"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."
"D
on'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."
"And that would be terrible?"
"To the moth it would. I think it dies or something, without them."
He stepped back, deferring to this dire claim. "Is that a scientific fact?"
She smiled. "My dad told me, so it must be true." She tried with her cupped hands to steer the moth away from the window. "Darn it, little wing, I'd open this window for you, but you've picked the only one that doesn't open."
"Who's your dad, a moth scientist or something?"
"Don't laugh, there are moth scientists. I knew of one, in graduate school." She tried to urge the moth toward the window over the bed, but nothing doing. It continued to throw itself eastward like a supplicant toward Mecca.
"Maybe if we close the curtain she'll go to a different window," he suggested.
"Maybe." Carefully she drew the white cotton curtain between the moth and the glass, but she could see that wasn't going to help much.
"She can still see the light," he said.
He'd believed her when she declared the moth a female. Deanna was touched. "You know what, I can't really sex a moth at twenty paces, I was bluffing. And no, my dad wasn't a scientist. He could have been. He was a farmer, but he was..." The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman's coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
"I can't really even describe how my dad was," she finished. "If you spent a hundred years in Zebulon County just watching every plant and animal that lived in the woods and the fields, you still wouldn't know as much as he did when he died."
"Your hero. I'm jealous."
"He was. He had theories about everything. He'd say, 'Look at that indigo bunting, he's so blue, looks like he dropped down here from some other world where all the colors are brighter. And look at his wife: she's brown as mud. Why do you reckon that is?' And I'd say something dumb, like, maybe in indigo buntings it's the men instead of the ladies that like to get dressed up. And Dad would say, 'I think it's because she's the one that sits on the eggs, and bright colors would draw attention to the nest.'"
"And what did your mama say about it?"
"Yeek!" Deanna howled, startled by the darting shadow of a mouse that burst from behind the woodpile and ran practically across their bare feet before disappearing into a hole in the corner between the log wall and the floor. "Damn." She laughed. "I hate how they make me squeal like a girl, every time." Eddie Bondo had jumped, too, she'd noticed.
"Your mama said 'Yeek'?"
"My mama said not a whole heck of a lot. On account of she was dead." Deanna narrowed her eyes, studying the hole into which the mouse had disappeared. She'd been stuffing holes with scraps of aluminum foil for two years. But anything with mice was a war you couldn't win, she'd learned that much.
She realized Eddie was looking at her, waiting for the rest of the story. "Oh, it's not a tragedy or anything, about my mother. I mean, to Dad it was, I'm sure, but I don't even remember her, I was that little." Deanna spread her hands, unable really to name the hole this had put in her life. "Nobody ever taught me to be a proper lady, that's the tragedy. Oh, now look, she is a she." Deanna pointed to the moth, which was pressing the tip of its abdomen against the fabric of the curtain, apparently attempting to lay eggs.
"My mama died, too, quite a while back," he said, as they watched the moth closely. "Happens, I guess. Daddy remarried after about, oh, fifteen minutes."
Deanna couldn't imagine such family carelessness. "Did you get along with her, at least?"
He laughed oddly. "She could have got along without me. She had her own kids, that was some of the trouble, who the ranch would go to. The whole ugly-stepsister story, you know."
Deanna didn't know. "My dad never did remarry."
"No? So it was always just you and him?"
Did she want to tell him this? "Mainly me and him, yeah," she said. "He had a friend, but that was years later. They never moved in together, they both had their farms to run, but she was good to me. She's an amazing lady. I didn't even realize until just lately how she'd been through hell and back with us. My dad was a mess on her hands at the end. And she had a little girl, too, with Down's syndrome and a hole in her heart that couldn't be fixed. My half-sister."
Eddie Bondo put his hands on Deanna's shoulders and kissed her. "This is you, isn't it?"
She ran a hand through his hair, newly shorn to a smoother shape--less crow, more mink. On Tuesday, her day of mortification after assaulting him in the chestnut log, she had let him talk her into many things, including cutting his hair with her little scissors. It was surprisingly thick, like the pelt of some northern animal that needed the insulation. The exquisite tactile pleasure of that slow hour spent out on the porch with her hands on his scalp had created between them a new kind of intimacy. Afterward they'd stood quietly watching a pair of chickadees gather up the fallen hairs for their nest.
"Me, no," she said, unsure what he meant, "my half-sister. Rachel was her name."
"It's who you are, I mean. You're telling me a piece of your life."
She looked at his eyes, watched him glance back and forth between her own two pupils. He was that close.
"Our bed's getting cold," he whispered.
"I don't think that's possible."
The fire cracked loudly then, like a shot, startling them like the mouse had, making them laugh out loud. Eddie Bondo ran for the bed and leapt under the blankets, hooting that the posse had found him out. She tugged at the edge of the bed, fighting him to let her in. "I reported you to the Forest Service," she warned. "Keeping a wildlife manager from her work, which is a hanging crime in these mountains."
"I get my last meal, then." He threw aside the covers to reveal himself, solemn and flat on his back. She pounced and tried to pin him, but he was strong and seemed to know real wrestling moves. In spite of her size and longer limbs, he could have her tidily turned with an elbow pinned behind her back every time. In less than a minute she was helpless, laughing as he straddled her.
"What is that, Bondo? Some kind of sheep-herding maneuver?"
"Exactly." He gathered a thick skein of her hair in one hand. "Next I shear you."
Instead he kissed her forehead and then each one of her ribs before nuzzling his head against her waist. But she tugged him back up to the pillow beside her. She needed to look at him. "OK," she said, "you're saved. I'm giving you a stay of execution."
"Governor. I'm your slave."
She wanted to play, but her mood was wrong for it. Speaking aloud of Nannie and Rachel had brought those two into this cabin. And her father, too--especially him. What would he have made of Eddie Bondo? "I told you something about me," she said. "Now you have to tell me one thing about you."
He looked wary. "I choose which thing? Or you get to ask?"
"I get to ask."
"A serious thing?"
"To me it is."
He rolled onto his back and they both stared up at the ceiling, its crooked log beams riddled with the small tunnels of beetles. Deanna thought about the trees they had been once, a long time ago. Suffering more in life than in death, surely. There was a scratching sound coming from the space above the roof boards.
"What's up there?" he asked.
"On top of those boards, cedar shingles--rotten, probably. See all the nails? Then galvanized tin on top of the whole mess."
"I mean that noise," he persisted.
"Mouse, probably."
"The same one that just made you squeal like a girl?"
She narrowed her eyes. "Different one.
One of his innumerable friends and relations."
They both stared for a while at the roof, their eyes following the sound as it moved higher, toward the peak. Deanna decided the motion was too slow for a mouse and considered the other possibilities.
"Who built this cabin?" he asked her.
"Guy named Walker, Garnett something Walker. There was this whole line of them, all with the same name. Kind of like land barons in this area, a hundred years ago."
"And this was the baron's luxurious abode?"
"Oh, not hardly. This was just the headquarters for one of his hundred logging camps. He and his sons logged out all these mountains. This was probably one of his last stands; the cabin is nineteen-thirties or so, I'd guess. Looking at the logs."
"What are they, oak?"
"Chestnut, every one. When people realized the chestnuts were dying out, they had this huge rush to cut down all that were left, even the standing deadwood."
He studied the construction more closely. "That's why the logs are kind of small and twisted?"
"Yeah. Deadwood, or maybe some of the bigger limbs off huge trunks they took for lumber. But Eddie, listen." She turned to look at him. "What I'm saying is, they realized the chestnuts were going extinct. So what did they do? They ran up here and cut down every last one that was left alive."
He thought about it. "They were dying anyway, I guess that's what they figured."
"But not all of them would have died. Some of those last chestnuts were standing because they weren't sick. They might have stood straight on through the blight."
"You think?"
"I'm sure. People study this stuff. Every species has its extremes, little pockets of genetic resistance that give it an edge on survival. Some would have made it."
She watched his eyes track the twisted logs as he pondered what she'd just said. This was the thing that surprised her again and again: Eddie Bondo paid attention. Most men of her acquaintance acted like they already knew everything she did--and they didn't.
"If some of the chestnuts had lived," he asked, "how long would they have stood?"
"A hundred years, maybe? Long enough to spread their seeds. Some of them did live; there's maybe five or six per county hidden back in the hollows, but there aren't enough to pollinate one another. If more of them had been spared they could have repopulated these mountains over time, but nobody thought about that. Not one person. They just sawed the last ones down, hell for leather."