The Story behind the poem
Button: Billy Goat Terror
A brief synopsis of his legendary life
The great goat Button’s massive horns hung in honor on a wall of our cabin/playhouse. It was a short walk from the cabin to the place the fearsome Billy was buried. Grampa had memorialized him by bending a sapling down to form an arch beyond which arch lay the grave of a goat who would have made the Gruff Brothers proud.
The arch and the grave beyond was a common destination for my siblings and I as children. We went there ourselves frequently and took any visiting friends or cousins there as well. We’d show them the horns on the wall of the cabin then walk to “Button’s Arch” which we passed beneath with a sense of awe and solemnity.
The grave itself was anticlimactic. There was no marker of any kind. Grampa told us that was where Button was buried, and we took his word for it.
Button must have been one of the first animals Dad obtained when he purchased and moved to the farmstead on which I grew up. I don’t remember the old goat at all. Either I was yet unborn or an infant when he lived his short but colorful life.
Dad didn’t grow up on a farm, but he often visited Great Grandfather Samuel’s as a boy and I believe that’s what made him want to be a farmer himself. I…
