“Well, sooner or later it’s bound to rain,” she said. “It always does.” She laughed.
“Aeyuh,” he said. He was thinking about something else.
“Thanks ever so much for coming by,” she said.
“Don’t mention it,” he said, “it’s been my pleasure.”
They shook hands, and he went down the steps and limped over the moonlit path to his truck. His hair needed cutting — dark shadow against the bone-white of his ears. Dust rose from the path and hovered like granary sift behind him.
“Good-night, George,” she said.
He half turned, smiling again, nodding, almost bowing.
She thought of her father, then of Henry’s father as he stood in the picture they had upstairs, huge and placid, with a cardigan sweater that was buttoned wrong and under his arm an absurdly small violin. With a part of her mind she heard George Loomis’s truck start up, saw the lights go on, and saw him backing away. Something flew soundlessly past, between the garage and where she stood. She knew what it was, but she couldn’t remember for a moment what it was called.
At last, looking over at the gray-white bench in the garden, she saw the ghost of Simon Bale. He was staring mildly, patiently, at the house. He was bent forward slightly, his knees together, the Bible closed in his lap. One of the bookmark ribbons hung over his knee. When he saw that she was looking at him, he gave a start and reached toward his hat-brim, perhaps about to stand up. But then he vanished, leaving only the shadows of tamaracks on the empty, moonlit bench.
3
It was the next morning, at the crack of dawn, that the Goat Lady — otherwise known as “Mother”—reached New Carthage. You could tell where she was by the smell from a half-mile away, and if your nose wasn’t working you could tell by the noise. She had homemade tin-can bells all over her homemade pink and purple cart, fixed on the sides with fencepost staples and baling wire, and her goats bleated like the seven angels of death. She had a shaggy, dun-colored billygoat and a square, black, six-year-old nanny up in front, pulling as though the rig had no wheels, and there were four more nannies behind, dragging along Indian-file on braided binder twine. Alongside the last of the four was a six-months’ kid. The four nannies in back were the milkers. One of them had tits so big she’d have stepped on them if the Goat Lady hadn’t had them up in a kind of sling made out of some kindly farm-woman’s bedsheet. On top of the cart she had a sign like a housetop — which in fact it was, the cart being the Goat Lady’s house, the rear wall an old tarpaulin — and on the sign, in lettering that looked like a joke from some children’s cartoon book that no child would think funny: MOTHERS GOTS MILK.
The Goat Lady sat up in front like a midget stagecoach driver or a burlesque of the fiery charioteer, her legs splayed out like an elderly madam’s, her skirt hiked up over her dust-specked, yellow-gray thighs, on her head a dusty black bonnet like an Amish woman’s. She had on, despite the muggy heat, every stitch of clothing she owned — a couple of coats, a sweater, three or four dresses, a dark red shawl. She had iron-toed shoes. People that passed her on the highway would run off onto the far shoulder from staring, and when she pulled up onto some farmer’s front lawn to eat her dinner or strip out her goats or try to peddle her goat’s milk and cheese, women would call in their children from outdoors. She had a face that caught the eye and held it, amazing and revolting, flatly inhuman: yellow teeth like an old sick dog’s, eyebrows like a badger’s, an enormous wide-bridged nose very much like — a goat’s. She looked about sixty but she said she was thirty-six, and no doubt it was true. It was unthinkable that the Goat Lady should lie, as unthinkable as that she should cheat or steal or plan. Most people thought she was part Indian; the Indians said she was a Gypsy. If people took her in, nights, fed her, clothed her, provided her with orange pop or root beer, it was not so much out of charity as out of impotence in the face of her boundless gall. The first place she stopped when she reached New Carthage, the Bill Kelsey place, they called the troopers; but there was nothing the troopers could arrest her for. In her old black purse inside the cart (the troopers said after she’d gone for good), she had three hundred dollars and a gun that was missing a firing pin. People were surprised that the Goat Lady had three hundred dollars, but how she came by her savings was no great mystery. She could no more make change than fly, or if she could she didn’t; she would merely pocket whatever you gave her, accepting it as a mother’s right, up to and including a twenty-dollar bill, and if you had nerve enough to ask for change she’d merely hold out her money, with magnificent disgust — wadded-up bills and dimes and quarters and three or four brand-new galvanized nails — and you could take whatever you wanted, including the nails. No doubt people gypped her from time to time — and perhaps worse. When a pack of small boys came close to her cart her eyes would awake like a chipmunk’s, and she’d begin to squeeze her hands together in an agitated, fierce-looking way. But finally she was ungyppable and untormentable: charmed. She seemed not really to understand the value of whatever money she lost, though she could count when she absolutely had to, and her fear of small boys was manifestly impersonal, like other people’s fear of snakes. She had more pack rat than human in her: She collected and jealously guarded her utterly meaningless treasure, and if in the end she lost all she’d saved, she lost it as pack rats lose their bits of bright cloth, old bobby pins, and tinfoil to large, inscrutable movements in space. At the same time, she was herself a large, inscrutable movement — as George Loomis said, though he knew her only by report, he said. She’d started out twenty-four days ago (this she had counted, marking off the days with a nail on the plywood wagon seat) from Erie, Pennsylvania, in quest of a son who’d left home in July to find work where the drought hadn’t hit so hard, and who had loyally sent for her at last, telling her to come to a place she had never heard of, didn’t know where to find and no longer remembered the name of. (It sounded like Fair.) She’d set out in an arbitrary direction, taking the only highway out of town that she knew (so that for her it was not arbitrary), and she’d been helped and hustled along (not even really knowing she was helped or hustled) in a generally north-eastward direction to the heart of the Catskills — through coal country and oil country and timber country — heading on in full confidence, saying only, when people tried in vain to break down the walls of her faith, “It’s a small world.” Now she was back in farming country, and she knew — though in fact her son may have been in, say, Blair, Wisconsin — she was getting there.
It was two in the afternoon when she reached the diner. The sun was a white ball of fire, and across from it the moon hung clear as could be. Callie Soames stared at the woman’s rig as people had been doing now for twenty-four days, watching the woman pull up to the pumps, bells clattering, as if to gas up her goats, then on second thought turn short and pull her pink and purple wagon over to the door, blocking it neatly, as if by plan. Starlings careened in the baked sky. In the dust below there were sparrows and cow-birds by the hundreds, picking up grain truck spill. The Goat Lady got down and came over to the window and pressed her face to the screen, shielding both sides of her face with hands as gritty as a miner’s. Then she came to the door and peered through the screen as she’d peered through the window. Finally she came in. Prince lifted one ear, then drifted back into sleep. There was oat chaff on the woman’s hat and shoulders from fields where combines were at work. “Hi,” she said. She stood four-feet-tall, with her big square brown fists on her hips — legs wide apart, mouth widely grinning, her nose like an elbow coming out of her face — so pleased to be here that for a moment Callie was sure the woman was someone she ought to recognize and struggled in her mind to place her.