No more animals,” I told Linda.
“We hardly have any.”
“A cat, two parrots, and a canary. That’s more animals than I’ve ever seen together at one time. And they all live in our house.”
“Well,” she shrugged, “I told you we should get some animals for outdoors. I can’t understand why anyone fortunate to own a barn like ours wouldn’t want a couple of cows or a donkey.”
Linda had always lived out in the country, and that was a big difference between us. Her past included subsistence living with a pig and several chickens in the Michigan north woods, while I had merely lived with Catholics in suburbia.
Antirural sentiments ran deep in the Blessed Sacrament Parish neighborhood of my youth, where no one would admit to watching The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, or Petticoat Junction, though with shades drawn, such activities undoubtedly took place. During the five-hour trip from Grand Rapids to my mom’s hometown of Port Huron in the ancient pre-interstate era, whenever we got stuck behind a poky driver on the sense-dulling cornfield-lined roads along the way, my good-natured father would inevitably grumble about “another damn farmer.” Branding a person a farmer was one of the choicest insults you could level at any hapless soul. In high school, we drew a line between the suburban high-steppers and the downtrodden yokels from outside the city limits. Even during the rebellious 1960s, however much I disdained the middle-class pursuit of manicured lawns bounded by smooth, rolling sidewalks, I considered life in the country a fearful remnant of Dark Ages chaos.
By the time I bought our 1907-vintage farmhouse in 1989, my attitude had shifted to the degree that I esteemed rural life as an escape from a series of apartments in crime-spattered downtown Grand Rapids. In a single year, thieves had broken into my battered Toyota so often that I installed old stove knobs on the in-dash cassette deck to demonstrate its worthlessness and left the doors unlocked at night to spare myself the cost of yet another broken window. Even so, some crack-crazed kid snatched the eighty-nine-cent notebook I used for jotting down business mileage, along with the stick-on digital clock my dad had gotten as a freebie with his subscription to Time.
Linda, who had been living in an ailing trailer with no phones, lights, or plumbing in northern Michigan, immediately loved the house on the outskirts of Lowell. And it answered my need for a yard where I could walk around without people looking out their windows and seeing that I was walking around a yard.
The first time I drove my parents out to see the house, their reaction to our little slab of rustic Shangri-La wasn’t particularly positive. When I proudly showed off the two acres of swampy thicket behind the back fence, my mother asked, “How are you going to get a lawnmower in there?” She gestured toward the rear door of the barn. “You’d better keep that closed,” she advised me, “Otherwise an animal is liable to get in.” I should have listened to her.
To this day, the barn remains something of a puzzler. Earlier owners of our property must have found something to grow and harvest somewhere, unless the vast storage capacity of the double-decker barn was sheer whimsy. Steep, nonfarmable hills shoot up just across the road. What I suspect was formerly arable land out back has since become a swamp. I blame a century of industrial tinkering with the Grand River for the biannual flooding that forces our neighbor to resort to rowboat trips to reach his truck each spring and fall. Initially used as a lumber waterway, the Grand River was later exploited as a source of fill-dirt for the cities on its route, though it also conveyed the clam harvesters pursuing cheap mother-of-pearl shell substitutes for a button factory in Lowell. The clammers camped on the shores of our property in the years before World War I, announcing their presence with the hearty smell of bivalves boiling in great cauldrons and, no doubt, the shouted melodies of traditional clamming songs.
More recently, the folks who sold us our house had spent decades grazing cows in the cowslip and kept porkers that were wont to stray upon the porch. After I moved in, and as my lifelong immunity to animals shifted to susceptibility, I came to suspect that an Amityville Horror–like entity was drawing beasts to our house, and I was merely the spirit’s latest vehicle for pet acquisitiveness.
Certainly I seemed fated to house a procession of rabbits whether I sought them out or not. Bertha came to us unbidden. Linda rushed in one afternoon from a housecleaning job and told me, “You’ll never guess what I saw at Joyce Howell’s underneath her bird feeder.”
“A bird.”
“A little charcoal grey bunny with brown and silver highlights.”
“I thought wild rabbits were solid brown.”
Her eyes widened. “This was someone’s pet. Joyce said the poor thing has been eating sunflower seeds all winter. I opened the patio door and tried to feed him. He came pretty close before he ran away. He’s one of those tiny Netherland dwarf bunnies we looked at when we bought Binky. Joyce’s husband is going to catch him.”
“And do what with him?” Linda’s glee had aroused my suspicions.
“He’s been eating the lower branches of their shrubs, and they just want to catch it, that’s all.”
But I knew there was more to come. A couple of days later, George Howell caught the rabbit in a basketball hoop–size trout net and zipped it over to us. Someone had conveyed the idea to George that we would welcome a new rabbit, and that someone called me downstairs from my upstairs hideout to meet our new resident.
Wearing thick leather gloves capable of repelling eagle talons, George engulfed the tiny animal with his hands, extracted it from a cat carrier, and hurriedly plopped it in Binky’s old cage, which someone had carried from the basement to its familiar place in our dining room. “I hope he doesn’t bite you,” George enthusiastically warned us. “That guy’s been taking out branches thicker than my thumb. I think he’s part beaver.”
“Wonderful,” I said, giving Linda the evil eye.
“He looks just like a Beatrix Potter bunny,” Linda bubbled. “Can we let him out?”
“Wait till I get out of here,” said George, who was clearly anticipating bloodletting and rampant destruction once we uncaged the beast. Before George was back in his car, Linda was petting the rabbit she’d initially named Bertie after P. G. Wodehouse’s pampered and clueless protagonist. But we turned out to be the clueless ones, along with our new veterinarian, when Bertie pulled a gender switch similar to Stanley Sue’s. Examining our bunny, whom we learned was the escaped pet of an unconcerned neighbor of Joyce and George’s, Dr. Colby initially sustained our guess that our rabbit was a male and suggested a second appointment to have him neutered. An intact male rabbit can earn its disproportionate title of “buck” through aggressive behavior toward people, furnishings, and female “does,” including occasionally spraying anything that moves or stands still. Having been hosed by Binky a couple of times, I was anxious to get Bertie snipped. But the day we dropped him off for surgery, Linda casually asked Dr. Colby just before leaving the examination room, “Are you sure he’s a male?”
The effrontery to veterinary science embarrassed me. “Dr. Colby already told us that he was,” I growled. Graciously our vet agreed to humor Linda by giving Bertie’s nether regions a second look. With some chagrin she pronounced Bertie to be the female we renamed Bertha.
Not long after, Linda came home from work with another sad animal story. “You know that lady, Terri, with the teenagers who just bought the tropical fish? They’ve got a really sweet parakeet, and no one pays any attention to him now. He’s all alone in a dark room, and his mate died a little while ago. He used to lecture the girl bird all the time, but now he just sits there and doesn’t chirp or hop around the cage.”
“That is a shame,” I told her, foolishly assuming that a show of sympathy would cost me nothing.
“I’m trying to talk Terri into giving him to us,” Linda concluded, as if we had already flung open the door to parakeet ownership.
Naturally, I was opposed to taking on another pet, but Linda convinced me that no less troublesome animal than the parakeet existed anywhere in nature, microscopic life included. I surrendered to the argument that an older bird wouldn’t even want to come out of his cage. Fortunately this turned out to be true with the blue-and-yellow Farley, whom Linda named after the Canadian nature writer Farley Mowat. On the sole occasion that Linda urged our parakeet out, he flapped around the dining room in such a state of disorientation, we consequently left him contentedly behind bars.
Caring for Farley was easy indeed. But I hadn’t figured on the companionship aspect.
“He misses Lilly,” Linda told me. “Lilly was the mate who died. He needs a little friend.”
“You’re fairly little,” I pointed out.
“Oh, look how sad he is. It’s not right that he should spend the rest of his days all by himself.”
“I don’t know. I sort of envy him.” But I had a feeling this discussion would recur until I finally gave in.
THE GREEN-AND-YELLOW budgie Linda picked out was so tame, she sat on Linda’s shoulder on the car ride home from Betsy’s Beasts. I illogically named her Rossy after a pop group from Madagascar. Within a couple of days, Farley’s personality did a 180-degree flip-flop. The old guy went back to the happy chattering of his peak parakeet years, and like an elderly bachelor who marries a young thing, he died a month later of sheer bliss.
“Rossy isn’t used to being by herself,” Linda reported a day after Farley’s demise.
“She can look at Stanley Sue,” I countered uselessly. “Or she can latch on to Ollie. Ollie’s her size, and he’s just a cage away. They can forge a strong platonic bond.”
“She needs a little friend.”
Powerless, I gave in to a chipper blue-and-white male Linda named Reggie, because she liked the way the name went with Rossy. But those two didn’t go together at all, avoiding one another in the cage with the steely deliberateness of Stanley Sue ignoring a new perch. A third parakeet, the yellow Sophie, added balance to the batch with her retiring personality. Before I had a quasi-say in the matter, these most unobtrusive of all possible pets were flying around the dining room and kitchen, chewing on the upper-level woodwork, and sampling morsels from our plates. I worried that Ollie would make mincemeat of the effervescent budgies, but they were fast enough to tease him and steal food from his dish, too. Ollie and I could only watch and squawk. Rossy, who continued to spurn Reggie’s affections, followed my suggestion of developing a crush on Ollie. She enjoyed sharing his cage top at mealtime just out of reach of his beak.
“We can’t take in any more of these hard-luck cases,” I groused during a particularly beleaguering dinner. Stanley was refusing one food after another via the fling method. Ollie was exercising his vocal tract. Penny, our usually well-mannered cat, kept sneaking into the dining room to get within pouncing range of the parakeets, who buzzed my head like deerflies. Bertha had somehow wormed her way into the inner springs of a small couch and was dulling her teeth on the wooden frame. “It would be one thing if there was a limit to them, but every single person you work for has an animal they’re thrilled to foist on us.”
It’s difficult explaining why I hadn’t mustered more resistance to the new arrivals, much less to any of the animals. If Linda had put the question to me, “Sweetie, should we get a rabbit, canary, cat, two parrots, and three parakeets?” and my answer would have had a meaningful effect on the consequences, I can’t imagine replying yes, and I would never have taken the initiative to acquire any of these pets on my own—with the possible exception of a cat. I was essentially just going along for the ride, as I had with most everything in my life.
Back in my early college years, I’d been abstractly enthusiastic about saltwater aquarium fish, because my girlfriend, Mary, enthusiastically bought them for me. I loved the bright colors and fluidity of the clownfish and other reef fish, the strangeness of the anemones and other invertebrates, and the exclusivity of a hobby that required safaris to neighboring towns.
I didn’t love my fish, but I loved the idea of having them. They were a logical extension to pawing copies of National Geographic and naively mooning over exotic alternatives to life in a bland suburban neighborhood that was more in line with Reader’s Digest. To my parents’ horror, my bedroom hobby expanded to fill several tanks, including a fifty-five-gallon aquarium whose water, salt, substrate, rocks, filters, pumps, and lights weighed over six hundred pounds and eventually cracked the ceiling plaster of the living room below.
Down the hall from my oceanarium was a second-story walk-out porch my family called the airing deck. My parents had replaced the original tar-paper surface with a flooring of loose, crushed white stone. Because this material reminded me of the bottom of my tanks, or because I was addled by a mixture of hormones and self-absorption, I decided that the porch made a convenient dumping ground for dirty aquarium gravel and the expended contents of aquarium filters. Leaves, seedpods, twigs, and sparrow droppings fallen from the huge maple that overhung the airing deck disguised my lazy landfill for several months. By the time my crime came to light, the organic medium had nurtured the growth of a tenacious layer of moss that no amount of bleach or careful harvesting could remove.
“Did I tell you about the Taylors’ French lop bunny, Bea?” Linda asked, as I chopped up a brussels sprout with my fork and tried to get Stanley to accept a bite.
“Whatever her problem is, we can’t take her,” I proclaimed, fully realizing that the firm line I was drawing could easily be erased. I was far more comfortable falling guilelessly into events rather than making decisions. I would endlessly second-guess my decisions if things went well, or blame myself if things went wrong. Letting circumstances wash over me was the way I navigated through life. It was how I had acquired a steady freelance writing job, how I had blundered into co-owning a typesetting business a decade earlier, and how I had acquired a column in a national music magazine. I was lucky that nothing dark and sinister had ever presented itself to me with each nut and bolt perfectly aligned to the mushy contours of my weak will, or I might have absorbed a felony just as I had absorbed reef fish, invertebrates, rabbits, a canary, a cat, two parrots, and three parakeets.
Linda must have recognized my attempted resolve by the quaver in my voice, because no rabbit named Bea or any other orphans directly followed. There were better ways of slipping animals into the house.
ON OUR THIRD wedding anniversary, Linda presented me with a large package whose festive, hole-punched wrapping paper concealed a cage.
“Oh, my gosh, another bird!” I said with a big smile on my face.
“It’s a dove,” Linda told me.
“Aw, you shouldn’t have,” I insisted, my smile still frozen in place. “I mean it, you really shouldn’t have.” But even I wasn’t enough of a curmudgeon to object to a gift that my wife had carefully framed as an expression of love. Howard, for his part, refused to toe the line as a symbol of peace, opting instead to perpetuate interspecies incompatibility.
Most commonly called a ring-neck dove (but also referred to as a barbary dove, collared dove, or turtle dove), Howard was a fawn-colored, mourning dove–size bird with a thin black ring around the back of his neck. An apricot-colored eye with a large black iris gave him a demeanor of perpetual surprise. His straight yellow toothpick of a beak originated just in front of his eye, suggesting an artist’s drunken slip of the hand while painting the upper mandible. Though he was handsome enough while standing still, the darting of his tiny head while the bulk of his body remained motionless gave Howard the air of a clown. His feet seemed borrowed from another species. In contrast to the velvety surface of his feathers, which often drew our finger pads to his back, Howard’s legs and toes were a scaly earthworm red indented with concentric circles.
The first time we opened the door to his cage, Howard stayed rooted to his perch for several moments, as if he couldn’t believe such magic were possible. With a hop he plopped both feet onto a lower perch, hesitated, turned his body toward the beckoning exit, then jumped onto the open door extending from his cage. A few steps across the bars took him to the door’s edge, where he waited like an Olympic diver mustering concentration for a difficult combination. Finally he flung himself across the dining room, wings flapping heavily as he settled on a chair back facing the parakeets’ cage. A maniac’s laugh, hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, erupted from his chest. Bowing rhythmically, he launched into a lusty series of hoots timed to the dipping of his body, raising one foot at the completion of each bow. His chest swelled as he hooted, but his beak remained clamped shut. As we soon learned, this series of hard-wired actions, instigated by the presence of other birds, was a fixed ritual for Howard. Whenever we freed him from his cage, he followed the same routine, from his initial look of disbelief to his concluding strutting-in-place recital.
The parakeets were unimpressed with Howard’s unvarying song and dance, and after a couple of days, I had to throw in with them. Our dove was a bit of a dud in the companionship department. Though he’d contentedly sit on a wooden perch for hours, once out of his cage he refused to wrap his toes around a human finger, cling to a wrist, or rest upon a forearm. He didn’t seem to be so much afraid of contact with us as he was completely disinterested in the concept. While Ollie cocked his head and chattered at the sound of our voices, and Stanley Sue at least cocked her head, Howard paid no more attention to my “Oh, what a pretty, pretty bird” soliloquies than rabbits Binky or Bertha had ever paid to the shouted command “No!” Howard struck me as a bird particularly ill suited to sharing space with people and their possessions, no more at home in a house than a rooster, and the cramped quarters of the dining room diminished whatever natural grace he possessed. Only when he abandoned those four walls and sailed into the living room to land on the handlebars of our exercise bike did a small hint of the beauty of his long-distance flight unfurl. Truly he belonged in the open sky or, at the very least, in a large aviary packed with palm trees, bromeliads, and docents.
My 1984 edition of Simon & Schuster’s Guide to Pet Birds described Howard’s ilk as “friendly birds, even toward small finches and such.” But not, apparently, toward any birds we owned. Our initial fear was that the mischievous parakeets might pick on Howard the same way they got the best of Ollie. Instead, Howard delighted in chasing the three budgies and Chester the canary around our dining room. His flight was clumsy compared to theirs; he was a bomber outmaneuvered by looping stunt planes. But as long as he could scatter the competition and subsequently crow from the top of the refrigerator, he was satisfied with his work.
“I hope he doesn’t hurt the other birds,” I grumbled to Linda, less because I thought he could actually do any harm and more because I hoped to make her feel guilty for inflicting this rabble-rouser on us.
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s harassing the parakeets.”
“No he’s not. Howard’s a romantic. He’s courting them. What do you think the bowing’s all about?”
That made sense. He never hooted at his rival, Ollie. Instead, he’d plop down next to Ollie and make a cudgel of his wing, attempting to knock him off his cage. For the moment, Howard stayed well clear of Stanley Sue. But his attention toward the budgies did indeed smack of ardor. Rossy, who had her small black eyes set on Ollie, cold-shouldered Howard’s come-ons. Sophie, who hadn’t decided whether or not she cared for Reggie, never considered a liaison with a dove. But Reggie, the spurned blue bon vivant of the parakeet set, had ideas of his own. Once Howard had exhausted his erotic repertoire and settled on the countertop or chair back to survey his uncooperative harem, Reggie swooped in behind him. Landing in the middle of Howard’s back, far removed from the business end, he would chatter excitedly while rubbing his loins against Howard’s wings in a miniature frenzy of delight. Howard basked in the attention. Craning his neck, he’d twist his head backward and with a series of short pecks diddle Reggie’s beak. Once his eyes had cleared of passion, Howard would snap to his senses and abruptly fly off, carrying Reggie on his back for a couple of wing strokes.
“Where’s your camcorder, sweetheart? They’d pay us $10,000 for that,” Linda urged me, referring to a television program that aired painful “home movies” from viewers each week.
“That’s a family show,” I quipped, little realizing that our boy-bird pals could actually make a grown adult blush.
One warm summer day, we received an unexpected visit from Jeanne Trost and her niece, Susan. Jeanne was a member of the Mecosta County church that Linda had attended during her carefree, electricity-free life up north before marrying electricity-free me.
“Jeanne! What are you doing down here? Is this your little niece?” Linda exclaimed. Shepherding them into the dining room, Linda immediately kicked over the oscillating fan that sat on a small footstool just inside the doorway. Stanley Sue, who was pacing Bertha’s cage top in search of a way of biting the bunny through the bars, jumped and flapped her wings at the noise. “That thing again,” Linda complained, as I righted the much abused fan. It barely survived a four-hour span before getting its face pressed against blue linoleum. Its grille was bashed in within a molecule’s breadth of the blades, resulting in intermittent ticking that numbered its days in our employ.
“Look at all these cages,” marveled Jeanne in a tone of voice I had lately begun to recognize as meaning, “Are you people out of your minds?” Reaching behind the refrigerator, Linda grabbed the end of an ugly plywood board and let it crash to the floor within inches of my stockinged foot, forming a two-foot-high, partially effective rabbit-proof barrier between the dining room and the rest of the house.
“I’ll let the bunny out in a minute,” Linda explained.
“I thought Susan might enjoy visiting the 4-H fair,” offered Jeanne, whose pinched mouth indicated that she wondered whether the fairgrounds would be less chaotic than our house. “This is my favorite niece in all the world.”
“Jeanne, have you met my husband, Bob?”
“You got pigtails,” said the little girl.
“I wish my hair was as pretty as yours,” Linda answered.
“Aunt Jeanne, I’m your only niece.”
By this time, I had safely squeezed behind Stanley Sue’s cage and table, retreating to the far end of the room to pry an ornery Ollie off his perch. Chester was obligingly trilling an aria that earned him a more puzzled than appreciative glance from Linda’s friend, who hadn’t moved from her entry point beside the peninsular counter that separated the dining room from the kitchen. Stanley Sue, handsome as a small hawk and bristling with intelligence, got a brief moment of glory when she delicately plucked a peanut from Susan’s fingers. “Isn’t she a good girl? Stanley’s a very good girl,” Linda observed. I brought Ollie over to show the pair, dangling him upside down from my finger. Cradling his back in the palm of my hand, I spread a wing to show off his secret yellow feathers, receiving a painful bite for my trouble and a polite mumble from Jeanne.
The seven-year-old rewarded me by voicing my least favorite question in the world. “Does he talk?” she asked. I considered the question a cliché on the same order of asking a dog owner if his black Lab could speak. Of course, we always made the same inquiry of other parrot owners, but as bird people we were exempt from such taboos. I was spared the need to answer when the aunt’s and niece’s eyes simultaneously locked on Howard.
“Look at the beautiful pigeon, Aunt Jeanne,” cried the seven-year-old.
“He doesn’t talk,” I said a little hotly, bitter that the ringneck had once again trumped every other animal in the room by magnetically generating interest all out of proportion to his attributes. Our ownership of Ollie and Stanley Sue was hard won, and it bothered me that trouble-free Howard grabbed the glory. It happened so frequently, I had formulated a theory. People expected to see parrots as pets. Few North Americans had ever encountered them in any other context. But nobody anticipated seeing a dove in an indoor cage. Insofar as the attention reflected back on me, I was happy to nestle Howard in my hands, presenting him first to Susan, who squealed at my suggestion that she stroke his silky back, and to Jeanne, who was obviously experiencing her first contact with a winged pet. Her finger brushed his feathers, then jerked back as the dove craned his neck backward and flicked his beak against my palm. I released him, and he flew hooting to the top of his cage.
“Want to come out, ’keets?” Linda opened the parakeets’ door before busying herself in front of the refrigerator assembling four glasses of what she referred to as “fizzy water”: carbonated water topped off with an inch of cranberry juice. Jeanne ducked slightly as the parakeets first hit the air, then stood with a hand covering her hair until she felt foolish enough to remove it. I was about to snag my beverage and leave Linda to her guests when I heard Susan exclaim, “He’s riding piggyback!”
Not only had Reggie alighted on Howard, but he was also engaging in the most lurid display of interspecies affection that I had witnessed to date. Squawking in a high-pitched buzz, the blue parakeet curled his extended wings around Howard’s sides in passionate embrace, the better to throw his whole body weight behind the grinding of his lower abdomen against his unlikely mate. In metronome fashion, his blue and black ribbon of a tail chugged back and forth against Howard’s stout tail feathers. Equally enraptured, Howard wobbled his head back to give Reggie the avian equivalent of a kiss, beak rapidly rubbing against beak, his pupils dilated, his quivering carriage slanted forward in a submissive stoop.
“What are they doing?” Susan asked in wonder.
Because children raised in the country learn the facts of life in animal terms almost as soon as they can crawl around the sex-crazed barnyard, Linda laughed and told her visitors, “Reggie’s trying to mate with Howard. He’s a little bit mixed up.”
I waved a stained dish towel in the birds’ direction, once, twice, three times, and like adulterers in the parking lot of the Red Roof Inn, they parted without a glance. Jeanne’s face, however, was anything but nonchalant. “That was a funny game, wasn’t it?” asked Jeanne, shooting Linda a pained looked indicating that the sordid scene wasn’t suitable for discussion in front of a youngster. “I wonder what kind of games they’ll have at the fair? You like Whack the Mole the best, don’t you Susan?”
“I like watching the animals play.”
“You can see all the animals from way on top of the Ferris wheel,” concluded Jeanne, who was obviously fearing a worst-case scenario of lusty pigs and goat satyrs.
I slunk upstairs to let Linda mediate, returning just a few minutes later to bid aunt and niece good-bye. At the door, Jeanne leaned her head into Linda’s and told her with a smile, “We enjoyed our visit. But I don’t think I’ll bring Susan back until she’s a little older.” That marked the first time anyone had branded our house an adult establishment.
HOWARD SOON DEMONSTRATED a talent for thievery. Later that week, as I reviewed an album by a South African chorale group for my column, a song caught my attention on Black Umfolosi’s Festival Umdlalo. It was an a cappella ditty called “Inobembela Njiba.” Since my Kalanga language skills weren’t up to snuff, I relied on the liner notes to learn that the song was about “a dove that steals from granaries and is then bewitched, resulting in it wandering around aimlessly in a confused state.” I didn’t know whether Howard had been bewitched, but his confused state was inarguable. The stealing reference was right on target, too. When not falling prey to Reggie’s charms, Howard’s favorite pastime was preying on our other birds’ food.
Howard was energetic in his thievery. He had to be in order to squeeze his handbag of a body through the wallet-size door of the parakeets’ cage only to revel in the exact same food he received in his own seed cup every day. Eating was secondary to the relentless search for some obscure fantasy delicacy that loomed large in his peanut brain. Using his beak as a rake, he dug deep into the dish to scatter impressive quantities of seeds admirable distances across the dining room. Compared to Howard, messy Ollie at mealtime was Miss Manners. Not even Stanley Sue discarded food with the dedication of our dove. I took to winding adding-machine tape around the invaded cage, threading it in and out of the bars as a backstop, which left heaps of otherwise untouched parakeet seed on the cage bottom. For all the industry of his mining operation, Howard retrieved few nuggets to his liking. He swallowed them whole with a total disregard for taste, leaving me to wonder if he weren’t an aesthete whose love of food was driven by the pursuit of textural perfection.
As Stanley Sue became more relaxed in our household, she spent less of her free time on top of her cage, devoting her exercise hours to harassing Bertha, opening and banging shut floor-level cupboard doors, and energetically gouging our baseboards. While Howard ignored Stanley Sue, he considered her dish fair game. The varied shapes and sizes of the parrot seed mixture proved so irresistible, he was willing to risk the larger bird’s wrath. Every week or so, I’d walk into the room to find a tattletale faun-colored tail feather on the floor of Stanley Sue’s cage, while Howard nursed his wounded ego on a chair back across the room. Because Stanley Sue had never shown aggressiveness toward anyone but the bunny, and even that was mostly bluff, we hadn’t realized we were putting Howard’s life in danger.
I learned about Stanley Sue’s temper the day I arrived home after a grueling five hours at the office and was going through my usual afternoon’s routine in anticipation of my nap. I took Bertha outside and plopped her in her backyard pen. Indoors, I popped the latch on Chester’s cage, liberated the parakeets, and then opened Howard’s door. I could see him ruminating on how best to take advantage of this unexpected stroke of fortune. I said hello to Stanley Sue, fruitlessly repeating the desired answer, “Hi, Bob, hi, Bob,” in hopes she would start talking again. Swinging open the door to her cage, I trundled off to the bedroom, where I upset a snoozing Penny by turning back the bedspread. Oh, what a strength-sapping half-day I’d had writing training materials for office-seating dealers. I closed the shades, shut my eyes, and slid into blissful unawareness.
Though I’m so light a sleeper, a falling dewdrop could disturb me, I heard no indication that anything was out of sorts. The only bird who might have alerted me to Stanley Sue’s attack on Howard was Howard himself, and his vocabulary was inadequate for the task. While the parrots, parakeets, and even the canary had peeps, chirps, and squawks with which to signify a broad emotional spectrum, Howard was capable of emitting only a surprised laugh that indicated he was on the make and a boastful hooting that asserted his magnificent presence. I know of no other bird in nature limited to just two sounds, and marvel that two are sufficient for social interactions among doves. Maybe other ringnecks can glean vast quantities of information from these unvarying calls. If so, I wish an in-the-know dove had pecked me on the forehead and led me into the dining room before Howard ended up on the bottom of Stanley Sue’s cage, his back torn open and smeared with blood.
“Oh, baby, baby, what’s happened to you?” I moaned, certain he was dead or on the verge of death. Shouting for Linda, who had just walked in the door. I gingerly picked up Howard and carried him into the bathroom. His eyes were open but cloudy. He barely moved as I held him. “Stanley got him,” I managed to say. “I think she must have cornered him in her cage.”
Linda uncapped a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and antibacterial Betadine, which we kept on hand for emergencies. I could hardly watch as she daubed the wound with a cotton ball. “I don’t think it’s as bad as it first looked,” she reassured me, as she cleaned him up. “It doesn’t seem to be too deep.” Still the silver dollar–size abrasion between his tail and wings was bad enough. If the pain was too great or if the wound became infected, he wouldn’t last the night.
Linda rushed Howard to Dr. Carlotti, a country vet who ran a small practice from his farm a few miles from us. I stayed home, trying not to strangle Stanley Sue. Instead, I inflicted on her the worst punishment I could think of. I put her in her cage and took away her bell, the bell that functioned as her proxy voice. It was the bell she rang whenever she wanted out of her cage, whenever she wanted some attention, whenever she wanted something to eat, whenever something in the house disturbed her, or whenever she was just plain moody. Taking her bell was as serious as slapping a prisoner in solitary confinement. In the three years we had owned Stanley, I had only taken her bell away twice: once when she had bitten me for no apparent reason, and once when she had bitten Linda without asking my permission.
Within an hour I relented. “Here’s your bell back,” I sighed, realizing that Stanley hadn’t been at fault for attacking a rival who had invaded her territory and stolen her food. She had simply followed her wild nature. I was to blame for Howard’s injury. I had seen the signs of trouble but naively assumed nothing worse would happen than plucked tail feathers, because that wouldn’t be nice, and Stanley Sue was a nice bird.
Stepping back from anthropomorphizing our pets while still feeling close to them was always difficult. It took me years to accept the fact that animals don’t act according to human standards of generosity and forgiveness—which I seldom followed, either. We could teach them certain behaviors we considered appropriate, but we couldn’t override the instincts that had allowed their species to survive for thousands of years. When mixing potentially incompatible pets, the best we could do was provide an environment that kept the chances for serious conflict near zero. For every lovey-dovey Howard-and-Reggie relationship, there could just as easily be a Howard and Stanley Sue.
Linda returned from the vet, and I could tell from her mood that Howard’s injury wasn’t life threatening. She even smiled as she showed me the celluloid “Elizabethan collar” that Dr. Carlotti had fashioned for him. “The doctor gave him a shot of Baytril and said Howard would probably be okay if we can keep him from picking at himself. But he doesn’t like that thing on his neck at all.” No longer in shock, Howard twisted his head in one direction then the other, unable to believe he was encumbered with the plastic cone contraption.
“We could put a ruffle on it. Make him look more like a clown,” I said.
“The trick will be getting him to eat. I don’t know if he can eat from his dish with the collar on, and we can’t take it off him for two weeks.”
During the first days of his recovery, Howard was glum. He sat motionless on his perch, legs folded beneath him to allow his abdomen to help support his weight. For much of the time, he kept his eyes closed, as if putting himself into a yogic healing trance, never uttering a sound, not even a single “om.” Linda performed the hard work of keeping his wound clean, though I took over some of the care once the injury became less evil looking. My role primarily consisted of hovering over Howard’s cage and making encouraging noises, then clucking accusingly at Stanley Sue. I cajoled him to eat by wiggling homemade bread under his beak until he pecked at it purely out of exasperation. After a few days, he graduated to spray millet, a cluster of dried seeds that I attached to his bars with a wooden clothespin. Once he’d had his fill of such lackluster fare, he mastered balancing the weight of his collar well enough to lower his head and root through his dish. By the end of the first week, he was once again shoveling seeds in all directions and had recovered his appetite for hooting.
Dr. Carlotti had told Linda that the patch on Howard’s back might never grow feathers again, or that feathers might only pop up here and there after his next molt. “Reggie won’t like that,” I complained. “It won’t give him anything to grab on to.” But within ten days, we could no longer see the rapidly healing wound through the feather shafts that sprouted up thicker than tattoos on a teenager’s shoulder. As Howard’s health improved, he grew restless in his cage. Collar or no collar, we decided to let him exercise. Owing to the peculiar aerodynamic qualities of the plastic cone, however, when he flapped his wings in an attempt to fly forward, he sailed backward across the room, startling the parakeets, who had never experienced so serious a violation of avian flight bylaws.
Linda and I had assumed that as long as we kept Stanley Sue’s door closed when Howard was at large, we could eliminate future fights. But once our ringneck had returned to full fettle with a luxuriously feathered back, he immediately tried to stage a rematch, armed with no more impressive weapon than his own foolishness. Having two birds that needed separate out-of-cage time added to the complexity of pet-keeping. It was also a harbinger. Within a year, we would find ourselves juggling three rabbits who couldn’t share a single room without engaging in fur-shredding melees. More complexity meant more scheduling, which meant more of my free time flew out the window.
As early as I can remember, I have always nursed a special contempt for people who make surrogate children of their pets. They’re the people who dress their animals in small plaid suits, bring them along on dinner dates, and spend sleepless nights worrying that an isolated cough is the first sign of a dreaded virus. Though I hadn’t done any of these, I knew that as soon as I had uttered the word “baby” when finding Howard hurt in Stanley Sue’s cage, I had unwittingly crossed an emotional threshold.
But at least my affection was no longer unrequited. Along with his grudge against Stanley Sue, Howard had emerged from his disaster with a new appreciation for us. His heart still belonged to Reggie. But when he wasn’t chasing the parakeets around the dining room, stealing seed from their dishes, or dreaming of vengeance against Stanley Sue, he might unexpectedly land upon my shoulder, bow and hoot in my direction, and tenderly chatter his beak against my cheek. The fact that this invariably happened during dinner, when I had a piece of bread in hand, I chalked up to mere coincidence.