Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [91]
“Let’s call her Peppermint,” said Owen, hanging over the front seat. “I just thought of it out of my head.”
On the way home, we stopped at Target and I bought a baby bottle and, since Peppermint would be living in the house with us until we found her a companion, a packet of Huggies, sized for a newborn.
“You’re crazy,” Mark said when Peppermint tottered out of the car and down the driveway in her diapers.
“I know,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “she is very cute.”
She was very cute. For almost a month, Peppermint lived in the house with us. She slept in Owen’s bed, sat on the sofa while we watched Lost, and rode around in the car with me when I ran errands. While I never carried her in my purse like a Chihuahua, it did cross my mind. She was very clean, cleaner than any dog. Like tiny high-heeled shoes, her hooves click-clicked on the wood floors as she followed me from room to room. If she couldn’t find me, she wailed until I called her and then she would scamper over and leap into my lap. Three times a day, she drank milk from a bottle, slamming down each meal in under a minute, the milk frothing at her mouth like foam on a latte. We were all besotted.
Goats are herd animals and must have goat friends. Given Peppermint’s happy and instant integration into our lives, I decided that for her companion we could handle a full-size breed, like a Nubian. Now that I’d mastered the tricycle, I was ready for a Peugeot ten-speed. Moreover, I wanted a full-grown doe this time. It would be a year before baby Peppermint gave milk, and I wanted to ramp up the cheesemaking right now.
I answered an ad posted by a 4-H girl named Wyone who had a Nubian doe that was milking at slightly over a gallon a day. This goat’s name was Pastry and she was a beauty. The supermodel of the goat world, the Nubian is a leggy breed with a Roman nose and long, floppy ears. I had to have one. I bought a $200 molded plastic calf hutch that looked like a cross between a tent and a Porta-Potty and dragged it into the middle of our yard.
One morning, Owen and I drove an hour north to Wyone’s farm. She led us back around the house to a paddock where lovely Nubian goats of all sizes and colors perched on hay bales and spools.
Owen squeezed my hand.
“You love goats,” I said.
“I also love ducks and chickens,” he corrected. “Don’t leave them out.”
Pastry had an auburn coat and white ears that resembled the pigtails on Cindy from The Brady Bunch. I gave Wyone a $100 check and led Pastry into the back of our minivan, where she rode home, completely silent.
When we pulled into our driveway, none of the neighbors was out raking or retooling mountain bikes, which seemed a good omen. A few neighbors had met tiny Peppermint and responded amiably, but I was unsure how they would react to a goat the size of a motorcycle with a giant, bulging udder. Owen and I coaxed Pastry out of the van and led her down the stairs to the yard. There, surveying her new home, suddenly she balked, locked her bony knees, and uttered an agonized cry that emanated from deep inside her chest. She turned and looked me in the eye with a wild expression and I looked back at her, puzzled, and then she bellowed again.
The shout of a miserable Nubian goat bears no relationship to a bleat. Pastry sounded like a sick, anguished human. “You’re okay,” I told her. She bellowed again and established her rhythm, which was to bellow every twenty or thirty seconds. When I attempted to briefly leave her side, she chased me and upped her tempo to constant, frantic screaming.
This is fine, I thought in those first minutes, patting her back. I can wait this out. I’ll just sit here in the yard and keep her company. All will be well. Owen brought out his copy of LEGO Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary and sat on a hillock of ivy near me.
The minutes and then the hours passed. Owen read. Pastry bellowed. Our neighbor