Edward the Goat

Edward the Goat

“Oh darn it, not again!  Give me back that spoon!”  My mother yelled at Cheetah.  Our small, tan and yellow spider monkey was waving a wooden spoon in his right hand as he clung to the side of his cage with the other.  He chattered back at Mom in high-pitched squeals.  My two brothers and I had just sat down at the kitchen table for supper.  

“I’ve had just about enough of this darned monkey!”  Mom huffed.  “Why did your father have to make this cage so big it won’t fit anywhere but right beside this stove?”

It was the sixth time in two days that Cheetah had reached through his cage to grab a spoon from one of Mom’s cooking pots.  He would usually find some food sticking to the spoon’s surface, and proceed to lick it off.  But this pot had been full of peas, and they had flown through the air when Cheetah flipped the spoon and dragged it through the cage’s wires.  Now he had nothing for his effort, and he was as annoyed as Mom. 

“Your father keeps bringing home these animals because he feels sorry for them,” Mom complained as she stooped to pick up peas.  And then I’m the one who ends up dealing with the consequences!”  (Of course, we knew she loved Cheetah as much as we did.)

Dad did have a habit of bringing home new animals.  It was a good thing we lived on a farm, I thought, and could always find a place to keep them.  Dad had found Cheetah in a garden store, all alone and curled up, looking miserable in a tiny cage.  Dad could not leave him there, any more than he could leave a stray dog beside the road.  He’d brought him home in the tiny cage.  Then he’d carefully measured the back door, into the kitchen.  He’d built the biggest cage he could, that would still fit through the door.  But, it turned out that the back door was bigger than all the other doors in the house.  Cheetah’s new cage was too big for all the other doors, and so it was confined to the kitchen.  And the only place it would fit in the kitchen was right beside the stove.  Seven-year-old Jim scrambled from his chair to help Mom gather peas from the floor.  He picked them up, one by one, depositing each pea in the bottom of Cheetah’s cage.

“Don’t give those peas to the monkey!”  I admonished.  At ten, I was always feeling a need to educate my younger brothers.  “He’ll just keep taking Mom’s spoons if we reward him for it.  He gets his own food.”

        

“It doesn’t matter if he gets them or not,” eight-year-old Dave answered.  He always had an answer for me.  “He’s already learned the trick.  He won’t stop doing it now anyway.”

Cheetah had dropped the spoon, and was scurrying around in the sawdust, popping peas into his mouth.  Jim reached his small hand under the cage’s wires and grabbed the spoon, before Cheetah could even notice.  Beaming, he handed it back to Mom.

        

“Thank you Jimbo,” Mom finally smiled, in spite of herself.  “You’re my hero.”

Just then, we heard the crunch of tires in the driveway outside.  The crunch sounded deeper than usual, like the stones were groaning under the extra weight of a truck with a heavy load. 

        

“Daddy’s home!”  The boys cried out in unison, jumping up from the table.  Dad had left early that morning in his big truck, the one he used to haul horses.  He had gone to a horse sale.  It was April already, and we needed more horses for the spring session of our horseback riding school. 

        

We ran outside, and up to Dad’s truck as he rolled to a stop in the driveway.  We started asking questions before he could even get out of the cab.

        

“How many horses did you get Daddy?”

        

“Are you going to unload them now?”

        

“Can we see?”

        

Dad ignored our questions.  “Is dinner on the table?”  He asked.

        

“Yeah, we were just starting to eat.”

        

“Well then, let’s eat first,” he said.  “I just want to unload this goat, and we’ll get the horses later.”

        

“Goat!”  We cried in unison.  “You got a goat?  Why did you get a goat?  Is it a boy or a girl?  Are we going to have goat’s milk?”  I remembered having goat’s milk at a friend’s farm one time, and I had not liked it at all.

        

“It’s a male goat,” Dad answered.  “He came from a race track, so he’s used to horses.  As a matter of fact, I do believe he half thinks he is a horse.”  Dad walked to the back of the truck and began to unhook the latches.  He lowered the ramp and we peered into the back.  Several horses were tied securely into the truck’s stalls, but at the front of the row stood an enormous white goat.  He wasn’t enormously tall, but enormously wide.  In fact, he was nearly as big around as he was up and down.

        

“Man, how did he get to be so FAT?!”  Dave exclaimed.

        

“Well, he used to go into the race horses’ stalls at the track and help them eat their food,” Dad explained.  “In fact, that’s why the track owner had to sell him.  One of the thoroughbreds just got fed up with sharing his dinner.  He got all riled up about the goat, and the owner complained.  So he had to go.  His name is Edward.”  Dad walked up the plank and untied Edward, and hooked a lead shank around his neck.

        

“Can I lead him, can I lead him?”  Jim begged.  Dad handed him the rope, and Jim tried to pull the animal down the ramp.  But Edward planted his hooves in the straw-lined truck bed, and leaned back with all of his big round weight.  Jim was a skinny kid, and he could not budge that goat.  I tried a tug myself, and so did Dave, and then we all three tried together, with no luck.  The goat was not going to move. 

Finally, Dad squeezed himself between the goat and the horse beside him, planted the bottom of his boot firmly against Edward’s rump, and pushed him down the ramp.  The goat bleated pitifully as Dad dragged him by the rope toward the barn.  He kept turning his neck to look back at his traveling partner, a tall chestnut thoroughbred. 

“That horse has been retired, from the same racetrack as Edward, and they’ve been friends for years,” Dad said. 

We put Edward in a stall in the barn and went back to the house to finish dinner.  We could hear him bleating as we sat around the table, all the way from the barn.

        

“A goat?”  Mom asked a little loudly when we told her what the noise was.

        

“Dick,” she said to Dad.  “What on earth possessed you to buy a goat?  What are we going to do with it?”  She had said the same thing about Cheetah.

        

“Well,” Dad took his time answering her, as he usually did.  “I bought a nice thoroughbred from a fellow who was retiring him from the race track.  He had this goat  - it was born at the track and had always lived there.  And the goat’s right partial to this horse... always slept outside his stall, followed him around, ate with him and everything.  The fellow offered to throw the goat into the deal.  I figured he might at least keep the horse calm in the truck.”

        

“Can we ride him Daddy?”  Jim piped up.

        

Dad chuckled.  “Well, I don’t know that he’s ever been ridden before.  But I guess it can’t hurt to try, as long as you can get your legs around that belly.”

Jim tried to ride Edward the very next day.  We all ran to the barn after breakfast.  Edward was standing at the end of the thoroughbred’s stall, where he’d spent the night.  We rigged up a halter for him from a rope, and led him out of the barn.  Jim took a running start, ran toward the goat, threw himself over the broad white back, and then tried to swing his right leg over to the goat’s other side.  Edward was not amused.  He immediately took off running, as fast as he could go.  His enormous barrel flounced around on his short, jerky legs and Jim bounced right off.  Then Dave had to try (they were always trying to outdo each other).  He couldn’t stay on either.  I couldn’t even get my leg over the goat’s back before he bounced me off.  Daddy, hearing our squeals of laughter, came out of the barn as Jim was sliding off the goat’s right side yet one more time.  Wide-eyed Edward trotted madly toward the end of the barnyard.

        

“I believe that’s about enough,” he said.  “You kids have got that goat all upset now.  Better just get in here and get these stalls clean before the riders start coming.”

        

Every Saturday in those days, children and their parents would come from all over town to take riding lessons from Mom and Dad.  Us kids all helped with what we could do.  My job was to feed the horses.  The boys cleaned the stalls.

Dave and Jim were just finishing their job, throwing the last pitchfork of manure and straw into the wheelbarrow, when the first of the riders arrived.  Dad and I began to get the horses to be used in the first class out of their stalls, and hook them to the crossties that ran the whole length of the barn’s aisle.  You could fit four horses there at a time, head to tail.  The others would be groomed in their stalls.  The first class of the day was for the more advanced riders.  They would clean their own horses, and put on the saddles and bridles. 

        

Within half an hour, the riders were all ready to go.  Each person led his or her horse out of the barn, and they all formed a line behind the barnyard gate.  Dad went to the head of the line, opened the gate, and told everyone, as usual, to walk on the side of the road and not cross it until he gave the signal.  Dad and Mom always worried about this part of the riding ritual, more than anything else.  The riding ring where they gave the lessons was on the other side of Beaver Creek Road from the barn.  And there was a hill just above the riding ring.  So cars driving on the road could not see what was ahead of them until they got to the top of the hill and looked down... down toward the riding ring to the left, and the barn to the right.  Mom and Dad had put signs up all along the road saying “CAUTION!  HORSE CROSSING!”  But some drivers would ignore the signs and come speeding over the top of the hill.  Mom and Dad worried that someday a driver might be going too fast while the horses were crossing the road, and would not be able to stop in time.  Edward was about to change all that.

I held the barnyard gate open as Dad and all the riders went through it.  I began to swing it closed as the last rider went through, but I was too late.  Edward had already dashed through, and was now loose on the road. 

        

“Daddy!”  I yelled, “The goat’s out!”  Dad looked back at Edward, who was walking calmly toward the riding ring, behind the last horse. 

        

“What the heck,” he said.  “Just let him come.  I don’t suppose he can hurt anything.”

When Dad was sure there were no cars coming in either direction, he yelled the standard order, “Cross over!”  The well-schooled riders and horses immediately crossed to the other side of the road in unison.  But Edward had a different idea.  He crossed halfway over, and continued walking in his place at the end of the line, but now in the middle of the road.  Dad went back and tried to push him over to the other side.

        

“Get over!  You dumb fool, you’re gonna get run over!”  But Edward just went on walking, right down the middle.  Dad tried kicking him in the side with his boot.  But it was like kicking an over-inflated inner tube.  The boot just bounced back.  So Dad gave up and went back to the head of the line.  The riders were all giggling into their hands.

        

“Alright,” Dad said to Edward, “have it your way.  But don’t blame me if you find yourself flattened by a speeding car.”  I was wondering if the car would bounce off.

Sure enough, he had no sooner said this than a red sports car came over the top of the hill.  Its’ tires squealed and the smell of burned rubber filled our nostrils as the surprised driver slammed on his brakes to avoid smashing into the goat.

        

“What the blazing.....?!”  We heard the driver exclaim from the car’s open window.  “Hey mister!”  He yelled at Dad, “Get your blasted goat out of the road!  Are you trying to get somebody killed out here?”

        

“No, no, I’m awful sorry,” Dad answered, trying not to sound as if he was beginning to enjoy this.  “I’ve tried to get him to move over, but he just won’t budge.  He’ll follow us to the riding ring, and we’re about there - you can see for yourself.  But you’re welcome to try pushing him aside, if you like.”

The man got out of his car, slammed the door, and walked up to Edward.  He placed a well-heeled boot against Edward’s side and pushed.  This time Edward did not just ignore the assault.  He turned, and lowered his head into butting position.  The man backed up fast, and got back in his car, muttering under his breath.  Edward maintained his place in the middle of the road, until the horses finally arrived at the riding ring gate.  Then he followed the last horse through.  The man slammed his foot on his gas pedal and took off, squealing more rubber onto the road. 

That night at dinner, we all laughed as Dad told Mom the story. 

“That goat could turn out to be mighty useful after all,” she concluded.

And she was right.  From that day on, Edward would follow the horses to the riding ring every time there were lessons.  He was not allowed in the ring with the horses, so he would wait outside the fence until the lessons were over, and then follow the horses back to the barn.  He always walked right smack in the middle of the road.  And the drivers who used the road grew to expect him there.  They stopped zooming over the top of the hill, at least during the times when riding lessons were given.  We all felt safer, thanks to Edward.

        

But the drivers were not happy.  They would call the house and complain about the goat.  Dad would tell them to think about taking another road.  But they did not want to have to go out of their way because of a goat.  Then, one day, Dad got an idea.  He was patching up another of Edward’s horse bites.  Edward had continued his bad habit of walking into the horses’ stalls - the straight stalls that were open at the end - so he could share their dinners.  Well the horses did not like to share their dinners (not even Edward’s old friend, the thoroughbred).   They would let Edward know they were annoyed by biting or kicking him, wherever they could reach.  Edward’s head, neck, back, and sides were always covered with wounds.  Dad was always putting medicine on them, so they wouldn’t get infected.  The  medicine he used was the same kind he used on the horses.  It was called Gensen’s Violet, and it was bright purple.  It looked pretty funny on Edward’s white hide.  One day Edward was particularly stubborn about leaving a horse’s stall, and he got a particularly large number of bites in return.  By the time Dad had patched them all, the bottle of Gensen’s Violet was almost empty, and the goat almost looked spotted.  So Dad just kept going, painting purple dots all over Edward until he was transformed from white to pinto, with purple spots.

The next day Edward followed the horses up the road in his usual manner.  The first driver to come over the hill stopped his car and got out, and walked over to Edward to get a closer look.

        

“Is that thing for real?”  The driver asked in astonishment.

        

“It’s a real goat, if that’s what you mean,” Daddy responded, deadpan.  The driver’s mouth twitched, then broke into a smile, and then he started to laugh.  Dad laughed too, and so did all the riders.  The driver shook his head, and walked back to his car without another word.  He kept shaking his head and laughing until Edward followed the horses to the riding ring, and he could drive away.

We didn’t get any more calls complaining about Edward after that.  In fact, it seemed sometimes that people would drive their cars over the hill at riding time on purpose, just to watch the goat.

Things went along like that for a while with Edward.  And I wish I could tell you that his story with us ended happily.  But it was not to be.  His eating habits finally did him in.

This is how it happened.  The thoroughbred was bought by a family whose boys had been taking riding lessons for over a year.  They wanted a horse of their own to keep at our farm, so they could ride whenever they wanted.  The horse’s life stayed pretty much the same, except that now only those three boys rode him, and they spent a lot of time with him in the barn.  And this presented a problem.  Edward didn’t care who owned his old friend.  He still went into the horse’s stall, and the horse still chased him out, with hooves and teeth.  Only now, sometimes, there were one or two boys in the stall along with them.  And Mom and Dad knew that, sooner or later, one of those boys would get caught between a hoof and that goat, and that would not be good.

And so, with much regret, Dad decided that Edward had to go.  We watched teary-eyed when he loaded him back into the truck in which he had come, only this time he was alone.  Edward bleated pitifully the whole way down the road as they headed off to the sale barn.  When Dad returned, he told us that he had found a good home for Edward.  He had sold him to a man who had a goat farm.  Edward would finally, for the first time in his life, be with his own kind. 

We didn’t hear any more about Edward until the next spring, more than a year later.  Dad came home from another horse sale, and sat down to dinner with an unusually sad look on his face.  Cheetah was no longer in the kitchen by then.  Mom had insisted that Dad make him a smaller cage, and he had been moved to our playroom.

        

“I ran into that old guy I sold that goat to, you remember, Edward?”  He said, “I asked him how Edward was doing, fully expecting to hear about how happy he was with all those goats.  Well, you won’t believe it.  That darned goat up and starved himself to death, just refused to eat.  Imagine that.  I told the old fellow I wished he’d called me.  I would’ve taken him back.”

I cried a little that night, thinking of Edward.  But then I imagined how happy he must be, up in heaven.  Up there, I thought, he could be a horse as much as he wanted.

Are you Too Afraid? 

(Part Two)

Are you too afraid?

Rejectors of the ancient scholars

to read their words anew?

Will you leave the legacy of interpretations past

on dusty shelves

scorned, unopened?

Are you too afraid

To mine the wealth

from stories of Revelation

to understand their context

and perceptions?

Are you too afraid?

Oh ye of little faith

Trust Allah, that God will guide you

through Mercy, Forgiveness

Consciousness

The Message speaks

to all who open their minds

to understand the box.

Are You So Afraid?

Are you so afraid?

Followers of the ancient scholars

to liberate Quran

from the bounds of interpretations past?

Will you guard it in their boxes

high on shelves

adorned, unopened?

Are you so afraid?

To share the wealth

of Revelation with untrained ears

that they might hear something

not yet perceived?

Are you so afraid?

Oh ye of little faith

Trust Allah, Our God

The Unseen, All-Seeing

Consciousness

Whose words still speak

to all who open their hearts

to all who open the box.

A Story of Pure Fiction (In the spirit of defying convention)

Shelby stared at the document again, for the umpteenth time.  And again, for the umpteenth time, she considered her options.  She was, indeed, the recipient of a rather large inheritance.  She did not need the money.  Even though she had, essentially, given up her "career" to support her husband and raise her children, her husband was successful, a good and honest man, and he had adequately provided for her.  Never mind the internal battles and sacrifices "giving up her career" had engendered over the years.  She did not regret her decisions, or her internal battles.

And yet, would it not be wonderful to have a source of funds all her own, that was not tied to his efforts, that she could spend without discussion and compromise?  Shouldn't she keep this money for herself, in case of need, or whim?

But she was also pulled by a sense of responsibility.  Inheritance was a gift, a privilege not shared by all.  She felt responsible to share this wealth.  She felt obliged to share it, as a person of faith, but how?  Simply donate it to a charity of her choosing?  Which one?  Was it more important to aid the refugees of the wars of liberation, or the children living in hunger and poverty in far away countries, or the victims of violence and circumstance closer to home, or help provide medical care to those most in need...?  And how could she know that it would really make a difference?

She thought again about her other option.  There was, at that very time, a campaign to build a new mosque in her community.  The mosque board, all men, had begun a concerted effort to raise the last chunk of money needed to complete the prayer hall.  The community, however, was maxed out of giving potential, having raised just enough to get the land and construction started.  She considered her other idea.  Give the mosque board the entire sum they still needed to raise, but with one stipulation.

Could she make that stipulation?  Her heart told her she had the right to do so.  But it would buck centuries of tradition.  She reviewed the arguments supporting her heart's conviction.  Her heroes were the modern commentators:  Khaled Abou ElFadl, Lela Bakhtiar, Amina Wadud, Azizah Al-Hibri and Asma Barlas.  That the message of Quran is divine and universal, in this she had no doubt.  But while some of its passages were universal, others were revealed for a certain community at a certain time, and must be understood for their deeper meaning.  The deep meaning of the Quranic passages on women was, first and foremost, that men and women are equal before God.  Quran gave women specific rights at a time when they were viewed as property, and even killed in infancy.   Some of those specifics today seem unequal and unfair.  But Quran did not specify that the project of equal rights should end with the specific prescriptions necessary in 7th century Arabia.  The movement toward equality between men and women, as between all human beings was set in motion by the Prophet's revelations, not set in stone.  She understood Quran to be a living document, to be read as the living word of God, again and again re-imagined as applied to each new époque.  

Shelby made her decision.  She asked for a meeting with the mosque board, to discuss a substantial donation to the prayer hall.  She decided to wear a headscarf to the meeting, to make them feel more comfortable.  "I have received a substantial inheritance." she began.  The men's sense of anticipation reflected on their faces, approval in their eyes.  "I feel that Allah is guiding me to share this inheritance with my Muslim community, in the form of a significant donation to the prayer hall.  But Allah has given me a vision of a prayer hall with absolutely equal access to men and women.  My stipulation is that the hall be divided into two spaces, separated by moveable screens, beside one another behind the mimbar.  Women are not in the back, or in the balcony, or in the basement.  They are on the main floor, equal before the Qibla, equal before God."

At this point I leave it to the reader to imagine the expressions on the faces of the men of the board, and their responses.  But I assure the reader that in Shelby's imagination, the equality of the prayer space in the new mosque gave the women an opening to re-value themselves and their importance to their community.  The energy this generated led them to create many exciting new projects - projects that addressed the needs of refugees of the wars of liberation, of children living in hunger and poverty in far away countries, of victims of violence and circumstance closer to home, and helped provide medical care to those most in need.  The men (most of them anyway) got used to having the women beside them, and watched this energy unfold and, after a time, congratulated themselves on the decision they had made to support their women's rights.