If anyone asked, we were surviving. Not that they asked. Not anymore, not with the streets gasping, gray and empty save for the motherless leaves and the wind slipping fingers under doors, spreading the gospel of winter. The town bell tolled, sirens blared, and everyone scurried to their plush and polished basements, if not plush, then certainly more polished than ours. We didn’t go to our basement. It was musty and wet down there, dripping spores and dangling spiders, more likely to kill than the probability of a tornado.
My stepfather, Amos, pulled out a stool, and I followed him to the porch with a doormat. There we sat and waited for a long wind funnel to take us to one kind of Oz, where a version of Ma was sitting on a golden stool, a brass crown on her small head and loyal subjects at her feet. After all, if Amos the physicist thought Kepler-186f could be heaven, out of reach in our current form but possible in another, then I could escape to an Oz of my imagination, maybe call it something else, something new and mine. Mine alone. We waited and waited, and when the storm didn’t come, when it scattered into air on the houseless plains, we decided to leave the porch and find ourselves a goat.
If anyone asked, we were surviving on long walks, goat meat, and canned tomatoes. The walks kept our blood flowing out of the other’s radius for as long as possible. I kept long nights roaming the woods, Amos kept long nights on the road, and we didn’t ask each other questions. We only spoke to discuss necessities: What are you making for dinner? Where did you put my favorite socks? Why didn’t you go to school today? The goat reminded Amos of home, his mother’s pepper soup. While he scalded his dying taste buds with habanero-spiced meat, I blended Ma’s tomatoes and stewed them with shrimp for my mild tongue. We were surviving on memory, the good kind, and all our good memory was tied to food. Food that was not easy to get in the middle of Kansas.
After the storm died on the fields, I worried we would not find a goat. It was darkening, for one, the sky a map of bruises.
The Miller farm was our first stop, just off a gravel road across from Dairyland. They had a llama and an alpaca, three hens, a rooster, five guinea fowl and five goats.
“They’re not for sale,” said Mr. Miller the first time we asked, months ago. “I’m sorry for your loss. But they’re family.”
When she was home, Mrs. Miller offered everything for sale, anything we wanted: chicken, guinea fowl, goat. They were not her family, she said. She needed the cash, she said. For her real family. (Not that we asked.) She would deal with her husband later. As far as I knew, Amos and I were the only customers for goat meat. Others might want pets, but I had yet to see anyone walking their goat on a leash.
But today was a lucky day for the Miller goats. Mrs. Miller was not home. The housekeeper, a college student with purple hair, met us at the door. She had firm instructions from Mr. Miller: no sales, no visitors. I heard voices behind her, a flashing television and laughter over two familiar TV voices. I almost asked if I could join them.
Amos stood frozen at the gate. I peeled myself away from the door. When I reached him, I pulled him by the elbow to the aging Camry.
“They’re going out of business,” I said. He grunted at my attempt at an excuse, gripped the leather of the steering wheel and dug his nails in. I winced. For a moment, I felt a pinch at the back of my head. The one I felt when Sam Chester scorched his thumb on the Bunsen burner during chemistry, the one I felt just before the basketball slammed my distracted face during practice. The one I didn’t acknowledge the morning my mother was gasping in the next room.
I took a breath, ushered my thoughts away from Ma and remembered Sam’s family had a farm, too, very close by.
“Keep right,” I told Amos, when he started to turn us back to the highway, to the Dillon’s
Market for tilapia fillets. “One more try.”
I didn’t want to go to the Chester farm. Not since Ma’s funeral. Sam Chester spent half his days there. Sam Chester was vulnerable there. Open, as close to happy as a halved spirit could get. I had been open once, too, at the farm. Now I couldn’t remember how. Sam was becoming a memory, too, and I wanted him to stay that way. An old escape, a kiss in the fields while my mother died in the cold house. But living memories were harder to shake.
At school, I kept my eyes down, away from his inquiring gaze. He tried to share lab stations and benches between games, all the while mimicking my silence. I requested a new lab partner, quit basketball and then debate when he joined. I didn’t speak, not even when his dimples grew shallow, not when they vanished into hard cheeks. His eyes paled, but eventually he took the hint. I was alone with myself, what I wanted, what I deserved.
Then the teachers started sneaking cards and notes into my locker, invitations to games and tournaments. It’s been a year, I heard them say in the space between one letter and the next. About time you returned to life. But I would not return. School had become a market of faces stuck between the desire to help and the desire to leave me to my grey clouds lest they migrated over. I was surviving. I didn’t have energy to figure out who was real and who was pretend.
Amos parked between Tracy Chester’s muscled truck and Sam’s green Audi. He eyed the luxury car, asked me if I knew the owner. I didn’t answer. Tracy Chester opened her door, wearing pink flip flops, jean shorts and a sleek shawl, her skin blotching at the cold. She wasn’t Mrs. Chester anymore, but everyone still called her that, so I did, too, in my head. She greeted us on the porch, door held open, Sam behind her. Her face bloomed, an invitation from a kind neighbor. Sam’s darkened: What are you doing back here?
“I’m Tracy,” she said, ignoring her son’s shadow. “It’s cold out. You all should come inside. I’ll make tea.”
“No need,” said Amos. “We’re here for a goat.”
“Fine,” she said. “Give me a smile, and I’ll sell you a goat. I can’t have you walking on my property all grumpy.”
“Ma,” Sam groaned.
Amos turned to leave.
“Wait!” said Tracy. “Gee, I was only pulling your leg.”
She stepped down from the porch and started a brisk pace to the barn, gesturing for us to follow. I knew this path well. The goats were fenced beside the barn. They were napping and defecating and munching on hay.
“Which one would you like?” Tracy asked, one hand on her waist, the other on the fence. The farm dog circled us, sniffing for bones.
“The friendly looking one,” said Amos, pointing. “With the two white feet.”
It was my turn to freeze.
“No,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” His voice was a blade kissing stone. Amos and I weren’t blood, but we had at least one thing in common. No one got in the way of our meal, just as no one got in the way of our grief.
“A goat is a goat,” I said. “You don’t have to be picky.” A goat was not just a goat. Not if you and your mother named him Wilson, fed him apples and promised to one day adopt him. But two truths could clash at a crossroad and remain true. A goat was still more than a goat if you hadn’t eaten all day, if you craved the meal your mother fed you when you returned home after lonely days abroad, the meal you tried to emulate to remember her. I knew this. I also knew hunger eroded his patience, so I stood firm. My hands clenched in my pockets. I stared at the poppies in Mrs. Tracy’s shirt. I tried not to look at Sam standing behind us, his face a canvas of confusion. I tried not to look at Amos, his face a growing storm.
“You can give orders when you’re paying,” he said.
I could pay for it, but if Amos knew I had money, he would ask where I got it, and it would be gone before a year passed, spent on expensive liquor, maybe even a down payment on a new car. My punishment for keeping Ma’s secrets. I looked at Tracy. Her face, glossy only a moment before, was blooming red, green eyes flitting from Amos to me. I tried not to panic.
“Tell you what,” she said. “Let the girl work here once a month, and I’ll give you a goat a year. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds good,” I said. I kept my voice flat. I couldn’t sound too eager.
Sam, finally catching our ruse, shook his head and went back inside. If Amos wasn’t on the road as often as he was, he would know what Sam and his mother knew. That Ma and I worked on Tracy’s farm when he was gone, that we spent summers here, while Amos crossed other states in the name of research, searching for new homes away from this one. Because ours was not a home anymore. We didn’t ask questions. We let him have his dreams, we let him have his time with his proxy wives and proxy children, painting pictures of perfection, at least until the day the picture slipped, and he saw a flash of fear in their eyes. Then he would return his gloom to us. Meanwhile, Ma and I found new dreams. Without Amos’ cloud above her, Ma borrowed Tracy’s seeds and built a garden of her own.
The garden made a beautiful picture. One he couldn’t know. Because we saved, to run, to build a new home. Ma hadn’t asked to come to the U.S. Amos had painted a picture of family, an irresistible portrait for the hungry, and so she had arrived with me in tow, not knowing how things worked. School allowed me an escape. All she had was an old house that yawned cold and empty save for spiders and long shadows. She went on walks to get away, but walking wasn’t enough, was it?
Amos frowned at Tracy’s offer. He sniffed, nose pinched, smelling suspicion. I waited for his tension to evaporate, breathed when his shoulders fell. Good thing he no longer asked about my life. Good thing his grief kept his eyes inward, clouded. Safe to assume Tracy was offering her condolences and only that.
“Two goats,” he said.
“What?” Tracy wasn’t used to bargaining. I hoped she would catch on quickly.
“Two goats a year.”
“Deal,” she said.
Still frowning, Amos nodded. “Give me another billy then. So long as he’s not too young or too old. I don’t have time to cook an old goat.”
The billy Tracy offered was old. But one problem at a time.
“Sam!” Tracy called. “Come here and help.”
Amos grunted. “We’re good.”
The last time one of the Millers had helped, killing the animal before we could argue, the goat died slow, too slow, so slow I recalled every breath and locked myself in the closet whenever Amos packed to kill another.
Since then, Amos didn’t like anyone peering over his shoulder. His kills were clean, he didn’t like to be questioned. I was only here because extra hands meant less time in the cold, because I lived with him and saw everything, almost everything. I still didn’t know how exactly my mother had died.
A spider, Amos had said. A spider on her pillow.
A brown recluse, said the doctor, too late.
I didn’t understand how the woman could survive a famine and a drowning, cobras and pythons and who knows what else only to die from a spider bite. I didn’t want to believe it. I disappeared into myself when I recalled my unbelief.
“Careful with that knife,” Amos growled. “Don’t want your blood in my meat.”
I handed him the knife. I bent down to hold the shuddering animal, locking one hoof over another, pressing down. Amos whispered a prayer, gauged the heart.
“Get the flamethrower,” he said when he was done.
He singed the hair off. I warmed my hands at the flames. I felt Sam’s knife-gaze at the back of my head. I didn’t turn around.
Amos scraped the goat and chopped off the limbs. He did almost everything himself, wrapped the head separately, re-sharpened the knife. I let him. I knew better than to put myself in the path of his rage. I cleaned out barrels and prepared the cooler, quiet, efficient. Until he dug a hole to throw away the entrails.
Ma would have cleaned it.
“What?” He stilled.
I hadn’t intended to speak. Unless I did. I had been misplacing my intentions of late.
“She didn’t like to be wasteful,” I said, barely a whisper. But he heard.
With those words, I saved the stomach and the liver. I couldn’t save any intestines—they were already in the ground, the chickens pecking around the farm dog, the dog licking at the blood. I wrapped what I could save in three bags, stuck them in the cooler above Amos’ meat. We packed. We washed our hands and feet at the outdoor tap. Tracy waved us out of the driveway; I waved back. Sam did not come to say goodbye.
Back in the cold house, Amos left me in the kitchen. My punishment.
I took my time. His punishment.
I cleaned both meat and entrails with lime, changed the water three times. I put them on the stove, lidded the pan, leaving room for steam. Then I left it all to boil. I walked out the back door and sat on a stump, overlooking Ma’s garden, what was left of it. If I closed my eyes and focused hard enough, I could see her on her stool, hunched over a potato mound, hacking at a difficult root with her hoe. I could see a younger version of myself pestering her about dinner. I could smile now, recalling that stubborn girl standing behind her mother with hands akimbo, bracing for the irritated, “You know very well how to make your dinner.”
I could stay here in this moment at least until Amos yelled at me to return to the kitchen. But if he forgot, if he, too, was trapped in a cocoon of tears, I would stay until my toes threatened to freeze, a reminder that most of my warmth had been lost to a summer long gone, a summer never returning. Even if the sky and the storms remained in denial, the earth stayed honest. The hibiscus petals had shrunk. Twigs that sagged like scarecrows were all that remained of Ma’s garden. Only the spiders persisted. An exterminator came every other month now to spray Raid in every corner of the house. He highly recommended renovating the basement. The landlord sent emails periodically, checking in, offering to move us to a new house, no need to worry about the rent, you’ve got so much on your plate, I’m so sorry for your loss.
We said no. We kept saying no. We couldn’t move. There was no memory in a new house.
This was home now, our punishment.
