What Comes After Read online

  “Would you shut up already,” Aunt Sue barked. “She’s a goat, in case you forgot.”

  Aunt Sue grunted again, pulled hard, then leaned against Reba and pulled harder. The first kid popped out and Aunt Sue fell backward, still holding it in her hands. She dropped the kid right away and went back for the other one, but a second kid slid out on its own, and a third one followed almost immediately.

  “I’ll be damned,” Aunt Sue said. “Triplets.”

  She gestured with her bloody arms at an open cardboard box nearby. “You can let go of Reba now. She’s done. There’s milk bottles right over there. You go ahead and give those kids one each.”

  “You’re not going to let them nurse at all?” I said. “What about the colostrum?” I knew from attending deliveries with Dad that colostrum in the mother’s milk helped immunize newborns against infections.

  Before Aunt Sue could answer, though, something else slid out of Reba. The bloody mass of placenta. Everything was happening fast with this kidding. Reba shrugged herself around and looked at it for a minute. Then she started eating it.

  I’d seen a lot of stuff with Dad, but I had to admit to being nauseated at that. I did what Aunt Sue told me, though. I grabbed the box of bottles and an old blanket and drew all three of the kids into my lap. They were all slick from the births, but I hardly cared as I hugged them to me. They were smaller than I’d expected — maybe because they were triplets — but each one was a perfect miniature of Reba. They stared up at me with huge liquid eyes and maaed feebly. Two took the bottles right away; the last one I had to coax, but pretty soon he sucked, too. For the first time since coming to Craven County — for the first time since my dad started coughing, really — everything seemed perfect.

  Aunt Sue wiped down Reba with an iodine solution. Then she started talking. It took me a minute to realize she was answering my question about the colostrum.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t notice,” she said, “but every one of these kids is a male — a billy.” She almost sounded angry.

  “Yeah?” I said, though I had a sinking suspicion about where she was going.

  “So they’re not good for but one thing, and that’s their meat. I’ll fatten them up for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, then do the slaughter when they’re bigger but the meat’s still tender. So there’s no sense wasting good goat milk on them. We’ll get them on grain in a couple of days. Till then the bottles will do just fine.”

  My heart sank — the perfect moment gone just like that — as she stalked outside to let the other goats back in for the night. I figured it must have been two in the morning by then. Patsy came in and stood behind me. She laid her head on my shoulder to check out the new kids. The other goats surrounded Reba, settled into the straw, and soon went to sleep. The kids sucked for a while, then stopped and looked up at me with those liquid eyes again. I wished they wouldn’t, because I couldn’t help falling in love with them when they did. I offered them their bottles again, and they blinked, and then sucked again, off and on until the milk was all gone. They staggered around a little on their wobbly legs, and I crawled on the barn floor with them, to catch them when they fell and lift them back up until they were too tired to stand. I gathered them into my lap again and tucked the blanket around us. They maaed softly for a while, and then one by one they fell asleep.

  Aunt Sue didn’t come back. An hour later a truck pulled up to the back porch. It was Tiny and Book, back late from their away game, and whatever party they’d been to afterward. The door slammed, and the porch light cut off.

  I stayed in the stall with the kids all the rest of the night. After a couple of hours, the billies woke one another again and bleated hungrily. I was out of bottle milk, so I gently massaged Reba’s udder and squeezed just enough from her teats to refill the bottles for the kids. Their little bellies swelled, and they soon fell back asleep.

  The kids gave me a reason to look forward to coming home from school each afternoon. They were all I could think about most of the time, and even if Littleberry had wanted to ask me out again, I never gave him the chance — rushing out to get on the bus the second the bell rang. We had to keep the kids separated from Reba during the day — I let her out in the field after the morning milking; they stayed in the barn. But once I did the afternoon milking, they could all play outside together. Reba couldn’t get enough of them then, nudging them around in the close-cropped grass, letting them butt her with their hard little heads. I followed along, waiting my turn, and when Reba needed a break, I took over.

  Their favorite game was when I pushed on their foreheads and they butted back until they practically couldn’t stand up anymore. They would probably have butted one another to death if Aunt Sue and Book hadn’t burned out the buds where their horns were supposed to grow. I hated seeing that — the tool Aunt Sue used was like a soldering iron, and she did it just a week after they were born — but I hated it even more the following Saturday when they castrated the kids.

  I’d gotten up early as usual that morning and gone out to the barn to do the milking and play with the goats and Gnarly. When I brought in the milk to pasteurize it, Aunt Sue and Book walked out without saying anything. I didn’t think much of it, though it was early for Book to be awake the morning after a game, until I heard one of the kids bleating frantically.

  I dropped everything and ran back outside. Book was sitting on the barn floor, holding one of the billies in his lap with his big, rough hands. Aunt Sue was binding the kid’s scrotum tight at the base with a thick rubber band. Everything happened fast.

  “Don’t worry,” Aunt Sue said before I could protest what they were doing. She let that kid go and grabbed another. “It only hurts for a minute. Everything gets numb and they can’t even tell when it falls off.”

  The first kid staggered away from them over to me, dazed. I picked him up and held him close to me; he was trembling.

  Aunt Sue might have been telling the truth, but I didn’t believe her. I’d never helped Dad with neutering or castrating any of the animals he worked with, so I didn’t know much about it, and didn’t want to know. But I could tell by the kids’ straining eyes, their plaintive bleating, and their stumbling around that they were scared and confused.

  Afterward, Book told me I couldn’t call them billies anymore.

  It was an hour after the castrations. The kids were still hanging close, bumping against me, as if I could protect them from what had just happened. We were sitting in the grass near the fence. The kids wobbled away from me a little ways and then wobbled back. Reba looked on mournfully.

  Book was in the backyard washing the new truck, which I con tinued to make a point of spitting on every time I walked past.

  “Once they don’t have their nuts, you’re supposed to call them wethers,” he said. “When they’re wethers, they don’t smell so bad as a regular buck. Plus they fatten up quicker.” He smacked his lips. “That’ll be some tasty meat. Too bad you don’t eat any, but more for me, I guess. Me and Tiny, last year the two of us ate an entire goat one time. We cut strips of a lot of it, wrapped it in bacon, and fried it. Called it Billy-in-a-Blanket.”

  “You mean wether,” I corrected him.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, “it just sounded better to say it that way.”

  “Because of the alliteration,” I said.

  Book kicked at a chicken that was trying to sneak past. It squawked and jumped out of the way. “Some damn times,” he said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  It wasn’t as if I didn’t know people ate meat, and it wasn’t as if I didn’t know where it came from. I’d seen plenty during those vet rounds with Dad, including this slaughterhouse outside our town where they stunned calves with sledgehammers then hung them upside down on giant hooks and sliced through their throats. And that was nothing compared to what they did at the chicken plant.

  But I felt protective of the wethers. I still gave them bottles sometimes when Aunt Sue wasn’t around.
She wanted to fatten then up with grain, but they still liked to nurse, and I loved holding them while they did. They followed me everywhere, even on my walks in the woods behind the house, all the way out to the Devil’s Stomping Ground. They knocked one another silly in ferocious butting contests. They hopped everywhere. They danced when I came home from school.

  I knew Aunt Sue had plans to slaughter them in a few weeks or a month, but I had plans as well — to keep them alive.

  Which was why I named them:

  Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

  Beatrice called me a couple of weeks after the kids were born. It was a school night. Aunt Sue had just left for work, thank God. Book had fallen asleep on the couch, still clutching the remote control. I sat on the floor in the hall off the kitchen, which was as much privacy as the phone cord would allow me.

  We hadn’t talked or e-mailed in a couple of weeks, and I wanted to tell her about the kids, but we barely got through our hellos before Beatrice cut in with her news.

  “I thought I was pregnant,” she blurted out.

  “You what?” She hadn’t told me she and Collie were having sex. She hadn’t told me she wasn’t a virgin anymore. How could I not know these things?

  “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I’m not. I never was, I don’t think. But I was worried for a while. I missed a period. My breasts sort of swelled a little, and they ached. But then I started bleeding. It might have been a miscarriage, or it might have just been a really heavy period.”

  “When?” I said. “When did all this happen?”

  “Last week,” Beatrice said. “I didn’t tell Mom. But I did go to the Planned Parenthood in Camden. They said I was OK.”

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess. I mean, I’m glad I’m not having a baby.” She laughed weakly.

  “I’m so sorry, B.,” I said, not sure what else to say.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It was hard not having you here. I had to figure everything out by myself.”

  “So you didn’t tell Collie?” I asked her. “He didn’t know, either?”

  “About the baby scare? No way. Anyway, we broke up.”

  “Sorry about that, too, B.,” I said, but this time I didn’t feel it as much. For some reason the news about her and Collie shocked me as much as the news about Beatrice maybe being pregnant. I was struggling to understand it all — why I was only hearing about this now, how she could have cut me out of so much of her life.

  “It was a while ago,” she said — though how long could it have been, really? “But it’s no big deal. I’ve been out with a few other guys. You know.”

  No, I didn’t. “Who?”

  “Just some boys,” Beatrice said. “Some stupid boys.”

  I wanted to press her for details — was it Brady Jenerette? Eric Wilburn? Nate? — but decided to drop it. I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to know, and I doubted she would tell me, anyway. I hesitated, then changed the subject.

  “So what was it like?” I asked.

  “What was what like?”

  “The sex,” I whispered, as though Book might wake up and hear me from all the way in the living room.

  “Oh,” Beatrice said. “That.” She laughed. “Nice at first. I mean, they were boys, and I guess they didn’t exactly know what they were doing, and I didn’t, either, not that it’s that hard to figure out. And they said all these sweet things, about how beautiful I was, or how hot I was, and how crazy they were about me. You know, all that clichéd bullshit.” She paused, and I wondered what she was thinking. It wasn’t so long ago that I didn’t have to wonder — I just knew.

  “I liked it while we were doing it,” she said eventually, “even though it was kind of messy. And I liked it afterward, the holding — or I guess the being held part.”

  “And then what?”

  “Oh, you know,” Beatrice said again. “Then you get dressed, and they’re in a hurry to leave, and you kind of are, too, because you don’t quite know what to say next, or to talk about. And then you see them at school and it’s awkward, and you want them to call, and they don’t, or you call them and they don’t call you back. And your best friend has moved away and isn’t allowed to talk much on the phone, and your parents still aren’t speaking to each other, or to you, and the next thing you know, you miss your period and think you might be pregnant.”

  I opened my mouth to say something to comfort her, to tell her I wished I could have helped her through all that. But then I thought about how she hadn’t been there for me, and how she hadn’t even asked how I was doing. So I just told her I was glad she was OK now, and I told her I missed her. It sounded automatic, and it sounded automatic when she said it back, “I miss you, too, Iris.”

  I lay awake for a long time that night after we hung up. I stretched out on my bed and felt my abdomen with both hands, trying to imagine being pregnant. I’d always been so thin, though. Where could there possibly be room for a baby? I wondered what it must have been like for my mom when she was pregnant with me, as young as she was then — not much older than Beatrice. Or me.

  I felt my rib cage, which stood out now that I was lying down. I cupped my breasts and thought of them swollen. Not Victoria’s Secret swollen. More like the nannies’ pendulous udders, hanging low with all that milky weight.

  Being pregnant had made Reba and Jo Dee skittish sometimes, and more dependent on me. Otherwise, though, they went on about their goat lives just like the others: foraging in the field, eating their hay, bumping and butting and climbing and sleeping. So what was the big deal about being pregnant? Other than the fact that once you had your kid, if you were human, it was supposed to change the whole rest of your life.

  I guessed it hadn’t changed my mom’s life, though, and I kept thinking about her that night, imagining her pregnant with me, and wondering what it must be like for her now, to have missed out on being my mom. Wondering what must have broken inside her, and how badly, for her to have left the way she did.

  One night in October, Aunt Sue made Book and me leave the house again because her company was coming over. It was a Friday, but the football team was off that week. Book’s face turned a dark shade of red, and he flattened his giant sandwich down on his plate.

  Aunt Sue narrowed her eyes. “Was there something you wanted to say about something, Book?”

  He didn’t look up, just hunched his shoulders protectively over his plate, as if he was worried she would hit him. “No, ma’am.”

  They were at the kitchen table. I was across the room on a stool, eating a saltine and an apple.

  Aunt Sue nodded. “All right, then. I expect y’all to be gone by seven.”

  Book scooted his chair back. “I don’t want her along,” he said, pointing at me without looking at me.

  Aunt Sue shrugged. “So have Tiny drop her off in town and pick her up later.”

  “Couldn’t I just stay here?” I asked. “I could just hang out in my room, or out in the barn with the goats. I could bring a space heater out there.”

  Aunt Sue looked in my direction, though not exactly at me, as if she couldn’t be bothered to bring me fully into focus. “Oh, you’re going to town,” she said. “There’s no discussion about that.”

  I sat in the back of Tiny’s truck again, though it was cold during the ride. They dropped me off at a mall, which surprised me. I hadn’t realized Craven County was big enough to have a mall, or a parking lot as massive as the one surrounding it — a black ocean of a parking lot, with the cars and trucks huddled together close to shore.

  I had no idea how I would spend the next four hours. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, or a way to get there even if I did.

  The mall doors swooshed open just then, before I could go inside, and Littleberry stepped out, along with two other guys and two girls, none of whom I recognized. One of the guys lit a cigarette and handed it to one of the girls. They were all dressed in standard-issue black o
n black, plus Doc Martens, except for Littleberry, who had on duck boots, which made me smile, even though I could tell with just a glance they weren’t L.L. Bean. He separated himself from his friends when he saw me.

  “Hey, Littleberry,” I said.

  He pulled off his black wool hat, freeing a wild mass of black, curly, Jim Morrison hair. His bottom lip looked normal, so I guessed he was dip free. “Hey, Iris. I never seen you here before.”

  “First time,” I said. I looked past him into the gaping mouth of the mall: Gap. Disney Store. Sbarro. Claire’s. Starbucks. Dick’s Sporting Goods. JC Penney. “Looks like a retail dream come true.”

  Littleberry grinned as if he was proud of his mall. Maybe he was. He pulled his knit cap back on. I wasn’t sure why he’d taken it off in the first place. “Hey,” he said. “We’re gonna go smoke a blunt. Wanna come?”

  I considered my options. I had only smoked once before, and it had given me a headache. But that would be nothing compared to what four hours in the mall would do to me. Plus, I kind of liked the idea of hanging out with Littleberry.

  “Sure,” I said. “Thanks. That sounds great.”

  “Awesome,” Littleberry said. I followed him and his friends across the vast parking lot, past the scrum of cars and trucks, past the security lights, and past the emptiness after that, until we reached a berm topped with a wall of pines. It was already dark where we were. We scrambled up the berm, even deeper into the dark, and sat in a line with our legs hanging over the side, looking back at the mall.

  “Feels like the end of the world,” said one of the guys, who looked like Opie on The Andy Griffith Show.

  “End of the mall,” said the other boy.

  “Same thing,” said Littleberry, sitting next to me. He busied himself with a little penknife, disemboweling a cigar. I felt a little nervous, sitting so close to him, and I wasn’t sure why. His arm rubbed against mine while he worked, but I didn’t mind. He smelled like fresh pizza.