one arrival and one departure

I think it’s time I told you the truth about me. By that I don’t mean that I have plain brown hair and my eyes are the same. I don’t mean that I’m on the puny side for a twelve-year-old, or that my mama’s name is Katy and she’s out there somewhere in this big wide world. It’s about God. I don’t think He likes me much. Seems like every time I took the time to ask Him for something, what I’d end up getting was something else entirely.

My eyes, for instance. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that if he was going to give a girl plain old brown hair, that he’d at least make up for it with some fancy blue eyes. So one Sunday while the preacher was preaching ’bout how good God is at giving us gifts and how all we have to do is ask for something and we’ll get it, well I closed my eyes right then and there and bowed my head and asked the good Lord to give me blue eyes. I tell you it wasn’t five minutes later we were leaving the church and a honeybee flew right up and stung me right under my left eye. I spent the next three days with my eye swollen shut and Pilot looking at me funny every time I went outdoors. I decided right then that preacher must be studying the wrong book.

When Ben rushed inside this morning without first stomping the dust off his boots and asked me real calm-like if I wanted to learn to bottle-feed a goat, something stopped me from jumping out of my chair and racing him to the barn.

“Why won’t its mama feed it?” I asked him. That’s when he looked down and seemed to notice his dusty boots for the first time.

“Forgot to stomp my feet,” he mumbled and shuffled back outside.

Well it’s a sad thing when a baby comes into this world on the same day her mama is taken from it. I spent the better part of the morning trying to get that little she-goat to take the bottle and Aunt Kitty tried for most of the afternoon with no better luck. A goat’s cry isn’t so different from a human baby’s and I don’t mind telling you by the end of the day we were all frazzled, even Pilot, who took to howling like a hound dog and pacing outside the barn door.

This is the part where I get back to God. See, I decided to pray the most backwards prayer I could, thinking maybe I could trick Him. After thinking on it for a while, I finally prayed that God would bring back the goat’s daddy (who lives on some neighbor’s farm, I think), hoping God would instead bring back her mommy. I know that seems unlikely, but I think God could work a miracle sometimes just to spite me.

We none of us ate much of our dinner that night, what with the goat’s crying and Pilot’s howling. It was later, when Ben was out closing up the chicken coop for the night and I was trying to get past the first paragraph of Moby Dick, that I realized the only sound in the night was the “chink, chink” of Aunt Kitty washing dishes. I dropped my book and ran barefoot out to the barn. Ben was standing at the door and turned to hush me as I drew near. There was just enough moonlight pouring through the stall window that I could see them there on the straw, Pilot curled up around that baby goat, the both of them snoring in their sleep. What can you do when you’re looking at a tragedy and a miracle sittin’ side-by-side? Ben shook his head and grinned and I grinned back at him and together we went back to the house.

Aunt Kitty started calling the goat Wilbur before Ben told her it was a she-goat, not a buck, but we’re all pretty used to the name after spending the day saying again and again, “Hush, Wilbur. It’s going to be all right.” Turns out we weren’t lying after all.