The Billy Goat
We are one second away from death always. I learned this lesson at an early age. My family lived on a five acre plot of land that afforded us the luxury of having lots of different kinds of pets. Of course we had cats and dogs but we also had chickens and rabbits and squirrels and the focus of this story a Billy goat. I was eight years old when this particular goat came to our family. I wasn’t particularly fond of the thing. It would eat anything and seemed to always be under foot. In nineteen-fifty eight the traffic on our road consisted of us, the two neighbors that lived on our road, farm machinery, and the occasional car seeking the shortest route to town. The car in question fell into the last category. I was riding a twenty- six inch bicycle that was way too big for me but it was the only one we had. I hadn’t been riding long so I went out the drive and down the road every chance I could. The only reason that I could ride the bike was it was a girl’s bike and I could step through the bar and push off and balance on the pedals. I was too small to reach the seat. I was riding up and down the road in front of our house on a pleasant summer afternoon when I heard something out of the ordinary.
Coming down the road was a green early fifties Dodge. This thing was flying. I was very wobbly on the bike so I stopped and straddled it and pushed it off the road into the side ditch until the car passed. The goat was enjoying some forbidden lush green side ditch grass. Just as the speeding car passed me the goat decided to bolt into the path of the car. It took the car a few feet to stop after hitting the goat. I froze. In the middle of the road was our goat. It didn’t look grotesque or bloody even though it had rolled out from under the car. It was gasping for breath, its side was still moving ever so slightly up and down but it was the quiver of a dying animal. No breath would enter or exit. Everything that was once inside the animal was outside lying in the middle of the road, still hanging to the goat by a thread of an intestine.
I wanted to but I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t move. My father came running out to where his oldest son was riding his bike his heart not beating until he saw me safe in the side ditch. The man got out of his car apologizing and offered to pay Dad for the goat.
“You need to slow down around here,” he told the guy in the same voice I had heard many times when he had to discipline me. “What if that had been one of my kids?”
The man’s shoulders dropped when he heard those words because he was totally convicted. He had two small children in the back seat of his death machine. They were peeking out the back window at me and the goat. They were younger than I but we shared the same realization. I didn’t know them but I am certain that it took them many sleepless scary nights to get over what happened that innocent afternoon. I know it did me. What If?
