Flat Broke with Two Goats

by Jennifer McGaha

  “You can do it, girl!” I told her. “You are almost there.”

  Using just his index finger and his thumb, David maneuvered the kid’s other hoof into diving position.

  “Push, girl!” he told Willow with such tenderness and such desperation that I felt certain the kid was dead.

  In that moment, though, I didn’t care. I only cared about Willow. What if we had underestimated her strength and stamina? What if, after all we done to keep her strong and healthy and happy, this was the thing that killed her? What had seemed like a wonderful idea now seemed terribly selfish. I had prostituted her, then forced her to endure five months of pregnancy followed by the pain and trauma of giving birth just so I could make Guy Fieri’s goat milk creme caramels. I would never do this again. Never. I laid my cheek against her cheek and closed my eyes. She was very, very still.

  And then, she lifted her head and began to push.

  “That’s right,” I told her. “Good girl!”

  Finally, miraculously, the kid, aided by David, began to ease forward. At first, a wet, unidentifiable mass appeared at the opening of the birth canal. It seemed stuck, frozen in time. We were all silent—David, me, Willow, all the other goats in the barn. But then, gradually, a nose emerged. Then eyes. Then a hoof and a knee and another hoof, until finally, one slick, slimy kid slid onto the pad.

  As I passed David a towel, the kid squirmed and kicked and maaed and baaed. Together, Willow and David worked to clean him, David vigorously rubbing his face while Willow nuzzled and licked his lanky body until he was a beautiful, caramel brown. Within moments, he was standing.

  “I think he’s hungry,” I said over his screams.

  Some days on the farm, everything felt brand-new again, as if I were once again discovering that baby chicks can grow into miniature dinosaurs overnight or that goats are little escape artists with horns. There were other moments, though, when I realized that though we weren’t experts on anything, we had learned a thing or two, such as the fact that if you pull a goat, it will instinctively back away. If you want a kid goat to nurse, you should gently push its bottom in the right direction. Now, I filled Willow’s bowl with grain and beet pulp, and as she idled over to her bowl, David lifted the crying kid and nudged it toward Willow’s teat. As the kid latched on and began guzzling milk, David lifted its tail to check the gender.

  But I knew already. He just had the look of a buck—broader in the nose and face than a doe. We had hoped that Willow might have a doeling that we could milk later on, but now we were just relieved that he was here and healthy and even more relieved that she seemed to be recovering. She ate her food and drank her water, then curled on the straw beside her son. They were lovely and serene, the very picture of domestic bliss. They were also exhausted. While I stood by their stall watching them sleep, David went outside to do some chores in the barnyard. I was snapping photos on my cell phone and texting everyone I knew and acting like my own daughter had just given birth when Willow called out, a low groan. And then she stood.

  “Something’s happening!” I called to David.

  He ran back into the barn and, just as he put on his gloves, a bubble appeared beneath her tail—another kid.

  “Hand me a clean pad,” he said.

  He scooted the pad underneath Willow’s tail, and seconds later, the kid dropped onto the clean surface. This kid was smaller than the first—and absolutely silent. David grabbed a clean towel and began rubbing its nose and mouth to clear its airway. And then Willow calmly began to help. She and David massaged the baby goat’s head and belly and legs while the first kid, who would soon become Willie—a nod to both Willow and Willie Nelson—nursed. It was as if he had just run a marathon in south Florida in July. He could not get enough to drink. Finally, the second kid stretched, wobbled to its knees, and stood. It was brown with a white stripe down its nose and white splotches all over—a perfect blend of Merle and Willow. David pushed the tiny goat toward Willow’s other teat, and while it nursed, I leaned over and lifted its tail. Underneath was one tiny slit—a vent.

  “It’s a girl!” I screamed, delirious with fatigue and excitement.

  Both kids had long bodies, short legs, and tiny ears, and the doe, whom we would later name Merlene, was simply magical—a miniature camel or a plastic toy horse come to life. I felt wildly fortunate. Willow was alive and well, her babies safe and sound. And after everything, David and I were still here together, standing in a now-filthy barn stall, full of blood and mucus and all sorts of other unidentifiable bodily fluids, grinning broadly, as if we had just won the lottery or an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris or a new house with plenty of good insulation and a bona fide electric water heater. In that moment, I could think of absolutely nothing better than this, no place on earth I would rather be.

  Cajeta

  •1/2 gallon goat’s milk

  •2 cups sugar

  •1 cinnamon stick

  •1/2 teaspoon baking soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon water

  Mate a beautiful LaMancha doe with an adorably haggard Nigerian dwarf buck. Wait 150 days. Sit in a freezing cold, dark barn with a laboring doe for eight hours or longer. Become sick and numb with worry as the doe’s labor drags on and on. Make all sorts of pointless promises about how you will never put your doe through this again.

  When the babies do finally arrive safely, feel enormous gratitude. Take eight million photos, and send them to all of your friends, family, colleagues, and people who inexplicably remain in your cell phone contact list despite the fact that you have long since forgotten why they are there. Post more photos on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Insist that all nearby friends and family visit. Check on kids obsessively, even though their mother is actually their mother, and you are just a bystander. Then, when the kids are two weeks old, when they have gotten all the colostrum they need and are strong and active and thriving, separate them from their mother at night so you can begin morning milking.

  Once you have a half gallon of milk, bring the milk, sugar, and cinnamon stick to a simmer in a saucepan. Remove from heat, and stir in dissolved baking soda. Return to heat, and cook until thick and caramel colored, approximately one hour, stirring frequently. When mixture is the consistency of a thick caramel sauce, remove from heat, and store in refrigerator (make sure to remove the cinnamon stick). Serve over ice cream or pound cake with warm brie and crackers. Or, if you prefer, shamelessly eat it straight from the jar with a spoon.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I was working upstairs at my computer one evening that summer when I heard David exclaim loudly, then open the front door.

  “Outside, Hester!” he said. “Outside!”

  And then there was a loud hacking—the sound of metal beating against the laminate floor. For approximately two seconds, I considered running down to see if he needed my help but then just as quickly reconsidered. A few months before, I had stepped barefoot onto a wolf spider, and though wolf spiders are harmless, I had been hysterical for hours. Whatever this was, it was something at least as bad as a wolf spider, and I was pretty sure David did not want or need my help dealing with it. Moments later, he appeared in the doorway at the top of the stairs. His eyes were wide, his jeans splattered with blood.

  “There was a fucking copperhead in the kitchen,” he said.

  “I figured,” I said.

  “Like two feet away from Hester!”

  “That’s bad,” I said.

  “Right by the refrigerator!”

  He was breathing hard, his chest throbbing. He looked at me as if I hadn’t heard, as if my ears were stopped up or my brain wasn’t working properly.

  “It was huge!” he said. “The biggest one yet.”

  I got it. I did. A massive copperhead had slithered across our kitchen floor, right where any of us could have easily stumbled upon it—me on my way to get a carton of Ben & Jerry’s, or David on his w
ay to stoke the boiler, or one of the dogs on his/her nightly kitchen patrol. Somehow, this was worse than a copperhead writhing beneath the china cabinet or a black snake crashing down onto the family picnic. Still, I found it hard to summon the same amount of horror I had felt with the first copperhead. Or the same depth of revulsion I had felt when I stepped on the wolf spider. Or the same degree of panic I had felt when wasps built a nest in our porch light and attacked me one morning before I had even had my coffee. I took my calm, lucid response as a sign of growth. David took it as a sign of psychosis.

  “What is wrong with you?” he said. “Why aren’t you flipping out? If ever there was a time to flip out, this is it!”

  “I’m just not that surprised,” I said. “I mean, I’m disgusted but not surprised.”

  It seemed that, in spite of myself, I had become accustomed, acclimated, habituated to life in the woods. In my old life, I had had the illusion of being in control, the illusion that things were okay, that my family and I were safe and secure. I no longer had such fantasies. Instead, I had learned to roll with the punches, to go with the flow, to—as one of my friends liked to say—bend with the wind. Wolf spiders and copperheads and critters of all kinds were a part of this life. I expected them, prepared for them. I shook out my boots before I put them on. I looked before sticking my hand in a dark cabinet. I used a flashlight when wandering around the cabin at night. Still, no matter how prepared I now was for the unexpected, there were surprises—such as the mammoth-sized possum David found scurrying up the barn wall one night.

  I liked possums enough in theory—as a concept. I didn’t want to hold one or own one as a pet, but we occasionally saw them in the woods or crossing the road at night, and I thought they were cute-ish. They had little pink noses and adorable, perky ears, and if you didn’t look at their tails, they were really quite precious. Still, we had six kid goats then—Ama had delivered two more healthy kids just after Willow’s kids were born—and they were all under two months old. Though we were pretty sure possums didn’t eat baby goats, we weren’t 100 percent sure, so David ran out to Tractor Supply and bought a humane trap, baited it with peanut butter crackers, and set it in the barn. That night, when he went to check, the trap was empty, the possum clinging to the barn wall. After three successive nights of this, David had had enough.

  “I think I can shoot it,” he said over dinner on the fourth evening.

  “What is wrong with you?” I said. “You are not going to shoot it! You are not.”

  This was my role, coming up with everything we weren’t going to do with no plan for what we were going to do, and this strategy was wearing thin. David scowled.

  “So what do you suggest?”

  I faltered. He waited.

  “Maybe we should bring the babies up here to the house,” I finally said.

  David seemed to scowl even more deeply, though his beard was so thick, it was hard to tell for sure.

  “We’re going to keep six baby goats in the house?” he said.

  “Okay, so maybe not in the house. How about in the boiler room?”

  David sighed, put his dirty plate in the sink, and sat back down to switch out his tennis shoes for his barn boots.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I’m going to try to catch it.”

  “With your bare hands?”

  “What are my other choices?” he asked.

  He had a point.

  “Wear your gloves!” I hollered after him as he headed outside.

  Rabies was rare in possums, but it was possible. I was not sure how I knew this, but I did. A little while later, David returned with a report: no possums in sight. But later that night—much later—he checked again. I was in bed when he texted me: Got it! I hopped up and ran down to the driveway where he was standing next to a blue plastic tub.

  “She was running up the wall,” he said, “and I grabbed her by the tail.”

  Tiny holes dotted the tub lid, and I leaned down to peer into the dark, silent interior.

  “It’s awfully quiet,” I said. “Are you sure she’s okay?”

  “Yes,” David said.

  “You didn’t hurt her when you dragged her off the wall?”

  “No, she’s fine.”

  This was, in fact, not the first time we had had a discussion like this. Once, at the old house, our dogs had chased a possum into the wood pile, where we found it lying prone on a log. While David headed to the garage to get a shovel to bury it, I screamed for him to rescue it before the dogs killed it.

  “It’s dead,” David had said.

  “It’s not dead! Have you not ever heard of ‘playing possum’?”

  And sure enough, after we had gathered all the dogs and gone inside, the possum had hopped up and headed back from whence it had come.

  “I told you,” I had told David. “Playing possum. It’s a real thing.”

  Recently, I had read that in addition to the two primary stress responses—fight or flight—psychologists had named a third type of response: freeze. People freeze when they believe they cannot safely defeat the threat against them or outrun it. Instead, they become too afraid to act at all. They are paralyzed. It was a feeling with which I was all too familiar. So many times in my life that had been my response to fear, and I saw that now as clearly as I saw that possum playing dead on the pile of logs back at the old house. Now, perhaps we had another possum playing possum on our hands. Then again, maybe David had swung it too hard and jostled its little brains.

  “I just think it’s possible you hurt her,” I said.

  “I didn’t hurt her.”

  “Well, let’s take her up in the forest and let her out,” I said.

  I thought it sounded like a cool adventure, something fun to do at the end of the day. After the morning milking, I had spent most of the day working at my computer, typing up anecdotes about farm life. David, however, had worked all day doing repairs to the barn and fence. He had hammered and sawed and lugged and hauled until he was spent, and he was not so excited about a late-night excursion.

  “At midnight? You want to go up in the forest at midnight?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Why not?”

  David stared at me. My hair was wet from the shower, and I wore a short, black silk nightgown with a white lace bodice, my grandfather’s flannel shirt, and a pair of Chacos caked in mud. David opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. He reached down and lifted the tub.

  “Get the door for me,” he said.

  He heaved the container into the back seat of my car, then reached across and strapped it in, like a baby in a car seat.

  “You drive,” he said. “I’ll ride in the back with the possum.”

  It was a line we would use from that night on. “You drive; I’ll ride in the back with the possum,” one of us would say, and the other one would spurt a mouthful of coffee or beer across the room. It was funny, yet it also seemed to encapsulate our situation in some essential way, to reduce it to its necessary parts. How crazy was this life we led, how weird and wacky and totally unexpected?

  In a way, I wanted to ride next to the possum just so I could say I had once ridden next to a possum. But then I pictured it suddenly hopping up and manically flinging itself about the tub, and that’s when I realized that I certainly did not want to ride beside a possum—even a confined one—so I climbed into the driver’s seat, and David got into the back and rested his arm on the tub.

  “Are you sure she can’t get out?” I asked.

  “I’m sure,” he said. “Just focus on the road.”

  Constantly checking the rearview mirror, I drove slowly down the gravel drive and turned left onto the pavement. The road was dark and deserted, and though we passed a couple of houses, there were no lights anywhere. A quarter of a mile from our mailbox, we came to a place where the road cut throug
h a wide field. On our right was a large crop of tomatoes. On our left was a vacant field.

  “Here,” David said. “Stop here.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes! Stop!”

  I slammed on the brakes and skidded onto the private gravel road leading to the empty field. At first, I thought the possum was trying to escape, that maybe David had been bitten, but when I glanced in the backseat, David was calmly unbuckling his seat belt and opening the door.

  “Here?” I said. “You’re going to dump her out here?”

  “Why not? There’s a great big field.”

  “Well, for one, it’s private land. And for another, it’s too close. She’ll find her way back.”

  “No, she won’t. There’s that huge hill.” David gestured behind us to the mountain where we had searched for Maple and Cinnamon, our runaway goats.

  “She can climb that,” I said.

  “No, she can’t.”

  “Yes, she can.”

  “No, she can’t.”

  This was not going at all like I had anticipated. Sure, David was tired, and sure, this wasn’t a night out at the symphony or the theater, but somehow, I had envisioned a romantic adventure with me in my silky negligee and David in his snug blue jeans and work jacket. We would wind through the forest along the Davidson River, past Looking Glass Falls where we had written the senior superlatives, past Sliding Glass Rock and Pink Beds and the Cradle of Forestry, all the way up to the parkway, where we would park and look across the Shining Rock Wilderness all the way to the pinnacle of Cold Mountain. We would marvel at the crisp, clear air, at the millions of stars overhead, at the tiny lights below us, and it would be exactly like when we were teenagers, only now we would be sober, and instead of me lying with my head on David’s lap, he would be in the back with the possum, and I would be up front driving. Granted, it was not the perfect date, but it was certainly better than driving three-quarters of a mile and dumping an possum in our neighbor’s field.