One Little Goat

When I was a child in Texas, my parents raised goats, which prowled the fencerows all day looking for weak spots, and escaped to forage poison ivy encroaching on the yard or graze idly in the neighbors' sorghum fields. Occasionally we came home from town to find the goats had shouldered open the backdoor and climbed onto the kitchen table, where they stood at leisure, eating anything tasty within reach. Our neighbors disliked us, not only because we were Jews, leftists, and outsiders in innumerable and unnamed other ways, but also because of the regular damage our goats did to their fields. One neighbor whose land abutted ours, though he himself lived in an iridescent yellow house on the edge of town, drove up our long rutted driveway one day after a goat escape and climbed out of his pickup with a shotgun. He strode toward the goat barn with his 12-gauge beneath his arm, and at age 3, invariably naked and grubby, I clung to his leg pleading until his heart softened. Our family—including the goats and my mother, who opposed the chemicals he sprayed on his soybean fields that wafted down the hill toward us—was a constant thorn in his side, and he liked to let us know how he felt about it. Once as my father and one of his long-haired friends from out of town were idling down the rutted road with beer cans cracked, probably sharing a joint, they came upon this neighbor standing by his truck at the roadside taking a piss, and as they passed he waggled his dick at them in acknowledgement.