Billy Ray's Farm Page 12

  MY DADDY HAD a goat one time, when he was a little boy. He told me the story more than once. I can imagine Tula back then, back in the thirties, the roads dirt, my daddy with his little goat cart and the goat pulling him down to the store. Thinking about him and his goat gets me confused with the Faulkner story about Boon Hogganbeck hitching a wild horse to a cart and it knocking one of the wheels off on a post. But Daddy told me about his little goat and how it would pull him around everywhere, and how he kept it for a long time, and how one day finally they evidently decided to kill it and eat it and they cut its head off in front of him, and of how it kept on bleating even after they had cut its head off. Who would do some shit like that to a kid? Who did it? He never made that part clear.

  THE LITTLE GOATS prospered and grew. Young children were brought out from Oxford to pet them and play with them. They made you just feel good in your heart, by God, to look out there in the heifer pen and see them prancing around, like they had springs under their feet, or all four legs were pogo sticks. They seemed to have limitless energy and enthusiasm. Nanette had a big old bag with fat teats winking from between her legs, and I even thought of milking her but never did.

  The little goats got to be the size of big rabbits pretty soon. Their little bleats were musical, and Nanette seemed content. She was bad about butting, and Tom’s youngest boy had gotten scared of her for that reason, but it never bothered me. Even if she hit you it wasn’t that bad. If she hit me I’d just get ahold of her horns and wrestle with her for a while. She wasn’t mean. She was just a goat.

  I COULDN’T EVEN hear the tractor running at all. I said, Shit, it’s done quit, and it’s sitting there with the key on, what’s that going to do to it, anything? Will it cause something to short out, some other stuff’s already shorted out, it doesn’t have any headlights or a fuel gauge or a temperature gauge that works, what else is going to go wrong with it?

  I was still running and I knew there wasn’t any chance of him still being there by the time I got back. Just more wasted effort, just one more thing you spend time doing that doesn’t pay off, what difference would it make anyway, they’re dead already, they’re gone, but in a bad way that lives within me I would have felt better if I could have killed him. No solid proof that he was the one, but he was the only one available and he would do.

  When I got back to the wall of sagegrass I bent over again, and soon running running running I could hear the short muffled murmur of the tractor still chugging, odd how that distance swallowed all the sound up, but nothing had changed up there. I stopped behind the tractor and broke the shotgun open and pulled out some shells. The no. 4 pellets were smaller but there were more of them. I loaded the chamber and closed the gun and went out front again. I knew he was gone. It had been probably over ten minutes and he wouldn’t have lain there for that long, probably. Although with a wild thing you wonder just how they do live, on winter nights when the moon is up and ice hangs from all the trees, and the grass is white and frosted and stiff. What warmth is there for them and where do they hide? But man has a tough time of it, too. He tries to raise goats for the joy their companionship brings. For the goat-songs they sing.

  ME AND THE little goats never did exactly get to be best friends. I liked them fine, but it didn’t seem to go the other way. They weren’t like dogs, puppies, cats, kittens. They didn’t live in the house or even on the front porch, although one time I took one of them over to the patio where the family was cooking out. It didn’t really want to go, but I took my belt off and made a loop with the buckle and put the loop around its neck and opened the gate and started leading it out. Nanette got upset. She came after us. The little goat was bleating for her and she started bleating back and it just made the little one bleat harder and before long it started sounding like somebody was murdering them. But I closed the gate and took on off across Mamaw’s yard with it, it kicking and struggling, trying to pull away, and I kept talking to it, and trying to pet it, but it didn’t want to calm down, and it took a while to get it over on the patio. And it didn’t like it over there, and kept on bleating, and although everybody thought it was cute, it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t going to make much of a pet. I took it back to the pen and put it up. Billy Ray came home that evening and opened the gate and let them out in the pasture for some reason. The next morning there were only two baby goats.

  BILLY RAY AND I have these little talks sometimes. I tell him how things are going to go if he doesn’t do A or B and leave it at that and then when he doesn’t do A or B it happens and we have to talk again. And I knew that I had made it perfectly clear to him that Nanette and her babies needed to stay in the heifer pen because of all the coyotes that were around. We’d shot them. We’d captured them. They were still here. Now we’d lost a baby goat because he hadn’t listened to me. I told him, Let’s get them back in the pen and let’s keep them in there, okay? He said okay.

  I got on the tractor while he herded them up back toward the heifer pen. I was holding out for hope, hoping against hope, hoping that maybe one of them had just gotten separated from her and was wandering around out in the pasture, bleating for her. But I made a wide and close sweep right before sundown and there was nothing. Meat, bones, blood. All gone. But like I said, it wasn’t much bigger than a rabbit.

  I COULDN’T TELL if he was gone or not. Everything looked the same. The tractor was still running. The wind was still blowing. There were some pieces of rusted tin lying out across the short pasture grass in front, remnants of the tornado of ’84 that sucked the two-story barn up howling and spewed it back into thousands of pieces, and it was still lying here and there. Once in a while you’d run over a piece of it.

  I had my shotgun up, ready to aim it. But I didn’t see a damn thing to aim it at. I knew I couldn’t be that lucky. I knew he was gone.

  The place was green and beautiful. The sycamores that lined the creek were in full foliage and up past the other pond you could see the line of cedars along the fence. More than once I’d mowed a big patch of pasture and kept cutting it into ever smaller circles and seen the rats running, and then watched the hawks fall on them and carry them to the big oaks down in the bottom below the house and eat them perched on a limb, ruffling their feathers just before sundown. In long years past I’d fed Mary Annie’s daddy’s cows out of his blue-and-white ’67 Chevy pickup, delivered their babies, hauled off the dead carcasses of some that hadn’t made it. I’d been on this place over twenty years, had seen it change through weathers and wind and snow, had mowed it, fenced it, farmed it, made love and made children from that love on it. I didn’t like anything coming on it and taking what he wanted.

  LIFE ROCKED ON. It always does. No matter what happens, you just keep going to the day you can’t go anymore. I was saddened by the death of one of the little goats, even though I hadn’t known it very personally, but I was determined that it wouldn’t happen again. But Billy Ray has problems. He has cows and heifers and bulls and sometimes I don’t fully understand every little increment of what’s going down because I don’t have time to listen to all of it, but I do sit down at night with him sometimes and discuss this cow or that cow. This fence or that fence. This bull or that bull. I know I will never be free of cows. And I know that’s what he’s interested in, even though I’m not, so I try to go along with him some and cheer him along some, although I know already the heartbreak of cow ownership and do not want to sip the wine of its fruits anymore in this life. He let the goats out again for some reason or another, and another one disappeared.

  I got pretty pissed off then. I got the remaining two back in the heifer pen and I kept them in there. But one night not long after that, he came back again. The dogs raised a commotion, some bleating was heard, and the next morning when I went out Nanette was sitting very still with her horns caught in the woven wire and the last remaining little baby goat was lying close to the back gate with its throat torn open. It was quite dead. The son of a bitch didn’t get to eat it, but he killed
it anyway.

  The way I saw it, I had failed as a livestock caretaker to take care of the stock entrusted to me. I don’t think it bothered anybody else as much as it did me. I just couldn’t quite reconcile it. It didn’t seem fair.

  Billy Ray had to haul the last baby goat off. I don’t know where he took it. I’m sure wherever he took it, some coyotes found it and ate it anyway.

  IT CAME AS A big revelation to me that he was one of those big brown pieces of tin lying out in the pasture only when he stood up and started walking away. I cocked the hammer and put the bead on his shoulder at less than forty yards and when I touched the trigger I saw the hair fly. But it didn’t knock him down and he only whirled and started running up the hill. I ran with him, sideways, breaking open the gun and fumbling another shell from my pocket and loading it and shutting it and cocking it again and trying to track him. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t blown him down. How petri-fied with fear had they been when he came? At the creep feeder on top of the hill he whirled again, still looking for where the shots were coming from, and it was like he couldn’t see me at all, and I leveled on him and fired again, and I knew it was a load of OO buckshot, and a blast seemed to fan around him, some shock wave that hit him but still didn’t topple him, and he left running, tail out, streaking low, and I tried to reload again, but it was no use, because he was too fast, and he was headed right toward the cows, standing down there in the bottom below the house, as if he knew somehow that I wouldn’t shoot that way, and he dove among them and exited very fast stage left, ducked into the overhanging creek trees, was gone.

  I stood there looking after the last fleeting image of him, brown, low to the ground and laid out, getting away. Holding the gun like nothing. And feeling so helpless and hating it so bad. He was just an animal, but still he got the best of me. He came, he saw, he ate, he left. And there was not one thing I could do to prevent any of it, given the circumstances of my station and my family and cattle matters that were out of my hands. But still, it hurt. It hurt about as bad as anything had in a while. They were just so goddamn cute. If you could have seen them, you would know what I mean.

  WE DON’T HAVE any goats now. Nanette got sick and died. I found her. I don’t know if Tom ever told his children or not. But I guess when they grow up they might read this and finally know.

  I keep one of Nanette’s horns in my desk drawer. There is also a picture of her on the promo CD of Blue Mountain’s Dogs Days. The horn, hollow and fluted, is a spook, a talisman, a key. I keep it here to remind me of what a man can go through for goats. It reminds me of what is possible in this life in the country, and sometimes what is not.

  Shack

  MOTION: That’s what catches the fox’s eye. It’s the same for me. That’s why I see him first some evenings after I’ve climbed down from the roof. He has a run he goes into by the overgrown fence, down below where my neighbor Johnny’s horses usually graze. One evening, at almost dark, he came out from the fence bushes and walked halfway to the boat dock and then stopped when he saw me. But there was no wind, and I was standing still, and he either couldn’t figure out what I was or couldn’t smell me, and he went on across the pasture and about his business, which was probably catching his supper. Snacks of field mice. Maybe sleeping birds for a treeclimber like him.

  I like it that the fox is there. I hope he’ll stay on with me, and that maybe some more frogs will show up. There’s only one left from the forty or so I put in the pond five or six years ago. They were a gift in a cardboard box and some boys had caught them for me with their hands in exchange for a reading at the Clarksdale Public Library one night. They must have all left except for this one, or maybe he hopped his way there from somewhere else and never was in the original bunch.

  I saw him just this morning, sitting and blending into the cool mud beneath some ferns below the lip of the bank. I got to within ten feet of him and he didn’t jump. He has big round dishes under his eyes.

  The fox has seen me, I know. He’s heard me hammering, and he’s probably heard Cher’s new song on my radio, and at night when I run the generator and the halogen lights, he’s seen and heard all that, too. There are deer that come across the place, that hang around there and drink from the pond. Shane saw one walk across the shallow end, and yesterday I found a bed where one had lain, and their little heartprint hooves have left their signatures in the dry dust of the barn, close to the half-gone salt block. There are a few squirrels, and sometimes a big pileated woodpecker, what the old folks I was raised around called an Indian hen. Once in a while a great gray crane comes to visit and walk in the shallows with his long and bending joints.

  FOR A LONG TIME it lies buried in the brain like a seed: a vague idea of a little place somewhere off to itself, four walls to get inside, a roof to keep you from the rain, but where you can sit and watch it come down.

  Money and time are problems even if you have the location. But there was never any question in my mind about that. It would be somewhere beside the pond at Tula, close enough to step out the door and fish. When I bought eight acres with a house and the pond and a barn, years back, the house was old, and in a bad state of disrepair. When I was younger I had known the nice old lady who lived there. I did some work on it, built a new front porch, even painted the whole outside, but then the foundation started sagging because of termites, and instead of trying to put in a new foundation I had the house torn down. Even now I’m still chipping the mortar from the chimney bricks in an attempt to salvage enough of them for maybe a small patio at the shack. The bricks are handmade and irregular, and I think, old, maybe very old. Only the bricks and a big silver maple mark the spot where the house stood for so long, from before the time when I was a boy and used to open the gate beside Miss Lutee’s house to go down to the pond and fish. She lived there for a long time, long years ago.

  The land slopes down from the road, open pasture except for a few very big sweet gums and catalpas, and on the back side there are dense stands of old pines, some cedar and sweet gum, not nearly as many hardwoods as I’d like, things like red oaks and white oaks and pin oaks. But eventually there will be a good hardwood forest there. Not in my time, probably, because they grow so slowly, but maybe my grandchildren will be able to enjoy going over there to fish, and maybe hunting squirrels in the trees that will be grown by then. The little trees are already there, planted by nature, and you can see them if you walk slowly and identify them by their leaves and bark. I’m going to flag the ones I want to keep with surveyor’s tape. But the ground is also choked with young sweet gum trees, and they’ve all got to go, by spray rig and rotary cutter, meaning I have to get the tractor in there eventually, but for now I don’t have a road into it. I’m working on that, too, cutting tangles of dead pines killed by the Southern pine beetle, piling wood as I go, spraying and cutting the undergrowth that’s left, trying to take back a little bit more each year.

  These things take time for one man. Shane’s helped me a good bit, though. He’s torn down some old fences for me, pulled up the posts and piled wood for me.

  Finding the spot was what clinched it for me. Seeing where the house could sit made me start putting it there. But it wasn’t an easy place to visualize for a long time. M.A. had pointed to the spot before, had said it would make a good place for a little house. There are two huge pine trees, really big ones that soar on up there. One pretty good–sized cedar is back behind them, and a few elms are scattered to the left side and back, four or five of them. It’s a shady spot. It was overrun with briars and honeysuckle and poison ivy and sumac and all kinds of tough slick vines and dead fallen pine trees. The ground rises sharply behind the big pines. It was a mess. But I saw that the trees had grown in such a fashion that a small house might sit right in the middle of them. I took my steel tape back the next time and made a few measurements, stumbling around in the overgrowth and vines, trying to see what might fit in there. And then maybe through grace or something I began to see it. The house could sit back
of the two big pines and the left side of it could nestle up pretty close to the tall cedar. Maybe the cedar could be right at the edge of the porch.

  The house could sit within a couple of feet of the elms in the back. If the house was small enough it could. A small house, then. Maybe even a tiny house. That way I wouldn’t have to cut down any trees. That way I could make the house fit the land. I kind of began to see it. I kind of began to have a vision. That was last summer.

  THE TINY BOOK OF TINY HOUSES by Lester Walker is a book I’ve looked through a lot of times. It has all kinds of interesting houses that people have built through the years, all over the country, and the main thing they all have in common is that they’re small. But a small house also means smaller cost. I was thinking about trying somehow to build mine myself. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, only that I wanted to, that the actual occupying of it after the building part of it was over would be a constant source of pleasure, to be able to sit in it and remember nailing all of it together.

  But everything had to be level and square, didn’t it? Everything had to be laid out properly, didn’t it? You had to kind of know what you were doing, didn’t you? It needed not to leak. It needed to be able to be heated in the winter, maybe cooled a little in the summer. Would it have electricity or would it not? Would it matter? It might. If I was going to write over there I’d need my electric typewriter for sure. I’d need some kick-ass music and there wasn’t any doubt about that. On a cool evening in October when turned-orange sycamore leaves were drifting down onto the still face of the pond I might want to plug one of the guitars into the amp and turn it up to Scream to celebrate sundown.

  What would it be made of, wood, brick, siding, logs, were log homes hard to build? What if you spent a bunch of money and did it wrong and the roof leaked or none of the windows would open, what would you do then? Just leave it? You’d have to make it right, whatever it took. But is the ordinary person capable of that?