“We’re going to take good care of him,” I said. “I promise.”
The boy nodded but said nothing while David and the boy’s father lifted Alf into the crate in the back of our car. As we pulled away, the boy and his mother stood in the drive, his face hidden in her T-shirt, her hand smoothing his hair. Abashed and close to tears myself, I looked away.
Later, of course, after the goat got sick, I would realize how wrong I was, how deeply flawed my thinking was, but in that moment, I truly believed that, in the long run, the buckling would be better off with us—surrounded by a protective fence and plenty of goat friends and fed a steady diet of hay and grain. By the time we hit the main road, I was sure of it. And by the time we saw the hazy blue outline of mountains, I had shaken off the image of the grieving boy, and Alf had a new name, a name that continued our somewhat hit-or-miss bluegrass and country music theme, and though we debated naming him Ralph after Ralph Stanley, because that rhymed with Alf and might be easier for him to learn, we figured goats didn’t really know their names anyway. So we named him Waylon after Waylon Jennings. And as if to applaud the rightness of our choice, just as we turned off the interstate at the Flat Rock exit, my favorite Waylon Jennings tune came on the radio—“I’d Love to Lay You Down.” David cranked it up, and I, certain that this was a good omen, sang along.
At home, we unloaded Waylon into his stall, then offered him grain and water. Then, before we even went inside the house, we decided to put him with Holly. It did not occur to us that we were asking too much of him, that a five-month-old goat that had just been ripped from his family, then dumped in a barn with strange goats might need a bit of time to get his bearings. Nor did we recall at that moment the lesson we had learned from immediately introducing Ama to the other goats. We just figured a date was a unique situation. What young, robust, fertile, heterosexual guy wouldn’t want to hook up with a hot girl on his first night away from home?
Plus, a storm was imminent. Though there was no rain yet, dark clouds gathered at the tops of the ridges, and there was the low rumbling of not-too-distant thunder. David hustled Merle into his new stall, then opened Waylon’s door into the yard. Waylon ambled cautiously out, head down. Then David opened Holly’s gate and led her into the conjugal chamber. Standing just outside the fence, between the girls’ pasture and the boys’, giving them what we hoped was a respectable distance, we waited. Based on our experience with Ama and Merle, we fully expected them to rush at each other, to devour one another like a couple of ecstasy-popping teenagers. Instead, they stood several feet apart, completely silent, Holly bored and distracted, Waylon wide-eyed and overwhelmed.
The air was full of green smells—fresh cut hay and rain. From where David and I stood just outside the fence, I could see the rain coming. A giant, gray wave began at the house and moved down the driveway toward the field, then the barn. Goats hate rain more than just about anything, and as the torrential sheets headed our way, Waylon and Holly edged close to the barn, under the overhang, close to each other but not touching. Waylon gazed longingly toward the barn door. Holly stared expectantly at me. Clearly, we were done for the day.
“Maybe he’s too young,” I said.
David sighed and headed back into the pen. He managed to get the goats back into their respective stalls just in time. Lightning flashed between the pallet slats, and thunder shook the hollow. And then came the wind—terrific gusts that shook the oak trees and rattled the barn. Unless I wanted to make a run for it, I was going to be here for a while, so while David ran around, feeding the girls and doing repairs, I crouched next to Waylon.
“You’re okay, buddy,” I told him, rubbing his flank. “Everything is all right.”
He looked away, his gaze directed at the barn wall. And then he stood and turned his back to me. The first time, I thought it was unintentional. Maybe he was just shifting positions. But then he did it again. And again. Whenever I moved to his front, he turned his back to me. Whenever I tried to pet him, he flinched and backed away. Not easily dissuaded, I offered him grain and hay and licorice treats, but every time I held out my hand, he clamped his jaws shut and looked away. The mere sight of the plastic licorice container caused all of the other goats to begin a frenetic clamoring, but the noise only seemed to make Waylon more quiet, more withdrawn.
Crouched in the far corner, his head against the doorframe, he was almost unrecognizable as the high-spirited buckling who had, just hours before, been joyfully head-butting his young friend. He wanted nothing to do with me or David, and it would be days before he allowed me to pet him, weeks before he would come over to greet me when I came into the barn. As we shut him into his stall that night, I thought of the boy who had witnessed his birth, who had chased him through tall grass and cradled him in his skinny boy arms, and I knew that Waylon must certainly have been thinking of him too.
• • •
The next morning, when Holly still seemed to be in heat, David and I decided to try her on another date with Waylon. We weren’t too optimistic about the outcome, but we figured it couldn’t hurt to try. We put them back in the pasture together and, once again, pulled up our chairs to watch. Instantly, the air felt different, charged with a quiet yet unmistakable energy.
At first, Waylon eyed Holly from afar, but his eyeing was no longer remote. It was eager, expectant. His ears went up. His entire body quivered. Like a bat honing in on a mouse, he cocked his head in Holly’s direction. He leaned into the air and sniffed hard. Then out came the needlelike erection, and before I even saw him move, he was on top of her. I waited for her to try to throw him off, to dart toward the gate, but instead, she stood calmly and quietly, if not exactly enthusiastically, while he completed the act. It took three, five seconds, tops. And then, finally, there it was—a slight but definite arch of her spine.
“Bingo!” David said.
But I wanted to see a few more times just to be sure. After all, we had driven six hours round trip and spent our last bit of cash on this goat. I wanted to be guaranteed some goat cheese out of the deal. Fortunately, Waylon was happy to oblige. He completed the act four times within ten or fifteen minutes. In between lovemaking sessions, he stood with his head resting on Holly’s back, a postcoital goat cuddle. And even more amazingly, our wild and unruly Holly let him do it. She cuddled him back. I got out my phone and snapped a million photos of them standing there together, his narrow white head resting in the crook of her back, her eyes, for once, soft and tranquil. All in all, it was decidedly different from Ama’s manic mating with Merle, and when we finally took Holly back to her stall, she seemed already decidedly more maternal—older, wiser, more graceful and serene.
One morning a few days later, I started down to the barn and heard such an agonized yelling that I bolted down the drive and threw open the barn door. Loretta stood in the middle of her stall, screaming every bit as loudly as her mother had the day we got her. When I let her out of the barn, she ran to the fence, wagging her tail and positioning her posterior next to Merle’s face, an act that sent Merle into a frenzy of sputtering and hollering and peeing and lip curling. He repeatedly threw himself at the fence. He tried to jump over, squeeze under, barrel through the wires. On the other side, Loretta attempted the same with equal vigor. And when it became apparent to them that they could not get to each other, Loretta let forth a shrill, tormented wail that continued for three straight days and three straight nights.
We planned to eventually move the bucks completely away from the girls, but for now, they were within sight during the day and within smelling distance of each other at all times, which meant that hormones were constantly flying in both the girls’ dorm and the boys’ dorm, which is how I had come to think of the different areas of the barn. Whenever Loretta began her wailing, about once every three weeks, we settled in for three days of lust so intense, it made our own dating years seem tame in comparison. It was as embarrassing as it was fascinating to watch.
At the end of those three days, however, Loretta calmly walked back to her stall and joined her family, as if she had been under a spell and was suddenly released from its power.
Willow’s heat cycles, however—like everything about Willow—were more understated, more dignified. When I noticed her quietly standing near the fence and wagging her tail one day, I was heading out to go on a bike ride, but I texted David and asked him to put her in with Merle. His report that night: she had stood. Merle had fulfilled his role. Back arching may or may not have occurred.
“What do you mean it may or may not have occurred?” I asked.
“I just couldn’t tell for sure,” he said.
Over the next couple of weeks, Ama went into heat two more times—or seemed to go into heat. She was routinely so loud and demanding, it was hard to tell, so we put her back in with Merle two more times, which meant that if she were pregnant, we wouldn’t know her exact due date for sure—again. David also wanted to put Holly back in with Waylon, but I was certain, especially when she missed her next heat cycle, that that one session had done the trick. Now, if everything went as planned, we would have three pregnant does and a slew of new kids by February.
Lemon Whey Pie
FILLING
•1 1/2 cups whey, divided
•1 cup sugar
•3 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
•3 egg yolks (save whites)
•1 1/2 tablespoons butter, melted
•1/2 teaspoon salt
•1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bring 1 cup whey to boil in medium saucepan. In separate bowl, whisk sugar, cornstarch, and remaining ½ cup cold whey until it forms a smooth paste. Add paste mixture into the hot whey, stirring constantly until it thickens. In another small bowl, lightly beat egg yolks, and combine with butter, salt, and lemon juice. Pour a small amount of the hot whey mixture into egg yolk mixture, and stir. Add this mixture to the mixture in the saucepan and cook two minutes, stirring constantly.
MERINGUE
•3 egg whites
•¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
•¼ teaspoon salt
•½ teaspoon vanilla
•6 tablespoons sugar
Beat egg whites, cream of tartar, salt, and vanilla in a bowl until foamy. Add sugar, one tablespoon at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Continue beating at medium-high speed until stiff, sharp peaks form.
TO ASSEMBLE
Pour filling into prebaked pie shell. Top with meringue, and smooth to seal edges along the pie crust. Bake in preheated oven at 350 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes.
Chapter Twenty-One
By late fall, the dachshund calendar hanging in our kitchen began to look like a bizarre fertility clinic spreadsheet. In between my hair appointments and David’s dentist appointments, I wrote “Lottie in heat,” “Willow exposed to Merle,” “Ama in heat,” “Ama in heat?” “Ama in heat!” and so on. We also recorded the goat’s weights and measurements, their birthdays, their history of worming and vaccines. This thing that had once been a new hobby, a distraction to help us forget everything we had lost, now seemed an integral part of our lives. Even though we didn’t get paid in money, farming began to seem more and more like a job, and for the first time in our lives, David and I both loved going to work.
Instead of the corner office I had at the college—the one that smelled like coffee and floor wax, where students cried about their ex-lovers and argued about their grades while I sat in a black swivel chair, wearing REI dresses and flower-print bifocals from Whole Foods, trying achieve that perfect balance between being professional yet approachable, encouraging yet firm—now I worked in a barn. No matter how cold it was outside, the barn was warm and cozy, filled with the heat from so many bodies, and after my morning chores were done, I often lingered there, rubbing the goats’ noses and drinking in their musky scent.
On those mornings, I often thought of my grandparents, of the sprawling farms from their childhoods that had been parceled out and divided among their many siblings, then finally sold for next to nothing in order to pay other expenses. My grandfather began work at Champion International in Canton in 1935 when he was eighteen years old. He only had a sixth-grade education, and he worked as a crane operator, lifting massive rolls of paper onto the loading dock for the train. The job paid well enough, but for a man who had grown up on a farm in Sandy Mush, who had spent his childhood baling hay and plowing fields, mill tasks—the dark confinement of the plant, the monotony of the work—was contrary to his nature. He craved fresh air and sunshine, something to do with his hands, he got to do that sort of work only twice in his lifetime, both times when he was laid off from Champion.
The first time, when he was not even twenty, he got a job in Houston digging pipelines. My grandmother got a job as a clerk in a general store. They had been there a year when my grandfather got the call to come back to work at Champion. He walked off his job and went straight to the general store.
“Come on,” he told my grandmother. “We’re going home.”
The second time, when he was in his early twenties, he found work building the Blue Ridge Parkway as part of Roosevelt’s Civil Conservation Corps. He had worked only one day when the foreman from Champion called to ask him to return to work. My grandmother took a taxi all the way from Canton to the parkway to give him the news. Years later, my grandfather still talked about how beautiful the parkway was that day, about the cool breeze off the mountains, the feel of the ax and pick in his hands, the sweaty, grueling work that was somehow purifying, and there must have been times when he regretted throwing down his tools and returning to the tedium of plant life. Still, he had a wife and two kids to support by then, and mill work was something he could depend on.
Then, one sultry summer day in 1946, when he was not yet thirty years old, my grandfather was sitting at the breakfast table one morning when he passed out cold. He had been drinking coffee, and he simply set down his mug, closed his eyes, and fell out of his chair. My grandmother was standing at the stove, frying sausage and scrambling eggs, and when she heard him hit the wood floor, she ran to him, shaking him and screaming his name while their two coal-headed babies looked on. My grandfather was so clammy and cool, so utterly still, she truly believed he was already gone. Nonetheless, she called for help, and while she sat on the floor with her husband, waiting for the doctor to arrive, something that had heretofore been just a fleeting shadow in her thoughts began to take form and shape, to grow into a horrifying and fully realized truth: her husband was an addict.
For the better part of two years, my grandfather had been popping handfuls of pain pills, moving groggily through one day and then the next. He kept pills on his nightstand, pills in his pants pocket, pills in his car. He didn’t count them. He just took a “few” or “some,” however many the occasion seemed to demand. By the time the doctor arrived that day, my grandmother had formulated her thoughts into words, and when she told the doctor where the remaining pills were and approximately how many he had taken, the doctor gave him an injection to “roust him up.” By the time my grandfather regained consciousness, my grandmother had called her brother-in-law to report her husband’s condition. Her brother-in-law, Bill, in turn, had called their father, and by the time my grandfather was back at work that evening, my great-grandfather was paying a visit to his son’s dealer, the town doctor. I never knew my great-grandfather, but by all accounts, he was a formidable man, and whatever he said to the doctor must have been convincing because for the next sixty years, my grandfather was clean.
Standing in the barn one morning, my cheek resting against Willow’s soft fur, I thought of how soul-zapping that sort of work must have been for a man who wanted nothing more than to be outside, a man who was smart and funny and savvy, who could have been anything he wanted to be, if only he had had an education and some money in the bank. My grandfather
had been dead for five years when my grandmother told me about the pills, and now I knew why he had taken them. It came to me as simply and as surely as if he had told me himself, the whole story. It was as clear as the creek gurgling outside and the squawking of hens in the coop.
I knew how one day he had needed something to take the edge off the tedium, to float through yet another monotonous shift. How, once he started taking them, he didn’t know how to stop. How he was twenty-seven years old with a wife and two young kids he adored, but that when he allowed himself to think, he saw his whole, long future stretching ahead of him. He saw himself, day after day, year after year, lifting bales of paper onto a crane and dumping them onto a loading dock. The whole idea must have filled him with a longing so intense, it was physically painful, and even when he finally accepted his lot in life, the yearning—not for another wife or different kids or a bigger house or nicer car, but for a day’s work that left him feeling larger and more dignified instead of diminished and chipped away—must have stayed with him, the mysterious aches and pains a reminder of all that had passed him by.
All my life, I had had a safety net beneath me, people who had helped me get this far and who would be there again if I really needed them, if I were sick or one of my kids were sick, if I needed food or a temporary place to stay. We had never asked my parents or David’s parents to bail us out of our tax situation. They were comfortable but not wealthy, and forking over the type of money we needed just wasn’t feasible. They had given us plenty to get me started in life, and they had paid for plenty more along the way. We were lucky, way luckier than my grandparents had been, way luckier than many people who had lost their homes or who had never had homes to begin with. I knew that.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 22