Cooper: hey!
Me: Hey
Cooper: hey i was just thinking about you
Cooper: about your npc task force thing
Cooper: and how you wanted to meet someone with npc
Me: Yeah?
Cooper: do you remember my grandma?
Me: I remember she was very nice.
Cooper: yes, she is very nice, but she has dementia, unfortunately, and i was thinking if you wanted we could go talk to her. it’s not npc but it is similar and i thought it might be nice for you to see that she hasn’t lost herself completely
Cooper: she’s still happy, i mean
Me: Yeah, I think that would be good!
Cooper: cool
Cooper: well let me know when you want to go
Cooper: i know how you like to pencil things in :)
Me: But
Me: You know what?
Me: How about now?
Cooper: okay!
Frieda: The McCoys? Oh yes, of course I know the McCoys. They’ve been here for about as long as the Linds have. They came around the same time, migrated from Boston to set up farmland. Our families have lived around the mountain from each other for almost one hundred years. The best story is their shared, well, stewardship of an albino goat named Francis.
Sammie (snorts, to Cooper): Is that how you got your middle name?
Cooper: My mom says no but the coincidence is unsettling.
Frieda: I believe this was around the turn of the century. The story goes that… let me think. Francis was an albino goat, and he was such an oddity that people came from all around town to look at him, and I believe it was one of the McCoys who had the idea to charge people to see him.
Cooper: Of course it was the McCoys.
Sammie: Hey!
Frieda: A penny a peek or something like that. The difficult part of this was, ’scuse me. (coughs) The difficult part about this was that the goats roamed the backyard freely between the two pieces of property. One of the Linds, I think it was Geoffrey Lind, claimed that the McCoys had no right to make money off Francis because Francis was born of their goats. Then Patrick McCoy, of course, said no, absolutely not, Francis was his goat Freddie’s kid. What was funny was that Francis wasn’t even a kid anymore. He was a fully grown goat! So the whole life of this goat they didn’t even care whose he was, but now that they found out they could make money off him, they both claimed him. They were still fighting even when there was a line of people outside to see Francis, and finally Colleen McCoy, who was a religious woman…
Sammie: No surprise there.
Cooper: Ha!
Frieda: Colleen McCoy had this high-and-mighty idea in her head that was just like the story in the Bible with the wise King Solomon. You remember that, Jerry?
Cooper: It’s Cooper, Grandma.
Frieda: Oh, you look just like Jerry.
Cooper: Jerry’s my dad.
Frieda: Of course he is!
Sammie: So you were saying about the wise King Solomon…
Frieda: What was I saying, sweetheart?
Cooper: Francis the goat. Colleen McCoy.
Frieda: So Colleen got it in her head that only if she threatened to cut Francis in half, Francis’s true owner would reveal himself. She was quite dramatic.
Cooper: No surprise there.
Frieda: Colleen lifted the knife above her head… (feigns lifting knife)… and slowly brought it down, down, down, toward poor Francis the goat, and no one said a word!
Sammie: What?
Cooper: Wait, it gets better.
Frieda: So neither Geoffrey Lind nor Patrick McCoy was the true owner of Francis. For all they knew, Francis could have just wandered down the mountain from someone else. Or most likely they had just forgotten.
Sammie: But did Francis die?
Frieda: Yes, he did.
Sammie: Aw! How?
Cooper: They had a goat roast, because all the town was there anyway!
Sammie: They made Francis into a roast???
Frieda: Yes, and legend has it he was delicious.