literature

Belling Percival

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Maybe we should get some goats, we said. Maybe it'll be fun, we said. Maybe we can make our own cheese and save some money, we said. 
Then we bought a billy goat.
Let me clarify one thing: male goats do not produce milk.
Allow me to explain something else: male goats stink like their lives depend on it.
Permit me to tell you this: male goats are the reason you should live in the city.
This terrible trifecta added up to our horrifyingly ill-behaved billy, Percival Augustus. He was a Tennessee Fainting Goat, or Myotonic goat. My best friend John picked the first name, as it seemed to fit his sharp face and beady eyes; I picked the second in the hopes that it would give him some sense of refinement. It did not.
Percival, or Percy, as we called him, had a strange affinity for causing trouble. He would crash about through the undergrowth, leaving a scattering of broken fences and trampled flower gardens in his wake. He made it into our neighbours' yards several times, once at midnight, terrifying little Susie Waters out of her mind. When we reinforced the fences and made them taller, he learned somehow to dig underneath them. Percy would not stay inside his pen. And when there was nowhere else to go, he went inside the house.
John, who had come to feed the cats while we were on vacation, found him in the living room. Percy had the cord of a lamp wrapped around his neck like a scarf, and was busily eating the lampshade. As John later described it to me, he "had a smug look on his face. That goat knew exactly what he was doing, and he was glad."
It took John an hour to clean up the rest of the living room. The lamp would have to be trashed, along with several of the cushions, and baking soda did nothing to remove the muddy hoofprints in the carpet. By the end of the ordeal, John was very angry. He left the house without feeding the cats, remembered halfway home, and returned to finish his work; when he got home, it was close to 9 pm. 
John came by to talk to us about Percy the day we got home. He had forgotten the spare key and was sitting on the bench swing in the cold. I could tell immediately that it had something to do with Percy: he was one of the only things in the world that could make John mad.
"Something has to be done", he insisted to me, after relaying his story. "That goat is up to no end of trouble, and he loves every minute of it."
"It's not like we can spank him. He's practically immune to pain." We had tried smacking him with a flyswatter, pinching his ears, even taking a plastic BB gun to him from a distance. 
John pondered this for a moment, and then said, "Maybe we don't need to punish him - we can just stop him if we hear him coming." Thinking out loud, John gabbered a bunch of ideas out at me. We could attack a walkie-talkie to his neck. We could permanently affix a horn to his mouth, so that every time he breathed, it would make a noise. We could tie maracas to his feet. 
"Or", I suggested, "We could go a bit more old-fashioned. Maybe we should just attach a bell to his collar."
"Percy doesn't wear a collar", said John, dismissing my idea straight off.
"So we put one on him. It's that simple."
John pouted. "The maracas were a good idea", he protested. 
During the next week, I retrieved a rusty cowbell from our garage and purchased a dog collar meant for a Labrador. I was certain that the matter of belling Percival would be done within five minutes.
John was in the goat pen when I arrived; amazingly enough, Percy was also in the goat pen, rather than traipsing along outside of it. "I heard you coming a mile away", said John, raising his eyebrows at the cowbell.
"Good. That means it'll work."
John fiddled with the collar and managed to attach the cowbell to the dogtag loop. Then we turned to Percy.
There was only one issue: Percival did not want to be collared.
It was almost as if he knew what was coming. As soon as we came towards him with the collar, he bolted, bucking and leaping. John let out an angered yell and raced after him, while I attempted to keep up. "We just have to tire him out", called John. "I patched all the fences yesterday."
But John hadn't patched up the fences as well as he'd hoped. Percy was quick to find a hole, and slithered underneath the fence like a snake. John tore off his baseball cap and threw it in the dirt. He'd have to go out the gate; between dirt on the ground and barbed wire on the fence, his new shirt didn't stand a chance.
By the time John and I made it out of the goat pen, Percy was on the front lawn. John took off, not even looking behind him to see if I could keep up.
John finally caught up to the wretched goat, right up next to my father's old pecan tree. I don't know why he hasn't cut the thing down yet. It rose up to meet the clouds, gnarled and withered, bent in an unnatural fashion; it was dead as a doornail and no longer bore fruit or leaves. John had Percy up against the trunk, and when the goat tried to walk around the tree, he ran into me. I was certain we had him now; there was nowhere for him to go.
Percy knew he was cornered. But billy goats never back down.
So Percy went up.
He turned to the tree and gave an impressive leap, his hooves scrabbling to find purchase on the rough bark. Before John had time to process what was happening, Percy was on a thick branch high above his head. John and I stared up in amazement. Percy stared down in triumph.
I suppose, had fate not intervened at that moment, that Percy would have proved difficult to remove from the tree. But that day we learned something about Percy that we didn't know before: Percy is terrified of heights. The thing about Tennessee Fainters is, well, they faint. 
Percy's limbs stiffened and he flopped over to the side, immobile, right off the branch, and directly onto John's shoulders. John fell to the ground under the goat's weight, but quickly recovered; before Percy regained consciousness, he grabbed the collar from me and slipped it around Percy's neck. 
When Percival stood up, he didn't seem to know the difference, and he headed off in the direction of the pen, clanking and ringing all the way. He knew it was feeding time. 
"One thing's for sure", said John, "He doesn't need more cowbell. But I still think the maracas would have been a good idea."
To this day, Percy has never tried to climb a tree again, but he has managed not to lose his cowbell. 
A story from quite a while back
© 2015 - 2024 chika365
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KuroGalaxy14's avatar
Lol! Dang, I should try to write something like this, although I probably wouldn't do nearly as well at it. You seem to have a knack for it.