Jacob Lestermeyer was going on and on about the pharisee next door as he led us from one farm building to another in search of the mystery duck. We started in a sprawling barn with a baffling maze of pens and cubbyholes. We rooted through squads of protesting hens, eyeballed nervous ducks resting on ancient straw bedding as hard-packed as driveway dirt, combed a food-storage room cluttered with spilled feed sacks, and slowed to admire dozens of day-old pheasant chicks trickling in and out of the heat circle cast by a brood lamp. Out the back door, we dodged a pygmy goat with a taste for shirt buttons in an otherwise deserted chicken coop, craned our necks behind a two-tiered wall of rabbit cages, stuck our heads into a shed so gloomy, Big-foot could have lurked inside unnoticed, and collectively lifted one end of an overturned wooden cart that hadn’t rolled anywhere on its spoked wheels since long before our host’s beard had gone grey.
“The last time I saw her, she was under here.”
Lestermeyer grunted from the exertion of twisting his thick body into the proper angle to peer beneath the cart while still helping to hold it up. “No, excuse me, that’s our ducklings.” Balls of yellow fluff flowed toward the shadows. An outburst of peeps was muffled as we eased the upended vehicle back to the ground.
“What kind of babies are they?” Linda beamed.
“I hope the pharisee didn’t get his hands on her,” he muttered.
“So, why do you call him the pharisee, again?” I asked, uncertain if I had missed the explanation.
He stopped and straightened a pair of glasses that somehow fit around a globular nose. “Because he can quote the letter of the law as fine as the Devil can quote scripture. Had the cops over here twice last week.”
“The cops?” asked Linda. He was too angry to answer at once. As we followed him up a rise in back of the barn, a raw ditch of a miniature lake snapped into view, a great gouge of earth resembling the scar a meteor might have left behind. An excited stream of water from an angled pipe fed the long and narrow, apparently bottomless pit. Blazing reflected sunlight all but hid the score of ducks that paddled far out in the middle.
“Our geese make too much noise,” he snarled. “They wake him in the morning. I told the cops I’ve lived here thirty years. You don’t put up a house beside a petting zoo if you want to live the life of Riley. You see the sign out front that says ‘Lestermeyer’s Petting Zoo’? You can see it clean from the intersection. It wasn’t any surprise.”
“It’s the only way we found our way here,” I told him. “The house numbers don’t make any sense. They go up for a while, then they go down for a while, then they go up again.”
He nodded happily. “‘Lestermeyer’s Petting Zoo.’ The pharisee erects his temple next door then complains that Noah got here first. There’s your duck, out there.”
We shielded out eyes but couldn’t see a thing. “What does she look like?” Linda asked. “If she’s a Khaki Campbell, or call duck, or black and white Cayuga, or Blue Swede, or Muscovy, we don’t want one. We could have gotten one from Mr. Murdoch, but we didn’t want to let him know some of the other ducks he sold us are dead.”
“Raccoons,” I added.
“We don’t want an Indian Runner duck, either,” Linda said.
“We couldn’t get her out of there, anyway,” Lestermeyer told us, waving an arm toward the pond. “Not until they go back to the barn on their own about the time it gets dark.”
“Hours from now,” I explained.
“Mr. Murdoch doesn’t have anything we want right now. We like his ducks, but we want something different.”
“Raccoons,” pondered Lestermeyer. “We get skunks after our chicken eggs.”
“Let’s look around,” I urged Linda. “There must be another duck here you’d like.”
“How about a Rouen,” he suggested. “A Rouen,” he repeated in response to our blank expressions. “The drakes have got green heads exactly like your mallards.”
“A Rouen is a domestic mallard.”
“We can’t have boys,” Linda lamented. “My husband doesn’t want any babies.”
“No ducklings, either,” I clarified.
“There’s a female Rouen out there,” he told us, as he squinted into the blinding glare.
“She won’t come out until it gets dark,” I said.
“I’ll get her,” he promised. As he walked to the nearest shore of his backyard ocean—a hardened lip of dirt sprinkled with wiry sprigs of grass—three ducks swam toward him, matching his rate of travel. The Rouen hen accompanying a pair of males resembled a slightly larger, fatter version of a female mallard. She quacked briefly and vigorously when Lestermeyer grabbed her, but I missed the miraculous moment of capture; I was transfixed by a vision of mythological proportions. A one-eared goat with a purple scarf tied around her neck appeared from the rise behind Lestermeyer’s barn, followed by four auricularly intact goats so evenly spaced in single-file procession, all five might have been connected by identical invisible lengths of chain. Though I was close enough to nudge any one of them, their slitted eyes didn’t register my presence as they swept along a goat-width path that rounded a rail-fenced pony pen. Just their twitching tails moved unsynchronized. It was the only example of order I had witnessed since arriving at Lestermeyer’s Petting Zoo, and the sight took my breath away. I turned to share the moment with Linda, but she hadn’t noticed them.
“I’m not very impressed by the way girl mallards look,” she said, as Lestermeyer grappled with the wing-flapping female, and I feared another search for the mystery duck loomed. But the Rouen revealed sublime color variations when he brought her close to us. Her tan head was streaked with brown, and a thick black stripe interrupted the flow of orange across her bill. Her back was jeweled with glowing shades of brown—each feather exploded in a sunburst of gold against a raw-umber background. Her breast was creamy chestnut. Her folded wings disclosed a band of electric blue bordered by the purest white. Her tail was white. Her feet were as orange as Peggy’s, and she shared Chloe’s inappropriately noble bearing, along with a boisterous voice sure to harmonize with the Khaki Campbell’s quacks during my extensive stretches in bed.
“She’s a beautiful duck,” Linda decided.
“I had no idea,” I marveled, still stricken by the bovid apparition.
“Couldn’t we get a donkey, too?” she asked. “He’s got the cutest little one in the barn.”
I could only sadly shake my head.
After we had slipped the duck inside the kitty carrier, Lestermeyer led us around a hissing gang of geese, through a small assembly of pious-faced sheep, and into a boxy, vinyl-sided farmhouse to complete the commercial transaction. All the shades were drawn, possibly in an attempt to pharisee-proof the house. The feeble glow of a table lamp in the living room confirmed the murk rather than dispersing it. We felt our way to overstuffed chairs and sat down in front of a coffee table piled with rolled-up newspapers secured with rubber bands. Either Lestermeyer was behind in his reading, or he supplemented his income delivering papers. A silent shadow that I took to be his wife rose from a couch of uncertain hue and retreated to the kitchen. Staring into my open wallet, I struggled to distinguish between the one- and five-dollar bills.
“You sure have a lot of animals, Mr. Lestermeyer,” said Linda.
“It costs me more than I make to feed them.”
“So, what do we owe you?” I asked.
“Eight dollars will do.”
Apparently our mallard wasn’t what Rupert Murdoch would have called a show duck. That also meant Lestermeyer had spent close to an hour with us for less than a ten-dollar payoff. He even refused to keep the change when I handed him a pair of fives.
“I can’t do that,” he told me, fishing eight quarters from a covered candy dish and stabbing them into my palm. “Thank you, but I can’t take money I haven’t earned. If you want to make a contribution, come back and buy more of our animals. We’ve got a little of everything.”
“We’re all through accumulating animals now,” I informed him with wholly unfounded optimism. “But we’ll tell our friends about you.”
“You certainly are a good man,” said Linda, as she leaned over to give him a hug, and my silhouette of a head nodded in agreement.
“Good luck with the pharisee,” I told him.
WE SPENT THE drive back home praising Lestermeyer for his dedication to his animals. Over the next couple of weeks, he kept cropping up in conversation. Linda and I would sit down for dinner to feed Stanley, Ollie, and, to a lesser extent, ourselves. Hearing us clatter around in the kitchen, newcomer Maxine would raise her voice from the duck pen. Chloe would quack in counterpoint. Then Linda would say, “Poor Mr. Lestermeyer. He sure does love his animals.” And I would answer, “I don’t know where he gets his energy.” Then I’d add, “I wish he was selling some of that.” These gripping observations typically trickled on after dinner, but they stopped for good during a particular Friday evening when Linda spotted a classified ad in the paper that made her shout at decibel levels rivaling Chloe’s, “What’s this?” It was an ad placed by Jacob Lestermeyer. In addition to introducing children and their families to the pleasures of mingling with tame domestic animals, Lester-meyer’s Petting Zoo provided another service. The same goats, rabbits, ducks, and chickens were also available for enjoyment as butchered meat.
THAT SPRING AND SUMMER, as visitors to the petting zoo were busy cuddling or cooking Lestermeyer’s livestock, I watched helplessly as we took on additional pets from other fronts. It started with Linda grieving, “Now that Bertha’s gone, I don’t have a little animal to hold anymore.”
“You’ve got Penny.”
“She’s your cat. And she hides upstairs all the time.”
“Okay, then you’ve got Agnes.”
“She’s become an outdoor cat. And she doesn’t even like to look at us.” That was true. Whoever had briefly owned our small black cat before dropping her off on our property had apparently mistreated her. Whenever I scolded her for paying too close attention to the parakeets, or if I made an abrupt grab for a bag of tortilla chips sitting near her on the couch, she would cringe as if expecting a whack. She grew incrementally less fearful as time passed. Penny, on the other hand, had taken Agnes’s intrusion into our house personally. She would flee from me rather than suffer the betrayal of inhaling Agnes’s scent upon my person. She had developed as many hiding places as Binky, secreting herself behind the file cabinet, under the bed, or on top of a slide-projector box nestled in a storage shelf. Whenever I wanted to pet her, I was forced to lie upon the floor and stretch an arm into her hidey-hole. As long as just my fingers reached her, she would purr and roll and, at her wildest abandon, even lick my hand. Catnip occasionally lured her out into the open, though once the euphoria dissolved, it seemed to leave her with a heightened sense of vulnerability.
I didn’t take Linda’s assertions seriously about wanting another pet until the day I arrived home from work and was horrified to find a pair of guinea pigs occupying Bertha’s old cage. When Bertha had died, both Linda and I vowed never to get another rabbit, because we simply didn’t have good luck with them. From what I had read about guinea pigs, their constitutions were even more fragile, and their cranial activity, to put it politely, was significantly less intense. I raised a ruckus, and the guinea pigs promptly went back to the store. My position stressed two unassailable tenets. First, no pets were to be brought into the house without the permission of both husband and wife. Second, okay, we would get another rabbit. Two rabbits? Fine. My guinea-piggish reasoning went as follows: as long as we were falling down the rabbit hole, two bunnies would undoubtedly be less trouble than one. Rather than amusing themselves eating our baseboards and pulling up the living room carpet strand by strand, they would romp and play with each other, freeing up hours of leisure time for us. We decided to look for a pair of Netherland dwarfs.
As a starting point—and for the sheer aggravation of the exercise—Linda phoned our local Lowell pet shop, Betsy’s Beasts, and asked Carl (of “No refund without fish carcass” fame) if he had any Netherland dwarf bunnies at the store.
“I only stock dwarf Dutches and French lops, and only one breed at a time. Right now, we don’t have either one, but I could order one or the other, depending on which breed has the best availability.”
Linda plowed on cheerfully. “I really want a pair of Netherland dwarfs like Bertha,” she explained, although he could have no idea who Bertha was. “Would you happen to know of anybody in the area who raises them?”
“If I did,” he answered, “I’m not going to tell you who they are. I never discuss my suppliers with the public. I don’t make a profit when you buy a product somewhere else.”
“What if I promise to pay you a commission on any rabbit we buy?”
“I have no way of verifying that,” he told her wearily. “You might turn around three months from now, buy another ten rabbits, and I wouldn’t see a cent.”
“I wouldn’t do anything like that,” Linda said. “My husband doesn’t want ten rabbits, he only wants two of them like Bertha.”
“If I take you at your word that you really want just two, I can have two animals in the store within a week. But you’ll have to stop in first and put down a deposit on them. That’s store policy.”
“But what if I don’t like the two rabbits you happen to get in? They might not have a temperament like Bertha. We bought Binky without making sure he enjoyed being held, and he had an attitude. We really want a couple of Netherland dwarfs, but I can’t tell which ones are right for us unless I have several to choose from.”
The barrage of rabbit names brought out the worst in Carl. “A customer just walked in the door,” he fumed, as if he couldn’t believe the imposition of two individuals requesting his services at once. “When you make up your mind about what you want, give me another call. Actually, don’t call. I’d rather you came into the store when I’m not so busy.”
Carl was less busy a few months later when Betsy’s Beasts gave up the ghost, leaving Lowell without a pet shop and fish carcasses with nowhere to go.
Perhaps because rabbit breeder Warren was plagued by guilt for having once sold us Binky, he acted happy to receive Linda’s call and even more happily recommended a woman named Carrie who specialized in Netherland dwarfs. In contrast to Carl, Rupert Murdoch, and Jacob Lestermeyer, Carrie didn’t exhibit any of the obvious eccentricities we had come to associate with people who sell animals. She might have revealed a few oddball traits had we spent more than an uninterrupted minute in her presence. Hard at work at an undisclosed project inside her house and warily attentive to the teenage son whose muscle car crouched in the driveway, she took us out to a double-stall garage stocked with a row of rabbit cages and disappeared. She returned to point out the parents of her newest batch of rabbits—or kittens, according to the rarely used technical term for bunny babies—before disappearing again. Just as we were deciding which of the young rabbits to put to the hold-and-cuddle test, she whisked between us to open the cage.
“He takes after his father; he’s very mellow,” Carrie told me, when I picked up a fat black rabbit with stubby ears and huge black eyes. He didn’t wiggle, bite, or pee on me when I held him to my chest. In fact, he seemed to enjoy it.
“He takes after his mother, he’s pretty hyper,” Carrie explained, when Linda attempted to subdue a caramel-colored bunny disinclined toward human contact. She returned him to the cage in favor of a Bertha clone that briefly tolerated Linda’s advances before kicking to signify his hankering for solid ground. Carrie took him from Linda. “This coloration is called Silver Marten.” She blew upon a small section of fur on the bunny’s back. “See the silver coloring that comes through under the black? That’s how you tell a Silver Marten. Go ahead and take your time,” she shouted, as she intercepted a lanky high-school-age boy wearing a basketball shirt and a sour expression, then disappeared into the house with him.
“Isn’t he a doll?” Linda cooed over the Silver Marten. Bertha had been unhealthy for such a significant portion of her time with us that this bunny’s bright eyes were a revelation. So were his sleek black coat with the tan stripe between his ears, his silver ring around each eye, and his silver flecks, which gained momentum as his fur flowed toward his feet. His stomach and nether regions were also silver and possibly martinized, too. I opted for the plump black charmer but was instantly vetoed.
“Can’t we get the brown one instead? I don’t like the looks of a solid black animal.”
“Agnes is solid black,” I reminded her uselessly, adding in the same breath, “Do what you want to, they’re your rabbits.” Before leaving with the two brothers that Linda had chosen (one Silver Marten, one brown) and a wallet forty dollars lighter (show rabbits apparently going for twice the price of show ducks), I asked Carrie if we could assume our bunnies would remain best buddies.
“It depends,” she said. “Sometimes they get along. Sometimes they don’t.”
“Shouldn’t they get along because they’re brothers?” Linda asked.
“They might,” she shrugged. “They might not. Puberty is when everything changes, and these guys are just a week or so away.”
I hadn’t even slammed my driver’s-side door when Carrie’s screen door banged shut and she was back inside the house. Maybe she was allergic to rabbits. I feared I had developed a weird physiological reaction of my own to the Netherland dwarfs the next day, when I said good-bye to a Silver Marten and a caramel-colored bunny on my way to work, then said hello to a Silver Marten and a fat black bunny when I returned in the afternoon. In my absence, Linda had driven the thirty miles back to Carrie’s to make the exchange. She must have been plagued by guilt over my not getting the rabbit I had wanted, I hypothesized.
“The black one has a better personality,” Linda pointed out.
AT BINDER PARK ZOO in Battle Creek, the cereal-producing city where Linda’s mother lives, the children’s zoo area includes an expansive outdoor rabbit pen. Clumps of full-grown rabbits play together on the grass, groom one another, and stretch out side-by-side for a nap in the sun. In our many visits to the zoo, we never saw a single instance of discontent among the bunnies. They appeared inherently as well suited to social interactions as ducks. And Silver Marten Bertie and roly-poly Rollo seemed headed down the path of sibling bliss. They loved jumping in and out of an Easter basket together that Linda had set up on the floor of our porch or friskily chasing each other around the dining room and kitchen. They shared the same cage, eating out of the same bowl at the same time. They were closer than two peas in a pod, more gregarious than mushrooms on a log.
One night after Linda and I had just settled into bed, we heard a loud thump from the dining room. It was the sound of hormones kicking in. After two more contained explosions, we flicked on the light to find Bertie and Rollo clawing and biting each other with such intensity, they had skidded their cage several inches across the linoleum. Then, as abruptly as the aggression had begun, the pair reverted to a peaceful coexistence that carried through the following day. By nightfall, hostilities began anew. Soon the brothers couldn’t occupy a room together without uniting in a rolling ball of mayhem that left half-dollar-size patches of fur scattered across the floor and a musky wild-animal scent in the air. By then we had already purchased a second cage, ending our dreams of mutually sustaining rabbit buddies and replacing them with the burden of feuding family members that we had to sequester at all times. We had hoped that getting the brothers “fixed” would remedy the problem, but their territorialism was too deeply ingrained.
After dinner each night, Rollo got the run of the dining room and kitchen while Bertie investigated the nooks and crannies of the living room. Mornings, we reversed rooms and rabbits. Yet when both bunnies were confined to adjacent cages, they acted like the dearest friends on earth. Rollo would stick his nose through the bars and lovingly lick Bertie’s ear. If Rollo lay against the right side of his cage, Bertie would press his body against the left, letting fur and flesh mingle through the wires. As long as they didn’t share a common space, they were inseparable.
Back when we had first brought the bunnies home, I built a rectangular pen for them in the backyard by throwing up a run of fencing alongside the duck pen, and I use the words “throwing up” deliberately. My results looked just that professional. After the siblings became dysfunctional, I was forced to add yet another fence to divide the enclosure into separate territories for Messrs. Hatfield and McCoy.
“With this, my days of building pens are done forever!” I must have hollered as a challenge to the gods when my labors had come to an end. I have no other explanation for the Herculean construction project that was set in motion when Linda’s newfound friend LuAnne phoned about an advertisement she had spotted in a local weekly shopping newspaper called the Buyers Guide. Linda had met LuAnne the previous year when her son performed pet-sitting duties for us during our Amish-watching vacation in Pennsylvania, and LuAnne’s devotion to animals put ours to shame. Her house pets included an orphaned Green-Winged Teal named Terry who lived in her upstairs Jacuzzi. While paddling in crystal-clear water strewn with floating romaine-lettuce-leaf treats, Terry also had the option of nibbling from a row of bowls that curved along the edge of his tub. His smorgasbord included Cheerios, freshly grated filberts, succulent garden peas, sweet corn sliced off a cob each morning, and occasional dollops of pasta.
“I talked to the poor woman who placed this ad in the newspaper,” LuAnne explained gravely to Linda. “She was chopping up an onion for dinner when she happened to look out the window. And can you believe the knife slipped and she nearly cut off all her fingers? She had to take a leave of absence from Amway, and now she can’t afford to keep her animals, so she’s giving away two ducks.”
“Sweetheart,” entreated Linda, “Could we maybe take a couple of nice ducks in need of a good home? Before you say no, just listen,” and she told me the tearful onion tale.
Three ducks, five ducks, I didn’t see what difference two more ducks could make and enthusiastically replied, “I don’t know. I guess.”
“LuAnne said the lady has a couple of geese.”
“Geese!”
“I told her no.”
“Definitely not.” A goose was a vicious annoyance with wings. In my graduate-school days in San Francisco, I would hike to Golden Gate Park from my Willard Street apartment and throw stale cookies to appreciative tame ducks. I stopped feeding them the afternoon a large white goose took exception to the quality of my offerings and rose from the water to energetically bite my leg. More recently, Linda and I had been admiring a scenic pond and Victorian gazebo near the West Michigan town of Cedar Springs, when a gang, not a gaggle, of domestic geese rousted us from the area. A goose was the last thing I ever wanted to own.
A woman with a bandaged hand took us around the side of an attractive ranch-style home and into a backyard as scarred and denuded of vegetation as Rupert Murdoch’s place. A ring of fencing housed a pair of the fattest ducks I had laid eyes on to date along with a clamorous pair of geese. The enclosure was so decrepit, my pathetic pens evoked the grandeur of Chartres Cathedral in comparison. A loose corral of four-foot-tall wire fencing fixed to the ground by a few wooden spears kept the ducks and geese confined by virtue of their own lack of will. More miraculous than the waterfowls’ failure to push their way through the makeshift gate was their survival in this sorry jail in the face of raccoons, owls, foxes, dogs, and even coyotes. I could only guess that these nighttime hunters feared that the pen might collapse on them if they set foot inside.
Plump as penguins, the two Khaki Campbell males, Stewart and Trevor, easily lived up to Rupert Murdoch’s show-duck claims. Their necks, chests, and shoulders were a buttery caramel that grew pale around their wings. Their lower backs and tails were cocoa colored. More arresting were their upper necks and heads, which appeared to be the same shade of brown as their backs, but glinted iridescent green when hit by just the right angle of light. Equally striking was the incredible roundness of their breasts, which gave each duck the bearing of a pampered pasha who expected to receive his weight in gold on his next birthday.
“Will male ducks be all right with our females?” I asked no one in particular, and no one duly answered.
“The geese sure will miss Stewart and Trevor,” the woman lamented above a din that could only have been matched by my sticking my head under the hood of a car while someone punched the horn. But I had to admit being attracted to the geese. They winningly balanced the attributes of bluster and shyness, first honking threateningly with their necks extended and their heads nearly touching the ground, then straightening to dance away on timid tippy-toes. Far from menacing her, as I had expected, they approached with embarrassed awkwardness. By any reckoning, the pair was beautiful. Caressing their necks and shoulders was a grayish white so silky that, as with Howard’s back, my fingers yearned to touch it. A slightly fluffy brown-gray stripe resembling a mane slid down their heads and necks, enveloping their eyes. Their lower backs and tails were solid white. White and black played upon the folded wings. Their faces were kindly and quizzical. Their mannerisms projected a sense of vulnerability at odds with my conception of gooseness. I was hopelessly in love.
“Sweetheart, she says their names are Liza and Hailey, and they were raised with the ducks by the little girl.”
“Then we shouldn’t separate them,” I answered, after the pretense of a meditative pause. “It wouldn’t be right,” I said, frowning, secretly overjoyed that I was getting the last thing I had ever wanted.
A duck pen capable of comfortably holding three, four, or even five ducks proved woefully too small, once two African geese joined the flock. At first blush, the challenge seemed to be simply a matter of maintaining reasonable standards of cleanliness. The goose sisters profusely soiled the straw bedding at twenty-minute intervals, creating an ecological disaster every two days. Weary of hauling out armloads of soggy, smelly straw, I hatched a plan for a presumably maintenance-free waterfowl pen substrate. Unfortunately, the solution demanded the two things of me I’ve hated my whole life: hard work and getting dirty. Decades parked in front of a computer screen had left me with the stamina of a petunia. Running the weed-eater around a few rocks ruined me for an entire day. Yet I still concocted a project that would have daunted even a healthy person.
For vague reasons that blinded me at the time with their brilliance, I decided to model a waste-disposal system based on the concept of the bed of an aquarium, even though an underwater ecosystem had nothing in common with our backyard. Nevertheless, I soldiered on with the idea, beginning with a trip to the hardware store and the selection of a dozen fifty-pound bags of sterilized white sand for the bottom filtration layer. Back outside in the parking lot, I was on my own conveying the sandbags from a wooden skid to my car trunk. The compact dimensions of the bags suggested that the manufacturer had printed the 50 LBS. boast on the label with a wink. Nothing the size of a flour sack could be difficult to heft, I figured. But once I had locked my hands around a sack, the only thing that moved when I straightened my body was vertebrae slipping. Huffing and puffing in Sumo-wrestler fashion, I managed to transfer eleven of the twelve bags to my car before collapsing in the front seat. I decided to consider the abandoned twelfth bag a tip.
While my body toyed with a state of shock, I began plopping the sandbags into the old wheelbarrow, slitting them open, and trucking the loose sand down to the pen. Our clay-hard, rockstrewn backyard soil suddenly became as unstable as swamp muck, miring my wheels if I moved slower than a gallop. Dumping the sand was sickeningly anticlimactic. My backbreaking labors yielded a granular deposit slightly less substantial than that of confectioner’s sugar on a doughnut. I trudged on to the pea gravel, nevertheless. Between the thoroughfare of Fulton Street and our barn, silhouetted against a troubled sky, loomed magnificent Pea Gravel Mountain. The mighty dome had been deposited the day before by Tip-Top Gravel Company, and like the mythical bird that given an infinitude of time grinds down Everest by swiping its beak against the cliffs, I commenced chipping at the base with my shovel.
The haul from the gravel pile to the maw of the duck pen—across the side lawn, around the pine trees, past the pump house, between the house and the milk house, through the backyard gate, across the cement deck, down the hill, amid a knot of disbelieving ducks and geese—became my own miniscule trail of tears. That day, I trucked just enough gravel to cover the embarrassingly unimpressive dusting of sand. The following day, I lay in bed, nursing my aching arms, rubbery legs, twitching shoulder muscles, and locked-up lower back. The third day, I complained about how much work was left to do as a substitute for doing the work. The fourth day, my mind mercifully overloaded upon its reminiscence of the initial wheelbarrow load, erasing the entire experience from my memory.
The next five afternoons after work, as soon as I let the ducks and geese out of their pen to frolic unemployed in the yard, I submitted to the slavery of the shovel. To ease the pain, I sang prison work songs under my breath. Depending on how high I heaped the stones, each wheelbarrow weighed between 175 and 250 pounds. Once I managed to set it in motion, it was loath to stop without banging me up in some fashion, especially during the thrilling plunge down the backyard hill, when I switched roles from cart pusher to dragging victim. When the task was finally finished, I had managed to transmute a mountain of gravel into a molehill-deep layer distributed across the pen.
Amazingly, the aptly named pea gravel functioned exactly as planned. No matter how vigorously or how often the ducks and geese exercised their digestive systems, a quick blast of the hose dispersed the pea-green blobs and sent the unmentionable molecules hurtling through the aggregation of pebbles. Huge boulders that had belched forth from the Earth during the Precambrian Era had waited patiently hundreds of millions of years until their girth had sufficiently diminished to adequately perform these toilet duties for our pets, and we were grateful to every last little stone. We looked ahead to years of trouble-free pen-cleaning, never dreaming of the strange permutations that the gravel bedding would undergo before long. Suffice it to say that three decades hence, when developers convert our property into a gravel pit, excavation will be halted by the discovery of a mysterious rectangular artifact more resistant to air hammers than any other substance on the planet.
Even with the pen flooring suddenly clean enough that a duck could—and would—eat a meal off it, the enclosure was clearly too small for its occupants. It was partly the sheer biomass of five ducks and two geese that caused overcrowding. But the main problem was the romantic interest the male Khaki Campbells started to demonstrate toward all five females, and we knew the situation would worsen as the young lads matured. There was no escaping it. I was doomed to enlarge the pen. Given the choice between hiring Dell to abuse my intelligence or abusing myself, I decided to undertake the construction of a brand-new poultry wing, assisted by my good friend, Bill Holm, the only person I knew whose mechanical ineptitude dwarfed mine.
I first met Bill after returning to the Grand Rapids area from graduate school in 1978. I was certain that my Master of Arts degree in English/Creative Writing would be a boon to any company, and the princely offer of $3.00 per hour from a textbook publisher established the value of my education. When the publisher called with the job offer, I explained that I had anticipated a living wage. After careful consideration, he grudgingly raised my hourly boon to $3.01. Next stop was a newspaper, the weekly voice of a posh pseudo-suburb that offered me a better deal in the role of typesetter and layout artist, two positions about which I knew nothing. Bill was supposed to interview me, but couldn’t be bothered to keep the appointment. I ended up working at the paper for two years, worming my way from the composing room to the editorial office, where the magnificent Mr. Holm held court. On my first journalistic assignment, covering a school board meeting, when I asked Bill a question, he held me off, saying, “The writing window is closed.”
Despite this rough beginning, Bill and I became good enough friends that we ended up sharing an apartment that was complete with all the troubles old houses bring. One particularly cold winter day, the water spigot in the kitchen refused to spig because the pipe was frozen. On Bill’s suggestion, we placed a space heater under the sink and blasted the pipes with incendiary temperatures for an hour without effect. That we tried this in a second-story apartment when the frozen water line hid in the bowels of the basement demonstrated not only our profound ignorance of plumbing principles, but also a pitiful lack of common sense. Later when Bill and Carol married, they requested my help building a backyard shed from a kit. We managed to use and connect all the pieces, although the lean-to appearance of the finished product failed to represent the builder’s art. But helping Bill had put him in my debt. Anyway, I had no one else to ask.
In order to put Bill to his best use—lifting and holding things I was too weak to lift and hold without help—I did as much of the basic work as I could ahead of time, keeping every aspect of the project as unchallenging as possible. For example, I had decided to expand the duck pen by exactly eight feet for the simple reason that eight-foot boards were a standard length. The fewer cuts I needed to make with my brand-new circular saw, the fewer were my chances of lopping off my fingers. Half of the expansion would be for the female ducks and geese. The other half would be a separate pen for the increasingly naughty male ducks. That meant putting in a second entrance. Duplicating the plank door that Dell had made didn’t seem complicated. I laid the cut boards side-by-side and connected them with crosspieces to eventually yield an approximate twin to Dell’s design. But while Dell’s door retained the same fixed rectangular shape at all times, mine formed a different parallelogram whenever I moved it, compelling me to add diagonal bracing that his somehow didn’t require.
Observing my few bits of completed work when he arrived, Bill complained with a mixture of awe and stinging disappointment, “You’ve already got the whole thing done.” Checking himself from delivering what could have been regarded as a compliment, he hastily added, “I see you’ve turned your yard into a Superfund site. Or is this a special project for the Arts Council—some sort of study in deconstruction?”
With his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, baseball-style OCRACOKE ISLAND hat with clownishly oversize brim, ST. JOHN, AMERICAN VIRGIN ISLANDS T-shirt, and military-green tech pants festooned with Velcro-closure pockets that had obviously never been opened, he was the slumming yuppie to the hilt.
Considering that our task consisted of nothing more than hammering together a few boards, hanging a door, and covering the frame with wire mesh, progress didn’t go badly at all. By noon and the appearance of Linda bearing sandwiches and glasses of fizzy water, we had hammered together a few boards.
“That looks good,” Linda said haltingly. Her puzzled expression only deepened when I explained that the mosquitoes had slowed us down. There wasn’t a buzzing bug in earshot as we gathered around the table on the back deck. Along the fence that separated the swamp from primitive civilization, however, we had spent more time swatting insect diners off our arms than pounding in nails at crooked angles, and there weren’t enough tiny bibs to go around. Actually, our division of labor was nearly perfect. While I had it all over Bill, knocking in three-inch nails reasonably straight for the first inch or so, my strength and attention would rapidly begin to wane. “Finish this one, would you?” I’d squeak, wiping sweat and mosquito bodies from my brow. Bill would finalize the job with a few absentminded whacks while formulating his next derogatory remark.
“The geese are a psychological projection, aren’t they? That’s why you like them. They look like you. They even sound like you, but a lot more masculine.”
“They’re females.”
“Exactly.”
After lunch and a hearty application of mosquito repellant, our pace quickened. We completed the innovatively tilted pen frame, hung the door, rehung it when it banged against the opposite post, then rehung it again after the door planks had decided upon a finished shape. Attaching the wire mesh to the frame turned out to be more time-consuming than anticipated. First there was the problem of unrolling the unwieldy roll without roll or person rolling over. Then came the painful cutting-to-proper-length with tin snips whose snipping ability would have been tested by tin foil. The geese watched our every move with an intensity befitting a hawk, honking conversationally and rustling around the pen with each fresh pratfall or collision of hammer and thumb.
“You’re all right,” I assured them, as we packed up for the day. “You are very good girls.”
“What’s that sappy voice you’re using?”
“What voice?”
“‘Goosey, goose, goosey,’” cried Bill in a falsetto.
“I don’t talk like that,” I countered.
“You’ve been yodeling like that all day. ‘How’s the goosey doing? Yo-de-lay-de-hoo!’”
“I never yodeled,” I laughed in embarrassment.
“My God.” He folded up the stepladder and stared at me. “I just noticed what’s wrong with you. You’re almost happy, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You are. For all the years I’ve known you, you never once mentioned the animal kingdom. But here you are with your little goosey friends and a big moronic smile on your face. Either that, or it’s the Zoloft.”
“It’s because you’re about to go home.”
After Bill left, I let the ducks and geese out of their pen and flopped down on a flat section of ground near the redbud tree. I spread my fingers in the warm grass and flicked an ant off my thumb as bumblebees gathered in the spirea bush behind me. Daphne, Chloe, and Maxine wandered only as far as an exquisite patch of mud just on the other side of the pen door, while the two African geese and the male Khaki Campbells chatted excitedly as they ambled up the hill. A fat white cloud released the sun, flooding the back of my eyelids with a vibrant raspberry light. Cars whooshed past the house with their radios playing. The happy grunts of the geese grew close. Though they had the entire yard to graze, they were pecking at the ground with the Khakis a few feet from my legs.
My limbs and brain felt heavy. Sleep nibbled at me—at least I thought it was sleep until I felt a distinct pecking on my shoe. Liza and Hailey were taking turns playing with my laces, while one of the male Khakis—we couldn’t tell Trevor and Stewart apart—urged them on with whispery quacks. I sat up slowly, but still apparently too fast for Hailey, who stumbled away with a wing-flap. Liza, identifiable by the faint yellow ring around her eyes, held her ground. When I shifted to a cross-legged position, she honked softly and padded closer until her abdomen rested against my calf and she was almost sitting in my lap. I showed her my hand and moved it behind her head to stroke the soft feathers of her neck while she stared at me with an unfathomable eye. She stretched her neck, grabbed a shirt button, and pulled it. On her second try, she had the button and a clump of fabric in her beak. Hailey leaned forward to nip at my shirt pocket. The two boys were showing untoward interest in my pant cuff. It was too much of a good thing. After a seeming eternity outdoors, I stood up and walked through a volley of disappointed honks back into the house to wash Liza’s muddy lipstick off my shirt before Linda could discover it and jump to any conclusions.