“Where’s the goat?” he asked.
“Oh!” Harry said, as if this had just occurred to him. “This way.”
He led us through a grove of oaks and pines to a broad gate that he unlatched. Inside the fence, we were instantly surrounded by massive cows, a rare, very large breed with thick heads and lovely, dappled coats—show cows. They edged closer and closer, bumping into us, pressing us closer to the gate. Jill carried a box of Nilla Wafers.
“Here,” she said, passing Alex and me handfuls of wafers. “Feed them these. They love ’em.”
We offered the cows the treats, and one particularly friendly bull sidled up to Alex, sniffed her hair, then rearing on his hind legs, placed his right front foot firmly on her back.
Alex crouched down and said quietly but urgently, “Dad. Dad.”
“Oh, he’s just trying to say hi,” Harry said.
David ran over and shoved the bull away, and just when I was thinking there were no goats, that this had all been an elaborate ruse designed to get us trampled to death by cows, a herd of Nigerian dwarfs darted through the trees—a dozen goats of varying sizes and hues, blacks and tans and pure white.
“There she is!” Harry said.
The goat he pointed to was white with long, lower lashes and brown and black markings around her legs and eyes—a short Sophia Loren with sides like heavy buoys.
“She’s beautiful!” I said. “What’s her name?”
“Katherine,” Harry said. “After my mother.”
While Harry launched into a long story about his mother, about her extended illness and subsequent decline and eventual death, David and Alex offered the goats cookies.
“Do you spell Katherine with a c or a k?” I asked Harry.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You can change it if you want.”
Katherine/Catherine seemed perfect with one notable exception: she had horns. Everything we had read said not to get a goat with horns, but she was so lovely, so well cared for, so very pregnant, that David and I instantly decided the horns were not a big deal. She was tiny. How much harm could she possibly do?
David squatted down, wrapped his arms around the doe, and lifted her as if he were lifting a heavy box, with his thighs and calves. Holding her out so that her horns were at a safe distance, he made his way to the car. The rest of us trailed behind, and while Harry helped David settle Katherine/Catherine into the dog crate in the back of the car, we said our goodbyes. And then Katherine/Catherine began to scream, not a restrained, anxious babbling, but a frantic, maniacal bellowing that did not let up the entire drive home. Whenever David took a curve at over five miles per hour, I worried that she was being jostled too hard. I didn’t know how careful one had to be with a pregnant goat, but I was pretty sure she shouldn’t be slammed around in a dog crate just weeks before her delivery date.
“Slow down!” I said over and over, screaming to be heard over the goat.
The smell of goat poop and urine mingled with her distressed bellowing, a disturbing, nauseating combination. In the backseat, Alex covered her ears and stuck her head out her open window. At red lights, people pointed into our car, and we read their lips: Is that a goat? There’s a goat in that car! Later, I would read Louise Dickinson Rich’s 1942 memoir, We Took to the Woods, about the years she spent living in the backwoods of Maine, and feel a special kinship to the people Rich described as “woods queer.” It was a term applied to people who had lived in the isolation of the woods for so long, they had gone a little nuts. Maybe we weren’t completely crazy—yet—but the moment we decided to throw a pregnant goat in the back of our car and haul it across state lines, we had definitely lost touch with what most people considered normal behavior.
Finally, two hours after we left the farm, we were home. Alex and I bolted from the car and watched while David moved Katherine/Catherine into the pasture with Holly and Willow. This, it turned out, was a grave error, a rookie mistake. Katherine/Catherine chased and butted the other goats, knocking their underbellies with her sharp horns. As we watched her try to gore Holly and Willow, we decided that, although she had seemed perfectly fine at the farm, there was something terribly wrong with this goat—maybe a genetic defect, some mental problem that was the result of inbreeding or injury.
Finally, we put her in a stall with grain and hay and called it a day. That night, we did what we always did when we had a goat question. We Googled it. And lo and behold, it turns out that you should never, ever, ever just throw a new goat in with your existing herd. You were supposed to introduce them slowly, over time. At first, they should be kept in separate areas, where they gradually become accustomed to each other’s scents and sounds. Then, after a week or two, they can be together for short periods under supervision. And then, if they were doing well, they can be left together unsupervised. So over the next few days, we backed up and did what we should have done to begin with, which seemed to be our modus operandi: Proceed at breakneck pace until a problem occurs, then furiously backpedal.
Those first few days, while Katherine/Catherine screamed and Holly and Willow stared horrified through the fence, David and Alex and I debated about her name. I worried that it was disrespectful to change it since, after all, she was named after Harry’s dead mother, but we often referred to our dog Kate by her formal name, Katherine. It would be too confusing to have a goat named Katherine/Catherine and a dog named Katherine. Finally, Alex, who had spent some time in Ghana when she was in college, suggested we rename the doe Ama, the Fante name for a girl born on a Saturday, the day we had gotten her—a Saturday birth, or in this case, a reinvention. It seemed fitting.
For days, Ama continued to scream. More than once, I thought something terrible had happened, that her head was stuck in the fence or one of her horns had been ripped from her head. I ran down the driveway only to find her standing by the gate, perfectly fine, bellowing at a truly shocking level. Eventually, I figured out that she was crying for David. Whenever he was working down at the barn, within her sight, she was fine. Whenever he came up to the house, she panicked.
Mercifully, Ama eventually calmed down. Though she would never closely bond with Holly or Willow, she eventually accepted them as members of her herd—not siblings, but perhaps distant cousins—and they quickly learned to keep their distance from her, a feat made easier by the fact that Ama’s collar had a silver bell. Whenever Holly and Willow heard the telltale ringing, they darted off to the far side of the pasture. After a couple of weeks, the does seemed to have the dynamics of their relationship sorted out. Finally, we were able to leave them all in the field together.
According to Harry and Jill, Ama had been exposed on January 15. Exposed. That meant the day that pregnancy likely occurred, but somehow, it conjured images of a virulent virus or a pervert yanking down his shorts at a city park. It implied vulnerability, maybe even victimization, but once again, if I was going to be an actual farmer, I was going to have to toughen up. So I tried to focus on the numbers. In 145 to 153 days from that exposure date, give or take a few days, we could expect babies. According to my calculations, Ama should give birth in early June. So on June 4, day 145, we began our vigil.
Chapter Thirteen
When goats are born, they dive into the world front legs first, poised to hit the ground. Their heads come next, nose, eyes, ears, the places where their horns will be, and then the rest: body, tail, back legs. Moments later, the doeling or buckling wobbles to its feet—stunned, amazed, ready to begin. Or at least that is the way it’s supposed to happen.
We had read that most Nigerian dwarfs have a fairly easy time with labor and delivery, but David and I wanted to be prepared to assist Ama—just in case. We read everything we could find about goat pregnancy and labor and delivery. We studied diagrams of how the babies should be positioned, then studied more diagrams showing all the possible problematic postures—front legs back, elbows back, head back, breech. If
the doe seemed to be having trouble, you were supposed to reach in and reposition the babies.
On paper, this seemed like an excellent idea—totally doable. The problem was that when it came to actual dicey situations, I had a history of collapsing under pressure. Once, when Aaron was a toddler, he had run into a wall and split open his forehead. Blood gushed everywhere—across the wall, into his blond hair, down his T-shirt, and all over me as I held him. David and I raced him to the emergency room. There, David held Aaron’s hand and whispered comforting things while the doctor stitched his wound. I began to feel woozy and dizzy.
“You’re doing great, sweetie,” I told Aaron. “I have to leave,” I told David.
Across the hall, I lay on the bathroom floor, my face pressed to the cold tile, my eyes closed to keep the room from spinning. When I finally felt better, I stood and splashed cool water on my face, then made my way back to the waiting area where David and Aaron sat reading Highlights magazine. Aaron, despite having a transparent bandage on his oozing gash and dried blood in his hair, was the very picture of tranquility.
“You can’t just fall apart like that whenever something happens,” David said on the way home.
“Of course I can,” I said.
I blamed my wooziness on multiple things—my low blood pressure, my childhood diagnosis of epilepsy, etc.—but the fact was, I was just not any good in a crisis. Therefore, since I doubted I would be much help during the actual goat delivery, I vowed to do my part beforehand.
Because I had read that sometimes goats accidentally had their babies in their water buckets, we exchanged Ama’s large bucket for a small Tupperware container, and I gathered the other necessities. At Walmart, I bought K-Y Jelly, adult pee pads, and a package of latex gloves, and David assembled a birthing kit—a plastic tub filled with all the aforementioned items plus iodine, towels, paper towels, trash bags, a computer printout of the various birthing positions, cotton balls, dental floss, etc. Having a birthing kit made me feel responsible, like I was doing something preparatory, preemptive, proactive, all those p words not normally associated with me.
Over the following days, we watched Ama almost as closely as we had watched the baby chicks. We made multiple trips back and forth to the barn as we looked for signs of impending labor. On the morning of June 5, day 146 after her initial exposure, Ama refused her breakfast and wouldn’t leave her stall. This was definitely a change from her normal behavior, and refusing food was one of the indications of labor.
All the literature I had read said that you should feel a pregnant doe’s tail ligaments to see if they were loose. Loose ligaments meant labor was near, so though I had no idea what “loose” versus “tight” felt like, I put my middle finger and thumb around the base of her tail. The ligaments seemed loose, but I wasn’t sure, so I checked the angle of her teats. If the teats were pointed at a forty-five-degree angle, she would kid within the next twenty-four hours. It was practically guaranteed. I squatted beside Ama, turning my head this way and that until finally, I determined her teats were at something roughly like a forty-five-degree angle. It was as precise as I could be.
Certain that she would kid any moment, I returned to the house for the birthing supplies. I also brought the book I was reading, Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. It would calm my nerves, I reasoned. Distract me. At the barn, I pulled a lawn chair into the entranceway and settled down beside Ama. As I read, I kept jumping up to check Ama’s vulva, which was supposed to be changing—swelling, turning red, dripping fluid. As she paced around the barn, I cooed sympathetic things to her—Good girl. You are so beautiful. You are going to be a great mama. Finally, she stretched onto the straw, her hips spread wide—child’s pose. Her breathing was heavy and loud, the air stale and thick.
Aaron’s twenty-second birthday was eleven days away, and watching Ama’s bulging, clumsy body, the way she shifted on the straw, searching for a comfortable position, reminded me of the hot, muggy summer years ago when I had been expecting Aaron. My legs and ankles were swollen, my belly round from my unborn son and the cannoli I ate after lunch each day. My diaphragm was smashed against my lungs. At night, I slept propped up on a stack of pillows, my stomach lurching and heaving like a giant water balloon.
Up until now, I had been excited about this moment, thrilled about seeing the kids and about what their births would mean—that after all this work, all the planning and hoping and dreaming, we might finally be able to have our own goat milk—but now, I panicked. The air in the barn felt too close. My heart began to race. My palms were damp, and I struggled to breathe. Frightened for Ama, worried that even after all our preparations, we weren’t really prepared, I was now certain I wouldn’t be able to handle any problems that might develop.
This was foolish. I was foolish. My formal education was useless. What I needed was practical knowledge, real-life experience, the type of know-how I had scorned when I was a teenager. In need of fresh air, I put down my book and walked out into the harsh sunlight.
Just beyond the barn, the hillside had exploded with roses in all shades of red and pink. As I stood admiring them, David pulled up in his truck. He had been to the store to get more birthing supplies—a rubber suction bulb and a stethoscope.
“I don’t even know where a goat’s heart is,” he said. “But I’m going to Google it.”
Google. What a poor substitute for experience, for the type of apprenticeship that happened naturally for kids who grew up on farms. At our high school, we had had two covered breezeways—the smokers’ breezeway and the nonsmokers’ breezeway. The smokers’ breezeway led from the main building to the vocational wing, and many of the farm kids hung out there. They wore work boots and Wranglers and wide, round belt buckles. In between classes, they leaned against the railings, smoking Camels or dipping Skoal. My friends and I—the college-bound kids, the honors-class kids, the band kids—hung out on the other breezeway. We never smoked at school. We smoked on the weekends, and then only if we were drinking or stoned.
Looking back, I realize how ridiculous we were with our IZOD shirts and French jeans, our gold-bead necklaces, and our arrogance. If I could go back and live it all over again, I would spend my whole day on the smokers’ breezeway, asking all the questions I wish I knew the answers to now: What’s the best kind of hay for goats? How much grain does a pregnant doe need? How the hell do you know when a goat’s tail ligaments are actually loose?
Holly and Willow were out in the pasture, lying back to back, chewing their cuds. They seemed grateful for the break from Ama, glad to know that she wouldn’t decide to claim the spot of grass they were sitting on. I called to them—hey, sweet girls—then headed back in the barn.
While Ama chewed on hay and scratched her nose on the barn wall, I knelt behind her to see if anything was happening. Her vulva was still tight, and there was no discharge. I sat back down and waited until eventually, the light began to fade. Finally, when the barn was so dark I could no longer read, I closed my book, shut all the goats in their stalls, and called it a night.
The next day, day 147, Pretzel and Hester walked down to the barn with me. Ama was unusually affectionate, a sure sign of imminent labor. As I knelt on the stall floor, she crawled onto my lap, then licked my arm all the way from my wrist to my elbow. I sat rubbing her head until David called for me. Outside the barn door, one of our hens, Terry, sat hunched over on a bed of straw in a dog crate.
For the past two days, Terry had hunkered by the coop door, not eating, not laying, not pooping. The other chickens had clustered around her, screaming and squawking, just like they did when Chicken Seizure Salad had her episode. For her protection, David had moved Terry to the crate with her own food and water bowls. The hospital, David called it. A couple of times a day, he fed her electrolyte water from the rubber bulb that was supposed to be for suctioning the baby goats’ noses. Now, he was crouched over a tub of warm water feeding her vegetable oil out of a te
aspoon. My cheese thermometer was next to the tub.
“I need you to help me for a second,” he said.
“Did you use my cheese thermometer?”
“Only before I put the chicken in.”
“Jesus,” I said.
Terry was missing feathers near her tail, and though we had never killed a chicken and never planned to, the scene itself was uncomfortably familiar. Add half an onion and some spices, and this tub was a Crock-Pot full of chicken and herbs. I filled and refilled the spoon while David held Terry and fed her the oil that was supposed to help her digestion. When he was satisfied she had had enough, he put her back in the crate, then headed into town in search of antibiotics.
Pretzel and Hester were lounging contentedly outside the goat pen, and I called to them as I went back into barn—Good dogs! Then I resumed my post beside Ama. It was a humid, lazy afternoon, and just when I was nodding off to sleep, I heard barking, which quickly became a frenzy of yipping and growling. Ama looked up. I looked up. But by the time I walked outside, it was too late to catch them. Hester was in front, Pretzel not far behind, his tiny legs flailing behind Hester’s as they tore through the creek and up the mountain. I ran screaming after them, but they ignored me, and soon their frenetic yelps became more and more distant until finally, there was only silence.
They had run up the steepest part of the mountain, into the fifty acres that was nothing but thick brush and trees and rocks. There was nothing to do but wait for them to come home. I couldn’t climb that far up the mountain by myself without getting lost, and even if I could find them, they would just run from me. I texted David—Hester and Pretzel have run off!—then headed back into the barn to sit with Ama. Every few minutes, I went outside and paced up and down the road. I listened and called for the dogs, alternately scolding and pleading for them to come back, but they were evidently too far away to hear me, or at least, I was too far away to hear them.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 15
