Technically, both Holly and Willow were old enough to mate, and they were both within the acceptable weight range, but just barely. Both Saanens and LaManchas go into heat for only a few weeks out of the fall months, so if we missed our chance to mate them this year, we would have to wait another year. Still, just to be on the safe side, we decided to hold off until the next breeding season. We wanted to be certain the does were mature enough and healthy enough to carry and deliver their kids safely. And though Nigerians are fertile all year and we could have tried to breed Ama again, we decided to give her body a break as well. So we packed up our milking supplies and waited.
How to Milk a Stubborn Doe
The first hurdle is getting the goat onto the milk stand. Once she is on the stand, you’re 90 percent done, but the first time or two this will likely involve a lot of coaxing and pulling and pleading. You may even need to act out hopping on the stand, just to show her how nice it is up there, how totally comfortable and perfectly fine it is.
Once she is finally in place, offer her plenty of grain. Then, while she eats, wash her teats and udder with a paper towel dipped in udder wash. I make my own wash by mixing a half tablespoon of bleach and a drop of Dawn dishwashing detergent with one cup of warm water. (Warm is optional here, but your doe will appreciate it. Remember your last gynecological exam. Warm gel is definitely preferable to cold.) After making sure that your hands are clean, position your thumb and forefinger at the top of the teat to close it off. Then firmly close your other fingers in a squeezing motion. You should never, ever yank or pull on the doe’s teat.
Back in high school, I played the clarinet, and the first time I was successful in getting milk from the teat, I was reminded of my stint in the marching band, as this is pretty much the same motion you make on a clarinet as you move down the musical scale. The first few squirts should go into a strip cup (a cup with a screen on top) so that you can check the milk for any abnormalities, like blood. After this, milk into the pail or, if you prefer, a mason jar, which is actually my preferred method. That way, when the goat kicks, you have time to yank your hand away and save the milk from getting poop/mud/straw/hair in it. Sometimes, a particularly obstinate doe can be calmed by a little impromptu serenade, which you can deliver while still squeezing rhythmically. My favorite milking tunes are Charlie Rich’s “The Most Beautiful Girl,” Hank Williams’s “Hey [Hay], Good Lookin’,” and Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay,” which I change to “Hay, Lady, Hay” and which the girls seem to especially appreciate.
Chapter Seventeen
One day that summer, I was at UNC Asheville teaching a high school writing workshop when David texted me. A helicopter was circling our roof, a helicopter with an insignia on the side—the highway patrol. It was so close, David could see the uniformed men inside.
We both knew why the helicopter was there. That first spring, we had planted a vegetable garden in the field near the bridge, but the only plants that produced anything were the herbs I had potted and set on our front porch, and even those were flimsy and sparse, not at all like the lovely plants I had grown at our old house.
Discouraged, I had tried to imagine how the original inhabitants of this place had survived. We knew from the remnants of the barn that they had raised animals and from the original garden plot that they had also raised vegetables. But how? We talked about trying to rent a garden plot somewhere else, perhaps in the field just over the hill from the house, but it seemed crazy to rent land when we had fifty-three acres at our disposal. Then, the next year, when the planting season rolled around, I had an idea. The tin roof of the cabin was a lovely, flat, sunny space, ideal for a rooftop garden.
“You’re kidding,” David said.
“Let’s just try it.”
He researched what type of plastic buckets to use and the proper ratio of dirt to compost to worms, and he spent hours hauling the dirt-filled containers to the roof. I had envisioned a couple of tomato plants and maybe some basil, but when he was finished, we had tomatoes, squash, bell peppers, mint, banana peppers, potatoes, and corn. From the yard, you could see the tomatoes bulging from the vines, the brown silks hanging from the corn husks.
At the time, we had joked about it. Hope no one thinks we’re growing weed up here. It was hilarious, absurd. Besides, we rarely saw planes crossing over, much less helicopters. But that day at UNCA, I realized we were undergoing an aerial search, being sized up to see if we merited an all-out raid. It was both totally predictable and surreal, and as someone who had spent the better part of the last few years on the “wrong” side of the law, I felt an odd mixture of guilt and outrage. And then I started to panic, but I tried to appear calm while my students responded to the writing prompts I had given them: Write about your earliest memory. Write about a time when you tried for something and failed. Write about your greatest fear.
While my students worked, I texted David: Put the dogs up. Get them all inside.
I was most worried about Pretzel because of his habit of bolting directly toward cars, a tendency we likely encouraged when we stopped our cars and picked him up. “You wanna drive?” we said, and he rode the rest of the way to the house with his paws on the steering wheel. I also worried about Reba. In addition to occasionally trying to annihilate our other pets, she was also skittish and unpredictable with people. Once, she had lunged viciously at David’s five-year-old niece. I could only imagine what she might do if a group of armed men barged into our house—and what they might do in return.
Besides, even after all our time here, almost three years now, the property still looked sketchy. The cracked porch window had not been repaired. Axes and chainsaws were propped by the barn. The coyote skull Hester had recently brought home was lying on the slab of tin covering the wood pile. An old copperhead skin was stretched across the front porch. In fact, we had long since stopped locking the doors because we figured that anyone brave enough to break into our house could just have whatever he wanted.
While I waited to hear from David, I thought of all these things. I also worried that he might panic, run into our bedroom, and pull our old rifle from its dusty leather case. Every time I gave my students a prompt, I instructed them to keep writing until I stopped them, and now they were writing furiously: Write about the weirdest meal you’ve ever had. Write about your favorite teacher. Write about the strangest thing about you. Write about the first time you believed you were in love.
While they wrote, I pictured the scene unfolding at home, both the scene that was actually happening and the scene that could happen if the cops got a search warrant and returned. Four months before, the home of a man who lived across the mountain from us had been raided. Police believed Bob had a moonshine still on his back porch, and in response, they sent in a team of officers from four law enforcement agencies—the sheriff’s department, the police department, the North Carolina Alcohol Law Enforcement agency, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
This show of force had arrived at his house at 6:00 on a Monday evening. As soon as the cops entered, Bob ran upstairs and grabbed a gun. He then stood on the stairs, and pointed a loaded rifle at the officers. One ALE special agent, a Homeland Security special agent, and two sheriff’s deputies fired their weapons. Within moments, Bob was dead.
Now, I wondered whether he had had time to consider who among his friends and neighbors might have betrayed him. Perhaps it was someone who had sat on his back porch and drunk moonshine out of a mason jar and swapped tall tales with him. Perhaps it was a neighbor who didn’t like the company he kept. Maybe it was a friend of a friend, someone he had never met.
In any case, his story was as familiar to me as the weeping of willow trees or the sharp scent of pines. It was the same old story generations of my family had told while gathered around dinner tables or on front porches, stories about running liquor across state lines, about dodging the law and outwitting the guys who would shoot first and ask questions
later. Sitting in class, watching my students work, I saw it all as clearly as if I had been there—my neighbor standing on his staircase, the rifle aimed at the officers, his eyes blazing, his hands sure and steady.
Are they still there? I texted David.
Yes, he said. Just above the tree line at the top of the waterfall.
A moment later, David ran outside and stood at the base of the falls, his arms thrown open in a gesture of defiance: What the hell are you doing? Leave us the fuck alone!
Only he didn’t actually say that. He just thought it. And I didn’t know about that part of the saga until later that evening, when I was making avocado gazpacho with the corn from a neighbor’s farm because our corn didn’t get enough sun, even on the roof. While David reenacted the scene, I tried to imagine what the men in the helicopter must have thought, my husband’s manic yelling, his unruly gray hair, his wild, unkempt beard.
Later, we learned that the highway patrol routinely did flyovers to scan for suspicious activity. If they found anything that met that criteria, they sent in a smaller helicopter, one that could get a closer view. An aerial search, apparently, did not require a warrant, and I suppose, to some people, we did look suspicious—an old, ramshackle cabin tucked back in the hills, a yard strewn with chunks of a tree trunk that needed to be chopped into manageable pieces, a chicken coop and barn pieced together with wooden pallets and salvaged tin. Like Bob, we were suspiciously Appalachian. Rednecks. Yokels. Hillbillies.
As the patrol helicopter hovered over the cabin, I thought of the simple dignity of the lives of my parents and grandparents and all the people who came before them, people of this region who had tried, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, to eke a living off the land. Just weeks before, I had found, in a box of my grandmother’s old cards and letters and photographs, a photograph of my great-grandmother, Lizzie, taken just before her wedding. In the photo, a dark-headed woman stood in a cabin doorway, one hand on her hip, the other by her side, her dress cinched tightly at her narrow waist. A handkerchief was tucked into the collar, and just below the waistline of her skirt was a small flaw—a tear, perhaps, or a patch. The woman was solemn, her lips full, her eyes deep coal, like the curly hair beneath her wide, straw hat. Next to Lizzie, the cabin boards gaped and yawned.
Lizzie’s given name was Elizabeth, but as far back as anyone could remember, people had called her Lizzie, and when she married Weaver Haney on July 24, 1914, they were both so long from these Appalachian hills that they seem to have sprung from the oak trees, from the wide, meandering Pigeon River, from the very earth itself. Lizzie was just seventeen years old, Weaver only nineteen, but already, their histories were deeply intertwined. They knew most of the same people, had known each other’s families most of their lives, but they also knew the land as intimately as a lover. They knew the places where it was soft and generous, the places where it was hard and unforgiving, the way the blight would come and wipe out a whole crop of tomatoes, the way a late frost or a dry summer could ruin a crop of beans or corn and leave families hungry, weak, and vulnerable to disease.
After Lizzie and Weaver married, they moved within shouting distance of both their parents’ homes, near the country store his parents ran. Weaver built a log cabin with three rooms—a kitchen, a living area, and a bedroom—and a loft. The cabin was heated with a woodstove, which also provided the heat for cooking. There was an outhouse near the garden where they grew corn, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and potatoes, staples that would feed their family of twelve throughout the summer and through the long winter months. They also raised chickens and cows and pigs.
Lizzie had her first child when she was nineteen, and she had another child roughly every two years for the next twenty years—ten children born from 1916 to 1935. My grandmother, Adeline, was the fourth child, the second oldest girl. In addition to working beside her husband in the field, Lizzie cleaned house and canned vegetables and churned butter. She made her children’s clothes, her own soap, her own cures for ailments of all kinds. She cooked massive cakes of cornbread and pots of pinto beans on top of the woodstove in the living room, and before her daughters were old enough to go to school, they too were lifting heavy skillets full of steaming cornbread, changing babies’ diapers, gathering eggs, scrubbing floors.
It was not a life that allowed for much contemplation, but I often wondered what she had been thinking all those years when she was raising her babies, when she was wringing the necks of chickens and chopping and hauling firewood and plowing the fields alongside her husband and sons, when she was hacking black racer snakes to death with her hoe and boiling walnuts to dye her own clothes. Was she happy? Was she glad to have a husband and so many babies to love? Did she ever want to be something other than a wife and a mother, to wear something other than a homemade dress and a homemade apron? Did she ever wonder what the ocean sounded like or how a large city looked at night, all bustling and loud and full of light? Or was she simply too worn out to want anything at all?
These last months at the cabin, these questions had been taking shape in my subconscious, but now here they were, emerging in a vivid, visceral awareness. The knowledge my ancestors had was knowledge passed down from generation to generation, vital information that kept people alive—how to turn a breech calf, when to plant corn, how to roll and dry tobacco, how to wring a chicken’s neck, how to salt and store hog meat, how to spray milk on green bean vines to keep off the beetles. Next to them, David and I were just two posers, two farmer wannabes pretending to be the real deal. Wandering among my working students, waiting for David to text me back, I saw that clearly for the first time.
“Keep working,” I told them. “Keep going until I tell you to stop.”
Write about a time someone you loved disappointed you. Write about a time you disappointed someone you love.
Finally, David texted me again: They’re gone.
Keep the dogs up, I texted. All day. They might come back.
My students gathered in groups, sharing their responses to the prompts, telling each other what they loved, what they wanted to know more about. I moved from one group to another, mentally calculating how long it would take the cops to get a search warrant, how long before they came tearing down our driveway, spewing dirt and gravel, sending our chickens flying into their coop, our goats kicking and galloping through the field. How easy it would be, I thought, to run upstairs and grab a gun. How counterintuitive, in fact, to just open the door and let them all in, all those men, all those guns.
Just stay calm, I texted David. If they come back, you have to stay calm.
On the day the officers shot our neighbor, two officers were treated for injuries received at the scene. One injury happened when an officer fell through a rotten step. Another officer had an “unexplained small wound to his elbow.” In later news briefings, the sheriff would call the incident “incredibly tragic,” as if some random event had taken this man’s life, as if, by sending that massive show of force to get one man with one still, they had not set up a situation bound to beget violence.
At exactly noon, my students began packing up their notebooks, getting out their cell phones and their lunches. Today was my birthday, and I had plans to go to lunch with my mother. It was too late to call her and cancel. She was already on her way. So I gathered my belongings and texted David one last time: I’m leaving now. Remember to stay calm.
I met my mother at the newly opened Sierra Nevada in Mills River to celebrate. I ordered an open-faced ricotta sandwich, Hop Hunter IPA, and blue-cheese cheesecake for dessert, and my mother and I talked about normal, everyday things, like how open-vat brewing differed from traditional brewing and how unusually dry the summer had been. And when we finished eating, I lingered, staring out the window, sipping my beer, missing my grandmother especially on this day we had so often spent together.
A few weeks before my grandmother died, after one of my overnight stays, we s
at quietly at the kitchen table. While I drank coffee, she smashed a prune into sugary oatmeal, smeared Country Crock and Welch’s grape jelly onto a slice of Sunbeam bread. With every bite, she took a different pill—a diuretic, a blood pressure pill, a thyroid pill. She was bent and tired, struggling to breathe. Beside her chair, an oxygen tank hummed. And yet, in the stillness of morning, the world to come just beyond her reach, her mind found a vivid spark.
“Do you remember that time we took you to Ruby Falls over in Tennessee?”
Maybe if she had asked me another time, when I had been washing dishes or helping her microwave lunch for her cat, I would not have remembered. But there was something about the quiet morning and the clarity in her voice that sent me tumbling back over forty years, and I was once again in a dark elevator shaft, my fingers clutching my grandfather’s gray pants legs, his firm hand resting on my head, the air growing cooler and more damp as the elevator dipped beneath the earth.
“I remember,” I told her.
She smiled and took a bite of her toast. Her eyes, once hazel, were milky white, and she stared beyond me to the robins gathering on the rock wall outside.
“There were hiking trails,” she said. “And all sorts of exhibits. Do you remember?”
I tried to remember, to release the slippery fabric of my grandfather’s pants and leave the elevator, but I was stuck there, four years old and terrified of the groaning, creaking elevator, of the darkness that seeped through my skin and settled in my bones.
“No,” I said. “I wish I did, but I don’t.”
Months later, after she died, I tried again to remember, to find her there in the elevator, to remember what she had said and how she had said it, to recall if she had laughed or tried to comfort me, if she had been scared herself or enjoying the adventure, but as hard as I tried, I could not see her there. Still, I knew she was close by. I felt her presence. Perhaps she was in the dark back corner of the elevator, her arms folded demurely in front of her, her hands swishing the lint from my brother’s shirtsleeve. Or maybe she was just above us, waiting to descend, her delicate fingertips poised above the “down” button, a blue vinyl bag dangling from one shoulder. Or perhaps she had gone down before us and was waiting by the water, her body light and shimmery against the dazzling falls.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 19
