Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [70]
“No kidding? You’d go all day?”
“Supposed to. We usually didn’t. I’d just skip breakfast and try to be good for a month. But the best part is the end, where you have this giant feast to make up for everything you didn’t eat that month.”
“Like Thanksgiving?”
“Better than that. It lasts three days. Not even counting the leftovers.”
“Man. A pig-out.”
“A goat-out, is what it is. My family was nix on pork, on both sides—Jews and Muslims agree on that. But we love goat. People think lamb’s the Middle Eastern thing but the real, true tradition is qouzi mahshi, milk-fed kid. Mom and I would always go visit the Arab cousins for Id-al-Fitr, at the end of Ramadan, and they’d roast a kid over this giant spit in their backyard. Then there’s another feast four months later, Id-al-Adha, which requires an even bigger goat.”
“I don’t think I’d care for goat.”
“No? You ever eaten it?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing. Qouzi mahshi, yum. It’s like a sweet, tender calf, only better.”
He looked doubtful.
“Hey, I thought you raised goats, Rickie. What are those things with horns I’ve seen back behind your house?”
“Oh, that was a Four-H project.”
“And you didn’t eat your project at the end?”
“Nah. They’re just there to keep down the weeds, I reckon.”
“Are they for milk, theoretically, or for meat?”
“They’re supposed to be slaughter goats. The idea was to sell them at the state fair while they were still under forty pounds or something. The judges feel their ribs and hipbones and everything and give you a grade.”
“And did your goats make the honor roll?”
“They were pretty good. But you can’t sell a goat around here. Heck, you can’t give away a goat around here. I know because I tried.”
“But I’ve seen them all over the place. Here in this county, I mean.”
“Well, see, there was this big slaughter-goat craze a while back in Four-H. Mr. Walker got people started on it for some reason, and now half the back fields in the county are full of goats people can’t give away.”
“Huh,” Lusa said. “Who’s Mr. Walker?”
“He’s uncles or cousins to us someways. By marriage.”
“Everybody within sixteen miles of here is uncles or cousins to you someways.”
“Yeah, but Mr. Walker, he’s the livestock adviser for Four-H. Or used to be, when I was a little kid. He’s prolly retired now. He’s got that farm over on number Six that’s all weedy in front? He grows chestnut trees, I heard.”
“Chestnut trees all died fifty years ago, Rickie. The American chestnut went extinct due to a fungal blight.”
“I know, but that’s what people say he’s growing. I don’t know. He knows all this stuff about plants. Everybody said he should have been the crop-project adviser, not the livestock adviser. That’s why he screwed up all these kids on the goats.”
“Huh,” Lusa said. “You think he could help me find a cheap goat or two for a feast? What the hell, I’d even invite your mom and aunts up, scandalize the family with qouzi mahshi and imam bayildi.”
“What’s that?”
“Food of the gods, Rickie. Roast goat and roast stuffed vegetables. Actually imam bayildi means ‘The emperor fainted.’ Which is what your aunt Mary Edna would do if she saw a goat looking at her from the middle of her mother’s walnut dining table.”
Rickie laughed. He had a wonderful laugh, wide open, the kind that showed molars. “You don’t need Mr. Walker to find you a goat. You could just run you an ad in the paper: ‘Wanted, free goats. You deliver.’ I swear, Aunt Lusa, you’d look out your window next morning and see a hundred goats out there eating your field.”
“You think?”
“I swear.”
“Well, they’d keep the thistles and briars from taking over my hayfields. I could get rid of my cows. Then I wouldn’t have to learn how to run the bush hog.”
“’At’s a fact, they would keep your briars eat down. They don’t take much hay, either; they can feed theirselves pretty good off the brush, most of the winter.”
“Are you serious? My God, then I