Megan Bergman - Birds of a Lesser Paradise - Stories

The pain, Mom said. I was talking about the pain—

Of course I had to make it stop. I’d do anything for your mother, Dad said. So I got out the Remmy Ultra Mag we kept on hand for bears, and I shot that bird to dust.

I bit my tongue and wanted to cry.

We turned around soon after, Mom said, and headed back to New England.

You could breastfeed and drive at the same time, Dad said.

You looked out the windows, Mom said.

• • •

The cheese barn is cold in the morning and freezes my hands. Jesus, who always comes into the barn when I’m there, greets me. She has shredded ears; that’s how you can tell her apart from the other goats. I don’t tell anyone I call her Jesus, because it’s just the thing that Willow would “have to think about.”

I don’t know, I can imagine her saying. It doesn’t offend me, but will it offend others?

Jesus sucks on my finger. I love Jesus, and if I ever leave the farm I’m going to beg Pete to let me have her. She’s cowlike, white with black spots, and expects attention in the way of a kitten. I’ve given other goats benign names like Gingersnap and Chamomile, things you can say in front of Willow that will make her scrunch up her nose and say aw .

Leave me alone now, Jesus, I say. I have work to do.

I milk half of the goats in the morning and half at night. They each give me about a gallon of milk a day, which is a pound of cheese when it’s all said and done. We have twenty-five goats on the farm, but not all of them give milk. There are a handful of retired stud goats and some old girls we don’t breed anymore. Every season, complaining about mouths to feed, Pete puts a bullet from his.38 in the back of some skulls, mostly young boys and old girls. I hate that part. If I had a place of my own, and one day I will, I’d take them. Part farm, part sanctuary.

We have a modern milking setup with stanchions. The gist of the operation: four goats climb onto the platform at a time. Their milk goes into tubes that lead to a pasteurization machine, a big chrome vat. Bags of the white stuff hang over gallon buckets, which allows for separation of the curds and whey. I mix in a little rennet, and poof: cheese. Mostly chevre, a little Havarti.

Today I set out my molds, lay a sheet of cellophane wrap over each, and then begin the process of laying out what will become the top of the artisan cheese — Herbes de Provence make people feel fancy.

The room smells dirty, but it’s not. I Clorox it nightly, and finally convinced Pete to remove the old jersey cow tails pinned to the beams of the milking station, a nod to what was. I set out lavender hand soap and keep things hospital-clean.

Jesus butts the backs of my knees. You’re gonna make my work look sloppy, I say. Every time I touch you I gotta go wash my hands.

Phoenix, Pete says, sticking his head into the barn.

Yeah, I say.

Did you tell Willow…

I did, I say.

I can’t find her.

I’m sure she’s around, I say.

Hey, he says. Can you make some of that goat’s-milk fudge? We have a group from Pennsylvania coming in on Sunday, and I think they’ll go for chocolate. We need to make some big sales.

No problem, I say.

Just don’t work overtime, he says.

I won’t, I say, though this is not true. I always work overtime, but I rarely charge them for it, because they’re so stressed about money. I take pride in my work. I want things to be clean and beautiful, and if that means staying up until midnight making fudge and wrapping it just the right way, that’s what I’ll do.

After setting the cheese, I deadhead the begonias in the planters and wipe down the edges of the dirty clawfoot bathtubs we keep outside for the goats to drink from. It’s a charming operation, despite Willow and Pete stomping around, avoiding each other. I wrapped white Christmas lights around the bittersweet that climbs the fence closest to the barn and painted the door light purple.

I like living here, but it gets lonely. Sometimes I go into town for a beer, but everyone worth looking at is married; they’ve come here to relish their relationship in quiet. Or drown it. I came here two years ago when I had nothing: no money, no career, no boyfriend, only thirty odd books on Egon Schiele, Klimt, Expressionism, and Dada that I didn’t fully understand. I was interested in radical distortions, the idea that people could evoke mood with shapes and color. I spent all my money on canvasses and oils, but the work I made did not satisfy me. No meaning had been transmitted; it was lost in primal jags of paint. I felt hopeless, in need of hands-on work I could feel good about. Those days my mom claimed I was looking for a life. I hope that I’ve found one, but I’m not sure.

I think about what it would be like to sleep with someone again. I think about sleeping with everyone, even people I don’t like. Even Willow and Pete. When I say I think about it, I mean I imagine it by accident, and have no intention of doing it. I think imagining sex is a way to process what you know about a person, their attributes and hang-ups, their mastery and abuse of the English language.

Tonight I work three hours late, three hours which I will not mention to Pete and which he will not acknowledge, even if he saw the lights on in the cheese barn. Who wants to fight with Pete about money?

Besides, I need the practice for running my own farm someday. I don’t have a college degree or seed money.

We eat dinner together Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Saturdays are supposed to be “date night” for Pete and Willow — another idea Willow came up with for saving their marriage — but I have yet to see them go out on a date. Tonight is Friday, which means Willow will make a stir fry. Her stir fries are good enough but always bland, and I have to dump a tablespoon of chili-garlic sauce on the vegetables to enjoy them.

Your food would make me cry, Willow said once.

Everything makes you cry, Pete said.

I come into the kitchen just as Willow is setting the table and I wash up. She lays plates down with such love and grace, as if feeding someone is an important and intimate gesture — and I think it is.

Thanks for cooking, I say. The broccoli looks great.

I didn’t burn the rice this time, Willow says, genuinely proud of herself. Willow always burns the rice. I think it’s because she’s insecure. A confident person trusts their ability to cut the heat at the right time; Willow needs to see it stuck to the bottom of the pan before she knows it’s done.

The farmhouse kitchen has big pine plank floors of varying widths, scratched by dogs that no longer live here. The countertops are slate, and the sink must weigh two hundred pounds. Willow strung Nepalese prayer flags over the dinner table, fashioned curtains out of feed bags, and taped 1960s postcards to the fridge. In winter it’s the room we live in when we’re out of bed, because the woodstove and oven keep it warm. In summer it reeks of spoiled vegetables, hot compost. We drink from Mason jars and eat from mismatched china. The windowsills are cracked and full of dead wasps.

I can smell Willow’s perfume as she sits down next to me; the scent is, I believe, part of her plan to become irresistible to Pete. She smiles and I smile back. Pete has a newspaper on the table and looks at the sports section. The tension between them is a vacuum, and I always feel in danger of being sucked in.

Mom called, Willow says.

Pete doesn’t look up, so by default she’s talking to me.

What did she say? I ask. I get up to retrieve my jar of chili garlic sauce. The fridge is old, pastel blue, and has rounded edges. Willow bought it secondhand because she liked the design; the hum and poor cooling quality drive Pete crazy.