Monday, January 28, 2008

www.whiteville.com

By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff Writer

For some reason, I have always loved goats.

As someone said many years go, goats are cool. They just hang around doing goat things, like eating acres of kudzu. One goat thing I can’t abide, however, is the habit of laundry eating.

Some friends gave us a young billy goat last fall. His name is Jack, or Baa-Baa Jack, if Miss Rhonda is calling him.

I have owned goats before, with varying degrees of success.

There were Shakespeare and Faulkner, whose owner was happy to get rid of them because they were such prolific breeders. At the time, I was under the misguided impression that I could make a living farming. Goats were coming into their own. All I had to do was get a couple of nannies, and I’d be rolling in cashmere.

Except for the fact that either my nannies were nuns, or Shakespeare and Faulkner had adopted an alternative lifestyle.

One of the girls had a kid from a previous relationship, a young billy named, naturally, Billy. Billy had a habit of sneaking into the house when he became scared, which was usually around midnight on almost any given night. He liked to sleep on the couch, thus causing an incident that would dovetail nicely into any anti-alcohol program for teenagers.

A young man who shall remain nameless needed a place to sleep one night, because he’d been drinking too much. With some reservations – I knew him well, and that’s why I had reservations – I offered him my couch.

After being subjected to a couple of hours of braggadocio and tall tales of various and sundry exploits (how a 19-year-old could have had such a full life is beyond me, even today) the couch-borrower settled in for a long early-spring nap. A rainstorm came up in the night, and sure enough, Billy the Kid sneaked in the back door of the old house and headed for his couch.

I was awakened by screams.

“There’s a demon on me!” the young man yelled. “Oh help me Jesus, I’m sorry! I won’t never get drunk again….”

And while I’m sure Jesus has helped the young man through the years, he did indeed get drunk again.

And again. And again.

But that’s a column for another day. I was just glad my goat was okay.

Sadly, a pack of wild dogs decimated my goat herd, leaving only poor old Faulkner to play with my dogs, harass the neighbors, and steal salads from the kitchen. Faulkner grew to be a very large goat, and while Miss Rhonda and I were courting, he made a pest of himself. Whether it was the apples she continually fed him, or whether he was lonesome, I can’t say. We had to be sure the back door was well shut, lest Faulkner sneak in and devour our supper.

When we moved to the city, he moved over to live with the neighbors – the same ones he once harassed. They actually wanted him as a companion for their horse.

But – or should I say, butt – Faulkner had a bad habit.

Faulkner loved waiting until someone’s back was turned, and giving them a full-speed ram in the rump. Three or four times of those lovetaps got him banished to another neighbor, who understood and respected goats (and never turned his back on one).

Goats are generally the ticket for clearing overgrown fields and thickets, and that’s what was on my mind the next time we got a goat.

Problem was, Mutton was too spoiled from living in the suburbs, and clearing brush was too much like work. Mutton also met an untimely end, killed by a creature biologists claim no longer exist, but Carolina panthers are a column for another day.

We were goatless for a number of years, until Margaret Porter came up to me in church one day and asked if we’d like a goat.

I’d been craving a goat or three for a while, since Sam the Pig is better at basic destruction than clearing. After an evening of chasing Jack up and down the Cape Fear River, Margaret’s son Les swooped in and caught Jack. Soon Jack settled down in Rhonda’s lap, and was ready for his new home.

Much like Sam the Pig, Jack started out (briefly) in the house, then was moved (quickly) to his new pen, from which he (immediately) escaped. Since then, he wanders the yard, gnawing grass and weeds to the ground, bouncing around Sam, and basically behaving like a young goat.

Jack discovered the clothesline.

I prefer the feel and smell of clothes that have hung in a strong breeze. It saves electricity, too.

But the sight of a line of crisp white shirts flapping in the breeze was too much for Jack. My goat is apparently a slave to tasteful men’s fashion. Either he likes Brooks Brothers, or he really likes Brooks Brothers, because I noticed he only ate the really good shirts.

Over the next few days, he ate a hunting coat, a suit jacket musty from the closet (Brooks again) and a really ugly sweater (good boy!). He has also developed a penchant for clean sheets, which means he get locked up until the sheets are dry.

In retribution he targeted an old wool blanket, but he didn’t know I’d left it there for him, anyway.

If you’ve never had a goat, you should get one; goats are generally one of the happiest animals I’ve ever encountered, kind of like a puppy on mood-enhancing drugs, except with horns and hooves. There is the whole smell thing, I will admit; oddly, no manual has yet been able to explain to me why sometimes Jack smells, and sometimes he doesn’t.

But what Sam the Pig doesn’t root up, Jack the Goat will eat down. I can find a new home for my lawnmower, which was part of the master plan anyway. At the current rate of progression, I doubt I’ll even have any weeds left in my yard by April – unless Jack find my new dress shirts first.

When that happens, I’m selling him to the nearest carnival, so everyone can enjoy Baa-Baa Jack, the Incredible Laundry-Eating Goat.