Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [105]
“You can thank Mr. Walker for that. He’s like the granddaddy of all the goats in this county.”
“I do thank him—I did. I called him up on the phone. He was very nice.”
“Nice, huh? That’s not what they used to call it up at school.”
“Well, I think he’s a swell old guy. Totally helpful. You know what he told me? Sometimes you have to rub the buck with a rag and then dance around waving it in the girls’ noses, to turn them on.”
“O-oh…yeah,” Rickie said, nodding slowly. “I believe I heard about that down to Oda Black’s. Somebody said they seen you up here doing naughty things with goats.”
Lusa got elderberry hooch in her nose when she laughed. “They did not.”
“Oh, OK. My mistake.” He smoked and gazed out at the field. The grass looked white in the moonlight, as if touched with hoarfrost. “Would that really help, you think? I mean, why would it?”
“Pheromones,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Smells. A whole world of love we don’t discuss.”
“Huh,” he said. “So. Fifty-eight does. Think you’ll get fifty kids out of ’em?”
“You bet. And you know what else? You won’t believe what else.”
“What?”
“Over in the little pasture where I used to keep the calf? Three bucks—my backup men. And in the old pasture, the one behind the orchard that’s gotten way overgrown with briars? Guess.”
“What, more goats?”
“Seventy-one does.”
“Shit, girl! You’re in business.”
“Looks like it. Those are all does that have been pastured with a buck at some point recently, or that people couldn’t be sure of. Mr. Walker said not to take them since I couldn’t make them come into season right away. But I thought, why not just take them and keep them over there? In October I’ll turn my boys loose on them, and then I’ll have my second batch of kids born and fattened up in time for Greek Easter and Id-al-Adha.”
Rick whistled. “You’ve done your math.”
“A regular goat-breeding genius.” She tapped her head. “You’re not supposed to count your chickens before they hatch, but I talked to my cousin already, the butcher. He’s so excited you wouldn’t believe it. He’s going to start taking orders in September. He thinks we can make a killing.”
“Yeah? How much?”
“Well, not a killing. Enough. Enough to cover the big stuff—the barn repairs I need to get done right now, for instance.”
“Per pound, what are we talking about?”
“A dollar sixty, maybe a dollar seventy-five?”
She had no real frame of reference for this price, but Rickie evidently did because he whistled approvingly. “Man. That’s good.” He grinned at her. Her eyes were fully adjusted to the darkness, and she could see him clearly: not exactly a carbon copy of his father, but with exactly the same gleam in his eye. She turned up her bottle and let the tail end of the Serpent bite her tongue.
“Look,” he said, pointing up toward the moonlit hillside. She could see the pale, hump-backed shapes of her goats spread evenly over the pasture, the way a child would put them in a drawing. Eventually her eyes made out something else: the movement of the dark billy. He was working his herd, methodically mounting one doe after another. Lusa watched in awe.
“You go, boy,” she cheered solemnly. “Make me a new barn roof.”
Rick laughed at that.
She looked up at him. “Have you ever noticed what goats do in the rain?”
“Yeah. They get all hunkered up into a horseshoe shape.”
“It’s the funniest thing. I never knew that before. Yesterday morning when it was pouring rain, I looked out my window and thought, This I need, all my goats have come down with polio or something. But then as soon as the rain stopped, they all straightened out again.”
“Just goes to show you. You never pay much attention to a goat till he’s fixing your barn roof for you.”
“How right you are, my friend.”
The moon was high now, and smaller, and she felt her grief shrinking with it. Or not shrinking, never really changing, but ceding some of its dominance over the landscape, exactly like the moon. She wondered why that was, what trick of physics made the moon appear huge when it first came up but then return to normal size after it