“Oh, that’s not polite of him at all. Does he not know about consent? Your rooster certainly doesn’t.”
“No, they’re animals. Consent is a foreign concept to them, and, sadly, to many human men as well.”
“Touche.” Amazing. We actually agreed on something! “Do all the goats sleep in here?”
He exhaled loudly through his nose, then laid his fork over his empty plate. “No, only Bitsy. Which is short for Elizabeth. The others do get crabby at times, especially Fawn, the herd matriarch, and she knocks down Bitsy, which gets her all tangled in her harnesses. It’s easier to have her sleep up here when they’re penned in like they are now with the deep snow. She has nowhere to get away from the mean girls in the holding pens.”
“Mean girls are the worst. What’s wrong with her legs?” He seemed taken aback at my interest, which was quite genuine.
“She was born with a congenital issue that left her rear legs paralyzed. Her owner was going to send her to the slaughterhouse, but his wife had fallen for the little doe and didn’t want to see her butchered, so she called me. I ran over to get her, and she’s been here ever since.”
“Oh wow, that’s incredibly sweet of you.” He stared at me as if he didn’t expect a kindness from me. “How long has Bitsy been here at Happy Laurel Farm?”
“Three years.”
“Did you name her?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of goat is she?”
“Nubian.”
“She seems quite nice once you get to know her.”
“Yeah.”
Oh great, we were back to two and three-word sentences. “And did you fashion her little wheelchair cart contraption?” I glanced back to find the goat we were talking about and discovered that she was eating the popcorn from the tree. “Oh, uhm, Bitsy is eating the popcorn.”
“Yeah, she likes it.”
“Oh, well, so do I. I love buying a big tub at the movies and getting extra butter on it.” I dabbed at my lips with the folded paper towel Acosta had shoved at me when I asked for a napkin. “Do you get out much? I remember reading that there was a small theater in the town with only one screen! That’s so quaint.”
“Yeah, that’s us. Quaint.”
I let that one fly by. “You know, the theater is probably doing well as are the other small businesses in town due to the influx of gas workers.” Well, wasn’t I clever shifting the conversation so neatly to the upside of my father’s business? I drew in a breath to continue about the merits of gas workers to small town economies when my sight drifted from a glowering farmer to a big, black goat. “The tree! The goat is eating the tree!” I pointed at Bitsy with my fork.
“Yeah, she likes that too.” I gaped at the man. “What? She’s a browser. That’s the third tree I’ve had in here so far. So we as a country need to move away from fossil fuels and your company is adding to the rampant ecological destruction by hiking up greenhouse gases and—”
“I thought goats ate tin cans.”
His look of contempt was hot and painful as a sunburn on your taint.
“That’s a fallacy. They’re browsers. They enjoy shrubs, weeds, small tree branches, tree bark, and some fruits and veggies. They love corn stalks and pumpkins.”
“Oh. Huh.”
“You really know nothing about the animals whose farms you’re destroying with your drilling, do you?”
“I know cows moo and chickens crow.”
“Do you know anything about farm animals that you didn’t learn from a See ’n Say?”
“Obviously.” I sat there picking at my eggs with my fork as my brain scrambled for some tidbit about farm animals. Mr. Melios began humming theJeopardytheme and smirking to himself. “I know you get milk from cows and bacon from pigs.”
“That is incredibly unimpressive. I have three-year-olds who come here to visit and know that.” He snapped up my plate before I was done. I began to sputter, then decided to hell with it. I wasn’t sure I liked eggs that came from sexed-up hens on second thought. He tossed the dishes into the sink with a clatter that made the goat spin around and scream-blat. Why was the goat so vocal? Were they all that loud? “You’d think that your father would have sent someone out here that had at least a passing knowledge of farming and what it is I do here. Typical of corporate America. Just in case you didn’t get it before, let me spell it out for you. I’m a steward of this land. I’d sooner be run through a combine than sign that fucking paper of yours.”
With that rather well-stated and visually graphic announcement, he stormed out, whipping the door open with such force it slammed into the wall behind it with a crack. I looked at Bitsy, who looked back at me. She had pine needles stuck in her teeth. Oh! She only had lower teeth. Oh God that was bizarre. Why was that? Was the normal goat dentition?! Had her leg condition also affected her teeth? Farm animals were weird.
