What Comes After

by Steve Watkins

  After I finished with Patsy, I scratched her under her chin. She seemed surprised by that — I doubted Book or Aunt Sue were ever very sweet to their goats — but she quickly relaxed. She closed her eyes. If she’d been a human, she might have even moaned.

  After she stepped off the stand, Loretta practically hopped on up. I must have gotten too cocky, because again I didn’t lower the stanchion, and I also forgot to refill the feed trough, so once Loretta finished what Patsy had left in there, she pulled away and knocked over the milk bucket.

  Book laughed. “Told you. Mama’s gonna have your ass now.”

  “Just don’t tell her,” I said.

  He laughed again. “She’ll know. Can’t make the cheese if you don’t got the milk. Can’t sell the cheese if you don’t got the milk. Can’t do nothing if you don’t got the milk. And you don’t got the milk.” He noisily sucked down the last of his Big Gulp. “Mama says once we turn them pregnant goats into milkers, she can make a couple hundred dollars a week extra from all their cheese. Unless somebody goes around spilling too much.”

  I put Loretta in the stanchion and refilled the grain trough, and finished up with her milking.

  The third milker, Tammy, had slipped back outside the barn. Book finished off his Big Gulp, then said, “Hold on. I’ll show you how to fetch her. She likes to be trouble.”

  I followed him outside, thinking he’d coax her in with grain, but he just screamed at her and shooed her back toward the barn. He kicked her so hard that she stumbled, and before she could fully right herself, he kicked her again.

  “Stop!” I yelled.

  “Stop, hell,” he said. “You want her or don’t you?”

  I laid my hand gently on Tammy’s head, but she shied away, and when I tried to lead her into the barn, she balked and bolted back out into the field.

  Book snorted his usual snort. “I ain’t going after her,” he said. “That one’s all on you.”

  I ended up tricking Tammy back to the barn with a pile of grain on the ground by the door. When she wandered over to inspect it and then eat it, I jumped out from behind her and shoved her inside — and latched the door before she could bolt again. I had to drag her onto the milking stand and dropped the stanchion over her neck right away. Book went back to the house. Patsy and Loretta stayed out in the field. Tammy, defeated, shoved her face into the trough and let me milk.

  We had to pasteurize the milk, then stir in the bacteria culture and rennet, which is what turned it into cheese. Book told me how to do it while he sat at the kitchen table. “So this is your job from now on, like Mama told you this morning,” he said. “Now what you do is just cover it and let it sit in the fridge or anywhere cool until tomorrow, then you salt it and set it up so you drain off what they call the whey, and then you have your cheese.” He pointed to the stack of plastic containers. “Mama spoons it in there, and that’s what she sells at the farmers’ market.”

  “You don’t add anything else?” I asked him. “You don’t smoke it or flavor it or anything?”

  Book shook his head. “Mama says it’s too much trouble. We’re the only ones in five counties that makes goat cheese, and rich people can’t get enough of it just like that — just the soft goat cheese. They think it’s better than real cheese. More fancier.”

  Looking around, I figured they could use the money. They didn’t have a computer. No answering machine and probably no voice mail — just basic service and a black telephone so old the numbers were worn off the touch pad. They did have a TV and an antenna on top of the house, but no cable and no satellite dish. Aunt Sue had a twenty-year-old VCR that probably ate most of the tapes she brought home from the warehouse.

  About the only thing she had for entertainment that worked properly was a small, tinny, food-stained Walmart store-brand CD player. She kept it on the kitchen counter for listening to her country music CDs. Book told me sometimes he snuck his friends’ heavy metal on when she wasn’t home, but Aunt Sue always knew when he did because she said the nannies heard it all the way out in the yard and it caused their milk to sour.

  We had sandwiches again that night. I made mine with white bread, processed cheese, and wilted leaves from a half-brown head of iceberg lettuce, with a dill pickle on the side, which was pretty much all they had that I could eat. Aunt Sue didn’t allow us to eat any of the goat cheese or drink the goat milk. I thought about telling Aunt Sue that I was a vegetarian, but I suspected she would give me a hard time about it. Plus if all we were ever going to do around there was eat sandwiches, it probably didn’t matter. She and Book both made Dagwoods like the one Book had been eating the night before, with plenty of meat. I felt a little sick watching them wolf it all down.

  They talked about the football team, the schedule, the college recruiters, the asshole coaches, the asshole refs, the game coming up this Friday night, the game last Friday night, which must have been before the school year even started, though I didn’t care enough to ask. Neither of them asked about my day, which didn’t really surprise me. But I thought I should at least make some effort to be friendly.

  “So I think I got my schedule lined up OK,” I said when they both stopped to chew. “It’s not great. I’ve already taken all of the AP classes they have here when I was back in Maine. They might put me in some senior classes in the spring, though, which could be good.”

  Book snorted. It seemed to be an involuntary response to just about everything. “Know what AP stands for? Absolute Puke.”

  Aunt Sue didn’t laugh, but she did nod, which I supposed meant she appreciated Book’s joke.

  Then she turned back to me. “Was there anything else you wanted to interrupt us about?” she asked.

  I thought about just shutting up. I’d gotten pretty good at it over the past month, biting my tongue around Mr. and Mrs. Stone, and eventually even around Beatrice. But I was getting tired of it. And besides, there was something I had to ask if I didn’t want to have to survive every day at school on a diet of Fig Newtons and Snapples.

  “I’d like to pack my own lunches for school,” I said. “Sandwiches would be OK,” I added, which I thought was pretty generous of me, given the limp thing on my plate. “I hope that’s not a problem.”

  Aunt Sue looked as if I’d just walked in the door uninvited. She glanced down at her sandwich, then back at me. Finally she said, “I ate school lunch.” She nodded at Book. “He eats school lunch.” She leveled her gaze at me again. “You eat school lunch.”

  She took a bite of her sandwich. “Now, was there something else you needed?”

  “No,” I said, afraid my face had turned red and they could see that I was embarrassed and angry. “There’s nothing.”

  I made myself finish my sandwich, though every bite seemed to stick in my throat, and I had to drink glass after glass of water to swallow. Then I rinsed my knife and plate and cup and laid them in the drain board.

  “Thanks for dinner,” I said. Aunt Sue and Book both grunted.

  I went upstairs, intending to reread Huckleberry Finn and write my essay, but when I shut the door, the tiny room felt too claustrophobic again. I stood on the bed and leaned against the window, drinking in the evening air, listening to the low bleating of the goats — a comforting sound, but not comforting enough to keep me from missing Maine, and Beatrice, and Dad, and a life that wasn’t mine anymore. Whatever I might have been hoping for in North Carolina, it wasn’t this.

  I lay on the bed and curled into a ball and stayed there, and thought about Dad — his gray hair he always let grow too long and unruly, his green fishing cap, which was buried in one of my clothes piles on the floor, his red flannel shirts that always had a tear in them somewhere, his Saturday stubble, his Sunday aftershave, his Christmas-tree coffee mug, which he used year-round. I dug through the piles of clothes until I found his cap, then held it against my chest. I sat hugging it for a few minutes, then pulled out my notebook and started another letter.

  Dear Dad,

  I milked g
oats today. I’m surprised by how much I remember about them from Mr. Lorentzen’s farm. There are also chickens and guineas, and they have a great dog here named Gnarly. . . .

  I finally forced myself to sit up and do my homework, and that helped a little, too.

  The phone rang just before Aunt Sue left for work.

  “Iris!” Aunt Sue yelled from downstairs. “You got a phone call.”

  I practically ran from the room to get it. It had to be Beatrice. No one else knew where I was or would think of calling me. I reached for the phone, but Aunt Sue didn’t let go right away.

  “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 afternoo
n, 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.