Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [92]
“Oh, it’s just a goat,” I said casually. “She’s having a bad day.”
Owen read. Pastry bellowed. I began to worry.
“I need to go inside for just a little while,” I said to Owen.
“You can’t leave me here alone with her.”
“I won’t be gone long and you’ll be fine.”
“I really, really don’t want you to go,” he said.
“I’ll buy you any LEGO in the store if you sit out here.”
“Which one?”
“Which one do you want?”
He thought. “The AT-TE Walker, it’s like a car with legs and it brings around clone troopers.”
“How much does it cost?”
“You said any LEGO, Mom.” “Whatever,” I said.
I went in the house and called Mark. “Could you please, please come home? This goat is a problem.”
When I went back outside, Pastry was bellowing and Owen was no longer reading, he was weeping. “Mom,” he said. “This is so embarrassing. We should have never gotten this goat. The neighbors are going to hate us. They’re going to get really angry.”
“It’s going to be fine, honey,” I said. I fed Pastry a dried leaf, which she crunched like a potato chip.
“Oh, that’s not so bad,” shouted Mark as he strode up the hill an hour later. “She just sounds like an elephant!”
Night fell. I poured myself a glass of wine, grabbed a sleeping bag, and walked down to the hutch to spell Mark. “Enough of this nonsense, right, girl?” I said. I found a patch of clean straw and sat. Pastry looked at me, searching my eyes. You seem like a very nice person, but what is happening? Who are you? Where is my baby? Where are my sisters? Where is Wyone? Then she bellowed again.
I lay down in the sleeping bag, holding Pastry’s collar to keep her from bolting the hutch. She stood, staring out warily into the dark, bellowing only occasionally now. The wine had made me thirsty, and I thought of our sofa lit by the glow of a reading lamp, the clean sheets on the bed, a glass of water.
The suburbs fall eerily silent at night, the sounds of children and leaf blowers suddenly and completely absent. I could hear the furtive snapping of twigs as the cats made the rounds, and probably the skunks, rats, and raccoons as well, though I preferred not to think about them. Through the cut-out window in the plastic hutch I could see our house with the one light in the bedroom lit late into the night, where Mark was reading. The house looked insubstantial, the walls we lived inside thin and provisional. Cars howled far in the distance on the highway.
At dawn, I crawled out of the hutch, dry-mouthed and stiff, hoping that Pastry might greet the day with serenity. But she tore out of the hutch after me and gazed around in what appeared to be renewed horror. She broke the silence with a bellow. Straw clung to my jeans and I smelled, even to myself, like goat. I looked up and saw Mark on the patio, staring down at me with an expression on his face so thunderous it required all my bravado just to meet his gaze.
I went into the house, sat on the sofa, and listened to Pastry. Neighbors were eating their Puffins and tying their ties, listening to Pastry. If we got busted, I would not blame them. If we got busted, I’d lose not just Pastry, but Peppermint. My heart would break. At 6:58 a.m. I called Wyone. Fifteen minutes later, Pastry and I were in the van driving north.
“Nubians, as a breed, are well known for their repertoire of vocal skills,” I read in Dairy Goat Journal a few days after the Pastry fiasco. No kidding, I thought. Had I merely chosen the wrong breed? Could I try again with a grown doe from a more timid breed? The Oberhasli is everywhere described as a calm and quiet caprine. It is also the handsomest of the dairy breeds, with a walnut brown coat, a black dorsal stripe, and black boots. According to Dairy Goat Journal, the coloring should resemble “the wood on the back of a violin.” Goats bring out the poet in everyone.
Jennie Grant, the Seattle goatherd, had recently acquired an adult Oberhasli whom she described in her blog as “graceful, docile, and has something