The Ram (16 page)

The ewe drops to her hind legs without warning and Peach startles before regaining her focus. She sees Linx move up next to her, the coffees and pastries clutched to his chest. His face is white and stony.

“It’s going to come out,” Peach says and stands back. She looks around for something soft for the baby to rest upon and wishes she’d brought a heavier, down-filled coat. She decides she’ll have to catch the lamb before it lands on the unyielding brick of the street.

With each contraction, the lamb emerges farther out of the ewe. The face of the lamb is calm, its eyes squeezed shut. Ten minutes later, Peach is easing its back legs free from the mother. The birth has been a success. A semicircle of onlookers have gathered to be witness to the process, keeping several feet back from the ewe. The girl in the lavender dress is among them. She grins widely at Peach and swings her skirt around her legs.

Peach runs her hands over the lamb, clearing some of the afterbirth from its wooly face. Its eyes open, striking in their blackness, and Peach gently carries the lamb, a female, to the side of the ewe and eases her under her body. The baby finds a teat and takes long draws of milk from her mother.

And then Peach notices the number painted on the side of the ewe. It’s a fat number 8 in deep scarlet. She swallows hard.

She stands away then, waiting for the mother to regain her feet and let the lamb nurse more naturally. But the pained bleating continues, the ewe does not stand on her hooves, and Peach realizes she must be having twins.

Moving back around the sheep, she can see the tips of two hooves emerging, solid and sharp. But this time there is no length of nose accompanying them and when the ewe gives a strong push, Peach can see how the hooves tilt slightly upwards. The lamb is coming out backwards and face down.

“I’ve got to do something,” she says to Linx.

“Let it be, Peach,” he cautions, but she is already digging around in her purse. She pulls out a small bottle of hand sanitizer and unscrews the cap. She dumps the contents of clear, gelatinous alcohol over her hands and forearms, rubbing it into her skin. The smell makes her cringe, the fumes overwhelming her sinuses. She knows it’s better than nothing.

She slips one hand into the ewe and Linx exclaims behind her.

“Oh God, you’ve gone insane.”

She can feel the backside of the lamb but she can’t get a good hold of the legs. So she pushes in her other arm and locates the pelvis with her hands. Not sure of what to do at this point, Peach kneels behind the sheep and glances at the lamb nursing strongly on the laboring ewe.

Perfect Peach can do this, she thinks. She knows that this is part of her flowering life. That she’s meant to be here, now, helping this ewe give birth. This animal is her responsibility and she will see to this taxing labor.

The uterine walls contract, squeeze against Peach’s hands and she can feel the baby shift slightly toward her. She waits and when she feels the contraction again, she pulls gently on the back legs of the lamb, careful not to tug so roughly that she’ll dislocate a joint or two.

Sitting with crossed legs behind the sheep, Peach finally pulls the second lamb into the cool air of Easter morning and swabs off its face with her palms, sticky and wet with birthing fluid. The lamb doesn’t suck in air at first. But after a moment, it pries open its small mouth and flares its nostrils.

Peach checks its sex and sees that it’s male. She bursts into tears and her sobs become uncontrollable.

Instead of placing the ram down underneath the ewe, she stands with him still in her arms, his shaky legs dangling from her embrace. Now she understands why she did what she did last night, why she took what she took.

And then, without plan or thought, Peach runs to one of the barricades. She shuffles her body up and over, legs wide and splayed, and flees down the street, away from the other sheep. The heartbeat of the animal held close to her core thumps in time with her own. She can hear Linx calling for her to come back. She can hear the little girl let out a scream followed by loud sobs of confusion and anger over the stolen Easter miracle.

45 Riley

The carbs from the pancakes and the greasy meat have made him sleepy, but instead of heading for his bedroom and catching a late morning nap, Riley decides he better call one of the two people who need to hear about his accident. He presses his phone to his ear after dialing and takes a deep breath, keeps his eyes fixated on the drawing hanging on his refrigerator.

She picks up after one ring, her voice light at first and heavier upon hearing who’s calling.

“He’s playing with his Easter toys right now,” Kristin says and then yells at someone in the background, saying something about rolls of paper towels.

“It’s Easter, Kristin. I just want to talk to him for a second,” Riley responds. He keeps his voice mellow and quiet. He doesn’t want the exchange with his ex to be more wrathful than necessary.

“Right, one of the only days out of the year you
do
want to talk to your son.”

Riley keeps himself from saying something snide about the boy’s possible parentage. But even though he keeps silent, it does him no good. Kristin seems to know his thoughts, despite his lack of words.

“Go to hell, Riley. I’ll get him on the line.”

A high-pitched voice, small and distracted, comes on the line.

“Hi, Riley.”

He can’t believe the boy is five-years-old. Soon he’ll be able to have longer conversations with him, talk about sports and girls. Then the kid will be shaving hair from his chin and driving a used car too fast down the highway.

“Hey, buddy. What toys are you playing with?”

“Mom got me a blue chicken for Easter. Did you see it?”

Riley is thrown by the question. Kristin and Tate don’t live in Boise, but then he recalls how his mind worked when he was that young. The world was small and all the people you knew were in the same area. Distance meant nothing, nor did complicated relationships. Tate might even think Riley and his mother are actual friends.

“No, I didn’t. You’ll have to show it to me next time I see you.”

“When is that gonna be?” the boy asks and his voice gets far away. Riley can tell he’s pulled the phone away from his mouth.

“Soon, I’m sure.” Riley tries to find it within him to say something about the accident. But he doesn’t know how to tell a young child that he’s missing all the toes on his left foot. No matter how often he rehearsed this call when he was drunk on Jameson or Maker’s Mark these past afternoons, now, with Tate on the phone, he knows it’s not the time.

He smiles into the phone and imagines the boy’s light hair with the curls at his neck and his hazel eyes. He wonders if he’s gotten any taller, wider, smarter since he’d seen him last.

“You have a good Easter, okay? I just wanted to call and say hello. Eat a bunch of those sugary marshmallow chicks for me.”

“Okay,” Tate says absently, distracted by something. “Me and the man will have fun with the blue chicken. I promised him I’d share everything with him.”

Riley’s brow creases. “The man. Do you mean Brian, your stepdad?”

“No, I mean the man,” Tate repeats and then sings a Sesame Street tune about being a good friend. “If you come visit me, you can be friends with the man, too.”

Riley runs his eyes over the picture of the golden eagle Tate drew. Its flat, lifeless eyes stare back.

“Okay, little dude. We can all play with the blue chicken together the next time I see you. It’s a deal.”

“You want to talk to mom again?”

“No,” Riley says, “I only called to talk to you. “

Later, after the talk with Tate, Riley considers calling the other person he’d avoided telling about his accident. But he decides against it. He figures she’ll be eating Easter dinner with her family, shallow dishes of
camarones
and
langosta
arrayed on card tables, the house alive with the voices of fifty relatives and friends. Maybe the voice of a new boyfriend. And Riley knows, as bitter as it makes him to hear Kristin’s voice, it would be nothing compared to hearing the deep timber of a stranger speak over the line connected to a number he used to adore calling.

“Mayra Vega Pena,” he says her name and continues on with his mock conversation while opening his fridge and hunting for more food, though he isn’t hungry. The drawing from Tate is no longer in his line of sight. He smells cabbage rotting in his produce bin. “I have something to tell you about my toes.”

46 Peach

The lamb is limp and weak by the time Peach gets him into her apartment. As she walks by her couch on her way to the kitchen, she snatches a quilt off the back cushions. It was something she picked up at a thrift store a few years back. Whenever she had friends over, which was very rare, they would ask if it had been made special for her by an aunt or grandmother. Peach would tell them it was from her mother, that Peach had even picked out the colors, the red and orange blocks stitched together. But it was all a lie. It meant nothing to her. It was a blanket.

She tosses it on the kitchen floor and gently lays down the newborn lamb. Linx bursts through the front door and slams it behind him.

“You’ve lost your balls,” he yells at Peach, but she doesn’t stop moving to argue with him. She considers him lucky to have caught up to her, getting in her little Honda before she drove off, screaming at her the entire drive back to her apartment. She would have left him downtown otherwise.

“The expression is ‘lost your marbles.’ It has nothing to do with balls. And please don’t yell around the lamb,” she says and opens the refrigerator. She rearranges some green olives, a jug of guava juice and produces a glass bottle of whitish-yellow liquid. She pours a bit into a smaller glass and heats it in the microwave for thirty seconds.

She snaps her fingers at Linx. “Get in the second drawer down by the oven and bring me that plastic funnel.”

He does what she says, a look of confusion on his face. “Why the hell do you have yellow milk in your fridge?”

“It’s colostrum,” she says, the only explanation she’ll offer up. “And the lamb needs it.” She did not question the stars, especially her best, lovely star, when they murmured to her the dictate to get the nutrient-rich milk. She had obeyed, confused at the time, though their commandment now had meaning.

She snatches the funnel from his hands and pulls the milk from the microwave. She dribbles a bit on her wrist, the way she’s seen mothers test the milk for their infants, and is satisfied it’s not too hot for the lamb’s mouth.

The animal is quiet, eyes rolling around, taking in the colors and shapes of the kitchen. Peach gently pushes the tip of the plastic funnel into the small ram’s mouth and drips a bit of the warmed milk onto his tongue. His eyes snap forward, locking onto the funnel and he sucks down all the milk he’s given.

“I’ll have to get a livestock bottle later today at that farm store,” Peach says.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Peach is in love with the way the lamb kneads at the tip of the funnel with his lips. He has heavily lashed eyes. He smells like warm cream though his wool is covered in putrid secretions.

“He’s a sign, Linx. This baby is a sign that I’m on the right path. That what I’m doing with my life is perfect and correct.”

Linx pushes himself onto the counter and hits his head on one of the cupboards. He rubs his skull and frowns. “That doesn’t make any sense to me. What sign? You stole a newborn lamb from its mother, from a flock of sheep wandering around downtown Boise. The whole situation was odd and then you had to go and kidnap a baby animal. There were cops everywhere. What if they find you and ticket you or something?”

The milk in the cup is almost gone and she’ll have to heat more. The lamb is stirring, kicking out his legs. One of his ears flicks about, doing little turns and twists.

“I left the ewe the female. I took the male. It makes sense,” she says and then stops herself from saying anymore. She knows that it
doesn’t
make sense, not to Linx. And the more she says sends her further down the hole she’s digging, making her sound crazier. The last thing Peach wants is for Linx to think she’s crazy. He’s her best friend and a true companion. He’s perhaps the only person who will accept her once she undergoes the change that’s coming. At least she hopes.

Linx slips down from the counter and takes the glass from Peach’s hand. He pours more of the rich colostrum into the container and nukes it. “Thirty seconds?” he asks.

She nods, her eyes growing teary. The ram truly is a gift and for all her odd actions and nonsensical rants, Linx has already given up his protests to help Peach.

The first sound the ram makes is a weak bleat. Then he pushes himself up, hinging at his knees, and stands on the second-hand quilt. Peach reaches her arms around the lamb in case he wobbles and falls. She wants to protect him from the sharp angles of the wooden cabinets and the base of her stainless steel refrigerator.

She feels bolder than ever. More resolute. Peach has brought a bit of the sacred, the holy into her life and she knows it’s just the beginning. The ram tips slightly, his drying wool grazing her fingers, but regains his balance and bleats again, louder. Then two more bleats. Five more.

“He’s going to be so strong,” Peach cries. Linx passes her the glass of warm milk and then resumes his roost on the counter, watching the show through narrowed eyes.

Summer, 1999

47 Riley

His father puts his finger on the title of each class elective as he reads them aloud to Riley.

“See, Pre-Law,” he says and pokes at the word. “They offer it as a high school elective. I’m sure it’s the basics of our judicial system taught in simple terms but it won’t hurt as a primer before college. Put it down as a first choice with French 4 as a second choice.”

Riley hates law and the French language, but he finds himself writing out each of the course titles in caps, putting each letter into the separate boxes printed lightly on his registration form. He wonders why the French can’t spell their words phonetically. He can’t get behind a language that disregards all the consonants and extra vowels they put on the ends of their words without pronouncing them.