Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [74]
“Aunt Lusa, you worry too much.”
“I’m a widow with a farm drowning in debt, standing in a barn that’s about to fall on me. You’re right. What, I should worry?”
He laughed. “About the family, I meant. They’re just jealous that Uncle Cole went so crazy over you. But who wouldn’t? You’re so pretty and smart and stuff.”
She made a face at him, a squashed, sorrowful smile, to keep from crying. “Thank you for saying that.”
He shrugged.
“And listen, Rickie, thanks for just…I don’t know. Making me laugh out loud. You don’t know how much I needed that.”
“Well, listen. If you need help with this goat thing.”
“Oh, I’m just dreaming. It’s desperation.”
“What were you thinking? Tell me.” He was a peer suddenly, earnest and kind. She saw something of the older Cole she’d known—not in Rickie’s eyes, which were dark, but in the seriousness of his face.
“Well, what I was thinking was, I know this butcher in New York, Abdel Sahadi, he’s my mother’s cousin. He probably sells—I don’t even know, a thousand goats a year? Maybe more.”
Rickie whistled, long and low.
“Yeah,” she said, “New York City. It’s all people, eating all the time. That’s basically what you’ve got going there. But he sells almost all those goats at holiday times. All at once. So he doesn’t want them trickling in all year long. He needs five hundred, all in the right week. If it’s winter when you want one, you have to order it way ahead of time, and you pay a fortune for it. You wouldn’t believe what people in the city will pay for a milk-fed kid at holiday time. It’s like the ordinary rules of what you can afford don’t apply at those times.”
He was listening to her carefully. It made her listen more carefully to herself.
“Rick. Do you mind if I skip the ‘Little Rickie’? You’re not so little, you know?”
“Hell, I wish somebody would bury the damn ‘Little Rickie.’”
“OK, Rick. Tell me this. Is there any possible way I could produce fifty or sixty suckling kids by the end of December? And then maybe twice that many in the spring, four months later?”
He didn’t hesitate to take her seriously. “You know about worming, ketosis, birthing, all that, right? It’s some work. Did you ever raise livestock before?” She tilted an eyebrow at him, but he was suddenly off on his own calculations. “OK. You’d have to have two seasons. Not the same mothers for both kiddings.”
“Right.”
“How’s your fence? A fence that won’t hold water won’t hold in a goat.”
She laughed. “I think I’m OK. It’s electric.”
“Really? Shoot, that’s good. When’d you put that in?”
“I don’t even know; years ago. Cole did it. It runs all the way around the main cow pasture up there. He had a bad stretch with some roving cows.”
“That’s lucky, that you’ve got that. That costs some money to put in.”
“I know, he told me. But he said if his cows had got over in Mary Edna’s garden one more time it would’ve cost him his manhood.”
Rickie laughed. “All right, then, lady, I think you’re set up. Goats’d do fine out there on your brush; you wouldn’t need to grain them or hay them much, maybe just give them some fodder after it snows. But kidding in November, they’d need shelter. If it gets real cold, you’ll need to get the mothers in your barn when they’re ready to spring. You build them a little kidding pen. Jugs, they’re called.”
Lusa looked up at the ceiling of the barn cellar, envisioning the space above. The door to the main gallery of the barn opened onto the hillside. She could change the fencing just a little to give access to the big pasture. “If I didn’t have it full of tobacco up there, or stacked full of hay, I’d have some room.”
“That’s going to be your trick,” he said. “Getting them to settle down and kid right, after it gets cold. That’s not the normal season. I’ve never seen it done, to tell you the truth.”
“Oh. That must be why goat’s so expensive in the middle of winter.”
“Oh, yeah. They’d be worth gold to somebody that wanted them.”
“But do you think I could do it?”
He spoke carefully. “It’s possible. I think everybody in the county would think you were crazy for trying it.”
“How about if