Belzhar (12 page)

“Oh, Myrtle,” Griffin says. “She’s in the kidding stall.”

“You’re kidding,” I say. It’s the kind of dumb line that Reeve and I would’ve said to each other.

But Griffin just says, “Do you even know what a kidding stall is?”

“Is it . . . when you tell a joke, but you take your time with it? Get it?
Kidding?
Stall?
” This, too, is the kind of dumb line Reeve and I would’ve said to each other.

Griffin just says, “It’s where a pregnant doe is sent to give birth. That’s what the females are called: does. And the babies are called kids. She’s probably going to go into labor this week. My dad’s overseeing the whole thing.” I look at the face of the poor, isolated doe. I may be reading into things, but she looks fearful, and I don’t blame her.

“Is she okay?” I ask.

“She’s fine. Let’s go,” Griffin says, and he leads us back outside. For him it’s time to go. End of story. No emotion. He’s one of those boys who can get away with being like this. Moody. Silent. There have been boys like that since the beginning of time, and there’s nothing to do but try not to let them get to you.

• • •

Late that night, fast asleep and actually warm beneath the comforter in my cold little room, I’m awakened by loud talking. “I’m asking you—no,
telling
you—to get dressed and come help me,” says a man’s voice.

“I already told you—” says another voice. Griffin’s.

I quickly pull on my robe and head out into the main room. Mr. Foley is standing fully dressed and facing Griffin, who looks sleep-stunned in drawstring pajama bottoms and no top. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time,” Griffin is saying.

“Then just
do it.
”

“Hi. What’s going on?” I ask.

“Sorry we woke you. Our doe is laboring, and she’s got a problem,” says Mr. Foley. “I need someone to come out there with me. My wife has arthritis in her hands and that rules her out, but Griffin refuses to help.”

“Dad, I told you, I’d only fuck it up.”

“Watch your mouth, sir. And you have no way of knowing that. You’ve never done this before.”

“Exactly. I
can’t,
” says Griffin. “Why won’t you get that through your head, Dad?”

“That’s all you have to say?” says Mr. Foley. “What is
wrong
with you?”

They look like they’re going to take a swing at each other, so I step up and say, “I’ll help.”

Both of them look at me as if they’ve already forgotten I’m there. And then, when they remember, they seem to think it’s stupid that I’ve inserted myself into this. How could
I
possibly help? I’m small, and not very strong, and I don’t have any useful skills whatsoever. I spent most of a year lying in bed at home until I was shipped off to a misfits’ boarding school. But I keep picturing the frightened eyes of the doe in the birthing stall.

“Thanks, but you can’t help,” says Griffin’s father.

“No, I can,” I say. “I’ll get dressed. Wait, I’ll just be a sec.”

In our coats, with the snow still coming down, the two of us head out into the cold with Mr. Foley’s industrial flashlight. Griffin stays in the house, and as we pick our way through the snow, I turn around and see him framed in the lit window, looking out unhappily. He sees me and steps away.

At night, the barn is a very different place from the day. The doe is moaning, and we crunch quickly across the straw in the dim light to reach her.

“This is Myrtle,” Mr. Foley says, though I already know. “Griffin’s mother named her.” It’s as if he wants to assure me that he doesn’t believe in anything as sentimental as cute names for goats.

We get right down to business. The problem is that the doe has started to deliver the baby goat—the kid—but the legs are coming out, not the head. “This is a very dangerous presentation,” says Mr. Foley, showing me the alarming sight of two baby goat feet sticking out of the mother. “She’s a young doe,” he says. “A yearling, very small. Hasn’t been used for milking yet. I tried to get in there and position the kid’s head, but it turns out my hand’s too big.”

He looks at me in expectation, and I realize he needs me to reach my hand inside the mother goat and straighten out the kid’s head. I look at the doe, who’s quietly moaning, and even though this is way outside my experience and my comfort zone and way above my disgust level, of course I’m going to do it. Or anyway I’m going to try.

I was wrong earlier when I thought about how easy it was to be a goat. That isn’t always true. This goat is in pain, and her eyes are so sad and desperate. I think about how everyone suffers: animals, people,
everyone.
I almost know what she feels, and I have to do what I can.

While Mr. Foley rummages around for a box of rubber gloves that will fit my hand, I go over to Myrtle and stroke her head, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” even though it’s not. And then I whisper into her pinkish, hair-prickled ear the first thought that occurs to me, which is a ridiculous one.

“Do you like poetry?” I ask the goat, absurdly. “Sylvia Plath wrote a poem about being pregnant. I think the end goes ‘I’ve eaten a bag of green apples / Boarded the train there’s no getting off.’”

All she does is moan further. “Oh, you
don’t
like poetry?” I say. “That’s okay, you don’t have to.” Mr. Foley appears with the box of rubber gloves, and I pull one out as if it’s a Kleenex. My heart is pounding as I struggle to snap it onto my hand, and it takes two tries.

Now, without thinking, I gently poke around inside the goat. That is what I’m doing, and that is where my hand is:
inside a goat
. How bizarre is that? If somebody back at The Wooden Barn had said to me: “Guess where your hand will be over Thanksgiving vacation?” it would have taken me the rest of my life to come up with the correct answer.

I want to explode with embarrassed laughter now. But then I hear Myrtle moan again, and I forget about the strangeness. Mr. Foley coaches me, and when I locate the head, I try to grasp it but it’s slippery, and I have no idea what I’m doing. I make a couple of feeble tries, but I can’t get a grip. I’m no good at this. I’m the worst person for this job, totally useless.

Myrtle has boarded a train and there’s no getting off; and by agreeing to help her I’ve boarded a different kind of train. I have to see this through to the end.

“Okay, easy now, Jam,” says Mr. Foley. “Take a deep breath. You can do it; I know you can.”

And then, suddenly, I get hold of the whole head, feeling the contours, understanding what I need to do. Turning it is like turning a dial, and almost immediately I feel the baby goat shift into a better position, and the nose points down and out.

“There you go,” says Mr. Foley.

I pull out my glistening, gloved hand and we watch as Myrtle immediately starts pushing out her kid. How does she know how to do this? She never even attended a single childbirth class. “A single
goatbirth
class,” Reeve would have said. “La-m-a-a-a-aze,” he might have added, making a sound like a goat.

After a number of pushes, the kid comes out in a glistening heap behind its mother. Mr. Foley goes to look, and announces that it’s male—a buck. The umbilical cord ruptures on its own and doesn’t need to be cut, like it would with a human baby’s. Almost immediately Myrtle, who’s no longer moaning, turns around to investigate. She begins to lick her kid to clean off the mucousy stuff that’s all over it like glaze. All I hear now is the steady sound of licking, and the occasional nighttime goat noises from all around the barn.

This has to be one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever done. I wish Griffin had been able to see it. I wish he’d seen me in veterinary-obstetrical-girl-action-hero mode.

“Why don’t you go on back to the house and get cleaned up, Jam,” Mr. Foley says. “I’ll stay here with them.”

“Oh, I thought I’d just let Myrtle clean me up,” I say. Then, seriously, I ask, “Why didn’t Griffin want to be here for this?”

“Well, you know, the fire,” he says. And when he sees my blank expression he continues, surprised, “He didn’t tell you?”

“No. We’re not actually good friends. He was just being nice when he invited me here.”

“I see. Well, he doesn’t like to talk about it. If I were him, I wouldn’t want to talk about it either.” He waits a moment, as if trying to decide what else he can tell me. Then he adds, “I’ll just say that there was a barn fire here last year and every goat was killed.”

“That’s
horrible,
” I say, thinking of the goats, and Griffin.

When I get back to the house, Griffin is curled in the window seat of the main room, wrapped in a blanket and asleep. I guess he’s been waiting here the whole time. And now I know why. I go stand over him, watching as he sleeps.

“Griffin,” I say. “It’s a boy.”

AT THANKSGIVING DINNER, OVER AN ENORMOUS
turkey and various kinds of goat cheese, Griffin’s dad raises a glass to me. “There’s one person in particular who I’m thankful for. Our guest, Jam,” he says. “She was heroic.”

“It was nothing, I do it all the time,” I joke.

Griffin knocks his glass against the others, but he doesn’t smile. After the meal, his mom insists she has the kitchen covered and sends us off. I want to go see Myrtle and her kid, who Mrs. Foley has named Frankie. Reluctantly, Griffin comes with me. In the barn, I crouch down to pet the now cleaned-up buck, who, astonishingly, can already stand and walk, while Griffin stays to the side.

I assume his aloofness is because of the fire. But you’d think he’d be cheered up even a little by seeing the baby goat doing so well
.
Finally he asks me, “Are you done?” and we leave the barn.

• • •

By the next morning, the snow has stopped, and after Griffin takes care of some jobs around the farm, he suggests we go cross-country skiing. I’ve never done it before, but it turns out not to be as hard as I’d thought. He leads the way across broad white spaces and a frozen lake. Together our skis move back and forth, making identical quiet sounds out here in the open. It seems as if no one is around for miles. Being outside in the wildly white, silent day with Griffin, even after having barely slept the night before, is somehow
bracing
—I think that's the word. When the grounds narrow and he moves ahead of me, I see how graceful he is on these skis.

Then, back at the house, he prepares some cocoa in a little copper pan with a cinnamon stick thrown in. “Mexican style,” he calls it, and we take our mugs over to the fire and play a round of the card game Bullshit. His parents are off in the barn, and we have the place to ourselves for a while. Our faces are warm and flushed as we slap down cards on a small, scuffed table.

Without thinking I say, “Your dad told me about the fire.”

He looks up from his hand of cards. “Nice going, Dad,” he says.

“Well, I’m glad he told me. It’s this huge, awful thing that happened to you.”

“Not everything should be talked about.”

“If you do want to talk about it,” I say, “I’d like to hear.”

“Why, so you can get all the gory details and discuss it with Sierra back at school?” says Griffin.

“Hardly.”

“What happened was my friend Alby came over early that night,” he says, his tone flat. “And we got high in the barn, and I guess at the end he must’ve tossed the joint. Did my dad tell you
that
?”

I try not to react to this. “No,” I say. “I didn’t know.”

“Well, now you do.” He slaps down a card. “And in the middle of the night I heard my parents shouting, and I ran outside to the barn. By the time the firemen got there, all the goats had died from smoke inhalation.” He sounds entirely unemotional; it’s as if he’s telling me a story about something much more ordinary. Like about how goat cheese is made.

“That must have been the worst thing in the world,” I say.

“It was,” he says. “But it’s over now.”

“That’s it?” I say. “‘It’s over now’?”

“What do you want from me, Jam? There’s nothing I can do about it, so I try not to think about it. I try to stay away from the barn, and all the new goats. Don’t you ever want to forget what happened to you?”

“Of course. But it doesn’t work that way.”

Then I realize how little I’ve thought about Reeve since I’ve been at the farm, except when I first realized I’d forgotten to bring my journal. I was so upset about not going to Belzhar this weekend, and yet look how well I’ve adjusted.

Griffin says, “So, what about you? You want to tell me more about that guy? Your boyfriend? Reeve, right?”

I’m surprised he’s remembered his name. “What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you want to say.”

I dip my head down, looking away. I do want to tell him things, and I think I might actually be able to, a little. I take my time with it, and he doesn’t hurry me along. I say, “It was just so
intense
. It kind of took up my entire inner life.”

“Go on.”

“I woke up every school day and thought about how I’d be with him soon. Our relationship was like one of those YouTube videos of a flower growing in speeded-up motion. All of a sudden we were in love.”

“Sounds amazing.”

“It is,” I say. Present tense.

“You want to say anything more?” he asks. “Like how he  . . . Like what happened?” A wave of bad feeling crosses me, and I shake my head. Griffin quickly says, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him, but he’s right; maybe he shouldn’t have asked, for now the subject of losing Reeve is changing the atmosphere, the room temperature. It’s amazing how that can happen all of a sudden.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he says.

“I just miss him,” I say. “I started to think I was okay about not going to Belzhar this weekend, but I guess I’m not.”

“You could write in
mine,
” he suddenly says, and when I look at him, not understanding, he explains, “My journal. Maybe you could get to Belzhar that way.”

“
Your
journal? But you’d lose five pages. One whole visit there. You’d do that?”

“Sure,” he says, shrugging.

“Well, thank you,” I say.

Neither of us has any idea if it will even work, but we go upstairs, and Griffin pulls down a folding ladder from a hatch in the ceiling. Following him, I climb up into the attic bedroom where he tells me he’s lived since he was little. It’s darker here than everywhere else in the house, because the windows are small and narrow, and the walls are painted blue, like a man cave. The ceiling is sloped, and old posters of grunge bands are tacked up and curling at the edges. The room smells like the inside of a cedar chest. Griffin goes to the desk and opens the top drawer, taking out his journal and solemnly handing it to me.

“Sit here,” he says.

I sit down at the little school desk. Carved into the surface in a crude handwriting, it says,
MRS. COTLER SUCKS
and
SCHOOL’S OUT
4 EVER
. And in smaller, slightly anxious letters,
FUCK IT ALL
.

I lay the journal down on the worn surface and open it. “You’re sure about this?” I ask him, and he nods. Shuffling through the pages, I try not to read anything, but a couple of phrases pop out: “she was a tease,” and “so peaceful it was awsome.”

Finally I find the first blank page, and I smooth it down with my hand, and then I smooth it down again. Then I just sit there.

“Go ahead,” he says. “I’m serious.”

“And you’re just going to stay here?” I ask nervously.

“If it’s all right with you,” he says.

“Okay then,” I say. “See you later.” And I pick up the pen and write a single sentence:

It’s been so hard to be without him.

Right away I’m there. This is the first time I haven’t been leaning against the study buddy, and now there are no arms circling me. The light’s even gloomier than usual in Belzhar, and it smells strange. A kind of spoiled-milk and fur smell. Goaty, I think, now that I know what a goat smells like.

I’m standing in the middle of an empty space, straw scattered under my feet. This isn’t the Belzhar I know, and I’m not on the playing fields; I’m somewhere else.

It’s the Foleys’ barn, I think. At least kind of, except there aren’t any goats here, just their lingering smell. And though I liked the smell before, it’s sort of disgusting now.

In the distance comes the peculiar
maa
-ing of a goat, as if the animal is trapped behind the barn wall. I worry that it’s Frankie.

Over in the corner of the barn I notice a shape, and I go to see what it is. There, bizarrely, is Courtney Sapol’s dollhouse. Kneeling in front of it, I look around for the mother and father dolls, but they’re not here now. From somewhere deep inside the dollhouse, a tiny male voice calls, “Jam! Jam!”

“Reeve!” I shout, putting my head at eye level with the house. “Where are you?” I peer into the rooms, but every one is empty.

“I’m here! Where are you?”

“I’m right here. Wait, I’m coming!” I call, but of course I can’t get to him. We’re in different worlds that overlap a little, but not enough.

Now I thrust my face deep into the living room of the dollhouse and peer out the windows on the other side. A pasture is visible, and in the distance is a single, solitary figure. I can’t make him out, but he’s tiny, doll-size, and as he comes toward the windows I’m so relieved to see that it’s Reeve.

But then he trots closer to the house, and finally he’s up against the windows, and, yes, he’s Reeve, but he’s got the body of a goat, with hooves and white fur with pinkish skin beneath.

Reeve and the goat have been hideously fused together, and the freakish creature they’ve become opens its mouth, draws back its upper lip, and cries out, “Ja-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-am!” The syllable sounds half human, half goat—the agonized cry of a creature that isn’t one thing or another, and can’t bear it.

“Jam, come back!” I hear. “Come out of Belzhar!”

The words snap me sharply to attention like a phrase spoken by a hypnotist. With a violent pull, I’m suddenly thrust upward and out of that fucked-up, hybrid version of Belzhar.

And now I’m facing Griffin, who just stares at me, while I stare right back. We sit together for a minute, not saying a word. I realize my heart’s been beating very fast, and I put a hand to my chest, calming myself down and trying to get back to normal as best I can.

“What was that? You seemed frantic,” Griffin says quietly. “And you’re shaking.”

I hadn’t realized, but it’s true.

“Put this on,” he says, and he takes off his maroon hoodie, one of his rotation of several hoodies. It’s huge on me, of course, but it somehow makes me feel better. I actually stop shaking.

“I was half in my Belzhar and half in yours,” I explain. “And Reeve was there, but he was part goat. It was like a nightmare. Writing in another person’s journal, I guess, creates a mash-up of two totally different Belzhars.”

“Amazing.”

I think about how the goat was bleating, and Reeve was calling my name, and I was shouting from my place in the empty barn that lies on the boundaries of those separate worlds.

“And you know, the way you were writing was pretty strange,” says Griffin. “It was like an in-class essay and you had a lot to say. So then I looked down at what you’d written.”

“But that’s private.”

“Sorry. My eye just went there, and I—” He cuts himself off in the middle of a sentence.

“What?” I ask.

“Have a look.”

He hands me his journal, and this is what I see:

It’s been so hard to be without him.

“What
is
this? After the first line, it’s just
nonsense,
” I say. “And I kept writing on top of my own writing.
That’s
what I was doing?”

“Yeah.”

“At least I barely took up any of your space,” I say. “I don’t think you’ll have to give up a whole trip after all.” Then I ask him, “Why were you so generous to me, letting me do this?”

Griffin shrugs and looks uncomfortable. “I don’t know your situation, exactly,” he says. “But being in love, and having your boyfriend die suddenly? That’s so unfair. I know you didn’t tell us the specifics, but I’m thinking maybe it was violent or something.” I don’t reply. “You don’t have to answer me, Jam,” he adds. “You never do. I just wanted to say that.”

It’s up to me to say something back, but I can’t. Think about what happened, Dr. Margolis always said, and the way you describe it.

But it’s so hard to talk about, and my thoughts get all chopped-up. It’s a lot easier now to talk about anything other than myself. “Your journal,” I suddenly say. “Can I read it?”

“First you complain about me looking at the nonsense
you
wrote,” says Griffin. “And now you want to read what
I
wrote?”

“I don’t really know much about you.”

“As I told Mrs. Q,” he says, “I suck ass as a writer.”

“I don’t think you used those exact words.”

“Maybe not.”

So Griffin agrees to let me sit on his bed and read his journal while he waits at his desk. The writing and the spelling are awkward and immature in places, but it’s definitely him. It’s not only that I don’t want to talk about myself anymore. I’m also very curious about him. I start with the first page:

My name is Griffin Jared Foley and I am sixteen years old and live on Foley Farms where my family makes goat cheese. I have always been different from the rest of my family. They are country people in all ways. They love it here and don’t see the need to go anywhere else. It is very beautifull here in Vermont I agree. But I guess I am restless. Ever since I was little I was that way. In school when I was a kid I hated sitting still, and I always jumped up and talked too loud and got in trouble with Mrs. Cotler, who looked like she would have a conipshion.

I was sort of wild, I can totally see that now. I liked to go sledding, and not just on sleds but on anything I could find. Pieces of cardboard, cafateria trays, etc. Once when I was ten I and two freinds took our sleds out to Hickory Hill in the middle of the night. Like at three AM. It was awsome. We got grounded for days but we didn’t care. We would always have that sled ride to remember.