What Comes After (6 page)

“I don’t like calls here,” she said. “Keep it short.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

Beatrice heard.
“Yes, ma’am?”
she said once I had the phone to myself. “What’s that all about?”

“It’s how they talk down here,” I said. I stretched the cord out of the kitchen and down the hall. “Aunt Sue has a lot of rules. I’m supposed to say it, to be polite.”

“You aunt doesn’t sound too polite herself,” Beatrice said. “Telling you to keep it short the first time I even call.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s pretty strict. But they have goats here, so that’s a plus. And they have a dog.”

But Beatrice didn’t seem to hear me. “God, I miss you, Iris. There’s nobody to talk to up here. I still can’t believe you’re really gone. How are you? How’s the school?”

“Different,” I said.

“Different how?” Beatrice asked.

I told her about the girls in the restroom, and the chewing tobacco, and Book’s friend Tiny with his big elbows.

“What?” said Beatrice. “They think the Civil War is still going on,
and
they’re perverts?”

“Some, I guess.”

“Just remind them who won.”

“Maybe I’ll wait awhile on that.”

“Do they have a softball team?”

“I haven’t checked. Anyway, it looks like I’ll have to come home in the afternoons to milk the goats and do chores.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“It could be worse.” I didn’t want to tell Beatrice how much I already liked the goats — the feel and smell of them. And how much I liked Gnarly, and he liked me. I didn’t want her to think anything was good here.

“It’s not OK, Iris,” she said. “It’s child labor. You should complain to someone.”

“There’s no one to complain to.”

“What about a social worker?”

“I don’t think I have one.”

“Well, when you get one, complain.”

“OK.”

“OK.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

There was an edge to my voice that surprised me, and I wondered if Beatrice noticed. I didn’t want her advice. I didn’t need it. I needed her to understand what I was going through, and for her to be torn up with guilt that she hadn’t made her parents let me stay.

“So how are your parents doing?” I asked. “Are things any better now?”

“Oh, God,” Beatrice said. “
Them.
Who knows? They’re parents. They fight; they don’t fight. I’m just trying to ignore them.”

“So what about Collie?” I asked. “How are things with him?”

“You mean Mr. ‘It’s complicated’? I think I’m going to start ignoring him, too. But there are plenty of boys up here besides him. Well, maybe not plenty, but some. Nate called me tonight.”

“Nate?” I said, surprised. Nate and I had dated for a month back in the spring; I stopped seeing him after Dad got so sick.

“Yeah,” Beatrice said. “I mean, we just talked. He heard Collie and I were having a fight, and he just wanted to see how I was doing. That’s all.”

That edge came back into my voice then — and I didn’t care if Beatrice heard it. “You can’t go out with somebody your best friend dated, B.”

“I know, I know,” she said quickly. “I wouldn’t ever do that. You know I wouldn’t. Come on, Iris.” She sounded hurt.

I knew I was supposed to say something to make her feel better, maybe apologize. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t know what else to say to Beatrice, though, and she didn’t seem to know what to say to me, either.

Aunt Sue ended the conversation for us.

“Hang up!” she shouted from the kitchen.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Yeah,” Beatrice said in a voice that was already fading out. “I heard. Bye, Iris.”

“Bye, B.”

I didn’t want to be crammed into Tiny’s truck between him and Book, so I rode the bus the next day. I felt strange at school, silent in a way I’d never been before, and I kept to myself. I ate lunch alone under that pine tree outside, handed in my
Huck Finn
assignment, didn’t say anything in any of my classes. But the farm was different — or at least the part that I quickly claimed as mine: the fields and the barn and Gnarly and the goats. I played with Gnarly as soon as I got off the bus in the afternoon. I milked the goats and looked after the chickens and started making the goat cheese. Aunt Sue supervised me the first time, but the process was simple. She couldn’t find much to criticize.

“Put in more salt,” she said, and that was about it. “People around here like salty. Salty boiled peanuts, salty goat cheese, salty everything.”

So I added more salt, which was double the standard recipe I found in one of her cheese-making books for what they called bag cheese — the soft white chèvre that was all Aunt Sue made.

My third day there, Aunt Sue ordered me to clean out the barn, which I’m sure she thought was a lousy job, since neither she nor Book had done it in what looked like years. But I didn’t mind the work. I liked having a routine and feeling useful. Most of the goats wandered out in the field, but Patsy stood half in and half out of the barn door, hardly moving, watching me intently as I stacked and cleaned and piled and nailed. I had the impression that she was taking inventory of everything I left in and everything I hauled out. She walked around inside the barn several times once I was done, as if inspecting the job.

“So what do you think?” I asked her. “Good enough?”

She blew her nose on the barn floor, raising a puff of hay dust.

“Forget it,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anybody sweeping out a barn.”

If a goat can shrug, then that’s what Patsy did. Then she blew her nose again, I guess to make a point. But I still wouldn’t sweep.

The other goats, or three of them anyway, rubbed against me as if I was a fence post when I took a break after a couple of hours and went out into the field. Patsy let me scratch her head and under her chin when I milked her, but Loretta, Reba, and Jo Dee loved it anytime, all the time. They liked to play with me, too — wrestling and tag and tug-of-war. Gnarly stayed on the other side of the fence when I was with the goats, watching jealously until I came back out into the yard to pay attention to him some more, too.

The one goat I had trouble with was Tammy. She butted me hard a couple of times when I tried to play with her in the field, and tore a hole in my T-shirt with one of her horns. All the goats except Jo Dee, the youngest, had horns, and though they weren’t very long, they could still hurt. Tammy poked the other goats with the pointy ends of her horns sometimes. She never drew blood, but you could tell it hurt. Patsy wouldn’t stand for it, though, and tossed Tammy back a couple of times a day just to make sure she knew her proper place in the herd.

One afternoon that first week, when I was busy in the barn, I heard Tammy bleating frantically, and I came outside to find her with her head stuck in the fence. I had to wrestle it around to pull it out, but it wasn’t easy. “Just turn your head sideways!” I yelled at her about ten times. “That’s how you got it in there in the first place!” When I finally got her loose, I thought she’d be grateful, but she just waited until my back was turned and butted me into the fence.

I got mad at first, but then I thought about how Book had treated her that first afternoon, and I thought about he treated Gnarly. I knew goats liked to play rough, but Book wasn’t just rough with the animals; he was mean.

Book had an away game that first Friday, and it was close enough for Aunt Sue to drive and still make it to her shift at work. She left in the afternoon and didn’t bother inviting me along. I didn’t mind, because it meant I had the farm all to myself, and after I milked the goats and finished the rest of my chores, I decided to explore the woods behind Aunt Sue’s property — a tangle of brush and saplings and hardwoods that eventually gave way to pine forest. Book had told me there was supposed to be a haunted place deep in the forest, ringed with stones, where nothing ever grew and the earth had been scorched by fire. He called it the Devil’s Stomping Ground. He was probably trying to scare me, but it just made me curious. I looked for it for a long time, but all I ever found was a nice green meadow, the grass chewed low by deer. It was a serene spot, the opposite of a devil’s stomping ground, but I decided to call it that, anyway.

Gnarly trotted along with me, happy as usual to have somebody notice him, and he lay down with me in the cool shade at the edge of the meadow. I petted him for a long time, rubbed his belly, checked him for ticks and fleas.

“You like this, boy? Huh? You like this, Gnarly?” I talked to him the way I’d talked to dogs all my life, and I let the calmness of the Devil’s Stomping Ground and being with Gnarly wash over me.

When we got back to the farm, I found Loretta chewing on the rusted end of the downspout from the gutter at the corner of Aunt Sue’s house. I had no idea how she’d managed to get out of the pen. Patsy was pressed against the fence watching — more curious than concerned. Goats can eat a lot of stuff, but I doubted rusty downspouts were on the recommended list. Plus I knew Aunt Sue would be mad if she saw any of the goats running around in the yard — or chewing on her gutters. Loretta must have really liked the taste, though, because I had to grab her by her horns and pull to get her back inside the fence.

She quit fighting when I opened the gate, though, and she nuzzled me once I got her in — an unexpected display of affection. That moment, and the sweet afternoon with Gnarly, made me realize how long it had been since anyone had shown me any sort of kindness. I dropped down onto my knees and hugged her back.

Aunt Sue and Book continued to ignore me for the most part. No one asked about school, or how I’d slept, or if I missed my dad. At Aunt Sue’s it was chores, dinner, and reality shows on TV. The only things Aunt Sue and Book talked about were goat cheese, football games, and the sorry knuckleheads Aunt Sue worked with at Walmart. Aunt Sue sat on the back steps every morning and evening smoking her cigarettes — one after breakfast, one after dinner, one anytime she drank a beer — and if I happened to walk past, she sometimes nodded, but that was all.

At school, in English, the class got into a discussion about Jim in
Huckleberry Finn
— about what he meant when he called Huck “honey” all the time.

“Mrs. Roosevelt,” one kid asked, “do you think Jim was on the down low? You know, like, dude has a wife and kids and all, but he’s got a thing for the Huckleberries, too?”

Everybody cracked up when he said that, except Shirelle. She rolled her eyes in exasperation.

“Yeah,” a girl said when things quieted down. “I wondered about that, too, if Jim’s sweet on Huckleberry. They spend all that time in their nudeness and everything.”

Mrs. Roosevelt told them they should keep in mind that people talked differently back in those days, before the Civil War, and what people a hundred years from now would think about the way people talked today.

“I guarantee if they write the book on us, somebody better have a whole bunch of them Sharpies to pass out in the classrooms,” said a boy. “Do some Sharpie marking on those books first thing.”

Shirelle shook her head. I knew if I was going to make a friend in Craven County, she would probably be the one, but I didn’t try to talk to her after class. I didn’t try to talk to anyone else at school, either. Things were strained between Beatrice and me — we were e-mailing but hadn’t talked in a week, since my second night in North Carolina — but I hoped that would pass, and I still didn’t want to be a part of anything here. Except maybe Gnarly and the goats.

One night near the end of my second week, not long after Aunt Sue left for work, Gnarly started barking. I had just fallen asleep, and it woke me up with a start. Maybe it was squirrels, or raccoons, or deer. Maybe he was just barking because he felt like it, because Aunt Sue was gone and he was happy. It didn’t seem to bother Book — I doubted anything could wake him up — but after an hour I couldn’t stand it anymore. I went outside and found Gnarly running back and forth under the clothesline, so I lay down with him in the grass, which calmed him down. As soon as I went back inside, though, he started up again. I jammed my pillow over my head, closed the window, shut my door, but nothing worked. Finally, after another noisy hour, I went back outside and unhooked Gnarly’s leash. I figured he would run around in the field for a while, maybe head for the woods and tire himself out. And it seemed to work, because everything was quiet when I crawled back into bed.

The sun was barely up hours later when I heard someone yelling. I bolted straight up in bed, confused. I’d been dead asleep for the first time since I’d been there. Dreaming about my house in Maine, only it didn’t look like my house, exactly. The rooms were empty. I was looking for somebody. Just like in the dream I’d had about my dad. Beatrice was there, but she wasn’t who I was looking for. Then Book was there, telling me I forgot to feed the goats, I was supposed to feed the goats, what about the goats?

The yelling that woke me up kept on, finally shaping itself into Aunt Sue’s voice: “Who in hell let Gnarly off the clothesline?”

Book ran out of his bedroom and into the kitchen — I heard him even though my door was shut — stuttering so bad it was impossible to understand a word.