watching the soap filter down to the drum.
When I was four years old, my father pitched my Raggedy Ann doll into our living room wall just above the mantle. A few inches to the right and she would have fallen into a bed of acrylic ferns. As it was, she fell flat against the clock that rang out the hours of our lives so long as we remembered to wind it and whose time was often off. When my mother placed the doll back in my lap’s sulcus, I smoothed her apron over her knees but saw that one of her eyes was loosened. My mother said that she would sew it, but she soon forgot. I began to love winding my fingers behind that roving eye, held by a few strings yet seeing farther, I knew, than the other one. Holding Raggedy Ann from behind her felt oculus, from behind the eye that came so easily undone, I could see more too. And helping to unravel my doll’s sense of sight, I could feel the sweetness of nearly cutting off the tip of my finger by pulling tightly on a strand of something soft.
More remarkable than the sheep that outnumber New Zealand’s people are the glow worms outnumbering the sheep. Glow worms being no worms but fireflies that prefer to live underground, clinging fast to rock face smoothed by centuries of rivers running to no ocean. Were you to see glow worms in the open air, you would not see them at all. They luminesce from organs otherwise invisible except in a place so lightless. They luminesce to lure another body close, to meld into a single sapphire flame convulsing against a plate of stone. It is the light of the desire that you pay to see at the tourist bureau.
Sitting on a cool, tin bench inside a rowboat bent like a clothes hanger at its prow, being drawn forward I knew not where, I fixed my eyes on endless elfin holocausts. Alight like infant stars and reflecting against the foreheads of our boat’s other passengers, they returned to me, I felt, as if I had lost them, though I had never been to New Zealand before. But you can know someone without knowing how you know him. You can recognize a glow worm without having seen a glow worm prior. So I sat in perfect passive tranquility in this fugue from day’s brash horror, feeling rescued from skies blue beyond bearing. Preferring the larval light of worms that are no worms to speak of to that of the sun for the time being.
Our sheep’s eyes glowed green in our headlights’ glare. Headlights staring back at headlights, they dimmed into a nothingness the moment we turned off our truck's ignition. Or so I thought, because their eyes turned black as buttons by morning, doll’s eyes anyone might pull apart and blind accordingly. Back into plastic discs I might sew with string then loosen with my finger. But skipping beneath a waning moon while trying to catch fireflies overspreading a bed of shuttering tulips when I was still quite young, I confronted a pregnant ewe darting bolts of green light at my sternum, as if in warning. A cloud passed over the scythe in the sky and all became dark except for the emerald light that flew from her face like spears, telling me to go back inside, little girl. To leave the lightning bugs alone altogether. Her headlight eyes caught in no headlights of their own.
In New Zealand, you hear of nothing but death, you should know before you travel there. Death of the flightless birds, the kiwi and takahe and the penguins scaling the rocks flanking Milford Sound, where we kayaked at night once we grew tired of impelling ourselves downhill, weighting our heads with fiberglass shaped rounder than our skulls. Species of fat, splay-toed birds keep going extinct due to introduction of unnatural predators from the British Isles. For all the sheep you see ready to collide with the luge tracks, there are that many deaths to come. Because being a common kind of animal doesn’t make your life an endless one. Because even birds that fly will someday fall forever to the ground. Starlings and sparrows as well as those takahe that have spent the day clambering up a cairn of tin cans only to survey the wreckage below them.
At my dad’s wake, the man who now farms his land told me my dad was not a common man. He didn’t explain himself and I didn’t ask him to expound, because I supposed I knew what he meant anyhow. That my dad felt for string in his pockets after he had buried a sheep, whereas the more common among us remain part sheep ourselves, leaving them to bury their brethren, with which they never bother, do they now?
Left alone to our commonness in night’s dark deep, the eyes of those of us unwilling to starve our fingers of oxygen glow a sour shade of green before turning lightless as buttons at daybreak. Sun shot through amber, my father’s eyes were buttons too come noon, but they were glass buttons at least. An azure ring divided ocher iris from pupil, a blazing blue I had not seen the like of since visiting the glow worm cave as near to the bottom of the world as I shall ever come. A cave with no worms to speak of. A cave throbbing with the light of two bodies wanting to become one, dripping with larvae sticky to the touch and you’d do well to stay away from. A cave so far below the luge’s course so sweetly sinuous you would never know of its existence if not for the brochures the concierge handed to you. Such concentration of love often being buried beyond all finding.
Newborn lambs bleat while they spring high into the April air in the Northern Hemisphere, thinking they are birds for a time, bounding into puddles, frightening the frogs, and dirtying their hooves. But to them the clouds look like wool. The sky is a pasture of parading sheep with no weight to them. Witless, wingless creatures that they are.
Even flightless birds, after all, have wings strapped to their torsos. They have only to learn to use them. To flap them fast enough when time comes to careen off a cliff at predator’s approach. But this world spins too fast and they are not in time, not in time. Late past all hope.
Sometimes I wonder if this planet will tire of turning, if it too will take a lamb’s leap somewhere, far beyond its orbit. Trip into a puddle of mud then stand in the spray of a garden hose. I should like to see that, but I don’t expect it. My life is halfway over now, if not more so, and this world is already an old one. And it is only young life that springs high enough to touch the clouds of wool. Jesus and the lambs and the birds that have taught themselves to fly, piercing the ether with beaks whittled into javelins. Spring being the youngest season, while I have always favored autumn.
In the chill of an April autumn morning, we left our hotel in Queenstown to take a helicopter where yet fewer humans roamed among a greater preponderance of sheep. A helicopter because my credit card had just room enough and I too felt like springing. Because whatever else I am, I’m no flightless bird. Because I’m not dead yet—Daddy, do you hear me? Do you hear my little lamb voice over the helicopter wings’ whir? A thrash of sabers through air soft as wool sheared close to the belly. Chop, chop, chop, as high as we can go! Off with your head, Daddy. If that dictionary didn’t kill you so long ago.
The man who carried our bags to our room in Wellington stood no more than five feet tall, his head’s pate even with my shoulders. But he had dark, rippling hair and wide, cerulean eyes the size of lakes seen from a helicopter’s height. Lakes that shimmered with desire when he looked first into my eyes then level with the slope of my breasts hung snug inside my sweater. When he closed the door, my husband said I gave that little man a big hard-on, and I told him to go fuck himself. Because I had not seen such bodies of water casting their glow on me for too long a time. Nearly bright as sheep’s when you round your car into the driveway.
Sheep cannot walk through walls of any kind. They are not like Jesus sprung from his crypt. They cannot see out of buckets with no holes punched through them. And then any farmer’s herd has only one ram, with all the ewes to his lonesome. Taller by a head than his female retinue, his testicles hang heavy as sacks of flour, scraping the dandelions clean of pollen. He is the only sheep tall enough to stretch his neck high enough to eat the apples hanging from the tree branches. Letting all the weight go to his balls.
One morning when I was 9 or 10 or 11, our ram woke me with his bellows, echoing against the transparent walls I knew divided the brume into checkerboard squares in the orchard across my bedroom window. With a plastic bucket over his head, he butted his head against tree trunks through which Jesus alone could pass, Jesus the light of the world who could see through polyurethane as well as slip through the eye of a needle with all the poor people. The bucket I had left beside the ladder, full of apples the night before, while the ram had paid for his hunger with eternal night for all he knew, blind to everything but the bucket’s black interior. But we scrambled our eggs and fried our bacon without hurry, lavishing our toast with jelly, laughing the louder the longer he yawped in panic. Because even darkness can be risible while you spear yourself yet more bacon strips looking on at a sheep gone blind like the doll you’ve long lost track of. He with no horns of his own.
Once our lambs turned three months old, my dad sawed off their horn stumps to keep them from growing long. He shot each with a syringe then held its abdomen in a vice between his thighs while clamping shut its jaw. When he was done, I would wave the saw in the wind, still with blood at its teeth, making it ululate in a plangent rue that ricocheted off the sides of the barn. I would harmonize with its wail, singing in some new language with no words I understood but knew were words all the same. Maori incantations probably, begging the gods to accept my offering, though I never knew where the little horns were kept. But whatever orison I sounded, whatever spirits I invoked, my voice ached with so much unmet beauty to myself alone, echoing against those walls in the air and those we covered with paint, that my dad had eventually to rip the saw from my hand and hang it where I could not reach.
In Rotorua, we ate sushi in a strip mall half a mile from our hotel. After sharing a piece of lemon mochi looking like a jaundiced sperm sac, we walked toward the hot springs, passing a man with ashen skin and no body below his waist, his rib cage truncated into a squat plinth supporting too reedy a neck. Propped in a wheelchair outside a liquor store, the whites of his eyes looked blank as new-shorn sheep skin in the sign’s phosphorescent leer. Then he looked into my pupils’ widening dark and I saw that his irises were too blue a blue, that they glowed with a watchfulness I hoped would fade come daylight. I turned my head away, inhaling a secretion of sulfur from the pools of mud in which I would kick my legs like scissors through glue, and walked the faster on.
I had thought we would breathe the healing vapors in the nude, but at the hot springs’ entrance we confronted separate women’s and men’s changing rooms. So I wore the $100 bathing suit and swam through pools of increasing warmth, spending the longest time in the hottest one, poised at the highest elevation and overlooking a sky teeming with stars so numerous I thought that there might be enough, that stars should perhaps have their predators too, as glow worms also must. Inside the mud pool afterward, I sat beside my husband on a low cement step, feeling my lower body cool into an emptiness. The blanket of mud concealed all my body below my ribs, expanding and contracting still without my consent. So that I could see only the part of me that too might survive in a wheelchair perched outside a liquor store on this austral continent. Had all the longing died out of me like headlights at an ignition’s click, the whites of my eyes too might still be very white, much too white in fact. Had that which glowed blue inside me as any glow worm been below my navel and not inside my iris.
Jesus is a lamb, common as rain come springtime, pullulating like feathers on all the flightless birds. And lambs leap as high in the air as they can but soon fall to the ground, where wild dogs wait for wingless creatures to feed upon, to tear their legs apart so their blood will stick to the bottom of your shoes like an afterbirth of carrion. But when Easter comes to New Zealand, the leaves have all but fallen and the lambs are lambs no more. Too tired to leap with their shrouds of wool grown cumbrous as sackcloth, they masticate blonde grasses lining the luge. They watch endless cataracts of a species all too common ascend the skies in the funicular before racing to mountain’s base before disappearing into the lake beyond. Seeing everyone but themselves fall into the gray waters while they stay standing high on a hill. Knowing no one will bury them here now.