Author: kmcdonaldl

We waited for an hour for the buyer to show up. The four goats already loaded in the trailer. They called for their mamas for a little while and gave up calling when we gave them their food. We penned the wether lambs up the day before so they’d be easy to catch. There is nothing to do to prepare them for this permanent separation. We can not warn them, we have to trick them, distract them with some food, grab their back leg, drag them out and away from their herd, their mama, the life they’ve known.

The buyer came. She was a nice woman, with a nice husband and two daughters. They have a bunch of goats north of here. They keep them like we do, for milk, for meat, for the small profit at the end of season. Yes, they were also interested in our doelings for sale. We had about 9 more goats we had to cull out. After the negotiation we decided on seven goats, and off went Helen and her baby, Cookie Cutter’s little baby, Cookie Brown’s baby, and Plank.

Plank was born in Washington. It was a bad season, the corral was over crowded, the wetness persisted threatening hoof rot. The babies that spring all had worms and diarrhea. We nursed them all back to health, but they seemed permanently stunted. Plank was so named because when we loaded her in the trailer to go clear brush she was as tiny as a plank of wood you would lift over your head.

As her peers grew, she remained small, escaping from the corral every chance she got. She’d wander over to us unloading hay, or sitting by the fire. We’d hold her and cradle her. She was family.

I promised her a place in our herd forever last spring when we took her ailing mother to the butcher. Her mother, her protector, her ally. She was alone then in a herd where you have to defend your position in the pecking order. You have to bully for your food. She was small, tough, but not prone to fighting.

She loaded up last night without protest. She has loaded in trailers her whole life. She stood in the trailer without panic, looking around, wondering.

The mothers will call for their babies today. Scarlett will wonder where her son is. Cookie Brown will call for her daughter and her daughter’s daughter. In a few days they’ll settle down, readjust. Will they forget? Or just let it go? Do they remember this culling year after year?

I don’t walk out to the goat corral anymore, going in and playing with them like I used to. Petting them, feeding them, holding their babies. The goats that remain call up the goats we have gotten rid of, I think of Alphabet, Pippi, Earling, Peaches, the Monkeys, Plank. These goats’ sisters and mothers and grandmothers lay around the coral in their family groups. Smaller groups now. Much smaller.

I refused to be tied down to convention. In my closet of the childhood room I shared with my brother and sister, my mom had a box of papers with a red bumper sticker on the side: Men, can’t live with em, can’t shoot em. My father probably gave it to her. My parents shared a warped sense of humor. I took it to heart, or deep into my subconscious. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew it was neither wife nor mother. Unless of course I was in a lesbian relationship with adopted troubled kids from some distant and less fortunate place- then wifedom and motherhood would be somewhat more justifiable, palatable even.

How is it my finger is gold banded? My nipples sore from nursing? Everything I own has throw up, poop, pee, or smashed avocado on it? Was it the romance? Was I swept off my feet? Was it the pull of my biological clock, the ache that came when I saw a small hand reach for mine?

My child grew large in my belly as soon as we moved to Utah a state whose birthrate per capita is the largest in the country. This rural, sandy, isolated place is good for making babies. Suddenly everywhere I looked there were pregnant women, women carrying babies, women with a trail of children following them loudly. I was not special. I was not unique. The wonder of it, the rapid cell division within me, was as mundane as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. My glow was blotted out by the weebling and wobbling of so many other pregnant women- their large bellies careening around the supermarket aisle before them. I was surrounded. No one looked at me special. I was not doing anything strange.

But I was. Inside me another being fought for survival. Demanded oreos and garlic bread. Demanded naps and three am play times. This being inside me pushed to get out, trying every corner of my body, her fists and knees protruding from me as though my stomach were made of elastic. Her little fingers wrapped around my lower ribs, squeezing and pulling them downward, pulling herself upward against my lungs. Yet none of this was strange.

I grew up on the coast in Florida. My peers were amazed at my birth and wedding announcements. Because it is not assumed we are all having children, and especially me who made a career railing against doomed stereotypical female roles. Was it my own demonizing of it, my own preaching against it that turned it from unappealing and boring to rebellious and dangerous? I resisted it so strongly that it became alluring again.

My midwife filled out our first birth certificate wrong. She put my maiden name down for both myself, my husband, and our new daughter. I laughed, my husband didn’t. It took her a moment to comprehend what I was trying to tell her, and then it puzzled her, this maintenance of my identity, this stubborn clinging to my old, original self.

I could not give up my name. My husband understood, and he did not encourage me against my instincts. My name was very much a part of my identity, of my people, the dwindling tribe I come from. I could not in one short year make so many sacrifices. So I walked down an aisle, if you can call it that, with my stomach 6 months out of my dress, vowing myself to kingdom come, but always I promised to remain a McDonald.

My daughter stays on my hip while I grocery shop. She holds an apple, trying to bite into it with her gums. We pick up beans and rice, she plays with the bag. Everything is filled with wonder. Around me the mormon moms push carts stacked high with gallons of milk loaves of bread and cookies, a couple children trail behind eating ice cream cones from the deli, the youngest one sits in the cart screaming or babbling. My little pearl is swallowed by an ocean of over breeding, multiplying women, who do not pause to share in the wonder of my little being. They only wonder how long it will be till I have my next one. And next one. And next one.

That’s not true, they know I’m not mormon. Because they don’t see me at their ward. They do not see me at monthly bunko. They see me pumping my gas at the farm store in a blouse a little too see through that slightly exposes my breasts when I lean over. I crouch down and jump up, screaming at the window of my car where my daughter screams back from her car seat- amazed each time I reappear. To her I left forever and then I came back. My same old self. I am wife. I am mother. I am cook. I am maid. I am McDonald. I am feminist. I am writing.

There is a scene in Grapes of Wrath when an Okie family stops in at a rest area. They are about to cross the Mojave and need to fill their truck up with water. Their kids drink from the hose. The father asks the diner waitress if he can buy a loaf of bread. She doesn’t want to give it up, she can’t just be selling bread to everyone, they’d run out and wouldn’t have none for the customers’ sandwiches. Plus the bread truck won’t be back for a few more days. Her husband in the back yells at her to give it up. But the loaf is too expensive, he asks to buy half a loaf. She is more annoyed. Her husband tells her to sell the whole loaf for half cost. So she sells it to him with reluctance. The two boys come inside, and stare at the candy case not saying anything. He asks her how much the candy is, she says two for a penny. The father buys both boys a piece of candy, they thank them and leave. The waitress, her husband, and the truckers watch the family putter down the road to California. The truckers look at the waitress, that wasn’t penny candy, that was two cent a piece candy, they tell her. Shut up she says. When the truckers take off they leave her a big fat tip.

Like her, I struggle between myself and faith that there is enough for us all.

From the corral I hear the does whining. Trotting in circles, Jill runs from Elijah, Colleen from Curly, round and round. The other does lay in the sun away from the barn, they don’t lift their heads. It is a sick sound, a squeal, a cry, a sort of yelp that the does let out, these younger ones who don’t want to be mounted. Elijah gives chase, lowering his curled horns almost grabbing her back hooves. I turn away and down the lane. I can not help sympathizing with the does. I do not take their trotted circles for coyness, these girls really don’t want it. I wish we had a buck pen set up so the two ole bastards could stare at each other all day, pissing on themselves and each other. There is no smell like a buck in rut.

The baby is distracted by a bird, she does not notice the commotion. The dogs lay in the shade. Our neighbors plant young cottonwoods- slightly yellow with the fall- along the fence line. I am embarrassed they can hear the primal grunting and crying from the pen.

The skinny cat haunts me. I leave a can of tuna fish for my new kitten- the one that adopted us- came calling at night in hunger till I relented and left her some milk. The skinny cat is older. She is sleek and calculating. Appearing on the table trying to get at some black beans in a jar. Her sleekness is not fashionable, it does not wear well on her, hip bones jutting.  The grey of her coat with faint stripes and the green of her eyes would otherwise be appealing if she did not seem as though she would eat your face off if you turned away for a second too long. She is at my car door when I leave, sniffing at the rank milk I spilled in the backseat a month ago. Her hardness hardens me, and I act as though I’ll kick her, certain if I play nice she will jump into my arms and eat my baby’s nose.

My kitten is both weary of and eager for my touch. Is it her smallness? What allows me to love her? Her mother and litter mates abandoned her weeks ago. I have not seen another cat in the area all season. I wondered at her existence, where did she come from? Where had her mother come from to land under the old granary and give birth to a multitude of little beings?

At the ole lady’s house next door I discover she has a small nest of pink bodied kittens, abandoned by their mother. Did their mother starve before returning? Did she know she could not nurse them- so left them all rather than wither with them? Was she a heartless little thing, leaving them to their own without a second thought?

My neighbor took to feeding them, even though she says she had about twenty feral cats hanging around last month. Is my kitten’s family right next door? Living in the brush behind the yellow house? Did she stop too soon at my trailer, as she followed her family across the fields and corrals?

The starving cat with green eyes haunts me. My willingness to kick her starving stomach haunts me. She disappeared into the sage and rabbit brush. What did I have to fear from her? What would she have taken that I could not spare? If I dole out a sliver of compassion for her will it consume me, ruin me, here in a country with lots of wild things fighting to survive. Why do I cater to a kitten so openly, yet so strongly defend against its starving brethren? At some point my city girl silliness has to adjust to the realities. Dinner sizzles in the skillet, it is goat- it is Sally- whose daughter Plank has an eternal place in our herd despite her runtiness and inability to birth. I can not stomach butchering her after orphaning her last spring.

The dog got a rabbit this morning. He left it at the truck, an offering. The kitten rips into the flesh.

The water feud goes back 30 years to the previous land owner and the dead husband next door, it landed in our laps 7:30 on a Sunday morning with a call from the water master. It has to do with pressure and shares of water, auxiliary water systems, it has to do with some getting too much and some getting more, with large pastures fighting to stay green in the desert, cows stripping every last bit from the land, it has to do with what I think is right and what my neighbor insists is right. The water feud was long buried, both with the sale of the land and the death of the neighbor. But 30 years of water flowing against your will is something hard to get over, the ole lady next door jumping back into the fight.

She is really sweet, not a push over, she plays with the baby teaching her tricks, like sticking her hand in a water glass. She always sends me home with brownies or cookies pulled from her deep freezer. Usually she has a fire going, it is chilly here even in the summer and she likes to be comfortable. Her husband died before I ever landed here.

It’s not personal, I tell my husband. He is pulling hay from the field, hundreds and hundreds of bails by hand. Of course it’s personal. I want to defend my neighbor, the ole lady, her nephew, his wife. I don’t want to grimace when I see the water master, our friend, who left carrots and fresh tomatoes on our trailer steps. I don’t want to feel guilty that our partner is taking all the heat on this, himself a member of the Church, going every Sunday, seeing these people. What happened to the small community I was a part of?

My husband is right. It is personal. Water is personal out here. And though no one is starving, the cattle are still fat, and the overflow of our neighbor’s water seeps down to our fields, one day it might not be that way.

Carcass Creek feeds the valley. It used to freely wind through the valley catching cattle and sheep in its steep banks, devouring them, pioneers finding their livelihood drowned. Cottonwoods hugged its sides, deer, elk, coyote, mountain lion, all drank from it. Whose creek is this? Who owns the water, the underground springs, the snow that melts in the spring? The Grover Irrigation Company does. They divvy the shares of water – all taken now- to the residents of the valley. New residents threaten to drill deep wells to tap into underground water, to access what they are not allowed to buy into.

The creek ran free for centuries until now. On the upper side of it, up the mountain a ways, the wild roses, moss covered rocks, a spongy green oasis still exists. It rushes over rocks in the soothing tone water gets as it moves wild and untethered. Below it hits the head gates, is diverted to both sides of the valley.

From the top of the hill this morning I could see our pastures and our neighbors’ pastures, I could see the cows, the deer my dog chased from the field, jack rabbits running from my daughter’s sounds, ravens flying below me, their wings flapping loudly- sending wind across my ears. And from everywhere I could hear the swish swish swishing of irrigation heads spitting onto the fields.

A sprinkler is a bird, and the number of birds you can run depends on the shares you have. And you can’t buy more shares. They are already designated, a long time ago, before we were here. Newcomers beware, you can put up a house, but this valley is closed for ranching and farming.

A rich guy up the highway doesn’t worry about the non existence of new water shares. He can afford a deep down well drilled into the earth’s core, tapping the underground aquifer that feeds all of our wells. He uses it for several acres of pasture that will feed a few horses, that will look good and awe his guests. His property has the bright red barn and three car garage, you can’t miss it, when you head up the mountain. He is the last house before Dixie Forest. His bright green water hungry pastures stand in the middle of the pinions, pines, junipers, red rock cliffs that come natural to these parts.

But it’s nothing personal, he says. Land is for sale. Water shares are not. He is just making due with what he’s got. The ole lady next door relents at the pleading and persuading of her grown children. Her nephew waves hi and thanks us for our help with his loose calf earlier. We are not bad people. We are neighbors. We are all making due with what we can. Stretching the hay fields as long as they’ll last. Pasturing the cows a little too long in each field. All this tension and it hasn’t even been a dry year.

The grandkids from next door descend for three days. We knew their coming by an old mattress that’d been drug from a trash heap into the barn on top of our things. The kids needed it for god only knows what. They came around milking time to check on a bucket of baby birds they left in the barn. The swallows’ nest fell in front of them- scattering three young birds- but don’t worry they know how to flutter.

The mattress was a landing pad for the kids to throw the birds up so the birds could learn to fly. There were only two birds though, the third had not been found and still was under the debris somewhere. I encourage them to put the nest up high in a bowl with the babies, hoping against hope the mom might still take them.

The weekend passes with the children climbing to the top of the hay stack- about 20 feet high- an appropriate altitude for flight lessons. The babies tossed in the air fluttering down into the goat pen where 194 hooves wait to stomp them. Another child scaled the fence to retrieve the babies- a reasonable excuse to enter the forbidden goat pen. The terrorized birds were alive for the second day.

My days filled with the fear my dog would snap at the squeals of delight and eat one of the grand children- slinging their body parts across the yard with the deer skulls, hides, and dead rock chuck.

The little boy greeted me on the last day with a present- a wriggling live trout about 6 inches long- for my kitten to snack on. The kitten heard them coming and did not show herself. The kids and crowds pulled out that night- quiet and a dead fish on the kitten’s dish all that were left behind.

The neighbors lost another cow. A smaller brown one, its head hangs over the side of the tarp as they haul it, dangling from the tractor, puttering down the road. At least this time they carried it proper.

The last cow they lost was at the start of the season. She was black, tall. I saw her in the afternoon when the ruckus of my dogs’ barking roused me from the trailer.  She was mooing and mooing, standing at our gate. The dogs barked at her, she took no notice of them. She walked slowly up the lane, mooing. I locked the dogs up, then returned to her side. With the baby on my hip, I waved my arm, talking to her, C’mon Mama get along.

She turned around and headed back up the lane, towards the field in a distance where her herd was. She moved slow, I kept on her, the baby curious. C’mon Mama, get on.

She looked back at me every few steps, resistant to return up the lane. She ducked into the field gate before the turn. I left her there, safe enough, a good distance from the highway, and didn’t think of her again.

That evening, right before the in-laws arrived for an outdoor dinner, the neighbors came driving down the lane slowly, dragging a tarp behind their truck, a dead cow hanging behind, her entrails scraping along the dirt lane. A treat for the dogs, a greeting for the in-laws.

The next day I called in on the ole lady next door. We talked of the weather, of the garden planting, of the valley news. Her nephew lost a cow she said. I saw it, being drug along the lane, how’d she die?

Oh she’d gotten lose. Slipped out the fence, calling and looking for her calf. I guess they’d been separated during the move, her calf ending up with the second group up the mountain.

I think I saw her earlier that day, I tried walking her back, but she stopped in the field across the lane.

They knew she was missing, found her on the lane out there, and tried herding her back, but ended up chasing her to the highway. She stepped out in front of an old pickup- little 90 year old man was driving. Smashed his truck up real good. Killed the poor thing. Just out there calling for her calf. Calling and calling.

My daughter grabbed at me, wanting to nurse.

Boys still haven’t buried her, she’s sitting out in the field, out there in the sun.

My daughter was restless. I left, told her I’d call in soon.

I walked home down the lane, my daughter on my hip. Seeing that black cow, her searching and calling, determined to find her little calf. Her little calf, probably up the mountain calling and calling for milk. My daughter beat on my chest to nurse. It was lunch time.

We have too many animals. 46 goats, 20 sheep, 2 dogs. This is pared down from a hundred plus animals we moved here with. My husband said long ago, before we were married, that if I wasn’t careful he would keep building and building up the animals, that he was, potentially, an animal hoarder.

A cat dumped a litter of kittens under the old granary at the Bateman place. They were multicolored and mewing. I feared they were a snack for my huge white guard dog. I could hear them, but not see them, on my daily treks to the bathroom. Then one morning, a little grey stripey kitten was in front of our path, our huge dog charged it ignoring my screams, I saw only kitten blood splattered over the faces of my husband and daughter. Our dog sniffed it, nosed it, and then of all things, tried to play with it.

Feral cats litter the countryside. My mother-in-law feeds, neuters, and keeps the ones that land at her door, some coming on their own steam, others dumped off there in the cover of darkness. The house is crawling with cats. My house is crawling with a baby. I don’t much care for animals indoors, not even my husband’s boots. If I was allowed my insanities I would have little tissue booties for everyone as they stepped into my 10′ by 20′ living space. All of this is to say, that a kitten on my floor spilling tuna fish from her mouth was the last thing I had hoped for.

But here she is. Little orphan Jane, whose mother and litter mates abandoned her. Did she nap while they were moving? Did her mother move all but the last one? How did this little grey thing get left behind? She came to us mewing in the dark. Starving. How did she find us?