The turkeys were Harvey’s idea. He remembered what one of the old-timers said thirty-five years ago when he first purchased the old Sheasby house: to keep from going loopy in the foothills it is best to make friends with the animals. Good country thinking. Over the years Harvey had tried befriending squirrels and wolves and the occasional deer, but his first real animal friend was a woman he managed to get pregnant.
Ellie didn’t hold it against him when he joked about it in his weekly newspaper column. PREGNANT CRYPTID CAPTURED AT SHEASBY FARMS—TWO DOLLARS TO PET! was his headline. Neighbors talked. How could Harvey, well, you know? Does intercourse still work when there’s a thirty-year age difference? You think you know somebody and then, poof, you never know people. Ellie had trouble keeping track of all the rumors. She was a whore, a saint, the victim of predatory male courtship. On more than one occasion the rumor was she had been abducted and impregnated by aliens. And Harvey? He loved the publicity. What can I say? he wrote in his column. It’s a savage world in the foothills. Hibernating bears like to stay close to their honey.
Then the news nobody anticipated.
Miscarriage, Harvey reported. No sympathies, please.
So, to make Ellie forget the miscarriage Harvey purchased a dozen turkeys. A mix of toms and hens. Fair price from George Lindquist. Cute little devils. Ugly, but cute. He was driving home with them in the back of the pickup when two of the birds took an unfortunate leap and gobbled their way under the wheels of a passing semi. Harvey spent an hour gathering the remains off the highway.
“It’s okay,” he told Ellie as he unloaded the pickup and sent the remaining turkeys sprawling into the fields. “This makes a baker’s dozen.”
“You’re not a baker,” she said coldly. “And you can’t count.”
“You’re missing the point.”
Ellie chewed her lip. “What makes you think you can breed wild turkeys?”
“Maybe I can’t. But it’s something to take our mind off things,” he said, trying to be reassuring.
“What things?” she hissed. She said it deliberately to make him feel uncomfortable. It hurt her, this flippancy, this old patronizing wisdom of believing he could make it right with the snap of his fingers, even if he wasn’t trying to be mean and was only trying to show he loved her. Hey, honey, you lost the baby but I got you turkeys! That was the problem with Harvey: he loved so big he never realized when he was being a fool.
“We need to relax,” he smiled, and put his arm around her awkwardly in a half embrace she did not return. With Harvey it was all whimsical. He had avoided seriousness for most of his life. Even when his mother died he turned it into a joke, refusing to give a eulogy and inviting people to the pulpit to tell a story about Judith that made them laugh instead of cry. Harvey didn’t make any room for tragedy. That was why he wrote a silly column for thirty-five years and never once said anything worth repeating.
“Breeding them won’t be so difficult,” Harvey said as they surveyed the turkeys from the slope. No sooner had he said it than he let his chin drop against his chest, the way he did when suffering indigestion. “I did not mean that,” he said.
“I know with you it’s just words,” Ellie said, patting his cheek.
Harvey gazed at the flock which began to sputter and zag in the evening snow. The bigger toms were marking their territory. “Ten is luckier than twelve. I feel good about having ten,” he said.
“They’re heading for the thicket,” Ellie said. “Boy. You sure did get the wild ones.”
Harvey snorted. Then he brushed past her. Ellie held her breath as he started into a trot, waving his arms and calling after the turkeys.
Halfway down the butte he was in full sprint. Two of the jakes disappeared into the thicket. Harvey managed to keep the others at bay by throwing snowballs until they started back up the slope toward the old barn that must not have been used in half a century.
After he corralled them into the barn Harvey found Ellie inside. She kissed him on the cheek. Before turning up the stairs she said, “Next time, try not to dream so big.”
Harvey converted the barn into a pen for the toms and jakes. On the other side he put up some wire meshing for the gobblettas, as he called them. When he bought the feed and supplies one of the farmers had told him to keep the toms and hens separate.
“Nothing like delayed gratification to raise a roost,” Harvey laughed.
“Don’t be a jackass, Harvey. If you let those toms on her now they’ll tear her to pieces. And I mean pieces. You’ll lose the whole rafter.”
Harvey stood there with the bag of feed slung over his shoulder, nodding his head without a clue. The farmers snickered. They knew Harvey never did mind looking like a fool.
“Well, I appreciate the advice,” he told them. “It shouldn’t come as any surprise that I do my best sex scenes with a typewriter and a glass of gin.”
He never could keep the turkeys penned up for long. They were always escaping. Sometime past midnight Harvey could hear the jakes pecking at the windows. When he opened the door they invited themselves inside and stood in the parlor, bobbing and fanning tails as if it were a game.
During the afternoon, when he was tired of writing or bored with reading, Ellie found him in the barn teaching the toms how to gobble. Like the town, they were confused by the winter that refused to thaw.
“If they don’t learn to gobble the hens won’t know it’s time to mate,” he explained.
After a few weeks of training Harvey became impatient and decided to let the turkeys roam instead of cooping them in the barn. For two days it seemed to be working. They heard gobbles before sunrise. The toms were strutting like he had read about in the manual and there were other proper courtship displays.
Then one morning they found four of the turkeys butchered during the night. Feathers and guts and turkey heads all down the slope.
“Maybe wolves,” Ellie said.
The surviving turkeys seemed to sense something was wrong. For Ellie it was plain to see these were not dumb birds. There was something human about the way the turkeys marched in ritual fashion among the tattered corpses. Circle left. Circle right. Fluffle and ruffle. Gobble gobble. An unsettling little dirge. It gave Ellie hope that nature knew what it was doing even when it seemed to be spiraling this way and that inside her own body.
Harvey was collecting the turkey innards when he noticed one of the toms went into a frenzy. It dashed down the slope, heading for the pond.
“Suicide!” he yelled.
He tried to get Ellie’s attention but she was petting one of the gobblettas with purple caruncles and acted as if she didn’t hear him. Harvey tossed the half-frozen entrails at her feet as he ran past her.
The tom had leaped into the pond. It wasn’t moving. Harvey leaped in after it. By the time he reached the bird it was floating on its side, mostly submerged in the water. Rolling out of the water Harvey took off his shirt and wrapped it around the tom. It still wasn’t moving. He tipped it upside down and began to whack it with an open palm. He shook it by the feet.
“Goddamn it! Goddamn you!”
Ellie, who had come out of her trance, watched him swing the turkey by the legs as if it was a wet towel. He whirled it around his head. Twice he rubbed it violently against a tree trunk. He massaged the turkey’s chest with his palms. The gobbler’s head knocked against his mouth. Harvey tasted blood. His knees buckled under him and, in frustration and rage for fifty-seven years of futility, he tossed the gobbler into a heap of snow like an Olympian. Then he rested with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.
The turkey lay in the snow for a few minutes. Then it twitched. It wobbled back to its feet. It strutted up the slope. It paused in front of the gobblettas to puff its chest and shake its wattle.
“I’ll eat you, I’ll braise you in your own juices you . . . you . . . motherfucker!” he screamed.
Ellie could not stop laughing. Harvey huffed past her, grunting like a school boy embarrassed he’s fallen off the playground swings.
Harvey took a long bath. Later, he sat on the bed and watched Ellie alternate between painting her toenails and folding unused baby clothes. She put them in a box destined for the attic. He wanted her to be bitter. He wanted some acknowledgment of discomfort, some forbidden rage. But she kept appearances with a remarkable indifference, with what he supposed could only be the evolutionary legacy of some pioneer stoicism. She was the most audacious toe painter in history.
Maybe this was her way with grief. It wasn’t like he knew her that well. He had seen her in a window display one afternoon while shopping for some replacement parts for his typewriter. She said she was a professional mattress sleeper.
“If I buy this bed do you come with it?” he asked.
She might have found him creepy if he didn’t have such a stupid grin on his face. Like it was his first pickup line in thirty years.
He thought it would be over within a month. It had been four years.
Harvey wrapped his arms around Ellie and pulled her close. He put one ear to her belly. He had not done this when she was pregnant and now he felt like he had missed out on one of life’s great mysteries. All these years he had been waiting for something to happen, something, well, dazzling was the only word that came to mind. He thought Ellie would sweep him off his feet, but after four years they were just Harvey and Ellie, Ellie and Harvey. Wasn’t there something more? Isn’t that what people come out here for? he wondered. To be dazzled? By suicidal turkeys? Nope. He knew better. People retreat to the foothills to be bored. Now he knew why. It was too exhausting to be dazzled.
She ran fingers through his hair. For a moment she thought he might touch her like before. Harvey had little interest in sex. It was a freak of nature she had gotten pregnant at all. Sure, they had a routine, but it was nothing fancy. Like washing dishes.
“I’m fifty-seven next month,” Harvey said. “Jesus was in his thirties when he saved the world. What the hell have I done in fifty-seven years?”
Ellie smiled and kissed the top of his head. “You resurrected a turkey.”
With the snow momentarily thawed, the toms started mating regularly. At night Ellie could hear them. Harvey was pleased. The hens were really coming into lay. The first breeding yielded nine poults. They matured unreasonably fast. In six short weeks the male chicks had grown into jakes and were trying to mate with their mothers. And then the gobblettas were roosting again. Harvey counted the eggs. Forty-seven.
“It’s not natural,” Ellie told him as they watched the jakes try to woo their mothers away from the older toms. While one of the toms was busy gobbling to attract a mate, the faster jakes would mount the hen who had answered the call. Then the old tom, entirely oblivious, would mount her a second time. They watched this deranged family charade repeat for hours.
“It’s incest,” Harvey said, doing his best to sound stoic. “Or some other polygamy.”
By the end of the week there were over one hundred eggs in the barn.
“Come to bed,” Harvey told her one night as she stood by the door. “It’ll even out. Let nature run its course.”
For the next two weeks he tried to hide from her the nastiness of the hatching, worried she didn’t have the stomach for it. On the other hand, maybe she wouldn’t be upset. Since they had been together she had about as much passion as a doorknob.
One morning he found her in the bathroom. She was kneeling among the hens. There was fresh hay in the tub and cracked eggs in the sink. At least four dozen chicks. Chirping and echoes. Bloody handprints on the floor. Soiled towels. Mangled lumps of poult flesh on the tile.
Ellie was bent over one of the smashed eggshells. It was only after she looked at him that he realized she had been giving a newborn poult mouth-to-mouth. The thing squirmed between her fingers like a cannoli. Harvey watched as she took a knife from her pocket and delicately nicked the throat before fitting in the straw. She blew hard. The poult’s chest puffed like a sad balloon.
Harvey dropped the egg he was holding.
“Get the fuck out!” Ellie screamed.
Exactly forty-three poults survived the hatching. Most of those in the barn froze to death overnight. They brought the survivors inside. They were ugly, misshapen things. Three beaks, eleven toes, wattles dangling from their asses. They kept breeding. Eighty. Then well over one hundred and fifty turkeys. Harvey lost count. Ellie ran out of names.
Ellie insisted on keeping the turkeys inside. Harvey had grown tired of the affair. He wanted them gone. He was less playful at breakfast, not as quick with his jokes. Ellie suggested he start writing his column again but Harvey said he had lost his appetite for words.
Harvey tried to get rid of the turkeys. He wouldn’t say whether this was for his benefit or hers. He sold as many as he could to restaurants and chased others into the woods. He left the windows open for them to wander outside but not even the wolves could keep pace with the breeding. For every ten butchered by wolves another two dozen hatched. He stopped feeding them, hoping the numbers would taper off. Instead, they ate their own dead.
The turkeys kept them awake at night. When Harvey turned in bed Ellie was waiting for him. She had watched the turkeys breed. She had taken notes, even drawn pictures. It was all very educational. She slept naked now, surprised at her own insistence at trying to be a mother. When Harvey told her to be quiet and tried to fall back asleep she gobbled into his ear before mounting him.
He rolled over one night and was surprised not to find her in bed. He checked the bathroom and the kitchen. All he found were a few stray turkeys roaming the hallways and others asleep in the tub. He searched the barn but she wasn’t there either.
Outside, she had left an obvious trail to follow. He went at a casual pace, not wanting to excite himself. How many times had he warned her about these trails? At least a dozen. She wasn’t familiar with these woods. It was easy to get lost. And there were salt wells. One misstep and she would be pickled sixty feet deep with nobody to hear her screaming.
Harvey kept pushing through the trees, determined to follow what sounded like gobbling. When the gobbles quieted he followed the thucking of an ax in a tree stump until he found Ellie and her brood.
It was a massacre. Ellie was standing on the far end of a clearing. She wore pajamas stained with blood. Dozens of turkeys circled her like enthusiastic disciples. They turned to look at Harvey, heads bobbing, but Ellie did not. She breathed deeply. She focused on the ax, swinging it like a blind executioner until there was nothing left of the turkey but a clump of feathers and twisted knots of skin. She tossed the remains into a heap and waited for the next turkey to take its place. Good God, Harvey thought, she must have led them out here like the pied piper.
When she paused, Harvey admired the scene. The blood made a handsome drizzle on the snow, cruel and jagged in some places and almost lovingly geometrical in others. He knew she had been at her task for some hours because the snow had fallen unevenly and the spatter of blood beneath the snow emerged in various shades. The earth was a gruesome layered cake. He could not help but feel impressed—unnerved, but deeply impressed by this brutality.
“What are you doing?”
Ellie didn’t look at him. He took the ax from her. He did it gently, so as not to startle her.
“I think they’re dead,” she said. She used a sleeve to wipe her nose. Blood smeared across her cheek. Behind them, the turkeys gobbled.
“What are you doing?” he asked again.
“This is what I do,” she said. “This is what I’m made for.”
“Come on,” Harvey said, a bundle of nerves and sadness. “Let’s go home.”
She led the way out of the woods. The front door of the house was locked. In his hurry, Harvey had forgotten his keys. All the lights were on inside and it sounded like a cocktail party. Harvey cupped his hands against the window glass. Ellie did the same. It was difficult to make out the shape of things at first, but within a few minutes they could see the silhouetted figures of turkeys. There were hundreds of them. It was a mess. There was hay. There was shit. There was blood. They had torn open the cardboard box of baby clothes Ellie left on the stairwell, leaving onesies and burp cloths mangled on the floor. One of the turkeys had stuffed its head inside a mitten and walked in circles bumping into furniture. Several toms had violently mated with the hens. There were broken eggshells. Quite a few turkeys were seated around the dinner table.
“You should write about this in the column,” Ellie finally said, trying to restrain her disbelief. “People want to know about this kind of thing.”
“Nobody would believe it. It’s too weird,” Harvey said.
Harvey tried the doorknob. It was locked. He tapped the window glass. When Ellie put her arms around him he flinched. She held him. She tried to calm him. For the moment neither of them moved, blanketed by the snow that all around them became a fuzzy, almost blue weirdness drowned out by turkey gobbling. They watched, on the outside looking in, as if it were the first time.