“Don’t be going anywheres,” Aunt Sue said. “Go get yourself whatever kind of cleaned up and ready you need to be. Y’all got school, and they told me to send you early for the paperwork. I already filled out my part. You got to be there to do yours.”
It took all the restraint I had not to run out and defend Gnarly, but I knew I had to get along with Aunt Sue and Book, because where else did I have to go?
So I went to take a shower — and wondered if high school would be as bad as things already seemed to be at Aunt Sue’s. I shuddered at the thought, and at the thought of facing it alone. I’d walked or ridden bikes or carpooled with Beatrice to school every day of my life until today, and the prospect of going without her, especially here, at a new school in a new state, left me shaky.
Half an hour later, a small truck pulled into the yard. A guy was driving. Book introduced him as Tiny — they were football buddies — and told me to squeeze in the middle. Tiny, who was even larger than Book, grunted a sort of hello. He seemed nervous, but that didn’t stop him from trying to feel my chest with his elbow, pretending to be adjusting the bass on his CD player.
“Hey,” I said.
Tiny said he was sorry; it was an accident.
Book just snorted.
Craven County High School was two stories, with walkways on the outside of both stories, but since they’d built it in a geological depression, it sat low to the ground and looked like it was sinking. If there was a town of Craven — and I understood that there was — they didn’t put the high school anywhere near it, because all I saw when we got there was the same woods that surrounded Aunt Sue’s property.
Book and Tiny didn’t even bother to point me in the direction of the office. A couple of their large friends grabbed them in the parking lot, and they dragged one another off toward what appeared to be the gym.
I stopped a small boy with bangs and a giant backpack that looked as if it might cripple him over time. “Can you tell me how to get to the office?” I asked.
“Say what?” he said.
I had to repeat it two more times before I guess he finally understood my Maine accent. In the end he just pointed, as if he wasn’t sure I knew much English.
Kids on the first floor hung close to the wall on their way to classes or lockers because of all the guys who leaned on the second-story railing and spit chewing tobacco over the side. I thought I was safely out of their range as I hurried toward the office, but halfway there a disgusting black wad landed on my backpack with a sickening splat.
I ducked into a nearby restroom to wash it off. Three white girls were already in there, sitting on the sinks, smoking cigarettes.
“Excuse me,” I said to a thin girl in an oversize army jacket. She didn’t move except to blow out smoke and then tap her cigarette ash onto the floor.
“I have to use the sink,” I said. She looked me over, shrugged, and slid off.
A second girl chirped at me. “You talk funny. Where you from?”
“Maine,” I said. I didn’t tell her that she was the one who talked funny. Her “talk” sounded like “towk.” Her “where” sounded like “wur.”
The second girl offered me a cigarette. “You want one?”
I shook my head. “Don’t smoke,” I said. “Thanks.”
They all laughed. “Everybody smokes down here,” the first one said. “It’s practically a state law or something.”
“What about spitting tobacco?” I asked, nodding toward the brown stain on my backpack. “Is that a law, too?”
“Nah,” the army jacket girl said. “More like a sport.”
All three girls tossed their cigarettes in a toilet but didn’t flush. As they filed out, the last one turned back to me and said, “Welcome to Hell, Yankee.”
I shook my head after they left. North Carolina didn’t feel like a different state. More like a different planet — one so choked with cigarette smoke that there might not be enough oxygen to sustain normal human life.
I finally made it to the office, and after signing some registration forms, I had to meet with the guidance counselor to pick up my schedule. His name was Mr. DiDio. He was a heavyset man wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He also wore his hair in a ponytail. He had a large Persian rug on the floor of his office and several beanbag chairs. The room smelled of patchouli. He called me “dude.”
“Sorry I’m in such a rush here, dude,” he said as soon as I sat down — in a real chair by his desk. He handed me my schedule. He had a southern accent like everyone else I’d met, though not as pronounced as the boy with the backpack or the girls in the restroom. “I went through your transcripts already,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot we have to offer you like the AP classes you had in Maine, but I think we can work out a few things next term, some senior classes maybe. Stuff like that. Let’s just start you off in these junior classes and see where we can take it from there.”
He stood up. “Meeting with the principal,” he said, shrugging and grinning, as if he was in trouble for something, but also as if it wasn’t that big a deal.
I reached out to shake hands, but he put his palms together over his heart instead and said, “Namaste.”
“OK,” I said. “I mean, yes, sir. Namaste.”
North Carolina felt weirder than ever.
At lunch I saw Book with Tiny and some other large boys who I assumed were football players, but Book didn’t say anything, even though I know he saw me, too. The school lunch was something called Hot Hamburgers, which turned out to be grilled hamburger patties on toasted white bread with an ocean of brown gravy poured on top. There might have been canned vegetables under the gravy, too, drowned and dead. It made my vegetarian stomach turn — not that the school lunches back in Maine smelled any better.
I found some vending machines in the hall next to the cafeteria, where I bought Fig Newtons and a Snapple, then I wandered outside and sat alone under a pine tree at the edge of the school property. Other kids were hanging around outside, too, but no one paid any attention to me, not that I expected they would. I didn’t particularly mind being invisible, though. It beat being the object of ridicule because of my “accent.”
After I finished, I pulled out one of my notebooks and started a new letter to Dad.
I’m not sure I’m in America anymore. I’m definitely not in Maine. I might have to see about taking ESL classes to fit in here and know what anybody’s saying. Or maybe SSL classes. Southern as a Second Language. . . .
After lunch I had English. I heard it before I got there — the room was practically shaking from all the talking and yelling. The teacher, Mrs. Roosevelt, was an older black woman with silver hair and a wide face. She wore bifocals that could have hung down on their silver chain in front of her shirt, but she had them stuck up on top of her hair. She asked me my name and directed me to a seat, then closed the door and stood in front of her desk with her arms folded. Everyone hushed.
I thought she’d take attendance, but she didn’t. She pointed to a couple of kids in the front row and told them to pass out a stack of books that balanced on the edge of her desk — worn copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was surprised they were just assigning it now, in eleventh-grade English. In Maine we had read it in middle school.
“Now, I want you all to look through these books,” Mrs. Roosevelt said. “Do you see anything unusual?”
I flipped through my weathered copy and saw black smudges on many of the pages.
Several hands shot up. Several kids shouted. Mrs. Roosevelt nodded at a white boy near the back.
“Somebody went at them with a Sharpie or something,” he said. “They scratched over a whole bunch of the words.”
Mrs. Roosevelt asked what words.
The hands went down. Nobody shouted this time.
“What words?” Mrs. Roosevelt asked again.
Another boy in the back, a black kid, said, “The N-word, Mrs. Roosevelt. It’s anywhere they have the N-word.”
“And what’
s the N-word?” Mrs. Roosevelt asked. She knew, obviously, but she was determined to make us say it, or to make somebody. I knew it wouldn’t be me. I scanned some pages. Every reference to Nigger Jim was now just Jim with one of those black smudges in front of it. A part of me wanted to raise my hand and say how stupid it was — that it made people think even more about the N-word than if they’d just left it alone. I kept my mouth shut, though. I wasn’t about to let them hear me say the word nigger, or anything else, in my Yankee accent.
“What’s the N-word?” Mrs. Roosevelt asked again.
One of the black girls, who sat at the desk next to mine, nodded, and Mrs. Roosevelt nodded back at her. The girl was pretty, with straight black hair pulled back with a red headband. She said, “It’s nigger, Mrs. Roosevelt.”
Mrs. Roosevelt hunted for her glasses, though she didn’t put them on, just held them in her hand. “Your homework this week is to read this book. All of this book.” Then she nodded again at the girl sitting next to me and said, “Shirelle, will you please turn to the beginning of the novel and read us what Twain wrote there?”
Shirelle did: “‘Notice: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.’”
“Thank you, Shirelle,” Mrs. Roosevelt said. “For tomorrow, I want you to think about that, and come prepared to tell me why Mark Twain wrote it. Also, I want you to write a one-page essay arguing for, or against, the censorship in your copy of Huckleberry Finn.”
I looked around. Black kids made up about a quarter of the class. White kids and a couple of Hispanic kids made up the other three quarters. I wondered how any conversation about race, or Huckleberry Finn, or anything would go here. Back in Maine, we hadn’t had any black kids at my school. I’d never heard anyone use the N-word, and no one had ever blacked it out of a book with a Sharpie.
I was determined to stay angry at Beatrice — not call or write for at least a few days — but as the first day of school wore on and I had no one to hang out with between classes, that determination faded. Talking to Beatrice was too deeply ingrained a habit, and I hoped she’d sent me an e-mail apologizing for how she’d been at the airport. So during study hall after Mrs. Roosevelt’s class, I got a library pass and lucked out because I found an empty computer. Signs on the wall listed all the things you were blocked from looking up: sex, of course, and pornography, abortion, murder, homosexuality, birth control, dozens more. I was surprised that nothing blocked me from checking my e-mail, but I wasn’t about to ask. My heartbeat quickened when I opened my account: there was a message from Beatrice — and it sounded as if she missed me as much as I missed her.
Hey, Iris,
I did the dumbest thing today. I got home and kept wondering where you were, why you weren’t home yet, too. I don’t know who I’m supposed to do stuff with since you’re gone, except Collie, and I’m mad at him.
I had to stop reading for a minute. I didn’t want to be the new girl from Maine who everyone knew about because they saw her bawling in the library. I read a poem once called “The Crybaby at the Library,” about a boy who starts sobbing in a library because he didn’t do his math; he just goes on and on until everything’s soaked, all the books swell with moisture, the pages curl up, the ink smears, clouds form at the ceiling. I didn’t want to be him.
The rest of the e-mail was just news from school and town. She was mad at Collie because his Facebook page listed his relationship status as “It’s complicated.” Nate, this boy I went out with for a while, told Beatrice to say hi for him. Coach wanted to start up a fall ball league. She didn’t mention her parents, though, and she never said she was sorry. The bell rang before I could write her back, which was probably good because I was still hurt and angry and sad, and couldn’t think of anything to say.
That afternoon, when I realized, too late, that I didn’t know what bus to take, I had to walk the four miles home from school. Two miles on the shoulder of County Road, another two down the canopy road to Aunt Sue’s, though I missed her driveway and went an extra half a mile before I realized what I’d done and doubled back.
I was sweaty and tired when I finally got to the farm, but I quickly forgot all that when Gnarly rushed up to greet me, tail wagging like crazy, as if we’d grown up together. I rolled on the ground with him and let him lick my face all he wanted with his big slobbery tongue. I got up and raced him back and forth across the yard, threw him sticks, scratched him and hugged him and rubbed his belly. I’d never seen a dog so happy for the attention — and I was just as happy to be giving it.
Several goats maaed in the field next to the barn, and I wanted to go meet them, but Gnarly didn’t want me to go so soon, so I waved to them and kept playing with the dog.
I finally had to take a break, though — to go inside to the bathroom and to get a drink of water. I didn’t see or hear Aunt Sue, so I assumed she was asleep. I looked for something to eat while I was in the kitchen, but there wasn’t much besides lunch meats and bread: saltines, an apple, cans of green beans and peas and beets. A half-empty jar of peanut butter with traces of old grape jelly and cracker crumbs.
I was just heading for the barn to finally introduce myself to the goats when Book and Tiny drove up from football practice. Book had an enormous Big Gulp in one hand and a 7-Eleven burrito in the other. No books. He headed straight for the barn. Tiny turned his truck around and left.
“Well, come on, already,” Book said, waving his burrito at me. “Goats ain’t gonna milk theirselves.”
He yelled at them in the field and herded them over while I pulled open the barn door. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dim light in the barn, and to see what a wreck it was: dirty goat stalls, splintery wood, a flimsy milking stand, rusty tools, randomly stacked hay bales, phantom engine parts, scrap metal, a chicken coop leaning precariously to one side. Once the goats crowded in, they stayed close together in their open stall and eyed me warily.
Book plopped down into a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, still wearing his padded football pants and sweaty gray athletic department T-shirt, his Big Gulp balanced on his belly. The burrito had disappeared, except for the wrapper. He threw that at the goats, and one of them ate it.
All five were nannies, two of them pregnant. One was obviously due anytime; the other was just beginning to show.
“Those three,” Book said, gesturing to the milkers, “their names are Patsy, Loretta, and Tammy. The pregnant ones are Reba and Jo Dee. Mama named them after old-lady country singers. Except for Jo Dee. She ain’t old.”
Patsy, the smallest goat — or at least the shortest — nodded at me. I nodded back. I could tell right away she was the herd queen. The others bunched up behind her.
“You don’t have a buck?” I asked.
“We used to,” Book said. “His name was Ruckter, but we couldn’t keep him away from the nannies no matter what. He would jump over a fence, dig under a fence, knock down a fence, any which way so he could do the nannies. Plus he had a bad case of goat funk that never let up. So we got rid of his sorry ass, and now we just go out and get us a Rent-a-Buck when we need one.”
The slats in the side of the barn let a soft yellow afternoon light leak in. Book told me that I should always milk Patsy first. “She’s the boss of the rest of them,” he said. “Plus she’s Loretta’s mom. Once you get Patsy up there, every one of the other ones will go after her. But if you don’t get her to do it — or to do anything — the others won’t budge a muscle. They will fight you, and you’ll have to drag their asses up on that milk stand.”
I looked at Patsy again, and she looked back at me in the same way — each sizing up the other. I already knew about herd queens and a lot of other things about goats from helping Dad at Mr. Lorentzen’s farm back home. It would have made Dad happy to know I still remembered.
Patsy was a Nigerian dwarf. Her beard nearly reached the ground, thanks to
her stubby legs, but you could tell she was strong. Loretta, her daughter, appeared to be half Nigerian, half La Mancha. All the others were full La Manchas — taller, leaner, more American. No ears, or practically none, anyway, which is another characteristic of the breed.
“Mama says Patsy gives the best milk,” Book said. “It’s fatter than those other ones give, so it’s tastiest. But Mama mixes their milk all up, so I don’t know how she knows the difference, but she does.”
I took a handful of feed and held it under Patsy’s nose. She didn’t take her eyes off mine as she tongued it out of my hand. She nodded at me again, and then, without my coaxing her, stepped up onto the milk stand.
“You better lower that stanchion down over her neck to keep her there,” Book said.
The stanchion was like the thing that keeps people’s heads in place on a guillotine, which I’d read about in A Tale of Two Cities — not that anybody in Craven County was likely to have ever heard of it.
Something told me Patsy didn’t like the stanchion, though, and that I didn’t need it with her. Maybe with the others, who seemed more skittish. But not with Patsy.
She didn’t move while I milked her. Just ate out of the feed trough at the head of the stand. She smelled like dirt and hay, and like our barn back in Maine, and like Dad when he came home from his vet rounds to other people’s farms.
Dad used to tell me I started out in life loving animals — since the second I was born. He said it was probably because my mom was feeding a hog we had in our backyard when her water broke and she went into labor. Everything happened so fast, she couldn’t make it past the barn before I was ready to come out. Dad did the delivery and said it wasn’t half as hard as getting a horse to foal. Mom apparently told him it smelled like manure in there and asked him to please get her up to the house. Dad told me he threw the placenta into the hog pen for the hog to eat, which my mom thought was disgusting. As soon as I could crawl, though, whenever I was outside, I would try to get into the hog pen with that hog. I liked that story. It was one of the few my dad ever told about my mom.
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