The Girl Who Paid the Rent in Quarters

The neighbors

The next morning, Thursday, the goats had to go to the fairgrounds.

We did not own a trailer. My husband had always borrowed one from a man at the dealership, and that man was on vacation, and in any case my husband could not hitch it, and I had never backed a trailer in my life.

I had been so busy with the lock that I had not even thought about it until that night, sitting on the porch steps after supper with a glass of tea. I lay awake worrying about it. I prayed about it, the plain way I pray, which is mostly just telling God what is wrong and asking Him to keep an eye on it.

At seven Thursday morning I heard a truck in the lane.

It was a neighbor named Corliss, who runs beef cattle on the next road over. I knew him only to wave to. He was pulling a stock trailer that was swept out and bedded with clean straw.

“Abe called me,” he said through the window. “Said you had three goats going to the fair.”

Behind him, Abe’s pickup pulled in, and behind that another one.

I have tried to tell this part to people and I always cry, so I will be quick about it.

Those men did not make a speech. They did not ask me a single thing about Russ. They got out and walked to the barn, and one of them took Clover, and one took Biscuit, and Abe, who must have been close to seventy, walked Clover up the ramp one slow step at a time because she would not load.

Noelle walked beside him the whole way with her hand on Clover’s neck.

My husband came out on the porch in his back brace, holding on to the post. He was not supposed to be on his feet that long. He stood there anyway, watching, and when the trailer gate swung shut he lifted his hand to those men.

Abe lifted his hand back.

The show

The fair was hot and loud and smelled like fried dough and diesel and sawdust, the way fairs always do. The goat barn was full of kids in white shirts bent over their animals with brushes and clippers.

Noelle washed all three goats in the wash rack Thursday afternoon. She trimmed hooves and clipped ears and brushed until their coats shone. My mother came and sat on a bucket and handed her things. I had to go to work, and I went, and I thought about her all afternoon.

Friday morning was dairy goats. Noelle showed all three, one class after another, and the first was Nubian junior does, with Clover.

I sat in the bleachers on the end of the show ring with my mother. My husband could not come; the bleachers were more than his back could stand. I held my phone up and video called him so he could see.

Noelle walked Clover into that ring in her white 4-H shirt with her braid down her back, and she set her up square, front legs straight, back legs just so, and held her chin up with one hand under her jaw.

She did not look at the bleachers once. She looked at the judge, the way they teach them.

Clover took second in her class. The judge said she had a well-attached udder and a nice, level topline, and that the young lady showing her clearly knew her animal.