Every October, like clockwork, Buck Henry starts showering himself with his own urine. Buck Henry is a six-year-old, long haired LaMancha dairy goat. Bucks (male goats) have a long, pencil-like penis, which they can aim quite accurately. Buck Henry aims for his beard and fires off a round or two. He’s constantly pestering Mr. G., his lifelong companion, sniffing him around the hind quarters and rubbing up against him in all manner of inappropriateness. Mr. G. just stands there, looking on, inscrutable—I can never tell if he’s waiting for it to end or if he likes the attention. The smell of urine-saturated goat beard, however, is unmistakable and apparently irresistible to the does, housed about fifty yards away. When they go into heat, they run to the nearest fence and bleat and bleat and bleat. Young bucks can jump a four-foot fence practically from a stand-still, and when that happens all sorts of chaos ensues. Buck, however, is getting arthritic and can’t jump anymore, so he likes to rub his cheeks and his perfumed beard on my trousers at feeding time, not so much out of affection (though Buck is an affectionate animal), but out of habit and a perpetual sense of ownership.
—
It’s just before dawn, late in February, and it’s raining for the fourth day in a row. The temperature is in the mid-thirties, and my rubber boots have developed a small crack along the ball of my left foot. As I slosh across the ever-deepening mud-field, carrying an armload of hay for the sheep, cold water seeps into my boot and soaks my sock.
—
I am sitting on the back stoop of the barn, watching the sun set. Orange light filtering through a layer of burgeoning storm clouds in the distance and an old hackberry tree a hundred yards away gives the scene a lonely, exotic look, like I am on the Serengeti or the edge of the Outback. It’s early summer, just after evening feeding, and I am taking a short break. Four baby goats are using me as a playground. I feel their hooves tap my shoulders and arms. Their mothers, Clara and Clover, also LaManchas but short-haired, stand nearby, watching, serious. I smell like hell—soaked with sweat and coated with grime, I’m wearing my third t-shirt of the day, but a shower and a beer await. I can’t recall ever having been this happy.
—
First, I have this thought: We have way too many animals. They’re expensive, they suck up an enormous amount of time, energy, and cash, and with the exception of some eggs, goat’s milk, and the occasional plate of lamb chops, they don’t produce much. They are way more trouble than they’re worth. We should get rid of them. Then, I have this thought: We need a llama.
—
It has been a long, strange spring, the longest and strangest of my sixty-six springs for sure. The pandemic, the ever-impending collapse of the economy, the shenanigans of the president which are no longer amusing even to the most cynical and sardonic among us, the ever-widening chasm between everybody and everybody else, the emerging difference between what we thought we were and what we actually are, the wearing-of-masks or the not-wearing-of-masks, the navigating of side glances either way, the continual hand-washing, the brutality of the police, the outrage of the mobs. It’s all background noise. Deafening, but definitely background.
—
In March, just three months before I was scheduled to retire, the college administration decided we would not be coming back from spring break, but would instead finish the semester on-line. Right then, my teaching career developed a slow, fizzling leak. I had worked at the college for thirty-one years as a teacher and academic administrator. For some of those years the college was the one stable part of my life—through a divorce and several resulting moves, through remarriage and a couple resulting moves, through the ping-pong years of sending my own children off to college and taking them back in for a few weeks, or a few months, or a year, sending them off again, taking them back in, etc., through being stalked by a coworker who truly believed I was the Second Coming of Jesus while simultaneously having a secretary who thought I was Satan Incarnate, I had work. I had friends and colleagues, I had confidants, I had papers to grade and classes to prepare, I had meetings to attend and decisions to make, I had projects to complete, reports to write. I had a paycheck every month, insurance (good insurance), I had stability and seniority. I had the knowledge that unless for some reason I decided to commit a felony or have an affair with a student (neither of which are in my character—since I’m way too much of a coward), none of that was likely to go away.
—
And then it went away.
On the farm, every day is everyday. We feed animals, we work in the garden, we mow and we mow and we mow, I work around the pond, Vanessa collects eggs (way more than we can ever figure out what to do with) and tends the chickens, we work in the other garden, we make lists, we take turns checking things off those lists, we make new lists. Everyday is every day.
—
Periodically, generally under stress, Vanessa convinces herself that I’m going to die and leave her to deal with all this on her own. Her fear is not unfounded—I am six years older than she is, and her first husband did, in fact, die of colon cancer in his mid-forties. So, I grant that she has reason for concern. But there’s nothing I can do about it because in every scenario, I’m dead. “It’s easy for you,” she says. “You’ll be gone. I’m the one who will have to deal with twelve acres and all these animals.” Over the years, I’ve figured out that making the argument that death has its own drawbacks doesn’t carry much weight when she’s in one of these moods.
“I’m the one who will have to deal with all this shit,” she says. “I don’t even know how to put the… the… the thing on the tractor.”
“Which thing?” I say. “A lot of things go on the tractor.” (The things are actually the point of having a tractor.)
“You know… the… oh, never mind…! If… If I die, you’ll be fine.”
“I won’t be fine,” I say, trying to be supportive and understanding, but sounding, I’m sure, impatient and condescending. “You’ll be dead. How could I be fine?”
“You know what I mean!” she says. “You can do everything around here. I can’t.”
That’s true. I can do just about everything on the farm and in the house—all the house work, all the animal care, all the heavy lifting. My bread making skills suck, my cooking is not a tenth as interesting or imaginative as hers, and my sense of tidiness borders on her sense of chaos, but I do have the upper body strength, I know which gas can fills which gas tank, and I can put the thing on the tractor.
—
There are the chickens. Currently, two flocks. The older flock (diminished to fifteen hens and Arthur) lives in the chicken coop—an old board and batten shed that we converted to a hen house when we bought the place. The young flock (thirteen hens who survived the shipping) lives across the property in a smaller, separate coop and run. The plan had been to move the chicks in with the chickens and let them assimilate. We do that by moving them at night—when they are docile and night blind. That strategy also takes advantage of their small brains. When they wake up, they think they have always been where they are.
Except this time, they didn’t. Every night for about a week, we moved five or six chicks into the larger, older chicken coop, and every afternoon when we let them out to free range, they hopped fences, skirted across the barnyard, raided the garden, and made their way home. Eventually, we gave up.
—
My knees are starting to give out.
—
There is the food: eggs, goat’s milk, yogurt, cheese, butter-milk pancakes. There are radishes, green onions, a variety of lettuce. Our two refrigerators, one in the kitchen and one in the barn, stay stuffed with bags stuffed with greens pretty much all spring, and again in the fall. We’ve had lettuce in the fridge as late as Christmas, still fresh and crisp, picked a month earlier. There is a crop of raspberries in June, and another in September, wild blackberries growing along the perimeter fences in July. New potatoes and summer squash by solstice, sweet potatoes and winter squash by Halloween. There are all the herbs—basil and dill and oregano and sage and rosemary and thyme and mint and mint and mint. There are tomatoes, half a dozen varieties—green and fried, ripe and sliced, in sandwiches, on plates, drizzled or salted or sprinkled with basil and olive oil, tossed into a salad or stir-fry, canned, or parboiled, skinned, seeded, and simmered into sauces for the coming winter. Sometimes they don’t even make it out of the garden—picked and eaten, unwashed, right off the vine.
—
Or fed to Buck across the fence—the beast nibbling right out of the palms of our hands.
—
The thing is, I have not lived in the same house for more than six years since I graduated from high school nearly fifty years ago. From the age of eighteen to thirty-six, I made major moves every three years: from Texas (U.S.A.F tech school) to England (U.S.A.F. duty station) to Maine (starting college), to Missouri (finishing college), to California (graduate school) to Japan (first full-time teaching job), to middle Tennessee, where I have lived for thirty years. Even here, where I secured a tenure-track position and quickly jumped the canyon between paying rent and paying a mortgage, every six years has brought a move—upgrading to a larger house, or a divorce, or a remarriage—something that required moving. It seems to be in my blood. I get the seven-year itch.
—
When we got the original set of goats—Buck Henry, Clara, Clover, and Mr. G.—in the spring after we bought the property and started building the farm, in my own mind, I committed to being here as long as they were living. The length of a Buck, I thought. Now they are getting old. We are no longer breeding goats, no longer milking. Clover, the sweetest and most affectionate of them all, but who was never any good on the milk stand, has gone to live with friends three counties over. Buck has suffered a string of maladies that brought vet out in the past couple of years. He’s been under general anesthesia twice, all hundred and seventy pounds of him stretched out on a blue-tarp under a hackberry tree in the buck-yard, tongue hanging out like a cartoon. Clara has recently started what could be a long, slow decline. She’s not eating much, not pushing the others around and bullying them, not her usual, dominating, bitchy self. Only Mr. G., a wether (castrated male, kept as a companion for a buck), seems to be sliding into old age with any grace and dignity.
And I’m starting to feel jumpy again, as if there’s something just over the next hill that will satisfy, some image not yet in focus but begging to be seen, some tune not yet made into a song, some Lebowski rug that will pull the room together. The elusive call of possibility against the bitter-sweet refrain of the every day.
—
Yet, the thing is, we do need a llama.
