Laura McPherson -- Roger
The goats brayed at Cate through the chicken wire that was stapled between the posts of the paddock. The sun was just peeking through the trees and brought out dapples of copper on the goats’ deep chocolate coats as they cried for carrots and the big meadow instead of feed and the little paddock. As Cate turned away, the biggest goat, Roger, head-butted the gatepost. Cate turned back towards him.
“Baaah,” she bleated through her crunching hangover. “Baah, baah, baaah.”
Next, she had to care for the ducks, then the pigs. Then breakfast for herself, maybe. Afterwards would be the outside chores that grew with the passing days like sunflowers in June, then lunch, then the inside chores. Their dream farm, which kept her from ever sleeping.
The ideal was to be self-supporting, which meant that Nolan supported them by working at the firm downtown while Cate worked the farm, except downtown was now an hour and a half away instead of 20 minutes so 8 to 6 became 6:30 to 7:30 and “our farm” became Cate’s list of chores and the place where Nolan slept, except the nights he was too tired to drive home and then Cate would—
“Oh, biscuits!” Cate swore as the fresh bucket of water for the ducks dropped out of her trembling fingers and over the front of her jeans. The water squelched down between her socks and the cheap boot inserts that were buying time against the necessity of a new pair. Everywhere Cate looked she saw necessities coming, put off, and overdue.
I need help, Cate thought. She whistled through her teeth as she picked up the empty bucket. The ducks blinked at her lazily and thought about honking once the sun finished rising.
***
Cate and Nolan. Nolan and Cate. Cate and Nolan had wanted children. Nolan and Cate did not have any children. Cate’s womb ticked like the old clock over the oven, dry and dispassionate, faintly dusty and out of reach. Tick, tick, tick.
The hands ticked to 12:01. Cate stood up, the aluminum legs of the kitchen chair scudding over the linoleum as she swung it underneath the access hatch to the unfinished attic. She pushed the wood flap open with both hands and then supported it with one palm as the fingers of her other hand danced around the rim. When she felt glass, she pulled the bottle through the opening before her trembling support arm gave way.
Nolan was going to be home early today, so Cate did not chill the bottle. She used to drink ginger and juniper cocktails until the doctor told her she shouldn’t drink at all if she wanted a baby, much less ginger and juniper. The doctor asked how she could drink that mix, anyway, and she had said, it’s slimming. The doctor had said, well, you won’t want to be slimming, either.
Cate poured the wine into a glass, just a regular glass, and drank it so quickly that the glass was superfluous. The green bottle danced in the sunlight as she poured again.
Cate took the glass with her into the living room, where with the duster in one hand she made half-hearted stabbing motions over the shelves and knick-knacks. She worked across the living room with her emptying glass, drinking white wine instead of ginger and juniper, weighing all of 110 pounds after a good dinner and a hot bath. Without any wine left to slosh in the glass, Cate did not realize her hand was shaking. She returned to the kitchen and poured a third glass.
Nolan didn’t like it when Cate drank, so Cate had a system. She wrapped the empty wine bottle in a grocery bag and winced as the porch door banged behind her. It was warm for September, and dropped leaves formed a crisp tannic frosting over the gravel driveway. She opened the trunk of her car and pushed the bottle into a nest of others just like it, the plastic bags whispering softly.
Back inside, Cate sucked the wind-chapped bight of her lower lip between her front teeth, first one side, then the other sweet on her tongue as she eyed the attic access panel. Was it a two-bottle day? It wasn’t particularly worse than yesterday, which was a one-bottle day. The day before that, Sunday, had been a no-bottle day because Nolan was in the house all day, fixing all of the wrong things, never far from the kitchen. As she was reaching for the chair to swing it out as her footstool, she heard the crunch of a car churning gravel and foliage down the driveway. Nolan, home already. She ran for the bathroom to brush her teeth.
***
Nolan’s fork chased the last of his mashed potatoes around the plate, crushed peas hemorrhaging green ovum in their wake. The yellow roses he brought home for Cate sung a dirge over the peas. He hadn’t said a word since Cate had suggested they have wine with dinner, when Nolan had said sure, though he hesitated, then Cate realized except for her stash there was no wine, and Nolan never left the kitchen, so they drank ginger ale and it made Cate cranky and depressed.
“Gotta get the goats back in the barn.” Cate speared a cold pea that looked like it deserved it.
“Right,” Nolan said.
“I need help,” Cate said.
Nolan thought that pouring every dollar he earned into a farm that might never turn a profit was plenty of help, but he said, “I’ll clean up dinner.”
“Right,” Cate said sourly.
Nolan stood up to clear the plates. “Huh.” He leaned over the extra chair that was pushed partway under the table beneath the attic hatch and scraped at the vinyl cushion with a fingernail. “There’s a footprint on the chair.”
“You knew how short I was when you married me.”
“I just wonder how you got on top of the chair.” Nolan winked.
Cate scoffed despite herself and after she was done with chores, she held her breath waiting for Nolan to peek into the attic until the moment she heard his laptop close and he came to bed.
***
It was 4:02 and Cate had popped open a shiraz. It was a two-bottle day because one of the ducks bit her shin after Roger the goat had finally succeeded in knocking her, ass-over-teakettle, into the dirt. Her whole right side was sore and her favorite barn jeans were now destined for the scrap pile. The dishes from lunch and the ticking clock over the oven stared her down as she drank. Her phone buzzed loudly on the table with an incoming text from Nolan: Last-minute client dinner tonight. I hope you didn’t start dinner yet, sorry.
Cate texted back some platitudes about it being all right and not having started dinner. She looked at the second bottle. A third bottle would constitute dinner. A third bottle and a bowl of popcorn in front of the TV.
The goats had to be put up for the night before she started a third bottle. They knew when Cate was drunk and would caper joyful circles around her instead of following Roger to the barn for their night treats, and then her popcorn would be cold and oily by the time she got back to it.
She shucked on a light jacket and walked towards the meadow. The far, long side of the meadow was just a single-row windbreak of trees away from the main road and she could hear the occasional car whining past. The goats tended to cluster on the opposite side, closer to the small apple orchard to be within reach of the windfalls.
She placed one hand on top of the gatepost as her other moved for the latch, and the gate swung under the weight of her arm before her fingers found the metal pin.
“Oh, fucking biscuits,” Cate swore. Her optimism strained her eyes as she scanned the far back of the pasture. Not even a thin wind disturbed the tall grass.
Cate ran back to the house and grabbed her car keys and a box of Cheerios to coax the stray goats into the back of her car. She wouldn’t have been able to hook the little livestock trailer to the truck by herself, even if Nolan hadn’t taken the truck to work. This was going to be ridiculous, but she told herself it would work.
As the sky darkened, Cate drove at a crawl up and down the same two miles of road, calling out of the rolled-down window: “Roger! Sprout! Hayseed! Lila! Roger! Sprout! Hayseed! Lila!”
Nolan always said they shouldn’t name them, that they’d be selling their children when the herd started to grow and maybe eating them, but now she was glad they had names she could call because it felt like she was trying, and if only she shouted loud enough, someone would help her and the goats would be back where they belonged.
A car heading in the opposite direction slowed down and stopped in the road across from Cate. “You looking for a goat?” the old man behind the wheel asked.
“Yes! Yes!”
“I saw a big brown one about two miles back there.” The man paused, looking closely at Cate. “Have you been drinking?”
“Glass of wine with dinner. Thanks! Thank you so much!” Cate sped off towards Roger, it had to be Roger because he was the only big one they had—but where Roger went, the others were likely to follow. Well short of two miles Cate saw him, standing placidly in the middle of the right lane, in the high beams of her car, as the rapidly narrowing evening abruptly collapsed into darkness.
Cate slammed on the brakes and remembered to steer into the skid, but not how to tell which direction the skid was heading to. Her beat-up blue Corolla gamely left the road and flipped up the opposite side of the drainage ditch, rolling down the shoulder of the highway like the wine bottles in the trunk and tossing Cate against her seatbelt.
When the hurricane of loose stuff inside of her car came to a still on the inside of the roof as the car settled with its tires in the air, Cate unclipped her seatbelt and crawled out of her open window.
The red and blue lights of a police car shattered amongst the blue, green, and yellow shards of wine bottles stretching a hundred feet down the roadway, empty of goats. Cate did not look behind her at the car. As long as she did not look, she would not see their blood leaking out from underneath the roof, and they could still be back home in the pasture where they belonged.
The police car parked sideways across the road and the officer came out and knealed next to Cate. She sat up, her bruised ribs singing.
“Are you okay, ma’am?”
“I need help,” Cate sniffed.
“OK. I see that. We’ll get you help.” The officer recited codes that Cate only half-understood into the radio strapped to his shoulder. “Have you been drinking, ma’am?” the officer asked.
“I need help,” Cate sniffed.
Roger strode confidently out of the ditch at the side of the road and gently butted the side of Cate’s face with his velvet nose before lipping her hair. Cate wrapped her arms around his strong neck and buried her grappa tears in his soft hay-smelling fur. DSS
Laura McPherson of Addison, IL., is a writer whose fiction "has been longlisted by American Short Fiction and published in Night Picnic Journal.
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