Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [94]
“So that’s the first thing I’ll ask people when they call: ‘Have you got does? And are they now or have they ever been pastured with a buck?’ Right?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“If they are, I should just pass?”
“That’s up to you. If you want kids by the end of the year, you should.”
There was a pause. She seemed to be writing something down. “OK. And the next question?”
“What kind of goats are they? You’ll want Spanish, or Spanish crossed with what they call brush goats, which is what most people have around here. Meat goats, just ask if they’re meat goats. Your Saanens, your Swiss dairy goats, anything somebody’s milking, that’s probably an animal you don’t want.”
“OK. What else, you said the age was important?”
“Nothing over five years, nor less than one hundred pounds.”
Again, she was taking notes. “What else?”
“Well, of course, you want them healthy. You don’t want parasites. Look them over when you go to pick them up. If you’re not one hundred percent satisfied with the looks of them, don’t take them.”
“That’s going to be hard,” she said. “To turn up my nose at somebody’s offer of free animals? Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“That’s why you have your truck. You go to them. They’re the beggars, they’re hoping you’ll take the useless beasts off their hands. You’ll decide.”
“Oh, you’re right. That’s a very good way to look at it. Thank you, Mr. Walker, you’ve been extremely helpful. Do you mind if I call you back if I have more questions? I’m kind of learning as I go here.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Widener. Good luck to you, now.”
“Thanks.”
“Bye-bye.”
He hung up the phone and cocked an ear toward the front hallway downstairs. Still clutching the towel around his waist with one hand, he tiptoed over to the window and peered out, though he didn’t expect to see anything new in back of the house. Who could have been at his door? He dressed very quickly in the doorway to the landing, a place in his house where he seldom tarried, and it gave him pause when he glanced up and caught his reflection inside the chestnut frame of the antique mirror that hung there. He felt he had seen a ghost, but not of himself: it was the mirror frame that provoked him, his surviving face circumscribed by the remains of that extinct tree.
He padded down the stairs in his leather slippers, since he’d left his muddy boots outside the door to clean later, feeling too tired and fed up to do it when he came in from the field. His trousers, covered with green cockleburs, he’d folded over a kitchen chair, dreading the chore of picking them. The sharp burrs would prick his fingertips and leave them with a dull, poisoned ache. Garnett believed that if the Almighty Father had made one mistake in Creation, it was to give us too darn many cockleburs.
At the front door he opened the screen and poked out his head, then looked to the left and the right. Nobody. There were his boots side by side, still waiting muddily by the door. No car in the driveway, no delivery truck or any sign that one had been here. Usually the big UPS truck backed up on the grass and left an awful, curved scar of mud there. That boy they’d hired to drive it had more earring holes than brains in his head.
Garnett stepped out on the porch and squinted through his cloudy corneas at the heavy afternoon air, as if he might be able to decipher traces left in it. He didn’t get unexpected visitors very often. Never, in fact—nor unexpected phone calls, for that matter, but mercy, when it rained it poured. Someone had been here, and he’d missed him. It wasn’t an easy thing for him to let go of.
Then he saw the pie on his porch swing. A berry pie, just sitting there, taking in the day. It had the pretty little slits in the top from which a berry pie bleeds its purple fluids—oh, what heavenly mysteries