The light was golden, and the blood was red. It had spilled like milk across a waxed checkered tablecloth, or at least that’s how Janey had seen it. The groundhog, the same one as always, had been standing upright on the curb of their street, small dark paws to its unseen mouth. It hadn’t been Janey who killed it. The groundhog stood and watched the cars or the trees or the neighborhood homes, and it ate a walnut, the yellowed crust and black decay bitten to the quick in slow turns.
The walnuts fell predictably, through the leaves with a thud, volleyed into soil and against sidewalks. Janey’s daughter would kick them, and they’d crumble or roll, into the road or into the grass, her legs long and knock-kneed and bruised like apples.
Janey’s daughter played in the front yard, and Janey watched through the picture window. There was an elderly woman, slight and dressed in kelly green schoolgirl shorts, pleated at the hip, and a matching cardigan buttoned up to its lace-trimmed neck. She had a purse, and maybe a wig, and she held the purse tight to her chest with both hands; it was fist-sized and pearl-handled, a ruby clasp at its front. She walked upright, as though she weighed nothing at all and her spine had not yet been bent by time or age, and she nearly bound down the sidewalk toward its end, to where Janey and Harry and their daughter lived in a Victorian house painted white. But the woman, in her beige patent-leather Mary Janes paired with ruffle-hemmed socks, decidedly turned each time before reaching them, swiftly returning up the street, the house where Janey and Harry and their daughter lived gape-mouthed in wait, the curtains shifting like tongues.
Janey stood and hid her body half behind the window’s curtain. Janey’s daughter twirled and fell and kicked walnuts, their rot staining the sidewalk black. The woman was gone for the moment, a green nothing in the distance, and the groundhog was there until a car drove by and hit it.
Somewhere, blocks from them, the high school marching band practiced for a Friday night football game. Janey’s daughter stood still, her apple leg midswing, walnut at her toe, yellow and indistinguishable from the falling leaves, the sun, the brass bells of the trumpets and trombones and sousaphones, all of which drifted through the emptied autumn sky, hollow and bright and featherlight. The snare drums snapped and the walnuts dropped fat and dumb with broken branches and the groundhog laid dead, its blood wet and red and following in the gutter, the woman approaching once again.
Janey’s daughter first set her toes down gingerly in the grass, her kick abandoned, and second leaned forward to look at the blood, her long hair hanging in curls past her cheeks and her eyes, casting the dead groundhog in a shimmering blonde net. Her head hung a foot into the road. Janey gripped the curtain, imagined the car hitting not the groundhog but her daughter, her daughter’s head a walnut thudding to the pavement. She swallowed, hot and thick as the blood in the gutter.
“Careful girl,” the elderly woman said, her small ruby and pearl purse clutched beneath her chin. Her voice was clear and loud as she stood across the street at the end of the sidewalk. Janey’s daughter looked up, hair falling back past her shoulders, brushed softly against her pink cheeks. She swayed on her bruised legs to steady herself.
“It’s a horrible thing for a child to die,” the woman continued, and she stared not at the blood or the dead groundhog nor at Janey’s daughter and her bruised legs but at the white Victorian house and the picture window reflecting nothing in the glare of the sun, the curtains stilled. Janey was pressed to the wall, heart beating, mouth coppery and tight. She listened for the woman to say more, but nothing was said. When she was sure of it, Janey composed herself, smoothed her damp palms against her skirt, tucked a stray hair behind her ear, and walked past the window to the front door, her shoulders squared and even.
“Dinner, honey,” Janey said then, but she had timed it wrong, the whine of the door’s hinges interrupting her. She offered the door and her daughter and the woman all a polite apologetic smile before she beckoned her daughter inside, away from the blood. Janey’s daughter looked first to the woman and then to the blood, and she turned slowly, her hair fanning out around her as she did. The band began to play once more—or they had been playing all along—and Janey’s daughter marched to the front door, her knees high, her eyes stony, a hand at her forehead in salute. Janey smiled politely again at her daughter, and when she looked up, the woman was gone.
Dinner was, as it often was, another happening in another day in which things predictably and regularly occurred. It was never a particularly interesting happening; it was tedious and dull. Janey and Harry and their daughter gathered around the table. They never said grace but sat with their heads bowed as they cut and scraped against the ceramic plates. Janey stared at the food on hers, the thin line of pink through the middle of her meat, soft and sweet as her daughter’s cheeks. She rested her fork and knife on the edge of her plate.
“We’ll have to clean the curb,” Janey said.
“We’ll have to give the groundhog a funeral,” Janey’s daughter said. Her daughter was six, and she understood death.
Janey looked to her daughter and nodded, and, when full, Harry unspooled the hose from the side of the house, and Janey found a dirt-caked shovel with a long wooden handle. Once at the curb, they found that twilight had shifted the blood into something tarred and ashen and identical to the spilt walnut stomachs, still wet despite the hours that had passed. Janey and Harry and their daughter stood in the street and observed the dead groundhog, and in the electric blue just before nightfall, their skin appeared pearlescent, three ghosts harvesting another. The groundhog’s fur rustled in the small breeze, and as Janey watched the soft, silken hair move in the non-light of dusk, an immense sense of possibility twined itself along her spine.
“Janey, get it off the curb. Then turn on the hose, will you?” Harry said, turning toward his daughter. His daughter nodded and ran lightly across the lawn to the side of the house, her feet bare, her hair silver. Janey shoveled the carcass from the curb and looked to Harry who shrugged, whispered that they could discard it in the woods behind their house. The suggestion was followed by the creak of the hose spigot, the rush of water coming in spurts and splashing onto the grass and the curb and the road. Their daughter returned, and Harry sprayed the water until the blood ran clean.
Across the street, in front of a blue-painted house, a young boy screamed. He screamed not for the groundhog or the three on the curb but because every night at eight o’clock he left the light of his home’s screened-in porch to stand in the front yard and scream. Janey’s daughter did not look up from the wet cement nor did Janey or Harry, but they listened to the scream and stared at the absence of blood, the dead groundhog still cradled in the metal bed of the shovel.
Days later, Janey suggested they go to the petting zoo. Their daughter had been cross and had taken to sitting at the tree line at the edge of their backyard, assuring the dead groundhog she’d give it a proper burial when she found a cardboard box nice enough to act as a coffin. Janey had gently laid the groundhog several yards back in the woods within the prickled brambles of the underbrush. The vultures circled overhead, and Janey’s daughter sat and chattered to the carcass and the stilled trees of the woods. The old woman with her straight and weightless spine walked up and down the street, lithesome as a child, one day in red and then again in green, and the boy screamed, and walnuts fell with hollowed thuds. The Friday night football game had come and gone, another happening, and the marching band was quiet. Janey loaded her daughter into the car, and they rode through dappled yellow light and trees, past the drying cornfields and along the railroad tracks to a pumpkin farm a mile out of town.
Janey’s daughter sat in the back seat with her arms crossed, and Janey looked up at the cloudless sky so blank it could hardly hold the light. They idled in the dirt lot in silence. The farm had pumpkins in wooden crates and a red barn with horses, a wooden cart with a good-faith money box, and apples and donuts in creased white paper bags. There were hay bales and corn stalk bundles, homemade scarecrows dressed in flannel. The goats were fenced in chicken wire, and they waited for the people to come. There was a small farmhouse, the siding weathered with paint peeling, the windows propped open, the front porch rocking chairs empty. When Janey withdrew the key from the ignition, Janey’s daughter trudged from the car past the round orange pumpkins all the way to the goat pen. Janey followed, the stench of goat and perfumed apples settling sour in her throat. Her daughter’s hair, in feral uncombed tangles, swung to her waist as she loped to the pen. Janey was filled with a quiet unease at the sight, at hair so long on a little girl hardly taller than her own hip.
The goats paid no attention to Janey, only her daughter. They followed her daughter as though she were pulling them on a string; they smiled and bleated, and their tongues reached through the chicken wire to curl around her daughter’s fingers and hands and legs and arms. Janey’s daughter giggled and reached over the fence to pet their heads and stroke their horns, their eyes loose and wet and gleaming in the light of the sun. Janey stood back and watched, hand at her brow to shield her eyes, the goats’ grins filled with a knowing Janey couldn’t comprehend, the polite squareness of their teeth, the whiskers on their cupped chins. The dead groundhog seemed forgotten, Janey’s daughter delighted once more, licked clean of both death and blood by the goats.
“Do you see their pupils?”
Janey startled, and Janey’s daughter paused, her hand extended over the wires, and they both at once turned toward the voice that had spoken.
“The opposite of a cat’s,” a small child said. But when Janey looked again, it was not a child but the woman from the sidewalk dressed in a uniform red, her shorts oversized and folded over at the hem and belted around her small waist, her rainboots muddied with dirt and straw and animal excrement. Her hands were empty—they no longer held the pearl and ruby purse. Janey’s daughter blinked, and Janey stepped closer to the goats, sheathed an arm around her daughter’s shoulders and chest.
“Look,” said the woman, and Janey and her daughter looked, the goats expectant, waiting. They looked into the goats’ eyes, which were dumb and deaf and milky, ambers and blues so bright they were blinding, the rectangular pupils an offing stretched horizonal across each eye. The goats cocked their heads as one to follow the intent gaze of Janey and her daughter and the woman, their necks and horns and heads rotating, knobbed and owl-like, eyes static in their bony skulls as they did so.
“They’re rectangles,” said Janey’s daughter, and Janey realized she felt embarrassed that her daughter had said something so simple, as if the woman might have been hoping for more.
“And horizontal. A cat has vertical pupils so it can attack. A goat has horizontal pupils so it can avoid an attack. It’s why cats are harbingers of bad luck, and goats are close to God,” the woman said, extending her hand into the goat pen as one would offer a hand for a kiss from a prince. A goat obliged and licked the skin. The woman nodded to herself and withdrew her hand, wiped it dry with a white handkerchief.
“Well,” said the woman, and she adjusted her cardigan so the buttons were straight, patted the lace on her collar so it would lay flat, before folding the handkerchief to return it to the pocket in her shorts. “Let’s have a coffee, then.”
Janey and her daughter blinked, and the goats smiled with all of their square teeth. The woman set off toward the farmhouse, her red rubber rainboots cutting red lines against her naked calves. Janey’s daughter looked from the goats to Janey, and the goats looked too. Janey shrugged, and the two followed the woman toward the house where she had already gone inside, the screen door snapping shut just as they arrived. Janey held her daughter’s hand as they climbed the warped wooden steps to the warped wooden porch, her daughter peering through the screen first.
“Don’t just stand there,” the woman called from nowhere, her voice carrying clear and loud, as though she were standing beside them.
Janey opened the door, and together, she and her daughter found the kitchen, the woman sitting at a small table clothed in lace, a porcelain teacup of coffee set before her on a matching porcelain tea plate. A man sat beside her. He was tall but sunken, his shoulders and ribcage slumped in something akin to slumber; his eyes were open, but they did not seem awake. His face was oblong, soft and gentle, as if his skull had unstitched itself, as though it used to hold something that was now lost. The man had short white hair and a short white beard, all of it downy and full and wrapped around his face like the cottoned gauze after a tooth removal.
“Don’t mind him,” the woman said, crossing her ankles. Janey sat across the table from the man and the woman, and she held her daughter in her lap. She stared not at the man but at the woman’s legs and noticed for the first time the woman’s skin. It was smooth and tight, unblemished and unwrinkled. The legs themselves were slender with little muscle, her knees prominent and knobby. Janey looked then to her daughter’s legs piled and dangling from the height of her lap. Janey’s daughter also wore rainboots, hers yellow not red, and they too were dirty with mud and straw and goat.
“I didn’t leave the house for a while,” the woman said, noticing the intensity in which Janey had been studying the legs around the table. She stretched her legs then to show them off. “No sun has touched me.”
Janey nodded although this didn’t seem right. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the woman’s face, just her legs or the legs of her daughter, identical save the bruises. Unsettled, Janey shifted her attention to the man who sat still and in silence, only his throat moving as though swallowing were an effort, as though his own saliva were a poison he had to force down.
“He lost his mind too,” the woman said, drumming her fingers against the tablecloth. They were trimmed and neat, lacquered with a plain, clear coat of polish and nothing more. “They say it’s dementia, but I don’t believe it,” she looked at him, her eyes twinkling with a light absent from the space around them. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
Janey’s daughter threaded her fingers through Janey’s, and Janey considered the possibility of gently excusing themselves, of leaving the house and finding their car, of driving back to their home with the groundhog not yet buried nor decomposed in the woods.
“You own the petting zoo?” Janey asked instead.
“Yes,” said the woman. “We started it shortly after our daughter was born. It was for her, you know. She loved the goats.”
The man swallowed again, his soft unstitched face furling and unfurling between his brows, his eyes focusing only briefly, if at all, before returning colorless, gazing out as if the room were an empty nothing, looking only upon the non-light of dusk despite it being mid-morning.
“I thought about it a lot, you know,” the woman said.
“Opening a farm?” Janey asked politely. Unable to bear the man’s absent, warped face, Janey, without thinking, looked at the woman. The woman’s face was neither old nor young, and her lips were painted red, her cheeks pink, both the pure, chalky tone of a child’s makeup palate. But the makeup seemed not like dress-up but merely the woman’s face; were she to wipe it off, her face would be gone all together. Then, of course, there was the woman’s hair, a short, stacked beehive, crooked on the crown of her head.
“No,” said the woman. “I thought often of her death.”
Janey coughed a small cough. “Excuse me?”
“When my daughter was born. She’d lay in her bassinet, and I’d think often of waking up and finding her dead. But you must be careful, thinking those thoughts. It’s a terrible thing for a child to die.” The woman lifted the teacup filled with coffee to her mouth but did not drink from it. “Is your daughter baptized?”
“What’s baptized?” Janey’s daughter asked, the first words she had spoken since entering the farmhouse.
“No,” said Janey. She watched the woman closely, saw how as the man’s face sunk deeper within itself the woman’s face drew tighter, an anger puckering across her red lips and pink cheeks. The woman uncrossed and crossed her ankles once more.
“You must.” The woman said sternly. “You of all people must.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Janey, but Janey swallowed a swallow not dissimilar to the empty man’s swallow across the table, remembered imagining her daughter’s head falling like a walnut in the street. She heard the thud and squeezed her daughter’s arm.
“Ruthie wasn’t baptized, and where is she now? Wherever Walter is. That’s where he went, you know. It’s not the dementia. He’s trying to find her, out there in the blankness. Look at his eyes! Nothing! That’s where they are.”
Janey held tightly onto her daughter. The woman paused, collected herself, set her teacup back on the lace tablecloth.
“But a baptism. It’s important. Walter, Walter he had always joked that the goats had baptized Ruthie, the way they’d lick her clean. They loved her; they loved the smell of baby. They’d have taken her if they could. They licked her the day she was born, and we brought her out to see the world, to see the sun. They’d have taken her. But they didn’t. Only God can, only baptism can.”
The light in the kitchen shifted between shades of gray and yellow and the man swallowed and the woman lifted and set down her teacup without drinking from it. Outside, the goats bleated, but they could not hear it.
“Is the groundhog with them?” Janey’s daughter asked. “Is the groundhog with Ruthie and Walter?”
Janey’s mouth went dry, and the woman stared at Janey’s daughter with none of the simpleness of a goat, her eyes black and round and full of cruelty. “Do you think God cares about your groundhog?” the woman asked sharply, rising on her childish legs. Janey’s daughter began to cry then, and she buried her face in Janey’s hair. Janey stood and shifted the weight of her daughter to her hip so she could carry her out of the house.
“Thank you for the coffee,” Janey said as she backed out of the kitchen. The goat excrement from her daughter’s rainboots crumbled across her skirt, but Janey paid no mind, noticing only the way the woman straightened her hair as she stood. While Janey and her daughter left the house and returned to the bright light of day she wondered if, beneath her wig, the woman’s skull was as soft and rotted as her husband’s.
At dinner that night Janey’s daughter asked to be baptized, and Harry looked to Janey and Janey looked to Harry and together they shrugged. Harry called the parish and arranged a meeting with the priest, and, on a Tuesday evening, they left their house and walked up their street to the church. The streetlights were on, and the sky was the same deep blue that always seemed to precede nightfall, and Janey felt much lighter than the sky, her shoulders and spine straightening, as though she weighed nothing at all. For a moment, as Janey tried to see all that the quiet of the night held, she seemed to forget how to walk, but still she moved easily down the sidewalk. Janey remembered too the possibility she had felt when cleaning the dead groundhog, and she squeezed first her daughter’s hand and then Harry’s, carrying with them that possibility as they crossed the threshold into the church. The church was made of stone, and the carpet was red but not bloody, and the office they gathered in smelled of dust and wax and of nothing else that was discernible. The priest held open the door and ushered them in toward a collection of chairs arranged around a desk.
“Well,” said the priest as he settled in behind the desk. “I hear this little one is looking to get baptized.” Janey’s daughter nodded her head and climbed into a chair, her legs not yet reaching the ground. The priest laughed a deep and happy laugh. “Better late than never, I always say.”
Janey and Harry took their seats on either side of their daughter. They discussed it and set a date, and Janey’s daughter did not mention the groundhog or Walter or Ruthie and the empty space they now inhabited even though she had wanted to. On the walk home they heard screaming, the boy across the street having just left the light of the screened-in porch to stand in the front lawn.
“Maybe,” said Janey’s daughter, “he needs to be baptized too.”
Harry looked to Janey. Janey understood how Harry felt about the whole ordeal—they were humoring their daughter. This was a phase, and the baptism was a hollow promise to quell her nerves about a world she was beginning to understand—it was hollow but not in the way Walter’s eyes had been. But as the boy continued screaming, Janey could not return Harry’s look. Janey had sat in the priest’s office on the red but not bloody carpet holding with her the sheer might and possibility of the moment when evening finally ceases and shifts into the full darkness of night. Janey thought about how the woman, with her unknowable skull and her children’s legs that had not seen light, had seen something in Janey, had known Janey right down to the very quick of her. Her fingers trembled around the hand of her daughter, and together the three walked quietly through the screams and back into their house.
On the morning of the baptism, Janey and Harry waited on the front steps for their daughter. In her white dress and white shoes, she had asked them to wait before she ran off into the backyard. There, she stepped through the brambles and the underbrush in search of the dead groundhog, her bruised legs becoming prickled with small scrapes and cuts. The vultures had so far made good work of the carcass, and Janey’s daughter knelt and wiggled free one of its yellowed and curled bottom teeth. She closed her hand, blackened with blood and soil, and returned to her parents with the tooth in her palm.
On the walk to the church, the sun burned beneath Janey’s skin, and she knew it was God. Her daughter skipped in her dirty dress and muddy shoes, and Harry looked at the trees. Once in the nave, bright, blinding shades of amber and silver streamed through the stained glass windows, and it was as though they stood in the horizonal pupil of a goat’s defenseless eye. The water mirrored the sun, a pool of absent blood. Janey was not close to God but of him, and after her daughter was saved, her palm clean and the groundhog tooth settled on the bottom of the baptismal basin, the priest opened his arms in offer, and Janey stepped forward and into the light.