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ground, thanks to her stubby legs, but you could tell she was strong. Loretta, her daughter, appeared to be half Nigerian, half La Mancha. All the others were full La Manchas — taller, leaner, more American. No ears, or practically none, anyway, which is another characteristic of the breed.
    “Mama says Patsy gives the best milk,” Book said. “It’s fatter than those other ones give, so it’s tastiest. But Mama mixes their milk all up, so I don’t know how she knows the difference, but she does.”
    I took a handful of feed and held it under Patsy’s nose. She didn’t take her eyes off mine as she tongued it out of my hand. She nodded at me again, and then, without my coaxing her, stepped up onto the milk stand.
    “You better lower that stanchion down over her neck to keep her there,” Book said.
    The stanchion was like the thing that keeps people’s heads in place on a guillotine, which I’d read about in
A Tale of Two Cities
— not that anybody in Craven County was likely to have ever heard of it.
    Something told me Patsy didn’t like the stanchion, though, and that I didn’t need it with her. Maybe with the others, who seemed more skittish. But not with Patsy.
    She didn’t move while I milked her. Just ate out of the feed trough at the head of the stand. She smelled like dirt and hay, and like our barn back in Maine, and like Dad when he came home from his vet rounds to other people’s farms.
    Dad used to tell me I started out in life loving animals — since the second I was born. He said it was probably because my mom was feeding a hog we had in our backyard when her water broke and she went into labor. Everything happened so fast, she couldn’t make it past the barn before I was ready to come out. Dad did the delivery and said it wasn’t half as hard as getting a horse to foal. Mom apparently told him it smelled like manure in there and asked him to
please
get her up to the house. Dad told me he threw the placenta into the hog pen for the hog to eat, which my mom thought was disgusting. As soon as I could crawl, though, whenever I was outside, I would try to get into the hog pen with that hog. I liked that story. It was one of the few my dad ever told about my mom.
    After I finished with Patsy, I scratched her under her chin. She seemed surprised by that — I doubted Book or Aunt Sue were ever very sweet to their goats — but she quickly relaxed. She closed her eyes. If she’d been a human, she might have even moaned.
    After she stepped off the stand, Loretta practically hopped on up. I must have gotten too cocky, because again I didn’t lower the stanchion, and I also forgot to refill the feed trough, so once Loretta finished what Patsy had left in there, she pulled away and knocked over the milk bucket.
    Book laughed. “Told you. Mama’s gonna have your ass now.”
    “Just don’t tell her,” I said.
    He laughed again. “She’ll know. Can’t make the cheese if you don’t got the milk. Can’t sell the cheese if you don’t got the milk. Can’t do nothing if you don’t got the milk. And you don’t got the milk.” He noisily sucked down the last of his Big Gulp. “Mama says once we turn them pregnant goats into milkers, she can make a couple hundred dollars a week extra from all their cheese. Unless somebody goes around spilling too much.”
    I put Loretta in the stanchion and refilled the grain trough, and finished up with her milking.
    The third milker, Tammy, had slipped back outside the barn. Book finished off his Big Gulp, then said, “Hold on. I’ll show you how to fetch her. She likes to be trouble.”
    I followed him outside, thinking he’d coax her in with grain, but he just screamed at her and shooed her back toward the barn. He kicked her so hard that she stumbled, and before she could fully right herself, he kicked her again.
    “Stop!” I yelled.
    “Stop, hell,” he said. “You want her or don’t you?”
    I laid my hand gently on Tammy’s head, but she shied