It was March, 2020, spring break of the last semester of my career teaching composition in a community college. As a nation, we were in the early stages of the COVID pandemic, isolating ourselves, trying to figure out how to scrub packages left on the front porch by UPS, learning how to make masks because there weren’t many available for purchase, and watching the residents of tall apartment buildings in large cities cheer health-care workers as they trudged to and from the hospitals where they were trying to save as many lives as they could. The death toll mounted.
I was sitting in my home office one afternoon about two o’clock, working at the computer, trying to get all the materials for all of my classes ready to go online. That included all lecture notes, overhead slides, assignments, assignment instructions, quizzes, discussion questions, everything. Literally, everything that I would normally deliver and explain in class had to be written out, formatted, proofread, and uploaded into empty course shells so students could access it from home. It felt like a Herculean task, especially considering that it was for the last two months of my career.
Vanessa opened the door and said, “I’m heading to the barn. Justine’s about to deliver.” She was excited. Vanessa, I mean. I’m not sure how Justine felt about it. Confused, I suppose. Justine was a two-year old La Mancha dairy goat. This was her first delivery. She had always been a skittish goat, a wall-flower, last one to the feed bowl. Now, she was big, very big, and she was especially wide. Earlier in the afternoon we had coaxed her into the barn from the brush yard, a distance of about fifty yards, by offering handfuls of grain every three or four steps. It was a slow process, and not entirely linear: step, step, step, pause, grain; step, step, step, pause, grain; then a random noise or quick motion would scare her back several feet, and we’d start again; grain, pause, step, step, step….
A few minutes later, I followed Vanessa to the barn. Our barn was almost new. We had built it just a few years earlier. It was divided into three roughly equal parts: one side with a gravel floor for the tractor and related implements; the center, with a concrete floor, for a workshop and grain storage; and one side with a dirt floor and hay for animals. The latter section is what we called “the barn,” or when we needed to be more specific “the barn part of the barn.” Using T-posts, wooden pallets, and bailing twine, we had fashioned a make-shift pen in the barn part of the barn for such events as goats giving birth.
When I arrived, Vanessa was already in the pen with Justine, and a little caramel-colored hoof was just starting to emerge from Justine’s backside. But just one, which was not a good sign. We waited for the second hoof to appear, but it didn’t. We waited some more. When it still didn’t, we waited some more. And then some more.
Vanessa had already helped deliver many baby goats, and she had read THE BOOK several times, so she knew what to do. She washed her hands, soaped up, and slipped her fingers inside Justine to get the second hoof in position. This job fell to her because we both acknowledged that my hands are way too big to fit inside the rear-end of a goat.
This was one of those moments we truly missed having Jordan, our youngest daughter, at home. Jordan, who had moved to North Carolina a couple years earlier on the pretense of starting a life of her own. had the perfect combination of gifts for this situation. She’s small, patient, agile, quick to strike, and fearless when it comes to working with animals. She was a champion chicken catcher, sheep wrestler, and goat midwife. She has the hands of surgeon—thin, nimble, and precise. For years, whenever I dropped a screw or a nut into the dark crevice of some contraption I was tampering with, the first words I uttered were “Jordan! Where are you?” But, alas, she was three hundred miles away, so I looked at Vanessa and sighed, all the while secretly thanking my lucky stars for having hands the size of a personal pan pizza.
Vanessa was working. My job was support. “You’re doing great,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster as she carefully searched Justine’s cervix with the fingers of her right hand. “I can feel it in there,” she said, her eyes half closed in concentration. She winced and then closed her eyes completely, in order to focus, I assumed, sight being completely useless or even a distraction in this moment. “I can almost…” Another pause. “I can…”
Then suddenly, she opened her eyes and withdrew her fingers, and just as suddenly there was half a goat baby sticking out of Justine’s posterior. The kid—soft, white with beige trim, covered in a kind of slimy, graying goo—just hung there, half in and half out, as if having second thoughts about the wisdom of this journey. It was alive, occasionally opening its grey eyes through the mucus and membranes. Pretty. Confused. Vulnerable. In shock.
Justine continued to contract, and with every contraction, the kid emerged a little further into this world, until she eventually spilled out onto the hay and lay there while Justine turned around—the placenta bag dangling between her hind legs like a balloon half-filled with water—and started to clean the baby with her tongue, as goats do. We named the baby Blossom, and we thought we were done. Dam and daughter in the manger. All was well with the world. Or at least the small one right in front of us.
Then, however, we saw another caramel-colored hoof peeking out of Justine’s caboose. It didn’t take us long to realize this was clearly not a spare hoof in case Blossom had a flat; it was attached to a whole other goat. Worse, it was upside down. That could only mean one of two things: either it was a terribly deformed goat, or it was a rear hoof and this was a breech birth. Then a second upside down hoof appeared, and Vanessa, sweaty, tired, and smeared with goat blood, mucus, and the veiny membranes of afterbirth, looked me squarely in the eye and said, “You might want to go get the book.”
I did as she asked. I knew the book would tell us what to do, but mostly I just wanted to get out of the barn for a moment. I took my time walking to the house, checking on the dogs, making sure the toilets weren’t running, doing anything to stretch out this break as long as I could. As I was strolling back up the hill toward the barn, book in hand, I heard Vanessa yell, “Help! Help! Help!” I picked up the pace, and when I got back to the pen, I saw Vanessa standing behind Justine, this time, with her hand up Justine’s backside all the way to the wrist. At that moment, it looked sort of like Justine was trying to suck Vanessa inside of her through some sort of Caprine Uterine Witchcraft, and I wondered, briefly, if I should grab Vanessa’s ankles and hold on for dear life.
Vanessa, on the other hand, had a much more realistic view of the situation. “I’m trying… to turn… the baby… over,” she said.
“And you’re doing great!”
She wasn’t really doing great. She was doing her best, but the kid wasn’t cooperating, and Justine seemed to have no idea of the drama being acted out behind her. After a few more moments of closed-eye, intra-uterine, woman-goat midwifery, Vanessa pulled her hand out of Justine’s backside, for the last time that day, I hoped.
Now, we were back to tiny, caramel-colored goat hooves peeking out from the thick curtains of Justine’s cervix, She was still contracting regularly, and on each contraction, the hooves would come out a little, then retreat. Then they’d come out again, then retreat. “Hang in there,” I said, again, stuck in my role as cruise director, “You’re doing great.” This time, Vanessa’s response was a stone-cold stare.
At some point, I suggested tugging on the hooves a little with each contraction. I was thinking that maybe we could coax the little guy out gradually, like we had coaxed Justine into the barn earlier. We worked on it slowly, together, taking turns, and after a while there was a second goat baby in our midst. A male. We named him Pat, after a female friend. We were done, we thought, at last. It was dinner time. It was past dinner time. We were hungry, we were dirty, we were tired, we were covered in various forms of goat muck. It was dark outside the barn.
But then, somehow, in a Coronavirus-induced fog, a third baby goat appeared. At least partly. I won’t describe the actual birth because I don’t remember it. What I do remember is clearly thinking, This baby is not going to make it. He struggled to breathe, we were holding him and bouncing him, and Vanessa stuck her finger down his throat to clear the passage, while I wiped away mucous and blood and afterbirth. All this time, Justine was cleaning Blossom and Pat, and looking at them as if trying to decide which she wanted to keep.
The third one—we later named him Buddy—never made it, never really had a chance. Justine never gave him the attention he needed; she never tried to lick him to life, as she had instinctively done for the others. Perhaps she knew there was something wrong in Buddy that was beyond our ability to sense. Try as we might, and we did try, Vanessa and I were poor substitutes for a willing mama. As I recall now, two plus years later, he died within twenty-four hours wrapped in a towel on our bed.
Blossom and Pat, on the other hand, were fine. Within an hour, they were both up and wobbling around the pen, nosing for nipples, taking naps and waking up, taking in their surroundings as serenely as baby goats do. A couple of days later, we opened the gate and introduced them to barn, and, not long after that, the barnyard. And the world was a little larger for it.
Adapted from a FB post from March 20, 2020