Vigil

When goats are born, they dive into the world front legs first, poised to hit the ground. Their faces come next—nose, eyes, ears, the places where their horns will be—and then, the rest—body, tail, back legs. Moments later, the doeling or buckling will wobble to its feet—stunned, amazed, ready to begin.

Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to happen. One Saturday this past May, my husband and daughter and I drove to a farm in South Carolina to pick up a bred Nigerian Dwarf doe. She was white with long, lower lashes and brown and black markings around her eyes—a short, misshapen Sophia Loren. The original owners called her Katherine, after the husband’s dead mother.

“With a c or a k?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” the farmer said. “You can change it if you want.”

Catherine’s/Katherine’s sides were heavy buoys, and she screamed in protest as my husband and the farmer lifted her into the dog crate in the back of our car. Then she screamed for another two hours, all the way back to North Carolina.

At first, it seemed disrespectful to change the name of a goat named after someone’s dead mother, but I was so unnerved by not knowing how to spell it correctly that a couple of days later, we renamed her Ama, the Fante name for a girl born on a Saturday. A Saturday birthday, or, in this case, a rebirth of sorts.

We hoped to milk Ama after she kidded, but we also just really wanted a Nigerian Dwarf baby. We had looked at picture after picture on Craigslist and watched a million YouTube videos of Nigerian Dwarf kids running across people’s decks, leaping onto the backs of their pigs, and so on. They were ridiculously cute, which is the criteria we use around here when deciding whether to pick something up by the side of the road and house and feed it for the next decade.

However, aside from the fact that we had had two doelings for a few weeks, we knew nothing about caring for milk goats. To try to prepare, we had read Storey’s Guide to Raising Dairy Goats, and I had been on every available website and blog and discussion board I could find. I even regularly read Christian homesteading websites, which was stretching my tolerance a bit, but they were full of good information since, apparently, there is some connection between fundamentalist Christianity and goat-rearing that I don’t quite understand. My favorite website, however, was one where the farmer was a vegetarian who raised only LaManchas, and she was super sweet and helpful until people wrote in asking for advice about meat goats, and then the farmer would tell them to go to hell. In so many words.

Ultimately, after all the reading and research, we decided that raising goats was a lot like having children: You just sort of had to dive in and try it. Which is, now that I think about it, not the way that everyone looks at childrearing and maybe not the way we should have approached that either, but there it is.

Ama’s former owners said she had been exposed on January 15. Exposed. That was a term I was learning. It conjured images of a virus floating around a crowded party or of a pervert yanking down his shorts on the side of a busy trail. It implied vulnerability, maybe even victimization. But in any case, the exposure date meant the day that the buck mounted the doe, which was an image I didn’t really want to have in my head at all, and so I just focused on the numbers. About 145-153 days, give or take a few days, from that exposure date, we could expect babies. Allegedly.

And so on June 4, day 145, I began my vigil.



June 4 . Day 145 – I read somewhere that sometimes goats accidentally have their babies in their water buckets, and so we switch out Ama’s large bucket for a small Tupperware container, something even a two-pound goat could crawl out of. And then I gather everything necessary to assist in the delivery. Just in case. At Walmart, I buy KY jelly, adult pee pads, and a package of latex gloves, and then I assemble a birthing kit—a plastic tub filled with all the aforementioned items plus iodine, towels, paper towels, trash bags, a computer printout of the various birthing positions, cotton balls, dental floss, etc. At the last minute, I include a computer printout of diagrams of the various kid presentations which might require intervention. I feel responsible having the birthing kit. It means I’m doing something preparatory, preemptive, proactive—all those p words that one would not normally associate with me.



June 5 – Day 146 – This morning, Ama refuses her breakfast and won’t leave her stall, so I am certain she’s going into labor. Also, her tail ligaments are loose, and her teats are pointed at an angle (forty-five degrees), which we have read means she will kid within the next twenty-four hours.

I sit in a lawn chair in the barn staring at the goat – at her vulva, to be specific. Every time Ama twitches, I think something is happening. I am reading The Empathy Exams, which somehow makes me feel like a gentler person, someone who is trying to be the proper support person for my goat, and every now and then I coo sympathetic things to Ama. Good girl. You are going to be a great mama. Etcetera.

There is something about the humid summer air, the presence of this goat and her unborn kids, the fact that the very first chapter of The Empathy Exams is about pregnancy, which takes me back to another hot, muggy summer, almost twenty-two years ago. My legs and ankles are swollen, my belly taut with my unborn son and the cannoli I have every afternoon for snack. My son’s feet press into my diaphragm, and my stomach lurches and heaves, a giant water balloon. At night, I sleep propped up on a stack of pillows.

Now, the goat stretches onto the straw and makes her hips wide—child’s pose. Her breathing is heavy and loud. I put down the book and watch, and suddenly, the air is stale and thick. I am having trouble breathing, and so I stand up and walk outside, into the harsh sunlight. On the bank just beyond the barn, the hillside has exploded with roses in all shades of red and pink.

My husband has been at the store, and now he returns bearing a plastic suction bulb—the kind you use to suction out the noses of human babies—just in case we need to suction the kids’ noses. The bulb comes in a package with a tiny brush and tiny nail clippers. He puts them in the birthing kit along with a stethoscope he has just purchased.

“I don’t even know where a goat’s heart is,” he says. “But I’m going to Google it.”

Ama chews on a bit of straw, scratches her head on the side of the barn. But nothing interesting is happening where it is supposed to be happening. Still, I sit with her until the light fades over the blueberry patch on the hill. And then I close my book and shut her into her stall for the night.



June 6 – Day 147 — Ama is being unusually affectionate. She tries crawling into my lap, and she licks my arm all the way from my wrist to my elbow. These are definite signs. It’s going to happen today, for sure.

Outside the barn door, one of our laying hens sits in a dog crate my husband has dubbed The Hospital. For two days, the chicken had hunkered by the coop door. She was not eating or laying or even pooping. The other chickens had clustered around her screaming and squawking, and so my husband moved her outside to The Hospital where she has her own tiny food and water bowls.

A couple of times a day, my husband feeds this chicken—one we have not named because we can’t tell her from the other nine who look just like her—electrolyte water from the plastic bulb that was supposed to be for the baby goats. Late in the afternoon, I find my husband crouched over a tub of warm water, one hand on the chicken, another feeding her teaspoonfuls of vegetable oil. My cheese thermometer sits next to the tub.

“I need you to help me for a second,” he says.

“Did you use my cheese thermometer?” I ask.

“Only before I put the chicken in,” he says.

The chicken is missing feathers near its tail, and though we have never killed one of our own chickens for meat, the scene itself is uncomfortably familiar. Add a half an onion and a bay leaf, and this is a crockpot with a hen stewing in herbs.

My Dachshund and Lab are lounging outside the goat pen until, suddenly, they aren’t. Barking and yipping and growling, they tear through the creek and take off up the mountain.

I have been trying to maintain a calm presence, to be respectful of the dying chicken and maybe to lure the goat into feeling secure enough to begin labor. But now I run screaming for my dogs. Their yelps become more frenetic and more distant until, finally, I can’t hear them at all. They have run up the steepest part of the mountain, into the fifty acres that is nothing but thick brush and trees and rocks.

My husband has now gone into town in search of antibiotics for the chicken, so I text him to come back, that we have an emergency, and then I head back in to check on Ama. When the dogs finally return hours later, I have visualized their deaths so vividly and in so many different ways—sliced open by a bear paw, shot by a hunter, attacked by a coyote—that their arrival isn’t even a relief.



June 5 — Day 146 — I think Ama has changed her mind, which is completely understandable. I remember feeling this way when I was being wheeled into the hospital to have my own children. I remember thinking, oh, you know what? I thought I wanted to have kids, but now that I think about it, this seems really scary and painful, so just never mind.

The chicken is still alive, but barely. Maybe it’s a sign. I don’t know. I have taken to referring to the cage as Hospice. I sit by her cage and talk to her, like you would a dying person.

“Hey, girl,” I say. “You’ve given us a lot of good eggs, and I want to thank you for that.”

Her head is tucked deep into her chest, like she’s soundly sleeping, maybe even dead already, but I can see a tiny movement in her back, a barely detectable rising and falling.

The summer my son was born, a stray pregnant cat hung around our apartment. At least once a day, this cat left a massacred bunny at our front door, so we took to calling her Kujo. One day, Kujo showed up bunnyless and panting and yowling by our front door. We let her inside. While my daughter played Barbies on our back porch, the cat stretched out on the wooden boards in what we thought was normal labor.

Finally, when it was apparent that something was wrong, we took Kujo to the vet. Hours later, we got a call from the vet saying that he had good news and bad news. Two of the kittens had died, but Kujo and one of the kittens had survived. An hour later, another call. The other kitten had died, but, good news, mama was doing okay. And one final call. They were sorry to tell us that Kujo had died.



June 6 — Day 147 — My husband and I are arguing because we are stressed which is what we do when we are stressed. He keeps propping the barn door open, and I keep shutting it. I tell him it’s bad luck for a pregnant goat to stare at a dying chicken, and after I say it, I realize I am only partly kidding.



June 7 — Day 148 —I am absolutely certain Ama will most definitely probably go into labor any minute now. I follow her around, checking her vulva for changes. It is round and puffy, like bubble wrap, and so I pull up a chair in the barn and angle it so I can stare at this region while she eats alfalfa hay.

I am on chapter two of The Empathy Exams—“Devil’s Bait.” It’s an essay about people who have Morgellons, a disorder in which they believe they have all sort of things living under their skin—things like worms and such. But, of course, the essay isn’t really about that. It’s an essay about how compassion is more important than literal truth, which reminds me of my daughter when she was five, and her brother was two.

My son would say something earnest but misguided like, “Grasshoppers have twenty-eight legs,” and I would say, “Really?” or “Do they?” or something similar. And my daughter would go off—screaming about how wrong he was, how completely ridiculous a notion that was, how she could prove he was wrong just as soon as she could find her grasshopper book.

And I would look at her, her eyes bright and full of righteous indignation, and say, “Honey, is it better to be right or kind?”

She would pause and take her wrinkled forefinger from her mouth because sucking on her forefinger was what she did when her brother made her anxious by being wrong.

“Right?” she would say. And then, seeing my face, she would say, “Uh…kind. I meant, kind.”

It was an exchange we had over and over throughout her childhood, one that she says echoes—for better or worse—in her head routinely now that she is an adult. In any case, this essay I’m reading is very insightful and thought-provoking and also very disgusting, and all the while I am reading about it, I am being bitten by gnats and flies and mosquitoes, and I’m having an allergic reaction to the hay and straw, and Ama is peeing what might as well be poisonous gasses because her pee is so pungent, and even though the chicken looks a little perkier today—holding its head upright, peering through the bars of the dog crate in sort of a cheerful way—I still think that, surely, it must be almost time.



June 8 — Day 149 — I cannot sleep. I am having all kinds of weird dreams about birth and birthing and death and dying. I dream I go into the barn, and there is a stall full of Beagle puppies. And I dream about my grandmother, who died last June about this same time. My body remembers this, tunes in to everything that is the same now as it was then—the delicate pink and white laurel blooms dotting the mountainsides, the hot rain pounding our tin roof, the way my shirt sticks to my chest whenever I walk outside. In my dream, I’m back at my grandmother’s house, and it is summer again. The windows are open, the scent of peonies in the air. It is as if the whole house is waiting. As if waiting for death and waiting for birth are similar in ways my unconscious self understands, and my conscious self does not.

When I wake, it occurs to me that I am slipping into shady mental territory. I worry that, like the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I will soon be crawling around the edge of the room, bits of wallpaper lodged beneath my fingernails. But still.

“I think the babies will be born when the chicken dies,” I text my daughter. “It will be a sign.”

I am joking again. Sort of. And she sort of thinks it’s funny. And then I tell her that a chicken dying of natural causes looks remarkably like a person dying of natural causes. Which it does. Her beak is dull gray, her face pitched forward, and she could just be deeply sleeping, but there is something even quieter than sleep—a raw, piercing stillness.

We have Nicaraguan rum in the freezer—Flor de Cana—which is just perfect since I am on the chapter on Nicaragua in The Empathy Exams. Late this evening, my son—who I must confess is almost twenty but not quite and definitely not twenty-one but I didn’t buy the rum—his sister did—and maybe I should stop him, but I really believe the drinking age ought to be eighteen anyway, but then again, I’m pretty sure that it’s not okay to allow your kid break the law just because you don’t agree with it, but anyway —whips up pina coladas which we drink together in the barn. The day has been hot and humid, and we suck on the cool ice and watch the goats play. Ama follows us around, licking her lips and putting her front paws on our thighs. When she does this, it looks like the babies are going to fall through her belly onto the ground, a feat my Flor-de-Cana-filled mind almost believes is possible.



June 9 — Day 150 — Maybe it was a fake pregnancy. I have been reading about that online, about how a goat can really believe she is pregnant, and she will grown huge, and actually go into labor and then deliver an empty amniotic sac.

I read all the discussion forums again. Most Nigerian Dwarfs don’t go over 153 days. Maybe that’s right. Or maybe it’s not. The teat thing was wrong, so now I don’t know. Someone had a Nigerian Dwarf go to day 157. Someone else says you should never let them go over day 155.

Now, I mentally tick off the things in my personal history which provide evidence of my incompetence. The latest example occurred just weeks before when my husband and I got our first goats. After much discussion of what kind to get and where and when to get them, we ended up purchasing the first goats we saw—a La Mancha and nursing doeling we found via Craigslist. As an afterthought, we decided to also get one other doeling whose mother was struggling to feed her other three babies.

The second doeling, Willow, was tiny and cuddly and brown, a miniature baby camel. We kept the second doeling in the house, next to our wood boiler, and turned the mother and baby out into the fenced field after they spent the night in the barn.

That next evening, almost exactly twenty-four hours after we had brought the goats home, my husband and I went inside to eat. We were gone twenty minutes, thirty at most. My husband left his truck running while we ate a bowl of pintos and cornbread, and then he headed out to run some errands. Within moments, I heard hollering from the far field. Holding Willow, I ran outside.

“They’re gone!” my husband screamed. “They’re gone!”

I looked from him to the fence, scanned the hollow, then the hillsides. To realize exactly how gone the goats were, you would have to know where we live, to see this hollow surrounded on all sides by rhododendron thickets so thick you can’t see more than a foot in front of you in places. We searched the woods, hiked the ridgeline and the surrounding properties. We posted “Lost Goats” signs on all the major roads. We called our neighbors and animal control and sent our dogs on search missions through the woods. Nothing. It was as if, as my husband put it, they had been beamed into space.

For days afterward, while we searched for the errant goats and worked on fortifying the gates and fences, I was Willow’s constant companion. I took her outside and followed her around with a copy of Storey’s Guide opened to the “Bad Weeds for Goats” section complete with illustrations. Every time Willow showed an interest in a plant, I held up the book to try to determine whether it was one of the forbidden weeds. And I offered her warm goat’s milk infused with molasses every few hours, but she never learned to take the bottle, so I gave up and began feeding her like a kitten from a saucer propped on an upside down soup kettle. At night, I wrapped her in a towel and held her while we watched “Columbo” reruns together on my computer.

Although I was pretty sure we didn’t deserve to have any more goats (because I was raised Presbyterian and deserving is definitely a prerequisite for acquiring), I did know from all my reading that since goats are herd animals, they should never be raised alone. It will stunt their emotional growth.

We kept hoping the other goats would “show back up,” a phrase so nebulous as to encompass all possibilities without dwelling on their probable fate. Getting a new goat seemed to close forever the, albeit remote, possibility that the goats had somehow survived and were munching happily on dead leaves somewhere and to pretty much embrace the whole one-of-these-days-one-of-the-dogs-will-drag-home-one-of-their-bones scenario, but we finally accepted that they weren’t coming back and went in search of another goat.

We ended up with a beautiful two-month-old Saanen we named Holly (after Hank William Jr’s daughter, because, like Holly Williams, our Holly was so blond), and we moved both goats out to the barn protected by a complex system of gates and bungee cords and more bungee cords and more gates and some metal locks and latches and more bungee cords. We wanted to do it right this time.



June 10 — Day 151 — Still no babies. I cannot sleep. Last night, I watched a video of a pig giving birth. She lay on her side while baby and baby slid effortlessly from her silent, prone body. At the end, the videographer announced that she had fifteen piglets, eleven live babies. Below the video, people posted about the four dead babies. Oh, no! How sad. And so on.

When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed I had a sheep that gave birth to a lamb, but the lamb was a tiny square, head folded into body, legs tucked underneath, an origami baby lamb.



June 11 — Day 152 — The chicken is still alive, and now my husband thinks there may be an obstruction in its throat, and so, per the advice he received via The Internet, he massages her chest, then hangs the chicken upside down by its feet in an attempt to dislodge whatever is in its throat. The chicken goes limp.

“She’s fainted,” he says.

Ama is doing all kinds of normal goat stuff that has nothing to do with kidding. No pawing at the ground. No talking to her belly. No heavy panting. She is eating hay and grain and weeds and headbutting the other goats in a generally nonpregnant sort of way. Every few minutes, she runs her enormous belly along the sides of the fence, then waits for me to rub her favorite spot—just between her horns. I squat beside her and massage her face and then her ears, sending positive energy intended to convey, I’m here for you, girl. Just let me know when.

In less than a week, my son will be twenty-two years old. In the weeks before he was born, my husband and I converted the walk-in closet in our bedroom into a nursery. We hung a wallpaper border that was yellow and pink and green and blue. We put a changing table where my husband used to hang his suit coats and a crib against the back wall where my shoes used to be. We hung a mobile and packed the crib with stuffed bunnies and dogs and a water-filled baby doll and a blue blanket with a giant yellow duck embroidered on the front. And then we waited.



June 12 — Day 148 — Well, it seems I was wrong. I asked Siri and I counted myself, but it seems that we both got the due dates wrong, or maybe I asked Siri the wrong question because she doesn’t usually get things wrong, and I usually do. Anyway, 150 days from January 15 is Saturday, June 14, two days from now, so maybe it won’t be today, or maybe it will be because there is a full moon tonight, and sometimes, when it isn’t rainy or foggy or hazy, when the clouds part, and the sky is clear and vast, and you can stand on the ledge outside my son’s bedroom and see the Big Dipper from the rooftop…on nights like that, the moon lights up this whole holler. The light bounces off the hillsides and the tin roofs on the hen house and the barn and the house, like lights on a movie set or a busy runway, like somewhere where people are not waiting to be born or to die but are dwelling in that space in between, the space where memory and reality and possibility collide.