One More River by Mary Glickman Read Free Book Online Page A

patch of crabby ground next to the village, crept under its post-and-wire fence, and lay down on some rocks. Panting with exhaustion, the shock, anger, and hurt beat out of him for at least as long as it took to catch his breath, he watched the goats.
    There were seven of them. A year or two before, he’d given them the names of Snow White’s seven dwarfs. When he told Bald Horace, the man laughed because the goats were does and their kids. He borrowed a buck when he wanted to breed. It struck him as quite comical for his high-steppin’ little ladies to have names like Grumpy, Sleepy, Doc, and Dopey although Sneezy and Happy fit, he had to admit that, and maybe Bashful, which was what Mickey Moe named the runt of the crew.
    That Thursday, Grumpy lived up to her name. For no reason Mickey Moe could discern, she ran up to poor Dopey and butted her in her side so hard she nearly fell over. Staggering off, Dopey tried to keep her distance, hiding behind the stump of the herd’s climbing tree. Grumpy saw where she hid herself and signaled with a flap of lip, a twitch of ear to Sleepy, Sneezy, and Doc. In a bunch, as if they’d been planning it all afternoon, the four of them charged poor old Dopey. They rammed her into the fence, and she bounced off bloody where wire cut into her. Mickey Moe could not endure the look in her pained little goat’s eyes. Her predicament drove all thoughts of his own problems aside. Jumping into the fray, he rushed to stand between Dopey and the others to save her, poor thing, and they butted him just as they’d butted her, as if he were not human, supreme over them, the almighty author of food and shelter and milking, as if he were just another goat who did not know his place, a foolish goat protecting the eldest of the herd, the one who required driving out as nature herself commanded. If Bald Horace had not chanced to arrive just then and rescue him, they might have done him serious damage. As it was, he was scraped bloody. When Mickey Moe tried to walk, he limped, so Bald Horace took him home to clean him up. He made him sit in the three-wheeled cart he pushed with old Dopey tethered to a handle, skittering along behind them. Can’t leave her with those bullies no more, he explained. I’ll have to leave her in the yard no matter what Aurora Mae has to say.
    Mickey Moe wondered who Aurora Mae was. He figured she must be Bald Horace’s wife. It struck him then that he’d never heard anything about Bald Horace’s family, which was curious, because Mama knew all the Negro folk around for three generations. She gossiped with Sara Kate about their goings on and spoke of their dead, too. Surely this Aurora Mae would have been mentioned some time or other. He would have asked Bald Horace directly who she was, but the man was preoccupied instructing him in the habits of goats and the proper manner of managing them without getting stuck in the middle of a losing battle. It felt rude to interrupt. Mickey Moe only followed some of it anyway. He hurt too much to pay considerable attention as his ride was hardly smooth and each bump in the dirt road sent fresh jolts of pain through his hip and into his ribs, which, he suspected, were cracked.
    When they got to Bald Horace’s home, a tar-paper shack not much bigger than Mickey Moe’s bedroom in the big house, there was no Aurora Mae to be seen or heard. After checking Dopey’s wounds and determining they could wait, Bald Horace took the boy in, rolled his pants up, and washed his cuts with warm water heated on the stove and mixed with Epsom salts. Next, he bandaged him with rags from a wicker basket that sat next to the stove as if waiting for that very purpose. All the while, Bald Horace talked nonstop in words that only meant something important later on.
    You see, son, you can’t give them goats the chance to gang up on you, which they surely will if you let ’em. And it ain’t always the smartest thing to get in there and think you can best