What Comes After (12 page)

Aunt Sue stood up. “I’m going outside for a smoke.”

I took the opportunity to sit closer to Reba, who laid her head in my lap.

“It’s her second time,” Aunt Sue said, sounding gruff, but not entirely convincing. “She knows what she’s doing.” Then she left the barn to have her cigarette.

The next couple of hours passed like that — me continuing to hold Reba, rub her, talk to her, while Aunt Sue alternated between smoking outside and standing watching in silence inside. Finally, around midnight, something happened with Reba. She shifted in a certain way; her breathing quickened; her nostrils flared. She made low, guttural sounds.

Aunt Sue said, “Here we go.” She pumped K-Y Jelly into her hands and smeared it up her arms, then she knelt behind Reba, spread Reba’s legs wide apart, and slid her hands inside. Reba started bawling hard, and pushing. “Hold her,” Aunt Sue said, and I held her, my arm locked around her neck.

“I can see the first one,” Aunt Sue announced. She pumped more jelly on her hands and went in again. “They’re tangled up, like I thought.”

Reba struggled against me as Aunt Sue worked her arms up inside and wrestled the first kid around. The struggle went on for half an hour. Sweat poured down my face. I wished I’d taken off my hoodie because I was roasting in it, holding on to Reba. Both of us panted, pretty much together. I said things, dumb things, but the stuff you always say in those situations:
Hold on. It’ll be OK. Almost there.

“Would you shut up already,” Aunt Sue barked. “She’s a goat, in case you forgot.”

Aunt Sue grunted again, pulled hard, then leaned against Reba and pulled harder. The first kid popped out and Aunt Sue fell backward, still holding it in her hands. She dropped the kid right away and went back for the other one, but a second kid slid out on its own, and a third one followed almost immediately.

“I’ll be damned,” Aunt Sue said. “Triplets.”

She gestured with her bloody arms at an open cardboard box nearby. “You can let go of Reba now. She’s done. There’s milk bottles right over there. You go ahead and give those kids one each.”

“You’re not going to let them nurse at all?” I said. “What about the colostrum?” I knew from attending deliveries with Dad that colostrum in the mother’s milk helped immunize newborns against infections.

Before Aunt Sue could answer, though, something else slid out of Reba. The bloody mass of placenta. Everything was happening fast with this kidding. Reba shrugged herself around and looked at it for a minute. Then she started eating it.

I’d seen a lot of stuff with Dad, but I had to admit to being nauseated at that. I did what Aunt Sue told me, though. I grabbed the box of bottles and an old blanket and drew all three of the kids into my lap. They were all slick from the births, but I hardly cared as I hugged them to me. They were smaller than I’d expected — maybe because they were triplets — but each one was a perfect miniature of Reba. They stared up at me with huge liquid eyes and
maa
ed feebly. Two took the bottles right away; the last one I had to coax, but pretty soon he sucked, too. For the first time since coming to Craven County — for the first time since my dad started coughing, really — everything seemed perfect.

Aunt Sue wiped down Reba with an iodine solution. Then she started talking. It took me a minute to realize she was answering my question about the colostrum.

“I’m guessing you didn’t notice,” she said, “but every one of these kids is a male — a billy.” She almost sounded angry.

“Yeah?” I said, though I had a sinking suspicion about where she was going.

“So they’re not good for but one thing, and that’s their meat. I’ll fatten them up for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, then do the slaughter when they’re bigger but the meat’s still tender. So there’s no sense wasting good goat milk on them. We’ll get them on grain in a couple of days. Till then the bottles will do just fine.”

My heart sank — the perfect moment gone just like that — as she stalked outside to let the other goats back in for the night. I figured it must have been two in the morning by then. Patsy came in and stood behind me. She laid her head on my shoulder to check out the new kids. The other goats surrounded Reba, settled into the straw, and soon went to sleep. The kids sucked for a while, then stopped and looked up at me with those liquid eyes again. I wished they wouldn’t, because I couldn’t help falling in love with them when they did. I offered them their bottles again, and they blinked, and then sucked again, off and on until the milk was all gone. They staggered around a little on their wobbly legs, and I crawled on the barn floor with them, to catch them when they fell and lift them back up until they were too tired to stand. I gathered them into my lap again and tucked the blanket around us. They
maa
ed softly for a while, and then one by one they fell asleep.

Aunt Sue didn’t come back. An hour later a truck pulled up to the back porch. It was Tiny and Book, back late from their away game, and whatever party they’d been to afterward. The door slammed, and the porch light cut off.

I stayed in the stall with the kids all the rest of the night. After a couple of hours, the billies woke one another again and bleated hungrily. I was out of bottle milk, so I gently massaged Reba’s udder and squeezed just enough from her teats to refill the bottles for the kids. Their little bellies swelled, and they soon fell back asleep.

The kids gave me a reason to look forward to coming home from school each afternoon. They were all I could think about most of the time, and even if Littleberry had wanted to ask me out again, I never gave him the chance — rushing out to get on the bus the second the bell rang. We had to keep the kids separated from Reba during the day — I let her out in the field after the morning milking; they stayed in the barn. But once I did the afternoon milking, they could all play outside together. Reba couldn’t get enough of them then, nudging them around in the close-cropped grass, letting them butt her with their hard little heads. I followed along, waiting my turn, and when Reba needed a break, I took over.

Their favorite game was when I pushed on their foreheads and they butted back until they practically couldn’t stand up anymore. They would probably have butted one another to death if Aunt Sue and Book hadn’t burned out the buds where their horns were supposed to grow. I hated seeing that — the tool Aunt Sue used was like a soldering iron, and she did it just a week after they were born — but I hated it even more the following Saturday when they castrated the kids.

I’d gotten up early as usual that morning and gone out to the barn to do the milking and play with the goats and Gnarly. When I brought in the milk to pasteurize it, Aunt Sue and Book walked out without saying anything. I didn’t think much of it, though it was early for Book to be awake the morning after a game, until I heard one of the kids bleating frantically.

I dropped everything and ran back outside. Book was sitting on the barn floor, holding one of the billies in his lap with his big, rough hands. Aunt Sue was binding the kid’s scrotum tight at the base with a thick rubber band. Everything happened fast.

“Don’t worry,” Aunt Sue said before I could protest what they were doing. She let that kid go and grabbed another. “It only hurts for a minute. Everything gets numb and they can’t even tell when it falls off.”

The first kid staggered away from them over to me, dazed. I picked him up and held him close to me; he was trembling.

Aunt Sue might have been telling the truth, but I didn’t believe her. I’d never helped Dad with neutering or castrating any of the animals he worked with, so I didn’t know much about it, and didn’t
want
to know. But I could tell by the kids’ straining eyes, their plaintive bleating, and their stumbling around that they were scared and confused.

Afterward, Book told me I couldn’t call them billies anymore.

It was an hour after the castrations. The kids were still hanging close, bumping against me, as if I could protect them from what had just happened. We were sitting in the grass near the fence. The kids wobbled away from me a little ways and then wobbled back. Reba looked on mournfully.

Book was in the backyard washing the new truck, which I con tinued to make a point of spitting on every time I walked past.

“Once they don’t have their nuts, you’re supposed to call them wethers,” he said. “When they’re wethers, they don’t smell so bad as a regular buck. Plus they fatten up quicker.” He smacked his lips. “That’ll be some tasty meat. Too bad you don’t eat any, but more for me, I guess. Me and Tiny, last year the two of us ate an entire goat one time. We cut strips of a lot of it, wrapped it in bacon, and fried it. Called it Billy-in-a-Blanket.”

“You mean
wether,
” I corrected him.

“Yeah, well,” he said, “it just sounded better to say it that way.”

“Because of the alliteration,” I said.

Book kicked at a chicken that was trying to sneak past. It squawked and jumped out of the way. “Some damn times,” he said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

It wasn’t as if I didn’t know people ate meat, and it wasn’t as if I didn’t know where it came from. I’d seen plenty during those vet rounds with Dad, including this slaughterhouse outside our town where they stunned calves with sledgehammers then hung them upside down on giant hooks and sliced through their throats. And that was nothing compared to what they did at the chicken plant.

But I felt protective of the wethers. I still gave them bottles sometimes when Aunt Sue wasn’t around. She wanted to fatten then up with grain, but they still liked to nurse, and I loved holding them while they did. They followed me everywhere, even on my walks in the woods behind the house, all the way out to the Devil’s Stomping Ground. They knocked one another silly in ferocious butting contests. They hopped everywhere. They danced when I came home from school.

I knew Aunt Sue had plans to slaughter them in a few weeks or a month, but I had plans as well — to keep them alive.

Which was why I named them:

Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Beatrice called me a couple of weeks after the kids were born. It was a school night. Aunt Sue had just left for work, thank God. Book had fallen asleep on the couch, still clutching the remote control. I sat on the floor in the hall off the kitchen, which was as much privacy as the phone cord would allow me.

We hadn’t talked or e-mailed in a couple of weeks, and I wanted to tell her about the kids, but we barely got through our hellos before Beatrice cut in with her news.

“I thought I was pregnant,” she blurted out.

“You
what
?” She hadn’t told me she and Collie were having sex. She hadn’t told me she wasn’t a virgin anymore. How could I not know these things?

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I’m not. I never was, I don’t think. But I was worried for a while. I missed a period. My breasts sort of swelled a little, and they ached. But then I started bleeding. It might have been a miscarriage, or it might have just been a really heavy period.”

“When?” I said. “When did all this happen?”

“Last week,” Beatrice said. “I didn’t tell Mom. But I did go to the Planned Parenthood in Camden. They said I was OK.”

“
Are
you OK?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess. I mean, I’m glad I’m not having a baby.” She laughed weakly.

“I’m so sorry, B.,” I said, not sure what else to say.

“Yeah,” she said. “It was hard not having you here. I had to figure everything out by myself.”

“So you didn’t tell Collie?” I asked her. “He didn’t know, either?”

“About the baby scare? No way. Anyway, we broke up.”

“Sorry about that, too, B.,” I said, but this time I didn’t feel it as much. For some reason the news about her and Collie shocked me as much as the news about Beatrice maybe being pregnant. I was struggling to understand it all — why I was only hearing about this now, how she could have cut me out of so much of her life.

“It was a while ago,” she said — though how long could it have been, really? “But it’s no big deal. I’ve been out with a few other guys. You know.”

No, I didn’t. “Who?”

“Just some boys,” Beatrice said. “Some stupid boys.”

I wanted to press her for details — was it Brady Jenerette? Eric Wilburn?
Nate?
— but decided to drop it. I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to know, and I doubted she would tell me, anyway. I hesitated, then changed the subject.

“So what was it like?” I asked.

“What was what like?”

“The sex,” I whispered, as though Book might wake up and hear me from all the way in the living room.

“Oh,” Beatrice said. “That.” She laughed. “Nice at first. I mean, they were boys, and I guess they didn’t exactly know what they were doing, and I didn’t, either, not that it’s that hard to figure out. And they said all these sweet things, about how beautiful I was, or how hot I was, and how crazy they were about me. You know, all that clichéd bullshit.” She paused, and I wondered what she was thinking. It wasn’t so long ago that I didn’t have to wonder — I just knew.

“I liked it while we were doing it,” she said eventually, “even though it was kind of messy. And I liked it afterward, the holding — or I guess the being held part.”