What Comes After (31 page)

“Please,” I said, “can you help me anyway? My goat is sick, and none of the other vets are answering. It’s an emergency.”

“Well,” he said, “all right. What’s the problem you have?”

I described all of Huey’s symptoms.

“How old is your goat?” he asked.

“A couple of months.”

“ Uh-huh, I see.”

“So can you come out here?” I said. “Please? I’ll pay you.” Though I had no idea how I would do that.

“How old are you, young lady?” he asked.

“Sixteen.”

“And is there someone else there?”

“It’s my aunt’s farm, but she’s not here.”

“Is she coming back soon?”

“No,” I said. “She’s not here. She can’t be here. Nobody’s coming.”

He said, “Well, OK, then. We’ll just have to handle this ourselves. From the sounds of it, it’s one of two things, and probably it’s goat polio.”

I sat down on the kitchen floor, deflated.
Polio
 . . .

“That’s the better diagnosis, actually,” Dr. Herriot said. “If you get to it in time, you can treat goat polio. If it’s the other thing — listerosis, which is a bacterial infection and needs antibiotics — we’ve got a tougher situation.”

I leaned back against a cabinet, the handle digging into my side. “So what do I do?”

“Goat polio is a thiamine deficiency. Does your aunt have any thiamine? If you’re raising goats, you likely have some in the house. Go look wherever you have to look. I’ll wait on the phone.”

I slammed open the doors to Aunt Sue’s goat paraphernalia cabinet, riffling through it all — bottles of stuff, books and pamphlets, cheese-making equipment — until I found what I was looking for. A large bottle with a dropper. I raced back to the phone.

“Got it!”

“All right,” he said. “Good. Good. Now, here’s what we do. Write this down. You have a pencil? Write this down.”

He gave me the dosage for Huey’s weight — which I estimated, but it was the best I could do. He said I had to give it to him every six hours over the next twenty-four.

“If you’re going to lose him, it’ll be a day to three days after the onset,” he said. “If he’s going to improve, you might see it in just a couple of hours, but you might not. You just have to stick with him, give him his doses when they’re scheduled.”

“He looks so bad,” I said, twisting the phone cord. “I don’t think he can even see me anymore.”

“That’s blindness. That’s a symptom, too,” Dr. Herriot said. “But even that can clear up. You just have to wait and see.”

“But what caused it?” I asked, worried that the other goats might get sick, too.

“Moldy feed. Moldy hay. Too much grain,” he said. “Your goat needs plenty of free-choice roughage, which is where he gets his thiamine. Too much grain, not enough of the other, that’s your recipe for goat polio.”

I knew I should get back to Huey, but I was afraid of getting off the phone — afraid of being alone.

“Is there any way you could come out?” I asked again. “Please?”

“I’m truly sorry, but it takes me too long to get anywhere these days,” Dr. Herriot said. He sounded tired just from our phone conversation. “You just call me when you see improvement.”

“I understand,” I said. “Thank you. I’ll call back.” And I hung up.

Huey lay on his side, twitching, but not convulsing the way he had been before. Drool puddled under his face. I had to turn his body up so I could work the dropper into his mouth and squeeze the thiamine down his throat without him drooling it right back out. He managed to swallow it, and I yelped with excitement. Patsy went back outside to be with the others, but Louie kept running in and out of the goat door.

I held Huey’s head in my lap and told myself again that I couldn’t panic just because something was wrong. That didn’t help anything. And stuff was going to happen. It was a farm. They were goats. They ate stuff they weren’t supposed to, or ate too much of something. I’d given them too much grain because I was so happy to see them, and happy to be with them, but that was stupid. I should have known better. And there wasn’t much roughage left in the field. The goats had stripped most of the saplings, pulled up most of the grass and weeds, stood as tall as they could with their front legs against the fence, or against any tree, to get at every branch and leaf they could reach. I should have been taking them on more goat walks. Winter was coming. I had to figure things out.

There were a hundred things to figure out. And the feed and the roughage were just two of them. The most pressing, though — the one I’d been trying not to think about — was that I was going to have to confess everything to the Tutens. I had to stay with Huey, see him through this, keep giving him the thiamine, reassure the other goats and Gnarly. I couldn’t leave. But the Tutens were expecting me home any minute.

Huey seemed calmer now — asleep or unconscious or in a trance. I hugged him, kissed him on his long, sloping nose, then slid out from under him. His breathing had softened. I just needed to get through the next six hours, hope he’d hang on, and give him his next dose. And then the six hours after that. And the six hours after that.

I coaxed the nannies into the barn one by one for milking: Patsy, then Loretta, then Jo Dee, then Reba, then Tammy. I thought about Littleberry trying to climb on her for a ride the first time I brought him to the farm. I wished he was here now.

I finished the milking and gathered half a dozen eggs from the roosts out of habit. It had gotten dark out, well into night. Gnarly and I shepherded the goats into their stalls and chased the chickens inside as well. I fed everybody, checked on Huey, who was still breathing in the same soft way, then went in the house to call the Tutens.

Mrs. Tuten listened on the phone while I explained the situation, including the agreement with Aunt Sue. I expected her to be furious, but she wasn’t. She just said, “I see.” I tried to apologize but she cut me off: “No time for that right now.”

They drove out to Aunt Sue’s right away. Gnarly went crazy barking and snarling when he heard them on the long gravel driveway, and I had hold of his collar and was shushing him by the time they pulled up to the house. Huey’s condition hadn’t changed from the first dose of thiamine; he still lay on his side, unresponsive. Louie hadn’t been able to settle down yet in the barn and just wanted to stay near me, so I’d let him follow me out to collar Gnarly and greet the Tutens.

Mrs. Tuten got out of the car and knelt down by Louie. She ignored Gnarly; I wondered if she didn’t like dogs, since they tended to lunge at her ferrets during their walks.

“Is this him?” she said. “Is he all better?”

“No,” I said. “This is his brother, Louie. Huey’s in the barn. He’s still sick.”

Mr. Tuten lifted a wicker basket and a small cooler out of the backseat of their car.

“We brought dinner,” Mrs. Tuten said. “It’s only leftovers, but it will have to do. Mr. Tuten, would you be kind enough to take everything inside the house?”

Louie rubbed against Mrs. Tuten’s thigh, and she patted his head, which he likely didn’t even feel. I was pretty sure she’d never touched a goat before. Mr. Tuten headed for the back door with the basket and the cooler. Mrs. Tuten stood up, though she kept her hand on Louie’s head.

“Now,” she said. “Let’s go see this sick goat of yours.”

I had my sleeping bag, but Mrs. Tuten made Mr. Tuten drive back into town to get his summer hammock for me to use in the barn. I argued with them — or actually with her. I’d slept in the barn before; I didn’t mind; I just had to stay close to Huey. But Mrs. Tuten insisted.

“There are mice in that barn,” she said. “I heard them. And I can only imagine what other sorts of vermin.”

“You just heard the chickens,” I said, but Mrs. Tuten wouldn’t listen. Mr. Tuten drove off while we washed the dishes from dinner, which had been vegetable medley and pork chops again.

When we finished, Mrs. Tuten put her hands on her hips and looked around, as if she’d been too busy to fully inspect Aunt Sue’s house until now. “It could certainly use a good cleaning.”

Mrs. Tuten said she thought it best if she and Mr. Tuten spent the night, since I was going to be out in the barn with Huey. And they
were
the foster parents. I knew there was no use arguing with her about it, or about much of anything. I was still waiting for her to be angry. She probably was, but she seemed to be one of those people who turned helpful in a crisis. As long as the crisis lasted, I figured her anger would stay in check.

Mr. Tuten helped me tie the hammock up in the barn. It had gotten colder, and a late-autumn wind whistled through cracks in the walls. I pulled on my hoodie and down jacket and a pair of insulated jeans I hadn’t worn since the winter before in Maine. Dad had had a pair just like them. Louie finally settled down and went to sleep with the other goats. Patsy lifted her head at any noise we made, just checking on things.

Mr. Tuten had to get up early for work in the morning, so around eleven he went upstairs to sleep in my old room. Mrs. Tuten stayed up to help me give Huey his second dose of thiamine. She shivered the whole time — she only had a thin jacket on — so I promised her I would crawl into my sleeping bag in the hammock if she would go back inside the house and go to sleep on the sofa, which she did.

I sat up with Huey for a long time after that, though. I turned off the overhead bulb so it wouldn’t disturb the animals, but I had a battery-powered lantern of Aunt Sue’s that I kept on so I could still see. I sang some songs to Huey that my dad used to sing to me. Not lullabies this time, but old songs like “Me and Bobby McGee,” and “Teach Your Children,” and this strange one by Neil Young called “After the Gold Rush,” part of which was about getting on silver spaceships and leaving Earth.

Huey shifted in my lap — not much, more like stretching out, then relaxing. His neck wasn’t so stiff anymore, and his head wasn’t turned so hard and rigid toward his flank. Maybe it was a sign that the medicine was working. “Huey?” I whispered. “Can you hear me? Hey, little guy. Are you there?” He seemed to relax a little more in his sleep, or coma, or whatever it was, and I finally crawled into my sleeping bag in the hammock and fell asleep.

Mrs. Tuten came back out to the barn what must have been hours later. The squeaky barn door woke me, but it took a few minutes to remember where I was — bound up in the hammock, with my sleeping bag so twisted around me that I thought I’d never be able to pull myself out. I’d left the lantern hanging on a nail, on a post next to Huey’s stall, and could see Mrs. Tuten in the dull light of it — wrapped in one of Aunt Sue’s blankets, sitting in the straw.

“Mrs. Tuten?” I said, still trying to get free of my bag.

“Oh, don’t get up, Iris,” she said, her voice low and husky, from either deep sleep or lack of sleep. I had a feeling that she might have insomnia a lot of nights, though I’d never actually seen her up late before. It was just the way she always seemed to be tired, sometimes staring off at nothing when she didn’t know anyone was around.

She said, “I came out to check on things. Are you all right? I’m sorry to wake you up.”

“It’s OK,” I said. “You didn’t wake me up. It’s time to give Huey his next dose.” I squinted to look at Mr. Tuten’s watch, which he’d let me borrow. “In about an hour.”

I finally made it out of my sleeping bag and tumbled onto the barn floor. Then I crawled over to Huey’s stall with Mrs. Tuten and sat in the straw next to Huey, who seemed to be snoring. I’d never heard a goat snore. It was kind of a muttering, spitting, whistling sound.

“You really should go back to sleep, Iris,” Mrs. Tuten said. “You could go inside the house, where it’s warmer. I can wake you up when it’s time for the medicine.”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Tuten,” I said. “I’d be too worried about him, anyway. I was hoping he’d be better by now.”

“He will be soon,” Mrs. Tuten said. “I’m sure he will.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d learned the hard way that things didn’t get better just because I wanted them to.

I thought Mrs. Tuten had nodded off to sleep, wrapped in her blanket in Huey’s stall. But then she started talking.

“My mother,” she said, “would have died to know I was sitting here in a barn like this.”

“How come?”

“Oh, she was very, very proper,” said Mrs. Tuten. “And she liked a neat house. I had to wear skirts or dresses at all times in public, and anytime I sat down on the floor, I was expected to fold my legs back to the side, like I’m doing now.” She stroked Huey’s neck. “And we did not have pets. We weren’t really around animals at all that I can remember.”

“None?”

“We did go to a petting zoo once. And there was a picture of me when I was three, sitting on a pony at a birthday party.” She stopped talking, but I could tell she wasn’t through.

She unfolded her legs and pulled her knees up in front of her. She hugged them and clasped her hands together to hold on. “Mr. Tuten and I were determined that when we had our daughter, she would have lots of animals,” she said. “Dogs and cats and fish and hamsters. Whatever she wanted. We fenced in the backyard, but we never did have the animals. Except Hob and Jill, of course. But they came much later.”