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Pax Agricola by Jay Lake Joe
Radford heard the bellow of a goat just outside his ancient Airstream
trailer. Decades of
experience told him what that particular call meant -- a proud goat,
somewhere she shouldn't be.
Joe jumped up from the kitchen table, scattering the spring seed
packets he'd just gotten in the mail. He
ran outside to see Bella, the beautiful brown Nubian who was his oldest
doe, in the garden nosing at the last of his winter vegetables. Joe's other two goats explored the
driveway. It was time to
change the latch on the goat pen again -- their tongues were like thumbs
and patient as sin. He
grabbed a spatula rusting in the grass along with a stray trash can lid
and banged them together.
"Come on, girls!" he shouted.
"Back in the pen." The
two in the driveway, Cloris and Rosaline, scuttled nervously toward their
familiar barnyard. Bella gave
him a baleful yellow-eyed glare and bent to the butternut squash. Joe shooed the other two goats all
the way in and, with a sigh of despair for his squash, stopped to chain
the gate shut. He
left the lid and spatula behind -- the racket wouldn't impress Bella; she
was too smart for that -- and stalked into the garden. She'd knocked the wooden garden
gate right off its hinges and torn the chicken wire away with it. "Come on, girl," Joe said, making
little clucking noises. He
smiled in spite of the damage to his vegetables. Bella was eating weeks' worth of
his meals, but damn was she smart. The
goat suddenly staggered and collapsed against the half-buried gopher fence
lining the squash row. A
second later, Joe heard the flat crack of a rifle shot. Stumbling through his
Vietnam-honed reflex of hitting the dirt, Joe ran to Bella. "God damned morons with hunting
rifles," he muttered, as he slid to his knees to calm the goat who bleated
softly. Logic told him there
wouldn't be a second shot from a flustered hunter, but his back still had
that target itch. Bella had taken the bullet in the shoulder. Her flesh wasn't badly torn, but
the real damage would be inside.
Joe took her jaw in his hand, stared at the barred pupils of her
golden eyes. She glared back
at him, angry and ornery as ever, her musky goat smell mixed with the hot
tang of blood. This goat
wasn't going to die, not in the next few minutes anyway. She was too pissed for that. Joe took off his second-best work
shirt, tore it in half and knotted the sleeve ends together to wind the
rags around Bella's shoulder and across her chest as a simple pressure
bandage. Half naked and daubed with the goat's blood, Joe trotted toward the
wooded fence line separating his property from Ralph Farney's just to the
west -- a deer-and-quail hunting lease. By the time he got to the barbed
wire, a big red SUV was slewing down Ralph's access road, too fast for Joe
to get the plates. Late February was out of season for
deer anyway, so the idiot had to have been hunting on a quail
license. Couldn't resist that
big brown doe glimpsed through the trees, no doubt. By sundown, the son of a bitch who
fired the shot would have his old frat brothers swearing he had been at
the golf course with them all day.
Joe knew from long experience that Ralph would be ignorant of any
wrongdoing. Ralph made too
much money off dumb-assed Back in the garden Bella struggled to her feet. Helping her, Joe knew he should
have the goat put down and slaughtered, which would provide food for
almost a whole season, but Bella was too good a friend to treat that
way. So he got the last of
the month's cash out of the coffee can under the trailer's hitch, evicted
some chickens to load Bella into the back seat of his rusty white Gran
Torino station wagon, and headed into Lockhart to see the large animal
vet. Back from the vet, tired and flat broke, Joe knelt in the garden in
the cool orange light of dusk and looked at the seeds he'd rescued from
the kitchen floor. Each
spring he got his order from some hippies out west. Near as he could tell from the
little catalog, they were a bunch of tie-dyed fruitcakes living in old
school buses, but they had the best damned tomato seeds going and some
mighty fine cucumbers and squash as well. Just like every year, the packets were handmade from recycled paper
grocery bags and sealed with wax, the varieties stamped on them with
fanciful lettering in spotty, colored ink. This time he'd got in Moreton and
Carnival tomatoes, Gold Rush zucchini, Saladin cucumbers for his pickles,
and just because he liked the name, Jack of Hearts watermelons. Rifling through the bucket he'd
put the seed packets in, Joe found the usual scribbled invoice, this year
with a note clipped to it: Dear
Mr. Radford. Because you are
such a loyal customer, we have enclosed a special gift. Yours in Green Earth, South
Cascade Seeds. And
those Oregon hippies had
sent him a new variety, their gift from the Pacific Northwest. Joe almost smiled. The kraft paper packet just read
"Pax Agricola" -- probably one of them Latin names the nurserymen used --
with two little girl fairies kissing over a flower Joe couldn't
identify. Right below that,
someone had written "Water with love." Water with love.
Right. Singing
Grateful Dead tunes the whole time, probably. Love or no love, Joe doubted this
whatever-it-was would even grow in Central Texas so far out of Oregon's
cold and damp, but what the heck?
He'd planted worse, and he could always turn the row over for a
summer vegetable if the pax agricola didn't grow. Joe
needed to work dirt, to forget the idiots on Ralph's lease and his worries
about Bella's wound getting infected. There weren't any directions on
the packet, so Joe turned the soil in one of the rows he'd left fallow for
the winter and mixed in bone meal and manure. With a gardener's natural economy
he shook out half the seeds, inspecting their hulls. Finally, by the early moonlight he
planted them one by one, each slipping beneath the earth as delicate as a
kiss. The
pax agricola sprouted almost overnight, fast as anything he'd ever seen,
sending up the hopeful green swords of little shoots. Joe studied them, trying to
determine if they were vines or bushes or what. From the little stamp on the
packet, he had imagined a tall plant, like a
That day he mulched the shoots carefully against a possible late
frost and double-checked his repairs to the goat-damaged chicken wire and
the gopher fence. Saturday night Ralph Farney's older boy Willie Ed, a varsity
forward for the Lockhart Lions basketball team, brought several of his
buddies and a couple of girls onto the deer lease. Joe watched the bonfire gleam
through the woods for a while, until the shrieking started. He tried to call the sheriff on
the party line, but Agnes Delore was badmouthing the other ladies in the
Emmanuel Episcopal altar guild in great detail and pretended not to hear
him asking her to get off the phone.
So Joe walked to the fence and climbed over. "What are you kids doin'?" he shouted into the glare of the
bonfire. Willie Ed was lying down in a clinch with some girl Joe didn't
recognize, one hand inside her sweater, the other down the waistband of
her jeans. Another boy hung
back. All three stared at
Joe. "Get out of here, old man," Willie Ed said in a rough voice that
probably scared the freshmen back at Lockhart High. Joe
folded his arms. "Somebody
screamed." The
girl glanced into the darkness on the other side of the fire, as the
second boy grabbed a burning branch.
"He said get out," the other boy shouted, waving the stick. "Where is she?" Joe asked the girl, ignoring the boys. "Willie Ed," she said, pushing her
boyfriend off. "We should
go." The girl started to
wiggle away. "I'm getting
Nancy." "Stupid old turd," Willie Ed said to Joe with a snarl, then turned
away. A
minute later, Joe watched two more boys and another girl walk out of the
shadows beyond the fire. The
six kids got into a minivan and drove off. The other girl -- Nancy? -- was
crying, but there wasn't much he could do about that. At least he'd got them to stop
messing with her. Maybe she'd
learned something. The
next morning his gate was bashed in, and his mailbox was missing, the post
a splintered stump. "Farney's kid?" said the
Caldwell Joe
knew where this was going, but he had to try. "That's what I thought," he
said. "Kid's a problem." The
deputy sighed. "Think about
it some more, Joe. The
basketball team's going to the Division II playoffs. School really needs him. Joe
hung up on the deputy.
Sometimes there was no point. * * * A
couple of weeks later, getting on into March, the pax agricola plants were
pretty -- long, leggy stems, purple-edged leaves like little blades, and
already a puffy crown like Queen Anne's lace got before it flowered and
bolted to seed. They were
only a couple of feet tall, but Joe figured they'd hit five or six feet
full-grown. He
spent a quiet Tuesday afternoon raising the chicken wire higher above the
pax agricola and weeding out the Johnson grass in his garden rows. The garden was more peaceful and
satisfying this spring, somehow.
Bella's stitches were healing up clean, so Joe had set aside the
antibiotics for future use.
The chickens clucked quietly in the yard around the trailer, and
the turkey vultures circled high overhead in a blue silk sky. It was a perfect
Texas spring
day. * *
* Joe's wife called him that night. "What the hell are you doing?" Beth Ann demanded, as soon as he
picked up the phone. "Hello, honey," Joe said.
"Nice to hear your voice again." "Don't you honey me, you
white trash fool. I haven't
seen a check in three months.
Only reason you don't have a demand letter from Pettigrew already
is he said I had to call you first." Just like old times, Beth Ann riding
his ass from the first flap of her gums. Also just like old times, she was
full of it. As Joe understood
the concept, "temporary support" was supposed to run out eventually, but
he and Beth Ann had been in the process of getting divorced for almost six
years. Pettigrew, her
boyfriend-attorney, had a buddy in the family court in
Travis County, and somehow things never turned
out like Joe expected, what with the endless stream of continuances, stays
and refilings. Stuffed behind
the paneled walls of his trailer, all that paperwork made nice
insulation. Joe
was pretty sure the system wasn't supposed to work this way, but he didn't
know who to complain to, and he didn't have the money for his own
lawyer. Besides, all the
legal fuss kept Joe's wife away from him, which was the real point. "Beth Ann," Joe said into the tense silence on the line, "You
haven't had a check because Pettigrew attached my pension last fall. If I work to make enough money to
pay you, I'll lose my Social Security, too. Then I'll have nothing." "Joe," she said, her voice growing sharper, "a woman has
needs. Just because you're
lazy doesn't mean I should do without." Last time he'd seen Beth Ann, she was driving Pettigrew's fancy
German car. "I understand
about needs, honey," he said, trying to be reasonable. "Well, you need to send
me some money, or I'll need to
have you back in court. And
Pettigrew says you won't like it this time." Joe
hadn't liked it the last few times, either. But the alternatives were
worse. For one thing, if he
didn't give her some money, she might come out here and visit him. "In the mail tomorrow," he
said. Beth Ann hung up on him.
Joe sighed, then went out to his coffee can under the trailer
hitch. He had just cashed
this month's social security check.
It was a hell of a price to pay, but at least he had his garden and
his solitude. One
Sunday morning a few weeks later, the pax agricola bloomed. They had matured much faster than
Joe expected. It was only
late March, and great purple-and-yellow flowers were bursting from the
tall plants, each as high as his head. The
blossoms were narrow, like lilies, but more open, with variegated petals
and the dusty smell of summer in their fragrance. As he sniffed them, Joe was
reminded of the endless summers of his long-ago youth, chasing snakes in
the tall grass, and nights between the cool sheets, savoring a chocolate
bar snuck into bed. He
liked the smell so much that he fetched a pitcher of tea and his lone
dinette chair and made a place in the garden where he could sit and watch
the flowers. Each bloom was
its own miracle, each plant its own world. This was why Joe lived in the
country, put up with the inconveniences and indignities of his life. The glory of nature, brought forth
by his green thumb, sunlight and water. There was plenty to be done around the place, but the plants were
too nice. Joe didn't usually
find himself being so lazy on a good working day, but somehow this felt
right. "Howdy, Mr. Radford," said a young man. Looking up, Joe recognized the newcomer as the kid who'd threatened
him with the burning branch.
"Yeah?" "It's, uh, me. Tony
Alvarez. You remember?" "I
remember. Can I help
you?" Joe was surprised at
himself as soon as he said it -- normally he would have run the punk right
off. "Thought I'd fix up that busted gate a little more, then come sit
with you a while here in the garden." The kid looked at his feet. Joe could swear Tony was
blushing. "If you don't
mind. Seeing as I owe you an
apology and all." "I
guess so," said Joe. "I
believe there's another chair in the hayloft of the goat barn." He really didn't care for
visitors, but the kid seemed okay. A
little while later a red SUV came crunching down the gravel drive and
parked next to Joe's old Ford.
Three young men in suits and ties got out. Two of them walked over to the
goat pen while the third brought Joe a big sack. "Got some burritos on the way down here," the man explained with a
grin. "Mind if we visit a
while? We, uh, kind of want
to make up for Decker over there being such an idiot." The stranger nodded toward the
goat pen, where his two friends were feeding carrots to Bella, Cloris and
Rosaline. Joe's face felt prickly, hot, like he was embarrassed, but he
wasn't. He rarely felt that
way, and certainly not now.
What was happening? He
glanced at the flowering pax agricola. They nodded gently in the
breeze. Then Joe realized there wasn't a breeze blowing. "Suit yourself," he said, almost
straining against his own words, "but I've about run out of chairs." Two was his limit, for all kinds
of good reasons. The
man smiled. "We brought our
own gear." Then, as he turned
away, he added, "And, hey...thanks for letting everything be okay." By
There were too many people, acting too nice, trampling all over his
land, and somehow it just didn't matter. Joe tried real hard to think about
that, but every time he concentrated on his irritation, it slipped away
from him. He had the
overwhelming sensation that life was good, life was supposed to be good,
and that he shouldn't worry about it. That scared the hell out of him. Fear cleared his thinking.
It had to be the damned pax agricola flowers. Everything that normally went
wrong around him was suddenly too right. That meant Beth Ann and Pettigrew
would be here soon. He really
didn't want to see his wife.
Magic flowers or not, she was out of his life, and he liked it that
way. No way was he
reconciling under the influence of pax agricola. Not with her, not with Ralph
Farney, not with no one. He
stood up, reached for one of the pax agricola flowers, to see if he could
break it off the stem. It was
like reaching into mud -- his hand moved slower and slower the closer it
got to the flower. Joe got
the feeling he could spend the rest of his life reaching for that flower
and still never touch it. Behind him, the double-toned blare of Pettigrew's car horn echoed
through the woods along the driveway. Joe turned to see the red BMW pull
to a stop behind the parked sheriff's cruiser. Following the BMW was a parade of
vehicles, filled with people he vaguely recognized -- court clerks and
Wal-Mart cashiers -- and plenty more he didn't. A helicopter clattered overhead,
then banked over the second-growth woods to look for an open field in
which to land. "Holy shit," Joe whispered. "All these people coming together and helping out...it's like the
beginning of peace, Mr. Radford," said Tony Alvarez. Joe
didn't want peace, he wanted solitude, damn it. If he didn't do something quick,
Beth Ann would be all over him trying to make up, and Joe would never be ready for that. If the problem was in the garden,
well, there was a solution for gardens. "I'm getting my goat," said
Joe. He shouldered Tony out
of the way, marched to the goat pen, and whistled for Bella. The
old brown nanny wandered up, glaring at him as usual. The liquid gold eyes with their
barred pupils could be unsettling to people who didn't know goats, but Joe
and Bella understood one another.
He undid the latch, put one hand on her collar and stroked her neck
with the other. "I've got a
special treat for you, girl," Joe whispered in her ear. "You'll love this. We're going to the garden." All
the years Joe had spent keeping the goats out of the garden had certainly
taught Bella that word. She
bleated, pulling him along to the chicken wire gate. Joe let the goat in, led her along
the rows of sprouting zucchini, cucumber and watermelon, and stopped in
front of the pax agricola. "I
can't touch 'em," he whispered in Bella's ear, "but you're ornery enough
to eat damned near anything, so do the right thing, old girl. Give me my life back." Tony Alvarez gave Joe a puzzled look. "You're letting the goat into the
garden?" Bella sniffed the thick stalk of one of the pax agricola. "Yep," said Joe, "and not a moment too soon." In
the distance he heard Beth Ann calling his name. "Bella, just do it," Joe said. Fine time for the goat to develop
some manners. "Hey, that goat, she's--"
Tony was interrupted by Joe putting a hand over his mouth. "Never you mind, boy," said Joe. Bella munched the first
stalk. The flower collapsed
in a spray of purple-and-yellow pollen. "Things can be too easy,
sometimes." The
goat set to the pax agricola with an appetite. She chewed down the stalks, ate
the blooms, tore the leaves.
As Bella finished off the plants, the hum of work around his little
farm settled down to an uneasy calm. "Well, Joe," said Beth Ann as she stepped into the garden. "Hello, honey," said Joe.
She was the same as ever -- peroxide hair, leopardskin spandex, a
leather miniskirt. It didn't
look as good on her as it had thirty-five years and forty pounds ago. Just the sight of her was
irritating. Then voices began
to rise again, this time in anger -- arguments breaking out, shouts,
curses, all the ragged symphony of daily life. Beth Ann's voice was just as nasty as the rest. "This is about normal for
you. You can screw up
anything." Over her shoulder, Joe could see the
deputies slugging it out with one of the Austin
lawyers. Pettigrew stalked toward Joe with
an angry look in his eye. "I
think it's the end of peace now, Mr. Radford," said Tony. As
the goat started in on the zucchini seedlings, Joe smiled. "Back to normal. Ain't it great?" * *
* After the County
Attorney
decided there wasn't any point in
prosecution for incitement to riot and disturbing the peace, Joe got out
of jail and came home to find that Agnes Delore and Tony Alvarez had been
feeding his goats and keeping an eye on the garden. Tony told him the goats had
behaved. The Gran Torino
really did run better, and the trailer was less drafty, so the whole sorry
business hadn't been a total loss. Joe
sat at the little table, examining the kraft paper pax agricola
packet. He tipped a few of
the remaining seeds into his hand.
Tiny things, to do so much, he thought, rolling them back
and forth with his fingertip.
He wondered for a moment how they'd taste. "You never know," Joe said aloud,
then dropped the seeds back into the packet and reached for the tape to
seal it up. Maybe next year
he'd be ready for more peace and less quiet. Outside, a goat bellowed.
It didn't sound like one of his. Uh-oh, thought Joe. He peeked out the trailer's tiny
window toward the goat barn and the pen surrounding it. Bella leaned against the
gatepost, scratching herself and glaring at him as she chewed her
cud. Then Joe saw a whole
parade of goats picking their way on to his property, heading for the
pen.
Copyright © Joseph E. Lake, Jr. 2004 About the Author:
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