“Well, you didn’t help things much,” I said. “You just got yourself beat up.”
“I hit him a couple of times.”
“Great. And now people are going to ask questions. They’re going to want to know why you got into a fight with him.”
We didn’t say anything else for a while. Littleberry wiped his palms on his jeans, then inspected them. Then he leaned against my shoulder.
“Sorry, Iris.”
I kicked at an old empty milk carton. “I guess it’s OK,” I said. “I appreciate you standing up for me. Just don’t do anything dumb like that again.”
Littleberry tried to grin, but I could tell it hurt his face.
Shirelle caught up with me after English and wanted to know about the fight.
“Dennis is telling people you pointed a gun at him, out at your farm,” she said. “What’s up with that? Is that why they got in the fight? And what the hell are you doing with a gun?”
I said I didn’t want to talk about it, but Shirelle was persistent. “We’re teammates, Iris. So tell me. If you’re in some kind of trouble, maybe I can help.”
“I can handle it,” I said. “But thanks.”
“Maybe you can and maybe you can’t. But sometimes you got to let your friends help you, and they can’t help you if they don’t know what’s going on.”
She picked up my backpack and slung it over her shoulder, then we walked down the hall together. She handed it back when we got to my locker, though she didn’t let go right away.
“Sometimes you just got to trust people, Iris,” she said. “At least a little.”
So I told her — about the deal with Aunt Sue, about hiding what I was doing from the Tutens, about Drunk Dennis and the field party and the vandalism — and about what had happened at the farm.
Shirelle was so mad, she was ready to fight Drunk Dennis and Donny herself.
“I never could stand those boys from the second I ever met them,” she said. “They’re not even first string. Donny, he’s like the water boy or something. Dennis plays on special teams, and that’s about all.”
She said she’d talk to her cousin, whose name was Tyreek. She said he played tight end on offense and linebacker on defense.
“Tyreek will definitely straighten out those boys.”
“But you just said he’s on the football team.”
“So?” Shirelle said. “They don’t all think the same way about everything, you know.”
“They don’t?”
Shirelle shook her head. “Not Tyreek. He’s no knucklehead. He went to Boys’ State last year, and you have to have the grades for that.” She rubbed her hands together. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I’ll make sure Tyreek has a word with Dennis the benchwarmer and Donny the water boy.”
Littleberry was waiting for me again that afternoon, sitting on the hood of my truck.
“So?” I asked.
He threw gravel at a spare tire mounted on the back of somebody’s Jeep. “So I’m suspended for three days.”
“What did you tell them?” I asked. “About why you got in a fight.”
Littleberry blushed. “I just told them it was about a girl.”
That made me smile, even though I was still worried. “And Drunk Dennis — what did he say?”
“Same thing. I said it first, and he did his snorting thing, but then he said it, too. I guess he didn’t want them finding out he was trying to commit arson.”
I didn’t ask why Littleberry wasn’t home or how much trouble he was in with his mom. It couldn’t have been too bad if he was here waiting for me. He got into the truck before I could ask if he wanted to, and we drove out to the farm.
I did the milking and gathered the eggs and started new cheeses, then I pitchforked up old goat turds out of the barn to inspect them — the same way Mrs. Tuten examined Hob’s and Jill’s. They were all nice, round pellets, which meant everybody was OK. I’d been reading one of Aunt Sue’s goat books, and it recommended checking the goats’ eyes, too — something I remembered Dad always doing — to make sure the tissue under their eyelids was red. If it was white, that could mean the goats had parasites that were stealing nutrients out of the food they were digesting, not leaving the goats with enough for their red-blood-cell supply, making them weak and sick.
They all looked good. We wheelbarrowed the turds over to the manure pile next to the barn.
The work usually had a hypnotic effect on me, but today I stayed anxious, flinching at noises and scanning the driveway. I kept the .22 next to me while we worked and carried it along when we took the goats for another walk. Patsy and the others had been so great the day before, chasing off Dennis and Donny, that I decided to reward them by letting them forage through the woods for as long as they wanted.
We eventually made it all the way to the Devil’s Stomping Ground, and I felt relieved once we got there, sure that we were safe, that no one would find us. I hadn’t been there since the day I buried Dewey. I leaned the gun against a tree and sat next to the stones I had piled over Dewey’s grave so no animals would dig him up and so I could find him easily whenever I came back.
Littleberry sat with me at first, but after a while he got up and started hopping with Huey and Louie. They liked it when Littleberry fell down, and butted him when he tried to get up. I draped my arm around Patsy. She let me lean on her while the boys played, and we girls all watched.
Snow started falling while we were there — light flakes, not enough to bother the goats at first. I caught some on my tongue, opened my arms, and turned my face to the sky. But the peacefulness didn’t last long. The snow picked up, soon falling heavily, and the goats hated that. They huddled close to one another and maaed nervously. Gnarly whimpered and whined. So we headed back home in the darkening afternoon.
As we walked down the fading trail, I thought about a winter day last year in Maine — a day I went out with Dad in snowshoes, down by a frozen creek not far from our house. We did that every week or so to look for traps people set there illegally. If we found one, we’d take long sticks and poke the center plate to make them spring shut. We had been walking for half an hour that day when we came across a bloody patch in the snow. A trail of blood led away from the creek, and we followed it. Something struggled up ahead in the snow, and we approached slowly. It was a white fox. One of his hind legs was caught inside the jagged teeth and iron jaws of the trap, which he had dragged with him for fifty yards before he collapsed.
We couldn’t free him. Every time we got close, he snarled and lunged and tried to bite us. He couldn’t move otherwise, couldn’t crawl any farther. Blood pumped out of his leg every time his heart beat.
Dad always carried his rifle when we went out on these walks. He lifted it off his shoulder and pulled several bullets from his coat pocket and slid them into the magazine. “You should walk away now, Iris,” he said. “Let me take care of this.”
But I wouldn’t go. I stayed next to him as he aimed and fired — twice, to be sure. We freed the body together, carried the trap back home to throw in the trash, and kept the fox with our other frozen animals until later in the winter, when we built the new crematorium.
After we got back home, Dad stared out a back window, not saying much. I remembered him coughing then, and I wondered now if that was the first time I had heard the cough, or if it had been there for a while and I just hadn’t noticed before. I put my arm around his shoulder and stood there with him for a long time. I loved my dad so much right then that it made my heart ache. And now, walking home from the Devil’s Stomping Ground, I loved him so much that I almost wished my heart would stop so I wouldn’t have to feel that deep ache of love, and the bottomless ache of loss.
“You OK?” Littleberry asked after we shut the goats up in the barn and fed Gnarly and hid the gun back under the steps. We seemed to be asking each other that a lot lately.
“Yeah,” I said, because how could I even begin to explain?
He didn’t believe me, I gue
ss, because he put his arms around me, and we did an awkward sort of hug. We stayed like that for a couple of minutes, with the snow falling harder around us, and the early winter wind picking up, until I melted, and let my head rest on his shoulder, and closed my eyes to the beautiful, terrible world.
Littleberry came out with me to the farm again the next day and insisted that I let him milk all the goats. It took him forever, but he was proud of himself, so I tried to be patient. The truth was I wanted the goats all to myself, but I guessed Littleberry had earned the right. That didn’t stop me from standing right next to him the whole time, though, and giving him plenty of advice.
“Don’t pull on Patsy’s teat the way you did last time. And lock the kids in the stall or they’ll go straight for the milk. And be sure to put plenty of grain in the trough for Tammy.”
We had just finished and stepped outside the barn when a familiar truck pulled into the backyard. It was Tiny’s. I squinted through the glare on the windshield and saw Shirelle and a black guy I didn’t know squeezed together with Tiny in the cab.
There was another car behind them — a black low-rider Chevy. Inside that were Drunk Dennis and Donny.
Littleberry reached for the .22. The goats crowded the fence close by. Gnarly’s fur stood up, and he planted himself in front of us as Tiny, Shirelle, and the guy — who I assumed was her cousin Tyreek — climbed out of the truck.
Shirelle waved, and she and Tyreek came right over. Tyreek was the same height as Shirelle — about five eight — but twice as broad. He had a hard look on his face, but that must have just been from squinting to see us through the afternoon sun, because it softened when he smiled.
“You Iris, right?” he asked, pulling a knit cap over his shaved head.
I nodded warily, wondering what they were doing here.
“Nice to meet you,” Tyreek said.
Then he turned to Littleberry. “I’ve seen you around school. Your name Doogleberry? Something like that?”
“Littleberry,” he said, shaking Tyreek’s hand.
Tyreek asked what the gun was for.
I pointed at the black Chevy, and Littleberry swung the barrel over that way, too. Dennis and Donny still hadn’t gotten out. Tiny stood next to his truck, wearing his short-sleeved football jersey, but no jacket or hat. He gave me a shy wave.
“Why is he here?” I asked Shirelle.
She shrugged. “Muscle?”
“Yeah,” said Tyreek. “Them boys — I call them Thing One and Thing Two — they needed a little persuasion to come out here and make things right. So I got Big Man in on the job to help me.”
“Tiny?” I said.
“Big Man. Tiny. Same-same,” Tyreek said. He waved Tiny over. “You can put down that rifle,” he said to Littleberry. “He’s all right.”
Tiny lumbered toward us as far as Gnarly but stopped there. Gnarly growled. “Hey, Iris,” he said. “We brung out Dennis and Donny. They come to apologize. There ain’t going to be no more trouble.”
I didn’t know what to say. Tiny studied his shoes. Then, not looking at me, he said, “That was me left them letters in your locker for Book. I don’t know if you knew that or not. I got a letter back from him in the jail, but they won’t let me visit. I guess I could of just mailed him my letters instead of leaving them for you at your locker, but I didn’t think to ask. Thanks for bringing them in. I know what he done to you was wrong, and he sure is sorry for it.”
He glanced up under his hooded eyebrows to see how I was taking what he said, then went back to memorizing the details of his shoes.
“All right, then,” Tyreek said. “We got that out of the way. Time to party.”
He pointed to Donny’s car and wiggled his finger. “Things!” he shouted. “Yo!”
Drunk Dennis and Donny crawled out of their car.
Tyreek turned back to me. “You got anything to put down over their car seats, and maybe the trunk? That would be great if you did. And if you got a couple of shovels, too, the Things would appreciate it.”
“I have a roll of Visqueen in the barn,” I said. “And shovels. Why?”
“Oh, just a little something we got planned.”
I went for the plastic and the shovels, the goats buzzing around me the whole time. When I came back out of the barn, Donny had backed his car over to the manure pile.
Littleberry stood off to the side with Tiny and Shirelle, all of them grinning huge grins.
Tyreek was laughing. “Thing One and Thing Two — they volunteered to take some of your goat poo off your hands.”
Tiny giggled. “You don’t mind, do you? It’s for my mom’s garden. I didn’t want to get it all over my truck, so they said why not load it in their little car to bring over to my house.” He giggled again.
“Yeah,” said Tyreek. “Kind of like how you volunteer for community service instead of going to jail, or having your ass beat and your coach told about what you did — shoving around a girl, trying to burn down a barn — so you get kicked off a football team next year.”
I smiled — still a little wary — and said they were welcome to take as much as they wanted. The turds were mostly dry, pinkie-size pellets. They didn’t smell especially good — kind of musty and grainy — but they didn’t exactly stink, either.
“If you’re going to fill up your car with manure, you could do a lot worse than goat,” I said. “You can probably just vacuum afterward.”
It took them fifteen minutes to fill up the trunk and the backseat. There was still plenty left.
“What about the front seat?” Tiny said. “They could sit on some of it. Hold it in their laps.”
Tyreek seemed to be considering the idea. Dennis and Donny both looked like they were ready to cry.
“That’s OK,” I said. “That’s probably good enough. Just make them promise not to ever come out here again.”
Tyreek looked over at Dennis and Donny. “Well? What about it, y’all?”
“Yeah,” said Tiny. “Y’all learned you a lesson or what?”
Dennis and Donny nodded. Neither had spoken a word since driving up to the farm.
“All right, then,” Tyreek said. “Y’all can take your dookie and go. I just got to get a picture first. Y’all stand right over next to the car. Leave the trunk open.”
They all pulled out their cell phones — Tyreek, Shirelle, and Tiny — and snapped pictures of Dennis and Donny and the car.
“You want one, Iris?” Shirelle asked.
I shook my head. “Just one more thing, though,” I said. I walked over to Drunk Dennis and tucked a dollar into his shirt pocket.
“You can have this back,” I said. “I’m keeping the goats.”
The following Thursday was Thanksgiving, and the Tutens surprised me with a tofu turkey — a Tofurky. Everything else was the same as a usual Thanksgiving dinner, except the no-meat gravy. Another surprise, or sort of a surprise, was Aunt Nonny, Mr. Tuten’s great-aunt, a tiny woman who was ninety-four. She lived in a retirement home called Cravenwood. She kept calling me Alice. I tried correcting her, but she had her mind made up.
“What year are you in school now, Alice?” she asked at one point. I was keeping her company in the living room, waiting for dinner to be ready.
“I’m Iris,” I reminded her.
Aunt Nonny looked at my face, her eyes blinking behind her thick glasses.
“You’re Alice,” she said firmly.
Mrs. Tuten walked in, and I looked at her. “No, Aunt Nonny,” Mrs. Tuten said. “She’s Iris. Remember?”
Aunt Nonny turned to Mrs. Tuten. “Well, don’t ask me.”
“Don’t ask you what, Aunt Nonny?” Mrs. Tuten said.
Aunt Nonny shook her head. “Never you mind.”
Mrs. Tuten turned to me and whispered, “She gets a little confused sometimes.”
Aunt Nonny wasn’t having any of it, though. “It’s not polite to whisper!” she barked.
Mr. Tuten intervened. “Time to sit down, Aunt Nonny,�
� he said. “Time to come and eat.”
Aunt Nonny eyed him suspiciously. “What are you serving?”
“It’s Thanksgiving dinner,” he said. For some reason Mr. Tuten was wearing Mrs. Tuten’s apron, the one that said, What part of IT’S MY KITCHEN don’t you understand?
Hob and Jill raced into the room and careened off all of our legs, including Aunt Nonny’s.
“Rats!” she yelled. “Rats in the house!”
Mr. Tuten took her arm and practically dragged her into the dining room. “They’re ferrets,” he said. “Not rats.”
Aunt Nonny didn’t miss a beat. “Lock ’em up!” she said. “Before they eat the rats! Lock ’em up tight!”
Mrs. Tuten filled Aunt Nonny’s plate with potatoes and creamed onions and green-bean casserole. Then she added a wedge of Tofurky with no-meat gravy.
Aunt Nonny clutched my forearm with her thin, veiny hand. “What is this we’re having tonight?” she asked, looking down at the Tofurky. “Is this some kind of a pâté? A liver pâté?”
“It’s still daytime, Aunt Nonny,” Mr. Tuten said. “And that’s called a tofu turkey.”
Aunt Nonny ignored him. “Watch out for the boys,” she said to me. “Boys will try to get you. That’s all they want to do is to get you. How fast do you run? I mean today? How fast do you run? You have to run fast when it’s time.”
Mrs. Tuten tucked a napkin in Aunt Nonny’s lap.
Mr. Tuten nudged the Tofurky, maybe to see what it would do. It didn’t do anything.
Aunt Nonny fished up some potatoes and a creamed onion. “That’s quite a lump,” she said. “I don’t care for lumps.” Mrs. Tuten scraped the creamed onions off Aunt Nonny’s plate but left the potatoes.
“Much better,” she said. “Now, Harry? Harry? When is your mother coming over?”
Harry was Mr. Tuten. I’d never heard his first name before. Mrs. Tuten always called him Mr. Tuten. He finished chewing whatever he had in his mouth, swallowed, then said, “Mother said to tell you she’s sorry she can’t make it, Aunt Nonny. She’s not going to be able to come today.”
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