I also knew I was not made of the same stuff with which my grandfather had been made. I did not have his grit or determination, his selflessness, his wisdom and foresight. Perhaps, years ago, if I had known how bad things were going to turn out, I would have chosen another profession, worked longer and harder, been a better provider for my family. But now I had spent years training and working as a teacher and building my writing portfolio, and I held to the stubborn belief that the way out of this was not through abandoning my life’s work but by digging in and working harder. Both of my grandparents had strongly encouraged my brother and me to get an education. They had celebrated our successes in school and in our careers, and I believed they would have encouraged me to keep going, to continue believing in work that fed both the body and the spirit, to achieve things that they had never had a chance to achieve.
Years before, when our children were in middle school and high school, David and I had taken our kids on a trip out West. In Utah, on our way to Salt Lake City, we had strolled along the rim of Bryce Canyon, admiring the cacti, the ponderosas, the magical, glowing hoodoos below. And then we came upon a grove of bristlecone pines, Pinus longaeva. They were twisted and stark, unimpressive, not at all like the magnificent white pines from home. But then we read the park service sign that told the story of these ancient pines. When the trunk of a bristlecone begins to decay, the tree, in an amazing feat of self-preservation, stretches its branches to the ground, forming a new trunk. It recreates itself. It is reborn. I had carried that image with me over the years, of the tired, mangled limbs untangling themselves and reaching for the ground. Hopeful. Tenacious.
What did it mean for me to be hopeful now? I wasn’t sure. I only knew that though farming had changed David and me as human beings, made us kinder and gentler, more grateful for each other and for what we had, I still needed something else, something to grab on to, some other meaningful work. Up until this point, my teaching “career” had done little to improve our quality of life, and now I desperately needed to find something new, something beyond the farm that I could do to improve our financial situation.
So that December, I told the humanities division chair at the college that I would not be back the following semester. Though I would continue to lead writing workshops at other places, I was done with teaching freshman composition, finished with being a permanent adjunct. The whole affair was just too frustrating, too demoralizing, and it was doing nothing to truly improve our lives. I had been writing blog posts for the Huffington Post, and now I wrote about the plight of adjuncts, an emphatic protest to the practice of using adjuncts in place of full-time faculty, and early the next year, I began looking into low-residency master of fine arts (MFA) programs.
My bank balance was exactly $4.57. Taking out loans and going even further into debt was not the most practical solution to our problems, but I needed to do something different, something radical, and this was all I could think to do. It was a risky move. I could end up further in debt with no better career options. However, an MFA was considered a terminal degree in my field, and it might help me secure a better teaching position. Given our circumstances, it was really the only shot I had at a better job, and on a personal level, I thought that perhaps I had a story to tell, one that others might read if I could ever just get it right. When I was accepted to my top choice of programs, Vermont College of Fine Arts, I took out a government loan for the entire cost of tuition—minus a six-hundred-dollar scholarship. Then I took a deep breath and began.
I would be fifty before I finished the program. When I was in my twenties and even my thirties, fifty had been unimaginable—a lifetime away. I had so much to do before then. I had kids to raise, a career to tend to, so much to do and see and accomplish. But now, here I was on the cusp of fifty, and the only thing I really knew was how very much I did not know, how much I would never know.
“If you could go back to any age, any age at all,” I asked my grandmother on my forty-fourth birthday, “what age would you choose?”
“Fifty-five,” she said without hesitation.
She was ninety years old then, and her answer surprised me then as it did now. Why not seventeen or twenty-five or thirty-two? Why, if you could go back, wouldn’t you go to a time when you had your whole life ahead of you, when you were young enough to alter the course of your future, to make better choices, be a better person? Perhaps she was simply being kind to me, choosing an age that was still ahead of me, giving me something to look forward to. Or perhaps this was one of the lessons she had learned in her long life: do not be too greedy, even in your wishing.
Goat’s Milk Custard
This recipe is adapted from Guy Fieri’s Goat Milk Crème Caramel recipe.
•1/3 cup sugar
•2 cups goat’s milk
•1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
•3 egg yolks, beaten
•2 whole eggs, beaten
•1/4 teaspoon vanilla
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Pour 1/3 cup sugar into a small saucepan, and heat slowly until the sugar melts and turns a dark brown. (Be careful not to burn!) Divide evenly among four ramekins.
Put milk and remaining sugar in a pan, and bring to a simmer. Combine egg yolks, whole eggs, and vanilla in a mixing bowl. Whisk until foamy. Temper by adding a small amount of the hot milk to the egg mixture. Slowly stir the egg mixture into the hot milk in the pan. Divide the mixture evenly among the four ramekins, and place in a roasting pan. Fill the pan with water until the ramekins are three-quarters covered. Bake 35 minutes or until the custards are set.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I was upstairs at my desk writing when David texted me: Come down. I normally did the morning routine at the barn, but this morning, it was raining, and I had convinced David to do it. I jumped up and ran downstairs, where David, still wearing his boots and barn coat, was standing by the door. Something was wrong.
“Waylon is acting funny.”
“What do you mean, funny?”
“He’s crying.”
Crying seemed a fairly general symptom, indicative of any number of things, but it turned out Waylon was also standing at an odd angle, his rear legs spread, his body arching forward. Though we had never had a critically ill goat, I knew that goats were not like dogs. They didn’t act ill one moment, then hop up and run around as if nothing had ever happened. The most pressing issue we had ever had was the previous winter when I was in Florida visiting my brother. Willow had gotten out of the pasture and eaten a few rhododendron leaves before David could stop her. Almost instantly, she had projectile vomited—spewing stomach acids and regurgitated rhododendron leaves all over David’s jacket. But then, just as quickly, the toxins expelled, she recovered. Normally, though, whenever a goat was sick, it was cause for concern. A goat could go from fine to dead within a span of a few hours, so any signs of illness needed prompt attention. I threw on my shoes and followed David down to the barn.
Waylon, who had until this point been decidedly nonvocal, stood in his stall loudly bellowing. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, or rather, nothing that was obvious to us other than his odd stance. Concerned about the cost of taking him to the vet, we decided to wait a little while to see if he improved. Maybe he just had a bad case of indigestion. Maybe this would pass. In a couple of hours, when it became obvious his distress was not easing, David pulled up my Mountaineer, threw a tarp and straw down in the back, and led Waylon out to the car using Hester’s leash. I jumped in the passenger seat.
The rain was by now torrential, and David smelled like a wet buck as of course did Waylon. The odor was nauseating and added to my growing sense of foreboding. This was not good—definitely not good. Waylon stood crying in the back of the car for the entire forty-minute drive. Periodically, I turned in my seat to face him.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “You’re going to be okay.”
But I was not at all s
ure he would be, and neither was he. His cries were agonized, his eyes wide and eerily bright. Finally, because my reassurances didn’t seem to help, I turned back around and looked out the window. The rest of the way, David and I rode in silence, the only sounds Waylon’s pitiful cries and the scratch-scratching of the wipers on the windshield.
We had been to Dr. Harris’s office a couple of times before, once when we took Conway and Loretta to be disbudded and another time when Conway and Loretta were both a couple of months old. Loretta had had a bad cough, Conway a touch of a cough, so we had taken them both in, just to be sure. In our previous lives, we were accustomed to vets who looked a lot like hospital radiologists. They wore khaki pants and button-down oxfords and long, white lab coats. If we brought a dog in for a rabies shot, we could expect to pay for an office visit—around forty dollars—plus the shot. When we first met Dr. Harris, we felt like we were in a movie. Tall and broad-shouldered, clad in jeans, a loose flannel shirt, and cowboy boots, she was nothing like our previous vets. In fact, she was unlike anyone either of us had ever met. When she came in to examine Loretta, she had one arm was in a sling, a purply-black eye, and a nasty gash on her forehead.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Oh, this?” she said, touching just beneath the stitches on her face. “I had a run-in with an angry bull. He tried to crush me against the fence.”
From that moment on, we adored her. She was both tough and tender, and when she readily diagnosed and treated Loretta’s pneumonia, we could not have been more grateful.
When we got to Dr. Harris’s office with Waylon, we pulled around back, and David led Waylon in the rear entrance. Inside, David helped a vet technician, a slender blond woman wearing jeans and a T-shirt, settle Waylon into a kennel in the back room. The kennel was one of maybe eight or ten large cages, many of them filled with barking dogs. Unable to witness Waylon’s suffering any longer, I retreated to the hallway while David and the technician stood next to Waylon’s kennel.
“Has he been peeing?” the technician asked David after a moment.
“Of course,” he said.
“Sure,” I called from the hallway.
“Well, I’m just wondering,” the technician said, “because it looks like he is straining to pee.”
David stood in the doorway with his back to me. His jacket and hair were soaked. His pants and work boots were covered with straw and mud and spots of blood from where Waylon had recently lost a scur, a small bit of unattached horn that sometimes grows after disbudding. I wore muddy jeans, my grandfather’s flannel shirt, and an old pair of hiking boots with soles so loose, they flapped up and down when I walked. I had not even combed my hair or brushed my teeth, and together, David and I looked disheveled, or perhaps worse than disheveled—like we had been lost for weeks in the wilderness. David looked from Waylon to the technician and back to Waylon. And what had seemed a deep mystery only moments before seemed so very obvious.
“Oh my God,” he said. “You’re right.”
And right away, I knew that was bad—very bad. I had read all about how males, particularly wethered males, should not have too much grain because it can cause urinary calculi, or kidney stones. The stones can then block the urethra, and if the blockage is not somehow relieved, the bladder can rupture, quickly killing the goat.
“How much grain have you been feeding him?” the technician asked David.
David kept the goats supplied with hay, but I was the one who determined the amount of grain they were fed. According to the online guide I had used since we had gotten the goats—for feeding recommendations as well as pretty much everything else—young, unwethered males could have three cups of grain per day until they had reached one year of age. What I had discounted, but which I would later learn was extremely important, was that the guide also recommended giving bucks a regular dose of ammonium chloride, which helped break up any stones that might form. Because Waylon had looked so thin when we got him, I had been feeding him the same amount I had been feeding the does—three cups of grain in the morning along with a cup of beet pulp and a cup of sunflower seeds.
Now, David looked at me.
“Three cups a day,” I said.
The technician was out in the hallway now. She gave me a long look.
“I’ll let Dr. Harris know,” she finally said.
And then she walked us toward the door, assuring us that Dr. Harris would call just as soon as she had examined Waylon.
Neither David nor I said much on the way home. What was there to say? It was my fault Waylon was sick. It was obvious from the technician’s questions, from her grim expression when I had told her how much grain Waylon had been getting, that I had been overfeeding him. I thought again, as I had so many times, of the day we had gotten Waylon, of the way he had mourned for the boy who had loved him and of the way the boy had mourned for him. I thought I had calculated the right amount of feed, but if there was one thing I had learned over the last few years, it was that, in farm life, good intentions were worth very little. When I had made a mistake in teaching, when I accidentally miscalculated a student’s average or forgot to add enough spaces on my individual conference schedule, those mistakes were easily remedied. In farming, however, whatever mistakes you made had swift and certain consequences, both emotionally and financially.
Later that evening, we got a call from Dr. Harris. Waylon did, in fact, have a blockage, and we had two choices. She could try to place a catheter into his bladder to allow the urine to drain. Hopefully, then, the calculi would dissolve, and he would be able to urinate naturally. Or she could cut a hole in his side and attach his bladder to his side, creating a permanent way for urine to pass through the body. This latter procedure, though extreme, would be a permanent solution. However, he would constantly leak urine, and he would always smell like pee.
Because it seemed less extreme, David and I opted for the first solution. We hoped to use Waylon as a stud in the future to help offset the costs for his upkeep, and we worried that a urine-soaked goat might dissuade potential clients. We also hoped to still have the beautiful, pure-as-the-driven-snow goat we had brought home just weeks before. Those seemed like selfish reasons, but this procedure also seemed like the less invasive, the less difficult one for Waylon. We gave Dr. Harris the go-ahead for the surgery, and she called us less than an hour later. The procedure had gone well, and Waylon was comfortable. They would watch him for a few days before sending him home.
In the weeks since we had gotten him, Waylon had gradually become more affectionate, especially with David. He even allowed me to rub his head and the soft spot just above his nose. However, the next week, when Waylon returned home with a catheter, a bottle of antibiotics, and a container of ammonium chloride that we had been instructed to add to his water, his beautiful, golden eyes were glassy and we tried to pet him, he shied away. Perhaps he hadn’t been here long enough to remember this was his home, or perhaps he still felt bad, or maybe the stay at the vet’s had been traumatic for him. It was hard to know. We didn’t really understand enough about goats to know exactly what was wrong or how to help him, but both David and I spent a lot of time talking to him and petting him, trying once again to reassure him and lift his spirits.
Dr. Harris had told us to look for signs that, in addition to passing urine through the catheter, Waylon was also peeing through his penis, so several times a day, David crouched on the ground next to him, his head next to Waylon’s underbelly, looking for urine. At first, we only saw urine from the catheter, but gradually, in the coming days, tiny drops of pee began to flow from Waylon’s penis. We were ecstatic. He was going to be okay. We went out for barbecue (pork for David, tempeh for me) and local beer and toasted to Waylon’s good health.
Finally, two weeks after the initial surgery, per the original plan, we took Waylon back to Dr. Harris’s office and left him to have the catheter removed. This time, we were optimist
ic, eager for him to be back to “normal,” but later that afternoon, the receptionist called. Waylon was no longer urinating from his penis, only the catheter. There was still a blockage. After a few days of “encouraging his urine flow,” Dr. Harris felt that there was enough urine passing to remove the catheter, and Waylon once again returned home. This time, he was in better spirits. He head-butted with Merle, munched on the pine limbs David threw out for him, and whispered to Holly through the fence.
I loved watching the two of them “chatting,” Waylon sticking his nose through the wires, Holly cooing back to him. Though Saanens tended to have only one kid at a time, Holly looked like she could easily have twelve kids in her belly. Waylon must have thought she was glowing. He never paid attention to any of the other does, only Holly, and I couldn’t help believing that he knew or remembered or sensed—whatever goats do—that the two of them had a special bond.
After his illness, we no longer fed Waylon grain, just hay and beet pulp and sunflower seeds and the occasional fruit or vegetable peel, and though he still occasionally cried when he urinated, he was definitely eating and peeing and playing. And then, the morning after Christmas, David went down to the barn and found Waylon crying in his stall. Crouching on the ground next to him, David saw pee coming out his penis, but it was coming in dribbles, not in a steady flow.
Our children were all home for the holidays, and Dr. Harris’s office was closed, so we decided just to watch Waylon that day. After all, there was some pee. Maybe he just needed to drink more. We added more ammonium chloride to his water, and all day long, David traipsed back and forth to the barn. Waylon cried intermittently, like he couldn’t decide whether or not to be upset. David checked on him last around midnight. All the other goats were lying down, asleep, but Waylon was still standing in his stall. Finally, David decided there was nothing more to be done that night, and around 2:00 a.m., he finally fell asleep.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 23