Seventy souls before supper
Scoop does not cover Columbia as a beat. Columbia is where the hills start considering other careers. But news travels downhill faster than a goat on a wet plank, and this particular news arrived with a number attached that a barn reporter cannot ignore: seventy.
Seventy barnyard animals — goats and sheep and lambs, two turkeys who had opinions, and a congress of chickens — had been left in a barn without the two things a barn is supposed to guarantee. A court handed them to the Central Missouri Humane Society. The Society posted the list. The phone became a living thing.
By supper the list was empty. Applications came so fast the shelter took the forms off the public square and made people say their names out loud. Four goats or sheep to a home, they said, which is how you can tell a place has met goats before. One family already keeping a herd added four more because four is a language goats speak.
We will not invent the eviction. We will not invent the barn. What we will invent, because this is the part the record leaves lying in the sun, is the first night in the new places.
A ewe who had stopped expecting the gate to mean anything felt the latch work the ordinary way and declined to celebrate until morning. A goat kid learned that water can be in a tub and also still be water. The turkeys filed a minority report and then ate anyway. Somewhere a person who had not planned to own a sheep stood in a kitchen and googled “how many friends does a sheep need” and got the only correct answer: more than you think, and also you.
The Ozarks did not empty that barn. Mid-Missouri did. But the lesson travels. Community is a word people put on festival banners. Community is also what happens when a number like seventy meets a county that still knows how to answer a phone before the coffee is decent.
If you adopted from that list: keep the second tub full. If you did not: remember that a barn can go quiet in a week, and a town can fill it in a day, and both facts can be true in the same summer.