VESTIGIAL HORNS by Ben Brooks
There was a connection, he could feel it. She was barely two feet tall, and she went about the house like she was drunk. Not too drunk – tipsy. She didn’t stagger, she lurched.
Harry kept thinking she would step right into something and hurt herself – the corner of a table, the hard seat of a stool, both situated at the height of her eyes, or run her nose smack into a door frame or the sill of a window – but she never did. He put his hand out to protect her when she got too close to something, but it wasn’t necessary. She always veered away. Her steps were guided by some sort of built-in system she had, like a dolphin or a whale. It was radar or sonar or something like that which tied Danielle’s little brain and her rubbery, stumpy legs to the space around her.
“She’s fine, Dad, don’t worry so much.” That was Ellie, his daughter. She had a frown on her face, a scowl, the same scowl she’d been wearing almost since the moment he arrived.
“I’m not worrying,” he said, “I just don’t want her to bump herself.”
“She won’t bump herself. You know, she’s done fine walking for the last two months without you here, she doesn’t need you looking out for her. And anyway, if she does happen to walk into something, that’s how she’ll learn about the world around her. There are realities. She has to know about the realities.”
“Well, is it all that terrible that an old man doesn’t want his granddaughter to find out about realities, to learn about the world around her, by injuring herself?” Harry said, indignant. He knew the comment, and the way he snapped it out, would irritate his daughter, but he couldn’t help himself. She irritated him.
“You don’t want her to get hurt? That’s touching, but it didn’t seem to concern you a whole heck of a lot when I was growing up,” Ellie snarled.
Simone reached a hand over and gripped Ellie’s arm just below the elbow. The two women exchanged a dark look. Then Ellie shook her head and turned away.
* * *
One by one. That’s what he thought. Ellie and Simone were in the kitchen with the door shut, banging pots and pans around, doing something about dinner, talking to each other – probably about him – and Dani was in her room taking a nap. Harry had a drink in his hand, in a cold glass that made his fingers feel wet, even though he didn’t think they really were. It was Simone who’d made the drink for him. After she measured out the gin she stuck her pinky into the glass to swirl it around with the tonic, then squeezed the juice out of a lime wedge and dropped the wedge into the glass. It landed on an ice cube, and the lime still clung to the same cube. When Harry sipped, he could feel it against his lip.
Harry was by himself in the living room, where he had been sent after Simone handed him his beverage. At home he had three or four drinks every evening, usually gin or vodka, occasionally whiskey or rum. He poured his first when he started putting his supper together. Ellie said they didn’t need his help, they could manage to roast a chicken and bake potatoes on their own, believe it or not. He was banished, and he sat listening to the sounds through the door, and that’s when he started thinking. One by one was the phrase that came to him. One by one he had lost almost everybody in his life. This didn’t seem like a tragedy to him, because it had happened over the course of years, decades, and besides, he certainly wasn’t asking anybody for sympathy.
He had simply outlived them all – outlived three wives, though only one had died while he was still married to her, the other two long after the divorces. His father passed away when Harry was still in grade school, and though his mother had lived a long life, she developed Alzheimer’s in her eighties and had succumbed to it two years back. For his sister it had been a particularly virulent case of breast cancer, and for his brother an accident in his house. Nobody knew exactly what happened to cause him to fall, but his wife came home and found Steven on the floor, his neck broken, though the ladder he had apparently fallen from was still upright. What Steven had been doing on a ladder in the dining room was anybody’s guess. Harry had known from his sister-in-law that Steven had been acting strangely of late, and ultimately that’s what the accident was attributed to.
Harder than any of the others was what had happened to Harry’s son, Rob, Ellie’s half-brother, who picked up an infection on a trip he made to Asia with a friend between his junior and senior years of college. None of the doctors Harry found for him ever figured out what the infection was, and none of the remedies or treatments they tried impeded it one bit. Over time the infection ate away at Rob’s insides. Everybody knew it was going to kill him, but nobody said it. At the end Harry was sitting in the hospital with him, as he did every evening, holding Rob’s fingers, trying to warm them up, but about five seconds before Rob wheezed in his final breath, Harry suddenly jerked his hand away. Why he did this, he could never explain to himself. The memory of it plagued him for years, and it had been nearly impossible to shake the idea that by withdrawing his touch the way he had, he had killed his own son.
Now all he had left, he thought, were Ellie and Danielle, family-wise at least. His daughter by his second marriage, and his granddaughter. There were a few friends back in Poughkeepsie, but those were mostly gone now too, and none were left that Harry had ever been particularly close to. Ellie and Danielle lived more than eight hundred miles away from him, in an old farmhouse in Wisconsin, so Harry didn’t get to see them very often.
There was a sharp edge to his relationship with his daughter. It formed the border between them, and that edge was able to cut in either direction. Though Harry could not recall what, if any specific event, had been the cause of the edge sharpening so much, he knew it had lain between them that way for a very long time.
Ellie and Danielle lived with Simone, Ellie’s wife. That’s what Ellie called her, though of course they weren’t actually married. It was Simone who had inherited the farmhouse, and Simone who had borne Danielle. They had decided between them, as far as Harry could tell, that Simone’s hips were built more broadly than Ellie’s, so she was more suited physically for the job. The sperm to fertilize the egg had come from a sperm bank in Milwaukee, and Harry imagined a proper German father for Dani, proper German son-in-law for himself. But the relationship was more complicated than that, because there was no biological tie between Ellie and Danielle, and therefore none between Harry and Danielle. Still, there was that connection. It was something Harry felt whenever he was around the little girl. Danielle was mostly oblivious to him, unless Harry stooped down to pick her up, but she was only sixteen months old and couldn’t be expected to understand the thing that Harry felt, even if somewhere inside her she may have sensed it, too.
The lifestyle his daughter lived was a lifestyle Harry simply couldn’t fathom. He joked to his friends back home that Ellie and her husband were Wisconsin farmers growing cheese out of the ground, the great crop of the state, but he didn’t tell anyone that the husband was a woman. And actually, Harry suspected, if either of them claimed the title husband, it would be Ellie to do so, not Simone. Though she was slimmer at the hips, his daughter had a hard-looking, wiry upper body and sharp angles in her face, not a shred of softness anywhere.
When he’d arrived on this visit he was amazed to find out that his farming joke wasn’t entirely a joke – that Ellie and Simone now kept goats. Ellie had never mentioned it on the phone, and she didn’t tell Harry on the ride from the Milwaukee airport either. But when they got to the house, there were five goats in the front yard. Dani was tottering about in their pen with them, holding Simone’s hand while she reached out to pat their sides.
“Goats are great,” Ellie said, once he’d hugged Simone and slobbered a big kiss on Dani, and Ellie had showed her father to his room. “They’re smart, and they’re actually amazingly clean.”
“What do you do with them?” he asked her.
“Do? We don’t do anything, Dad. Would you have us eat them? They’re just there. Here. Dani loves them. They’re actually fainting goats. They’re very cool.”
“Say what? What the hell are fainting goats?”
“They fall over whenever they’re startled. Something about their muscles freezing up. Technically it’s not fainting, but that’s what it looks like. It’s a genetic mutation. It lasts about ten seconds and then they get up again.”
“You’re making that up. That’s some sort of weird Wisconsin farmer mythology.”
“No,” Ellie said, “it’s true. They fall right over. And Dani loves to charge at them and clap her hands and make them fall. And we think she should grow up around animals. Not like as pets, something that’s there just for her amusement, or whim, but more than that – we think animals should be part of her everyday life, the fun part and the work part.”
“And this is because?” he said.
Harry snapped open the clasps on his suitcase and lifted the lid. He rummaged around with his hand for a moment, then pulled out a small package wrapped in bright yellow paper. The name DANIELLE was printed on the paper in large letters, as if the little girl would be able to read it.
“This is because that’s what we think,” Ellie answered him.
When she said that was when Harry first noted the scowl around her mouth, and the scowl hadn’t left her face since.
* * *
His first night there he didn’t sleep well. A comment Ellie had made at dinner about not realizing that alcohol and water were interchangeable, when he’d been refreshing his drink, had turned his mood further. And Simone had snatched away the peas Harry put on the tray of his granddaughter’s high chair for her, as if Harry were doing the exact wrong thing by giving them to her. Dani, eating with her fingers, had started dropping her peas over the side of her tray just to watch them splat on the floor, so Harry spoke to her about the importance of eating vegetables before giving her a few more. But Simone didn’t give Danielle a chance to show that she had listened to anything he’d said.
When dinner was done, Harry built up towers with plastic blocks for Dani to swat down. But sitting on the floor, and crawling after the blocks that she scattered, had kicked off pain in his back and leg. Then during the night, once they’d all gone to bed, a wind had come up. It rattled the windows in the room Harry was in ferociously, and he couldn’t sleep through the noise. In the dark it sounded like a gale or hurricane was blowing, and Harry imagined the old roof of the house lifting off, peeling away like a scab that hadn’t quite set, to reveal all the messy, festering life underneath.
He lay awake for two hours or more before finally throwing the covers off and rolling out of bed. His room was cold, especially the floor under his bare feet. Through the windows the day’s first gray light was beginning to ooze in. Harry stared at the windows that were still rattling, though beyond the glass, outside, everything appeared normal. From where he stood he could see down into the goats’ pen. There was a little goat house in the corner, a makeshift shed with an open doorway and straw on the dirt floor, but none of the animals were inside. Instead they stood around at odd angles to one another, chewing on food that Simone had put out for them the evening before. When he squinted, Harry could make out the white breath the goats emitted into the cold air from their nostrils.
He put on his clothes, including his jacket, and made his way toward the stairs. He listened at Dani’s door when he went past, but everything was quiet. He tried to go down the stairs without making any noise, but he couldn’t stop the old wooden steps from creaking. Outside Harry discovered that the wind that had been so loud during the night was barely more than a breeze. But the early morning was certainly colder than the day before had been. It carried more than a hint of a change in the season.
He stopped a moment to zip his jacket and look in at the goats, but he couldn’t think of anything to say to them. He was a man who had never been shy about expressing an opinion or offering advice, but after he retired – he’d been a senior accountant at a plastics manufacturing firm on the outskirts of Poughkeepsie – he had far fewer opportunities to express himself to other people. He had begun to fall out of practice.
The goats eyed Harry as he stood there, though without bothering to turn their heads in his direction. They all had the exact same protruding eyes, bulging, and with devious-looking horizontal slits to see through. Why Ellie thought those animals would be good company for her sweet little baby was beyond him. He flinched toward them suddenly and said the word, “BOO” in a high pitch, and sure enough two of the goats, the two standing closest to him, keeled over as if they had been shot. They lay on their sides for a few seconds, still, and then scrambled back up.
It was so absurd it made Harry grin despite himself. Then he muttered, “Hasta la vista, fainting goats, I’m taking a walk,” and he set off across the field toward the woods.
He realized he was limping slightly, his right leg still stiff from playing with Dani the evening before, and he slowed his step. He took in deep breaths, noting the aroma of sulfurous mud in the air, and he turned his head to take in the whole of the place. Only one corner of the field was used for a garden, the rest filled with tall grasses growing wild. It was mid-September, and Ellie and Simone’s garden still had tomatoes and peppers ripening, broccoli growing higher and cabbages growing fatter. The night before there had been vegetables from the garden in the salad, and Harry had remarked on how delicious they were. That was the only time all evening that Ellie had smiled.
Harry headed toward the woods, where the leaves had only just begun to turn red and yellow. He tried to keep his mind on Danielle, sweet little Dani, the reason he had expended the effort to make this visit, the one part of the trip he had been looking forward to. It was his greatest fear in life that the boundary between himself and his daughter would grow too sharp, that it would cut right through itself, and that Ellie would no longer accommodate his need to spend time with his granddaughter. As it was, Ellie had already hinted that the visits every two months or so were too frequent. Not that she said it in as many words, but she always made sure to mention how busy she and Simone were, how little spare time they had. In return, Harry was careful to remind them that he was almost no trouble to host when he came, but that just made Ellie roll her eyes.
He saw a bright red blur flit out of an oak tree into a neighboring juniper, but his eyes were too slow to stay with it. He stared into the juniper looking for the bird, but he couldn’t find it. Finally he walked up to the tree and began to shake on branches, thinking to make the bird fly out, but nothing emerged. It made Harry wonder whether what he thought he had seen was only something he had imagined.
His fantasy as he walked on the path turned to an accident that would befall Ellie and Simone, something that would kill them both instantly but leave Dani unharmed. Maybe their truck would overturn coming home from a movie while Dani was spending the night at a friend’s, or lightning would strike them both in the garden while Dani was inside napping. These were thoughts Harry had had before, thoughts he drove from his mind when they first came to him, but now he allowed himself to dwell on them. He played out the whole story while he walked. Following the funerals his granddaughter would come to live with him, and he would raise her in Poughkeepsie, in the very house that Ellie had grown up in, at least until Mary had moved out and taken their daughter with her, then filed for divorce.
It wasn’t that Harry wanted anything terrible to happen to Ellie, but he had to prepare himself in case something did. That’s how he framed it, that’s what he told himself. Sometimes the fantasy dwelled on the court fight he might find himself in, to prove to a judge that he would be a more fit parent for Dani than Simone’s mother. Harry had only met Cynthia once – she had flown from her home in Atlanta to meet the baby, just as he had come to meet her, shortly after Danielle was born. Cynthia was perfectly amicable, and Harry got along fine with her. In fact she seemed as baffled as he was about the way their daughters had chosen to organize their lives.
Harry walked with his eyes on the ground so he wouldn’t trip over any roots. All he needed, he thought, was to fall in the woods and break a leg in a place where nobody was around. Even just twist an ankle. He pictured himself crawling on his hands and knees back to the house, mud seeping through his trousers. He’d be dragging his bad leg behind him, exacerbating the injury. Then he really would be trouble. Ellie and Simone would have to wait on him hand and foot while his leg recovered enough for him to fly back home.
When he thought everybody must be awake in the house he turned around. To his surprise, the morning didn’t seem to be getting any warmer. He made his way a little more rapidly back along the path. Now the air was full of bird songs, and Harry saw several birds in the trees, but not any red ones.
He came to the edge of the woods and hesitated a moment before stepping out. Across the field was the house. It badly needed a paint job, the sides seeming more bare than yellow.
The house was a ramshackle affair, built in phases over time. From a distance it had no coherence, made no sense. In some places it was two stories tall and in other places three. Eight bedrooms had been cobbled together – that’s how many rooms Harry had counted in which beds and dressers were the primary furniture – plus additional miscellaneous rooms whose original functions were not clear. Ellie and Simone used those rooms as a study and as a playroom for Dani and to watch television, plus there were rooms for storage and rooms that were completely empty. There were nooks and crannies off every hallway, the house way too large for the three people who inhabited it, and Harry could imagine Dani, when she got a little older, being terrified to cross thresholds from one gloomy room to another, or to peek around corners or up any of the house’s three stairwells.
The house had been left to Simone in her father’s will, but it had been unoccupied for the last twelve years of his life. There was little about it now that recalled its original function as a house for a large farming family. In the winter, Ellie and Simone closed off one whole wing of the structure so they wouldn’t have to pay to heat it.
Harry crossed the field briskly, his legs swishing through the tall grass, and he entered the yard. As he walked by the goats he noted that they were alert to him, they watched him. He looked toward the house quickly with the thought that somebody might be spying on him through a window, but he didn’t see anybody. He then swiveled his neck and spat into the goats’ pen, but it wasn’t enough to knock any of them down. It was a gesture of defiance toward them, childish, aggressive, but it demonstrated his superiority over them, his dominance. It didn’t seem to faze the goats, however. The animals didn’t stir. They didn’t react to his gesture at all.
* * *
On Monday Ellie went to work. She had recently begun her second year as a librarian’s assistant at the local middle school. Without an advanced degree in library science, she couldn’t look for a job as an actual librarian, but she said she didn’t care about that.
That was another thing about her lifestyle that Harry couldn’t understand – not only did neither she nor Simone have careers, they didn’t want careers. They deliberately eschewed the whole notion of careers. They had devised a system whereby they would take turns working, take turns supporting each other, so the one who wasn’t working could be home with Dani. Prior to Simone’s pregnancy, and during the first seven months of it, they had both worked to save up extra money. Since then, Ellie had worked and Simone had been the stay-at-home mom, but the plan was that after the current year in the library, Ellie would quit her job and Simone would find something. The school system was a good bet for both of them because it gave them summers off, and they could spend long and lazy days together when the weather was warm.
Ellie gave Danielle a big, lingering hug and gave Simone a big, lingering hug, but she only pecked her father brusquely on the cheek. Simone handed her the lunch bag she had packed for her, and Ellie opened the door. But before she went out she said, “Dad, try not to get underfoot while I’m gone, would you? Simone’s got a routine down with Dani. I’d appreciate it if you could respect that.”
Her words were hard and cold, and they came from no source that Harry could see. He felt as if he’d been slapped – blood rushed up to his cheeks. “Me? Respect? Of course I’ll respect that,” he said. “Who do you think I am?”
“We’ll be fine,” Simone assured Ellie.
The truth was, Harry thought, he felt more comfortable with Simone than he did with his daughter. For one thing, Simone would never say something like that to him.
Harry and Simone played with Dani inside the house because it was still chilly outside – they played with her toys, they chased her around the living room and kitchen, squawking and giggling and tickling, they looked quietly at picture books with her – and then Simone fixed a bottle and Harry cradled Dani in his arms while he fed it to her, and together they settled her down for a nap.
“I love you, child,” Harry said softly as Dani nestled into her blanket. “I love you so much you make my heart ache.” He left the palm of his hand open, flattened on her back for a moment. Dani looked up at him through dark, wide eyes, two fingers in her mouth, and Harry smiled.
Simone, he thought, leaving the bedroom with her, was a good mother, and he felt guilty about the fantasy he had entertained earlier: the two of them meeting untimely deaths. He chalked it up to not having slept well. Simone was an attractive woman, too, he acknowledged, just a tiny bit on the heavy side, but with an interesting square-shaped face and a warm smile, and she had a striking hairstyle with the hair shaved on the sides and a long blonde tail of it hanging down past her shoulders. He could see why Ellie liked her.
They went down the stairs together and Simone smiled at Harry. “Would you fancy a cup of tea?” she asked with an ironic lilt in her voice.
“Sure,” Harry said. “Certainly I would. I’m a fancying guy. That would be great.”
He sat at the table and watched Simone pour out the tea and spoon honey into the cups. Then she reached down below the counter and pulled out a bottle of bourbon, and she waggled it in Harry’s direction with a questioning look in her eyes, but he shook his head no. He wouldn’t have minded a hit, notwithstanding that it was still well before noon, but he suspected Ellie and Simone both thought he was an alcoholic, and he didn’t want to encourage that idea. He could see Simone reporting to Ellie that her father had taken whiskey with his tea, and he could see Ellie rolling her eyes about it.
“So how’s Cynthia?” Harry asked, warming his hands on the cup. “How’s your mom doing?”
“Oh, she’s good. She’s doing fine. Busy, you know. That’s what she always says,” Simone chuckled, “always so busy. Too busy, the way she tells it.”
“I like your mother,” he said. “I think she’s great. Does she have any plans for a visit? Or is she too busy for that?”
“Oh no. She’ll be here next month,” Simone told him. “And she likes you, too.”
Harry nodded. He did like Cynthia, the little he knew her, but he felt competitive – she was Dani’s only other grandparent, he couldn’t help it, and she had the advantage of the blood connection that he didn’t have, the DNA. He was sure Simone had a better relationship with her mother than Ellie had with him, and he was sure Ellie was nicer to Simone’s mother than she was to him. Harry needed for Danielle to know him as she grew up at least as well as she knew Cynthia, and his greatest fear was that he would somehow get cut off. The connection between himself and Dani was always present to him, even when he wasn’t around Dani, but he knew that connection would wither unless he was there to nurture it.
When Danielle woke up from her nap, Harry and Simone were in the living room reading. Harry was in a chair with the newspaper, and Simone was curled up on the sofa with a book. The house was quiet, and though Harry could feel a cold draft coming in through the wall, he felt cozy, peaceful. Danielle called out once from her bedroom upstairs – briefly, abruptly – then was silent. Harry lowered his newspaper and Simone smiled over her book at him.
“Would you like to go up and get her?” Simone asked.
“Love to,” Harry said.
“That’s fine then. She’ll be happy to see you. Let’s just make sure she’s really awake.”
When Dani called again, Harry set down the paper and went to the stairs. He was amazed how hard his heart was beating, how excited he was. He opened the door and stuck his head into the darkened bedroom air, then flicked on the light. Danielle was standing in her crib, her thin hair tousled, her little hands gripped tightly around two of the bars, and she was bouncing up and down on her legs, flexing at the knees. When she saw Harry she had a big grin for him, and he grinned back.
“Da,” she said.
“Da,” Harry said back. “Da, da, sweetie,” only she didn’t answer him. Harry wondered if she was trying to say daddy to him, or Dani, or if it was just a random sound she’d made.
He put his hands under her armpits and Danielle let go of the bars. Harry lifted her toward him and brought her close. Dani wrapped her arms around his neck and nuzzled against him. He squeezed, though not too hard – he didn’t want to hurt her.
He felt the sting of a tear edge its way into his eye. This was it, he thought, this was all he wanted out of his life. If he never had another thing but this, it was enough. His granddaughter was still just a baby, she was only now learning her first few words, but Harry felt as if their minds were one, their spirits, their souls. If only it could last, if only it could be permanent, if only he wouldn’t have to leave. He let his tear slide out of his eye and run into Danielle’s hair. Then he felt that she was pushing against him, arching her back away, bucking. She wanted to get down. With reluctance, Harry lowered her to the floor, and she scampered off.
* * *
In the evening, after supper, after he’d done the blocks game with Dani again, lowering himself gingerly to the floor and then lifting himself back up even more gingerly, after he’d bathed Dani and read her a bedtime story and sung to her about the eensy weensy spider, which Ellie corrected to itsy bitsy, raising her voice to sing over him, Harry removed himself to a separate wing of the house. Ellie had come home from work in a sour mood, set off by an afternoon incident in the library with two of the girls – “God help us if Dani turns out that way,” she’d muttered – and he thought he’d give her and Simone a little space. He sensed that his presence was inflaming Ellie’s irritation. The students had been having an argument, and when Ellie reminded them that the library was a quiet place, they’d both turned their sarcastic, spiteful humor on her.
He left the lights off and walked in and out of the rooms in a dusky gloom, the click of his shoes on the old oak floors echoing sharply. The sky was not completely dark yet, though it was heading there. Harry had brought the newspaper with him, the sections he hadn’t read yet, but his back hurt and there were no comfortable chairs in that part of the house to sit in. And besides that, he was too restless to read, so he carried the paper folded up under his arm. There were only three days left in his visit, and nothing had happened yet, nothing definitive. Not with Dani, and not with Ellie either. Harry realized that somewhere inside him he had been expecting something momentous to occur on this trip, or at the very least, that he would receive some kind of a sign.
When he went back to the living room, feeling his way in the dark with his hands, Ellie and Simone were gone. He looked up the stairwell and saw that their bedroom door was shut and a stripe of yellow light was shining beneath it. He wondered if they had looked for him to say good night, or if they’d simply seen that he wasn’t around and made a convenient escape.
Harry went into the kitchen, straight to the cupboard with the bottle of bourbon in it. He put four ice cubes in a glass, lowering them into it one at a time so as not to clatter them together, and then he poured in what he estimated to be two shots of bourbon. Two generous shots. It wasn’t that he needed the drink, he told himself, but that they would expect him to need it. He might as well give them what they were after, he figured.
He drank it in the kitchen standing by the sink – not in a big gulp, but in one quick little sip after another. On the first sip the heat in the back of his throat stung enough to make him wince, but after that the liquid went down easy. He dumped the ice cubes, what was left of them, into the drain, and he washed the glass. But instead of leaving it on the counter to dry, he used a towel and put it back on the shelf with the other glasses.
That night, in bed, the windows rattled again. Harry assured himself that it was nothing to fret about, merely a breeze, but that didn’t help him get back to sleep. He shifted about and tried to find a comfortable position, curling his knees to his chest and then straightening his legs again, but every time he settled down, the rattling distracted him. Finally he rolled onto his belly and pulled the pillow over his head, stuffing it into his ears, and in that position he waited for morning.
* * *
He woke with a start, in a sweat, to a room filled with light. It took him a moment to remember where he was, that he was in Wisconsin, not Poughkeepsie, that he had come to see his granddaughter on a mission that seemed to have been of some urgency. The clock beside his bed told him it was nearly ten. He blinked at the glow of red electronic numerals. He remembered the long night, lying awake tossing, thinking several times that he was going to make himself get up in a minute or two. He must have finally drifted off, he realized, then sunk into the kind of deep, heavy sleep he hated. Now his back was stiff and his eyes hurt and his brain was slow, sluggish. It felt like it was still mired in something like mud.
Nobody was in the living room or the kitchen, but Simone had left a pot of coffee warming for Harry, and for that he was grateful. He poured himself a cup and held it close to his nose. Then he looked out the window. The sky had cleared overnight and the sun was shining. He saw, in the goat pen, Danielle with Simone. Simone had lifted Dani up and was balancing her on the back of the largest of the goats, a caramel-colored animal, but Dani was waving her arms around, not holding on. From Harry’s vantage point the goat appeared more or less oblivious to its passenger, and Dani looked no more interested in the goat. It seemed curious to Harry that if the goats were so jittery as to be paralyzed and fall over at the slightest sudden noise, they would otherwise be so placid.
Harry pushed the screen door open and stepped outside. He felt immediately that the air was warmer than the day before – late summer again. Dani and Simone both looked his way, and Harry lifted his coffee mug in greeting.
“Hey, there you are,” Simone called cheerfully. “Good morning, sleepyhead.”
“Good morning to you,” Harry called back. “And to you, sugar plum,” he called to Danielle.
He joined them in the goat pen, careful to latch the gate behind himself. Two of the animals sidled up to him and began nuzzling around his crotch. His instinct was to swat the goats away, but instead he made his hand pat one stiffly on the head, then the other. The hard bumps that stuck up beside their ears repulsed him.
“They’re not horns. They’re semi-horns,” Ellie had told him the day he’d arrived, when she’d been showing the goats off. “In some breeds they’re more prominent, in some breeds less. But they don’t have any useful function anymore. It used to be, when their goat ancestors were in the wild, they’d go after each other with them, they’d use their heads as weapons. Goring each other, fight to the death sometimes – the males only, of course.”
“You’re making that up,” Harry had said.
“No, I’m not. Totally typical males, fighting over the females, losing all sense of everything else. Horns – get it? Just like males of the human species, Dad, only they put the horn somewhere else for people. But they’ve settled down. It’s taken thousands of years, but goats have developed a few manners. The horns are vestigial. They’re like our toes.”
Now Harry reached past one of the nuzzling goats for Dani, and Simone let go of her so he could lift her off the goat she was riding. “Good morning, sweetie pie,” he said as he pulled her to his chest.
Dani burbled back, not actual words, though Harry thought he could understand what she was saying. She was telling him that she was glad to see him, too. Then she kicked her foot toward one of the goats, and the goat fell over. It lay on its side for a few seconds, then got back up. By then Dani was overcome with the giggles, and Harry and Simone were laughing, too.
The goat pen had a distinctly animal smell, and after a minute or two it reached up into Harry’s sinuses and made his eyes water. It wasn’t a bad smell, but strong – funky, organic, combining the odor of the animals themselves with their feed, their droppings, the muddy ground their hooves were constantly churning up. With Dani in his arms Harry turned to leave the pen, and the two goats that had attached themselves to him, including the one that had fainted, followed him to the gate. When they got there, Simone curled a hand around each of their necks to restrain them. After he went through the gate Harry held it open for Simone, but she told him to shut it.
“I’m going to spend a little quality time with these guys,” she smiled. “If you don’t mind taking Dani.”
“Why would I mind taking Dani?” Harry answered. “I love taking Dani.”
Harry hoisted the child higher and crossed the yard with her, carried her back inside the house. But as soon as he shut the door she started to cry. Scream.
“What’s wrong?” he said. He pulled his head back to look at her. “What happened?”
Dani’s crying intensified. It scraped out past her throat. It sounded like it would strangle her. While she cried Dani stared at him, and Harry felt stricken. Tears washed out of his granddaughter’s eyes, flooded onto her sweet little face.
“What, darling?” he murmured. “Don’t be upset. Tell Grandpa what.”
A minute later Simone was in the house, and as soon as Dani saw her, she reached out for her. Harry gave Dani up and the baby wrapped her arms around Simone’s neck. Her crying stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
“It’s okay,” Simone soothed, rubbing her hand on Dani’s back. “Don’t cry. You’re fine. Everything’s fine.”
“I don’t know what happened,” Harry said. “There was nothing wrong. I thought she wanted to come inside with me. She just started yelling.” He knew he hadn’t done anything, but it felt like he had to explain himself. Like he was in some sort of jam. Like with the police maybe, a traffic cop, like he’d been pulled over for running a stop sign and had to talk himself out of trouble.
“I know,” Simone reassured him, “sometimes she does that. She’s a sensitive little gal. I guess she just wanted her mommy. Or maybe she wanted to stay with the goats.”
“The goats,” Harry spat out. The goats were emblematic of everything that was going wrong on this visit.
“I don’t know what it is, but she loves being in the pen with those goats, don’t you, Dani? Maybe it’s making them fall over. That’s probably what it is.”
Danielle smiled at her mother.
“Loves it more than being in the house with her grandfather, apparently,” Harry said.
“I didn’t say that,” Simone told him. “Nobody said that. She loves being in the house with her grandfather, too. Don’t you, Dani? It’s just that she loves the goats also. She’s a little farm girl.”
“I can see that,” Harry said. “That’s pretty clear.”
He lingered a moment, unsure what to do, but now that Dani was quiet, clinging to Simone, he felt unneeded. He felt superfluous. He felt as vestigial as the goats’ semi-horns, those unwieldy protrusions, those rough bumps that used to be instruments of valor and death but were now merely ornamental, so he turned around and headed back upstairs to his room.
* * *
That evening, at the table, Ellie told them about her confrontation with the two girls from the day before. They’d come back to the library during their lunch hour. This time they weren’t fighting, they came in together, they were in cahoots. Ellie knew from the moment she saw them that their purpose wasn’t to study, to read. They sat across the room from each other, and when they thought Ellie wasn’t watching, they threw messages back and forth, messages on wadded up balls of paper. The balls fell among other students, some rolling in among the shelves of books, and this set the two girls to tittering raucously and uncontrollably. The head librarian was off at lunch, so Ellie was in charge. One of the girls was tall and lean, wiry, with bright orange hair that frizzed out from her head, Ellie told them, and the other girl was shorter, more shapely, and with silver braces flashing in her mouth.
“I really hate those kids,” she said. “Kids at that age are so obnoxious. They hate themselves, that’s what the trouble is. If you hate yourself, of course everybody else is going to hate you.”
Harry was tempted to suggest to his daughter that she lighten up a little bit, that she try to see things from a more philosophical side. A whimsical side. Kids are kids, he wanted to say, they’ve got both good and bad inside them. She had been no picnic herself when she was a certain age, he could have added – but he kept his comments to himself. He knew what the reaction would be to them. He had freshened his drink before he sat down at the table, and he took a slow sip. It bothered him that he didn’t know when or how Ellie had become so sour. He didn’t know when her equanimity, her sense of humor, her forgiving nature had leaked out of her, in the same way that air leaks out from a tire that’s passed over a nail.
“So what did you do?” Simone asked.
“I told them to stop. I walked over to the red-haired one and told her that if she threw one more message, I was going to drag her down to the principal’s office by the roots of her hair, and she’d be suspended. I told her I’d do that if she just balled up another sheet of paper, even if she didn’t throw it.”
“And she stopped?”
“While I was talking to her, something hit me in the back. It was a wadded up ball of paper. I turned around and the other kid jumped out of her chair and bolted out the door. Then the one I was talking to jumped up and ran past me. I could hear them both screeching hysterically in the hallway.”
“That sounds pleasant.”
“I know who they are.” Ellie said through tight lips. “They can’t escape me, the little bitches. The next time they come into the library, they’re mine. I own them. They’re dead meat.”
Simone smiled again at her, but Harry just sat there listening, his glass of bourbon in his hand. At that moment it didn’t seem possible to him that this was the same person as the sweet little girl who’d lived in his house in Poughkeepsie, until her mother took her away. What happens to people? he wondered. What makes them change so much?
Beside Harry sat Dani, in her high chair. Simone had fed her most of her dinner with a spoon, but the rest Dani was putting in her own mouth. She wasn’t paying any attention to the adults. Their world was their world, and her world was hers. Thick noodles coated with cheese were scattered on her tray. Rather than pick up the bits of food with her fingers, Dani used her whole hand to get them, pressing down on the noodles and letting the cheese adhere to her skin. To feed herself she mashed her open palm against her mouth and sucked the noodles in.
“What you need is, you need a vacation, sweetie,” Simone said to Ellie.
“That’s right, that’s it. A vacation, I do need one.”
Harry finally spoke. “A vacation?” he said. “It’s September. School just started a couple of weeks ago. You had your vacation all summer. You just had ten weeks off.”
Ellie glared at her father like all her troubles at school were his doing. “Well I guess I need another one.” Her voice came out as a sneer.
When dinner was done Harry offered to wash the dishes, but Ellie told him to go play with the baby. She said she’d clean up in a way that left no room for argument. It was still light enough outside to see by, and Simone said she was going to go check on the goats, to find out if there was anything they needed.
Harry put more ice cubes in his glass and refilled it. On the living room floor he started to make a tower out of blocks, but Dani wasn’t interested. She ignored the blocks and him. She swiveled around and reeled back to the kitchen in her tipsy, lurching manner. Harry heard Ellie order her to get out of the way, to go back to the other room. Then Dani started to cry. Harry went into the kitchen to pick her up, but that made her cry harder.
* * *
He hardly slept a minute all night. It didn’t seem possible, but that’s what it felt like. All night Harry rolled over from his back to his stomach, and from his stomach to his back. He was exhausted. He felt slightly dizzy, slightly nauseous. All night the old windows in the old frames rattled. It was like somebody had lifted the house out of the ground and was shaking it back and forth, wouldn’t let up.
And all night, as he lay there awake, the same thought kept coming to him. He’d push the thought away, but it would just bounce back harder. Louder. More insistent. It was the thought of his daughter perishing. And Simone, too, both of them. Their truck flipping over, a fire in the old house while Danielle was off somewhere else, food poisoning, a lightning strike, deranged teenage girls laying an ambush on the house. Some unspeakable tragedy would occur – yet in Harry’s mind he kept speaking it. It was left to him, afterwards, after the smoke had cleared and the bodies were settled in the ground and the paperwork had made its way through the courts, to swoop in and rescue little Dani. To take the place of her obliterated parents. To raise her and love her, and to be loved right back by her.
A stupid fantasy, he kept telling himself. Stupid and infantile and cruel. And so terribly transparent. He knew all about wish fulfillment, had taken an entire course on Freud in college. He knew what Freud said about dreams and fantasies, that they were what the dreamer wished would really happen, a better alternative to reality, and he lay in bed telling himself Freud was not always right. Modern psychology had proven that in more than one instance. The notion that kept coming back to Harry was that it was simply his stress speaking to him, his awareness that once he went back to Poughkeepsie he would be alone again, his lack of sleep. As little sleep as he had been getting, it was no wonder macabre ideas were erupting in him.
What’s wrong with me? he thought. Daylight was finally seeping in past the window shades. What in the world is wrong with me?
It was his last full day there. He had wanted the day to be special. He had wanted it to cement something permanent between himself and his granddaughter, something that could never be broken or cracked. The following morning, Saturday, Ellie would drive Harry to the airport in Milwaukee. They would have to leave the house early, maybe even before Danielle was awake. And after he left, he knew, he wouldn’t see Dani again for a couple of months, not until Thanksgiving.
He heard Dani call out, he heard a door open and shut, then another door, he heard the quiet murmur of voices. Then he heard Dani’s feet scurrying down the hallway. Harry liked the sounds of early morning in a busy house – somehow they soothed him. He threw the covers off and rolled out of bed, and he changed from his pajamas to his day clothes. When he heard Dani’s feet scurrying back down the hallway in the direction of his bedroom, he threw his door open.
* * *
Breakfast was oatmeal with raisins and cinnamon. Harry made it, but he didn’t cook until Ellie was off to work. Simone ate with Ellie, but Dani, for whom Harry was making the oatmeal, ate with him.
It looked to be a warm day coming up. Outside the sun was bright and the sky pure blue. Birds were busy and loud in the yard – through the window screens came a cacophony of songs and whistles and calls. It was all very peaceful, very cheerful, but a melancholy lump had settled in Harry’s chest. In addition, his eyes felt sore, abused, and behind them, pulling down on the flesh of his face, were about a hundred extra pounds of weight.
He was going to take care of Dani for the morning, that was the good thing. Simone had errands to run, and rather than drag Dani with her, or make Dani and Harry both come along, she asked Harry if he’d mind staying at the house with Dani.
“Of course I wouldn’t mind,” he said. “I’m happy to. That’s what I came here for.”
But as soon as breakfast was over, as soon as Simone had left and Harry had finished washing the dishes, and he had taken Dani outside, she wanted to go see the goats. She wanted to go into the pen with them. Harry thought maybe they would take a walk in among the trees, or just chase each other around in the yard, but Dani had her own ideas. He tried to distract her from the goats, to guide her toward the woods, but she tugged on his hand and pulled him to the pen.
“All right, all right,” he said, “you win. We’ll go in.”
He didn’t actually see what happened. A red bird flew by, a streak, a bright little blur lit up by the sun, and Harry turned his head to follow it. Whether Dani slipped in the mud, or whether one of the goats nudged her, butted her, knocked her over, he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that her first scream was shrill and piercing, and when he turned his head back around she was down in the mud, supine, her arms and legs flailing, and the goats had surrounded her, all five of them bent in close, as if Dani were the long-awaited meal that a neglectful keeper had just that moment remembered to throw into the pen for them. Apparently her baby cries weren’t the right kind to startle the goats and make them keel over.
“Get away!” Harry shouted, and he struck out at the animals in a panic. “Get away from her!”
He punched two of the goats in their sides with his fists, swinging wildly, and he kicked at heads and legs. The goats, as one, stiffened and fell to the mud. Then, still as one, they scrambled back up and turned their attention to Harry. They appeared nervous on their feet, restless, shifting back and forth, and their bulging eyes zeroed in on him in a menacing way.
“You evil fucking animals!” Harry swore at them. “You stay back!” And as if on cue, the goats all fell over again.
He squatted down to make sure Dani, who was still screaming, was all right, and to help her back to her feet. It was while he was in that position that the goats charged toward him. They rushed him – Harry felt them before he saw them. They came with their heads first, vestigial horns lowered, one catching his jaw and another his shoulder and a third his neck. That was all it took to lay Harry out in the black mud beside his granddaughter.
* * *
When Simone got home they were in the house, Harry in a chair holding a bag full of ice to his jaw to keep it from swelling, Dani stretched out on the rug at his feet, rolling this way and that. It had taken a while after they came inside, but she had finally stopped crying. Harry couldn’t tell where, if anywhere, Dani hurt. He had changed her clothes and rinsed off her face and hands, but he hadn’t bathed her, and there were clots of dried mud kinking up her hair.
“What happened to you two?” Simone asked as soon as she walked into the room. She set the bag she was carrying on a table.
Harry pulled the ice away from his jaw. “The goats,” he said. “The fucking goats is what happened to us. Your fucking goats.”
“The goats? The fainting goats? What about the goats? Are they okay?” Simone bent down over Dani and pressed her hand to the baby’s chest so she would quit rolling, lie still.
“Oh, the goats are fine and dandy. They jumped us,” Harry said. “Dani wanted to go in to see them, and as soon as we did they attacked us. They came after us. They had murder on their minds.”
“The goats did? Murder?”
“Yes,” he said, “the goats did.”
Simone picked Dani up off the floor and looked into her eyes, and the little girl gazed back. But when Simone smiled, Dani’s face stayed somber.
“You’ve got mud in your hair,” Simone said, fluffing out Dani’s curls.
“Mu,” Dani said back, trying out the word.
“That’s right, mud,” Harry told Simone. “That’s because she got knocked over.”
“She looks fine though. Are you all right, Harry?”
“I’m okay. I have a bruise where I got butted.”
“That’s weird. Those goats are so timid. They fall over at the first little thing. I never heard of them attacking anyone.”
“Well they attacked us,” Harry grumbled.
“That’s so hard to believe. It goes against their nature. It goes against their genes, against biology.”
“Well believe it or not, that’s what happened,” Harry said.
Simone carried Dani upstairs to bathe her and rinse the mud out. It was a rare event for the little girl to have a bath in the middle of the day, but she took it in stride. From his chair, the ice bag back on his jaw, Harry listened to the water run in the tub. Then, when she turned the water off, Simone shut the bathroom door. At that point the sounds became muffled.
* * *
At dinner, Ellie seemed disapproving. Tight-lipped. Nobody said it, but Harry felt certain that she and Simone were putting the blame on him for what had happened earlier in the goat pen. Somehow, he had caused the goats to shuck their very essence and turn into deformed versions of themselves. Ellie had had a better day in the library, but after she got home, she and Simone had huddled together in their bedroom, and when they came out Ellie’s mood was right back where it had been since the day Harry arrived. Toward him, she was downright hostile.
“Are you packing tonight, Dad?” she asked. “We have to leave for the airport early, you know. You should probably pack tonight.”
“I don’t have much stuff,” he answered. “It’ll take me five minutes to pack it all.”
“Still, you’ll be less rushed in the morning if you do it tonight.”
“All right,” he said, “fine, whatever you say. I’ll do it tonight.”
They wanted him gone – that much was obvious. It was obvious that it couldn’t happen soon enough for Ellie. He was a disruption in their lives, a monkey wrench. Dani was back to her usual self, but she hardly seemed to know Harry was there. She was playing with her food, chasing vegetables around the tray of her high chair with her fingers, and when he spoke to her she didn’t look up.
This was the way he should have known the visit would end, he thought. Fantasies be damned, they’re never the way things in the real world work out. If Ellie didn’t hate him, her feeling was close enough to that. She had her own life. Her own life in Wisconsin, her own life with Simone and Dani in the rambling old house, her own life with her irritating job, with fainting goats – and father or not, he was superfluous to that life. He was vestigial, a part of the life that had led Ellie to this point, but he had then shrunk down and faded like a useless toe or the nub of a horn.
“I guess I won’t see you again until Thanksgiving,” Harry said. He licked his lips.
“Thanksgiving? Are you coming back for Thanksgiving?” Ellie asked.
“I thought I would.”
“Did we talk about that, Dad?”
“I thought we did,” Harry said.
“You thought we did. But did we?”
“I thought we did,” he said again.
He jerked his head to the side, away from Ellie, back toward Dani. He reached over and rapped his knuckles on her tray. “I’ll see you at Thanksgiving,” he said, forcing a smile.
Dani looked up from the green bean and the red pepper that she had already turned to pulp, and she looked soulfully at her grandfather. Then her lips twitched, and Harry felt a bolt of warmth shoot through him. He felt so grateful – grateful for her, and grateful especially for the little smile that she sent him back.
Ben Brooks is the author of the novel The Icebox. His recent short stories have appeared in Sewanee Review, Chicago Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, and Confrontation. Brooks has received an O. Henry Award and the Nelson Algren Award. He is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.