by Nancy Hedin
“You started? Shit! Did the ram mount any of the ewes yet?”
“Are you kidding me? That horndog mounted just about everyone and some he mounted twice. Why? Isn’t that what we were here to do?”
“Well, yes and no.” Twitch took off his hat and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. He seemed to have worked up a sweat even though it was that ram and I who’d done most of the work. “There was at least one ewe Holcum wanted off-limits. He has another ram for her. It’s okay. I’ll talk to him later. He’s not home right now, just his wife.”
“Why aren’t you married?” I packed up the equipment and led that Casanova ram back to the Jeep.
“Me or him?” Twitch nodded at the ram.
“You.”
Twitch’s eyes bugged open. “Wow, where’d that come from?”
“So, what’s your answer? Why isn’t there a Mrs. Twitch?”
“Are you proposing to me?”
I shoved his shoulder. “Come on, you can tell me the truth.”
“I know I can. I want to tell you the truth. The truth is important.”
“Well?”
“The truth is the best ones are taken or too smart to take up with the likes of me.” He opened the door on my side of the Jeep. “Besides, I got everything I want without having to marry anybody.”
“You and Dad are a lot alike, and he found somebody to love him, though I wouldn’t recommend his taste in women. I’m not so certain why he’s as crazy in love with someone as ornery as Momma.”
“Goddamn, they were made for each other. Didn’t he tell you how they met?”
“Yeah, yeah. They met at the diner. Blah, blah, blah. It lacks romance in my mind.”
“Well, that’s fine. It just had to be romantic in their minds, and goddamn if it wasn’t. I was there. Ask him about it. He gets so gooey telling it. Your momma turned quite a few heads when she came to Bend.” Twitch pulled on the brim of my baseball cap. “How about you? You found some boy that makes you all gooey?”
“Nope.” I got back in the Jeep.
“We’ve got one more stop.” After he’d filled the Jeep with dust from fifteen minutes of bad roads he called “short cuts,” Twitch signaled a turn off the blacktop and snaked up the driveway to Kenny Hollister’s place. It was a farm about the size of our farm, but with fewer trees and more outbuildings. Two single-level pig barns flanked a beat-up trailer. The main house was a story and a half. It needed paint just like the garage and outbuildings that dotted the yard. The shit-and-dust-covered machinery was sheltered under a large carport to the west of the main house.
Twitch frowned and wagged his head. “Kenny called me all excited because he won a sow in a fight with some kid. Now the sow had her litter and they don’t look right.”
Twitch parked his Jeep by the main house and went up to the door. Mrs. Hollister opened the door before Twitch knocked. I followed him. I had hoped to get a glimpse at Mr. Hollister. I’d heard that not only were the Hollister folks old, but Mr. Hollister was kinda demented. I’d never seen an honest to God demented person. I peeked around Twitch and beyond Mrs. Hollister, but I couldn’t see the old man. Mrs. Hollister told Twitch that Kenny was hunting, and pointed him to the barn where the sick pig was.
There, in a small pen, a sow was lying on her side. She wasn’t moving. Perhaps she was spent from delivering, but that didn’t explain how weak and tired the baby pigs appeared. They were clean, rosy pink with a dot of iodine on a two-inch plug at their navels. One or two seemed normal, but the rest of the eight piglets dragged their hindquarters.
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Probably brucellosis,” Twitch said. “It’s caused by a bacterium. That sow was probably infected, and the kid didn’t mind losing it to Kenny. Kenny shouldn’t have added the pig to his herd.”
“What’s the recommended treatment?” I asked.
“There is no treatment now. All you can do is put them out of their misery.”
“It looks like those two piglets are okay.”
“Nope, if one’s got it, they’ve all got it, or are getting it. That’s just the way nature works sometimes.” Twitch glanced at me. “You okay?”
I lied and said I was, but I couldn’t wrap my head around one sick baby making the whole litter worthless. It was one thing to raise animals with the eventual outcome of being slaughtered, but this horrible illness just seemed wrong.
Twitch left the pigs in the pen and told Mrs. Hollister to have Kenny call him first thing when he got home and to keep those pigs separate from the others.
“He going to have to kill ’em?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m afraid so,” Twitch said.
“Well,” she arched her eyebrows and smirked. “He’s good at that.”
After Momma and Dad had learned that Becky and Kenny had been having sex, they’d herded Becky and me into family activities. It was a long fall of school and homework followed by Monopoly, Risk, Sorry, pinochle, hearts, and canasta. During Momma’s idea of a scavenger hunt, I located a missing set of car keys, seven stray socks, and the source of the sour smell that was coming from the southwest corner of the basement: cheese.
For those months, Momma didn’t yell about the junk that filled the yard: cars, the aluminum, the copper pipe, the fish house, the broken bicycles, and eight lawn mowers that together didn’t have enough working parts to get the lawn mowed regularly. For that time, our family pretended that beating each other at board games was an effective form of birth control.
Momma and Dad never forbade Becky from seeing Kenny. Becky saw him every day at school, but if they wanted to go someplace after school hours, Momma made me go with them. I lost sight of who was being punished, and most times I also lost sight of Becky and Kenny.
They traipsed off into the woods when it wasn’t too cold or raining. Sometimes, they made me leave the truck so they could make out there. Usually I was glad for the brush off. It gave me time to dream, read, memorize animal facts, or sketch animals from my field guide.
Occasionally, they went to the library, telling the boldfaced lie that they were going to study. Instead, they hid and made out in the stacks. A girl I’d never seen before nearly tripped over them as they smooched and talked baby talk by the arts and crafts section. The girl was beautiful, but I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again, because the library was not Becky and Kenny’s favorite haunt.
Kenny had quit football or was kicked off the team, depending on who I asked. The story I heard more than once was that Kenny had blindsided one of the scrawny sophomore boys and broke the boy’s collarbone in two places. Either way, the end result was that Kenny had Friday nights free.
One Friday night when Kenny came to pick up Becky, Momma pushed me out the door with them and yelled, “Lorraine will be your chaperone, kids. Be home by 10 p.m.”
Becky and Kenny both glared at me.
“Don’t look at me. I don’t want to go with you.” I had planned to take the fan bus to watch our football team humiliate or be humiliated by Upsala, but Momma had said I needed to stick with Becky and Kenny.
It was raining like a tantrum from God. I clung to the passenger door. Becky straddled the gearshift and made kissy noises at Kenny and prodded him about where he was taking her like he was possibly taking her to Fiji. Kenny pulled the truck onto the service road by the football field. Since the team was playing an away game that night, the place was deserted. Becky and Kenny had barely put the truck in park before they were all over each other.
Their pawing and panting made me glad to take my chances with the thunderstorm. I grabbed Kenny’s flashlight off the dashboard and took a veterinary science book I’d borrowed from Twitch and my mammal field guide.
“Honk the horn when you’re ready to leave.” I left the truck and slammed the door for effect.
The roof over the bleachers was useless because the rain was coming down sideways. I passed around the front of the bleachers to the concessions building and the broadcast booth,
a thin two-story building that looked like a giant box of saltine crackers covered in aqua galvanized steel. It was padlocked, but the screws on the hasp were stripped. Without much effort, I slipped into the shelter, pocketed the padlock, and pulled the door closed behind me.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness and the tunnel of light the flashlight gave me. I heard mice scatter. The floor was speckled with their scat. Mice, the universal kibble. Nearly every other animal was a predator to them, even some insects. At the same time, mice were baby factories; they had twelve to twenty-four litters a year with an average of twelve babies in each litter. I thought about Becky. Maybe Becky wanted to be a baby factory too. What about going to college? Becky had wanted to go to Bible College and study Greek and Hebrew, which made no sense to me, but more sense than staying in Bend and having babies.
A wooden ladder led to the loft where the radio announcers would broadcast the Bend Pioneers games to a meager masochistic listening audience. I climbed the ladder and made my way to the sports desk. A hook and eye kept the hinged shutter closed. I popped the hook and glimpsed at the weather. The rain had let up, and the clouds had parted. The scant fall daylight streamed in, but wasn’t enough to read by. I hooked the shutter closed again and shined the flashlight on my book.
I was reading about treating abscesses in goats when I heard Becky and Kenny laugh as they stumbled into the concession area below. Crap! I turned off the flashlight and pressed myself against the far wall of the loft above them. I hoped I was enough in the shadows that they wouldn’t discover me. From the way they were absorbed with each other, they probably wouldn’t have noticed a marching band. If love was blind, then lust was downright deaf and blind. They had no notion that anyone else got in there ahead of them. Where the hell did they think I was in this storm? Maybe that was the thing about lust: you didn’t care about any other person.
There was no way I wanted to be a captive audience for Becky and Kenny’s making out, but how the hell was I supposed to get out of there without them noticing me? Of course worrying about them seeing me had been my error in thinking. There was only one door. Instead of announcing myself and going back to Kenny’s truck, I had panicked and hid. I clutched my books and tried not to stare, but it was like a car accident. My eyes were drawn to the wreckage, and I could see and hear everything.
Kenny spread a blanket from his truck onto the floor of the concession stand and positioned his camping lantern close by. Becky stood with Kenny in the yellow-orange glow of the lantern.
“You smell so good.” Kenny buried his face into Becky’s hair.
“Stop it now. Maybe we should’ve just stayed at my house and studied tonight. Kenny, I can’t take that English test for you.”
“Who cares if I fail that dumb test?” Kenny’s hands patted her back like he was measuring her bones for slope and angle.
“I care. You’ve to graduate high school before you can join me at college. Besides, you’re going to care because it’ll pull down your average, and that means no spring baseball.” Becky pushed Kenny away weakly.
“What say I practice getting round those bases right now?” Kenny clasped his hands behind Becky’s back and pulled her to him in a bear hug, until their faces were so close they had to close their eyes to kiss or be cross-eyed. “You are so beautiful, Becky.” He loosened his hold on her and swept some stray hairs away from her face, barely touching her skin. “I promise to always protect you and be a man for you. That’s more important to me than graduating or sports or anything I can think of in this world.”
Becky looked into Kenny’s eyes and put her fingers flat against her mouth. “This is what love’s supposed to feel like, isn’t it?”
Kenny dug condoms out of his front pocket. He told Becky how he doubted his dad needed them anymore. Kenny held the foil-wrapped envelope between his teeth as he enacted a brief striptease for Becky. He popped the pearl snaps from his Western shirt. His hairless chest shone white in the lantern’s light. He kicked off his cowboy boots, and dropped his faded jeans. His white briefs and tube socks nearly glowed. Kenny fumbled with Becky’s clothes and dropped them to the floor.
Goddamn it. She was wearing my lavender tank top. I gasped, covered my mouth, and nearly gave up my position when I saw that Becky’s bra and panties were fire-house red, in contrast to the regulation white briefs Momma bought for us from J.C. Penney.
Becky was beautiful. Her breasts were bigger than Kenny’s hands, and her hips spun out from the small oval of her waist. Her legs looked long, muscled at the thigh and calf. I wanted new underwear.
Kenny and Becky kissed and caressed each other and lowered themselves to the blanket without even stopping kissing. It wasn’t long before they were both panting. I covered my eyes with my hands, but peeked between my fingers. I’d never actually seen sex between people before.
Sex education in Bend, Minnesota, was a grainy filmstrip in fifth grade showing a cartoon girl combing her hair in front of her mirror waiting for her period to come and make her a woman. I remembered how the diagram of the female reproduction system had looked like a deer skull with droopy antlers. Don’t even get me started on what happened when the junior high home economics teacher, who had an awful case of rosacea on a good day, had nearly self-combusted the morning she’d showed us a big plastic sculpture of the male parts. I didn’t want anybody to approach me with anything that looked like that. Becky didn’t seem to have the same reservations.
Kenny rolled to his side and unwrapped a condom. Becky waved him off like he didn’t need one. He gasped something about pulling out, and he entered her and started pumping away. When he started to shove off of her, she clung to him tighter and looked into his flushed, feverish face.
“It’s okay,” Becky said. “God told me. It’s really okay, Kenny, I want you.”
Kenny puffed and grunted and clawed and sobbed and came. Becky was like a live trap, and he seemed caught. Spent, Kenny collapsed on Becky’s breast as Becky rocked him.
Shit. Breeding farm animals was interesting, but it was nothing close to this. I wished I could have given them their privacy. I had no right to be part of their love.
Afterward, Becky and Kenny dressed silently, turned away from each other. Kenny gathered up the blanket and lantern, and they left the concession stand.
The pill would have outperformed Momma and Dad’s lecturing, planned activities, and my impotent chaperoning. Around Christmas, Becky and Kenny told Momma and Dad that Becky was two months pregnant. The two lovebirds sat at the kitchen table. Momma poured some coffee for herself and Dad. She got some milk and peanut butter cookies for Becky and Kenny.
“Go pet a beaver or something,” Becky said to me. I hovered at the periphery.
After hearing that she was about to be a grandmother, I had expected Momma to blow a gasket and maybe invoke some sort of plague on Becky for getting pregnant. I waited. She didn’t. Momma congratulated them and asked all the usual questions like it was just another ordinary thing in her day. When was Becky due? July. How was she feeling? A bit queasy, but pretty good.
After Kenny left there were some martyred sighs, but Momma didn’t rant or lecture or do anything interesting other than jot a few notes in her notebook. Maybe Momma still smarted from her parents’ reaction to her pregnancy just out of high school. Still, I expected Momma to give as good as she’d gotten. Wasn’t that the conflict that kept us from visiting Momma’s one remaining parent along with the four-hour drive? Wasn’t excommunication a family tradition when a child disappointed a parent? I felt like I was always close to being exiled to the desert, forgotten the way Momma had forgotten her momma.
“Well, we’re going to have a little one around here again,” Dad said. “You know, I always planned to have a dozen—any more kids than that and I didn’t think we had enough experience. Then you girls were born and your momma and I thought, why mess with perfection? The other ten couldn’t be nearly as interesting.”
Momma waved at me to join them at
the table, then she told Becky and me stories about our time in her womb.
“It was like you were both writing on the walls.”
I pictured Becky’s measured script massaging a note inside Momma’s body. I figured I’d probably carved my thoughts, scraped at Momma from the inside the way I grated at her outside of the womb.
“I worried you wouldn’t be strong enough for the trouble of the world, Becky. And Lorraine, I worried you’d make the trouble.”
Becky’s pregnancy required planning. Dad made a crib for the baby, and Momma made Becky and Kenny get married, not that it took much arm-twisting for Becky. Like Momma, Becky liked the pageantry. Pastor Grind urged Becky to make that pageantry occur as quickly as possible or he would not officiate. Becky promised Momma and Dad she’d finish high school if they signed for her to get married before our eighteenth birthday in June. They agreed and approved a January wedding.
All those magazines Becky had read probably gave her romantic ideas about dresses from a bridal store in St. Paul, but Pastor Grind’s time schedule forced Becky to settle for a trip to the St. Wendell shopping mall. I would have preferred hanging out at the pet store, the video arcade, or even J.C. Penney rather than the dress shop, but Momma threatened to release my pet mice and roast my chickens and rabbits if I didn’t pick out a dress to wear to the wedding. Dress shopping with Becky was bad enough, but even worse because she invited her closest girlfriends to meet her there. They were my classmates, but they were Becky’s friends. Where two or more of Becky’s friends were gathered, you had a coven.
Through the remaining days of school before the wedding, Becky was literally a blushing bride and had showed no shame about her pregnancy. She wore tented blouses and elastic waist skirts. When she spoke to me at all it was to ask if her breasts looked bigger, which they didn’t. I suggested her head and ass had swelled appreciably, but during that time period even I couldn’t flap Becky. The moment for which Becky was born had finally arrived. She was about to be a bride and mother. Becky had two-timed Jesus.
