Even with helping tend a cat, seven birds, and a rabbit, I was able to call most of the day my own. Breakfast was admittedly intense. Ollie and Stanley Sue insisted we hand-feed them portions of whatever Linda and I were eating. Penny, Bertha, Howard, the parakeets, and the canary each required individual servings rather than graciously sharing a communal bowl of cornflakes. They also each demanded a change of water and, once again, they wanted it in separate bowls. In the afternoon, juggling various out-of-cage times for the birds and the bunny, Bertha, nibbled away at more of our time. And Ollie still launched occasional wall-penetrating fits of attention-seeking throughout the day, though the companionship of the parakeets had blunted his vigor.
Dinner meant a repeat of parrot food-flinging antics followed by floor and ceiling cleaning. After dinner, once the parakeets and canaries had been cajoled into returning to their cages via handclaps and verbal threats, Stanley Sue demanded a half-hour of coddling with head scratches and exaggerated praises. Bertha then got her own romp through the house and a hide-and-seek-style roundup later. Finally, all six animal cages required covering at staggered beddy-bye times, and Stanley required peanuts at frequent intervals to curtail bouts of bell-ringing. Despite all this, and even though the day really wasn’t my own after all, I still maintained the fiction that the animals were merely peripheral to my life. Needless to say, this fiction was soon to dry up and blow away.
Howard’s injury had spurred us into a flurry of home-nursing, but our efforts were meager compared to the long struggle we soon faced with Bertha the rabbit. After surviving a harsh winter stripping evergreen foliage from the Howell’s treasured shrubs, she adjusted nicely to the cushy conditions inside our house. Even though she retained a wild streak from her months on her own outdoors, her independence manifested itself as impishness rather than insolence, the quality Binky had taken as his trademark. She hid from us but never resented being found. Her guinea pig size made her an expert at wriggling into the most hopelessly obscure portions of our house geography, including a crack between the living room couch and wall so narrow it might thwart a chubby mouse. To keep her more visibly entertained, I found a long, narrow box that once held a Try and Put Me Together–brand CD rack and filled it with crumpled newspapers. Bertha could structure an entire evening around shooting in and out of the box to rearrange the papers or eject them with her back feet according to her whim.
A doglike good-naturedness was her strongest point. Here was a rabbit who would not only sit upon our laps and enjoy petting but would also lick us to show appreciation—and not so obsessively as to suggest mindlessness. But her mood could abruptly change once we plopped her outside in her pen. A female John Henry, she dug and tunneled furiously in the sand, though without obvious escape attempts in the works. Her ability to tear around the pen in furious circles put Binky’s circumnavigation to shame, and I often kept an eye on the troposphere directly above our house for fear that she might generate a deadly funnel cloud. This ferocity was safely channeled as long as I left her to herself. But if I tried curtailing her fun too early, she might fling herself at my legs, snapping her teeth in crazed toy terrier fashion. I’d be forced to retreat to the house empty-handed, convinced that George Howell’s thick leather gloves weren’t such a bad idea.
“She misses running wild,” Linda insisted. “Can’t we just let her run loose in the backyard? The yard’s fenced in.”
“It’s considered fenced in for anything larger than a beagle,” I told her. “But Bertha would be out of there in a second. She could slip through the wires anywhere without even mussing a whisker.”
“Couldn’t you reinforce the fence somehow? Put in chicken wire along the bottom?”
“All around the yard?” I gasped. Our backyard was a healthy fifty feet deep and eighty feet wide. “Do you have any idea how much work that would be? That’s absolutely not going to happen,” I told her, ignorant that the chuckling gods had already ordained exactly this to happen.
The third week of spring, just three months after George had brought Bertha to our door, her appetite suddenly took a dive. As Linda and I sat at the breakfast table wondering what the problem was, we watched Bertha groom herself in front of the refrigerator. Each time she tried to rise on her haunches with her front legs off the floor, she lost her balance and nearly toppled over. We whisked Bertha to see Dr. Colby the next day. Dr. Colby determined that during her life outdoors in the Howell’s neighborhood, Bertha had picked up a nasty parasite that was blooming in her bloodstream and making her too sick to eat. He gave her a shot of parasite killer plus a vitamin injection to perk her up. Within a few days she seemed back to her old self.
A month later, however, she stopped eating again. Her balance problems worsened. During dinner, Linda liked to reach down from her chair with a piece of the ubiquitous bread-machine toast that all of our animals loved except the cat. Bertha would stand on her tiptoes to reach a piece. Trying to rekindle her appetite, Linda tempted Bertha to her side with the morsel, but any attempts to reach the toast sent the rabbit crashing over backward. At the vet’s the following day, Dr. Colby told us that the parasite had a thirty-day breeding cycle. A second injection should eradicate the little buggers for good. But she passed along the bad news that the accompanying digestive problems had allowed a buildup of toxins in Bertha’s body, causing irreversible nerve damage.
“Rabbits’ digestive systems are extremely sensitive,” she explained. “If you make a sudden change in a rabbit’s diet, or if a rabbit goes too long without eating, toxins that are normally expelled with the feces get into their systems.” She told us it was imperative that, if anything like this ever happened to Bertha again, we should keep her eating by whatever means possible.
We saw Dr. Colby again the following month when Bertha’s symptoms recurred. A month later when another bout made her even weaker, she told us that nothing further could be done. She had researched Bertha’s condition. She had even consulted with experts at the Michigan State University School of Veterinary Medicine, and they had offered no solution.
We took her at her word and resigned ourselves to keeping Bertha as happy as possible no matter what the outcome. I combed our yard for tender dandelion leaves every afternoon and evening and coaxed her into eating these. Because she was occasionally too weak to chew the pelleted food she needed, we soaked her rabbit Purina in water or pineapple juice until it attained an oatmealish consistency. Shoving this under her nose several times a day, we erupted in delighted cries of encouragement whenever she took a mouthful. I don’t know much about the alien psyche of rabbits, but I’m convinced that she ate the mush for our sake as much as hers.
By the end of the summer, she had lost so much strength that we were feeding her from a syringe. Even then, she seemed to enjoy life too much for us to take it away from her, stretching out in the sunlight in her pen and rolling delightedly on the ground. When I’d pick her up to carry her back into the house, she would give my hand a grateful lick instead of fighting me as before. A new round of nerve damage left her listing to one side like a cargo ship that had made too many transatlantic passages. Because she was no longer able to travel in a straight line and couldn’t slip away through the backyard fence, we finally gave her the chance to run free. As soon as I set her down in the warm grass, she took off in a long, smooth curve that eventually brought her right back to our feet. “We should change her name to Boomerang,” I joked.
One Saturday morning, when Linda was out of town and Bertha could barely sit up anymore, I took her to a vet down the road and had her put to sleep as I held her. Back at home I carried her around the yard until I found a pleasant spot beneath a large pine tree to bury her. A number of times in the ensuing weeks, I was sure I saw her ghost cantering through our living room or sitting on the upstairs steps.
I can think of no other circumstances where we develop such closeness with our animals as when we see them through serious illness. Linda’s attentiveness always put mine to shame. Each time Bertha had experienced a setback, I’d be so demoralized, I could hardly bear to be in the same room with the bunny. But Linda plugged away with a resolute cheeriness that helped me keep going. After Bertha died, my initial sense of relief shifted to a thick gloom. As sorry as I was about losing the bunny, I was sorrier for myself. I grew expert at sitting stonily on the edge of the bed in half-darkness or lying sprawled on the couch with an arm cocked over my eyes. Motivating myself to simply move my brooding to another room required the gathering up of vast internal forces. Strangely, I was in pretty fair spirits at the office. The environment was different, the tasks were clearly defined, and attendance was imperative in order to keep the paychecks flowing. That meant I wasn’t as far gone as I acted at home, but still bad enough that I woke up shaking most mornings.
We were having dinner at our friend Claudia’s house one evening. Linda was praising the baked vegetables while I slumped in my chair next to the vegetable tureen. Claudia convinced me to make an appointment with a psychiatrist to try Zoloft, which she had just begun taking with good results. “It will make an enormous change in your life,” she insisted. “I heard about this old guy at a nursing home, he was one of these downtrodden guys people love to run over, and Zoloft worked wonders for that little man.” I considered this all the endorsement I needed.
DR. GLASER CAME close to proving the old saw that psychiatrists have more neuroses than the neurotics they treat. Tall, stiff with unease at being human, and wearing the demeanor of a fussy choral-group leader, along with a mustard-colored suit, he drifted into the waiting room and introduced himself. When I offered him my hand, he took it as reluctantly as if I had presented him with a halibut. Inside a charmless office that might have belonged to a loan officer, I gave him a detailed description of my bedspread concealment during Stanley’s sickness, prolonged sadness at Bertha’s passing, bouts of chair-gripping nervousness at breakfast, and panic attacks dating back to the Ford administration. “I just finished reading Listening to Prozac,” I said, “and it sounds like I’m living in what the author calls ‘the penumbra of depression.’ I would like to try an antianxiety drug and see if it helps.”
“A parrot?” he inquired, after my outpouring had ended. “Was it a real parrot?” he asked in a tone of voice usually reserved for dealing with dangerous individuals. Immediately I understood the folly of choosing a mental health professional from the Yellow Pages based solely on proximity to home.
“Yes, it was a real parrot. An African grey parrot.” I answered. “Named Stanley Sue,” I heedlessly added, though he ignored this last ripe piece of Freudian fruit.
“Which antianxiety medication would you like to try?”
“I’ve heard good things about Zoloft,” I ventured, amazed that getting brain chemistry–altering prescription drugs should be this effortless. I had anticipated the kind of resistance my physician had mustered when I had asked him about serotonin drugs. Instead of writing me a prescription, he had suggested I take up racquetball instead.
“Zoloft is an antianxiety drug,” Dr. Glaser agreed, “and the side effects are minimal. What dosage would you like to try?”
“What would you recommend?” I asked, uncertain how my advice on this point could matter.
“The lowest clinical dosage is fifty milligrams. Would you like to start out on one hundred milligrams?” His faint smile conveyed a measure of genuine pleasure.
“You’re the doctor,” I rejoined weakly.
“I’ll have to ask you a few questions first.” He paused before cracking open his laptop. “Will the computer bother you? Some people don’t like the computer.”
“The computer doesn’t bother me.”
“If you’re sure.” On the Formica-topped desk behind him sat a second computer with a full-size monitor displaying the screensaver Johnny Castaway. The cartoon depicted the misadventures of a luckless soul marooned on a desert island, which struck me as a bad choice for a psychiatrist’s office. Reading from a file on his laptop, Dr. Glaser took me through a series of questions concerning my medical history, upbringing, education, and propensity for suicide. At the conclusion of each question, he looked me squarely in the middle of my forehead. I was unsure whether he had a vision problem or was as adverse to ocular intimacy with his patients as he was to shaking hands. Lowering his head as if embarrassed by this aspect of his profession, he delivered the last queries in a monotone. “Do people follow you? Do you hear voices? Do people plot against you?” He spoke so quietly, he might have been talking to himself. I wanted to truthfully answer “sometimes” to each of these poorly worded questions in order to score semantic points, but decided it was better to tell him no and make a fast escape from the island.
Four days later, I experienced my first Zoloft jolt. Poised on the living room couch with a half-hour to go until Wheel of Fortune, I was enveloped by an energized calm. The world and my outlook on the world became suffused with light. “It’s as if I’ve had this cotton in my head for all these years, and now it’s fallen out,” I explained to Linda, who smiled warily in response. Anxious to share my newly acquired Buddha nature, I strode upstairs and petted Penny. Neither of us exchanged a word, but as I stared at her, I received a revelation. I suddenly saw her as a being. Not as a pet or an underling, but as a complex personality. On the one hand, her face and eyes revealed the same trapped intensity as a human soul stuck in a physical body, but on the other hand her depth far exceeded any anthropomorphizing I might throw at her. She was limitless and unknowable, and I was honored to have her as my friend. Then I changed her litter and floated back downstairs.
The next day, my mood was even brighter. Under a spell of unusual ambitiousness, I devoted my Saturday to long neglected tasks around the house rather than glumly avoiding work per my usual weekend schedule. I carted animal cages outdoors and washed them to a shine with a high-pressure hose nozzle. I revved up the gasoline-powered trimmer and decimated an army of weeds between the side yard and the barn. The evergreen tree under which we’d buried Bertha had succumbed to an unknown blight, and Linda had repeatedly encouraged me to hire a man to chop it down. Now, wielding my chain saw for only the sixth time since I had purchased it and somehow mastering my timidity at its ability to maim, I lopped down the tree, cut the trunk and branches into matchsticks, and scattered them to the winds beyond our fence. Toppling the evergreen revealed a three-foot-high redbud tree standing almost on top of Bertha’s grave. Neither of us had ever seen the tree before.
“It’s a gift from God,” said Linda.
The Zoloft, as it turned out, was not. As the day progressed, I burned too intensely with energy that was not my own, a 110-volt bulb spliced into a 220-volt line. By Sunday, my nerves were acting up. By Monday, I was a blubbering wreck barely able to quiver into the office. En route to an out-of-town relative’s house the following Saturday, I vaulted out of the car and collapsed wailing on the grass next to a freeway mileage marker. A call to my psychiatrist brought a surprisingly lighthearted response. “You might want to play with your dosage a little bit. Try cutting it in half.”
The half dosage turned out to be just the half ticket I needed to feel half human again. Events like eating an egg at breakfast felt substantially less threatening, and I could actually make it through an entire morning sitting at my desk at work for periods of up fifteen minutes at a continuous stretch. While I couldn’t claim to have achieved the meditative state of mind I had hoped pharmaceuticals might bestow upon me, neither was I any longer a teakettle on rolling boil. I happily made due with simmer.
Things could have been a lot worse. I could have been a duck. A phone call from my sister, Joan, brought the news that her husband, Jack, had rescued a Muscovy duck from the parking lot of the automotive-parts business where he maintained the inventory database. The escaped domestic animal had blundered onto the property to search beneath a Dumpster for tidbits from employee lunches. Jack’s coworkers welcomed the hungry visitor with a mirthful stone-throwing contest until Jack eased the competition to a halt. Flinging a jacket over the bird, he caught her easily, stashing her in his truck until quitting time.
Stretching our kitchen phone cord to the limit, Linda relayed Joan’s description on a sentence-by-sentence basis of how they had managed to obtain the duck, while I sat in the bedroom, eyes foolishly brushing the same two sentences of a mystery novel. “Now they don’t know what to do with the poor thing,” Linda reported. “They would love to keep the duck, but they don’t have anywhere to put her,” she relayed. “She wants to know if we could possibly take her.” She pointed the handset at me from the doorway to the living room. “Here, talk to your sister.”
I waved off the phone in surrender. “Okay.”
“Don’t we have room for a duck?” Linda urged, certain she had misunderstood my answer. She tightened the phone cord even more to move a step into the bedroom, giving new meaning to the concept of a telephone extension.
“I’m perfectly happy to take the duck,” I assured her. At that moment, a lifetime with a duck seemed a small price to pay for avoiding her otherwise inescapable argument that a duck wouldn’t be any trouble at all. Having heard that line of reasoning speciously applied to a rabbit and a parrot, I never wanted to hear it again. Anyway, two factors stood in the duck’s corner. First, we owned a barn large enough to house a family of duck-billed dinosaurs. And the barn was situated far enough from the house that with luck I would have little involvement in the duck’s upbringing, maintenance, and walks at the end of a leash. Second, we had visited a farmer who extolled the quiet voices of his female Muscovies. According to him, they made a gentle rasping sound inaudible at fifty feet.
“We can take her?” asked Linda delightedly, when she understood that I had caved in. “He said we can take her,” Linda told my sister. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to have a duck.” Averting her face from the phone, she passed along the news to me. “I’ve always wanted a duck.”
It had been just after dinner when Joan called, but in the inky recesses of the barn it seemed closer to midnight. Instead of expecting a duck to settle into such gloomy accommodations, we cordoned off the workroom from the rest of the basement with a plastic kitchen gate that Binky had once chewed through, establishing an equally gloomy area for the Muscovy that was at least inside the house. Linda spread two weeks’ worth of newspapers on the floor while I studied a wall bristling with six hand tools that had so far seen employment only in pen- and fence-building projects. I had hoped I’d never have to pick them up again, but I now experienced a twinge of foreboding.
Wearing a buckskin fringed jacket, Joan swept in with a beer in one hand and a large pet carrier in the other—a much larger pet carrier than I had anticipated.
“Didn’t you say, ‘a poor little duck?’” I asked her. She dismissed me with the joyful laugh of an older sister not only relieving herself of a burden, but also putting that burden onto her brother.
“Come on out, duck,” commanded Joan, setting the carrier on the workroom floor and stepping back behind us to enjoy the fun.
“I think the duck needs room,” I explained as an excuse to step behind Joan. A serpentlike neck capped with a salt-and-pepper head emerged from the open door. As the Muscovy regarded us, a crest of sparse feathers atop her skull shot up like a quiver of arrows. As I regarded the Muscovy, I was morbidly transfixed by a fleshy red mask that extended from the base of her upper beak to encircle both wild eyes. She drew herself out of the carrier, raising her head to its normal height, doubling her dimensions to my expectations. This was a formidable duck. Populations of escaped Muscovies have established themselves in parks across America and in the Falcon Dam region of Texas, prompting an entry in Peterson’s Field Guide to Eastern Birds, which calls the species, “a clumsy, black, goose-like duck.” The National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America describes the Muscovy as “bulky.” Our duck was twice as large as a female Mallard and far more massive from her chest to the flat, wide tail that wiggled nervously as her head tilted and swiveled to appraise us from various directions.
“Hah!” laughed my sister. “That’s one grateful-looking duck.”
“She looks annoyed to me,” I answered, calculating the height of the plastic gate behind me in relation to the angle of my tensed body.
If the staff at National Geographic was correct about the “bulky” epithet, Roger Tory Peterson was even more on the mark with the “clumsy.” Fearlessly approaching the duck, Linda set out a ceramic soup bowl of water. Then, in charming innocence, I watched her scoop out and into another bowl a mixture of cracked corn and grains—known as scratch feed—from the first bag of hundreds and hundreds of bags I was destined to eventually lug into the basement. She set the bowl on the floor next to the water. Rather than scarf up the food as expected, the duck ran underneath the wooden workbench, turned around, ran through the bowls of food and water, knocking them over, and hid in an especially dark area beneath the aluminum workbench. Linda dutifully cleaned up the scattered grain, spread another week’s worth of newspapers on top of the spilled water, and replaced the cereal bowls with more substantial, less unstable plastic buckets.
Before bedtime, the two of us crept downstairs to dowse the lights, only to find the Muscovy dunking her head in the water, splashing the room and ruining a second helping of scratch feed.
“We’ll have to buy a pool for the barn,” Linda announced.
“A pool?”
“A plastic wading pool. I saw some up at the dime store.”
“They’ve got them at the hardware store, too. Half price. End of summer sale.”
Linda shook her head. “Those are with the stupid Ninja Turtle patterns. I don’t like the way they look.”
THE NEXT MORNING, I volunteered to carry the Muscovy, which Linda had named Daphne, to the barn while Linda cleaned up the disaster area that had formerly been our workroom.
“Be careful,” she cautioned me, when I bent over to pick up the duck.
“Do you think she’ll bite?”
“It’s her wings you need to be careful of,” she warned, relating the story of how a goose had almost knocked her out with a pinion to the jaw years ago.
I encircled the duck with both arms, clutching her tightly to my chest, but aside from managing a couple of energy bursts that gave me an indication of her strength, she didn’t put up a struggle. Once I was inside the barn, the thought struck me that I was actually using the building for its intended purpose. Previously I had viewed the barn the same way a visitor to Italy might view the ruins of Pompeii—as a relic of a lost way of life. Surveying the architecture of cow stanchions and smaller pens had never failed to fill me with a grateful superiority to the agrarian beings who had come before me. Now I was one of them.
When I followed Linda back to the barn later that afternoon, we were surprised to find Daphne perched on top of a wooden stanchion four feet off the ground. “My chickens used to roost in trees every night,” Linda told me, adding to my storehouse of information I could never use. As she spun the plastic pool into the duck’s part of the barn, I attached a hose to an all-season hydrant that had waited its entire life near the middle door of the barn for this very moment. The duck watched with disinterest as we filled the blandly blue non–Ninja Turtle pool, then flapped heavily to the cement floor when I wandered over to check the progress of the water. Linda’s gleeful smile faded as the moments ticked by without the portable pond attracting Daphne. Linda opened the waist-high gate to urge the duck to take to water, but almost instantly this act evolved into Linda’s chasing the duck around the pen and in and out of the pool. Of the gallons of water displaced by Daphne’s plunges, the majority was absorbed by Linda’s aqua dress.
“At least she knows where the pool is now,” I pointed out.
A couple of hours later, we checked on the duck again. The floor was dry, the pool unused, her food uneaten. “She’s not happy in here,” Linda decided. “She needs an outdoor pen.”
I didn’t like the way this was going at all. “We’ll let her run around the backyard during the day and put her in the barn at night.”
“Who’s going to catch her and carry her back and forth?” That gave me pause. “And what if a dog got in our yard during the day? A large dog like a German shepherd dog could jump right over our fence and kill her.”
Other than the dogless family that lived behind us on the river, our nearest neighbor was almost a mile away. “And where might this German shepherd dog come from?”
“We can use Binky’s old pen. We’ll hire a handyman to fix it up. Unless you want to do it yourself,” she added.
“A handyman,” I sputtered in thickening despair, envisioning an otherwise unemployable eccentric with a prison record and hair sprouting from his ears.
In the main, my fears seemed to ring true. After Linda placed an ad in the local shopping newspaper, we were deluged with disconcerting phone calls. A gravelly voiced man wanted to know the name of our business and what kind of benefits we offered. A fellow who was friendly with the bottle wondered if we could offer him night work. Three people were confused as to why they had called our number, two were abusive when I explained we wanted a duck pen, and another phoned to hone his English-language skills. Anyone remotely qualified wouldn’t touch a job so small. “Let me see that ad,” I demanded, convinced that Linda must have written a wildly misleading description of a Mackinaw Bridge–scale project, but her prose was on the nose. Just as we were giving up, a chipper and plain-spoken fellow named Dell asked to come over and look at the job, surprised us by showing up, and then shocked us by quoting a reasonable price.
I learned fast to stay out of Dell’s way. It wasn’t that his attitude was unfriendly. He spoke to me with a pleasant singsong delivery I accepted as his natural voice until I heard him engaged in clipped dialogue with his son. An ex-missionary in his early sixties who had spent years among the Yanomami people in Venezuela, Dell had seen a little of everything in life, but nothing as ridiculous as this fish-out-of-water city boy and his duck-pampering wife. “Sure, we can fix it so that the snow won’t pile up on top of the pen and cause it to collapse,” he responded exuberantly. “Of course, we wouldn’t expect too much snow to accumulate on top of a wiremesh roof, now would we, Bob?” His excessively affable tone suggested that he was talking to an idiot for whom everything had to be clearly laid out in the most positive terms possible. “Can we put a latch on the door?” he exclaimed so forcefully on another occasion, mocking a question I had asked, that I took a startled step backward, nearly knocking down the fencing he had tentatively tacked in place. “Sure, we’ll put a latch on her. You bet we’ll do that, Bob. But how about if we wait until we put the door up first?”
Once the door was hung, in a mistaken attempt to ingratiate myself, I complimented him on how well it fit. “That’s fantastic,” I simpered. “You can hardly see a sliver of daylight between the door and the frame when the door is closed.”
“Cut it out, Bob,” he growled, with only a trace of a smile.
Though Dell and I stood on opposite sides of the personality fence, he got along famously with Linda, apparently recognizing a fellow generous-hearted soul who was forced to put up with me. He complimented her on the morning glories climbing the side of our house in the brisk fall weather. He talked effusively about his family, joked about retiring to a warmer climate, and told stories about his missionary days in South America. Even after his tools were neatly put away and his son waited silently in the truck, Dell stood chatting with Linda in front of our open basement door, never once answering a question with a quip like, “Where does this kind of wood come from? I don’t know, Bob. I think it comes from a tree.”
Some of Linda’s success with Dell came from a natural-born ability to talk that she had honed to a fine sheen through unflagging exercise. She would talk to anyone anywhere, as I learned early in our relationship. On a trip through Michigan’s “thumb region,” we visited the Lake Huron town of Grindstone City, which in the early 1900s had been a bustling millstone-manufacturing center. A friend of mine had enticed me there with a surreal photograph of a beach littered with massive defective grindstones dumped at the last minute while being loaded on a ship. “The whole town is like that,” he had insisted. “You’ll see grindstones everywhere,” but we saw none at all. Nonplussed, Linda marched to the door of the first house she saw. Five minutes later we were sitting on a porch swing poring over a Grindstone City scrapbook with an elderly woman as loquacious as my wife.
But that was merely a warm-up. Years later on a bird-watching jaunt to Ontario’s Point Pelee National Park, we overnighted in the tomato-producing town of Leamington. Deciding to take a walk after dinner, we trundled down a one-block street in back of our motel. The outing was uneventful until Linda noticed a woman tending a garden. A full half hour later, we broke free of her backyard pond and ceramic frog collection only to encounter another woman with a hose and a patch of flowers. Two doors down and twenty minutes later, a young couple en route to their house from their station wagon was waylaid by my wife. Finally, with most of the block still stretching before us, I told Linda, “I’m sure several families have called the police by now to tell them about the suspicious characters casing their neighborhood.” Though our Canadian vacation had included visits to spectacular waterfalls, charming zoos, a historic basilica, and a whale-watching cruise, Linda would refer to the Leamington walk as “almost the best part of the trip.”
Three days after starting the job, Dell closed his toolbox for the last time, and I shamed myself by studying Daphne’s new home. I had originally based Binky’s pen around the leftover structure of a rectangular play area and sandbox. To transform the cozy rabbit pen into a raccoon-proof villa for Daphne, Dell had merely planted a few posts in the ground to extend the walls toward our back fence, covered the sides and top with wire, and added a wooden door. Even with my nonexistent construction skills, I should have been able to do the same. Little did I realize that our duck population was destined to outgrow the pen.
Once we transferred her from the gloomy interior of the barn to the fresh air and hazy sunshine of her pen, Daphne was a changed duck. She showed her appreciation by consuming great quantities of the scratch feed she had previously ignored. But the swimming pool went untouched. Neophytes to waterfowl, we didn’t know that Muscovies shared neither water pool nor gene pool with American domestic ducks that trace their roots to the common mallard. Unlike the Mallard derivatives, whose lives revolve around the pond, the tropical-born, marsh-dwelling Muscovies have comparatively underdeveloped oil glands and aren’t very waterproof. Consequently, they are poorly adapted to swimming. Because we were ignorant of these facts, Daphne’s failure to take advantage of the local pool facilities struck Linda as a wrong that demanded righting, a failure of nurturing whose blame we had inherited.
“She needs a little friend to show her how to swim,” Linda told me.
“You showed her pretty well a couple of days ago.”
“Ducks are very social. They aren’t happy by themselves.”
“Then,” I heard myself tell my wife as if through another person’s ears, “we’d better get her another duck.” In truth, I couldn’t think of a single reason not to. Having already bought the proposition that one duck was no trouble at all to keep, no trouble times two still equaled zero bother. How could it be otherwise? The ducks would live outdoors rather than gnaw at our woodwork, eat when stirred by hunger rather than dominate our meals, and wander our yard unsupervised rather than require complicated, coordinated periods of freedom.
With ruthless efficiency, Linda located a source for a companion duck in the person of a farmer a few miles north with the remarkable name of Rupert Murdoch. On the evidence, I decided that he probably wasn’t the infamous media mogul. Though his house was in no worse shape than ours and of similar vintage, the matchstick barn barely hung together, and the denuded yard of hard-packed mud boasted indescribable clutter. Duck pens claimed the area, but these were nothing like the roomy, open-air living quarters that delighted Daphne. The two dozen or so wooden-sided, side-by-side, four-by-six-foot pens each contained a flock of ducks or a gaggle of geese of heretofore undreamed of breeds. “That’s a black and white Cayuga,” the elderly Rupert Murdoch drawled, elongating the word “Cayuga” into poetry at odds with the squalor. “That one’s a Blue Swede,” though it appeared neither blue nor Swedish.
If the varieties of waterfowl were bewildering, the range of chickens wandering free-range or cooped up in the disconcertingly backward-leaning barn truly boggled the mind. We witnessed chickens whose feathers curled up like chrysanthemum petals, chickens with pom-poms on their feet, chickens with bald heads and necks, mouse-size chickens, mastiff-size chickens, and chickens whose complex color patterns turned them into optical illusions with beaks. A flock of what he termed “fancy pigeons” with feathered britches in place of naked legs scattered as he took us to the back of the barn to show us an inch-long, vitamin capsule–shaped white object. “Do you know what some fellows call these?” he asked us.
“I wouldn’t know what to call it,” I admitted.
“Some fellows call them rooster eggs. But they’ve never seen a rooster lay one.”
“What is it?”
“It’s an egg. But roosters don’t lay any kinds of eggs,” he explained with a wise grin.
After viewing various turkeys, pheasants, guinea fowl, grouse, and goats, and after stooping to pet a couple of barn cats and an old dog in a bandana, we followed Rupert Murdoch back to the duck ghetto. While Linda decided which duck to take home, I mentally recounted the plot of every episode of Hogan’s Heroes I could remember and was almost through the series run of The Prisoner when she finally picked out a female black and white Cayuga. “She’s a show duck,” the farmer warned us. “Costs a little more than your White Pekins or Khaki Campbells.”
“She would have to,” I agreed, unsure what either of those animals were but bracing for a bite to the wallet. The cheapest parrot, after all, wore a two-hundred-dollar price tag, cockatiels flew as high as one hundred dollars, and hand-raised parakeets at Jonah’s Ark commanded eighty dollars.
“Have to charge you ten dollars,” he insisted.
Using a long-handled net from a catfish farm, Rupert Murdoch dipped into the Cayuga pen, cornered the female, and with a twist of an arm, scooped her up. “You don’t want her flying nowhere,” he stated. When we nodded our agreement, he deftly plucked five primary flight feathers from her right wing. The duck never even flinched. “That will keep her on the ground.” As I helped him put the Cayuga in a cardboard box and tape it—this seemed to be the preferred method of transporting birds of every ilk—Linda shouted to me, “Sweetheart, come quick and see a little white bathtub duck.”
“That’s what you call a call duck,” Rupert told us.
“Another of your show ducks?” I asked.
He nodded. “It’s all the bigger they get.” I felt the pressure of Linda’s eyes. I shrugged. I nodded. The farmer netted a fourteen-inch-tall pure white duck with an orange beak and orange feet, and popped her in another box. If I knew how to whistle, I might have. No anxiety gnawed at me. We had a spacious pen capable of easily absorbing all three birds. We had a large fenced-in yard. We had a big bag of scratch feed. I had finally adjusted to my Zoloft dosage. Calmer and less crabby than I had been for years, I had nary a care in the world. Everything seemed, well … everything seemed just ducky.