Free The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

weekend.
    Perhaps he’d be so surprised that he wouldn’t even mind the eighty-eight goats in the barn.

Chapter Eight
    “What was that?” Brent asked as he pulled his heavy briefcase out of the backseat of the pickup truck. A large June bug buzzed past my ear in its kamikaze rush toward the truck’s dome light. The evening was surprisingly warm. Our trip to the farm from the train station was slowed by a heavy fog that clung along the roads. My mother used to call this summer nighttime phenomenon a “witches haze.”
    “What was what?”
    “That noise.”
    “Probably one of the roosters.”
    “At ten o’clock at night?”
    “Maybe he’s rehearsing.”
    “Shh,” he said. “Someone’s in the barn.”
    “No one’s in the barn,” I said, sighing, just as another loud thud echoed across the yard. Shit. I’d hoped that we could make it inside the house, go to bed, and wait until the morning for a tour of all the work that had been accomplished. Winding up, of course, in the barn.
    “Oh, whatever,” I said. “You’re going to find out soon enough. Follow me.”
    The sliding barn door was heavy, and it took me three heavy pulls before it gave way. Its squeaky protest jolted the barnful of goats into a rousing chorus of “baaahs.”
    Brent glared at me.
    “Just come in and look,” I said.
    The moment I flicked on the light, eighty-eight goats of all shapes and sizes rose to their feet at once and came running over to the edge of their pens to greet us.
    “Oh God,” Brent said.
    “They’re so wonderful,” I quickly retorted. “So friendly.”
    “I can’t believe you did this after I clearly said no.”
    “If after nine years together you still haven’t learned that I don’t listen to you, then you clearly deserve what you get.” I crossed my arms, content with such a logical argument.
    Brent sighed.
    “What are we going to do with all of them?”
    “Nothing. We don’t have to do anything with them. Co-farmer John takes care of them.”
    “You hired him?”
    “No, I didn’t ‘hire’ him,” I explained. “We don’t have to pay anything other than some utilities.”
    Brent shook his head in disbelief.
    “Why didn’t you wait until we could talk about this more?”
    “Because you would’ve have said no again. I’m not stupid.”
    He seemed frozen in place.
    “Go on,” I said. “Climb in the pen and pet them.” The pens were divided by the goats’ relative ages. The mothers were in one, the ones born earlier in spring in another, and the very newest ones were in yet another, huddled under heat lamps.
    “I have my suit on,” Brent said. “I don’t want to get dirty.”
    “Well, go inside and change then,” I said.
    “Maybe tomorrow,” Brent said, turning away. How was he resisting their allure?
    On the walk back to the house he kept several steps in front of me.
    “Are you mad at me?” I asked his back.
    “I’m pissed,” he replied without turning around. “We’re supposed to be doing this together.”
    Once we were in the house, he headed straight up to the bedroom. I heard the shower running, then shut off. I’d bought some local cheese to make him an omelet for dinner using our eggs. But he didn’t come back downstairs.
    By the time I went upstairs to check on him, he was already asleep, having broken our rule of not going to bed angry with each other for the very first time.
    The full moon shone across the bed, outlining his curled-up form. Maybe he was right. Maybe my decision had been too rash. What had I been thinking? Wasn’t taking care of a 205-year-old mansion enough of a weekend job? Did we really need a herd of goats to complicate matters? I hate when I begin to doubt myself. Especially when it involves things that can’t be undone.
    I’ve always been too impetuous…and capricious. That’s why I used to wake up on the F line at 6 A.M. with stubble growing through my makeup, one high heel missing, and a chorus of tiny empty Absolut bottles rolling