Winner of the 2008 Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction

Gregory Plemmons

Kidding Season

My house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac. I live in one of those new subdivisions on the outskirts of town. What was once cow pasture, now Affordable Living from the 180s. What was once creekbed, now Nature Trail, judging by the slurry of dead leaves and pea gravel I trudge through after storms, when I’m not able to go back to sleep. Where once grew broomsedge and chickweed, thistle and poke, there now sits an adequate graft of sidewalk and asphalt, heat- and shade-tolerant Rebel III fescue, all underneath a fresh dusting of TruGreen Weed and Feed.

Thus far the operation appears to have been a success.

There’s cable. Home warranty. Six percent APR. I can still smell the drywall. The only malfunction so far seems to be the ice machine in my kitchen. When it gets full, it creaks undulating, and my fridge sounds like the berth of a clipper at sea. The repairman is coming tomorrow.

In my new house I can watch the sun graze the bypass each morning and burn off the fog pooled in the bottomland. I can sip coffee barefoot outside on my new deck without the worry of splinters, the smooth planks on my feet a composite glissade of sawdust and resin, a product my real estate agent has assured me is environmentally and structurally sound. On my new porch I can sit and stare out at my goats as they faint, uninterrupted.

It is a peace that I have like no other. I brought them with me from rehab.

They’re bona-fide Tennessee fainting goats and they suffer from a condition called myotonia congenita. Look it up. Their nerves can’t fire chloride ions when needed, they sputter and spasm until it’s all just one big clusterfuck at the neuromuscular junction. The least little thing can set it all off. You can yell at them. Startle them. Flap your arms like a ninny, scream Dixie or gangsta. Jesus or Allah. Their response is the same. They freeze and fall over. Then they get up and do it. All over. Again.

I first met the goats during New Life. The New Life Lodge was our county’s only faith-based residential treatment facility for substance abusers. None of that California voodoo medicine stuff, sweat lodges or drum banging. Although I did learn some yoga. The New Life was just a small chapel, five cottages, and some barns. I thought it might be worth a shot. Cumberland Hall was the only place I hadn’t tried out yet, but my roommate at New Life had warned me they hijacked your neurotransmitters and put you on meds and then wanted to scan you for NIH research, take before/after snapshots of your gyri. This time I opted for Jesus. The credo at New Life was pet therapy, not PET scans. Pro-life, not Prozac. Free range and free will.

The New Life, my new life, was surrounded by five hundred acres of Cherokee National Forest and land trust. Hiking trails, well water, Bethesda-like springs. The New Life was just what I needed.

My old life had all started with chronic low back pain. Toward the end of my old life my ex-wife tells me I popped Percocets like they were Tums, before ordering Mexican food, as analgesic prophylaxis for the eating of nachos. My ex-wife says that I claimed that they hurt the roof of my mouth. I don’t remember this, but it’s true: they do hurt the roof of my mouth. My dentist says Doritos are more dangerous than Grape Nuts when it comes to chipped fillings.

I used to teach science and coach JV basketball before this all happened. I used to be a respectable non-goat-owning man. Where it all ended: this past March during basketball (St. Peter’s vs. St. Paul’s) I allegedly went up to the referee during half-time and asked whether we were home or away.

I was ready for New Life. The New Life featured an actual bona-fide working farm during residence; we all paid for part of our board this way. We assisted in raising exotic but edible free-range poultry for profit: ostrich, emu, and chicken, of course. During my stay, New Life expanded. I helped pave a pond bottom in preparation for aquaculture. One year from now there’ll be catfish the size of Welsh corgis, freshwater prawns the size of pork tenderloins.

I met the goats my first week at New Life. Katie, our counselor, told us there were four things to know about the fainting:

First, it was painless. I wanted to ask her how she could know this. “You just have to trust me on that one,” she said. “The New Life is all about faith. That’s the first lesson we teach here.”

Second, it was not truly fainting. The goats remained conscious throughout.

Third, it made their muscles bigger.

Finally, degree varied from goat to goat. Some only stiffened and froze and stood still. Others fell right to the ground.

Most of the goats were bred for their cashmere, Katie told us. There was little market for goat meat in town, except for the Mexicans, and they slaughtered their own on the south side of the county, right in their rag-tag carport carnicerias, roasted on spits, nortena music blaring for miles.

Every day Katie started us off with a simple devotion, then the men of our cottage headed down to the barn. We loaded alfalfa, helped put up fencing. By the fourth week I was helping with the herding and shearing. My last week at New Life I was made Goat Master.

My last day at New Life Katie let me ride in the truck with her down to the pasture. The windows were rolled all the way down as we both breathed in the honeysuckle. The sky blazed with blue. May was humidless, basky--her favorite month here at New Life, Katie told me: kidding season. The does hid their offspring and it was like looking for Easter eggs. New color combos popped out and scattered like marbles into the thickets.

“I don’t think I can go back,” I said. “I want to stay here.”

“You can’t stay here forever.” Katie looked at me. Her skin was ecclesiastically freckleless, smooth and scrubbed clean. She held a big hairball of cashmere in one hand, clippers in the other. “C’mon,” she said. “It’s your turn.” She gazed at my head. “You’re starting to thin up there,” she said as she rustled her fingers through my hair like mice. “You’ll need an edge when you get out of here.”

The strands of my hair drifted down to the dirt like spent dandelion fluff. Some of the goats fainted just at the buzzing of clippers. They’ve fainted at less: raindrops and snowflakes, grasshoppers, farting. Whenever we got done with the shearing, Katie and I liked to whoop out our favorite movie quotes at the top of our lungs, then watch the reaction: domino cinema.

“I am the great and powerful Oz,” I yelled. Freeze. Plop.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Katie screamed. Freeze freeze. Plop plop.

“Tomorrow is another day.”

My school agreed to let me come back in the fall if I stayed clean. Each morning I saluted my new head like a monolith. I smiled as I tried to start each day reassuringly level. And wondered when it would start to wear off again.

I still needed a place to live permanently. I thought maybe a new house might help. I decided to look in a new neighborhood. Liz, my real estate agent, practiced feng shui on the side. Everyone had to have their own niche these days, she said. Seemed like a good combo to me, I said. She was the one that suggested Harpeth Hills. The first house she showed me sat at twelve-noon on the keyhole, directly facing the street and oncoming traffic. Liz informed me this was strictly feng shui suicide. Unless I did something soon after I bought it, my karma might just go ahead and commit hari-kari, bleed bad Sha Qi all over the doorstep. Perhaps seep into the very foundation itself.

This was not something a man just out of rehab wanted to hear.

“You need some friction,” Liz warned. “This place has got some major bad energy flow.” I stood on the sidewalk, stared at my potential new yard, trying to see what she was sensing that I clearly wasn’t. She was quiet a moment as she flexed her right foot, feathered the edge of the monkey grass with the curve of her sandal like a dowsing rod. “I’d hang a small mirror out front,” she suggested. “Buy one of those gazing balls. That might do the trick.”

White bra-straps peeked through her black sundress like piped frosting over her shoulders. My ex-wife had an extensive collection of sundresses, breezy floral things she broke out at the first hint of spring. But I can’t ever recall seeing her in a black one. She never owned a black bra, and for Caroline, the two would have had to have matched.

I could shore up the rest of the bad flow from the sidewalk with a few hostas and mulch, Liz was saying, I could splurge on a few winsome impatiens. But she wouldn’t come down on the price. Standing there on the sidewalk, she looked less real estate agent than equestrienne, freckles that jittered in sunlight as she galloped from MLS listing to listing, closing to closing. Western not English; denim not jodphurs. Give me the pen, I said. Where did I sign? One could do worse than Liz Garrigan. I needed a woman. Something. Anything.

“All it needs is some trees,” she smiled. “Right over there. That would finish the rest of it.” She waved an arm toward the side of the yard. It was still covered in straw, fresh from seeding. “What do you say?”

I stopped and looked out at the lawn. I thought about Katie. I thought about kidding season. Then looked back at Liz. “What if I bought me some goats and put them out there to graze?” I asked. “Would that stop the Sha Qi?”

“Personally I’d go with maples. Or horses,” Liz said. I gazed at her beautiful, fluttering, capable hands. “But yes,” she paused. “Goats would do.”

I’d never owned an exotic pet except for my seventh-grade hermit crab. He outgrew his shell in a month and died homeless before I could snag him a new one. We’d lived three hours from the beach. I had zero experience with husbandry, at least of the animal kind, and I’d obviously failed in the other.

I told my therapist I was thinking about buying some goats. Being responsible for someone else can be a great motivation, she said. I said I was thinking about buying some fainting goats. I asked if she’d ever heard of them.

“Oh yes. I’ve seen them on the Discovery Channel,” she said, then paused. “Brillant defense mechanism. Primitive. But brillant.”

I called Katie up. She was willing to part with three of them. It had been a good season. I built a pen out front and put up a small wooden shed painted the same color (Lotus Yellow) as my new Perfect Starter or Empty Nester, Plan #10985. Word soon got out in the neighborhood. Families began to gather at the edge of my fence on the weekend. Some mornings I already spotted them when I brought in the paper, still in my bathrobe. Five-year-olds mashed their faces against the chainlink, toddlers rode piggyback, responsible fathers stood watch over the multitude and everyone clapped and waved hands to try and induce a fainting. I mustered politeness. I purchased freeze-pops in bulk, freely handed them out. If I was feeling particularly generous, sometimes I’d even explain how the goats descended from one tiny flock three counties over, were originally bred to keep predators away from the sheep. The old startle defense.

“Did it work?” One loquacious seven-year-old asked me, mouth gaping, blue raspberry cyanotically trickling down mouth corners onto his shirt.

“The sheep lived. If that’s what you mean, son,” I said. “Ask your daddy about sacrifice.”

Tranquility was dying on my cul-de-sac. Tranquility was dying even before it had ever had a chance to be born. But it didn’t mind. It gave me something. The crowds grew and grew. And then one day I got the notice from the Harpeth Hills Homeowner Association: the goats would not do. The goats allegedly stood in full violation of the Harpeth Hills Homeowner Agreement which I’d signed at the closing, along with everything else.

I called up my lawyer. Sam had already been helping with my divorce from Caroline. He’d known me since college. His father helped my father and so forth and so on. Sam had put on some weight since our college days. But then so had I, since the switch over to methadone. I watched as he wrung out a lemon slice then doused his iced tea with ten packets of Sweet ‘N’ Low.

“Anderson, I’ll be frank. You clearly stand in full violation of the two-dog-two-cat stipulation,” Sam said as he read over my papers. “But Covenant VIII of the Harpeth Hills Homeowners Agreement as it stands was drafted and intended for the sole purpose of discouraging residents from the business of keeping and raising animals in farm-like setting for commercial purposes.” He took a swig of his iced tea then he set down his glass. “Nothing specifically addresses the issue of noncommercial goats, pet goats, if you will.” Sam paused. “Do you consider them pets?”

“They’re not really my pets,” I said. I did not scratch their shoulder blades, I did not hand-feed them graham crackers or goat treats. I did not talk to them like children, or kids, ha ha ha, I started to say.

“Do they have names?” Sam asked me.

“No.” I couldn’t name them, in the same way that I couldn’t name what I’d felt the last rehab. Not hope, exactly. But something. There was the Big Black One, the White Speckled. And the Little Brown Bug-Eyed One. She was the one I felt closest to. She was the one that sometimes resisted the fainting, standing her ground.

“You gotta name them goats,” Sam said. “Throw in a little eccentricity. Endear yourself to the judge just a little. Southerners love that stuff, Anderson. It wouldn’t kill you.” He leaned back in his chair, touching the tips of his fingers to each other. “Otherwise all the judge is going to see is a washed-up philandering junkie. Jesus, Anderson. Go into any old nursing home these days, what do you see? Cats and dogs. Cats and dogs. Pet therapy. It’s our best line of defense.” I watched as Sam leaned over the table for dramatic courtroom effect, resting his elbows as he clasped and unclasped his palms. He was so close to me I caught a whiff of his aftershave. It wasn’t the cheap stuff. “Hell, my wife came home with a chihuahua last week for my son’s asthma. Let’s face it, Anderson, those goats have kept you from relapsing.” Sam shook his head with the truth of someone who had known me from the start of all this. “It’s the best chance you’ve got.”

“I guess it’s worth a try,” I said. “I’ll name them tonight.” I watched as Sam smugly leaned back in his seat.

“I happen to know that the current vice-president of the Homeowners Association has just purchased a miniature horse for their autistic son,” Sam tells me under his breath. “They’re hiding it out in the carport.”

I picked up the tab.

A week later my ex-wife called up. Caroline wanted to drop off our final divorce papers. I still wasn’t allowed to drive yet. “I’d hate if they got lost in the mail.”

I didn’t say anything.

“How is your pain?” she asked, forcing sincereness. Caroline always asked about my pain with the same tone she usually reserved for my parents.

“My pain is fine,” I said. “Better since yoga.”

“Yoga? Is that what they’re teaching over at New Life these days?”

“That’s right. You should try it.” Katie had taught me a few stretches. At first I’d been skeptical. But since yoga, my spasms had substantially lightened. My back no longer routinely went out anymore. Now it seemed content spending a quiet weekend at home with a few old back issues of mild pain, happy to hang out for the most part with the rest of my alignment.

Thirty minutes later, Caroline stood on my doorstep. “What are those goats doing in the front of your yard?” she said. “And what have you done to your hair?” She gripped the strap of her purse like a vine, as if the earth might cave beneath us again, catapult back to my Percocet days.

“They’re my new pets,” I grinned, rubbing my scalp with my palm. “And I’m now a goat master.”

She thrust me my papers. “I can’t believe you’re already off the wagon again.”

“I’m not.”

Caroline turned to go. A Buick was trapped in the cul-de-sac. It wasn’t that narrow but we both watched as an old man patiently turned a three-point turn into six before finally reversing.

“Boo.”

“What?” Caroline said.

“Boo,” I said, louder this time. “BOO.” My ex-wife didn’t fall down. Neither did I. We both just stood there and looked at each other for a moment.

It was like opening a carton of ice cream again only to find a new hoary layer on top of what was already frozen.

Sam called me this morning. “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. I’m not sure we can win this one, Anderson. We’ve got Judge Dickens. He’s the one whose daughter got killed by that drunk driver last year.” I remembered the story; it made all the papers. It could have been me. I glance out my front window. The Big Black One is still in the shed. The Speckled White One stands in a corner. I don’t see the Little Brown Bug Eyed One anywhere. “Have you named those goats yet?” Sam asks.

“Not yet,” I say. I hang up the phone and try to do yoga. I lie on my back and finish my poses, peel myself from the mat like a label. New and improved. As I stand up and look out my front window, I spot a boy at the edge of my chain link. He’s wearing a rugby shirt and looks about ten. I’ve gotten pretty good about estimating; the kids that visit my goats on the weekends have helped. I catch a glimpse of blond hair and red stripes. He’s watching the goats and clapping his hands. Each time they fall down, he makes a whoop. His motions are odd, faintly alien, and he turns his head curiously toward me, like a crane. Then I realize it’s him.

I step outside and cross the yard slowly, approaching him as if he’s a Rottweiler. I’m not sure why I’m afraid. Maybe he’s going to do something...autistic. Though I’m suddenly at a loss for what that might be: head banging? Seizures? Speaking in tongues?

My shorts flap in the breeze as I step toward him, over the monkey grass, over my freshly perked sturdy impatiens. He flaps his arms and the Big Black One and White Speckled topple. He laughs and jumps up and down. The Little Brown Bug-Eyed One creeps out of the shed with all of the ruckus.

The boy makes an animal sound then suddenly tumbles as well.

At first I worry it might be a seizure. I run over, drop to my knees to make sure he’s breathing. His color is pink: eyelids half-closed but untwitching. A minivan trolls up the cul-de-sac, pauses and idles, then lays on the horn and I jerk a look back.

A small jolt of pain needles my back and all of the air in me leaves at once.

I kneel for a minute and wait for the ripple of spasm. I know that it’s coming. I try stretching it out with a pose, go into down-facing-dog position. Treasure your breathing. Nuture your breathing. The pain doesn’t let up as I lower my body into balasana, pose of a child, forehead pressing the earth, sprigs of new grass shoots tingling my temples, still freshly shorn from the New Life. I squeeze my eyes shut as another spasm shoots through me.

I hear the slam of a car door.

“Zeldon!” Zeldon. I open my eyes. The boy is already up again, glued to the edge of the fence. The soles of his Velcro-sealed sneakers meet me at eye level; his feet flash alternating red darts of light at me like a rail crossing each time he dances and a goat topples over.

“Zeldon!” The voice is growing closer now, along with my pain, and I watch the boy rub the nuzzle of the Little Brown Bug-Eyed. The pain starts to leave me; I feel it take flight. I rise up from the ground, brush the straw from my shins. I open the gate and the boy rushes in; there is falling and rising all over again. He stands over the paralyzed Little Brown One, waving his arms like a prophet now, wild-eyed and spastic, orange irises pulsating as fast as the lights in his shoe heels.

“You can take her with you,” I whisper as we wait for the rising. And she does. She uprights herself within seconds, it’s like watching a kayaker half-moon and snap back to the surface, only no gasp for air this time. Then she’s running away from the boy. I scoop her up with one sweep and she goes instantly limp in my hands.

“Ask your daddy,” I say.

I offer her up, Little Brown Bug Eyed, to the responsible father approaching us fast. I offer her up and wait for re-quiver, and it feels like a prayer not a sacrifice.