working.
W e acquired two goats. One cold morning I woke to their urgent bleating. They were chained by the front door frantically eating gorse and butting each other. My father smiled at me and said, “These are yours.”
They were young she-goats, frenetic and boisterous, and I loved them utterly and was terrified for them. I’d follow their famished, curious investigations of the slopes, the fervor with which they went for weeds, nosed aside a few fallen scarers my parents had made. I tried to keep them away from the dying garden with which I still struggled, a custodian of its decline. Whenever my father looked at them, I felt sick.
“What are they called?” he said to me.
I shrugged.
“Why won’t you name them?” He was sad.
I did name them, but with fleeting, random syllables, which I changed every two or three days, and which I never told him, as if that might keep them safe.
They ate dead leaves; they ate gnarly barky bushes. They grazed on bedraggled refuse I pulled up from the vegetable patches, and on clots of moss in the corners of our walls.
—
On the hill we used a different, vaguer calendar than the one I’ve since learned. The seasons ours described—summer, dimming, and winter—were suited to a different place: the mountain had two seasons at most. What we used was an inheritance, I think, a throwback from somewhere more changeable. It did grow colder in the top room. It was weeks after I’d run away, after the goats came, but I don’t know exactly how long, before my father killed again, unless he hid other such killings from me.
I stood in the remnants of the garden on an evening full of sunlight lingering on the slopes, and below the raucous goat complaining I became aware of another growing beat. My insides clenched.
My father’s window glowed against the creeping dark. He huddled within, bent by the sill. He was the color of the dirt on the window. His hand was rising and falling in that deadening drumming, and I saw something limp and flailing snapping back and forth in his grip. There was no more killing purpose to his continued pounding.
I don’t know what it was. He held the animal by the ears and punched it again and again into the ruined floor and made its body a sack of blood. I was sluiced through with a sort of bilious terror but I wasn’t surprised.
Nor did I hide. I just stood by the glass and watched and whimpered.
When he was done breaking the animal (I don’t know how he’d caught it, I don’t know what it had done, I don’t know why he took it back into the house to do it or if it was dead when he did) my father stood, holding the dripping skin. It was properly dark now and he stood in front of his window with the light behind him so he was a black form to me, a shadow man, and I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew which one it was.
He certainly saw me but he looked at me no longer than he did at anything else before he left the room and I heard the front door open and I ran to keep the house between us and he went to fill the hole in the hill alone.
—
Once during the goats’ vigorous evening meal my father leaned out and looked at me and said calmly, “Quiet them, please. Will you take them somewhere else, please?”
Whenever he spoke directly to me I was pinned in place. I made myself stumble forward pulling at the goats’ leads and they complained and went stiff-legged so I had to lean against them while my father watched. I strained. I saw past him to a man in his room.
Maybe I recognized him from the town, though it was weeks since I’d been there. I thought maybe he’d been at a pump, or hauling sacks of stone across the bridge, for workshops. For an instant, looking at the bulk of him, I thought he was the hunter, but he wasn’t. He waited for my father to return to their conversation. On the table between them was a half-finished drawing of a key.
—
Are the keys waiting for you?
I didn’t want to ask my father but
W e acquired two goats. One cold morning I woke to their urgent bleating. They were chained by the front door frantically eating gorse and butting each other. My father smiled at me and said, “These are yours.”
They were young she-goats, frenetic and boisterous, and I loved them utterly and was terrified for them. I’d follow their famished, curious investigations of the slopes, the fervor with which they went for weeds, nosed aside a few fallen scarers my parents had made. I tried to keep them away from the dying garden with which I still struggled, a custodian of its decline. Whenever my father looked at them, I felt sick.
“What are they called?” he said to me.
I shrugged.
“Why won’t you name them?” He was sad.
I did name them, but with fleeting, random syllables, which I changed every two or three days, and which I never told him, as if that might keep them safe.
They ate dead leaves; they ate gnarly barky bushes. They grazed on bedraggled refuse I pulled up from the vegetable patches, and on clots of moss in the corners of our walls.
—
On the hill we used a different, vaguer calendar than the one I’ve since learned. The seasons ours described—summer, dimming, and winter—were suited to a different place: the mountain had two seasons at most. What we used was an inheritance, I think, a throwback from somewhere more changeable. It did grow colder in the top room. It was weeks after I’d run away, after the goats came, but I don’t know exactly how long, before my father killed again, unless he hid other such killings from me.
I stood in the remnants of the garden on an evening full of sunlight lingering on the slopes, and below the raucous goat complaining I became aware of another growing beat. My insides clenched.
My father’s window glowed against the creeping dark. He huddled within, bent by the sill. He was the color of the dirt on the window. His hand was rising and falling in that deadening drumming, and I saw something limp and flailing snapping back and forth in his grip. There was no more killing purpose to his continued pounding.
I don’t know what it was. He held the animal by the ears and punched it again and again into the ruined floor and made its body a sack of blood. I was sluiced through with a sort of bilious terror but I wasn’t surprised.
Nor did I hide. I just stood by the glass and watched and whimpered.
When he was done breaking the animal (I don’t know how he’d caught it, I don’t know what it had done, I don’t know why he took it back into the house to do it or if it was dead when he did) my father stood, holding the dripping skin. It was properly dark now and he stood in front of his window with the light behind him so he was a black form to me, a shadow man, and I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew which one it was.
He certainly saw me but he looked at me no longer than he did at anything else before he left the room and I heard the front door open and I ran to keep the house between us and he went to fill the hole in the hill alone.
—
Once during the goats’ vigorous evening meal my father leaned out and looked at me and said calmly, “Quiet them, please. Will you take them somewhere else, please?”
Whenever he spoke directly to me I was pinned in place. I made myself stumble forward pulling at the goats’ leads and they complained and went stiff-legged so I had to lean against them while my father watched. I strained. I saw past him to a man in his room.
Maybe I recognized him from the town, though it was weeks since I’d been there. I thought maybe he’d been at a pump, or hauling sacks of stone across the bridge, for workshops. For an instant, looking at the bulk of him, I thought he was the hunter, but he wasn’t. He waited for my father to return to their conversation. On the table between them was a half-finished drawing of a key.
—
Are the keys waiting for you?
I didn’t want to ask my father but
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