Hey Jupiter

I GOT IN a fight with a goat, once.

It was late last year, and I was volunteering at a goat sanctuary once a week, which meant that I was mucking poop for four hours every Monday, a practice I found weirdly, wonderfully fulfilling. It was wet during that wintertime, so we had to spread wood chips around their habitat, and one day as I climbed up a mountain of them to fill a bucket, my legs sank into the pile.

In that firm, half-buried stance, I plunged in my shovel and felt some deep, ancestral memory in my body sigh, Yes.

The majority of goats in a goat sanctuary are boys. It makes sense, when you think about it—but I’d never thought about it, until the sanctuary staffer pointed it out, this wild inverse to the human value system. Male goats who are born in dairies are worthless, so they’re often killed. In this sanctuary, there were more than a dozen of them, many sizes and breeds, one missing a leg and some missing their horns, or their balls, and on this farm, they weren’t expected to do a single thing except live.

They were happy. They came charging when I approached, lugging the morning’s hay. But even when I wasn’t feeding them, one or another would saunter over as I swept or shoveled poo and nudge me, or rub against me, like an enormous, inflexible cat.

On my first day, I noticed one named Jupiter, who stayed apart from the pack, often at the edge of the vast fenced enclosure. He was tall, and brown-black, missing his horns but growing an epic goatee. He’d been watching me throughout the day, but it wasn’t until I put down all the tools and was getting ready to leave that he walked over, a bit tentatively, and then leaned his head against my chest.

He stood still, sidelong to me, resting his long neck across my torso. I put my hands up and pet it with one, cradling his skull with the other. Eventually, he rubbed his head up and down, up and down, against me as I stroked his body, and I remember feeling like it went on for a really long time but also that it could never end. But eventually, I walked away from him, got in my car, and drove away.

I think it was two weeks later that we argued. I was putting hay in the secondary feeding area that’s set up to make sure smaller or less aggressive goats still get food while bullies are crowding the main trough. And big ol’ Jupiter came over there and started butting out a tiny chestnut-brown goat named Jonathan.

I chastised him like one would a dog. “Hey,” I said. “Stop it.”

He didn’t. Jonathan kept trying to eat, and Jupiter kept ramming his little body away. “Hey, quit it!” I said, and he looked at me with irritated vibes; if he could’ve glared, he would’ve. I took some hay over to Jonathan and hand-fed it to him, placing my body between the two goats, and I could feel Jupiter behind me, sulking. So I told him he was being a jerk.

I don’t know if it’s weird that I was disappointed in the behavior of this goat. But I felt that he could do better, and so I was. We didn’t interact further as I went about my chores, and it felt the way it does when couples have tension, strain in the air across the farmyard, and yes it did occur to me that maybe I was projecting—did I have to be projecting, that I thought I was in a fight with this goat?—but then, an hour later, I saw him moving toward me out of the corner of my eye and looked up as he crossed the grass, head down. He approached me like that—bowed—until he was standing right at my feet. And slowly, reverently, he leaned his forehead into me.

He was apologizing.

I was dumbstruck.

Hey, Jupiter. There’s a Tori Amos song with your name in it that I listened to compulsively in high school, though I can’t say I really knew (or know, still) what it’s about except that it’s sad, and that I was sad then and sad, too, the day that you came over to apologize to me without my asking or begging or trying to demand an apology from you.

Which I wasn’t going to do. Because the fight was no big deal—was not about any kind of harm you’d done to me—and because you’re a goat. You didn’t have to do it, because you know there are dozens of other humans who bring and would continue to bring you food, even if we fought forever. But you, you didn’t want that. You wanted not just to make peace, but to initiate peace. You wanted to take accountability better than any boyfriend I’d had in decades. Better than my own blood. You, Jupiter, are a goat. And you knew that I can expect more.