What Comes After

by Steve Watkins

  Then, under his breath, he added, “Since she’s dead.”

  I laughed so hard that I choked on my Tofurky. Mrs. Tuten raced into the kitchen to get me a glass of water, and Mr. Tuten jumped out of his chair and pounded me on the back. Hob and Jill, who’d been hiding under the table, came out to look and started dooking like crazy. Aunt Nonny held out her plate to no one in particular and said, “More lumps.”

  Once she finished eating, and talking about dead people who she thought were still alive, Aunt Nonny wanted to watch football. She said she liked the Dallas Cowboys, and if they weren’t on, somebody was sure going to hear about it from her. She was all ready to make some serious trouble for the networks, but we found a channel with the Dallas game, so everything turned out OK. She fell asleep after about a minute. Mrs. Tuten found three creamed onions in one of the pockets of Aunt Nonny’s dress.

  After we had Aunt Nonny cleaned up, I asked if I could borrow one of the Tutens’ cars. They had let me take it a couple of times before, for quick trips to the grocery store. I was hoping they wouldn’t mind.

  “I thought I would go to the jail,” I said. “Since it’s Thanksgiving. To see my aunt.”

  Mrs. Tuten’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “Are you sure, Iris?” she asked.

  I told her I was. I said that Aunt Sue was the only family I had left, and I thought I should at least try to visit her. I couldn’t tell Mrs. Tuten that I had to show Aunt Sue the check register for all the bills I’d paid in November, and the farmers’ market deposits to prove I’d earned enough for the December bills.

  “Just be careful, Iris,” Mrs. Tuten said as I loaded a couple of Thanksgiving dinner plates into the car.

  Mr. Tuten put his hand on my shoulder and handed me his cell phone. “You can call us if you need to.”

  Dad and I never had the traditional Thanksgivings like other people did — not after Grandma and Grandpa died. I thought about that as I drove to the jail. Instead we went out for Chinese. The first few years we had to drive all the way down to Portland, but once they opened the Panda Palace, out next to the L.L. Bean outlet, we stayed in town. We ordered three meals: one for him, one for me, and one for my mom. Dad and I got the same thing every year: Peking duck for him, moo shu vegetables for me. I don’t remember when I started ordering for Mom. For months after she left, I set a place for her at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s until Dad told me it was making everybody uncomfortable and I had to stop.

  He didn’t say anything about the Chinese, though, even though neither of us ever ate it and it just went to waste. I don’t know why I did it, exactly. I think I had it in my head when I was little that Thanksgiving was the time of the year when people might come home after being gone, even if they’d been gone for years. After a while it just became a habit, a part of our ritual, even after I stopped expecting Mom to show up.

  Last Thanksgiving I didn’t order for Mom at first. Dad ordered his Peking duck, and I ordered my moo shu vegetables, and then I didn’t say anything else. Dad kept looking at me, and the waitress just stood there, pencil hovering over her order pad.

  “Are you sure you don’t want anything else, Iris?” Dad asked.

  “Yes, yes,” the waitress said. Her name was Sally — her American name, anyway — and she knew us. “You want other order, too?”

  I finally said OK, how about just some eggrolls this time. Sally wrote that down.

  Dad and I kept them in the refrigerator for three weeks before one or the other of us got around to throwing them away.

  It wasn’t a regular visiting day at the jail, but I was hoping they’d relax the rules because it was a holiday. I got lucky: Connie, the same guard from last time, was on duty and convinced her supervisor to let me in. They let me bring in the plate of food for Aunt Sue, too, after they inspected it. They said they’d take the other plate to Book.

  “What’d you say that was again?” the supervisor asked.

  “Tofu turkey. Tofurky.”

  I knew they remembered what it was called; they just thought it was funny and wanted to hear me say it again.

  The Aunt Sue who walked into the visiting room was smaller than the one I’d lived with out at the farm. She was smaller than the Aunt Sue I’d visited several weeks earlier. Connie had her hand on Aunt Sue’s back as they walked in, and I almost had the sense that Connie was carrying her. I breathed easier at first, seeing her looking so weak and vulnerable. But the old Aunt Sue reemerged as soon as she sat down and I offered her the Thanksgiving dinner.

  “They already fed us ours,” she snapped. “Don’t expect a thank-you, because I didn’t ask for it, either.”

  Connie pointed. “It’s Tofurky, Sue. You ought to try you some. I bet you never had any of that.”

  Aunt Sue twisted up her mouth; I thought she might spit, but she didn’t. She untwisted her mouth and looked at me with dull eyes. She wore the same orange jumpsuit, or one just like it, with the words Property of Craven County Jail stenciled on the front.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. “I have the deposit slips. For December. For the bills. And what I paid out in November.”

  Connie had let me bring the checkbook into the visiting room. I laid it on the table between us. “Here it is.”

  Aunt Sue picked it up and examined every entry. Then she went through the register a second time. Then she looked up at me.

  “Now I guess you got to go to work on the January money.”

  She stood up and gestured to Connie that she was ready to leave. “You want to keep them goats, I expect to see the same thing all over again by Christmas.”

  I was already tired just thinking about it, but underneath all of that I was happy — joyful even.

  I’d saved the goats for another month.

  On the way out of the jail, I asked if I could see Book. I hadn’t planned to. I was still afraid of him, but I also remembered him crying out at the lake and begging Aunt Sue to let him stop.

  He wouldn’t look at me when he came into the visiting room — a different one from the one I’d been in with Aunt Sue; Book’s was on the men’s side. He crossed his arms and tipped back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. His face was puffy, and he’d put on weight. He didn’t say a word at first. I felt nauseated just seeing him, and suddenly wished I hadn’t come. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a letter from Tiny, who still left them in my locker, probably out of habit. The guard, whose badge said Smith, stepped forward and grabbed the letter before I could pass it on. He opened it, read it, stuffed it back in the envelope, and then handed it to Book.

  “I guess he can have this,” Smith said.

  Book chewed on his bottom lip. He cupped the letter between his hands. Then he started crying, although he didn’t make any noise — just tears slipping down his cheeks and falling on the table. He looked back up at the ceiling.

  Then, in a faint voice, so faint I almost didn’t hear it, he said he was sorry.

  I stared at him, though he still didn’t look at me.

  I thought about him being in jail for the next several months. I thought again about him crying out at Craven Lake and begging Aunt Sue. I started to feel sorry for him, just for a second. And then I thought about him not stopping until she finally said he could.

  “OK, Book,” I said. “I’ve gotta go.”

  I wished Littleberry was around, but he’d gone to Raleigh with his family to visit his grandparents, so I made a quick trip out to the farm, then went back home to the Tutens’.

  Mr. and Mrs. Tuten were watching an old movie, To Kill a Mockingbird. I’d seen it before with Dad. It was one of his favorites. Aunt Nonny was back at the nursing home.

  Mrs. Tuten scooted over to make room for me on the couch. “Would you like to watch with us, Iris?”

  I surprised myself by saying yes. It was the first time I’d done anything like that with them. I was tense at first. It didn’t help that Mr. and Mrs. Tuten both had ferrets
in their laps. But I must have relaxed after a while, because I fell asleep around the time Scout put on her ham costume for the school play. When I woke up, hours later, the lights were off and I was stretched out on the couch under a warm blanket. Someone had tucked a pillow under my head. Someone had even taken off my shoes.

  I’d seen plenty of diarrhea before, on vet rounds with Dad, but nothing like Huey’s. I noticed it as soon as I got to the farm the next afternoon. I had told Mr. and Mrs. Tuten that I was going to a movie with Littleberry; they didn’t know he was still out of town. My hands shook badly as I tried to hose Huey off, but the diarrhea just kept running down his legs. The nannies huddled away from him at first; Louie danced around as if it was some sort of game.

  Then Huey started staggering. He weaved his way into the field, but then veered back. It was clear that he didn’t know where he was going. He stumbled into the side of the barn.

  “Huey!” I shouted. “What’s the matter, boy? What’s the matter?”

  He walked in a circle next, his head turned back toward his left flank, as if he couldn’t move it anywhere else. He kept circling in that direction, around and around, head turned, diarrhea running out behind him almost constantly.

  I chased after him, frantic with worry, and tried to hold him still. I reached my hand under his chin to lift his face and check out his eyes. He felt hot; his eyes were dull and cloudy. He looked right at me, but I could tell he didn’t see me.

  “I’m here, Huey,” I said, hoping he could still hear my voice.

  He dropped to the ground and started convulsing.

  “Huey!”

  I dropped down beside him and held him until the convulsions subsided. The ground was cold and damp, and soaked through my jeans. Huey’s neck was rigid, with his head still turned back. I tried to straighten it but couldn’t. He moaned.

  “What’s the matter, Huey?” I kept saying. “What’s wrong?” Gnarly and Patsy and the rest of the goats crowded around us in a protective circle, including Louie, who had stopped playing.

  “Huey!” I yelled his name one more time, but he still didn’t respond. The diarrhea continued, even as he lay there. He seemed paralyzed.

  The November sky darkened. There hadn’t been sun all day, and the late afternoon threatened to turn into night much too soon.

  Huey was shivering now. I ran into the barn for a blanket and brought it back outside. I wrapped him in it, scooped him up, and carried him into the barn. I laid him in clean straw. Patsy and the others followed us.

  “Just wait here,” I said to Huey. I turned to Patsy. “You watch out for him, OK? I’ll be right back.”

  I ran over to the house, wishing someone was there to tell me what was wrong, to tell me what to do. But who was I going to call? My dad? Aunt Sue? The Tutens? Littleberry? I fumbled through Aunt Sue’s goat-care guide, the one I’d been reading, but couldn’t find anything that helped. I stared at the phone, as if I expected it to tell me what to do, struck by how completely alone I was. I tapped myself on the forehead with the receiver. I had to think of something. I had to. I’d lost Dewey, and Jo Dee’s kid. I’d lost Dad. I’d lost Beatrice. I couldn’t lose anyone else.

  I kept tapping, harder, until my head finally cleared and I did the obvious thing — I grabbed the phone book. It was several years old, but probably still good for most numbers. The first two vets didn’t answer, but I jotted down their emergency numbers in case I couldn’t reach anyone now. The third number just rang and rang and rang.

  “Come on! Come on!” My fingers shook as I dialed.

  An old man answered at the fourth number I called.

  “This is the Herriot residence.”

  I sagged against the counter in relief.

  “I have an emergency,” I said. “Can I speak to the vet?”

  “I’m the veterinarian,” he said. “But I’m retired.” I strained to understand him through his thick southern drawl.

  “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 suppos
ed 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.