Church of the Goat Man

Abstract

Church of the Goat Man Kathleen Driskell (bio) 1 The Goat Man has his own Facebook page, Wikipedia page, short movie, entry in the Encyclopedia of Louisville, and is the subject of several poorly produced podcasts I have listened to recently. The Goat Man is also known as the Pope Lick Monster. Pope Lick is the shallow creek that meanders alongside the county road in Kentucky that we have lived on for decades, also named Pope Lick. When I rattle off my address, I usually get one of two reactions. Some snicker at the supposed bawdiness of my road’s name. To them, I explain that a “lick”—something between a rill and a stream—is a water source that emanates from a salt deposit and attracts all sorts of wild animals, making it a popular hunting spot. “Uh-huh,” they respond, as if to imply sure, whatever you say, lady. The other reaction is from those who already know something about the Norfolk Southern train trestle that towers over both Pope Licks, the creek and the road, and where the Goat Man lurks searching for his next victim. They may have even heard that the Goat Man has taken up residency with his wife and kids nearby in the old, abandoned Devil Church. If so, I might tease a bit, telling them that, actually, I am married to the Goat Man, which makes me Mrs. Goat Man, I suppose, though, honestly, no one has ever seemed that interested in hunting me down. [End Page 27] 2 At sixteen, I sat next to my mother in the local Methodist church, watched her finger slide across the words of the hymnal, her elbow in my ribs nudging me to sing along. I hadn’t found Keats yet, nor his poems about skepticism that would come to mean so much, but I was already bone sure her fundamentalist God wasn’t ever going to be more than a puff of superstition for me. Even in times of desperation, a child’s traumatic accident, my husband’s cancer, I’ve waved off any notion of that god as if it were cigar smoke in a crowded restaurant. Yet when I unlock the front door, enter my home through what once was the steeple with an actual brass bell hanging overhead and pass through my living room in what was the nave (what I suppose still is the nave), I am electric, charged by and grateful for the unwavering faith of those Lutherans who, at least a decade before the American Civil War, raised this building for worship. I feel more than lucky—I feel as if my family was meant to live here, in this church. That I was part of a rescue squad sent with my husband to save the beautiful old post and beam structure, its lumber harvested from nearby woods a hundred and forty years earlier, meant to save what had become a sad sack of a building by the time my husband and I stumbled upon it for sale in 1994. But what congregation—early or of late—could have imagined me schlepping through the nave with groceries, putting a head of romaine and a gallon of two percent milk away in the refrigerator, now sitting where we discovered a pulpit when our Realtor unlocked the double doors at the front of the church and stepped aside as my husband and I made our way in for the first time. 3 Nearly thirty years ago, I pushed past the Realtor, into the vestibule, and stood for a moment, gathering my senses before commencing warily, hands in front, feeling my way, blinded by having just come out of blazing sunlight. I almost turned my ankle on an empty wine bottle. Terry and I had been jabbering nonstop about the fabulous home we could make in the church since we discovered it while out house hunting. [End Page 28] Hopelessly lost, far beyond any of the Louisville neighborhoods we’d grown up in and running late for a showing for a home we already knew we couldn’t afford, we pulled over to get our bearings and realized we were in...