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“Goatski is having a kid,” she said. Every morning Mama went to the goat pen behind the house to milk and feed the goats. She liked to get creative about their food as she did with Norm, adding oats or wheat groats to their chow, and fresh carrots and seaweed in summer. The goats didn’t seem to mind like Norm did.

“Does eat oats and mares eat oats and little lambs eat ivy,” Mama liked to sing. “A kid’ll eat ivy, too, wouldn’t you?”

“No!” I chimed.

“Goat’s milk is the best kind of milk for you to drink,” she told me. “It’s easier for kids to digest.” Some people wrinkled their noses about the taste, but I didn’t know any differently.

Mama taught herself to milk her first goat in Franconia. She held an old waterlogged how-to-milk book her father had given her in one hand and practiced squeezing the heavy finger-shaped teats with the other. After a few tries the milk squirted out in hot, hard streams to make a lonely patter into the stainless steel bucket. Her hands and arms got cramps at first, but once she got the hang of it, calluses built up on her palms and she could get a pail in ten minutes. The milk squirting into the liquid of a full bucket made a satisfying cheeeeet sound. Once the females gave birth, we could get milk out of them for nearly a year. We’d keep or sell the baby girls, but the boys were in less demand.

Papa looked up from his bowl of oats. “Let’s hope it’s not a billy.”

Papa didn’t like to talk about how to get rid of the billy goats. We needed only one billy, who got to visit with the female goats when they were in heat. Brutus was big and black and a little scary as he stood in the doorway of the old camper with eyes glowing out of the darkness, or sometimes snorting and stamping around his pen like the bull in my book The Story of Ferdinand after he got stung by a bee.

“I’m going back out to make sure Goatski does okay,” Mama told Papa. She felt a bond with goats during birth; she’d been there, too.

“I want to come,” I said.

“Okay, bundle up.”

The air steamed from the goats’ nostrils and they stamped their tulip hooves in the mud at our approach. Ma-Goat’s udders swayed back and forth when she trotted up to the fence, her own pregnant belly hanging like a water balloon from the knobby ridge of her spine, knees bulbous under the weight. The goats were my friends, but they were complicated. Their eyes were not warm and gentle like Norm’s but urgent and impatient, swirled marbles with the distinct black bar of the iris in the middle. Once their needs were met, they became playful, rubbing their pointy-ridged horns on the cedar fence posts and butting at each other, but never becoming exactly cuddly.

“Give them this,” Mama said, handing me a head of lettuce she’d brought from the greenhouse. “Make sure everyone gets some, but stay outside the fence.”

Barley’s square teeth snapped out of her delicate mouth at the leaves. Through the opening of the door, I could see Goatski lying on a nest of hay in the shed, her body heaving and lurching as Mama squatted beside her.

“Here it comes,” Mama said. Soon I heard the bleating of a baby goat as Mama helped pull it free of the birth sac.

“Oh, shit,” she muttered. “It’s a boy.”

We left the kid to nurse and went in to tell Papa.

“Better to get it over with,” he said as he put on his coat.

“I want to come,” I begged, sensing a disturbance in Papa’s mood.

“Not this time,” Mama replied, her lips firm.

Papa, I imagine, tried not to let his feelings get wrapped up in it as he headed to the goat shed. The billy had short black hair in cowlicky curls like a child’s, legs long and gangly, hooves still soft. He must have bleated and searched Papa’s hand for a teat as Papa put him in the burlap sack filled with cast-off rocks from the garden and tied it tightly. The oak-staved rainwater barrels sat under the eaves of the farmhouse to catch the runoff and in early spring grew a dark skin of ice overnight. Papa punched the crust through with an ax and dropped the burlap bag into the water, forcing himself to stand next to the barrel and make sure it