5 ◆ Lyris

LYRIS WOKE IN THE MORNING and found Follard’s jack- knife under the pillow. She considered cutting Micah’s shoestrings with it, but what kind of revenge would that be? He could just get new ones. She turned onto her back in the sagging bed. The mattress rested on what appeared from underneath to be a panel of hog fence. No matter which end she placed her head at, her feet were higher. When she slept on her side, the bed put such a twist in her spine that she felt old and bent the next day.

But wasn’t that the way? she thought. The cracks in the ceiling reminded her of the Great Lakes. Homes was the word that helped you remember their names. Until you were on your own, you took the makeshift bed given you and dreamed of the strong beautiful bed you would have for yourself someday. She got dressed and went downstairs. Light filled the kitchen. She smelled pancakes and the dusty husks of the cornfield across the road. Soon the corn would be harvested and bound for the river in semitrailer trucks and hopper cars. Charles had explained this.

She stood in the doorway, waiting for her life to come back to her body. Saturdays here seemed aimless, windblown, whereas in the orphanage they had been days of cleaning. All the kids would walk around with mops in their hands and the sting of bleach in their noses.

Charles slid three pancakes from a spatula onto Lyris’s plate. “What’s this about someone with a metal detector in the yard last night?”

“He said his name was Follard and he was lost,” said Lyris. She uncapped a bottle of clear corn syrup, which looked like furniture polish.

Charles sat in a chair backward, the rounded rail under his arms. The sleeves of his blue sweatshirt were cut above the elbows. “Did you ask him over?”

Lyris cut her pancakes with knife and fork, wondering what Charles was trying to be. He was a mystery. A shadow moved across his eyes. “No sir. I’ve never seen him before. He just walked up out of the grove.” Charles’s hair was thick and black — Micah said he dyed it — and a bit shaggy where it curled over his ears.

“He’s no one you want to know,” said Charles. “The best you can do with a kid like that is stay away.”

Someone, she suspected, had said the same about Charles one time or another. She could see in his face that when talking about Follard, he was talking about himself as well. That’s how he could be so sure.

“Did Mom leave already?”

“Yes, about three hours before she had to. But understand what I say about Follard. And if he comes around again when Joan and I aren’t here, I want you to tell him whose place this is. I’ll tell him if he doesn’t get it. And we don’t want any metal detecting on our land.”

“All right. I understand.”

“Maybe he’s got the idea that whatever’s under the ground is free for the taking. This is not how it works.”

“No.”

“I know this kind of kid. And I say it for your own good and believing full well that you can take care of yourself.”

“Which I will.”

The dead and seedless head of a sunflower moved across a windowpane. Charles’s eyes met hers and did not look away. “Can I ask how you got your name?”

“Well, there was a garden at the orphanage, and the gardener, not the one they had when I was there but some other one before that, her name was Lyris.”

“And later, when you had foster parents —”

She ate a wedge of pancakes from the flat of her knife while waiting for him to go on.

“Which were the ones that made bombs?”

“Pete and Jackie. But I don’t know if they really made them. They had the instructions and all.”

“And none of them ever wanted to change your name.”

Lyris thought for a moment. “Why? Do you think I should?”

“No. It’s a nice name and it suits you. I just wanted to know how it works, with the foster parents and everything. Joan got Micah’s name out of the Bible.”

“I thought she might have,” said Lyris. “What did this Follard ever do?”

“They say he burned his parents’ house. I don’t know the whole story. I didn’t really follow it. It happened some years ago. He went to court, but they couldn’t prove what happened.”

“Did he really?”

“Who knows? They say he did.”

“I think he might have been lost, like he said.”

Charles got up from the chair. “This is not an easy place to get lost in.”

“All right.”

“Can I make you more pancakes?”

“No, thank you.”

“There’s a special one you better have.”

He carried her plate to the stove and came back with a scrap of browned batter in the shape of a cursive L. “That’s for Lyris,” he said.

After breakfast they drove over to Charles’s brother’s place to build new doors for the barn. Jerry had a table saw and a lumber pile. In his faded blue postal clothes and the white pith helmet that shaded his eyes, he sat on the front steps by a silver keg, drinking a glass of beer. Charles sorted through the lumber, measuring boards with a tape. He dragged out the ones he wanted and put them on the wet grass in the sun. The boards were of different colors, but weathered and faded so that the same grayness of grain showed through all of them.

Jerry came down the steps and stood by the wood. “Caught me on my break.”

“You know,” said Charles, “a policeman came by our place looking for a keg last night.”

“Same here.”

“What’d you say?”

“Not much I could say with the evidence so evident. But you know Earl. He’s more curious to know what happened than he is eager to put himself out. He did say he would get my lights taken away if I misused them.”

“He must have come over here after being at our place.”

“I imagine, but he didn’t say so.”

“Always one step ahead, isn’t he?”

“Not hardly. What are you making?”

“Barn doors.”

Jerry got into his car and drove off to deliver the mail, leaving the three of them in the lonely blue light of his place down in the hollow. They worked all morning, and it never seemed to get any later. Lyris and Micah brought out sawhorses from a corrugated metal building. Charles tried to be patient with Jerry’s warped lumber, but he swore and raked his fingers and misplaced his tools. Watching him trying to contain his unruly nature was like watching someone tie himself up with rope. Lyris and Micah liked it when he lost his tools, because then they could pick them up and hand them to him. Charles ran the circular saw while Micah and Lyris helped steady the boards on the sawhorses. Sawdust flew in furry arcs that coated their arms and necks. Charles went out of his way to show them the way that things should be done, demonstrating how the release of the thumb lock made the steel tape race back into its housing, and how when a frame was square, the measurements on the diagonal were exactly the same. When the measurements differed, though, he seemed uncertain what to do about it. Lyris chewed the skin on the side of a fingernail, thinking that big things they had no clue about were happening somewhere else in the world.

Eventually they got the planks sawed and laid out over backing frames with X-shaped crosspieces to keep them “on the square.” Then it was time to nail, which came as a relief, because they could all take equal part, slugging away, with little precision required. Planks gapped in places, and the ends were not always even, but Charles said they could caulk the gaps and saw the ends back at home, where he had a chalk line somewhere. Each door was too heavy for all three of them to lift, but somehow not too heavy for Charles alone to lift. He put them into the back of his pickup, and they rode home, where they tore down the old doors and set about hanging the new ones. Charles screwed the straps of the old hinges into place. The doors opened and closed better than Lyris expected, and looked all right, except that one door was green, the other blue and red. That could be fixed with the painting, which would wait for another day.

In the afternoon they went to an auction house called the Palace to find a goat for sale. This was a big square building of whitewashed brick flanked on either side by open-sided sheds and alleys of matted straw. Cows lowed in the sheds, and Micah ran toward the noise. He stopped short, however, before a large circle of dark and shining blood on the straw. When Lyris and Charles caught up, they discussed what might have occasioned the spilling of the blood and why it had happened right here, but none of them could get a mental picture of the violence.

“My uncle one time got a calf to raise and slaughter,” said Charles. “He was going to make himself into a gentleman farmer. He’d read all about it, but it wasn’t in him, you know? The seasons passed, and the calf got bigger, and when it came time to kill the thing, he couldn’t do it. They had that cow until it died of old age. It would follow my uncle around and come when called. When it died, they dug a big hole out back of the house and buried it there.”

“Appalling,” said Lyris.

They walked down the aisle between the pens. The cows moved slowly, as if embarrassed about their great size. The hogs lay splayed out on their sides, oblivious.

“They look hot,” said Lyris.

“A pig will look hot in any weather,” said Charles. “They’re just hot-looking.”

“Where are the goats?” said Micah.

“I’m wondering the same.”

Flies buzzed the blinking eyes of a pink sow with black spots. “What if God is some kind of livestock?” said Lyris. “People will have a lot of explaining to do.”

“They have that no matter what God is,” said Charles.

“Or a lobster,” said Micah. “How would you like to be a lobster and get boiled alive in a big pot?”

“I wouldn’t go for that,” said Charles.

“I seen it on TV.”

“Alive? Hard to believe.”

“Oh, it’s true,” said Lyris.

“What do you eat of a lobster, anyway?” said Charles. “Doesn’t seem like there’d be a lot of meat on them.”

“They’re crustaceans,” said Micah.

“Well, I wouldn’t eat a lobster if you paid me,” said Charles. “And I wouldn’t eat rabbit, although many do.”

“There’s a goat,” said Micah. He was looking into someone’s yard, where an animal slept in the grass beneath a tree.

“Hell, that’s a dog,” said Charles.

Lyris smiled as she followed Charles and Micah into the main building. There was something she liked about Charles, although he knew so little about lobsters.

The three of them walked up a set of wide and uneven stairs and came out at the top of an old wooden auditorium, semi-circular in design. The bleachers descended steeply, in ever tighter arcs, to a dirt pen two or three stories below.

“Imagine building this,” said Charles. “We had trouble with them simple doors.”

The bleachers were half full of farmers. Some talked, some smoked, some held radios to their ears. They wore wide-legged pinstriped overalls and cloth hats crushed down on their heads. The auctioneer stood at a raised platform at the back of the pen. The wall above his head had hand-painted signs for feed companies, well drillers, implement dealers, veterinarians, and banks. The biggest sign of all was a disclaimer: ALL GUARANTIES ARE BETWEEN THE BUYER AND THE SELLER WITH NONE MADE BY THE AUCTIONEER. Lyris felt she’d happened on some ancient place.

They walked down an aisle and took seats as the next sale was beginning. A door opened beside the auctioneer’s stand and five hogs sauntered into the pen, ringed noses testing the air. They were followed by a man slapping a wooden slat against his thigh and calling, “Suh! Suh!” He wore knee-high boots of black rubber with terra-cotta soles. Lyris expected the auctioneer’s speech to be hypnotic, nonstop, and indecipherable; she was ready for a torrent. Instead he said calmly, in a drawl more occupational than regional, that these were American Landrace barrows certified by the seller free of cholera and Bang’s disease and mange.

After the hogs were sold, the man with the flat stick and high boots bowed to the bleachers and herded the animals back through the doorway in the wall. Charles asked a group of farmers sitting below them when the goats were expected to go on the block, or had they already gone?

The farmers laughed. An old man wearing round eyeglasses asked what Charles had said. When it was repeated to him, the old man craned his neck to see who had asked such a thing. “Why, the goddamned dummy,” he said.

“Saturdays are hogs and cattle only,” explained another farmer. Using a blunt-nosed pencil, he was writing figures on a scrap of brown paper.

Charles gave the old farmer a wary glance. “What day are the goats?”

“They don’t get a day,” said the writing farmer. “It’s not an auction animal. Not that I know of, anyway.” He turned away. “Skel! This fellow wants to know about goats.”

Skel stood up and looked around. “We haven’t had a goat, geez, going on ten years.”

“Let’s go, Daddy,” said Micah.

“There’s no money in it,” said Skel. “I can tell you from sad experience, you’re better off with cattle.”

“Let’s go.”

“You’re telling me they don’t auction goats,” said Charles, hemmed in, it seemed, by everything they knew and he didn’t. “That it isn’t done.”

It wasn’t really clear whom he was talking to, but the farmer with the scrap of paper folded it and put it in the pocket of his green down vest. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “I could believe it happens somewhere.”

“They don’t auction goats in this county!” said the old man, as if the county’s honor had been called into question.

“They’re more suited to hill country,” said Skel. “You’ve come to the wrong place, son.”

Charles lifted his chin proudly, surveying the farmers arrayed against him. “Watch me,” he said. He got up and walked down the aisle to the pen, where he pushed open a gate and strode through. He stepped onto the platform and addressed the auctioneer, who listened impassively, as auctioneers will.

“Who is he, anyway?” someone asked.

“Our father,” said Lyris.

The old man with the round glasses opened a flat tin and offered it to Micah. “Want a Sucret?” he said.

A rowdy calf was sold, kicking and snorting, and then another pack of hogs. Charles reappeared from above and took a seat beside Lyris.

“I don’t mind, Dad,” she said.

“When you bid,” he said quietly, “just raise your hand.”

The next animal for sale was a white cow, which no one bid on, and it was withdrawn. Then the man with the flat stick pushed the door open and dragged in a goat by a rope looped around its neck. It had a shaggy reddish coat that reached nearly to the ground. Once it saw the audience, it moved ahead of the man, strolling in a stately manner around the pen, like a float in a parade.

“This is a Toggenburg doe, two years of age,” said the auctioneer. “I’m looking for a bid of sixty-five dollars.”

Charles nudged Lyris, who raised her hand.

“Sold,” said the auctioneer. “Young woman in the seventh row’s got herself a goat.”

Lyris felt all the eyes in the auction house on her. Maybe that was an exaggeration. But she had not felt chosen in this way since the Home Bringers stole her from her ironing board.

At a feed store on the way home they bought forty pounds of alfalfa pellets, a leather collar, and two metal pans. Charles pounded a stake into the back yard and tied the goat to it, leaving enough slack for her to get under the porch roof in case of rain. The goat’s eyes were slotted and lively, and she smelled like hot hay. Lyris set out a pan of water and another pan of the dark green alfalfa pellets. The goat showed no interest. Then Micah carried a lawn chair over next to the goat and sat down. This was a mistake. The goat butted the chair over, and Micah ran off. The goat walked over the chair with some difficulty. Charles cuffed her on her bony forehead and told her to cut it out, and she butted him. Then all three of them stood beyond the reach of the rope and watched the goat lower her head to the pan of water.

“How did you know they had a goat?” said Lyris.

Charles smiled. “I know the auctioneer. I called him last night, set the whole thing up.”

“But then,” said Lyris, “why did you ask those men?”

“Because I knew what they would say.”

There was a home football game that night, and the older 4-H girls went over to the field together in a club van. They would run the concession stand and earn the proceeds. The rival football players got off buses and stood around holding their helmets against their hips and blinking at the falling sun, their heads looking small and innocent above the platelike shoulder pads. It seemed to Lyris that any sport requiring so much padding had yet to arrive at an appropriate set of rules.

The game started. The fans prowled the sidelines with leather flasks and thermoses, screaming for progress. The band members stood in goofy uniforms, playing their instruments, and occasionally one would take off after sheet music that had escaped its harp-shaped holder to skip over the ground in the fall wind. It was an absurd and lovely spectacle for someone raised in an orphanage and by suburban terrorists. On break from the concession stand, Lyris stood behind the end zone, watching the roving street brawl of the game and drinking hot chocolate with Octavia Perry and two other girls from 4-H. Suddenly Octavia was being nice to her, and what a blessing this kindness seemed, if somewhat sinister.

“Isn’t this good cocoa?” said Octavia. “It’s so, like, chocolatey I could drink a barrel of the shit.”

“You’ve put something in it, haven’t you?” said Lyris.

Octavia smiled at her. She had blazing dark eyes and coral beads in her hair. “It’s possible.”

“Oh, drink up, Lyris,” said a thin girl named Mercedes Wonsmos. “You don’t have to be so Christlike all the time. Don’t try to iron us the way you iron your slacks.”

“Yeah, you can drop that tiresome act,” said Echo Anderson. “We’ve decided to be your friends, but you have to be genuine with us.”

“I have been. I’m not Christlike.”

“Have some cocoa,” said Octavia.

The crowd started yelling. The wave of sound rose and rolled their way. A small boy from the home team staggered into the end zone with the ball in his arms and a tall, thick-bodied opposing boy holding on to his leg.

“I scored! Let go! I’m going to spike!”

“I say you ain’t,” said the larger boy.

The referee raised his arms as if someone had pulled a gun on him and then tugged the fighting boys apart.

A squad of cheerleaders sprinted down the field with fists pressed awkwardly to their sides. “Ahhh, cut me some slack, ’cause if you don’t, I won’t, scratch your back,” they shouted.

The 4-H girls looked at each other and shook their heads in the steam rising from their cups. “I don’t know why we even have to drink when life itself is so fascinating,” said Mercedes Wonsmos.

The sarcastic delivery of her remark did not make it false. Lyris liked the cold hilltop field and the high lonely banks of floodlights and the white jerseys of the home team and the field so bright and the sky so dark. She took the pieces of the night into her heart and had room for more, as if her heart were as big as the auction house. Now the boy who had scored the touchdown spun free of the gyrating cheerleaders and came so near that she could have counted the cat decals on his dull gold helmet. He had an eager, what-next expression on his face and reminded her of Micah. She put her foot out and tripped him, settling a score that he could not have been aware of. Down he went on the grass, but he bounced up immediately, as if his fall were intended, a new part of the scoring ritual. His teammates gathered around, slapping and punching him to convey their approval. All of their helmets had the cat stickers, given for accomplishments on the field. The team seemed rich in achievement indeed, though it had yet to win a game. But this illusion was all right too, beautiful in its way, for if they counted themselves better than they were, then couldn’t she do the same? “Go, Fighting Cats,” she found herself crying, “go,” as if urging the boys to leave the field and the town and strike out through the bristling dry cornfields for the perilous journey to adulthood. Yes, she was thoroughly drunk, but with some clarity of vision, and at this moment she turned to see Follard standing among the thick and curving pipes of the pumping station behind the field. He saw her too. He swung down from the bolted blue jungle and came to the field’s end.

“I’m carrying your knife,” she said.

“Give it to me.”