Most websites we had read cautioned against indiscriminately leaving bucks and does together so that you knew when to expect babies. That way, you wouldn’t sit around the barn drinking rum and waiting for goats to be born when, in fact, their due dates were nowhere near. So for now, Merle’s area was separate from the girls’ area, and until his stall was complete, he would sleep in the alcove of the barn, where he could admire the other goats but not make overt sexual advances toward them.
At first, Merle was quiet and affectionate and calm. However, twenty-four hours later, the barnyard turned into a high school classroom. Merle strutted around his section of the pasture, peeing on his beard and into his mouth, curling his lips, and making loud, gurgling sounds. He was a baboon—a goofy, goat baboon. And though he could not possibly have looked more ridiculous, the girls thought he was hotter than hot, a sexy, sweating, stinking football team captain.
The girls paraded past him, tails and heads held high—runway models. They started at one end of the fence, paused next to Merle, then continued another few feet before turning and walking slowly back. Merle loved them all. He ogled and goggled and drooled and peed. He was Hugh Hefner, the king of his very own doe kingdom. At first, he seemed to like Ama best. Then, he went ballistic when Holly sashayed past. Finally, Loretta did her runway walk, and he could barely contain himself. He tried to climb over the fence, squeeze under it, go straight through the metal.
“Isn’t that just like a man,” I said to David, “to prefer the younger woman?”
Whenever I disparaged Merle, David defended him. He doesn’t smell that bad. Actually, I think he smells pretty good. You just need to stand back when he pees. And so on.
“He can’t help it,” David said. “It’s just basic biology.”
“I sure wish I had known this earlier,” I said.
David rolled his eyes. Here we go again. But it did seem to me that until this very moment, I had lacked an understanding of some fundamental truths that farm kids must have grown up knowing—how a buck or bull or boar will instinctively and aggressively pursue any ready-and-willing female. Knowing that might have made the rejections and betrayals I experienced in my young dating years a whole lot easier to take.
Goat Cheese
•1/2 gallon room-temperature goat’s milk
•1 drop double-strength liquid rennet
•1/4 cup nonchlorinated water
•1/8 teaspoon mesophilic starter
Strain milk into a large mason jar or other nonmetallic container. Dissolve rennet in water, and add to the milk. Sprinkle in mesophilic starter, and gently stir. Cover, and let the whole mixture percolate for approximately 24 hours. After the curds have separated from the whey (the liquid), dump the whole mixture into butter muslin or double-layered cheesecloth placed in a colander. Gather the ends of the cloth, tie the remaining cheese into a bundle, and hang for 3 to 4 hours to allow the whey to finish draining. Season with salt (I use about ½ teaspoon sea salt per batch) and herbs/vegetables/fruit, and refrigerate. (Be sure to save all of the leftover whey! There are tons of uses for whey, such as lemon whey pie on page 284.)
This cheese is wonderful plain or with flavor additions such as the following.
JALAPEÑO GARLIC
This is my husband’s favorite. He spreads it over everything bagels instead of cream cheese.
•½ jalapeño, seeded and minced
•½ to 1 clove garlic, crushed
LEMON
This is amazing on ginger snaps.
•1 teaspoon finely grated lemon rind*
•1 teaspoon organic sugar
* Grated lemon rind is also excellent with fresh rosemary, chives, or dill.
GARDEN VEGETABLE
•1/4 red pepper, seeded and chopped
•1/4 green pepper, seeded and chopped
•1/2 clove garlic, chopped
•1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
•A handful of fresh basil, chopped
•1 to 2 tablespoons shredded carrots
Chapter Nineteen
Every morning when I went down to feed Merle, he had an erection. His penis closely resembled a very, very long hypodermic needle. On his way out of the barn, he gave a couple of hip thrusts, then dispersed his genetic material all over the barn floor.
“My goat cheese!” I said in dismay each time.
We had been warned about this—by every blogger and homesteading forum and farmer we knew. For some reason, though, maybe because Merle had been so sweet and clean and doglike when we first met him, this behavior still surprised me. And even though we had anticipated it, his stench was truly shocking. Sometimes, we could smell him half a mile away. Our eyes stung when we went into the barn. At first, we played a game: How far away from the barn can we smell Merle? The answers: From the driveway. From the beginning of the fence. From inside our closed cars as we drove past the barn.
At least I had expected Merle to smell bad. What I had not anticipated was that David insisted on petting Merle, giving him vigorous, enthusiastic head rubs and side hugs, way more than the little strokes on the nose that I gave him. When David came in from the barn, I could smell him upstairs. When he sat at his desk in the far corner of the great room, I could smell him all the way in the kitchen. Finally, he got tired of listening to me complain about the smell and began keeping a change of clothes downstairs—which helped a little, but not much.
Ama was the first girl to go on a “date” with Merle, which was really more like a conjugal visit. Our plan was to eventually have a completely separate pasture for the bucks, but for now, the girls and guys were separated only by a fence and a couple of gates. Ama had been enthusiastically wagging her tail and backing up to the fence and making all sorts of low, growling sounds in response to Merle’s ridiculous displays, so we took this as a sign that the moment was right. David opened her gate and walked her into Merle’s area. Then we sat in lawn chairs between the fences and watched.
Immediately, Ama and Merle began circling each other, yelping and howling and hooting in a baboon-like fashion until they were a merry-go-round, running around and around in circles, their sides pressed together. Then they separated, backed away, leapt into the air, and landed in a head-butt.
“She’s going to hurt him,” I told David.
“No, she’s not.”
Our chairs were pulled close to the fence, and we each sipped a mug of coffee. I felt creepy, voyeuristic, but according to all the expert advice we had read, we were supposed to watch and wait for the doe to “stand” for the buck to allow him to mount her. Then we were to count the number of “pokes.” It was a decidedly unromantic term, but we had been told that three pokes were necessary to be sure the doe had a good chance of being pregnant. Three pokes or one hour together, whichever came first.
Once, Merle seemed to get a poke in, though Ama was edging slowly away at the time, so we weren’t sure whether or not to count it.
“Was that standing?” we asked each other. “Did you see a poke?”
We couldn’t be sure. We had also been told to look for her back to arch as a sign of successful mating, but that was not readily apparent either. Once again, we knew on an intellectual level what to look for, but on a much more important level—in reality—we had no idea what to expect. In any case, after this one episode, the two goats stood back and regarded each other from a distance. Then Merle turned his back on Ama and focused his full attention on his bucket of hay. They were done. David set his cup on his chair and opened the gate for Ama, who silently scurried out and into the girls’ area. Altogether, the experience was anticlimactic and vaguely unsatisfying. We had not even finished our coffee.
• • •
One night in August, David and I were in the kitchen, drinking mojitos made from mint David grew on the roof, when a slender, pencil-like tail trailed from under the corner wall. I sa
t at a barstool at the counter, and David sat at the kitchen table with his back to the wall.
“Is that a snake going into the wall?” I asked. “I think that’s a snake.”
“Oh, yeah,” David said, not even turning around. “It’s ringneck season.”
“What do you mean, ‘It’s ringneck season’?”
“I mean, I talked to the landlords, and they said they always had a problem with ringnecks this time of year.”
Although I was astounded, incredulous even, I was not hysterical. Perhaps the rum numbed my reaction, or perhaps I was getting used to this place, to the unlikely events that all seemed to fall loosely under the term adventure nowadays. At least David had not said it was copperhead season. Ringnecks were, for the most part, harmless.
The scientific name for a ringneck is Diadophis punctatus. They are slim and fairly small, around a foot in length. Usually gray or black, they have slender bright bands around their necks, like collars. Ringneck dating involves a male rubbing his closed mouth along a female’s body. Then, he bites the female around her neck ring and moves them both to an ideal position so he can insert his sperm into her vent. A love bite.
“What do you mean, you’ve talked to the landlords?” I said. “Have there been other snakes?”
“A few.”
David downed his drink, then sauntered into the great room and returned carrying a broom and a small, beige trash can. Just then, the snake’s tail disappeared into the gap between the floor and the wall. We watched for a minute, waiting to see if it would come back out, and when it didn’t, David sat back down.
I had not moved. The barstool I was sitting on was one of three we brought from the old house. At first, even though I wanted them, I had refused to bring the stools with us. It just seemed like bad form. The stools had been in the house when we purchased it. They came with the house, and since the house was no longer ours, these were not our stools. It was proper foreclosure etiquette. So my reasoning went. But then David said we had lost $150,000 in equity in the house and I should just take the goddamn stools if I wanted them. So I did.
“A few snakes?” I asked David. “How many is a few?”
“Four or five,” he said. “They’re harmless.”
“You have found five snakes in this house?”
“Just in my area.”
“Since when?”
“Oh, the last few days.”
“You have found five snakes in this house over the last few days, and you didn’t tell me? Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
David smashed the mint leaves in the bottom of his glass with a spoon, then licked the sugar off the side of the glass.
“Why would I tell you that?” he said.
Because I’m your wife, I wanted to say. Because I live here too, and I need to know what to be prepared for. But if there was one thing I had learned over the past three years, it was that no matter how hard you tried to be prepared, what you most fretted and worried about, you were never really prepared. You prepared for one thing, and then another, totally unexpected thing happened. So I supposed David had a point. There were enough other things around here for me to lose sleep over. No need to add a harmless ringneck to the mix.
Ringneck Season Mojitos
•6 ounces light rum
•6 tablespoons fresh lime juice
•4 tablespoons sugar
•Several mint sprigs
•Club soda
•Fresh lime
Combine rum, lime juice, sugar, and mint sprigs, crushing mint in liquid. Fill glass with club soda and ice, if desired. Garnish with fresh lime slices and more mint.
Chapter Twenty
By the end of September, we were desperate to find a bunkmate for Merle. Ideally, we wanted a Saanen that could also be a sire for Holly. Purebred Saanens would be easier to sell than Nigerian dwarf–Saanen crosses (or mini-Saanens). Plus, we had seen photos of crossbred Saanens online, and some were precious, but others were, well, odd looking. So David posted a wanted ad for a Saanen buck on Craigslist, and after several weeks, a woman finally responded. She had a pure, seven-month-old, ADGA-registered Saanen buck named Alf, the single offspring of their doe. Once again, we threw the dog crate in the back of my Mountaineer and set out to a tiny, rural community in the North Carolina Piedmont. After driving for almost three hours, David and I finally came to a winding gravel road lined on either side with cow pastures.
“Is this it?” David asked.
I held my phone, twisting and turning it, but the GPS was frozen, stuck on the last major road it actually recognized. I switched to a map and squinted to look at the road names.
“I think so,” I said.
David tried to remember what exactly Amber, Alf’s owner, had told him. Something about a white fence. Something about a deep curve.
“Did you not write any of that down?” I asked.
Clearly, he had not. Finally, we came to a white fence and a curve. A large NO TRESPASSING sign was tacked to a tree.
“This is it,” David said, heading up the steep drive.
At the crest of the hill, we came to a house, a small brick ranch. A youngish man in workout clothes was weed-eating along the front walkway. A German shepherd paced in a five-by-five pen in the yard, and a thin Saanen doe wandered loose, nibbling grass. David eased to a stop next to a large truck with a yellow state tag. The words SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT were emblazoned in black letters on the side.
“Shit,” David said. “He’s a cop.”
“Shit,” I said.
Not all cops were bad. We knew that. But we had spent enough of the last few years on the wrong side of the law to have formed some negative impressions. It was like eating a big plate of spaghetti just before you came down with a bad stomach bug. You didn’t necessarily blame the spaghetti, but then again, after vomiting chunks of tomato sauce and noodles all night, you sort of had an aversion to pasta after that.
Now, watching the lone doe wandering through the yard, the German shepherd barking frantically and lunging at the gate, I immediately wished we had not come. The doe was too thin, with only a German shepherd for a herdmate and no fenced area for grazing. David turned off the car, but he didn’t get out. He looked at me, then back at the man who had glanced up at us then continued weed-eating.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I just don’t know about this.”
“Do you want a buckling or not?” David asked. “This is the only one we’re going to be able to get in time.”
What I wanted was the perfect buckling, raised by a warm and fuzzy, liberal-minded family who believed in companion goats and secure fences. I wanted a goat that had been raised with a Great Pyrenees instead of a German shepherd, a goat who had an owner who was a little less paramilitary-esque. That’s what I wanted, but it seemed our lives now were always about a compromise between what we really wanted and what we could actually get. The window for breeding Holly was closing. She had already been in heat for two days, and she might not go into heat again this season. We needed a buckling, and we needed it today.
So David hollered to the cop, who finally put down the weed-eater and came over to our car, and after a brief, somewhat cool exchange, the three of us—David, me, and the cop—determined we were at the wrong house. Amber was, indeed, the cop’s wife, and Alf was, indeed, their goat, but the goat was at Amber’s sister house, a mile or so away. Apparently, he had spent the last few weeks on one extended date with Amber’s sister’s doe. The cop was heading to the gym, which was near his sister-in-law’s, and he offered for us to follow him to the correct location.
We caravanned down the driveway and through “town,” such as it was, long stretches of roads with nothing but mobile homes and churches and dirt patches for front yards. Finally, we turned down yet another gra
vel road until we reached a small pond, then a bridge. To the right was a small pasture, and in front of the rambling log house, a group of people had gathered—Amber, Amber’s sister, and Amber’s three kids, including one sandy-haired toddler wearing nothing but a diaper, his feet completely caked in red mud. And romping through the grass—leaping up and down, head-butting, chasing, and nuzzling one another—were a young boy and a lanky Saanen buckling, two spirited buckling-boys.
“Oh no,” David said as we pulled to a stop. “That’s the kid.”
On our way down, when we had called Amber to let her know we were running late, she had told us that was no problem whatsoever. It would give her time to get her son out of school so he could tell Alf goodbye. Dear God, we had said. That’s awful. We had almost turned around right then and there but, we reasoned, if the goat was going to be sold, he might as well be sold to us. We had just hoped the goodbyes would be over before we arrived, that the child wouldn’t have to watch us cart his pet away. But that was not to be. The scene that followed, therefore, was both expected and unexpected—the boy, about ten, lean as Alf, with freckles on the bridge of his nose, his jaw trembling, his eyes wet and round; the cop, now no longer a cop but a father, one arm slung around his son’s shoulder, telling us all that Alf would be fine, the boy would be fine.
“It’s just that they’ve played together every day since Alf was born,” Amber explained. “He comes in from school and just runs to that goat.”
Again, we hesitated. But I pictured the doe back at the other house, alone in the yard, an easy victim for predators, and here Alf was, running loose as well. Plus, he was thin—very thin—and I wondered if he had had enough to eat. David looked at me. I nodded, and he went back to the car for his wallet. Once the formalities were complete—the cash exchanged, the papers signed—the boy buried his face in Alf’s soft fur and tenderly ran his palm over the goat’s head. His entire being trembled—his lips, his bony shoulders, his pale, boy fingers. I put my arm around him.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 21