A couple of hours later, just when I was about to believe they were gone for good, when I was figuring out how I was going to tell David and the kids we had lost two more animals, they ambled down the mountain, tails wagging, tongues hanging out, fur covered in burrs and mud. By then, I had visualized their deaths so vividly and in so many different ways—sliced clean down the middle by a bear, shot by a hunter, attacked by a coyote—that their arrival wasn’t even a relief. I was a tangle of nerves and adrenalin and frustration.
“Get in the house!” I yelled, pointing the way.
Pretzel looked at me, whined, and ambled toward the front door. Hester got down on her front legs, wagged, then took off again.
“You little shit!” I screamed after her.
But she didn’t care. She was already long gone. Whatever she was chasing now—a fox, a deer, a rabbit—was on the opposite mountain, away from the highway, where the woods extended for miles. I was confident that she wouldn’t get lost—she had an acute sense of smell—but I was not as confident she wouldn’t get hurt. Finally, that evening, hours after she had first disappeared, I found her sitting on the front porch, her neck plastered with something dark, sticky, and rotten smelling. When I let her inside, she promptly passed out on her makeshift cushion—an old coffee sack stuffed with pillows. Then and only then did I allow myself to feel relieved.
I knew I shouldn’t have a favorite dog. It was like having a favorite kid. Even if you had one, you weren’t supposed to say it. And yet, Hester and I had been through so much, walked so many literal and figurative miles together, I couldn’t help feeling a special kinship with her. I understood her fierce individualism, the fact that she both loved me and sometimes had a powerful need to strike out on her own, and there was something about her wild and restless spirit that seemed to soothe my own.
“Good dog,” I told her while she slept.
She opened her eyes and wagged her tail once before passing out again.
• • •
The next day, day 148, Terry was still alive but barely. David, however, was still hopeful. He continued to feed her and give her antibiotics through the medicine dropper, but I began referring to the hospital as hospice. She was going to die, and perhaps because David had been trying so valiantly to save her, or perhaps because her impending death seemed to cast a shadow over Ama in her fragile condition, I was despondent. That afternoon, I crouched beside Terry’s cage. She was a beautiful chicken, brown with golden-tipped wings. Her head was tucked deep into her chest, as if she were soundly sleeping.
“Hey, girl,” I said. And despite every effort not to, every voice inside my head that told me this was childish and ridiculous and very unfarmer-like, I started to cry. “You’ve given us a lot of good eggs, and I want to thank you for that.”
I hadn’t planned to say it. It had just risen out of me, this sadness, this gratitude for Terry’s short life. Back in my old life, I never thought twice about the chicken that laid my eggs, but now, every time I found an egg—in a nesting box, in the hay feeder, in a bed of straw in the barn—I felt the same sense of wonder and awe I felt the day our first hen laid an egg.
I knew Terry. I knew where she liked to sit on the roost, that she loved kale and shredded carrots and the ends of strawberries, that she liked to perch on the top of a dead tree limb on sunny days. Knowing the animal that had provided our breakfast on countless occasions had caused a quiet but definite shift in my being. It was a change I could not yet define or explain but something I nonetheless felt.
Terry didn’t move at all, and for a second, I thought she was already dead, but then I could see the slightest movements in her back, a barely detectable rising and falling. Maybe she was just a chicken like any other of the millions of chickens that died every day in factory farms, their lives passing unnoticed. Or maybe she could hear me. Maybe she knew I was talking to her. I watched her quiet breathing for another moment, then headed into the barn.
• • •
David and I did not often share responsibilities. There were things I did (grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, walking the dogs) and things he did (everything else). Now, with the life-and-death drama happening at the barn, we each staked out our own areas. David’s zone was outside the barn, next to Terry’s crate. My area was inside the barn, beside Ama. While I watched Ama, he watched Terry, which worked well until he decided to prop open the barn door so he could watch Ama and the chicken at the same time.
“Stop!” I told him. “Leave it closed.”
“Why?”
“It’s bad luck for a pregnant goat to stare at a dying chicken.”
I was kidding, in a way. But in another way, I was not. This close juxtaposition of birthing and dying was unsettling—disturbing, even. Plus, I was getting worried. It was now past time for Ama’s babies to be born. She should have been in labor by now. Over the coming days, I spent almost all of my time following her around, checking her vulva for changes. It was round and puffy, like bubble wrap, which was a good sign that labor was approaching but not the sign that labor had begun.
And then Ama began doing something amazing. I had read that sometimes, in the days before they kid, expectant mothers “talk” to their unborn babies. I knew by now that goats were intelligent, sensitive beings. Still, that seemed a little far-fetched, so when Ama began twisting her head around and making quietly, motherly murmurings to her belly, I was astounded. She baaed so softly, so sweetly in tones so different from any I had heard her utter before that there was no mistaking that she was talking to her kids. What was she telling them? Was she reassuring them? Wishing them safe passage? Urging them to hurry? Perhaps she was simply confiding to them that she was stuck in the barn with a crazy lady who kept staring at her vulva.
I was now on chapter two of The Empathy Exams, “Devil’s Bait.” The chapter was about Morgellons disease, a disorder in which people believe they have things living under their skin, things like worms. Of course, the essay wasn’t really about that. It was about empathy, about how compassion is more important than literal truth, a subject I pondered while gnats and flies and mosquitoes bit my face and arms and bare legs, and the hay and straw made me sneeze, and Ama’s pungent pee made my eyes water. While I wanted to be empathetic with Ama, I’m not sure that what I felt was actually empathy. Perhaps it was more like mutual despair. We were both so very tired of waiting.
Spicy Crock-Pot Chicken for Chicken Lovers
•1 to 2 teaspoons salt
•2 teaspoons ground paprika
•1 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
•1 teaspoon onion powder
•1 teaspoon dried thyme
•1 teaspoon ground black pepper
•1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
•1 cup chopped onions
•1 humanely raised large roasting chicken from someone else’s farm
Combine spices. Massage into chicken. Put chopped onion into Crock-Pot. Add chicken and cover. Cook on low 4 to 6 hours.
Chapter Fourteen
When someone you love dies, that person comes to you in spurts, in bleeps and flashes you never see coming until they are there. All that day in the barn, while Ama whispered to her unborn babies, my grandmother seemed so near, I almost believed I could reach out and touch her. Twice, I caught a glimpse of something in the corner of my eye, a shadow, a change in light, but when I whipped around, there was nothing there. It was a trick, a ruse, a ploy of my mind. But it was not until I heard the thunder rumbling over the hill and saw the first flash of lightning through the barn slats that I realized why.
Today was June 14, one week before the summer solstice, the first anniversary of my grandmother’s death, a fact my body registered before my mind knew what was happening. All of my senses were on overdrive, tuned in to everything that was the same now as it was then—the delicate pink and white laurels dotting the mountainsides, the hot rain p
ounding the tin roof, the way my shirt clung to my chest like a wet rag. That night, after Ama was safely back in her stall, babbling and crooning to her babies, her vulva still unchanged, I lay awake for hours, and when I finally fell asleep, I had a dream that wasn’t really a dream at all but a memory.
In my dream, it was summer, and I was at my grandmother’s house. Through the open windows, the sweet scent of peonies mixed in the air with the acrid smoke from the paper plant over the hill. On the kitchen table, a fan whirred. My grandmother and I sat side-by-side. She was in a soft, pink armchair; I was in my grandfather’s recliner, and I knew in the way of dreams, deeply, intuitively, that he was already dead. My grandmother chewed tobacco and spat into a Styrofoam cup. Tiny beads of sweat dotted her forehead, curled the soft hair at her temples. A thin, clear tube ran from her nose to the oxygen machine by her chair. The tank hummed. I rocked back and forth, my bare feet pulsing up and down on the rug, sweat pooling on my chest. Just outside the screen door, a ruby-throated hummingbird alit on the feeder, rapidly flickering his green-flecked wings, tiny, hot bursts of emerald light.
When I woke, my mind was muddled, hovering on the very edge of the real and the unreal, the past and the present. And as strange as it sounds, I thought of Terry. Perhaps I had been spending too much time in a dark barn scrutinizing a pregnant goat. Still, something about the chicken dying reminded me of my grandmother dying—the dull gray tint of Terry’s beak, the way her face pitched forward, the way at first, she seemed to just be deeply sleeping, but then there was something even quieter than sleep—a raw, piercing stillness. In my old life, I had felt kinship and, of course, affection for my pets, but what I felt now was different, a deep sense that we were all connected, different parts of the same whole—Terry, Ama, my grandmother, David, my children, me—though what that whole was, I still did not know.
• • •
On day 149, I resumed my role as barn sentry and opened my book. I was now on the chapter on Nicaragua, which seemed appropriate given the heat. The solar-powered fan whirred and whizzed. Still, sweat poured off my forehead and onto my book, and Ama looked as uncomfortable as I remembered feeling in July 1994 when Eli was several days overdue.
Exhausted and miserable, I was nonetheless determined to take Aaron and Alex to the Fourth of July parade in downtown Brevard. Waddling along the sidewalk, heavy and round and sweating from every pore, I clasped each child by the hand and braved the cotton-candy-eating, lemonade-drinking, red-white-and-blue-clad crowd. And then a woman I knew from high school emerged from the throng.
“Oh my God!” she said, clutching my arm. “You’re pregnant.”
Yes, I confirmed. I was, indeed, pregnant.
“When are you due?”
“A few days ago,” I said.
“You look miserable,” she said. “I’ll tell you what you need to do. You need to go home to David and just fuck like rabbits. That does it every time.”
Looking at Ama, remembering how oddly and immediately effective that remedy had been, I was sorry that was not an option for her. All day long, she paced and grunted and rubbed against the barn wall. That evening, Eli, who was home from college for the summer, broke out a bottle of, ironically, Nicaraguan rum—Flor de Caña—that a friend had given him. Using fresh pineapple and lots of ice, he whipped up a tall, cold pitcher of piña coladas. We divided the pitcher into two glasses, then headed down to the barn to put the animals up for the night.
Since Eli had only spent a year here before leaving for college, he was both fascinated by the goats and wary of them. For the other eighteen years of his life, he had been raised by parents who were completely different from the people David and I had become. The parents Eli knew wore business attire and grew basil and tomatoes at their quaint house in the country. The people now lugging around chickens and estimating the angles of goat teats must have seemed alien to him, almost as strange as the pregnant goat that toddled after us screaming for attention, head-butting the other goats, licking her lips and slamming her front paws onto our thighs. When she did this, it looked as if the babies were going to fall through her belly onto the ground, a feat my Flor-de-Caña-infused mind almost believed possible. After twenty minutes, Eli and I were out of rum and out of patience, our thighs covered with mud and scratches, so we put the girls in their stalls and shut the chickens—minus Terry—into the coop. Then we went back inside to make another batch of drinks.
• • •
By day 150, when Ama was still not in labor, I was deeply concerned. Maybe she had a false pregnancy. I had been reading about that online, about how a goat could believe she was pregnant when she was actually not. Her uterus would expand, and she would go into real labor before finally delivering an empty amniotic sac. I read all the discussion forums again—to myself and to David, who was also, at this point, worried that something was wrong. That evening, for reasons I cannot now explain, I watched a video of a pig giving birth. The sow lay on her side while baby after baby slid effortlessly from her silent, prone body. At the end, the videographer announced that she had fifteen piglets, eleven live babies. Below the video, people posted messages about the four dead babies. Oh no! How sad. And so on. It was unnerving.
The discussion forums I read said that most Nigerian dwarfs didn’t go over 153 days, but someone had a pregnant doe that went to day 157. Someone else said you should never let them go over day 155 before performing a caesarean. Maybe that was right. Or maybe it wasn’t. Once again, I wished I had a real, live human being to talk to, someone who had experienced this before. Since the information I had read about the teat angle was wrong—or perhaps I was wrong about the angle of the teat—I didn’t know what to believe except that perhaps this was all a big mistake. I kept telling Ama everything was going to be okay, but the truth was, I had no idea how this was going to turn out. Ama could die. Her babies could die. They could all die.
Because we had somehow thought we could do this ourselves, we did not yet have a vet for our farm animals. After all, we had done pretty well taking care of the chickens. How much harder could goats be? But we were quickly discovering that not only were goats more complicated, our attachment to them was stronger. We were fond of our chickens, but they still seemed like farm animals. The goats, on the other hand, were more like pets.
So we began calling around, trying to find a vet who would come at night or on the weekend if Ama needed emergency care. We finally found two who did house calls and seemed to have good reputations. We added their phone numbers to the contacts in our phones, and though I should have felt somewhat relieved, that night, I dreamed a sheep gave birth to a lamb, but the lamb was not a real lamb. She was a tiny square, her head folded into her body, legs tucked underneath, an origami baby lamb. In the morning, I was certain: if Ama did not go into labor soon, I was going to go completely nuts.
Miraculously, though, Terry was still alive. David had been reading about all the possible home remedies for ailing chickens, and he decided she might have an obstruction in her throat. He took her from her cage and held her in one arm, massaging her chest and throat with the other hand. When he hung her upside down by her feet, Terry went limp.
“Oh no,” he said. “She fainted.”
He lifted her back up, and when her eyes fluttered open, he resumed rubbing her neck. I watched for a while, aware that we were in a strange state of limbo. We had a barn and farm animals, but that in itself didn’t make us farmers. My ancestors had drawn clear distinctions between livestock and pets. They raised livestock for food, and whether or not they liked them was beside the point. They could not spend all day sitting at a barn rubbing a chicken’s throat or playing midwife for an expectant milk doe. They had vegetables to can and water to haul and kids to feed, and an ailing chicken would have been quickly and efficiently dispatched and turned into something more useful, like chicken stew. But for David and me, the lines between pets and livestock, between animals and
humans even, were fuzzy.
Ama still showed no signs of kidding. No pawing at the ground. No heavy panting. She ate hay and grain and weeds and head-butted Holly and Willow whenever they came within fifty feet of her. Every few minutes, she ran her enormous belly along the sides of the fence, then waited for me to rub her favorite spot—just between her horns. I squatted beside her and massaged her face and then her ears, sending positive energy intended to convey, I’m here for you, girl. Just let me know when.
• • •
Finally, on day 153, David did what he should have done from the beginning. He calculated Ama’s due date himself rather than relying on my basic math skills. And when he did, he realized something important: I had the date wrong. I had asked Siri and counted myself, but either we both got the due date wrong or maybe I asked Siri the wrong question. In any case, I had made a mathematical error. It turned out that today was actually day 148 and the due date was still two days away. I had been so sure I had it right that I made him show me two different times, two different ways, but finally, I realized he was correct. It wasn’t as if I needed more evidence of my incompetence, but there it was.
That same day, however, we had a small miracle in the form of Terry. For days, I had been telling David it would be better to go ahead and put an end to her misery, but I was forced to eat proverbial crow when around noon that day, she stood up and walked out of her hospice crate and rejoined the other chickens as if nothing had ever happened. Together, they scratched and fluffed and nibbled grain in the afternoon sun.
She would never lay eggs again, and though my ancestors would have scoffed at the idea of feeding a chicken that no longer produced eggs, we were emboldened by her progress, and David was beside himself with pride in his new animal husbandry skills. “I told you,” he said when I marveled at her fine, gold-tipped feathers, at the especially spritely way she waltzed through the barnyard. She was not exactly restored to her former self, yet she was healed in some fundamental way that amazed and delighted her just as it amazed and delighted us.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 16