Flat Broke with Two Goats

by Jennifer McGaha

  But it was too late to reset the mood, if it had ever been set to begin with. David had already dragged the tub out onto the grass, and he now stood with one hand on the lid.

  “It’s just a little anticlimactic,” I said, right before he popped open the lid and turned the box on its side.

  I squealed and jumped back inside the car. David opened the back door, threw in the bucket, then hopped up front. Together, we watched the possum’s thick, rodent-like tail and her bright, beady eyes race across the tall grass and disappear into the brush on the far side of the field.

  “Let’s get out of here,” David said when she was gone.

  I hesitated. It seemed silly, I knew, but I felt an odd kinship with the possum. She had been evicted, expelled, ejected from her home, and while part of me hoped she would find her way back over the steep hillside, another part of me hoped that she would be happy here where there were plenty of mice and berries and snakes to eat, where she could romp unencumbered through the field, wiggling her little nose and making tiny possum handprints in the damp earth.

  I looked once more in the direction she had fled before gunning the gas and heading back toward home.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Though we felt like we had won the lottery when our six beautiful, healthy goats were born that summer, we did not actually win the lottery. However, by spring, we had reached a payment agreement with the state of North Carolina, and with our hefty monthly payments came a newfound freedom: our bank accounts were no longer levied, my wages no longer garnished. Finally, we could use our bank cards again. We could pay for gas at the pump, order a ninety-nine cent book from Amazon, reserve an airline ticket or hotel room when we traveled for work or school. Finally, we could envision a time when the state debt would be settled, when that was one less thing we had to worry about. Of course, we still owed the IRS a staggering amount that seemed no less insurmountable than it had four years ago. It was not cancer or heart disease or Alzheimer’s, yet it was something we both thought about every day, a bitter, pungent haze that hovered over our lives. We lived through it, around it, in spite of it, but we were always aware of its presence.

  We also lived with a slew of regrets—what if we hads and what if we hadn’ts: What if I had kept the full-time job at the university all those years ago? What if we hadn’t sent our kids to private school? What if we kept our modest house in town rather than buying Denise and Jeff’s house? What if we had had fewer dogs? What if we had talked sooner and more often and more honestly? What if I had majored in something other than English, something more lucrative?

  I also often thought about Denise. As soon as our house had gone into foreclosure, I had begun avoiding places where I thought I might see her. I even drove to a grocery store in a neighboring town to reduce my chances of running into her. I just did not know what I would say if I saw her. I did not even know what I wanted to say.

  For David, our relationship with Jeff and Denise had been primarily a financial one, but I had considered Denise a friend. Even though Denise and Jeff had experienced a net gain out of the deal by quickly reselling the house after foreclosing, I still wrestled with feelings of guilt and betrayal. Not one or the other, but both. Grief has a way of doing that—of forcing you to see everything more clearly. I had not been a good friend to Denise, nor had she been a good friend to me. Both of those things were true. They coexisted.

  Through mutual friends, I heard that Denise’s daughter had graduated from college and was in Europe and that her son had gotten his pilot’s license, and I was glad that her family was happy and doing well. Still, I often dreamed of her. In my dreams, I would be strolling down the ice cream aisle in the grocery store when I would bump into her. Or I would be at a party, and there she would be, across the room, laughing with a group of friends, and her eyes would grow wide and wary as I approached, as the partygoers scattered and left us alone.

  “I’m sorry for what happened,” the dream me told her every time. “I didn’t know it would turn out this way. I should have known, but I didn’t.”

  Sometimes, I woke up then, enormously relieved to have said something—anything—but other times, I lingered just long enough to hear her answer.

  “It’s okay,” she said each time.

  Exonerating me. Absolving me.

  • • •

  One afternoon when the baby goats were a few months old, I was outside on the front porch making my first batch of goat milk soap. It was something I had always wanted to do, one of the reasons I had originally wanted goats, but until now, I had not been confident enough to try it on my own. The recipes I had seen were too complicated, too time consuming, too science-y. And then one day, while browsing online, I came across instructions for how to make soap in a Crock-Pot in under an hour. It sounded relatively simple, totally doable, not much more difficult, in fact, than making Crock-Pot pasta e fagioli. I was in.

  The Crock-Pot was on a rickety, round glass table, which was not ideal but would have to do. I wore workout pants tucked into socks, tennis shoes, an old T-shirt, my grandfather’s oldest flannel shirt, yellow rubber gloves, and safety goggles. Hester took one look at me and scooted under the picnic table.

  “You’re okay,” I told her.

  She wagged her tail weakly but stayed put. I dumped the olive and coconut oils into the Crock-Pot and turned it on low, then headed inside to weigh the goat’s milk and the lye. This was the tricky part. I was very bad at measuring and weighing, at anything that required any level of precision or attention, and the whole process reminded me a lot more of high school chemistry class than anything I had done in recent years. And since high school chemistry class had not ended well for me, I was concerned. Though David had patiently explained to me how the scale worked—how to tell grams from ounces, how to weigh the measuring cup, then hit the home button to clear the scale before adding the ingredients—I was still nervous about using lye.

  I located a gallon of vinegar, which would supposedly counteract the effects of any spilled lye, and reread the instructions—always add lye to liquid. Lye to liquid. Lye to liquid. I repeated it to myself over and over. I had recently seen Crazy Love, a movie about Burt Pugach, the New York attorney who was convicted of hiring hit men to throw lye on his estranged girlfriend, Linda Riss. Linda was permanently blinded and disfigured from the accident but ultimately reunited with Pugach after he got out of prison. The movie was deeply disturbing on many levels, and it was all I could think about as I poured the lye crystals into the glass mixing bowl full of partially frozen goat’s milk. Walking outside so as to minimize the fumes in the kitchen, I held the mixing bowl at arm’s length and stirred. When the goat milk was thawed and the lye incorporated, it looked a lot like snow cream—piping hot snow cream, that is.

  I lifted the Crock-Pot lid and stirred the mixture into the melted oils. And then I got out my stick blender, stood way back, and began to pulse—short, tentative bursts at first, then more sustained movements. As the liquid began to thicken, I moved close to the table and watched as the mixture bubbled and fizzled and swelled. The stirring was meditative, soothing, like kneading bread dough. According to the directions I had printed from the internet, I was looking for a “trace,” which meant that when you lifted the beater, there should be an indentation where the beater had been. A sort of beater road or alleyway, if you will.

  After about ten minutes, the mixture began to look like butterscotch pudding. It was smooth and heavy, and when I pulled out the beater and piled some of the mixture on top, it stayed, and it looked exactly like the photo on the website. This, I decided, was so much simpler than birthing a goat. There were no plan Bs and plan Cs and all manner of contingencies. You just followed one set of instructions, and if you did that right, you ended up with soap. Now, all I had to do was put the lid on the pot and leave it.

  I took off my goggles and gloves and went inside to measure the essential oil, ho
ney, and ground oats. Finally, after about fifty minutes, I went back outside and lifted the Crock-Pot lid. And there it was—my very first batch of soap. A warm shade of ivory or a very light caramel, it smelled woodsy, earthy. Quickly, I turned off the heat, stirred in the oil and honey and oats, and dumped the mixture into two loaf pans lined with parchment paper. And then I stood back to survey my work. The loaves were slightly lumpy and smelled a little like breakfast, but they were already beginning to harden, to settle into something that looked like real soap. I was amazed.

  When I was growing up, my grandmother had often talked about her mother making soap in a pot over a fire in the yard, and perhaps because that seemed so laborious—so backbreaking and hard—or perhaps because I hadn’t even known that soap was something that could be made at home instead of bought at the store, that image had stuck with me. Now, like my great-grandmother and her mother before her and her mother before her, I had done it. I had made my own soap. I felt like I had run an ultramarathon. I had scaled Everest. I had given birth to septuplets. I had flown solo around the world. I was a visionary, a true pioneer. No longer was I returning to my roots. I had returned. I was Louise Dickinson Rich and Louisa May Alcott, an Appalachian Sarah, Plain and Tall. Still, as independent and self-sufficient as I felt, I had a nagging sensation that I was not actually so down-home. Back in my great-grandmother’s day, women did things like this because they had to, not because they wanted to, and if my great-grandmother had known I was whipping up soap in a Crock-Pot when I could just run down the road to Walmart and buy a pack of Ivory, she would have thought it a waste of time. And if she had known I was adding orange oil and organic oatmeal, she would have thought me beyond ridiculous.

  For my great-grandmother, making soap had been grueling work, and if I tried hard enough, I could see her outside her humble cabin, a third the size of ours. I saw her chopping wood, starting a fire, lugging a huge, heavy pot, and setting it over the hot coals. I saw her adding a thick slab of lard to the pot and mixing lye with water she had drawn from the spring and hauled herself. I saw ten children playing a game of tag, their feet pounding the grass, their squeals echoing through the treetops. I saw her sweating and bone-tired, bent over the pot, stirring and stirring and stirring with a long stick she had cut and shaved, her gray hair swept into a tight bun, her hands red and chapped, her face drawn. I saw corn stalks rustling in the field, mice darting in and out of the half-runner beans, chickens running loose in the backyard.

  And then I saw her pause and gaze across the valley to the mountains, at the trees flushing red and yellow and orange, at the deer and coyotes and black bear roaming the hillsides, at the trout and hellbenders and tadpoles swimming in the streams, the red-tailed hawks and the turkey vultures swarming overhead, and I saw the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes relax, the years fall away, and I knew then as certainly as if she had told me herself that her life, though hard, had its own magic, its own rewards.

  David was down at the barn putting up the goats. I could hear Ama making the special sound she made to get his attention—the sort of hysterical, bloodcurdling scream you might expect if a goat were being slaughtered. She loved him that much. I grabbed myself a congratulatory bottle of Bold Rock hard cider and eased onto a chair on the porch. High above the waterfall, a hawk lighted on a tree branch. I watched him land before his visage disappeared in the misty spray of the falls.

  Searching for the springhead one day, David had found a watershed about fifteen hundred feet above the cabin. There, in a mossy hollow, three springs emptied into a creek that gathered momentum as it flowed down the mountainside. I loved knowing that—that the waterfall was higher than I had ever imagined, that it sprang from the earth in a place where the soil was rich and loamy, that the part I could see from my porch was just a small fraction of the whole. Watching the sun dip behind the mountain and the moon rise high in the sky, I realized that the waterfall I saw in front of me was not the exact waterfall I would see tomorrow. It was continually reborn, renewed, restored.

  What did it mean to be reborn, I wondered. How much did you have to leave behind? How much were you allowed to take? I wasn’t sure I knew the answer to these questions, but what I did now know without a doubt was that I was not alone, that I had never been alone, that the people who came before me were still here, would always be here. And there, in the warm breeze, in the rustling trees, in the vast and endless sky, the ghosts of my grandparents gathered around me like stars.

  • • •

  My grandmother came to visit us at the cabin once, the autumn before she died. She was thin and frail, dependent on oxygen, a shadow of the woman who had raced down giant slides at the playground with Alex in her arms, carried Aaron on her sturdy hip, fed Eli green beans from a rubber-tipped spoon. She rarely left her home then, but she had wanted to see the cabin, so my brother, who was visiting from Florida, drove her over. My brother and David heaved her wheelchair onto the rocky front porch, and we all sat in the sun, watching the water pour down the mossy rocks. For a long time, my grandmother was silent, taking it all in.

  “It’s real pretty out here, Jennifer,” she said at last. “Real pretty. I think you’re going to like it out here.”

  And in that moment, I heard both what she said and what she didn’t say, that she felt my sorrow over the foreclosure and my struggling marriage, that she wanted to comfort me, to reassure us both that I would be fine without her. As hard as I had tried to hide our circumstances from her, to pretend this foray into homesteading was one exciting adventure that we had planned all along, she had sensed the truth, and she had come to check on me for herself.

  My grandmother understood loss. She understood hopelessness and poverty, the sort of wherewithal and gumption it took to live in a drafty old cabin in the woods. She also understood love and commitment and the value of family. She knew you could be happy with $4.57 in the bank if you were surrounded by people who loved you and people you loved. She knew you could make mistakes and get past them and that you could forgive the people you loved for doing the same. She was telling me that I could do this, that I would survive this, that I would be better because of this, and though it would be a while before I believed that myself, her words stayed with me long after her Toyota rumbled down the drive, kicking up dust and dirt and gravel in its wake. And later, when she was gone, truly gone, I would look back and remember how my grandmother had sat with me on the porch that day, her voice a soft and soothing echo through the hills.

  Goat Milk Soap

  The hardest parts about making goat milk soap are (1) milking the goat and (2) overcoming your fear of working with lye. The rest is a piece of cake. Once I got past my phobia of lye, I found soap making to be fun and relaxing. I loved all the smells and textures, the way the scents filled the entire house when the bars were curing. It was a lot like baking bread, and since I could no longer make anything as fussy as bread in our temperamental oven, soap making was a nice alternative.

  I have tried various methods with varying degrees of success, but by far the easiest way I have found is a hot-processed method that uses a Crock-Pot. Though hot-processed soaps have a slightly rougher appearance and tend to be darker in color than cold-processed soaps, they are ready to use soon after making and thus fulfill my need for almost-instant gratification.

  •20 ounces olive oil

  •40 ounces coconut oil

  •18 ounces frozen goat’s milk

  •9.56 ounces 100 percent pure lye

  Melt the coconut oil in Crock-Pot turned to low. When coconut oil is completely melted, add olive oil.

  Wearing protective gear and working in a well-ventilated area, slowly stir the lye into the frozen milk. (Note: Always add lye to the milk, never the other way around.) Once the lye has dissolved into the melted milk, slowly stir the lye/milk mixture into the oils in the Crock-Pot. Using a stick blender, blend in quick bursts for several minutes, until the mixture begins
to “trace.” At this point, the mixture should resemble a thick pudding (think butterscotch), and your blender should leave a “trace” or mark as you blend. You can test this by scooping out a spoonful of the mixture and plopping it on top of the remaining mixture. If it holds its shape, it’s ready. Continue with either the cold or the hot soap-making process.

  For cold-processed soap: Turn off the Crock-Pot, and stir in essential oils and other additions (such as oatmeal). Pour mixture into prepared molds. I use two standard glass loaf pans lined with wax paper. Smooth the mixture into the pan evenly. Let sit for 24 to 48 hours before unmolding and cutting into bars. (For a lighter-colored soap, you may put the molds in the refrigerator overnight. Remove the next day, and let sit for 24 to 48 hours before cutting.)

  Place the cut bars a few inches apart so they can “breathe.” Let sit for 4 to 6 weeks before using. I use old box tops lined with wax paper for this, and I try to turn my soaps once a week or so.

  For hot-processed soap: Once the mixture has reached trace stage, put the lid on the Crock-Pot, and cook on low for approximately 50 minutes, or until a pH test strip reads 7 to 10. You may need to stir the mixture once or twice during the cooking process.

  After the soap reaches the appropriate pH level, turn off the Crock-Pot, and stir in essential oils and other additions. Pour into prepared molds. Let rest 24 to 48 hours before unmolding and/or cutting into bars. This soap can be used right away but benefits from curing for a couple of weeks. I usually use one bar right away and save the rest.

  Note: I use the hot-processed method for rustic, earthy scents such as sandalwood and the cold-processed for fruity, flowery scents such as lavender.

  Reading Group Guide

  1. Imagine you are with Jennifer and David when they see the cabin for the first time. What would your initial reaction be? What are the pros of living there? What are the cons?