Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [178]
“That’s true,” Lusa said.
Jewel narrowed her eyes. “Remember that. Don’t wait around thinking you’ve got all the time in the world. Maybe you’ve just got this one summer. Will you remember that? Will you tell the kids for me?”
“I think so,” Lusa said. “Except I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“Just make sure they know that having them, and being their mother, I would not have traded for anything. Not for a hundred extra years of living.”
“I will.”
“Do,” Jewel said urgently, as if she meant to leave the world this very afternoon. “Tell them I just got this one season to be down here on the green grass, and I praise heaven and earth that I did what I did.”
In the early afternoon Lusa took a deep breath, picked up the heavy box of vaccine vials she’d bought from the vet, and went down to face her goats. After some weeks of worry over poor eating and lethargy, Lusa had figured out that she had worms in the herd—which according to Mr. Walker was no surprise, given their motley origins. His advice was to worm the whole herd at once with DSZ, which he vowed wouldn’t hurt her pregnant mothers, and while she was at it, to stick every last one of them with a shot of seven-way vaccine. Lusa was daunted, but Little Rickie had promised to come up and help. He claimed there was no sense letting all those years of 4-H go to waste.
Lusa found the goats easy to manage most of the time, much easier to herd than cattle once she got the first ones going where she wanted them. She already had them corralled into the small calf pasture by the time Rickie showed up for the rodeo. The idea was to let them through the gate into the bigger field one at a time. Rickie could wrestle each victim down as it came through, then shove the worm pill down its gullet and sit on its head while Lusa sat on the rear end and gave the shot. Simple enough in theory, but it took her a full hour to do the first five animals. Lusa felt like a torturer. The poor things struggled and bleated so, it was hard for her to keep her eyes open and aim for muscle when she jabbed in the hypodermic. Once she accidentally hit bone and cried out as loudly as the goat did.
“I’m a scientist,” she said aloud to slow down her fluttering heart. “I’ve dissected live frogs and sacrificed rabbits. I can do this.”
She kept hoping Rickie would volunteer to take over the needle, but he seemed as scared of it as she was. And she didn’t think she’d be any better at his task, forcing the huge worm pill down the hatch, which he seemed to manage comfortably.
“You should see what you have to do to get a cow to take a pill,” he told her when she remarked on his skill. “Man. Slobber all the way up to your armpit.” She watched him push the white tablet deep into the doe’s mouth, then clamp her lips closed and wobble her head from side to side. He was gentle and competent with animals, as Cole had been. That’d been one of the first things she loved about Cole, beyond his physical person.
The second hour went better, and by the time they reached number forty or so Lusa was getting almost handy with the needle. Mr. Walker had showed her how to give the thigh muscle three or four stout punches with her fist before poking in the needle on the last one. When a shot was delivered this way, the animal tended to lie perfectly still.
Rickie was impressed with this technique, once she got it working. “He’s a smarter old guy than he looks, I guess. Mr. Walker.”
“Yeah, he’s that,” Lusa said, keeping her eyes on the brown pelt of this girl’s flank. The hard part was getting the plunger pushed all the way down and then extracting the needle without getting poked if the goat began to kick. When she was out and clear, Lusa gave the nod, and she and Rick jumped off at the same time, allowing the doe to scramble to her feet. With an offended little toss of her triangular head, she ran with a slight limp toward the middle of the pasture, where her friends had already put the humiliation behind them and were munching thistles in vaccinated, amnesiac bliss.
“Did you know he was Jewel