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| Annie near the outer stall door |
Last Tuesday when I went out to the barn to close up the goats, they did not greet me with eager bleats or a rush to the fence as usual. Most of the pasture is behind the barn, and the weather had gotten cold again that day, so I went into the barn and expected to hear them in there. There were no hooves pawing eagerly at the stall door. Worried that something was wrong, I peeked through the bars above the wooden part of the door. Lily stood silently at attention in the middle of the stall looking intently at me. There was no sign of Annie. My heart sank.
I pulled the latch over, pushed the sliding door open, and stepped inside. I glanced out the open door on the opposite wall of the stall and I immediately saw her. On the ground, in the gate opening of the cross fencing, Annie lay on her side, motionless. I knew. I didn't even have to walk over. She didn't lay with her head on the ground like that when resting. Annie had died, died of old age. (She was at least 16 years old, maybe as many as 18, and 10-12 years old is considered old for a goat.)
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| the darkness I dug in |
I stood there in grief. Lily bleated at me, calling me away from my thoughts. She seemed confused. Mechanically I gave her half of a scoop of feed. She sniffed at it. She walked to the door and looked out. She walked back to her food bin and nudged it. I closed the outer stall door. I checked the water, gave Lily some absentminded scratches and pats. She started to eat half-heartedly. I left her to it and closed her in for the night.
I had just tucked the kids in bed before coming out, and they were not yet asleep. And of course my husband was gone for the evening. He had taken my eldest boy to an engineering activity followed by a science fair at a regional institute of technology. I sighed and gave him a call so as to give them advanced warning. Then I went in, checked on the kids to make sure they were settling, gathered a battery operated lantern, a shovel, and some work gloves. I thanked God that the ground had recently thawed.
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a picture of the pasture of bluebells where Annie is buried
(taken last year) |
Darkness had fallen. After finally figuring how to switch on the mercury vapor light above the large, sliding barn door, I began my vigil. I did not want to leave Annie out overnight. The bobcats, coyotes, coons, 'possums, foxes, weasels, etc. might get at her. So I picked a likely spot in the "bluebell pasture," put my lantern on a fencepost, and started digging.
It was cold, the upper 20's. My breath made little clouds of condensation before my face. It was still. The trees only rustled slightly. The cold turn had slowed the call of the spring peepers. Their usually energetic tintinnabulation was simply a thin chirping and not the boisterous trilling of the night before. It was as if they were passing the news on. "Annie.... died... Good... bye... dead... goat... dead... Annie... Annie... Annie... Annie..."
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| My oldest with Annie about 8 yrs. ago |
I began to dig. The grass roots crunched as the blade of the shovel sliced through the turf. The clay was waterlogged and heavy from snow melt and spring rains. My boots squished and squelched on the surface of the soil as I stepped. I jumped on the shovel top over and over again in order to drive it into the earth. I waggled the long handle, pushing it first this way and that in order to drive the metal surface into the gooey ground. Again and again I shook and scraped off spadeful after sticky spadeful. Occasionally I whacked the shovel on the nearby fencepost to remove a particularly stubborn scoop, and the thud echoed resoundingly in the surrounding woods. The pile of soil grew, but the hole seemed to fill itself in like an excavation at the beach that slowly seeps full of sand again.
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| my oldest with Annie about 3 yrs. ago |
My husband called to let me know they had left and would be home in another 45 minutes. After I disconnected, I stood for a moment in the twilight of lamplight, leaning on the shovel handle, steeped in sorrow, staring at the now shallow grave. The arches of my feet were beginning to hurt from standing on the top edge of the shovel over and over again in my thin rubber boots. My left forearm was a bit sore.
I thought about how four of my children did not remember a time before we had Annie. I wondered how my oldest son was taking her death as he drove home with my husband. He was my only child who might remember purchasing her. And he had been feeding her and letting her in and out for me quite a bit since the baby had been born. I sighed and looked up. A large, orange, full moon had risen as I dug. It peeked through the trees at about shoulder height, a reminder of the beauty of our seemingly cruel world, a sign that life goes on.
I trekked back to the house to check on the children again. They lay in silence. Accompanied only by my soft footfalls in the damp grass, I returned in silence to the grave, sidetracking past the cold, still form that lay in the grass, staring at me with unseeing eyes.
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| digging help |
A few short weeks before my uncle had died. As I dug, I thought of his grave, of the photo collage I had made to display at the luncheon afterwards, photos that seemed such an insufficient tribute to the life of a man. I thought of the advancing age of my parents, of the upcoming 40th birthday of my mate. I thought of the small, white casket of my oldest daughter and how long it had been since we last visited her burial site. I wondered if I would have to bury any other children, if my spouse would out-live me. I meditated on the bittersweet fleetingness of life as the fibrous roots of trees broke beneath my shovel like old bones.
Eventually my husband returned. By the stripes of light that his headlights made as they shone through the board fence, I watched him finish the digging. Soon he thought the hole was big enough. We lifted Annie gently into a wheelbarrow and he rolled it over to the hollowed out earth. Against my protests, he tipped up the wheelbarrow and she slipped into the grave with a soft thud. And there she lay, as she so often did, upright, with her legs tucked under her. Only this time she was nestled in an earthen bed instead of the bed of straw or hay or pasture grass that she usually lay upon.
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| Annie plowing through some of the snow this winter |
We took turns to scoop the clods of clay and piles of earth over her lifeless form. We chit chatted as nonchalantly as possible. Talk turned to tractors because if I had piled the earth on the other side of the hole, he could have pushed it back into the grave with our tractor and we wouldn't have had to continue to shovel. And if he had a new tractor with a front-end loader, he could have lifted Annie that way. I tried to conceal my annoyance from him. He'd been obsessed with tractor shopping for some time. It was an investment that made no financial sense to me. And I didn't want to talk about tractors.
I knew he wasn't trying to be critical of my grave digging. He probably missed Annie more than I did. He had been her primary caretaker, after all. He was probably only distracting himself from the unpleasantness, from his loss. It's something he has a habit of doing, indulging in avoidance.
My temperament doesn't shy away from such things. In fact, I brood a bit and dwell on them. I am sure that this, in turn, annoys him. In fact, I took solace in digging a grave for her by hand. There was some consolation in the fact that I lifted her gently. It was less harsh that she was buried slowly, shovelful by shovelful, in a way that hurt me in more ways than one, and not in one fell swoop. It was something concrete to do that allowed me to face and work through the experience of death.
Annie had made it through this long, snowy winter only to die in the spring! I had worried every time my husband travelled about what I would do if she died, me busy with kids and all, and the ground frozen. But she seemed to be doing alright throughout the winter, although she moved more slowly and seemed a bit hard of hearing.
But when the weather warmed, she took a turn for the worse. One of her front teeth fell out, and her eyes seemed to lose a bit of their luster. She took a longer time to come to the fence to greet whomever was outside, and she didn't call out as much as she used to. So we babied her- fed her oatmeal and molasses, checked on her several times a day, fed her by hand. She seemed to feel better, and eventually tried to steal the goat feed from her stall mate instead of being grateful for the warm oats. So we went back to supplementing her grass and hay with goat feed, and got a little lax about checking on her for a couple days, as it was Holy Week and we were all very busy.
In the end, I suppose Providence provided. My son was spared from having to find her. My husband was not on a week-long business trip. The ground had thawed. She was able to lie down and breathe her last in the soft, spring grass. And we were able to bury her without the children having to be aware of or part of the morbid job.
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| my youngest daughter with Annie about 5 yrs. ago |
She was such a part of our lives for so long. I remember a cold winter when she tolerantly let the chickens roost on her back for warmth like a living down comforter. She had a penchant for rose bushes and raspberry plants. She liked to take walks with people around the pasture. She never once jumped up on or butted anyone. The only aggression she ever showed was toward a stray kitten that gave her no peace. She'd nibble a bit of whatever you offered her, even if she didn't like it or wasn't hungry, just to keep you near her. She loved to sleep outside on nice nights (before we moved to the wilds and wouldn't let her anymore.) She came running to the fence whenever we went outside or pulled into the drive. She let the children pat her clumsily and drape her in garlands of clover chain. And if she really liked you, she'd lick you like a friendly dog.
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| my youngest daughter with Annie about 1 yr. ago |
My husband needs an antidote for the loss of our Annie Goat. When I mentioned the fact that our remaining goat was a herd animal in need of companionship and that the breeder we purchased her from so long ago had no goats for sale this spring, instead of thinking of selling Lily or giving her away, he's started contemplating the purchase of a pony as a companion animal for her! My oldest daughter is very excited by this possibility and is lobbying heavily. My oldest boy, who once offered to tend the stray horse (
Horsin' Around,
Gift Horse,
Sorry Charlie,
Charlie, et al. ,
Horse Trading, and
The Horse Saga) if he became a permanent fixture here, has no interest in replacing Annie with a pony. It's only been a week, and he isn't ready to move on to ponies yet. I agree with him whole heartedly, although for more practical reasons.
