"But different gods, right? Not the real one, not our'n."
"Yes, your'n. Same exact God. His technical name is Jehovah; all three factions concur on that. There's just some disagreement about which son did or did not inherit the family goods. The same-old, same-old story."
"Huh," he remarked.
"Do you know that most of the people in the world are actually not Christians, Rickie?"
"Is that really true?" He grinned sideways like a schoolboy trapped by a trick question. Then lit another cigarette to recover his dignity, raising his eyebrows in a question to make sure it was OK.
"Sure, go ahead."
"Can you say something in Jewish?"
"Hmm. Maybe you mean Yiddish. Or Polish."
"Yeah. Something in a language."
"Between Yiddish and Polish I'm not good for much. My bubeleh lived with us before she died--my dad's mother--but she was, like, classified. Dad wouldn't let her speak anything but English in our house. Wait, though, let me think." She rehearsed the phrase in her mind, then recited aloud, "Kannst mir bloozin kalteh millich in toochis."
"What's that mean?"
"'You can blow cold milk up my ass.'"
He laughed loudly. "Your mammaw taught you that?"
"She was a pissed-off old lady. Her husband ran off with a coat-check girl in a nightclub. You should ask me about Arabic, my mom taught me a bunch of things."
"OK, what's one?"
"Ru-uh shum hawa. It means 'Go sniff the wind.' Bug off, in other words."
"Rooh shum hawa," he repeated, with dreadful inflection, but Lusa was touched by his effort. His willingness to stand here and talk with her about foreign things.
"Yeah, roughly," she said. "That's pretty good."
Rickie smirked a little. "So," he said, exhaling smoke, "did you have other Christmases? Where you'd get presents and stuff?"
"Other Christmases, other Easters. Yep. It wasn't so much about presents, but definitely about food. Ramadan, that's a whole month where you don't eat during the daytime, only at night."
"No kidding? You'd go all day?"
"Supposed to. We usually didn't. I'd just skip breakfast and try to be good for a month. But the best part is the end, where you have this giant feast to make up for everything you didn't eat that month."
"Like Thanksgiving?"
"Better than that. It lasts three days. Not even counting the leftovers."
"Man. A pig-out."
"A goat-out, is what it is. My family was nix on pork, on both sides--Jews and Muslims agree on that. But we love goat. People think lamb's the Middle Eastern thing but the real, true tradition is qouzi mahshi, milk-fed kid. Mom and I would always go visit the Arab cousins for Id-al-Fitr, at the end of Ramadan, and they'd roast a kid over this giant spit in their backyard. Then there's another feast four months later, Id-al-Adha, which requires an even bigger goat."
"I don't think I'd care for goat."
"No? You ever eaten it?"
"Nuh-uh."
"You don't know what you're missing. Qouzi mahshi, yum. It's like a sweet, tender calf, only better."
He looked doubtful.
"Hey, I thought you raised goats, Rickie. What are those things with horns I've seen back behind your house?"
"Oh, that was a Four-H project."
"And you didn't eat your project at the end?"
"Nah. They're just there to keep down the weeds, I reckon."
"Are they for milk, theoretically, or for meat?"
"They're supposed to be slaughter goats. The idea was to sell them at the state fair while they were still under forty pounds or something. The judges feel their ribs and hipbones and everything and give you a grade."
"And did your goats make the honor roll?"
"They were pretty good. But you can't sell a goat around here. Heck, you can't give away a goat around here. I know because I tried."
"But I've seen them all over the place. Here in this county, I mean."
"Well, see, there was this big slaughter-goat craze a while back in Four-H. Mr. Walker got people started on it for some reason, and now half the back fields in the county are full of goats people can't give away."
"Huh," Lusa said. "Who's Mr. Walker?"
"He's uncles or cousins to us someways. By marriage."
"Everybody within sixteen miles of here is uncles or cousins to you someways."
"Yeah, but Mr. Walker, he's the livestock adviser for Four-H. Or used to be, when I was a little kid. He's prolly retired now. He's got that farm over on number Six that's all weedy in front? He grows chestnut trees, I heard."
"Chestnut trees all died fifty years ago, Rickie. The American chestnut went extinct due to a fungal blight."
"I know, but that's what people say he's growing. I don't know. He knows all this stuff about plants. Everybody said he should have been the crop-project adviser, not the livestock adviser. That's why he screwed up all these kids on the goats."
"Huh," Lusa said. "You think he could help me find a cheap goat or two for a feast? What the hell, I'd even invite your mom and aunts up, scandalize the family with qouzi mahshi and imam bayildi."
"What's that?"
"Food of the gods, Rickie. Roast goat and roast stuffed vegetables. Actually imam bayildi means 'The emperor fainted.' Which is what your aunt Mary Edna would do if she saw a goat looking at her from the middle of her mother's walnut dining table."
Rickie laughed. He had a wonderful laugh, wide open, the kind that showed molars. "You don't need Mr. Walker to find you a goat. You could just run you an ad in the paper: 'Wanted, free goats. You deliver.' I swear, Aunt Lusa, you'd look out your window next morning and see a hundred goats out there eating your field."
"You think?"
"I swear."
"Well, they'd keep the thistles and briars from taking over my hayfields. I could get rid of my cows. Then I wouldn't have to learn how to run the bush hog."
"'At's a fact, they would keep your briars eat down. They don't take much hay, either; they can feed theirselves pretty good off the brush, most of the winter."
"Are you serious? My God, then I wouldn't even have to run my baler or put up hay? That's the best idea I've heard all day."
"You need some hay," he cautioned. "For when it gets bad. Just not so much." He lit another cigarette from the one that was still burning. She walked over and took the pack from him.
"Can I try this?"
"Go ahead. Gives you cancer."
"I think I heard about that." She gave a small, mirthless laugh, peering into the hole in the pack. "I'll tell you, though, hanging on to extra years in my seventies doesn't seem high on my list right now. Under the circumstances." She extracted one white tube and stared at it. It smelled like Cole. "I can't even get excited about seeing thirty, to tell you the truth."
"That's how kids in high school feel. That's why we all smoke."
"Interesting." She put it in her mouth and leaned toward his lighter, which he pulled away, teasing her.
"This really our first time?"
"Yep. You're corrupting an old lady." She tried to inhale the tip of the flame, but her throat recoiled and she coughed. Rickie laughed. She waved a hand in front of her face. "I'm no good at this, obviously."
"It stinks, it really does. You shouldn't start, Aunt Lusa."
She laughed. "You're sweet, Rickie. Thanks for looking out for me."
He met her gaze for a second. He was a striking young man, a handsome union of his father's dark complexion and the Widener looks. Lusa was seized and simultaneously mortified by thoughts of his bare chest and arms, of putting her head there and being held by him. What was she, losing her mind? Was this celibacy, lunacy, or what? She glanced down at her tennis shoes.
"I really don't want to die," she said, a little shaky. "I don't mean to sound like that. I'm depressed, but I think that's normal for a widow. They say it passes. I was more just thinking that if tobacco's the lifeblood of this county, I should support the project."
>
"Nah, you don't have to." He dragged and puffed away, making tiny whistling sounds with his cigarette. He looked at her sideways. "Aunt Lusa, I hope you'll take this the right way, but you're no old lady. These guys at school, friends of mine? They seen you at Kroger's and said you were pretty hot."
"Me?" She blushed scarlet.
"No offense," he said.
"None taken. I know, you and Cole used to skip school together and he taught you how to sweet-talk girls. I keep forgetting I'm not your mother."
He grinned and shook his head. "You are not my mother."
"Thank you," Lusa said primly, feeling a little guilty for all the names she'd called Rickie's mother in her mind: long-in-the-tooth, leather-lunged Lois. "I'm sure your mother is a better soul than me."
He snorted. "If that's what you call it. My mother believes in no cussing, a good night's sleep, and everything in the kitchen decorated with little ducks."
"And how do you know I don't believe in those things?"
"I seen your kitchen."
"Hey, look, I can do this." She took a tiny gulp of cigarette smoke but mostly vamped with it dangling from her fingertips, draping her arm over the top of her head. "How old is Lois, if you don't think she'd mind my asking?"
"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 s
o 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.