The cabin where I live is not mine, although I’ve called it home now for several years. I had moved in after fleeing from a bad affair with a bad actor back in Toronto, and somehow I had become a permanent fixture. I was introduced to George by my aunt, Susan Kennedy, who runs the feed store in Laingford, the town to the north of Cedar Falls. She had arranged for me to stay in George’s old homestead cabin on the edge of his property for as long as I wanted, to make my puppets in peace and nurse my wounded pride. George Hoito, the septuagenarian Finnish farmer who is now my landlord, runs a modest dairy-goat operation, and in lieu of rent, I help out with the chores.
It’s my job to do the morning milking, which explains why, despite my late night, I tugged on a pair of overalls, which covered longjohns, workpants, undershirt, sweater and plaid Kuskawa dinner-jacket at seven-forty a.m. I was late.
I can’t say I hurried down the hill to the barn, though. The morning was perfect and the deer were still peacefully browsing, as motionless as OPP deer-decoys, the kind they use along the local highways to entrap drive-by poachers.
The goats yelled, as usual, as soon as they heard me outside the door. The noise they make, if you’ve not heard it before, would make you think that none of them had been fed, watered or milked for a year and a half. Goats are good at sounding desperate, but it’s all a ploy. Actually, contrary to popular belief, it takes a lot to rile a goat.
I was greeted inside the door by a tumble of goat-kids, the first spring crop, all ears and legs and too cute for their own good. George’s goats are Nubians, with long, floppy ears and Roman noses. They’re gentle, loving animals, they don’t stink (well, the females don’t) and they’re very finicky about what they eat. No tin cans or shirts off the laundry line for them. Only the very best hay and molasses-fortified grain will pass Nubian inspection. If there’s even a tiny bit of dust in the hay, or a touch of mould in the grain, they’ll look at you with their weird, lozenge-pupilled eyes, curl their fuzzy lips and sneeze in your face.
The kids weren’t hungry, because they were still small enough to be nursing off their mother, Donna Summer, the herd leader. She was going on eleven, but still producing triplets every spring, predictable as tax time. I fed her first, because those were the rules and she would have made her displeasure known if I hadn’t. I cleaned her manger, doled out her grain ration for the day and watched her gobble it up, scratching her ears as she chewed. She moaned with pleasure, a curiously human sound, like someone who has just finished an enormous Italian meal and is contemplating a plate of fresh, perfect cannoli.
The kids climbed into the manger too. The slats are too wide-apart to keep them from going wherever the heck they want, but it doesn’t matter. Goats are pretty relaxed about whose kids are where, although a milking doe won’t let someone else’s kid steal a quick drink unless she’s too busy to notice. The only problem arises when, as sometimes happens, a female kid with no sense of decency happens to slip into the breeding buck’s pen and gets pregnant prematurely. It doesn’t hurt the doe any, but pre-teen goats have teats like plastic drinking-straws and milking them is a pain in the butt.
Donna Summer’s kids were too small to worry about that yet, though. They were about the size of long-legged retriever puppies, and primarily interested in things that looked like they might produce milk. As I scratched Donna Summer’s ears, one kid already in the manger put its forefeet up on my back and started sucking on my left earlobe, while another grabbed my thumb.
Next in line was Julian of Norwich, a patient old girl whose milk production was down a little, on account of the fact that she was fifteen years old and getting a bit creaky in the joints. Most of the goats had no trouble leaping up onto the milking stand, but Julian executed the manoeuvre in several stages, fixing me with a reproachful eye, as if I were somehow responsible. I sang as I milked her (which often coaxes an extra ounce or two of milk into the pail—don’t ask me why). I noticed right away that my voice had a curiously nasal quality to it. Great, I thought. It probably meant that my speaking voice sounded stupid, too, which meant that not only would I be dealing with nose-comments during every single face-to-face encounter in the foreseeable future, I would also have to deal with it on the phone.
Good thing Juliet had given me a cellular. I could take the batteries out whenever I got home. There, at least, safe in the cabin, I could be miserable in peace.
My nose throbbed as soon as I thought about it. Up until then, the pain had remained in the back of my mind. With both my nostrils stuffed with cotton, I could hardly miss the bulging, which insinuated itself into my normally clear peripheral vision, but hadn’t taken centre-stage as yet. It did, though, not long afterwards. I finished the milking, let the goats out to browse and frolic in the early spring air and headed up to the farmhouse to join George for breakfast.
I hadn’t actually seen a reflection of myself yet that morning. There was only one mirror in the cabin, and I must have forgotten to stop by for a pre-dawn primp before heading to the barn. I should have checked, I guess. I should have prepared myself.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what happened to you?” George positively yelped as I walked in the door. I explained.
“You poor child,” he said gently, which made tears well up in my eyes again. I realized I would have to get a grip on that if I was to get through the day. “You look,” he said, “like a raccoon.”
“I beg your pardon?” I said. The remark effectively dispelled the weepiness. He probably said it to have precisely that effect. George is not a cruel man, normally.
“Your eyes, Polly. Have you seen your eyes this morning?”
Oh, God. Spare me. I went to peer at myself in George’s hall mirror. Shiners. Two of them. One on each side of my pathetic nose, which, I was glad to see, had shrunk a little from the bloated root vegetable it had been at the hospital. But the two black eyes were there to stay for a while. I smiled in a friendly way at my reflection. The effect was horrible.
“At least I’m not actually performing in the show,” I said, returning to the kitchen table, where George had poured me a big steaming mug of fresh-ground coffee. “At least I won’t have to go on stage looking like this.”
“Didn’t you say the actors have to wear masks anyway?”
“That’s true. Of course. Black hoods, actually. Maybe I should ask Juliet to give me a part. I could wear the hood all the time until my face gets back to normal.”
“It is not that bad,” George said, soothingly. Then he ruined it by asking if I had any makeup up at the cabin.
He put together a wonderful fry-up of bacon, eggs, fried green tomatoes and fried bread. I had three cups of coffee with cream and sugar, and in the last cup, George tossed in a capful of scotch (Glen impossible-to-pronounce) to chase the chill away. He is a lovely man and I want him to be my wife.
We took our plates outside for Lug-nut to lick, and then we smoked on the porch, me a cigarette and George a pipe full of new tobacco he was trying out because it was on sale at the Quick-Mart. It didn’t smell as good as his usual cherry-scented stuff, but he soldiered on with it because he is a Finn, and Finns never give up.
“It’s Canadian,” he said, coughing. “Susan says it’s additive-free and politically correct. I must give it a chance.”
George’s pet raven, Poe, who was watching George struggle with brand-loyalty issues, croaked in disgust. Poe was perched on his old friend’s shoulder, but as the tobacco began invading his space, he shook his black, sleek head, did his usual inelegant flapping hop and landed with a thump on mine, instead. I didn’t mind. In fact, when Poe sat on me, I felt blessed. Poe seemed to like cigarette smoke.
“You’re right, my friend,” George said, nodding at the bird. He dumped the smouldering mass into the bay tree that sat in a pot on the porch, refilled the pipe with the old brand, lit it and sighed in satisfaction.
“You can’t teach an old dog new vices,” he said. He sent a perfect smoke ring into the morning sky. “Peaceful,” he murmured. “Perfect.”
That