11 ◆ Micah

COLETTE GOT UP EARLY and fried doughnuts in an electric pan. Micah sat in a chair at the table, numb with sleep. What had he dreamed? He knew the shadows of it but not what made the shadows. Colette moved around the kitchen, talking quietly to herself. She had no idea of his late wandering, because when he got back to her house, the door was not locked. He had been turning the knob the wrong way, that was all.

Instead of putting the doughnuts on a plate, Colette laid them in a shoebox lined with wax paper. Then she took Micah back to his house in her car, an old Chevy Nova with a forest-green litter bag hanging from the tuning knob of the radio. She explained that she would be going on to Spillville, to see the world-famous Bily clocks and the memorial to the composer Antonín Dvorák. She had been planning this trip for some time.

Micah carried the shoebox into the house. He and his father ate the warm, jagged doughnuts and said very little. There was a deep scratch on Charles’s nose.

“What did you do?” said Micah.

“Bumped myself.”

“On what?”

“A coat hanger.”

Later on, the farmer named Skel who had been at the auction barn came by to drop off a book about raising goats. Lyris was still asleep, so Skel gave the book to Charles and Micah.

“As I say, I don’t recommend them as a rule,” said Skel. “They’re not much of a cash animal, and I don’t like the way they look at you.”

“Is that right,” said Charles absently. The book was called Modern Goat Husbandry, and like many books with modern in the title, it was old, with a woven binding of dark orange.

“It always seemed to me they were expecting something,” Skel explained. “Whereas a cow, feed it and hell, you’re the best friend it ever had. A hog, of course, is a different story. I don’t say a hog is friendly, far from it. But once they understand they can’t kill you, they become indifferent. Why, I remember one cold day in January —”

“What do you feed a goat?” said Charles. “We got some alfalfa yesterday. Are we on the right track?”

“We had a mix,” said Skel. “We give ours a mix until we decided to let them go.”

“You let them go?” said Micah. He pictured Skel’s goats traipsing about the countryside.

“What I mean is we sold them.”

A woman got out of Skel’s car, a glossy white purse under her arm. “We have to go, Skel.”

“What’d we feed our goats, Lucy?” said Skel. “What was that mix?”

“What you been giving ’em?” said Lucy.

“Alfalfa,” said Micah.

“We didn’t do that,” said Skel. “But it is done.”

Lucy nodded. She had a rugged face that made her look as if she could do anything. “Some go that route. What we did was shake up one part oats, one part Ringmaster Show Lamb, one part black sunflower seeds, and then sometimes a little nutmeg.”

Many buckets, and one with black sunflower seeds . . . The future was taking shape before Micah’s eyes, and it was good.

“And for cream, good news there, don’t bother with a separator,” said Skel. “Just put the milk in a big open jar in the refrigerator and leave it overnight.”

Micah and Charles stood in the yard and watched the farmers drive off in a silver Lincoln Town Car. “Here,” said Charles, handing Micah the goat book.

Micah wished that Joan were there to read to him. They had an early-morning ritual in which they would lie in Joan and Charles’s bed and Joan would hold a book in her left hand while draping her right arm over his shoulders. “Arm position,” Micah would say, and she would provide it, reading in her quiet, steady voice, Micah turning the pages. Charles would read aloud, but he could not resist adding sarcastic remarks, and when he got tired of a story, he would say, “And so they all moved away. The end.”

“When’s Mom coming home?” said Micah.

“Late afternoon, early evening.”

Micah carried his sleeping bag into the yard, unzipped it, and spread it under the willow tree. The light was more blue than yellow. He thought it important to notice the way the light was. It fell on the side of the birch trunk, which had bright bark and black scars. When the winter ice came, the birch would bend over the driveway so that its branches scratched the roof of Charles’s van, and Charles would remind himself to cut it down, but he never did. Micah pushed his shoes off with his toes and lay stocking-footed and holding Modern Goat Husbandry by Lloyd Mumquill between his face and the light. He liked the coolness of the breeze, because the house always seemed too cold or too hot, and this morning it had been too hot. He had had trouble breathing and felt a cold coming on, as his mother would say.

On the left-hand page opposite the title was a drawing of a goat with a comical animated face and the words Help Me! printed above its head. This made the book seem simple, but it was not. Micah read the introduction:

The average goat operation in this country clears a net of five to six percent. If this book could have the wondrous yet at the same time modest effect of reducing costs by one percent per hundredweight per annum while simultaneously increasing monthly dairy output by as little as nine ounces per mature nanny (see Appendix C), these figures would rise smartly, with seven percent becoming the floor and eleven percent the ceiling of our new and attractively remodeled “house.” No steward of C. hircus in this nation could resist an invitation to such a dwelling, and yet many prefer to stumble on in the wilds of blameless ignorance of certain economies. Now I want to introduce a phrase you will encounter with some frequency in these pages. It Does Not Have to Be So! Remember this and apply it throughout your daily chores and you will have learned all I have to teach. “Then tell me why, Mumquill,” you may say. “Tell me why I should read on.” This is a fair question. Perhaps you have examined other books pertaining to goat management and found them wanting. Lord knows I have. Many of these august publications look forward to a day when the pendulum of public opinion will swing from that virtual poison known as cow’s “milk” (the quote marks indicating my belief that cow’s milk is not milk at all but rather some dyspeptic and Vitamin A–deficient liquid of indeterminate nature, a danger to infants and old-timers alike, the Alpha and Omega of family living). Until that great changeful day, these utopian tracts suggest, the goat farmer is doomed to the here-a-penny-there-a-penny subsistence with which many of us are sadly familiar. Thus the solutions to our difficulties lie outside ourselves. Start a local production board! Catch the ear of a newspaperman! And if we all set to proselytizing from coast to coast, then slowly, imperceptibly, rich rewards will accrue, et cetera, if not to the present generation, then to its luckier heirs in some distant day. This approach, championed most prominently by Marilyn Faber in Goat and Man, which has seen an impressive if unfortunate six printings, frankly nauseates me. Moreover, It Does Not Have to Be So!

This is as far as Micah got, and that he did so was a testament to his perseverance. In order to keep going he had replaced the words he did not understand with other words that started the same way, which resulted in sentences that made no sense. If Joan were here, he thought, he would have her read not this book but some other book — The Railway Children, with the wrongly accused and absent father.

Micah lay on his back looking at the sky. The bending yellow reeds of the willow moved slowly against the blue. He sneezed, swiped the back of his arm across his nose, rose from the sleeping bag, and walked around behind the house. He batted the streamers of moss that spilled from the clotted eaves and grabbed a garbage-can lid to deflect the goat’s charges. The goat, however, did not want to fight. She lay in the sun, gazing up at Micah. There were mounds of manure here and there on the grass — perfect bearings of dark and shiny green, as if the alfalfa had gone through the goat without changing.

Micah fetched a hairbrush from the house and went to work on the goat’s red coat. Dusty hanks of hair came off on the bristles. Sometimes the goat tried to bite, but not seriously. Micah patted the bony crest of her head with one hand while brushing with the other.

The goat struggled up on its hard-shelled feet, as if to signal the arrival of an intruder. It was Micah’s Uncle Jerry, who said, “Oh, God.”

“That’s right,” said Micah. “We got her yesterday.”

“You want to go to a show?”

Having resented Jerry ever since he had cut down his tent, Micah said nothing.

“You don’t even know what it’s about.”

“Tent wrecker,” said Micah.

“Why’d you get a goat?”

“Lyris’s going to raise it for 4-H. But it’s half mine.”

“You’ll rue the day.”

“It does not have to be so,” said Micah.

Jerry rattled a newspaper in his hands and folded it twice. “Look here,” he said. “If this doesn’t interest you, then you’re no relation of mine.”

“Meet Gabriel Rain and His Huskies Monk & Tandy,” said the advertisement. The photograph showed a man standing between two proud dogs. The animals sat alert and open-mouthed and had thick silvery ruffs. “Melodeon Theater.”

The goat ripped the newspaper from Jerry’s hands and began tearing it up.

“Hey,” said Jerry. “Give that back.”

“She doesn’t listen to anyone,” said Micah. He picked up a shred of paper. “Look how small she makes it.”

Micah had been to the Melodeon in Morrisville once before. He and Charles and Joan had gone to see an old movie called Charlie the Lonesome Cougar, but they missed the first twenty minutes, and when they tried to stay for the beginning of the next show the usher said they couldn’t. Charles argued for a long time, but when they were halfway home he seemed to have forgotten all about it. That night they ate at a fish fry in a tavern in Chesley. Charles surprised Joan and Micah by going around to all the booths and drinking water from the glasses of the other customers. The people didn’t like it, anyone could tell, but most let him do what he wanted. Micah and Joan looked at each other and laughed with their mouths if not with their eyes. Micah thought that Charles was like the cougar in the movie, in that those who did not know him were afraid of him and those who did know him were keenly aware of this general fear without having any solution.

Now a horde of kids milled and shouted outside the Melodeon, and Jerry and Micah were carried along by the crowd. Someone shoved Micah hard in the small of the back, and he turned on a larger and older boy. Charles had advised him to go for the knees in a fight, but when Micah pictured the pale and lumpy knees of the bully, he could not do it. This was why he would never be a good fighter. He always thought of the other person, and by then he was lost. A tedious shirt fight ensued. Jerry separated the two boys and asked if this was any way to carry on.

At that moment a long convertible pulled up in front of the theater. It was driven by Gabriel Rain, whom everyone recognized from the picture in the newspaper. The dogs, Monk and Tandy, sat stoically on either side of the back seat.

“This is nothing new to them,” Jerry commented. “They’ve seen it all a thousand times.”

Gabriel Rain stepped from the car holding the propeller of an airplane. What this signified no one could say, but dozens of kids rushed him while the dogs cast their eyes about uneasily.

“See there,” Jerry said into Micah’s ear. “A normal dog, in this situation you would have a problem.”

“Get back,” said Gabriel Rain. “Get back, I say.” The wave of children broke and subsided, and the dog trainer raised the propeller over his head. “Now that you’ve all had a chance to see the movie, I thought —”

“What movie?” screamed several children at once.

“We ain’t seen any movie!” said the one who had pushed Micah, in that triumphant and slightly hysterical voice some children employ when an adult has made a big obvious error.

The owner of the theater stepped forward to deal with the misunderstanding. He twisted his hands while speaking quietly to Gabriel Rain, who tossed the propeller across the front seat of the car and listened impatiently. A funeral procession moved past, the slow black hearse followed by a line of clean cars with their headlights on. This quieted the crowd for a while, and the mourners looked at the dogs.

“Well, we haven’t seen no movie,” said Micah’s adversary.

Gabriel Rain removed his cowboy hat and held it over his heart. But once the last car had bumped over the railroad tracks, he threw the hat on the pavement and began berating the theater owner.

“Did you think I was going to be here all day?” he said. He bent to retrieve the hat, and a pair of sunglasses fell from the pocket of his jacket. “That’s not in the contract, sir, which you signed.” He took a piece of paper from the dashboard of the car and unfolded it. “It specifically says,” he said, and then he went into the details of the contract, which no one cared about.

The theater owner and Gabriel Rain reduced their argument to angry whispers. It cheered Micah to see that the owner was not going quietly but had adopted a pretty insistent tone himself. The two men hissed and pointed at each other with their forefingers held close to their chests, as if they could hide their animosity from the crowd. Then one of the dogs barked, and Gabriel Rain stopped talking.

“It’s like the dogs have trained him,” said Jerry.

Micah stepped forward to rescue Gabriel Rain’s sunglasses from the gutter. He breathed on the lenses, polished them with his shirttail, and handed the glasses to the showman.

“Thank you,” said Gabriel Rain. “It has come to my attention, everyone, that you have not seen the movie. Thus my visual aid” — he indicated the propeller on the seat of the car — “has perhaps caused nothing but confusion. Well, go in. Go in and see the movie. That’s what you’ve paid for, or are about to, and you won’t be disappointed. After the movie, there will be a demonstration in which Monk and Tandy will perform live some of the amazing stunts that you are about to witness on the screen, including the climbing of stepladders and so forth.”

Micah liked the movie, a black-and-white thriller in which the dogs were the real stars. The role of Gabriel Rain, whom no one had ever heard of apart from the advertisement in the newspaper, was played by someone else, who was equally unfamiliar. The story went like this: A doctor who flew his own plane was trying to transport vital medicine to an orphanage on a mountain. The villain wanted to stop the shipment so the orphanage would close and he could buy its land, under which lay zinc deposits, according to the map that he took pleasure in rolling out with a great rustling sound on tables, car hoods, and other flat surfaces. Gabriel Rain and his dogs enlisted on the side of the doctor, and there were many interesting shots of the dogs riding in the doctor’s plane with mountains and trees in the background. At one point the villain removed the propeller from the plane and buried it, but Monk and Tandy pawed it up from the ground and took turns carrying it back to the airport.

So that’s where the propeller came in.

Micah sat with his feet up on the seat and his arms wrapped around his knees, so engrossed in the film that it took him some time to notice what the usher was doing. She delivered food and drinks to Jerry and Micah. She also came and sat with them sometimes, and it was not long before Micah realized it was Lyris’s friend Octavia Perry.

“Micah,” she said, as if his name were something to make fun of.

“Taffy,” he responded, but his show of disgust was muted and perfunctory, since the bad guy was at that moment training the telescopic sight of a rifle on Monk the husky.

When Micah looked over to share his enthusiasm with Jerry and Taffy, he could see that Taffy was upset, and might even have been crying. She opened her mouth wide and pressed the heels of her hands to her face. Micah did not believe that she was worried about the huskies or the fate of the hilltop orphans. Then Jerry said he and Octavia were going for a walk. They moved off down the aisle toward the looming screen and out the door where EXIT glowed in red letters.

Micah met Jerry and Octavia in front of the Melodeon after the movie. Gabriel Rain and the dogs were gone. Micah had not really expected to see them again. The wind had picked up, and the sky seemed deep and vivid after the darkness of the theater. Octavia was smiling, which made Micah glad, for although he disliked her, he did not want to see anyone sad. Some of the parents who had brought their kids to the show were trying to work up a head of steam over the showman’s defection, but their anger was hard to sustain.

Jerry treated Taffy and Micah to ice cream at Birdsall’s, and Micah tried to send a subtle hint to Taffy about his uncle’s age by asking Jerry to tell what it had been like in South Korea when he was stationed there. Jerry had spent three years in the late seventies working as an electrician for armed forces television in the city of Seoul. He said he remembered exactly where he was when they got the word that President Park had been assassinated. He’d been in the apartment of a friend of his, and they’d been listening to a record by Doug Sahm. And he remembered the song that had been playing, “(Is Anybody Going to) San Antone.” Octavia looked at him as if she were going to jump across the table and take him to San Antone. Like Micah, she would not have known President Park or Doug Sahm from a box of apples, and yet Micah’s question had done just the opposite of what he had hoped it might do.