FROM THE ARCHIVE Goat by Jona Xhepa

FICTION

13 Nov

Maddie came to meet me in her jeep to collect me from town and I thought here’s a woman for whom no poems have been written. Past the pub/shop/post office where I posted a letter to a bed-ridden friend in the city with my feet on bitumen not to lose concentration, including a vial of lavender from the health shop which means. And the farm rising from the ground like a beam wanting to give birth to the rest of itself.

The hens were brooding. One night, Maddie showed me how to tell if the eggs are fertilised by placing her phone at the bottom so the egg illuminated in the dark and the veins lit up the albumen like jellyfish tentacles. Her friend from work came to visit; mind the chickens she said I’ll be back soon.

Their little coop was on a wooden house reachable by ladder, at the top of which your head got stuck in the clothesline, looking over the other side of the hen house down the ramp they used to go out to the grass for a feed and to meet the cockerel. I lit a cigarette watching his head jut under the Aztec skimmer. In the mesh, in the middle of the garden, the new chicks slumbered and ambushed each other.

Cloth leavened now
a purchased act
I give something like
snow dripping from a radio
a fixed hemline
needless the light
but as of now
this brightness is a bell

This gloaming induces patience in the spectator. I went to the front of the house to stand with the cat who thought she was a dog when Maddie came up and said we’d go and have a look at the goats.

In the morning she showed me how to milk them. Language is in the touch; soft stroking down the flank and rump with right hand then a reach out with the left hand to tug on the teats. When I did this alone in the coming days, with the pathway wrapping itself around the fields like powdered oats, I imagined a telly presenter standing over me while I expounded the virtues of fresh milk to the nation. The kiddies munched on my legs while I prayed Josie wouldn’t kick the bucket as I stood up spiralling, wellies licking the clouds and, on their way up, the locals. At least Josie let me hold her by the horns and look into her Doric eyes, but Val, the evil puca spirit, kept screaming like a petulant deity, floating towards me reminding me of my derelictions. Have at the weeds then and may you die; maybe Val doesn’t care if she dies.

They had to stay here in the field so Maddie could lay claim to it, this contested part of the country.

In the kitchen, I sieved the milk into one of the Euroshop jugs, having broken the other one. It shattered on the black floor which could never be properly washed, so I stood there for a minute looking at the pieces like black diamonds, thinking it would be nice to have a glass of whiskey and for it to be afternoon in a town where there are between five and eleven pubs with not enough people to fill them, and a bathroom in my Martello tower with a bath where I could take my glass. And one day a man with a beard would come into the pub where I sat munching a lightly creamcheased bread with smoked salmon and spring onions, in the middle of writing rude answers to the crossword clues when he’d come over and lead me to his boat to teach me how to fish then retiring to a portico carved into the sea wall, an immured Balkan bunker where I’d have a jade desk and velvet curtains. I’d make eggs with foraged seaweed in the morning and he’d go away for days and I’d have peace forever, except occasionally when a friend from town would bring over homebrewed ales then we’d pour our sorrows into crème-brulee tides – nobody would know me at his funeral.

Then I went to clean out the chicken shit and sang with sawdust fingers

Oh the mountain high porcelain leaves
It’s not for the rolling of the dice
But for the nerves that stick like fleas
That pain is pleasure visited twice

There was a song once:

Ponme la mano aqui, Macorina
Ponme la mano aqui

as if I was asking to be touched by chickens.

My unwashed hair grazed the straw and shit as I brought down a few eggs. Just as useless as me.

Cup of coffee and Maddie got up, she got up late usually and didn’t get back from work until past midnight. They must talk about her around here. Will I make you breakfast I said – no, she was just going to make a sandwich for work.

I made her a sandwich with everything I could find in the fridge. I thought of the rabbits in the freezer in the shed that could serve as dinner sometime. Just sip my coffee hate to be seen eating in someone else’s house. How long until I crave take-away I wonder and mentally count the cigarette papers on my pile of clothes. She looks at my offerings of lunch with lashings of gratitude from placid eyes. We’ll never know much about each other.

Gardening, the spot of gloom along my calves and between the shoulders comes innocuously biting anxiety along my temples. All the living things. Carrot and parsnip seeds. I have hunger but I want to dispel it to express gratitude to an unconscious world. The dog needs walking so we go up the path in the syrupy part of day until the horizon turns to barley. Back down the road I have become an implication, hermeneutically meaningful before and behind myself until all my anxiety lashes out at all the meanings that preceded my being here now with this dog. I try to hold the anxiety within me or chase it down with the molecules of myself, I ask the hedgerows to contain it and the wind to take it away from me. It shatters into re-addressed fragments by the time I reach the front garden. All this despair I will put into toast, the image of which makes me think of hunger in carrot seeds.

Putting care into making toast turns into a ritual over the week.

Recipe
Toast

-Angle knife with butter alongside soggy white bread that has been in fridge
-Place it at the top rack of a preheated oven
-Watch the top sizzle like plasticine sun rays
-Release from oven when crust looks like bark
-Put salt on caramelized butter marking each corner by syncopated tilts of the salt shaker then rectangularly move hand until evenly distributed
*Optional : If tomato at hand, pour the juice of one with seeds and leave to cook in the hot toast

before biting

Sitting on the couch by the window when chewing, the dog comes to sit beside me and I think of the mixture on my tongue, especially if it’s raining, because when it’s finished, I’ll just go back to being alive again.

At night I make sure the chickens are inside and walk down to feed the goats, penumbral night shelling the path. Val needs to be brought up to the side garden, Maddie needs some lawn-mowing. She doesn’t want to be walked up and chained and tells me as much while I’m opening the enclosure for Josie and the kiddies.

Halfway up the path, Val stops, ramming her back hoofs into the dirt. I swirl about her and pull on the rope until all my bones fall into the moon and a biblical wrath makes the trees stop swaying. I go behind her and kick her flank and punch her leg, Maddie said this would work. I’m frightened at my capacity for hatred. At the house I tie her to a sunken branch in dark calm. There’s a text from Spencer on my phone when I open the fridge to see there’s only two ciders and I have to get beer next time I get a lift into town. My room doesn’t have a door and the floor is open concrete. Spencer said our friend is sick and I will write him a letter while into sleep I think of broken asphalt shoved into green letterboxes.

On one of her days off Maddie takes me hunting. The sky takes on a confluence of starlings as she drives towards the mountains, but stops at the top of the hill when I tell her I’ve forgotten something. She insists on driving me back in this country’s religiosity of distances despite the under ten minute walk. Here I’ve relinquished distances like an avocado.

We don’t know each other well enough for me to ask her anything like is she sleeping with her friend from work. I breathe in the sun on whatever day this is and stop myself from thinking anything ridiculous which would make me laugh and be paralysed to answer her questions. Looking at the side of her face I think does she love everything in the world with a few exceptions, or does she love nothing except for her place and animals, and what song does she put on the radio when she’s leaving work in the dark. We met no one but she waved to one or two people on the road.

Eventually she drove into the yard of a farmhouse. The farmer wanted her to chase out the rabbits from his field who ate all his silage. Maddie took the ferret box and it felt like a chorus followed our movements from then on.

We have to be quiet here said Maddie. Spaghetti western breezes followed our tracks and crows clawed the pylons. She motioned towards holes in the ground to indicate where the rabbits hid. She took out tools from the van and put nets over the holes looking back at the dog who was flexing, turning into a black spasm in the duration of our stay. Silence had clasped the meadow before our arrival. She released the ferrets underneath the nets. What rumbled below came to the surface like a burden, the fur pierced the net furthest from us. Maddie stopped her gazing and grabbed the rabbit with a swift movement, snapped its neck and pulled with calculated tautness. The earth shrieked in the mangled cries of destroyer and captive – it’s odd how comical ferrets look and sound in real life, now they stood embroiled in the sad joke of rabbit fear. The spasms and squeaks of subsequent rabbits diving skyward into nets got shorter and more frequent in the pursuit of marauding ferrets. What does a rabbit recognize when he meets a subjugating ferret I thought to myself, it’s not just immobility and indignity. It’s not a recondite vision of the self. Why does the ferret kill the rabbit how does it know. Between each pull of rabbit spine and straightening of the body, I can tell Maddie’s awareness of me as spectator, my silence not an affirmation, because nothing like that exists here. Once dead, the dog deposits the rabbits on the pile of death. I think of women in Mexico watching poverty from the threshold of neo-Classical porticos.

The Irish for rabbit is : coinín

The Irish for ferret is : firéad

The Irish for Maddie is : I’m not quite sure

The Irish for killing a rabbit using a ferret might be : coiníní a sheilg le firéad

Maddie carried the ex-rabbits by their ears down to the car with the collected nets in the other hand. I sat in the passenger seat a couple of rabbits slung over my lap as we parted the hills. I imagined a man in a blue collared shirt and vest watching the hillside goings-on, looking at Maddie’s jeep pull up to the front of the house with a slant to the sinister. Coolly resting in this predetermined nuisance.

In the mornings, I began slurping the porridge in the most contorted way possible. Here is freedom I thought, give it a thump to goad it onto skin. After feeding the animals, collecting the eggs, opening the door for the dog, swathes of yesterday’s mind only pips in my fumbling. Occasionally, one of the quail chicks would freeze and look dead in the muddy patch by their enclosure, so I would bring it on the kitchen counter making a ball with my hands around the creature, shoving hot air inside and sometimes the bird would regain consciousness and other times my fingers would be a transporting sarcophagus. I made my porridge with those hands bringing the bowl out onto a bit of stone in front of the chick mesh while Maddie slept, with no neighbours or offices to walk into and start talking, only prowling globules of time-keeping and ambition ghosting around the skin in the cold.

When Maddie stirred, the silence and sculptured stillness became carnal as the idyll hadn’t done away with my need to hide, especially in the mornings. When she gets up and the mezzanine clicks, the pastoral brine makes me remember my shepherd ancestors while I put the tea in her thermos, slinking back and forth out of her sight lickety glances towards the bathroom, with no dictation on her part. The illusion persists, an ecdysial debris of remembrances on the sofa, on the edge of the kitchen counter.

And like a reprimand the morning followed and Maddie came down to the kitchen where we smiled. I picked up the paint buckets used to collect milk. The nausea began to arrive and I didn’t let it. Between the hedgerows down the path a bit of purple metastasized.

The white rope was broken.

Its absence encircled a blame being put on the local strange woman laying claim to a big field. Trembling I ran to the gate where the lock was in the place I’d closed it the night before, but the fence near the wood shelter was broken. The shelter itself empty. I decided, running through the wet grass and up the hill, what I would be from now on, but I could picture the result of the decision, I knew I would only be a spoony, empty thing.

When I saw Maddie, I was breathless holding onto an empty bucket where milk should have been. The goats are gone, I exhaled like a fool.

She didn’t sprint out the door but she was there soon. I put a curse on the western hills encroaching with purpura, saying nothing to Maddie who was scanning the path, then running her fingers where the rope should have been and entering the empty shelter with the atrophied smell.

On the way back up the path Maddie cried. I held my shoulder next to her biceps in a surrogate embrace. And I continued my wordless cursing to the invisible bad cess and to the angry puca soliciting the ubiquitous jealousy of the land for her revenge.

The next week I tucked myself in the passenger seat alongside Maddie’s steadfast driving, lamenting Josie, her closest friend, above the others. Leathery green in the rain streamed past us, being put upon by those who feel loss consciously.

Past the travellers’ camp where she pricked up her ears for familiar bleats, a farmer walked slowly towards the jeep and she slowed rolling the window down. Neither got to the point straight away. He said it was shocking, animal theft was happening all around this part of the country. Urging her to go to the country fairs and see if the goats mightn’t be on sale, if Josie wasn’t already slaughtered. Maddie cried quietly on the way home, then the next evening when her co-worker came to stay.

I went about bringing dead quail back to life, trampling on bits of inconvenience slithering on the dirty floor. I felt like a child absolved of responsibilities in times of crisis, and put a coat of plaster on the murky living room walls while Maddie continued her search.

She drove to the coast to meet her friend who got ducklings. I didn’t want to see ducklings. I wanted to stay indoors and get to grips with having lost a goat. Hunger shone in the luminous living room when the telly came on. A previously frozen dead rabbit sat thawing at the bottom of the fridge.

………………..

Jona is working with mythology, landscape and language. Bits of her previous work in literature, music and performance can be found at jonaxhe.wixsite.com/my-site.

Twitter: @quetzalfiach