Grief, it seemed, just kept finding me wherever I was, sweeping down and catching me unaware.
Post-Surveillance Gazpacho
This recipe is slightly adapted from Moosewood Restaurant’s Gazpacho a la Guadalajara.
•2 cups fresh corn, cut from the cob and boiled
•4 cups tomato juice
•1 cucumber, peeled and cubed
•2 avocados, peeled, pitted, and cubed
•4 tablespoons fresh lime juice
•1 clove garlic, minced
•1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
•1/4 teaspoons ground cayenne pepper
•Salt
•Fresh cilantro for garnish
Combine all ingredients. Chill 1 to 2 hours before serving.
Chapter Eighteen
In order to have cheese, you must first have a pregnant goat. And in order to breed a goat, you must first know when your doe is in heat, and since does are usually only in heat for anywhere from six to seventy-two hours, you have to make sure that the buck and doe are together during that crucial time period, a feat that sounds easier than it actually is. Over the next year, while we waited for Holly and Willow to reach full maturity, David and I extensively researched heat cycles in goats. We read Storey’s again. We read websites and discussion boards. We asked everyone we knew who had ever had a goat or who had ever thought about getting a goat.
A doe in heat may have a swollen vulva. She may have a discharge. She may be more affectionate or vocal than normal. However, like the temperature method of birth control in humans, this method is fallible. Sometimes, goats can have all of those signs but be in “false heat.” Sometimes, they can actually be in heat and have few to none of those signs. However, if you put your doe in with a buck, and she “stands” for him to mount her, that is a pretty good sign that your doe is, in fact, fertile. In other words, the only way to know for sure that a doe is in heat is to put her in with a buck.
Assuming we did successfully manage to mate the girls, there would then be the issue of what to do with the babies. Getting baby animals was something at which David and I excelled. Getting rid of baby animals was not. Doelings should be fairly easy to sell, but bucklings often were not. Storey’s guide had all sorts of suggestions about how to dispose of them: Drown them. Butcher them. And so on. I was sickened at the thought. But what if we ended up with all males, and we couldn’t even give them away? What would we do then? We had wethered, or castrated, Conway to keep him as a pet, but we didn’t have enough room for all the babies the girls could possibly produce.
The day we took Conway and Loretta to the vet to be disbudded, when they were just a week old, we had put them in a dog crate in the back of my car, and as we pulled out of the drive, Ama began a panicked, hysterical yowling. The kids, despondent, inconsolable, screamed back. When we returned that afternoon with the babies, still groggy from their anesthesia, they called to their mother, and as she answered them, they stumbled in the direction of her voice. Then they began head-butting her teats, wagging and flailing and crying in between gulps of milk. Their distress was real, and as I watched them, I thought of those nights when Aaron was a newborn, before we began letting him sleep in our bed. Every evening was traumatic, filled with his gut-wrenching wails.
“Just leave him in his crib. Let him cry himself to sleep,” my mother and grandmother both told me.
But I couldn’t do it for longer than five minutes. His desperate cries found me wherever I was, and soon, I was running to his crib and lifting him to my breast to soothe him. His face red and contorted, his hands balled into tiny, pink fists, he would nurse and sob, sob and nurse, the two urges intertwined, one indistinguishable from the other.
Of course, baby goats were not baby humans. They would eventually adjust to being separated from their mother, but I also really believed that, like dogs, goats had an emotional landscape, something that far surpassed simple instinct. I had seen too many examples of the goats’ tenderness for us and for each other to believe differently.
One day, when Conway and Loretta’s playful head-butting had become too rough, Willow had stood near them, watching. Loretta was often the last to get food. Ama still sometimes knocked her off a pallet or into the corner of the stall when she wanted to arrange a premium spot for Conway, and Holly frequently knocked her away from the food trough. She was on the bottom rung of the goat ladder. While Conway and Loretta sparred, Willow’s eyes were keenly attentive, and it was clear she was assessing the situation. Finally, she decided that Conway was being too rough. Before Conway could butt Loretta again, Willow placed her body between them and slowly edged Conway away.
What was remarkable was not so much the fact that she intervened but that she evaluated the situation first, then made a conscious decision to do so. In all my years raising animals, I had never seen anything like it, and it was just one more piece of evidence to support what I already intuitively knew: goats are complex social beings. They are capable of feeling sadness, joy, and concern for their herdmates, which made the question of what to do with the does’ kids even more complicated. It was a practical question, certainly, but for us, it was also an ethical issue. When would be the best time to take the kids from the mothers? And how could we ease that transition for both mother and kids? Finally, David and I settled those questions the way we resolved all difficult questions: we would cross that bridge when we came to it.
By fall, when Holly and Willow were a year and a half, we had decided that a stud service was the best option for impregnating our does. Stud services worked one of two ways. With “driveway breeding,” which did not necessarily occur in a driveway, a doe in heat was visited by a ready and willing buck. The other option was to temporarily board the buck and doe together until the doe completed one or two heat cycles. Boarding was the pricier of the two options, and we really didn’t want to leave the girls at another farm. Driveway breeding usually cost about fifty dollars per doe per session, and though it seemed a whole lot like prostituting our girls, we decided this was the best course of action.
We would find some handsome, smelly fellow and wait until the light was just right. Then we would put on some Barry White, pop open a bottle of wine, and put him in with our girls, and…voilà! Goat cheese. There was a certain ick factor here, the fact that if we chose one buck for more than one doe, the does would sort of be sister wives. But in the interest of creating excellent cheese, we were just going to have to get past that.
We wanted to find a pure Saanen buck to mate with Holly because we thought pure Saanen babies might be easier to sell and because we wanted to preserve her milking lines. For Willow, Ama, and, later, Loretta, we were hoping for a Nigerian dwarf buck. I asked everyone I knew—farmers, old-timers, vendors who sold goat cheese at the local market. No one did driveway breeding. They all bought and kept their own bucks to service their girls. Service their girls. This was how we talked now. So we began to consider buying our own buck, though all the goat guides and websites we read cautioned against it. Bucks stink, they said. They can be aggressive. They do disgusting things like pee in their mouths. They will try to mount anything that moves or doesn’t move.
We also knew that bucks needed to be kept separately from does because having a buck in rut near a doe in milk causes the doe to produce hormones that could potentially taint the doe’s milk, make it taste, well, goaty. Still, we had gotten the girls so that we would have milk, and if we didn’t find a buck soon, we would go another year putting money into feed and fencing and bedding and vaccines and so on without getting anything in return. So finally, we began scanning Craigslist for bucks for sale, and one day in the early fall, we came across a beautiful American Dairy Goat Association (ADGA) registered Nigerian dwarf buck for only two hundred dollars.
• • •
The buck’s name was Crescendo, and the owners lived on three hundred private acres in the midst of DuPont S
tate Forest, a ten-thousand-acre tract of public land. Following our Google directions, David and I headed up the gravel road past the Guion Farm access to the forest. And then we kept going, past deer, wild turkey, the occasional hiker crossing the road. When we came to an intersection where the road headed into Henderson County, we realized we had gone too far and began to backtrack.
Finally, our GPS took us to an unmarked gate at the entrance to an unmarked road. The gate had multiple locks, but Todd, the goat’s owner, had told us he would “dummy lock” the gate. It took David several minutes to figure out how to open it, but finally, he unlocked it. We pulled through, then refastened the gate and started up what initially looked like a road, only it wasn’t really a road at all, more a two-lane dirt path filled with large rocks and roots and deep gullies.
I had never been off-roading before, but this must have been what it was like, and I fervently hoped my Mountaineer could withstand the trip. Finally, we came to a clearing. On the edge of the clearing was a dilapidated, rusty trailer that brought to mind every single television docudrama I had ever seen about people being kidnapped and held captive in dark, rat-infested sheds. Somehow, the thought of being imprisoned for years without any hope of escape seemed worse than being killed—infinitely more horrifying than being, say, hacked to death with a chainsaw. Our gun, I thought. We should have brought a gun. We did have Hester, but sliding and slipping around, clawing at the seat, she hardly looked intimidating.
“Turn around!” I told David. “We have to get out of here!”
None of these were particularly rational thoughts. The chances we were going to be kidnapped or murdered with a power tool were slim. The forest was normally one of the places where I felt safest. I biked and hiked out here all the time. Still, terrible things did occasionally happen in the woods—rapes and murders and people who suddenly went missing, never to be seen again.
“That’s not it,” David said. “That’s not the place.”
“Turn around!” I said again, but even as I said it, I knew there was nothing to do but go forward.
We were going deeper into the forest, and I wasn’t sure that, even if we could turn around, we would be able to get back out. Always tell someone where you are going. That was rule #1 of being in the woods, a rule every hiker and biker around here knew. So rather belatedly, I tried to send Alex a text: We are in DuPont looking at goats. But the text wouldn’t deliver. We had no service. Then, up ahead, where the road dead-ended, was another clearing. As we got closer, I could see a Hummer SUV caked in mud.
“This is it,” David said as we pulled in parallel to the Hummer.
Just as I was about to suggest that we make a run for it while we still could, a man and woman emerged from a wooden structure to our right. It was not exactly a house, but it was not not a house either. It was more like a house-in-progress, a sort of upscale hunting shelter. David stopped the car. To our left was a playhouse with real windows that looked like something out of Southern Living, and next to that, a fenced area with Nigerian dwarf does and a Great Pyrenees. The dog barked frantically as the couple introduced themselves.
Todd and Debbie were young, in their late twenties or early thirties. Todd wore distressed True Religion jeans and a white T-shirt. Debbie wore Versace jeans, a T-shirt, and Coach sunglasses. The diamond on her hand was enormous. Todd stuck out his hand, and I shook it, and then David and Todd shook hands, and then Debbie and I shook hands, and it was such an odd combination of designer labels and purebred goats and prep-school manners meets serial-killer-on-the-run bungalow in the woods that I felt disoriented, as if I had gone bushwhacking and come out on Rodeo Drive.
“Wow. It’s beautiful out here,” I said. “How long have you guys been living here?”
David grimaced. He wanted to get on with the transaction. But something definitely did not feel right here, and though I was certainly not one to judge someone who might have run into a bit of financial trouble and needed to quickly leave town, I was trying to gauge the situation and determine whether or not we were going to be killed.
Todd seemed to be of David’s mindset. He offered monosyllabic responses to my queries, but Debbie was more forthcoming. From our conversation, I gleaned that she and Todd were from Los Angeles. His uncle had purchased a few hundred acres here “for next to nothing” back in the eighties, long before this became a state forest. Todd and Debbie had “recently” moved out here, though I had a hard time pinning him down on how long ago that had actually been. Debbie agreed to move to the house sight unseen, and after they first moved in, they slept in a tent inside the house until the roof could be repaired. Now, his father had had a stroke, and they were moving back to California to care for him. All the goats had to go.
While Debbie and I talked, Todd was fidgety, nervous. He kept checking his phone messages and running back and forth to the house. David too was impatient. He meandered over to the bucks. They were kept in a small, separate enclosure to the side of the house—more like a dog lot than a goat pasture. Debbie, Todd, and I followed him.
“Do you ever see snakes up here?” I asked as we tromped through the tall grass.
“All the time,” Todd said. “Copperheads. Rattlesnakes. You name it.”
The bucks were heartily devouring a block of alfalfa hay, but when we squatted down next to the fence, they paused and looked up, then came over to greet us. Even through a metal fence, Crescendo’s regal studliness was apparent. He had long tan and reddish-orange fur with streaks of white, eyes the color of straw, and a beard that was truly impressive. His bunkmate was polled and tricolored and beautiful as well, but he didn’t have Crescendo’s iconic, Billy Goat Gruff beard. David stuck his hand in to pet him and immediately yanked back his finger.
“He bit me!”
“He thinks you have a treat,” Debbie said.
It wasn’t a vicious bite, but even if it had been, it didn’t matter. Crescendo was just so buckly. He was all boy, a man’s man. David instantly loved him, and while I didn’t adore him quite as much as David did—he was musky smelling, his beard tinged yellow with urine—I couldn’t make an argument against getting him. He was, indeed, a beautiful buck, as far as bucks go.
“What do you think?” David asked.
“Sure,” I said.
We needed time to build a space for him and to get the remaining one hundred dollars, and so, the decision made, David handed Todd a deposit, one hundred dollars in cash. Todd ran inside and scribbled out a receipt on a piece of scrap paper, and then the four of us lingered for a few more minutes while I talked to Debbie: Do you stay out here alone at night? Do you have a gun? The answers were: Yes, and yes, several.
“We have a gun too,” I said, perhaps a little too urgently.
Todd gave me a look. David also gave me a look: Stop. Please stop. But before I could restrain myself, I was already clarifying. I didn’t want them to think I was currently armed. Or maybe I did. Maybe I should leave the meaning ambiguous, but I was too nervous to be quiet.
“I mean, we keep guns at our cabin,” I said.
All three of them—Todd, David, and Debbie—stared at me awkwardly for a few seconds before agreeing. Yes, yes. Out in the middle of nowhere like this, one might need a gun. You just never knew. After we scheduled a time to come back to pay the balance and pick up Crescendo, we got in our car and waved goodbye to our new, somewhat shady friends and slipped and bumped our way back to the dummy-locked gate.
Crescendo was perfect—healthy and beautiful and a really good deal. He would make a wonderful sire for our girls. The problem was, we were short on cash. Really short. For days, we had been low on gas for the cars and on groceries, and if we had been being practical, we probably would have realized we just needed to spend our money on food. Instead, we were thinking long-term—about how to stop pouring goat food into animals who were not producing anything for us in return. Of course, we loved them. But
they were farm animals, and farm animals are supposed to yield something, to contribute to their upkeep.
So the next morning, David called around until he found a buyer for his rifle, a family member who collected guns and who we knew was a responsible gun owner. Though the sale of the gun was legal, we did the exchange at a local park, which I was pretty certain was not legal, but it was a good halfway point between our houses. As David moved the rifle from the trunk of our car to the trunk of the buyer’s car, I scanned the parking lot for cops. Then the three of us hung out and chatted for a few minutes before David pocketed the cash—enough for groceries and the amount due on one hopefully fertile buck.
• • •
There was something about the whole thing—the sellers, the deal, the gun trade—that felt sketchy, but we would have no other money for days. In the meantime, Crescendo’s owners would be leaving town—if they hadn’t already. So the next evening, while I was in a faculty meeting, David took the money we owed, in cash, and headed back to DuPont. That night, long after I was home, David pulled into the driveway with Crescendo. He opened the hatch, and Crescendo stepped gracefully onto the gravel. David and I stood next to him, admiring the red and orange hues of his coat, his wildly epic beard.
“What are we going to name him?” David asked.
“Merle,” I said.
And it was done. Though his mother was a blue-eyed beauty named Viviana and his father a stately buck named Sandstorm, he was just more a Merle sort of guy—shaggy, bearded, haggard. Plus, we just weren’t Crescendo kind of people. Merle calmly and quietly followed David into the barn, where he ate some hay, sniffed around a bit, then delicately nibbled on an apple slice I offered him. The girls barely seemed to notice him.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 20