Searching for Caleb

We've got a whole damn herd," Duncan said. Justine was glad because the bucks would have had to be killed. She spent hours playing with the kids, running across the field so that they would frolic behind her. They kicked up their heels and turned awkward half cartwheels. She set her face next to their muscular little muzzles; their yellow, slashed-looking eyes looked softly back at her. After the first few days they were switched to bottle feedings, and then to milk from a pan, while Justine crouched beside them and stroked their tufted spines. She fed them handfuls of grass to accustom them to solid food, and for most of the day she kept them in her yard. Meanwhile Duncan carried in endless buckets of warm milk, which he filtered and ran through the great silvery separator.

There was suddenly a stream of customers with indigestion, allergies, or colicky babies, all desperate for goat milk, and the grocery store in Buskville had shown an interest in carrying Duncan's cheeses. "There," said Justine. "I knew it would work out!"

"Well, yes," Duncan said.

In May, all the kids died in one night from eating rhododendron leaves.

Justine wandered around forlornly for days, mourning as if the kids had been human. But all Duncan would say was, "Isn't it peculiar? You would think if rhododendron was poisonous they'd know it."

"All those lovely little brown soft furry babies," Justine said.

"But then, goats are fairly intelligent. Are intelligence and instinct inversely related?"

"At least we have the nannies still," Justine said. "We don't have to start completely over."

"No."

"And there'll always be a new batch next year, and I won't let them in the yard at all."

Duncan picked up her hand. "Justine," he said, "what would you think of getting out of the goat business?"

"What? Oh, Duncan, you can't quit now. Not after one little setback!"

"No, that's not the reason. I've been considering this for some time. I mean, there's no challenge to it any more. Besides, it keeps you tied down, you always have to be around at milking time. It makes me feel stuck, I feel so-and I was thinking. You know what I enjoyed most this year? Building that hen house. Putting things together, fixing them up.

Now Ma's brother Ed has a sort of cabinetworks down in Virginia, making unfinished furniture and so on. If he could take me in-"

"Virginia? But that's so far. And I never knew you wanted to make cabinets."

"Well, I do."

"We're so nice and settled!"

"But I don't like being settled."

"And we would never get back to Baltimore. Duncan, I've already gone far enough, I don't want to go farther. I couldn't stand going farther."

He waited a moment, looking down at her. Then he said, "All right."

They didn't talk about it again.

People came filing through Justine's kitchen for advice on their spring problems: love affairs, unexplainable bouts of wistfulness, sudden waves of grief over people and places they had not even thought they liked.

Justine laid her cards on the rosewood table.

"It will work out."

"Just wait through this."

"You will feel better a week from now."

Duncan plodded through carrying buckets full of milk.

He had grown very silent, although if she spoke to him he always answered. He began drinking bourbon at night after supper. He drank from his great-grandfather's crystal stemware. After the second glass his face became radiant and serene and childlike, and he would switch on a lamp in slow motion and start reading paperbacks. The technical books that he usually liked grew a film of dust while he worked his way through a stack of moldy, tattered Westerns the previous tenants had left in the barn.

Whenever Justine looked over his shoulder stubbled men were drawling threats and cowboys were reaching for their guns.

"Duncan," Justine said, "wouldn't you like to sit out on the porch with me?"

"Oh, no thank you. Later, maybe."

But later he went to bed, moving dreamily through the house, not asking if she were coming too. She sat alone at the kitchen table and shuffled her cards. Then she laid them in rows, idly, as if she were her own client. She yawned and looked to see what had shaped up.

She saw journeys, upheavals, surprises, new people, luck, crowds, hasty decisions, and unexpected arrivals.

Which meant, of course, that Madame Olita was right: it was not possible to tell your own fortune.

All the same, if she had had a client with these cards! She imagined how she would glance at him, interested for the first time, amazed at his quicksilver life after all the stale ones she had seen up till now. She imagined possessing such a future herself, having to consult the cards every day, so much was going on.

Then it seemed to her that she was not reading her fortune after all, but accepting little square papers that told her what was expected of her next. She had no choice but to stand up, and gather her cards, and wrap them in their piece of silk before she went to the bedroom to wake Duncan.

This time they moved in a rented truck, which was cheaper than Mayflower.