Flat Broke with Two Goats

by Jennifer McGaha

  • • •

  The next morning, I woke to find Piper, our Jack Russell, the dog my uncle Bill had given me, standing immobile, staring at his water bowl. His eyes were glassy and distant. Something was wrong, very wrong. Piper was now fourteen. Kate was twelve, and both Hester and Pretzel were pushing eleven. Kate had a weak sphincter muscle and took hormones to keep her bladder from leaking. Piper and Hester took arthritis medicine, glucosamine, and the occasional pain pill. Sometimes, after a hard day of mucking the barn or climbing onto the roof to repair it, David gave the dogs their medicines, then popped a glucosamine himself. We were all, it seemed, growing older.

  I woke David, then Alex, and the three of us debated what to do. We considered calling the vet, but due to the holiday, the office was still closed. The only option would be an emergency vet in Asheville, a forty-five-minute drive away. Besides the trauma of the travel for Piper, just walking in the door there would have cost us several hundred dollars, money we didn’t have. And even if we had had the money, I wasn’t sure that was the right course of action.

  Years ago, we had had a fourteen-year-old corgi, Julie. She was very healthy and happy until a blood-borne disease left her needing repeated transfusions, a process our then-vet had encouraged. Never once did the vet suggest that we let her die peacefully, and never once did I consider that myself. I had thought it was my duty to keep Julie alive, but the way she had finally died—in a cage at the vet’s office—had haunted me ever since. After that, I came to believe that my role was not to keep my animals alive but to, when the inevitable time came, let them leave this world quietly and tranquilly, surrounded by people and animals who loved them. It was, in fact, how I one day hoped to go, the very best death I could imagine.

  Over the course of the morning, Piper became more responsive, but he was still breathing heavily. I gave him a pain pill from the supply our vet had given us to use in just such a crisis. Then I wrapped him in a warm blanket and sat next to him while he lay in a toy wagon David had converted into a dog bed. David had removed the wheels and piled layers of old towels onto the wagon bed, and Piper was nestled in the center. Alex and I sat next to him, rubbing his soft head, then the prickly fur on his back, telling him what a good boy he was, how very much we loved him. Through his fur, I could feel the sharp bones of his spine. His breathing was slow and labored, his eyes closed.

  Mentally, I listed all the things I most loved about him—the way he walked by my heels down to the barn each morning, the enthusiasm with which he wrested a treat from my hand, nearly taking my fingers off, the way he never complained when I ate all the red and purple Skittles and left him all the green and yellow. I listed all the things I forgave him for—the time, years before, when he had viciously attacked our elderly border collie, the time he had bitten me between my thumb and forefinger, tearing the flesh so deeply, I could see the layers of tissue beneath.

  And then I listed all the things I hoped he would forgive me for—for not taking him to the vet for regular checkups, for not continuing to take him on walks after he got old, for sometimes letting the cat lick my ice cream bowl instead of him. And I thought about all the funny things he had done, all the near-misses he had had with death, like the time he swallowed a nest of crickets that had been poisoned with insecticide, about how he was stubborn and bullheaded like his father, a sturdy Jack Russell named Rollo whose belly had been ripped clean open in a fight with a black bear.

  And then, somewhere in the midst of my reverie, I realized David was standing in the doorway. He looked from Piper to me. For a moment, he didn’t say anything.

  “I’ve got to get Waylon to the vet,” he finally said. “He’s not peeing at all.”

  Which did not even seem possible. How unlikely was it that my oldest dog and my youngest goat would die on the same day? It was just so surreal. By that time, Aaron and Eli were awake, and while the boys made more coffee for us all, David loaded Waylon into the Mountaineer. He was gone a little over an hour when I got a text. Meet me at the barn, he said. Alone.

  Piper was soundly sleeping, so I left him in the wagon, threw on my jacket, and headed down the driveway. It was unusually warm for December, with a soft, springlike breeze that carried Merle’s scent through the air, like a bad perfume. I waited by the barn gate. Finally, David pulled in the drive and slowed to a stop. As he got out, I stuck my head in the door looking for Waylon, but he wasn’t there. Then David’s shoulders began to heave, and I simply assumed Waylon was dead. What else could it be? And as sad as I was, I knew that David, who had worked so hard to pull Waylon back from the brink of death, was devastated. I put my arms around him and hugged him hard while he cried, his beard wet and scratchy against my neck.

  “You did everything you could,” I said. “Everything anyone could possibly do.”

  Though I was sure that most farmers got used to seeing animals die, David and I never had. Over the last couple of years, we had lost a number of chickens, including Mella Yella and her sister and eventually, a year after David had so tenderly nursed her back to health, Terry. Most of these chickens just dropped dead one day, but a few lingered long enough to receive a few nights of special care in the “hospice” crate before quietly slipping away. We were always sad when we lost an animal, and we continued to be immensely grateful for the riches—emotional, spiritual, and physical—our animals brought us. Now, David nodded and cried until he was finally able to speak.

  “She’s going to try one more thing,” he finally said.

  “What?” I said.

  I was now standing back, staring at David, trying to revise my understanding of what was happening. What was happening was that Waylon was not, in fact, dead—not yet. His ureter was badly damaged from the calculi, though, and his bladder was once again blocked, and Dr. Harris was going to attempt the radical hole-in-the-abdominal-wall procedure she had mentioned earlier. Given Waylon’s weakened state, it was a long shot, but she would try.

  The rest of the day was a blur. David and I did not see any of our kids very often, and it was rare for all three of them to be home at the same time. Alex had gotten us all tickets to see the new Star Wars movie as a belated gift for David’s birthday, which had been a few weeks earlier, and that night we had planned to go to dinner, then to the movie. It was supposed to be a special evening for us all, a celebration. I felt like we should forge ahead, make Piper comfortable, then go on with our plans, but David and Aaron felt we should all stay home. Eli and Alex remained neutral on the matter. The problem was, no one could stop crying. All afternoon, David waited at his desk for the call from Dr. Harries, and I stayed upstairs near Piper so he would know I was there.

  Piper seemed comfortable, not in pain, not panicky or scared, and finally, after much deliberation, we all decided on a compromise. We would go to the movie but not to dinner. I gave Piper another dose of pain medicine, then ensconced him in a pile of blankets and settled him in the bathroom, away from the other dogs. Our drive to the movie was quiet, melancholy, a mood not helped by the fact that, despite David’s best efforts to clean and air out the car, the Mountaineer smelled unmistakably of buck.

  We got our popcorn and our beer and settled in to watch a Star Wars movie, and about halfway through the movie, David’s phone vibrated. He leapt up and ran into the hallway, and moments later, he sent a group text: Waylon is okay. The surgery had gone well, and Waylon could come home in a few days. David was ecstatic. I was, of course, pleased and happy that David was happy, but it was hard to be overly optimistic. Waylon had been through so much in such a short period of time, and it was hard to imagine that he would be happy and healthy once again.

  And of course, I was worried about Piper, but I needn’t have been. When we got home, he had thrown off all his blankets and was standing in the bathroom, barking for food. The next morning, he jumped up, ran outside, then followed me all the way to the barn and back. Still, David and I took him to our vet, wh
o confirmed what we had suspected, that he had had a stroke, that he could have another one in the future. For now, though, he seemed to be on the mend.

  The next day, David went to pick up Waylon, and when he got back, I went down to the barn. For a moment, I couldn’t believe this was the same goat we had sent to Dr. Harris’s office just days before. He pranced into his stall and began munching on hay, then took a spin through the field, stopping to eat leaves and to whisper through the fence to Holly. His entire back end, once white, was now dark yellow from the urine constantly draining out the hole in his side, and he reeked, but then again, so did Merle. It was just that Merle’s urine was all over his face rather than his back legs.

  In the coming days, we began to focus on the future and to look forward to the births of the kids—Holly’s, Willow’s, and Ama’s. We tried to envision what the kids would look like, what combination of colors and sizes they might be. Since Ama was brown, white, and black, and Merle was tan and white, the color combinations for their offspring were endless. Willow and Merle’s kids would certainly be tan, maybe also white, but we wondered whose ears they would have, whether they would be long and floppy like Merle’s or tiny like Willow’s. And then we began to debate the color of Holly and Waylon’s babies, which was ridiculous, since Holly and Waylon were identical, or at least they had been.

  “I wonder if Holly’s kids will be all-white like Holly or half-white, half-yellow, like Waylon,” David said.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “Very funny.”

  But joking was good. Joking meant that things were looking better, that we were on the upswing. One of the greatest surprises of this time, among all the others, was that Dr. Harris never charged us full price for any of Waylon’s visits. Each time we went to pick him up, we looked at our bill and saw that, for one reason or another, we had received a discount—a substantial discount. When we asked the receptionist about it, she would offer an explanation that was never really clear, something about how it was because of all the trouble we had had. The bottom line was that Dr. Harris was just a kind, empathetic soul who took one look at David’s bloodshot eyes and the buck that rode in the back of our car and decided we needed a break.

  When you have gone through a sort of travesty of your own making, failure begins to feel like part of you. You get used to it. People around you expect you to fail, and you learn to expect it from yourself, to see it as almost comforting in its familiarity. You begin to believe you are destined to make a mess of things. But then there are those unexpected kindnesses, those moments when someone does something to make you believe that perhaps you are more than the sum of everything you have done wrong, that perhaps you are worth more than you think. Dr. Harris was one of those people, a person who looked at us and saw two people whose love for their animals made them better somehow, more gentle and more noble, and her presence in our lives made us begin to feel worthy again at last.

  Pasta with Goat Cheese, Sun-Dried Tomatoes, and Broccoli

  •1/2 gallon whey

  •1 pound penne or bow tie pasta

  •1 crown of broccoli florets, chopped

  •1/2 to 1 bulb (not cloves) garlic, divided into cloves and crushed

  •2 to 4 tablespoons olive oil

  •2 tomatoes, chopped

  •1/2 cup chopped sun-dried tomatoes in oil, drained (reserve a tablespoon or two of oil)

  •1/2 cup Kalamata olives

  •1/2 cup chopped artichoke hearts in oil, drained

  •1/2 batch (about 1/2 cup) soft goat cheese, crumbled

  •Salt and pepper to taste

  Bring the whey to boil. Add pasta. Cook according to instructions, adding broccoli in the last 3 to 5 minutes of cooking. Drain. Sauté garlic in olive oil until fragrant. Add fresh tomatoes, and sauté for a minute or two. Stir in sun-dried tomatoes, olives, and artichoke hearts. Remove from heat, and add drained pasta and broccoli and goat cheese. Mix thoroughly. Season with salt and pepper to taste. If mixture seems too dry, add reserved oil from the sun-dried tomatoes. If you live in Asheville, serve this with Freak of Nature Double IPA from Wicked Weed Brewing because it is hoppy and refreshing and offsets the ton of garlic you are ingesting. If you live anywhere else in the world, serve it with a good merlot or something sparkling.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The term spring lamb, I have come to understand, is a euphemism. It actually means dead-of-winter lamb as, despite what the calendar says, goats, like sheep, give birth only on the most frigid nights of the year at some ungodly hour when wind is howling through the trees and sleet slicing through the barn slats. And if you are especially ill prepared to stay up all night—say, exhausted from a few nights of burning the midnight oil on your MFA packet or weak from too many meals of red wine and Starburst Minis—this is the time your doe will go into labor.

  For three nights that March, David and I donned every warm thing we owned—long johns, two pairs of pants, three jackets, hats, two pairs of gloves, hand warmers, foot warmers, neck warmers—and traipsed down to the barn for what became hours of huddling in dim light on plastic chairs or crouching on the floor, our hands growing numb despite the gloves as we chatted about normal, everyday things, the sort of things most couples talked about over a nice dinner. We talked about David’s work, about my work, about our human kids, about the unseasonably cold weather. Finally, we ran out of things to talk about and simply listened to the does’ heavy breathing.

  Holly’s kids came first. One blustery midnight, she gave birth to two beautiful, healthy, snow-white babies, a buckling and a doeling. The delivery was essentially uneventful, and by two in the morning, we had cleaned the stall, and the kids were standing and nursing on their own. David and I fell into bed exhausted but thrilled. We had done it, the three of us—me, David, and Holly.

  Then, six days later, I found Willow standing and staring blankly into the field—an early sign of labor. It was eleven in the morning. Thank goodness. The babies would be born by lunchtime, nursing steadily by midafternoon, and tucked in for the night at a decent hour. We had done this twice before now, so this should be a piece of cake. I moved Willow into her stall, put down fresh straw, and texted David, who was out seeing clients. Hurry home, I said. But there was no need for him to hurry. When he got home a couple of hours later, Willow was simply staring at the wall.

  While David drank coffee to stay alert, I drank a bottle of hard cider to calm down, and we took turns running back and forth to the house to go to the bathroom and grab additional jackets and blankets. At dinnertime, I brought two slices of cold, leftover pizza down to the barn, which we ate with gloved hands. Finally, Willow lay down on the straw and began twisting and squirming. David went into her stall and lay beside her, and I moved my chair close enough to stroke her head. It was dark outside, and wind thrashed the sides of the barn so hard, I could not tell Willow’s moans from the wind. Contractions wracked her body. Exhausted, she collapsed on my lap. I had read that one hour after a doe starts pushing, the babies should be born. If not, something was likely wrong. Now, Willow seemed to be pushing, but I wasn’t sure.

  “Was that pushing?” I asked David.

  He didn’t answer but crouched closer, rubbing her flank. After I was certain an hour had passed, I began to panic.

  “We should call someone,” I said. “Or take her somewhere.”

  “Who? Where?” David said. “There’s no time.”

  He was right. Though I had both our vet and the emergency mobile vet numbers programmed into my phone, if something happened to Willow now, there would be no time to get her anywhere. Finally, David made a decision.

  “Hand me a glove,” he said.

  He meant a latex glove, since he was stripping off his other gloves, and though I wasn’t sure exactly what he planned to do, I considering stopping him, calling a time-out so we could reevaluate and reassess. But then, just as quickly, it occurred to me that
there was no time to run back up to the house and Google this or browse once again through Storey’s Guide to Raising Dairy Goats to catch any important information we might have missed. This was a test, a pop test, and we were either prepared or not. So I stood and rummaged through the birthing kit until I found the gloves.

  “I need some lubricant,” David said. “I’m just going to see if I can feel anything.”

  I found the off-brand K-Y Jelly and passed it over Willow’s very still body. I crouched back down next to Willow, and when she raised her head, I kissed her muzzle. Her eyes were bleary and distant.

  “You’re a good girl,” I told her while David reached inside her in search of anything he could pull. “The very, very best.”

  And then there was a gush of fluid, like someone had knocked over a bucket of water. In the other deliveries we had witnessed, this happened after the baby had emerged in the bubble, but now the bubble had ruptured inside Willow. I didn’t know if this was okay or not, but she lifted her head and pushed again.

  “Pass me a pee pad!” David said.

  Determined to help, he once again stuck two fingers inside her birth canal. For a moment, he was silent, his face contorting as he tried to make sense of what he felt.

  “Teeth!” he finally said. “I feel teeth!”

  The baby’s foot was not positioned properly. He was supposed to feel hooves. Willow, however, seemed invigorated. She raised up and began to push, then finally stood. David matched her movements like a quarterback, spotting her to make sure she didn’t run into the barn wall. Finally, kneeling beside her and using one hand like forceps, he managed to reposition the kid. As Willow pushed, he pulled, and then I could see it, one wet, dark head and one hoof. And then she stopped again. She was just so tired. I could see it in her far-off look, in the way her back sagged and her head drooped.