“She’s, lemme think.” He looked at the ceiling. “I think she’s, like, around forty-one or-two. Aunt Mary Edna’s a whole bunch older than her. She’s like fiftysomething.”
“That’s about what I thought, the Magnificent Eldest. And Emaline is between them.”
“Yeah, Aunt Emaline’s older than Mom. And Aunt Hannie-Mavis is younger. She’s not forty yet. I know because she was lording it over Mom about being forty.”
“And Jewel’s what, between your mom and Emaline?”
“No, Aunt Jewel’s the youngest one. She was right before Cole, just two years apart or something like that.”
“Jewel? Are you sure?”
“Yeah. She’s not that old. I was just a dumb little kid when she got married—I was the ring burier. I don’t even remember it that well, but they have these embarrassing pictures. Luckily nobody gets them out anymore since Uncle Shel run off with that waitress.”
“Oh yeah, lucky thing that was.”
“Oh man, yuk-yuk-yuk.” He smacked his head, causing Lusa to giggle. She felt lightheaded, on a nicotine rush, though it was the conversation, too—the company—making her giddy. The last time she’d talked this long with a seventeen-year-old boy, she’d probably been in the back of a car.
She sobered some, though, to think of Jewel. Not about Shel’s running off; about Jewel’s being thirty and looking fifty. “I thought that was right, that she was younger. But lately I was wondering. She looks older.”
“She’s the littlest sister, though. My mom and them were always jealous of her growing up, because of Cole. He was everybody’s favorite, right? And him and Jewel were, like, unseparatable best friends.”
“Oh,” Lusa said, taking this in. “And then I came along. So they could all resent me instead.”
“They don’t, Aunt Lusa.”
“But they do. You don’t have to pretend.”
He looked at her, seeming just in that moment more man than boy, as if he understood pain. She felt her heart stir again, but it wasn’t desire, she realized, just a kind of love for who he might someday become. She could see how he would be with a girlfriend: sweet and in charge. Exactly like Cole at seventeen, probably. She leaned against the barn wall beside him, tilting her head back against the planks, both of them facing out the doorway into the evening. Content for a minute to be just where they were. The surface of the pond was the color of blood oranges.
“So,” he said.
“So?”
“So, you run your ad. People start showing up to dump off their goats, starting with me. You can have my two.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“And then what? What are you going to do with your five hundred goats?”
Lusa closed her eyes, tasting and smelling roast goat. Last time she’d celebrated an Id-al-Fitr was years ago, when her mother was still lively and well, someone Lusa could talk to. Someone to cook with. A late-winter celebration, it had been then. The Muslim calendar crept up eleven days on the Christians every year. By now, Id-al-Fitr would be close to Christmas.
She opened her eyes. “Rickie. Can you get a bunch of goats pregnant all at once?”
He blushed, and she burst out laughing.
“Not you,” she said, when she could speak again. “I mean if you had a bunch of female goats and a—what do you call him? A billy goat?”
“You call them does and bucks. If they’re meat goats.”
“Does and bucks, right. So, what happens? Don’t blush! Rickie!” She swatted his arm. He was giggling like a child. “I’m being practical. I just had an idea. Two huge goat-feast holidays are coming up, together, at the very end of the year. And that means Id-al-Adha will be—February, March—early April! The same time as Orthodox Easter and Passover. I can’t believe this!” She was talking fast, counting on her fingers and getting herself excited. “I need to look at a calendar to make sure. How long does it take to make a kid?”
“How long are they pregnant, you mean? Five months, a little bit less.”
She counted on her fingers. “That’s November, that’s perfect! A month to fatten them up. Can you get them all to, you know—don’t blush!” She smoothed her shirttails, made a sober face, and deepened her voice. “We’re farmers, Rickie. Farmer to farmer, I’m asking your advice. Could I get one stud billy to knock up a whole field of babes at the same time?”
“Ppphhhhh!” Rickie exploded, folding up on himself.
“I’m serious!”
He wiped his eyes. “I think so, yeah. You can give them hormones and stuff.”
“No, no, no. These are religious-holiday goats. No hormones. Can we do it another way?”
“It’s been a long time since I was in Four-H, Aunt Lusa.”
“But you know about livestock. How does it work?”
“I think how it works is, if you’ve got does that haven’t been around a buck at all, and then you put them all in the field with him, they all come into season together. I’m not positive, but I think that’s right. You could call up Mr. Walker and find out.”
“Oh, right. I’m going to call up some old dude out of the blue and ask him about goat sex!” She and Rickie collapsed again, starting the cow lowing in the stall behind them. Lusa tried to shush herself and Rickie, but she had to hold on to a post just to keep herself on her feet.
“Here, put this out for me,” she said, handing him the stub of her cigarette. “Before I burn down my barn.”
He tamped it out on the bottom of his shoe, then ran a hand through his hair and straightened up. She saw his eyes glance twice at the open doorway. It was no longer evening now but night, full dark.
“You need to get home,” she said.
“Yeah, I do.”
“Tell your dad it’s OK about the tobacco. He’s right, it really is what I wanted, not to set tobacco this year. Thank him for helping me stick to my principles.”
“OK.”
“Now get.” She smacked his thigh with the back of her hand. “Your mother will think I’m holding you hostage.”
“She won’t, either. They’re more shy of you than anything, the whole family.”
“I know. I’m an outsider occupying their family home. They want their farm back, and I really don’t blame them. Most mornings I get out of bed thinking I should pack my car and drive away without even saying good-bye.”
He raised his eyebrows. “That’d hurt some feelings.”
“Maybe that’d be my point.”
“Even if you left, we couldn’t be sure of keeping this place. My folks or Uncle Herb and Aunt Mary Edna, they could lose it next year to the bank.”
“That’s what I was thinking, too. Families lose their land for a million reasons. My dad’s parents had this wonderful farm in Poland, which they lost for being Jewish. And my mother’s people got run off their land for not being Jewish. Go figure.”
“Is that true? What type of farming?”
She glanced up at him, surprised by his interest. “The Malufs had olive groves along the Jordan River, or so I’m told. I don’t know the details; it was pretty far back. Mom was born in New York. But my dad was actually born on his folks’ farm, in the middle part of Poland, which people say looks like a storybook. I think they grew sugar beets.”
“That’s something, that you come from farming people.” He appraised her as though she’d suddenly grown taller or older. “I never knew that.”
She saw now that his interest was not in social history but in crops. She’d begun to comprehend this frank pragmatism and to suspect that if she could acquire it—if she could want to—she could belong here. She shrugged. “So what, I come from farming people. Doesn’t make any difference.”
He continued to look at her. “You talk about leaving, everybody says you’re going to, but you stay. There’s some reason.”
She sighed, crossing her arms across her chest and rubbing her elbows. “If there’s any reason or rhyme to what I’m doing, I wish I knew it. I’m like a moth, Rickie
, flying in spirals. You see how they do?” She nodded up at the lightbulb, where hordes of small, frantic wings glinted through the arc of brightness in circular paths through the air. They were everywhere once you bothered to notice them: like visible molecules, Lusa thought, entirely filling up space with their looping trajectories. Rickie seemed surprised to realize this, that moths were everywhere. He stared upward with his mouth slightly open.
“A calf will run around that way when it’s lost its mama and scared to death,” he observed at last.
“They’re not lost, though. Moths don’t use their eyes the way we do; they use smell. They’re tasting the air, taking samples from different places and comparing them, really fast. That’s how they navigate. It gets them where they need to be, but it takes them forever to get there.”
“‘Go sniff the wind.’ However you said that.”
“Ru-uh shum hawa. Exactly. That’s me. I can’t seem to go in a straight line.”
“Who says you have to?”
“I don’t know, it’s embarrassing. People are watching me. I’m figuring out how to farm by doing all the wrong things. And I’m having this retrospective marriage, starting at the end and moving backward, getting acquainted with Cole through all the different ages he was before I met him.”
She doubted Rickie was following this, but he was respectful, at least. They stood together watching the dizzying dance of silver wings through the cool air: tussock moths, tortricids, foresters, each one ignoring the others as it wheeled on its own path, urgent and true.
“Aunt Lusa, you worry too much.”
“I’m a widow with a farm drowning in debt, standing in a barn that’s about to fall on me. You’re right. What, I should worry?”
He laughed. “About the family, I meant. They’re just jealous that Uncle Cole went so crazy over you. But who wouldn’t? You’re so pretty and smart and stuff.”
She made a face at him, a squashed, sorrowful smile, to keep from crying. “Thank you for saying that.”
He shrugged.
“And listen, Rickie, thanks for just…I don’t know. Making me laugh out loud. You don’t know how much I needed that.”
“Well, listen. If you need help with this goat thing.”
“Oh, I’m just dreaming. It’s desperation.”
“What were you thinking? Tell me.” He was a peer suddenly, earnest and kind. She saw something of the older Cole she’d known—not in Rickie’s eyes, which were dark, but in the seriousness of his face.
“Well, what I was thinking was, I know this butcher in New York, Abdel Sahadi, he’s my mother’s cousin. He probably sells—I don’t even know, a thousand goats a year? Maybe more.”
Rickie whistled, long and low.
“Yeah,” she said, “New York City. It’s all people, eating all the time. That’s basically what you’ve got going there. But he sells almost all those goats at holiday times. All at once. So he doesn’t want them trickling in all year long. He needs five hundred, all in the right week. If it’s winter when you want one, you have to order it way ahead of time, and you pay a fortune for it. You wouldn’t believe what people in the city will pay for a milk-fed kid at holiday time. It’s like the ordinary rules of what you can afford don’t apply at those times.”
He was listening to her carefully. It made her listen more carefully to herself.
“Rick. Do you mind if I skip the ‘Little Rickie’? You’re not so little, you know?”
“Hell, I wish somebody would bury the damn ‘Little Rickie.’”
“OK, Rick. Tell me this. Is there any possible way I could produce fifty or sixty suckling kids by the end of December? And then maybe twice that many in the spring, four months later?”
He didn’t hesitate to take her seriously. “You know about worming, ketosis, birthing, all that, right? It’s some work. Did you ever raise livestock before?” She tilted an eyebrow at him, but he was suddenly off on his own calculations. “OK. You’d have to have two seasons. Not the same mothers for both kiddings.”
“Right.”
“How’s your fence? A fence that won’t hold water won’t hold in a goat.”
She laughed. “I think I’m OK. It’s electric.”
“Really? Shoot, that’s good. When’d you put that in?”
“I don’t even know; years ago. Cole did it. It runs all the way around the main cow pasture up there. He had a bad stretch with some roving cows.”
“That’s lucky, that you’ve got that. That costs some money to put in.”
“I know, he told me. But he said if his cows had got over in Mary Edna’s garden one more time it would’ve cost him his manhood.”
Rickie laughed. “All right, then, lady, I think you’re set up. Goats’d do fine out there on your brush; you wouldn’t need to grain them or hay them much, maybe just give them some fodder after it snows. But kidding in November, they’d need shelter. If it gets real cold, you’ll need to get the mothers in your barn when they’re ready to spring. You build them a little kidding pen. Jugs, they’re called.”
Lusa looked up at the ceiling of the barn cellar, envisioning the space above. The door to the main gallery of the barn opened onto the hillside. She could change the fencing just a little to give access to the big pasture. “If I didn’t have it full of tobacco up there, or stacked full of hay, I’d have some room.”
“That’s going to be your trick,” he said. “Getting them to settle down and kid right, after it gets cold. That’s not the normal season. I’ve never seen it done, to tell you the truth.”
“Oh. That must be why goat’s so expensive in the middle of winter.”
“Oh, yeah. They’d be worth gold to somebody that wanted them.”
“But do you think I could do it?”
He spoke carefully. “It’s possible. I think everybody in the county would think you were crazy for trying it.”
“How about if nobody but you and me and that cow in there knew what I was up to? And especially if nobody knew about my cousin Abdel and holiday prices in New York?”
“Oh, well, then they’d just think you’d gone off the deep end with too many pet goats. They’d think you were a city gal with her nose in a book and not one lick of sense in her head.”
She grinned at her coconspirator. “Not a problem. That’s what they think now.”
{11}
Predators
From inside her dark cocoon Deanna listened to the racket of a man in her cabin: the door flung open, boots stomping twice to shed their mud at the door, then the hollow clatter of kindling dropped on the floor. Next, the creak of the stove’s hinge and the crackling complaints of a fire being kindled and gentled to life. Soon it would be warm in here, the chill of this June morning chased outdoors where the sun could address it. She stretched her limbs under the covers, smiling secretly. Getting up to a warm cabin on a cold morning without having to go outside for firewood first, that was tolerable.
She felt something sharp against her leg: the plastic edge of one of his strings of condoms at the bottom of the bed, twisting there like a strand of DNA. She’d been astounded when he first produced these packets of cheerful little rubber disks in the primary colors, a whole procession of them strung together as if they’d come off some giant reel of condoms somewhere. “That’s my stash,” he’d said, utterly nonchalant, pulling them out of his pack like a magician’s tied-together scarves from a sleeve. He claimed to have gotten them free at some walk-in clinic that urged them onto its clientele. She disliked thinking of his ambling into such a place for treatment of God-knew-what. Didn’t really care for the grim realities of this man at all, the fact that he was a seasonal migrant picking up occasional work, salmon fishing, carving knife handles for cash. A male who shacked up for shelter, she suspected. She’d done her best to run him off, flying into her rage at him up in the chestnut log, yet he persisted in her territory. He’d been out several years from Wyoming—with his hunting rifle, following his passion, which they did not discuss.
He talked about everything else instead, and she found herself swallowing his stories like bits of live food brought to a nest: the Northern Lights unfurling like blue-green cigar smoke in the Arctic sky. The paraffin-colored petals of a cactus flower. The Pacific Ocean and tidepools, neither of which she’d seen, except for the artificial versions of the latter in the Chattanooga Aquarium. She thought now of the pink anemones waving in that water. Like herself, when he’d first spied on her with her sensitive, fleshy tentacles of thought waving all around her, until he’d touched and made her draw up quickly into a stony fist. But he knew just how to touch her, speak to her, breathe on her, to draw her out again. Physical pleasure was such a convincing illusion, and sex, the ultimate charade of safety.
The stove’s metal door banged shut and she heard the hush of his jeans shed onto the floor. Her body tingled with the anticipation of his return to her bed. She waited, though, and for a minute too long there came no body diving headfirst into her world under the quilts. She poked her head out into the morning and blinked at its brightness. It was late morning already. The sun was a dazzling rectangle at the window, where a naked man danced in silhouette, batting both hands at a frightened moth.
“Hey hey, careful!” she cried, causing him to turn to her. She couldn’t see his expression because he was backlit, but already she knew that face, its guilelessness.
“I wasn’t going to kill him,” he insisted. “I’m just trying to catch him and put him outside. Little bugger snuck in here, he’s trying to see you naked.”
She sat up and squinted at the desperate wings flailing at the window. “No, now that’s a female. She’s looking at you.”
“Hussy,” he said, trying to clap the moth between his hands. “Look at her, she’s terrified. Never saw such a display of manhood in all her days.”
“Don’t do it like that.” Deanna lifted aside the heavy pile of blankets and put her feet on the cold floor. The wood stove radiated a tangible field of heat that her body passed through as she walked to the window. “Best if you don’t touch it. The scales will come off its wings.”
Prodigal Summer Page 17