Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  When Susanna could put it off no longer, she carried the bottle of mare’s milk through the gate into the barnyard, and the three-month-old donkey ran straight at her. Junebug didn’t stop when he reached her, but lowered his head so that it landed solidly in her stomach, knocking her off balance. She stuck the thumb-size nipple in his mouth before he could bite her.

  At a few days old, the baby donkey had seemed dull, and the mama donkey wouldn’t let him nurse, and so Susanna thought it might be wise to let this one fade away and start again from scratch. Back when she had been struggling to feed and clothe five kids, she would have let nature take its course, would have left the baby to gradually grow weaker and then die, figuring if the mother didn’t want to feed it, then neither did she. However, her daughter Marika had visited and cried at how sweet he looked, and everybody came over and took his picture. They fussed over Junebug’s fluffy hair. The whole world went on and on about how she had to save this creature.

  Susanna had felt bullied when she first picked up the leggy little foal, leaned him against the side of the barn, and force-fed him milk she’d reconstituted from an expensive mare’s milk powder. She repeated this every few hours, around the clock, for the first few weeks. He never did learn to drink milk from a bowl the way the instructions on the milk bag claimed he would; two mornings in a row it appeared the baby had finished his bowl of milk, but when Susanna checked on him the next night, she found a twenty-pound possum stretching up on hind legs, supping there. When the baby was a few weeks old and able to eat some milk pellets, she built a crawl pen with a doorway too low for the mama donkey to enter, but the boy wouldn’t go in and eat his pellets unless Susanna pushed him in and latched the gate, and if she didn’t let him out again he spent the night he-honking for his ma.

  Now that she had gotten him down to one bottle-feeding a day, he seemed to be developing a problem in his left rear leg—he stepped only on the tip of the hoof of that foot and sometimes jumped around on three legs. She’d assumed at first it was an abscess that would resolve with some soaking, but a week of Epsom salts hadn’t helped. Marika kept begging her to drive the donkey down to the veterinary clinic at Three Rivers for X-rays.

  X-rays, thought Susanna, with exasperation. X-rays for a donkey! Used to be you had animals at your own convenience. Take cats. You had a bunch of cats people dumped at your place, and then every couple years most of them got distemper, and it was terrible to see them die with their eyes gummy, and the kids got upset, but then the strongest survived, and if you had only one cat left, then you had yourself one hell of a cat. But nowadays you had to get even the strays neutered and spayed and vaccinated. This was nonnegotiable ever since Marika got herself onto the Humane Society board of directors. Currently Susanna had three of these pampered felines in the house and two neutered feral cats in the barn. Used to be people drowned cats they didn’t want. Used to be if you had a pony or donkey that couldn’t walk anymore, you called some guy who came over and shot it in exchange for the carcass, which he fed to his hunting dogs.

  Now Susanna had a donkey that had grown to a hundred ten pounds of hand-fed trouble, and nobody would even share her fantasies of roasting it on a spit. All those sleepless milk-filled nights wasted, and she’d paid seventy bucks for milk powder and twenty-five for the pellets for this creature. If she continued on this path, not only would there be the fee for each X-ray, but there was the trouble of transporting him halfway to Indiana in the back of her truck.

  “This damned donkey gets cuter every day,” said Lydia, her neighbor and daughter-in-law, seeming to appear out of nowhere. “How’s my favorite living plush toy?”

  “Take him. He’s yours,” Susanna said. “Seriously. Take him.”

  “You know I can’t,” Lydia said. She stuck out her lower lip and blew air upward over her face so her blond bangs fluttered. “I never thought I’d look back fondly at being in jail, but at least it was air-conditioned.”

  Lydia fingered the moonstone she wore on a gold chain around her neck. It was the size of a radish. She was married to Jeffrey, Susanna’s middle son, and lived just a half mile away. Her sentence of a year in county jail for selling pot had just wrapped up a couple of weeks ago.

  “You are building up some serious karma taking care of this baby. Your aura gets brighter every day, Susanna.”

  “Sounds like more damned heat to me.”

  “I did the tarot for you before I came over, and it foretold of an opportunity for great joy.”

  When Susanna let go of the donkey, it moved around and bit at the seat of her jeans, the way a normal baby donkey might bite his mama and receive a kick in the head for it. Susanna smacked him, but the donkey figured she was being affectionate and nosed her some more.

  “Was that bite in the ass supposed to be joyful?” Susanna asked Lydia.

  “I brought the kids. They ran down to the creek to cool off. I hope you don’t mind,” Lydia said. “I need to leave them here for a few hours while I visit my ladies at the nursing home.” Lydia did hair and nails at a half dozen nursing homes in town, as well as at the Blossom Salon in Kalamazoo.

  A few hours for Lydia usually meant all day, so Susanna would have to feed six grandchildren lunch and supper instead of the usual three. While she was summoning the energy for a cranky response, a big pine tree by the driveway exploded into thousands of pieces before her eyes. She fell against the rail fence and held her breath, unsure of what she’d just seen or what she might see next.

  Junebug the donkey tore across the barnyard, ran to his mother, who kicked him.

  “What the fuck?” Lydia said and wrapped her fingers around the moonstone, pushing her knuckles into her breast.

  Junebug returned at a jog and stood stiff-legged at Susanna’s side. The chickens were squawking in their chicken yard, and Susanna could hear that the creek had erupted into quacking and duck-yakking. Bullet was turning circles frantically in the pasture, trying to see what had happened. Rachel’s yellow Lab loped over and started barking at the debris.

  When Susanna could breathe again, she stepped through the rail fence and walked to where the pine tree had stood moments ago. There she found a waist-high stump surrounded by toothpicks. The whole midsection of the sixty-foot-tall pine tree had been reduced to smithereens, and the splinters of wood were bone dry and warm to the touch. The upper limbs lay across the driveway. One had fallen onto the engine compartment of Susanna’s broken-down Ford tractor, adding insult to injury. Another branch had fallen onto Larry’s bicycle and knocked it over.

  “Well, that was something different,” Susanna said. Sweat poured anew from her face, neck, and armpits. Her limbs felt shaky. “Something I’ve never seen before.”

  “I think it was a sign,” Lydia said. She hugged Susanna and walked down the driveway toward home, without her children.

  A sign of what? Susanna wondered. She’d known trees to explode from lightning strikes, but never from plain old heat. Her own body was strangely warm these days, more than could be accounted for by the temperature, truth be told, worse than when she’d gone through her change. Maybe it was the blood pressure her doctor had warned her about, or the cholesterol, and maybe she was going to burst apart the same way the tree had done. When she went into the house, she saw a number five blinking on the answering machine, but didn’t push the play button, which might mean listening to somebody’s complaints.

  “Larry!” she shouted onto the porch. “Call your goddamned uncle.”

  THE MORNING EXPLODED with the sound of ducks quacking and yakking in the creek running below Susanna’s bedroom window. The noise woke her from a dream of tilling next year’s garden. In the dream, she had harnessed Junebug and his ma, Jenny, to pull the rotovator, and as quickly as the blades broke up the soil, tomato and bean plants sprang up. She laughed aloud, laughed as she hadn’t in ages at such an absurd thought, that the new donkey could be worth a damn. She folded her arms behind her head and wondered what the ducks might be going on about
. Were snapping turtles snapping up their ducklings?

  Those ducks were her summer alarm clock, but in the darker months she was forced to go mechanical; she was no more attuned to a five a.m. schedule than poor Larry was.

  “Damn noisy ducks,” Susanna said, as she did every morning. She would miss those ducks when they disappeared in autumn, but from her ex-husband she’d gotten the habit of lying in bed cursing them this way; though her husband had been gone ten years, she was a woman of habits. “Get the hell out of here, go south, fly off to the nature center, won’t you?”

  “Dumb ducks,” said another voice, quietly.

  “What?” Susanna sat up, blinked to make sure she was awake.

  “Dumb ducks,” said a man’s voice. “Like you said.”

  “Is there somebody in my bed?” Susanna’s bed was bigger than a king-size, so big that the mattress was a special order, and new sheets were expensive.

  “It’s just me,” said Wendell Wagner, Larry’s uncle, who’d been working on the air-conditioning late last night. Susanna had gone to bed as the man had still been puzzling through an ancient manual he’d found under the dusty unit. He told her that if the coolant had leaked out it would be a problem, because the refrigerant she would need was now illegal. Though she’d said Larry had to pay the man, when she saw what a hard worker Wendell was, she figured she could offer him a postdated check, one he could cash after she got her first paycheck from the school. Maybe she could make up for the expense this winter by skimping on fuel oil—she’d tell everybody to keep warm by remembering the summer heat.

  “You told me I should stay the night if it got too late,” Wendell Wagner said. She now saw him in her peripheral vision as a little range of foothills over on the far side of the big bed. When her kids were little, she’d always had to keep them from jumping around on the bed, and now the problem was just as bad with the grandkids. Not only did they jump on it whenever she left the door unlocked, but they enacted battles and built forts in and around and under it.

  “Well, I certainly didn’t mean you should sleep with me. I meant the couch in the living room,” she said. She had encouraged him to stay, hoping he would work all night if that was what it took to fix the old machine. At seven p.m., before he arrived, the radio announced that six people at the Kalamazoo County Fair had had to be rushed to the hospital for heatstroke.

  “I put a pillow out there on the couch for you, Mr. Wagner.”

  “Call me Wendell. I must’ve walked in my sleep.”

  “You’re starting to remind me of your nephew Larry.” She turned her head enough to see he’d carried that pillow with him and had it under his head now.

  “Oh, Larry’s a good boy.”

  “Wendell, between you and me, that boy’s dumb as a stump.”

  “He’s a late bloomer, and I want to give him a chance, same as you did. It’s awful nice of you to rent him a room,” Wendell said.

  “I didn’t want to, but my daughter told me to take pity.”

  “You strike me as a woman who doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to.”

  “Well, there’s a pretty good chance I’m kicking him out.”

  “And I believe if you want to kick him out, you will. That’s the kind of woman you are, a woman who knows her own mind.”

  Susanna had survived without her husband for ten years by sticking to her routines. She’d honestly planned to never lie down with one of them cheating, troubling sons of bitches again, but here she was, lying with a fellow in the very bed her husband had built, with him telling her what kind of woman she was. Her husband had used black walnut wood and got the idea of hitting the headboard with a chain to make the bed frame look old, and then he’d shellacked it. He probably built a bed for that gal at the bottle gas company, too, in their new place, thirty miles south of here, halfway to Indiana.

  “Now I remember why I came back here,” Wendell said. “That big yellow dog was lying on the couch, taking up all the space. That’s why.”

  “You could’ve pushed him onto the floor. He’s used to it.”

  “That’s a mighty big yellow dog you got. I wasn’t sure which end of him to push. And I figured if I pushed one end of him off, by the time I got over to push the other end, he’d’ve pulled himself back up again.”

  Susanna realized they were not just telling facts here. Wendell had gotten her laughing last night, and she’d made him a pot of coffee. Hot coffee in this heat! He’d claimed it made him sweat and so cooled him down. Also claimed it didn’t keep him awake.

  “That dog does something that drives me crazy,” Susanna said. “I’ll put a cast iron pan on the floor for him to lick clean, and if I don’t pick it up right away, he carries it out into the woods, so I have to go find it. He can carry a pan weighing ten pounds. But he provides a real service around here, that dog does, by eating all the food my grandkids drop on the floor.”

  In fact, Wendell had followed the sound of Susanna’s snoring to her bedroom, and he had climbed into the enormous bed slowly and quietly, so as not to disturb her, and he’d stayed way over by the far edge. Wendell would never have dared climb into a regular bed with a woman, but he figured that in a bed this size a woman might not even notice him.

  The ducks struck up another round of quacking and fussing.

  “You’re not naked, are you?” Susanna asked.

  “I don’t think I am.” Wendell lifted the blanket. “Nope, I’m definitely not naked.”

  “Good thing,” Susanna said and snorted. There was no law that she couldn’t try some talking herself. “’Cause if my grandkids had come in here and found you naked, they’d do terrible things to you.”

  “What kind of terrible things, Susanna?”

  “Oh, one fellow who crawled in my bed, they stole his trousers and filled them up with stinging nettles. The way he howled after putting on those pants, you’d’ve thought cannibals were cooking him.” She felt a little proud of this invention.

  “I still got on my trousers,” Wendell said. “My shirt, too. I’m not one bit naked, Susanna. That’s not anything to worry about.”

  “Another sneaker, oh, they drug him out of my bed and tied him up between my two donkeys,” Susanna said and smiled to herself. “Those donkeys pulled on him until he got to be a very tall man.”

  “I’m already over six foot,” Wendell said and turned toward her in the bed, smiling as much as he dared. “Do you prefer a tall man, Susanna?”

  “No reason you should care what I prefer,” she said, lacing her fingers over her stomach. When she took a good look at Wendell Wagner, she saw his long body and bearded face were dappled with sunlight. He was nearly as skinny as Larry, and half his face and neck were covered by his curly gray beard.

  Susanna’s husband had been a very tall man, six-foot-six, which was why he thought he needed a big bed like this, though Susanna suspected he was just trying to sleep farther away from her, giving himself the opportunity to steal away at night without her hearing. Though she’d hated his sneakiness, she didn’t really blame him for leaving. They hadn’t had much in common anymore besides the kids, and grandkids weren’t something he’d been interested in. He’d wanted her to sell this old place, go travel around the country. He’d gotten tired of a woman who wanted to garden all summer. Over the years, she’d realized he was better suited to the woman from the bottle gas company, who took long summer vacations with him.

  A dog barked outside the house. The rooster crowed in the chicken yard. The dog paused as if listening to the crowing and then barked again. The ducks started up quacking and yakking again.

  “But since you ask,” Susanna said, lifting her sheet for a moment of cool, “I prefer a man who’s not a lying, cheating, sly-acting son of a bitch.”

  “Should I get up and let the dog in?” Wendell asked.

  “Naw, don’t worry. Somebody else’ll let him in.” Susanna didn’t want Wendell to leave just yet. “I heard my grandkids up and around.”

  “You
think I ought to go out the window?” Wendell said. “So your grandkids don’t see me?”

  Susanna pretended to consider the offer. “No, you’d better not. If you go out the window, you’ll make them ducks crazy, wake up everybody in the neighborhood. And those kids’ll see you anyhow. They don’t miss a thing.”

  “I’ll stay right here with you, then.”

  “Doesn’t seem like you fixed my air-conditioning. It’s already ninety degrees in here.”

  “I’m afraid that old machine is kaput, Susanna. I’m speaking as a professional.”

  “Larry thinks you can work miracles.”

  “I can,” Wendell said. “But I work them when I least expect it. Listen, somebody’s yelling in your kitchen. Sounds like some of them kids might be fighting.”

  Susanna turned her head and listened, until she heard what sounded like a box of cornflakes hitting the wall and busting open. A chair tipped over, and somebody started to cry. She shook her head. Only now did she remember that Lydia had left three extra kids there for the night, so breakfast would be more riotous than usual.

  “Oh, that’s just how those kids eat breakfast,” she said. My daughter Rachel yells at them, but I don’t mind a little back-and-forth. Gets the blood moving.” In fact, as recently as yesterday morning she herself had yelled for them to shut up, but she’d done it without thinking, like scratching an itch. Maybe she just liked to join in their rowdy conversation.

  “Listen to them donkeys he-hawing in the barnyard,” Wendell said. “They do that every morning?”

  Susanna liked having the sounds of her place pointed out to her. She was so used to the donkeys and ducks and kids that they’d blurred into a background racket.

  “They figure I ought to be out feeding them instead of lying here talking to you,” Susanna said. “I got to feed the little jackass up there with a bottle. Another thing my kids got me into.”

  “And you don’t want to do it?”

  “Larry says you’re sleeping in a tent somewhere.”