The wooden barn where Wagner, 59, and Callegary, 57, installed Elliott smells of sweet hay. His books, a can of shaving cream and a razor sit on a shelf and his baseball caps and several satchels hang from hooks. His clothes are neatly draped over a folding chair.
Elliott's days were soon structured by the routine of caring for the goats. Just after dawn on a recent morning, Callegary arrived to help him milk. Yasmine, the mother of Jasmine and a La Mancha goat with tiny rosebud-shaped ears, bounded in first and buried her face in a trough of goat feed on the milking stand.
Elliott sat by her black flank and shaped his thumbs and forefingers into rings, as if he were making the "OK" sign with both hands. He tugged one teat and then the other, and milk pinged into a metal pail.
"Oh, my goodness, look how good you've gotten," Callegary said to him.
Callegary confides that she feels a particular empathy for Elliott because one of her daughters has also struggled with an addiction. And she believes her faith requires her to help those in need.
As a chorus of birds jabbered in the trees outside, Elliott wiped the goat's udder and lifted the pail of milk. Yasmine nosed a few last bits of food. "So you found some more, huh," Elliott said.
Between the morning and evening milkings, Yasmine and Lily, a floppy-eared Nubian goat, produce about 2 1/2 gallons of milk. Callegary makes it into soft cheese, which she packs in Mason jars and gives to friends.
She has kept goats for years, ever since a customer gave her husband a goat. The animals are good company and she loves the milk and cheese. The goats, she says, have personalities, more like dogs than cows. Little Hildie jumps straight up in the air like a spring, and Kyle stands on his hind legs to bite berries off a vine.
During the day, Elliott helps around the house, tidies up odds and ends in the yard or helps Wagner with his business. The older man was recently hospitalized because of complications of Lyme disease.
Some days, Elliott travels into the city to visit his doctor at Healthcare for the Homeless or his social worker. He has applied for disability benefits and hopes to find a job and an apartment soon.
Being with the family makes him feel loved and valued, Elliott says. He enjoys feeling productive and being responsible for the goats. They need him. In the quiet rhythms of family life and taking care of the animals, he finds the peace to put his life in perspective.
At night, after he has eaten dinner with the family and read or played a few hands of cards, Elliott walks to the barn and switches on the radio. In their pen, the two nanny goats lean against the barn door and listen. Elliott sees their gawky legs shuffle through the crack under the door.
After so many years of racking his body with heroin, he must teach himself how to sleep again. He closes his eyes, breathes in the scent of hay and thinks about the people - and goats - for whom he is grateful. Sometimes he thinks about what life will be like when he has an income and a place of his own.
He imagines returning triumphantly to the Charles Village park where he spent so many nights on hard benches.
But in his reverie, he doesn't return alone. Jasmine, his favorite kid, comes along too.
julie.scharper@baltsun.com
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See a video of Stephen Elliott and the goats at baltimoresun.com/goats
