What Comes After

That afternoon, when I realized, too late, that I didn’t know what bus to take, I had to walk the four miles home from school. Two miles on the shoulder of County Road, another two down the canopy road to Aunt Sue’s, though I missed her driveway and went an extra half a mile before I realized what I’d done and doubled back.

I was sweaty and tired when I finally got to the farm, but I quickly forgot all that when Gnarly rushed up to greet me, tail wagging like crazy, as if we’d grown up together. I rolled on the ground with him and let him lick my face all he wanted with his big slobbery tongue. I got up and raced him back and forth across the yard, threw him sticks, scratched him and hugged him and rubbed his belly. I’d never seen a dog so happy for the attention — and I was just as happy to be giving it.

Several goats maaed in the field next to the barn, and I wanted to go meet them, but Gnarly didn’t want me to go so soon, so I waved to them and kept playing with the dog.

I finally had to take a break, though — to go inside to the bathroom and to get a drink of water. I didn’t see or hear Aunt Sue, so I assumed she was asleep. I looked for something to eat while I was in the kitchen, but there wasn’t much besides lunch meats and bread: saltines, an apple, cans of green beans and peas and beets. A half-empty jar of peanut butter with traces of old grape jelly and cracker crumbs.

I was just heading for the barn to finally introduce myself to the goats when Book and Tiny drove up from football practice. Book had an enormous Big Gulp in one hand and a 7-Eleven burrito in the other. No books. He headed straight for the barn. Tiny turned his truck around and left.

“Well, come on, already,” Book said, waving his burrito at me. “Goats ain’t gonna milk theirselves.”

He yelled at them in the field and herded them over while I pulled open the barn door. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dim light in the barn, and to see what a wreck it was: dirty goat stalls, splintery wood, a flimsy milking stand, rusty tools, randomly stacked hay bales, phantom engine parts, scrap metal, a chicken coop leaning precariously to one side. Once the goats crowded in, they stayed close together in their open stall and eyed me warily.

Book plopped down into a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, still wearing his padded football pants and sweaty gray athletic department T-shirt, his Big Gulp balanced on his belly. The burrito had disappeared, except for the wrapper. He threw that at the goats, and one of them ate it.

All five were nannies, two of them pregnant. One was obviously due anytime; the other was just beginning to show.

“Those three,” Book said, gesturing to the milkers, “their names are Patsy, Loretta, and Tammy. The pregnant ones are Reba and Jo Dee. Mama named them after old-lady country singers. Except for Jo Dee. She ain’t old.”

Patsy, the smallest goat — or at least the shortest — nodded at me. I nodded back. I could tell right away she was the herd queen. The others bunched up behind her.

“We used to,” Book said. “His name was Ruckter, but we couldn’t keep him away from the nannies no matter what. He would jump over a fence, dig under a fence, knock down a fence, any which way so he could do the nannies. Plus he had a bad case of goat funk that never let up. So we got rid of his sorry ass, and now we just go out and get us a Rent-a-Buck when we need one.”

The slats in the side of the barn let a soft yellow afternoon light leak in. Book told me that I should always milk Patsy first. “She’s the boss of the rest of them,” he said. “Plus she’s Loretta’s mom. Once you get Patsy up there, every one of the other ones will go after her. But if you don’t get her to do it — or to do anything — the others won’t budge a muscle. They will fight you, and you’ll have to drag their asses up on that milk stand.”

I looked at Patsy again, and she looked back at me in the same way — each sizing up the other. I already knew about herd queens and a lot of other things about goats from helping Dad at Mr. Lorentzen’s farm back home. It would have made Dad happy to know I still remembered.

Patsy was a Nigerian dwarf. Her beard nearly reached the ground, thanks to her stubby legs, but you could tell she was strong. Loretta, her daughter, appeared to be half Nigerian, half La Mancha. All the others were full La Manchas — taller, leaner, more American. No ears, or practically none, anyway, which is another characteristic of the breed.

“Mama says Patsy gives the best milk,” Book said. “It’s fatter than those other ones give, so it’s tastiest. But Mama mixes their milk all up, so I don’t know how she knows the difference, but she does.”

I took a handful of feed and held it under Patsy’s nose. She didn’t take her eyes off mine as she tongued it out of my hand. She nodded at me again, and then, without my coaxing her, stepped up onto the milk stand.

“You better lower that stanchion down over her neck to keep her there,” Book said.

The stanchion was like the thing that keeps people’s heads in place on a guillotine, which I’d read about in A Tale of Two Cities — not that anybody in Craven County was likely to have ever heard of it.

Something told me Patsy didn’t like the stanchion, though, and that I didn’t need it with her. Maybe with the others, who seemed more skittish. But not with Patsy.

She didn’t move while I milked her. Just ate out of the feed trough at the head of the stand. She smelled like dirt and hay, and like our barn back in Maine, and like Dad when he came home from his vet rounds to other people’s farms.

Dad used to tell me I started out in life loving animals — since the second I was born. He said it was probably because my mom was feeding a hog we had in our backyard when her water broke and she went into labor. Everything happened so fast, she couldn’t make it past the barn before I was ready to come out. Dad did the delivery and said it wasn’t half as hard as getting a horse to foal. Mom apparently told him it smelled like manure in there and asked him to please get her up to the house. Dad told me he threw the placenta into the hog pen for the hog to eat, which my mom thought was disgusting. As soon as I could crawl, though, whenever I was outside, I would try to get into the hog pen with that hog. I liked that story. It was one of the few my dad ever told about my mom.

After I finished with Patsy, I scratched her under her chin. She seemed surprised by that — I doubted Book or Aunt Sue were ever very sweet to their goats — but she quickly relaxed. She closed her eyes. If she’d been a human, she might have even moaned.

After she stepped off the stand, Loretta practically hopped on up. I must have gotten too cocky, because again I didn’t lower the stanchion, and I also forgot to refill the feed trough, so once Loretta finished what Patsy had left in there, she pulled away and knocked over the milk bucket.

He laughed again. “She’ll know. Can’t make the cheese if you don’t got the milk. Can’t sell the cheese if you don’t got the milk. Can’t do nothing if you don’t got the milk. And you don’t got the milk.” He noisily sucked down the last of his Big Gulp. “Mama says once we turn them pregnant goats into milkers, she can make a couple hundred dollars a week extra from all their cheese. Unless somebody goes around spilling too much.”

I put Loretta in the stanchion and refilled the grain trough, and finished up with her milking.

The third milker, Tammy, had slipped back outside the barn. Book finished off his Big Gulp, then said, “Hold on. I’ll show you how to fetch her. She likes to be trouble.”

I followed him outside, thinking he’d coax her in with grain, but he just screamed at her and shooed her back toward the barn. He kicked her so hard that she stumbled, and before she could fully right herself, he kicked her again.

I laid my hand gently on Tammy’s head, but she shied away, and when I tried to lead her into the barn, she balked and bolted back out into the field.

Book snorted his usual snort. “I ain’t going after her,” he said. “That one’s all on you.”

I ended up tricking Tammy back to the barn with a pile of grain on the ground by the door. When she wandered over to inspect it and then eat it, I jumped out from behind her and shoved her inside — and latched the door before she could bolt again. I had to drag her onto the milking stand and dropped the stanchion over her neck right away. Book went back to the house. Patsy and Loretta stayed out in the field. Tammy, defeated, shoved her face into the trough and let me milk.

We had to pasteurize the milk, then stir in the bacteria culture and rennet, which is what turned it into cheese. Book told me how to do it while he sat at the kitchen table. “So this is your job from now on, like Mama told you this morning,” he said. “Now what you do is just cover it and let it sit in the fridge or anywhere cool until tomorrow, then you salt it and set it up so you drain off what they call the whey, and then you have your cheese.” He pointed to the stack of plastic containers. “Mama spoons it in there, and that’s what she sells at the farmers’ market.”

“You don’t add anything else?” I asked him. “You don’t smoke it or flavor it or anything?”

Book shook his head. “Mama says it’s too much trouble. We’re the only ones in five counties that makes goat cheese, and rich people can’t get enough of it just like that — just the soft goat cheese. They think it’s better than real cheese. More fancier.”

Looking around, I figured they could use the money. They didn’t have a computer. No answering machine and probably no voice mail — just basic service and a black telephone so old the numbers were worn off the touch pad. They did have a TV and an antenna on top of the house, but no cable and no satellite dish. Aunt Sue had a twenty-year-old VCR that probably ate most of the tapes she brought home from the warehouse.

About the only thing she had for entertainment that worked properly was a small, tinny, food-stained Walmart store-brand CD player. She kept it on the kitchen counter for listening to her country music CDs. Book told me sometimes he snuck his friends’ heavy metal on when she wasn’t home, but Aunt Sue always knew when he did because she said the nannies heard it all the way out in the yard and it caused their milk to sour.

We had sandwiches again that night. I made mine with white bread, processed cheese, and wilted leaves from a half-brown head of iceberg lettuce, with a dill pickle on the side, which was pretty much all they had that I could eat. Aunt Sue didn’t allow us to eat any of the goat cheese or drink the goat milk. I thought about telling Aunt Sue that I was a vegetarian, but I suspected she would give me a hard time about it. Plus if all we were ever going to do around there was eat sandwiches, it probably didn’t matter. She and Book both made Dagwoods like the one Book had been eating the night before, with plenty of meat. I felt a little sick watching them wolf it all down.

They talked about the football team, the schedule, the college recruiters, the asshole coaches, the asshole refs, the game coming up this Friday night, the game last Friday night, which must have been before the school year even started, though I didn’t care enough to ask. Neither of them asked about my day, which didn’t really surprise me. But I thought I should at least make some effort to be friendly.

“So I think I got my schedule lined up OK,” I said when they both stopped to chew. “It’s not great. I’ve already taken all of the AP classes they have here when I was back in Maine. They might put me in some senior classes in the spring, though, which could be good.”

Book snorted. It seemed to be an involuntary response to just about everything. “Know what AP stands for? Absolute Puke.”

Aunt Sue didn’t laugh, but she did nod, which I supposed meant she appreciated Book’s joke.

Then she turned back to me. “Was there anything else you wanted to interrupt us about?” she asked.

I thought about just shutting up. I’d gotten pretty good at it over the past month, biting my tongue around Mr. and Mrs. Stone, and eventually even around Beatrice. But I was getting tired of it. And besides, there was something I had to ask if I didn’t want to have to survive every day at school on a diet of Fig Newtons and Snapples.

“I’d like to pack my own lunches for school,” I said. “Sandwiches would be OK,” I added, which I thought was pretty generous of me, given the limp thing on my plate. “I hope that’s not a problem.”

Aunt Sue looked as if I’d just walked in the door uninvited. She glanced down at her sandwich, then back at me. Finally she said, “I ate school lunch.” She nodded at Book. “He eats school lunch.” She leveled her gaze at me again. “You eat school lunch.”

She took a bite of her sandwich. “Now, was there something else you needed?”

“No,” I said, afraid my face had turned red and they could see that I was embarrassed and angry. “There’s nothing.”

I made myself finish my sandwich, though every bite seemed to stick in my throat, and I had to drink glass after glass of water to swallow. Then I rinsed my knife and plate and cup and laid them in the drain board.

I went upstairs, intending to reread Huckleberry Finn and write my essay, but when I shut the door, the tiny room felt too claustrophobic again. I stood on the bed and leaned against the window, drinking in the evening air, listening to the low bleating of the goats — a comforting sound, but not comforting enough to keep me from missing Maine, and Beatrice, and Dad, and a life that wasn’t mine anymore. Whatever I might have been hoping for in North Carolina, it wasn’t this.

I lay on the bed and curled into a ball and stayed there, and thought about Dad — his gray hair he always let grow too long and unruly, his green fishing cap, which was buried in one of my clothes piles on the floor, his red flannel shirts that always had a tear in them somewhere, his Saturday stubble, his Sunday aftershave, his Christmas-tree coffee mug, which he used year-round. I dug through the piles of clothes until I found his cap, then held it against my chest. I sat hugging it for a few minutes, then pulled out my notebook and started another letter.

Dear Dad,

I milked goats today. I’m surprised by how much I remember about them from Mr. Lorentzen’s farm. There are also chickens and guineas, and they have a great dog here named Gnarly. . . .

I finally forced myself to sit up and do my homework, and that helped a little, too.

I practically ran from the room to get it. It had to be Beatrice. No one else knew where I was or would think of calling me. I reached for the phone, but Aunt Sue didn’t let go right away.

Beatrice heard. “Yes, ma’am?” she said once I had the phone to myself. “What’s that all about?”

“It’s how they talk down here,” I said. I stretched the cord out of the kitchen and down the hall. “Aunt Sue has a lot of rules. I’m supposed to say it, to be polite.”

“You aunt doesn’t sound too polite herself,” Beatrice said. “Telling you to keep it short the first time I even call.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s pretty strict. But they have goats here, so that’s a plus. And they have a dog.”

But Beatrice didn’t seem to hear me. “God, I miss you, Iris. There’s nobody to talk to up here. I still can’t believe you’re really gone. How are you? How’s the school?”

I told her about the girls in the restroom, and the chewing tobacco, and Book’s friend Tiny with his big elbows.

“What?” said Beatrice. “They think the Civil War is still going on, and they’re perverts?”

“I haven’t checked. Anyway, it looks like I’ll have to come home in the afternoons to milk the goats and do chores.”

“It could be worse.” I didn’t want to tell Beatrice how much I already liked the goats — the feel and smell of them. And how much I liked Gnarly, and he liked me. I didn’t want her to think anything was good here.

“It’s not OK, Iris,” she said. “It’s child labor. You should complain to someone.”

There was an edge to my voice that surprised me, and I wondered if Beatrice noticed. I didn’t want her advice. I didn’t need it. I needed her to understand what I was going through, and for her to be torn up with guilt that she hadn’t made her parents let me stay.

“Oh, God,” Beatrice said. “Them. Who knows? They’re parents. They fight; they don’t fight. I’m just trying to ignore them.”

“You mean Mr. ‘It’s complicated’? I think I’m going to start ignoring him, too. But there are plenty of boys up here besides him. Well, maybe not plenty, but some. Nate called me tonight.”

“Nate?” I said, surprised. Nate and I had dated for a month back in the spring; I stopped seeing him after Dad got so sick.

“Yeah,” Beatrice said. “I mean, we just talked. He heard Collie and I were having a fight, and he just wanted to see how I was doing. That’s all.”

That edge came back into my voice then — and I didn’t care if Beatrice heard it. “You can’t go out with somebody your best friend dated, B.”

“I know, I know,” she said quickly. “I wouldn’t ever do that. You know I wouldn’t. Come on, Iris.” She sounded hurt.

I knew I was supposed to say something to make her feel better, maybe apologize. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t know what else to say to Beatrice, though, and she didn’t seem to know what to say to me, either.

“Yeah,” Beatrice said in a voice that was already fading out. “I heard. Bye, Iris.”