Chapter 4: Goat Man

His Arkansas drawl was thick like rich molasses, flowing slow and easy. Ezekial Patterson seemed ageless; tall, a bit hunch-shouldered, and he shuffled along with a slight limp. “Patch,” as folks called him, was as much a part of his three hundred acres of river-bottom fields as the willows and the cottonwood trees. His best pal Purdy dressed in black with a floppy black hat. Patch wore long-sleeved blue denim shirts and trousers that went unwashed after he put them on new from the General Store. His jacket and trousers were crusted with grime from living among his milking goats. He once answered a discourteous remark about his laundry habits with a stern denial: “Uh’course I washes ‘em. Ain’t a summer goes by that I don’t fall in the river!”

His fedora hat was shabby and sweat-stained. Sparkling eyes peered from under that tattered brim, eyes set in a craggy face wrinkled by years of sun and work. Behind them one could see a sadness, a sorrowful secret. Graydon would learn that Patch had been in the “Great War” and had survived trench warfare and poison gas. He returned home never to speak of it, wanting only to forget. Patch abandoned his roots in the Ozarks to settle in the high Cascade Mountain country of the Methow Valley.

He survived on a small pension and creamery money. He milked several dozen goats out of a herd of more than a hundred, ran their milk through a cream separator, and once a week loaded the cream cans into a battered Model A truck to deliver it to the creamery in Winthrop. His pal Purdy usually rode with him to town. The spectacle of the two bachelors, one short and slight, dressed in black; one tall and gangling, in grimy blue, was an accepted eccentricity of Methow Valley life.

Patch leaned against the cracked fender of his Model A truck, offering to sell Dee Johns three good milking goats and their kids for $35. It would be a strain for Dee’s purse, but it was more than a fair price for good milkers.

“Missus Johns, you cain’t go far wrong with these nannies. They’re right good milkers, ‘specially ol’ Spot here. She’s been givin’ me near two gallons a day since she come fresh in March. An’ that little Nubian, she’s about as good, but she’s young yet. Give her another season and she’ll be a top producer.”

Dee considered how much milk and cream she’d get for her family, how much farm cheese and butter she could make, and how much cream she might sell in town. There would be meat when they butchered the wethers, the castrated male goats. Every male kid would be elastrated to prevent musky stench and aggression problems as they grew. Few animals are as unpleasant as a mature billy goat. Patch kept one for breeding, confined to a high, strong enclosure separate from the milking herd.

“Thank you, Patch,” she said, reaching into her apron pocket for the folded bills taken from her cookie jar in the kitchen pantry, hidden away from her husband’s thieving fingers.

Graydon became a goat-herder, charged with husbanding three milking nannies and their five kids. They’d tend the yearling nannies for milkers and in late fall they’d butcher the yearling males.

Spot, leader of the herd, wore a leather collar and a bell. Her bell would clang and her udder, heavy with two monstrous teats, would swing ludicrously between her back legs when she ran. The younger nannies pranced beside her, bleating excitedly. The goats were in heaven at Dee’s homestead. The rampant brush, wild rose thickets, ditch willows, volunteer alfalfa, and Canadian thistle with huge purple seed heads, all was a feast for them. And, oh joy! Just inside the fence by the house stood a tall spray of yellow homestead roses. Spot’s palate craved thistle heads and rose blossoms. The yellow roses were irresistible.

Spot nudged the yard gate open, wrapped her curling, grasping tongue around a glorious yellow rose, snapped it off and chomped it. She rolled it around in her baggy cheeks. Her eyes shined with pure joy. She snagged and ate three more roses. Spot’s joy was not to last. Dee came charging off the back porch, swinging a broom and screaming:

“Get away, you filthy beast! Get away from my roses!” Spot fled through the gate, bleating indignantly, her udder flopping and swinging. She ran splay-legged in an ungainly, lurching gait. Dee ran hard at her heels, swinging the broom from side to side, swatting Spot’s flanks.