“I want to talk with her. Right now.”
“How can you talk with her?”
“I’ll find a way.”
“Don’t you worry about Fiona. She’ll do what she wants.”
“Of course she will,” I said and laughed. “But there’s the problem of language. And the hill’s too steep for Fiona, Hugh. Believe me.”
“Cyril,” Fiona said, and the calf of her leg was hard and trembling, the skin was cold, “she’s just a child.”
“A young woman,” I heard myself saying. “About seventeen. But sit down, Fiona. You’ll fall.”
“I’m holding her, boy. Don’t worry.”
The moment passed. I made a low humming sound of affirmation in my nose and throat and said nothing. And who was to say which was the more remarkable, I asked myself, the girl or the goats? The goats were overly large, their coats long, here and there were the obvious bell-carriers, the jangling sunlit leaders, and it was quite apparent that the entire flock had come in slow hungry pursuit of the tough little black leaves of the olive trees, was following some purely aesthetic instinct to feed at dawn on the resilient branches laden with dawn’s oldest and most meager fruit. We could hear the hooves, the bells, the grass, the rubbing of long hair which was either dry and regal or still damp from the recent discharging of white milk. And the girl? This girl who carried no crook and appeared to feel no responsibility for lost kids or straggling elders? How could her slight vaulting presence down there be anything if not more remarkable than the indifference of her ancient goats?
“Baby. She sees us!”
The girl was waving. Standing still and waving. And in this instant, the very moment of correspondence between the girl’s world and ours, Catherine returned her wave, Fiona suddenly tightened her fingers in my hair. Hugh laughed because the largest goat had discovered the largest olive tree and like some tall but malformed adventurer was standing on his hind legs and nibbling in tenuous balance at the dusty leaves. It was like Hugh, I thought, to care more about the rising, unnaturally distended old goat than about the girl.
The goat chewed while the girl ran to us. Full of trust and candor she skirted a creamy boulder, she sped through the grass. On bare feet she raced toward the rocky, precipitous slope that separated the hilltop where we watched from the secluded green valley where her unsuspecting goats were feeding. But where had she gotten her clothes, the castoff garden hat and tattered dress so clearly unintended for rusticity? How could she be so unaware of girlhood, so unaware of the fact that the goatherd, in this lonely world, was usually a sullen boy or unshaven, unfriendly man?
“Here she comes,” Fiona cried. “Help her.”
How many times had we sat on this same fragment of rocky wall composed of stones that certainly were the teeth of time, sat together on this hill of ours and watched the transformation of hills and air, hemlocks and clouds, roots and rocks into a clear and sunlit but always lifeless panorama that we never ceased to admire? And now eagle, goats, unlikely girl. Perhaps Fiona had appealed to the sylvan sources in a voice more winsome and undeniable than ever before. At any rate I could not begrudge Fiona the exhilaration that was now removing her, distracting her, from Hugh and me.
“Don’t frighten her, Cyril. Please.”
I stood. We all stood. My very posture acknowledged the voices behind my back and welcomed the girl. Like one of her charges she scrambled up to us, raising dust, clutching at loose stones and tufts of grass, discovering crevices with her bare toes, laughing at the ease with which she emulated the climbing ability of her silken goats. Her face was round, her eyes were dark, the enormous flimsy hat remained somehow on the back of her head, there was a faded pink bow fastened to the bodice of the threadbare gown that fell below the knees and yet swirled and mingled with the bright air and dust she raised. She clung to the hillside, laughed again, glanced up and took her bearings and then lowered her eyes and without hesitation scrambled the last few feet into our waiting arms.
“Made it,” I said aloud, and placed the flat of my open hand on the small of her back, helped her over the wall, stepped aside for Hugh. We crowded around her shamelessly, Catherine took hold of a bare elbow, Hugh vied with Fiona for a closer look.
“She’s mine, baby, all mine!”
“Fiona saw her first,” Catherine said. “Let Fiona try to talk to her.”
“That’s right,” I murmured, “Fiona’s more bucolic than the rest of us.”
“Never mind. I’ll give each of you a little taste!”
We laughed. In unison we lapsed suddenly into silence. With unnecessary delicacy and concern for her feelings we stood around her — and stared. Not so the girl, who wanted to talk and did, and who was young but by no means a child and large though not as large as Hugh, Fiona, Catherine and me. Yes, it was the girl rather than ourselves who was outspoken in curiosity and who began and sustained our conversation, wanting to know us, wanting to tell us about her life. She spoke in a constant uninterrupted rush of sound and gesture, assuming our comprehension of the barbaric syllables and girlish pantomime. Up went the soft arm shaded with faint hair. She shrugged in the direction of the valley. She sighed, she extended both empty hands. She smiled, held up six fingers. She smiled, shook her head, touched both breasts, clapped a small hand to her unprotected loins. But all this was unimportant, she seemed to say, because she was only a goat-girl. Whereas we, she knew, were men of mystery, women of beauty. And she recognized us, she seemed to say, though she had never expected the goats to lead her to the good luck of this encounter, which she did not intend to spend on mere self-preoccupation. Hardly.
“Make her stop talking, baby. It’s time to eat.”
But she would not stop, was unquenchable, even while I raised my eyebrows and smiled and demurred and Fiona, lovely tense barelegged Fiona, opened the widemouthed sack and passed around the cherries. No, hands laden with that suggestive fruit and mouth stuffed with cherries, lips pursed to spit out the stones, on she talked — singling out each one of us for analysis, glancing to the rest of us for confirmation of her judgment, her appreciation, her right to associate herself with our mystery, our beauty. She overlooked Hugh’s missing arm, was simply not interested in his missing arm, but concentrated instead on Hugh’s little black pointed beard, reached up and stroked it with fingers juice-stained and knowing. She had tousled with the horns of the largest goat, she knew that the affinities between certain men and certain animals were to be respected. She touched her bare foot to Fiona’s bare foot, giggled when Fiona giggled, then swung about and exclaimed over Catherine’s breasts and filled her wet hands with Catherine’s hair. And then? And then she turned to me.
Or rather she glanced at Fiona, glanced at Catherine, and then once more gave me the sight of her perfectly round eyes which for the moment were certainly a match for the cherries. But no gesture of awe, no smile, no uncomfortable burst of shyness, no quickness of breath. Nothing. She did not care that by now half her flock was beginning to climb the further wall of the valley. She counted on Fiona and Catherine for tolerance.
“Kiss her, baby. She probably thinks you’re some kind of god.”
“Of course she does,” I said, and bent down and obliged Fiona as always. My face was half again as large as the girl’s, my lips were full while hers were thin and remarkably pink in color. The kiss was a mere stitch in the tapestry of my sensual experience. The distance between the goat-girl and singer of sex could not be bridged by a single kiss, prolonged or not, agreeable or not. But I who had kissed how many girls at Fiona’s bidding now kissed this one, and beneath my hand I felt a sprig of clover, a spray of green growth snagged from the field. At least there was a pleasing moisture on my cheek and mouth, at least the goat-girl considered herself loved by the unattainable man whose name she would always try to remember and say aloud to her goats.