Orion Magazine - March/April 2009

It was clearly a one-man job, feeding the crippled kid. Charlie couldn’t >gure out why Lucy insisted he help her. Most of the time, she was shooing him o= of things. Never mind, Charlie, she would say, just forget it, and snatch up the posthole digger and dig the postholes herself, or go back through the ?ower bed and weed it again as soon as he was done. He would vow to do better next time, and end up doing worse. She asked him to move the goats, and he put them in the pasture with the broken gate. They scattered and wasted their hay. He pulled ? owers along with the weeds. The windows dried streaky.

But every day he and Lucy sat cross-legged in the shade of a pear tree in the paddock, knees almost touching, while the kid slurped its bottle between them, and Charlie had to admit that it was almost peaceful. The kid was pure white, with blue eyes in a little birdlike face and spindly crooked legs that could not support its body. When it was born, a few days after Charlie arrived, its mother got up and walked away, tripping over it, and never looked back. Now it bleated for her every time the herd came near the tree, trying to drag itself after them. The goats would turn their heads and regard it with disinterest, like people passing a bum on a sidewalk.

Lucy was convinced there still might be hope, if they could just get its strength up. She had shown Charlie how to hold it, how to stroke its neck to encourage it to swallow. When they were out there together, she talked about the farm, the state she and her ex-husband found it in when they moved down from the north twenty->ve years before, and all the work they had done: the wall of briars they dug out of the pastures, the fences, the new roof they put on the farmhouse. She talked about her run-ins with the neighboring farmers—the Jesus boys, she called them—how they had waited all these years for her to give up and sell out, and how she had proven them all wrong.

“This pear tree,” she said a=ectionately, waving a hand toward its branches. “When we got here this pear tree only came up to my thigh.” She looked almost pretty; her narrow face tilted toward the kid, her long dark hair in a braid down her back, her blue eyes and turquoise earrings electric against her tan

skin. The wrinkles around her eyes softened them when she smiled. The silver rings on her >ngers glinted in the sun. A few days after Charlie arrived, he realized that she used to be beautiful. It had just been a glimpse, a ?ash of understanding—mostly she seemed like she had been exactly the same forever. The farm seemed that way, too, as if it were frozen in time, under glass.

Lucy sighed and shook her head at herself, muttering something about her husband. Charlie, catching every few words, had the feeling that he was loping along behind a train, trying to grab hold and pull himself up and on.

“Decades. Entire decades gone to that asshole. And I begged him to stay. Why? I was scared. Meanwhile, he was dragging me to hell and back. Sometimes I wonder how I got out of it alive.”

She took the empty bottle from Charlie, wiped the kid’s chin with her thumb, and handed him another bottle. He tried to imagine the husband. At >rst he pictured someone like Darryl, slithering around in his greasy-backed chair in front of the TV with half a dozen empty beer cans at his feet. But of course he’d be nothing like Darryl. He’d be a Yankee with a college degree and glasses and a little beard. A di=erent breed of asshole entirely.

Lucy leaned back and considered the kid, took the bottle from Charlie, and shook her head. “From your point of view, I imagine it all seems pretty damn foolish.”

Charlie cleared his throat. It made a hollow sound. He moved his face into the shade, looked down at the kid’s little face, the pink heart-shaped hooves that had never touched the ground, clean and soft as new pencil erasers. Look, Lucy, he wanted to say. You done what you did, and I don’t know enough about it to judge one way or another. But she’d only shoot him one of those looks she was always giving him. He could tell her he knew exactly what it was like, living with someone like that, but he could imagine what she’d say to that: Oh, do you now? He ran his tongue over his dry lips and searched for something else.