Flat Broke with Two Goats

by Jennifer McGaha

  That evening, after David and I put the goats in their stalls, we stood in the driveway, and for the first time in days, we breathed. In the midst of all the worry and uncertainty, here was a moment of tranquility, a moment when we accepted the crazy precariousness of it all—Ama’s future, Terry’s future, our future. Above us, the moon was full, the sky clear and vast. On nights like this, when it wasn’t rainy or foggy or hazy, you could stand on the cabin rooftop and count the stars. The light bounced off the hillsides and the tin roofs on the henhouse and the barn and the cabin, like lights on a movie set or a busy runway, like somewhere where people were not waiting to be born or to die but instead dwelt in that moment in-between, that space where memory and reality and possibility collided.

  • • •

  On June 18, 2014, I drove into town to deliver some eggs to a friend. The errand would take less than an hour, so there was no reason to rush. Nothing at all was happening with Ama. Then, as soon as I got into town, David texted: Come home now.

  I whipped into my friend’s driveway, set three cartons of eggs by her back door, then raced home. In front of the barn, I stopped my car and bolted to the field, where Ama lay prone on the grass. David crouched beside her, and next to them both, a slippery gray, white, and black kid lay on a dog pee pad. The kid was wet and slimy, its eyes covered with a creamy goo, and Ama was furiously licking the tiny, squirming body. I watched, mesmerized, while David exchanged dirty pee pads for clean ones and suctioned out the kid’s nose with the rubber bulb. Though I had made fun of him when he bought it, the bulb now seemed indispensable. How had I not known this?

  Finally, the kid began to look like a kid—soft, fluffy fur, curious blue eyes. David lifted the kid’s tail and looked closely: No vent. The kid was a boy—a beautiful, healthy boy. He baaed the tiniest baas, and while I was still trying to take it all in, to realize both the extraordinariness and the everydayness of this moment, Ama began moaning and pushing, her legs contracting as a second “bubble” emerged beneath her tail.

  Quickly, with gloved hands, David produced a fresh pee pad and placed it underneath Ama’s rear end. Moments later, the bubble burst, and a skinny white-and-black kid fell onto the sterile pad. David wiped the kid’s face and cleared its airway while I tried to maneuver the firstborn kid to Ama’s teat.

  I had read that the cleansing ritual is an important part of the bonding process, the time when the new mother realizes this is her baby and she needs to care for it. A new mother who doesn’t have this time with her kid might later reject it. I knew all of this, but I also knew that in order for the kids to have the best chance of survival, it was critical that they nurse soon after birth, preferably within the first hour. So from the moment I had arrived, I had been asking David what time the first kid was born. I wanted Ama to have enough time to clean him, but I also wanted to get him nursing. My best guess was we were about thirty minutes into the critical time frame. I squeezed Ama’s teat to be sure she had a good milk flow and guided the kid’s mouth to her. He fumbled about for a moment or two, like someone searching for a flashlight in the dark, and then he latched on. When I heard him swallow for the first time, I was immensely relieved. Now, David slid the second kid up so Ama could see it. Again, Ama began cleaning, and David checked under the kid’s tail. This time, there was a vent. She was a lovely doeling that more closely resembled a Holstein calf than a goat.

  After much shifting and nudging and encouraging on our part and much licking and baaing on Ama’s part, the doeling was soon clean and nursing as well. Despite all of our preparations and planning, Ama had not needed our assistance. She had done it all by herself. Nonetheless, we felt like heroes, as if we ourselves had done something astonishing. Ecstatic, relieved, exhausted, David and I pulled lawn chairs into the barnyard, and Eli, who had arrived on the scene just after the second kid was born, brought down a bottle opener and three bottles of Highland Brewing Gaelic Ale. We popped open the lids and toasted Ama, then watched as she fussed over the babies who were already standing and gazing contentedly from their mother to us.

  Eventually, after much debate, we named the doeling Loretta and the wide-eyed buckling Conway—a pair of classic country kids. Ama and I had been partners in her pregnancy, but from the moment she delivered her kids safely into the world, she was no longer interested in me. Whatever hormone surges or instincts had caused her to seek my company and affection were gone, and she immediately reverted to her initial assessment—that David was a much better human companion than I was. Whenever I approached her, she ran, baaing and snorting, her hair raised. Whenever David approached her, she sidled up to him, batting her long lashes, tilting her head for him to rub the lovely black brushstrokes near the corners of her eyes.

  And though she was generally a good mother to both her babies, from the moment they were born, Ama showed a strong preference for her son. When Conway cried, she nuzzled him to her teat, and he crouched down, tail wagging, drinking his fill. When Loretta tried to latch on to the other teat, however, Ama shook her away. Loretta stood beside her mother, her cries so high-pitched and insistent, we feared she was injured, punctured by the fence, gored by one of Ama’s horns. Once we realized she was not mortally wounded, only hungry, David and I crouched down and grabbed Ama’s collar, pushing Loretta from behind in the general direction of the teat. When Loretta’s tail wagged, we knew she was drinking.

  For the first two weeks, we left the babies with Ama all day, and at night, the three of them slept in a pile, each baby with its head on Ama’s back. There was no electricity in the barn, only a solar-powered light that worked or didn’t, depending on how much sun there had been that day. One evening, standing with David in the half-light watching the goats sleep—Holly and Willow curled up together in their stall, Ama and the babies in the stall beside them—I realized that if someone told me right then that I could go back ten years, have my old life back exactly as it was, a life where I never saw my husband, where our lives were always about becoming instead of being, I would have refused.

  It was such a simple realization, yet it seemed momentous. Being poor means not having a lot of options other people have—Should I pay at the pump for gas or pay cash in the store? Should I drive or fly to my destination? Should I get new brake pads like the mechanic recommends or just hope they hold out a while longer? Now, even a hypothetical possibility emboldened me. Given the alternative of that life or this one, I would choose this one. And then, for once, instead of trying to fill in the rest of that thought—but I really wish we had—I tried to leave it just as it was: I choose this.

  Prenatal Piña Coladas

  •1 1/2 ounces coconut cream

  •1 1/2 ounces pineapple juice

  •A few slices fresh pineapple

  •2 ounces Flor de Caña rum

  •1 cup ice

  Blend all ingredients in blender until smooth. Pour into tall, chilled glass. Drink in barn. Refuse to share with pregnant goat no matter how much she begs.

  Chapter Fifteen

  My parents still lived just across town in the same house I grew up in, and we saw them regularly. We took walks, had meals, celebrated birthdays and holidays, and whenever we added new animals to the farm, they came by to see them. My mother, especially, loved all animals, and she cooed over the chicks as they slept in the brooder, fed Holly and Ama licorice treats, cradled Willow in her arms. Still, living in a drafty, vermin-infested cabin was a fate that, through hard work and frugality, my parents had escaped. They would never have allowed themselves to end up in our situation, but if they had, they would have chosen any remedy over this one. They would have given their dogs away, sold their cat, moved to a modest, tidy, safe apartment in town like the one they lived in before I was born. In other words, they would have done something sensible.

  My life now was so far removed from the life I had had growing up, from anyone else’s I knew, in fact, that I moved deeper and deeper into th
e memories of my grandparents and great-grandparents, to their stories of survival and perseverance and connectedness to the land. Their spirits guided me, provided me solace and wisdom, and they came to me at the oddest times, when I was folding laundry or frying an egg, when I was walking down to the barn with my dogs each morning or shutting the goats in their stalls. They came to me when I was cooking dinner, when the kitchen was close and sticky, moisture droplets forming on the windows, the warmth rising and clinging to my face. They came not in a steady, logical progression but effervescent and shifting, all vapor and steam and heat.

  My great-great-grandmother was Sarah Caroline, but everyone called her Callie, and when I imagined her, Callie was short and slender, with charcoal eyes and skin like burnt clay. Callie was part woman, part ghost. She was full-blooded Cherokee. She was the daughter of a slave. She was my great-grandmother’s curly locks, my grandmother’s strong arms. She was my mother’s high cheekbones, my wandering, restless spirit. In the midst of my kitchen, among the jars of cumin and coriander, cinnamon and cloves, the baskets filled with spring onions and new potatoes, I conjured her, whispering her name over and over and over again—Callie, Callie, Callie—and when I finally came across a photo of her in a book of family history I inherited from my grandmother, I was shocked by the accuracy of my dreaming.

  In the photo, Callie sat in front of a log cabin next to her husband, a baby girl on her knee, five older children clustered around her—three girls, two boys. Callie’s eyes and hair were the color of coal and river silt, of obsidian and moonstone. Her eyebrows were thick and straight, her nose broad. Three of her children were dark like her, the other two lighter, like their father. I held the photo to the light. I put on my reading glasses. I tilted it to one angle and then another, searching for some sign of how she felt about the solemn, bearded man beside her. Did she love him? At night, when they were finally alone, when she loosened her hair from the tight bun and eased into bed, did he run his fingers through her smooth, silky hair? Did he whisper to her how beautiful she was, how loved? And did she touch the creases on his face, marvel at the broadness of his shoulders, at the hardness of his arms?

  Try as I might, I could read nothing from Callie’s face. Her lips were tight and closed, her expression impermeable. And yet there was something in her hands, a tenderness that reached out across the century and rendered me breathless. The baby in her lap, my great-grandmother, wore a long gown and leaned slightly forward—eager, expectant. Callie’s left hand rested against her daughter’s folded hands as if to hold her in place, as if her child might spring from her lap and fade into the ether, like a ghost.

  • • •

  One evening in early August, my parents came over for a family picnic on the front patio. Eli was still home for the summer, and Alex was visiting for the weekend. It was an idyllic Southern summer evening—warm but not hot, just breezy enough to keep the gnats and mosquitoes at bay. We popped open a couple of bottles of merlot and ate grilled chicken, vegetable kebabs, arugula salad with shaved fennel, parmesan, and walnuts, with blueberry cobbler and buttermilk pie. Afterward, we strolled down the road and picked daisies, which we fed to Conway and Loretta. Then we gathered eggs and shut the chickens into the coop for the night. Fireflies cast a soft, yellow glow over the blueberry bushes on the hillside as we walked back to the house.

  Moments later, as we were once again sitting on the patio, sipping what was left of the wine and watching the moon rise over the waterfall, we heard a loud cracking sound, followed by a tremendous splat. All six of us were stunned into inertia until Eli screamed, “Oh shit!” followed by a command that was more sound than word, more sheer urgency than direction: “Move!”

  Later, my mother would say she thought a bat had fallen on us. Alex thought part of the house had given way. David thought someone was throwing rocks at us. But then, there was no time to process our thoughts. Eli’s instruction was so alarmingly insistent, we did not hesitate. Wine glass in hand, I jumped in the back seat of my Mountaineer, which was parked next to the patio. Alex and my mother ran down the driveway. David, my dad, and Eli leapt to the edge of the patio. From the car, I could see a tremendous black snake writhing on the porch. It was as wide as my hand and at least five feet long, maybe longer.

  I was not a stranger to black snakes. I had grown up in a house surrounded by woods. As a kid, I had hiked and canoed. I had gone to summer camp. I was used to seeing black snakes at a distance—crossing a trail or crisscrossed around a tree limb. I knew they were harmless. They were good, helpful snakes. They ate mice and other rodents. But still. I huddled against the far car door, my knees pulled to my chest, my arms wrapped tightly around my knees, each arm clutching the opposite elbow.

  “Oh God,” I said to no one in particular. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

  And then I noticed the string of small, inert objects scattered across the rock. Still, it took a few minutes for me to put it all together. The patio was situated under two staggered overhangs, one for the second level of the house and another for the third. A defunct doorbell alarm, resembling a plastic megaphone, hung just beneath the third overhang. Usually, there were wasps’ nests covering the alarm, but just a few days ago, I had noticed something new—a bird’s nest. And then I understood what had happened. The snake had crawled underneath the roof to reach the nest and had fallen, dragging with it an entire nest of babies whose lifeless bodies now lay scattered across the patio.

  It was a scene straight out of a Hitchcock film, a scene that instantly snapped me out of this place I had come to and back to where I was before: Our van repossessed. Our electricity cut off. The friends we had lost. The family members we had disappointed. The sound of the sledgehammer against my old garage door. A nest of mice in the walls. A copperhead writhing under my dead grandmother’s china cabinet. No matter how hard I tried to put it all behind me, how far I believed I had come in embracing our new lives, they were always right there, just beneath the surface—all of our failures, all of our shortcomings. Perhaps they always would be.

  Eli stood on the very edge of the patio. His arms were crossed, his watchful gaze trained on the snake. David and my dad hunched together for a moment, conferring, and then David ran around the corner of the house and rummaged around. He returned with a five-gallon plastic bucket, which he held sideways while my dad prodded the addled snake with a long stick.

  My dad was in his midseventies. He wore loose khaki pants, trail shoes, and a cap, and as he danced nimbly about, dodging the snake, the snake coiled and drew its head back. For a moment, everything was still. My dad was still. David was still. Eli was still. The waterfall was still. No one said a word. No one breathed. I heard the blood pooling in my fingertips.

  And then I became aware of a piercing screech coming from somewhere down the driveway. It was so haunted, so wild, so not human, it took me a moment to realize what it was. But then I knew: it was Alex.

  In any real crisis, Alex was the calmest person in the room, but she did have one phobia: snakes. All her life, she had had nightmares about snakes. Even a photo or a dead snake by the side of the road sent her into hysterics. Alex is twenty-five years old, I told myself. She’ll be fine. Now, the snake slowly twined around my father’s outstretched stick until the snake and the stick were one dark shadow on the moonlit porch. In the distance, the wailing grew louder, more alarming. Part of me wanted to stay in that car forever, smashed up against the window, the window cool and damp against my cheek, the waterfall once again a pulse in the mountainside. But, just like all those years ago when she was the reason I had to pull myself together and keep going, my daughter needed me. So I slid over to the driver’s side, the side opposite the patio, creaked open the door, and bolted down the driveway. Alex was crumpled over, trembling, her hands on her thighs. Her long, curly hair covered her face. My mother smoothed her hair, patted her back.

  “You’re okay,” I told her.

  But c
learly, she was not. From what I could gather from Alex’s disjointed report, the snake had narrowly missed her lap. It had whizzed past her, grazing her legs as it fell, the dead baby birds rolling between her feet.

  “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me!” Alex said.

  “Oh, honey, no. No, it’s not,” my mother said, still patting her.

  She meant to be comforting, I suppose, but her meaning was unclear. Was it a lesson in relativity? Did she mean having a black snake and a nest of doomed baby birds fall on you wasn’t that bad compared to, say, being stung by a swarm of bees or accosted by a mother bear? Did she mean worse things had happened and that someday, this incident would take its rightful place behind other unfortunate happenings? Or perhaps, was she looking ahead to all the shocking, painful things that were bound to happen in the future, things we had no control of, things we could not even see coming?

  Certainly, there were worse things, much worse things—cancer, car wrecks, drug addiction, suicide, natural disasters. Every day, people went broke and had to make adjustments, move to places much scarier than this—places that were actually dangerous. Some people had nowhere to live at all. They lived in cars or under bridges or in tents or makeshift lean-tos. They had no one other than themselves, no one they could call to coax a huge, angry black snake into a bucket for them. They were completely alone. And yet somehow, the shocking suddenness of this, the complete absurdity of it all, was still working its way through Alex’s consciousness. Somehow, though, her frantic gasping and wheezing and crying made me calmer. Or at least convinced me that I needed to appear calmer.