Half of the shed was a lean-to, open to the east, facing the blacktop. A doorway cut into the interior wall of the lean-to led to the closed part of the shed, and that’s where the goats had gone to lie down in the straw, where they could be away from the brunt of the wind.
Captain realized he needed something to use for a lead. Otherwise, how would he get those goats across the road to his father’s barn?
That’s what he was wondering as he stood in the pen’s shed.
Then he thought of the bales of straw. Just enough light from the snow cover outside coming in through the doorway helped him find the bales, and in an instant it all clicked inside his head, and he knew what he’d do. A great happiness spread through him. The light from the snow cover, the straw bales — it all meant that someone was helping him to do the thing he’d come to do. It meant that what he intended was right.
He couldn’t get at his knife with his gloves on, so he slipped his hands out and stuffed the gloves into his jacket pockets. He opened the blade of the knife and felt it lock into place. Then he bent over and grabbed one of the strands of twine that held the bale together.
Just as he was ready to cut it — he’d use it for a lead — the billy goat, Methuselah, butted his head against him and the blade slipped and gashed the hock of his left thumb. He felt the cold air sting the flayed skin, and he knew right away he was bleeding.
“Goddamn it,” he said.
Then he went back to work. He cut the twine and then made a slip knot around the neck of the first goat. He’d save the cantankerous one, Methuselah, for last.
The other four were agreeable. The two nannies let him lead them across the road to his father’s barn with little complaint. He was able to carry one of the kids on each trip.
He put his gloves back on, blood soaking into the left one. When it came time to loop the twine around Methuselah’s neck, the goat balked, jerking his head this way and that, filling the shed with his bleats. Captain kept at it, finally getting the job done, and Methuselah let him lead him a few steps before he dug in and refused to go any farther. Captain tugged hard on the lead. That’s when the twine snapped. He went stumbling backwards, falling on his butt on the frozen ground.
That made him mad. First the cut on his hand and now this. He could feel time ticking away, and he still had so much to do.
Methuselah kicked up straw with his hind hooves. Captain decided to leave him alone. He needed to get back to work.
Then Methuselah charged him, and Captain turned and ran out of the shed, out of the pen, ran through the snow toward the trailer.
Methuselah stopped. He went quiet. Captain turned and watched him to make sure he was calm enough not to cause trouble. The goat went closer to the trailer, right up to the back steps, and there he got something in his mouth and started chewing on it. A spray of sparks danced in the air, and that startled the goat, and he stepped away from what Captain could now see was a cardboard box.
He thought that shower of sparks was a beautiful thing, something he, like Methuselah, didn’t expect. It reminded him of fireworks on the Fourth of July, which had always been his mother’s favorite holiday. He could remember sitting on a blanket at the State Park with his father and her. He lay on his back with his head in her lap, and he watched the fireworks burst into sprays and showers in the night sky above the lake. “Look at that one,” his mother said. “Oh, and that one. How pretty they are.”
He liked to imagine that the fireworks were the wings of angels, painting the sky red and blue and silver and gold as they streaked down to Earth to see to this or that.
His mother had something she liked to say to him when she told him goodnight. It came from a poem she learned in school when she was a girclass="underline"
Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
He wasn’t sure he could say exactly what that meant, but he’d never forgotten the sound of her voice when she said those words — hushed and dreamy — and he knew, without her having to say as much, she was telling him that he was one of those lovely stars. He was one of the forget-me-nots of the angels, and no matter where he found himself, he could count on them to keep him from harm.
Methuselah was coming back to the box now. Well, just let him, Captain thought. He realized then that there was a man behind the trailer, and he knew that man was Ronnie.
“That’s when he saw me,” Ronnie told the deputy. “I knew I was caught, so I stood up. Methuselah stopped in his tracks, stopped bleating, just nosed at the snow. Captain turned back to watch him, and then, after a while, he came up to me, and he said, ‘You come back for good?’”
The wind was really howling now, and Ronnie had to get up close to Captain to make himself heard. He leaned in toward the boy’s ear. He said, “No, not for good. I came out to check on Della and the kids.”
“They’re gone,” Captain said. “Car’s nowhere to be seen.”
Ronnie nodded. “Good thing I came, though.” He pointed down toward the other end of the trailer. About two-thirds of the way down, his Marathon can sat in the snow. “Hole in the siding there. Wind could’ve blown out the pilot light on the furnace. I patched it up.”
Captain looked down at the Marathon can and then back at Ronnie. Captain’s nose wrinkled up, and Ronnie knew he smelled the gas. He waited for Captain to ask him about it, and when he didn’t, Ronnie knew he was afraid to ask him what he was doing with a can of gas back there because he was up to something himself that he didn’t want to have to explain.
“So you’re not back for good?” Captain finally said.
He was clearly disappointed, and Ronnie, who couldn’t work a miracle and make that gas jump back into the can, felt ashamed to be standing there in his presence.
“No, Captain,” he said. “It’s too late for that.”
“Your daddy would never hurt you,” Brandi told Angel. “You know that, don’t you? You know he loves you, and I love you.”
Angel’s bottom lip quivered. “It’s all been so hard,” she said.
Brandi gripped her hand. “It’s going to be all right. Everything. You’ll see.”
She was thinking of the night that Ronnie told her he was going for a drive, that he was feeling antsy. She was reading one of her baby books, and when he came back, she couldn’t have said how long he’d been gone. He came in and went right into the shower. She wouldn’t know until he told her later that on his way back to town, he smelled gasoline and recalled that earlier in the day, when he’d brought the gas for Brandi’s Mustang, the cap on the can’s spout had been difficult and he’d crouched down and used the tail of his T-shirt to get a better grip so he could twist it off and get about the business of pouring gas into the Mustang’s tank. All day, he’d thought he was catching the faint scent of gasoline, and finally that night as he sped up the blacktop, he imagined that not even the strip of the shirt that he’d cut away while he was behind the trailer was enough to get rid of that smell — a smell that seemed dangerous to him now on account of what he’d just done.
At the city limits, he pulled off into the parking lot of the Dairy Dee, closed for the winter, and there he slipped off his coat and pulled the T-shirt over his head. He wadded it up and stuffed it under the passenger seat. Then he put his coat back on and zipped it up. He went on to Brandi’s, and he went straight into the bathroom and undressed and got into the shower.