Sweetheart, come out here quick! Hurry, sweetheart.” A fresh layer of snow tried to muffle Linda’s voice. But her summons still reached me upstairs from the backyard, penetrating two panes of glass, thirty feet of diagonal space, and the pleasant whoosh of heated air through the furnace duct. I was lounging in my office enjoying a cup of ginger tea and savoring the fact that Linda was taking care of the ducks on a frigid January afternoon while I read a detective novel with a warm cat pressed against my leg.
“Sweetie, come quick, it’s Hector!”
Bolting out of my chair, I thudded down a flight of stairs, dodged a twenty-five-pound bag of rabbit food in the living room corridor, and bounded toward the basement. Various unpleasant scenarios crowded my brain. The farmer who had sold us Hector three months earlier was right about our Muscovy’s mercurial personality. Hector could have injured one of our ducks, though so far he had reserved his aggressive attitude for people. That meant he might be chasing Linda. When gripped by a darker mood, he would not be deterred from latching on to a leg or article of clothing with his wickedly serrated beak. Or the blowhard could have clashed with our neighbor’s dog or a raccoon on snack break from hibernation. Clomping across the basement floor, I expected the worst as I threw open the back door. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
Dressed in a nylon jacket and crowned with the inevitable stocking cap, Linda stood beaming on the back deck with a large white duck perched on her shoulder.
“What is he doing up there? Are you okay?” I demanded, fearful that Hector might have bitten my wife silly.
“He flew up there himself. Well, he didn’t exactly fly. I was bending down to pick up the hose, and he sort of climbed up all on his own.”
“You must be very proud,” I muttered above the hammering of my heart. “Both of you.”
“Take a picture of us, sweetie!”
WE HAD AT FIRST treated Hector with such extraordinary caution, he might as well have been a fer-de-lance. Isolated in his wire loop, he was safely prevented from inflicting any evil on our geese and ducks that his Muscovy mind might devise. I was especially wary of him. When dangling an arm into his loop to give him water or a fresh bowl of feed, I moved in exaggeratedly slow motion, speaking in the same reassuring voice that Dr. Glaser had used successfully with me.
“Now, I’m just giving you something nice to eat, Hector,” I’d quietly explain. “Here, I’m setting down the bowl, and in no way should my fingers remind you of edible pink worms. They are far too bony to enjoy, not succulent like Linda’s, if you get my drift.”
After a couple of days of keeping Hector in solitary confinement, Linda complained, “This isn’t any better than the way he lived before. He needs room to move around.”
“How about Idaho?”
“Just let him out. He looks utterly harmless to me.”
“So did Ollie, and Hector’s a lot bigger.”
But the next time the ducks were grazing in the yard, Linda deemed it a good opportunity to test Hector’s social skills, despite my whining protests. “It’s a huge area,” she pointed out. “He shouldn’t feel territorial or hostile toward the ducks or geese.”
“How about toward the person who picks him up?”
With a dismissive sigh, Linda reached into Hector’s pen, pulled him out without incident, and deposited him on the grass near our geese Liza and Hailey. I took two long steps sideways that simultaneously took me closer to the geese in order to protect them in case of an attack and also closer to the basement door should I decide to run for it instead. The geese continued nibbling at the lawn as Hector waggled his tail and waddled a few steps toward them. The female ducks busied themselves patrolling the area near the spirea bush in search of fresh patches of gourmet mud. Stewart and Trevor shadowed the females at a distance, confused by their low autumnal hormone levels as to what they should do next. A tanker truck thundered past the house. A sulfur butterfly fluttered in a splash of sunlight on the border of our woods. Hector moved closer to Liza, flapped his wings, and ambled off on his own in another direction.
Once back inside the pen, the story was different. The geese and female ducks gave the liberated Hector a wide berth, as if they were noticing him for the first time, while Stewart and Trevor quacked in whispered gratitude for the fence that separated them from the Muscovy. Hector walked to the water bucket, towing a perimeter of empty space around him. Looking bored, he gave the feed dish a perfunctory peck, toddled toward Maxine, who scurried away from him, then began preening the base of his neck with his beak. From the open basement door, I leaned toward the yard, expecting a ruckus at any moment. During dinner, deafened to the outside world by the indoor birds, we peered through the windows. A placid white shape stood by as the geese splashed in the pool. Then it was dark. There was no trouble the next day, either.
Hector turned out to be a complex Jekyll and Hyde of a fellow who seldom socialized with the other ducks. For days at a time, his behavior was innocuous almost to the point of invisibility, as he kept silently to himself while brooding over weighty matters known only to a waterfowl who doesn’t enjoy the water. His antipathy toward the pool was responsible for the dirt-streaked feathers that gave him the air of a tough from the wrong side of the marsh. Even by Muscovy standards, the preen gland at the base of his back wasn’t up to snuff. Try as he might to groom his feathers, his beak either came up dry or globbed his tail and lower back with yellow spots. Once Linda realized how agreeable our “Ducker Jekyll” could be, she occasionally whisked him into the basement, plunked him in the laundry tub, and lathered him up with baby shampoo. “I think he likes it!” a soaked Linda would holler up the stairs to me, as Hector thrashed in the basin. She never quite got him clean—industrial solvents would have been required—but he looked substantially better after a bath and sported an agreeable Johnson & Johnson scent.
Hector’s Mr. Hyde aspect would descend upon him without warning. One day he’d be docile and withdrawn. The next day, without so much as the portent of a full moon, he would undergo a personality cataclysm. As if seized by the spirit of a rabid lapdog, he would follow us around the yard panting with great gusto, his crimson-masked head thrown back, beak thrust open, crest raised, and glassy eyes lit with incomprehensible intent. “He just wants to be petted,” Linda explained, and against any prediction I would have made, he huffed and puffed contentedly in place as she stroked the back of his neck. If she sat down in the grass, he would actually climb upon her lap in search of affection.
But petting him could be risky. His hissing just as often gave way to aggression, as he defended what he considered his territory. When Hector was out of the pen and out of sorts, I seldom ventured into the backyard without a pushbroom to push between my body and his jagged-edged bill, capable of inflicting frighteningly hued hematomas. If he was bent upon attack, there was no cowing him. On one occasion, each time he came at me with blood-lust on his brain, I picked him up and tossed him in the air, but he would not be discouraged. Fluttering to the ground, he resumed the attack unceasingly and tirelessly. When he was in such a state, there was no herding him back to the pen with the others. Carefully avoiding his snapping beak, I picked him up, clamped him against my chest, and plunked him down inside the pen. But he never transferred this hostility to his fellow inmates. He wandered sullenly but nonviolently among the ducks and geese, as disconnected from their social order as a tortoise at a bridge tournament.
Though Hector’s good days and bad days were evenly doled out, we doted on his outgoing personality most of the time and found more comedy than threat in his rages. He was mysteriously selective in his judgments about people. Whenever my parents and sisters, Joan and Bette, came for a Saturday lunch, we inevitably lured them into the yard. Without hesitation, Hector would bypass my well-nipped legs in favor of launching beak strikes at my mother. She was, in fact, the first of us ever to suffer a Hector attack, and because she was so engrossed describing a friend’s latest ailment, she didn’t even notice that a large duck was chewing on the hem of her dress until I pulled him away. Just as quickly as Hector categorized my mom as beak fodder, he tagged Linda’s friend Deanne a romantic interest.
“Isn’t he sweet,” cooed Linda, as Deanne sat under our hackberry tree holding and stroking the love-struck miscreant. “I hope he decides to become Daphne’s husband. Rupert Murdoch said that Muscovies make the best mothers.”
“What a thought. That would mean more ducklings,” I pointed out.
“I would love it if we had some baby ducklings.”
“Muscovy ducklings,” I added, but Linda still didn’t get my drift.
“Growing up into big Muscovies. Like Hector,” Deanne prompted. Sensing that he was being insulted, Hector scuffled his clawed feet until Deanne set him on the ground.
WE DID END UP with baby ducks, but Daphne wasn’t the mother. Before the first snowfall of the season arrived—and a month before Hector turned himself into my wife’s epaulet—Daphne grew listless and stopped eating. Linda brought her indoors late one afternoon to spare her from a cold and windy night, and by morning she was dead.
“I think she was older than we knew,” Linda said. “She looked old when we first got her.” And it was true that even in death she seemed worn down rather than at rest. She had carried the heavy burden of ushering us into the world of poultry and had witnessed the passing of three friends—Phoebe, Martha, and feisty little Peggy. She was not only our first duck, she was our sole mouse-devouring duck, and her passing saddened us.
Although our waterfowl dormitory was segregated into male and female residences, we frequently allowed the boys and girls to mingle in the yard once spring had passed and Stewart and Trevor were no longer constantly chasing the hens—and I use that word correctly. Female ducks are hens. Male ducks are drakes. And duck owners who permit unchaperoned conjugals are asking for unplanned embryos. We were accustomed to Maxine and Chloe disappearing into their doghouses and sitting on a nest of unfertilized eggs for days on end, rarely abandoning their vigil to eat, drink, or upbraid our lawn. So we didn’t take the latest round of incubation behavior seriously until the morning we were greeted with the sound of peeping from the pen. Maxine jealously guarded four brown-and-yellow gobs of fluff. Chloe had just one duckling of her own. Considering her broken leg and limited mobility, one youngster was probably all she could handle. Chloe proved that she could handle me just fine when I reached for the tiny brown baby and she flew at my face. Miraculously, she missed my nose—only to catch my wrist with two rattlesnake-quick bites.
Linda was ecstatic about the babies. She laughed when they came out from their shelters to peck crumbled duck meal, whooped when they flapped their stubby, featherless wings, and nearly exploded when three of them tried swimming in their water bowl. But she also felt the weight of worry that any new mother undergoes. “What if Hector’s mean to them?” though he was too self-absorbed to even acknowledge their presence underfoot. “What if they get stuck in the swimming pool and drown,” she fretted, but they were too small to climb over the rim. “Do you think they’ll be safe out in the yard?” Behaving like miniature adults, they followed the other ducks around the lawn, the synchronized twitching of green sprigs betraying their presence in the tall grass.
Even I got caught up in the excitement, phoning my friend Brian in Washington, D.C., to brag, “We’ve got baby ducks!”
“So do we,” Brian replied. “We’ve got them in the pond behind the condo.”
“But these are ours,” I emphasized.
“We’re raising them.” “We’ve got all kinds of them,” Brian bragged. “You’ve got to come out here and see them.”
By midsummer, the ducklings had grown as large as their parents. They had also sprouted adult feathers and acquired determinable genders. Chloe’s Clara was her double. Via one or both of the male Khaki Campbells, Maxine had produced the mostly brown Gwelda, who wore a mallard’s white and blue hashmarks on her wings, and the miraculous Marybelle, who accessorized a coat like her sister Gwelda’s by adding a beige ring around her neck.
“Are you sure Howard didn’t get out into the duck pen?” I grilled Linda. “That ring looks like his work.”
The two male ducklings had rather plain brown-and-cream bodies offset by the dark green head and roguish curlicued tail feathers of a male mallard. We shuttled them into the boys’ enclosure lest further demon-seed hybrid offspring appear, but son and nephew fought so vigorously with father and uncle that we rapidly returned the newcomers to the female sector, figuring we could postpone dealing with their housing until spring when they would receive their first full wallop of duck testosterone. The addition of five ducks to a pen already occupied by Chloe, Maxine, Hector, Liza, and Hailey might have crowded the female side of the fence if the entire group hadn’t gotten along so well. But we threatened the harmonious atmosphere when we unexpectedly took in a quartet of birds vastly more unruly than the greenheads and several magnitudes bulkier.
THE FREDERIK MEIJER GARDENS was a botanical garden fifteen minutes from our house. Linda and I particularly enjoyed visiting the rain forest conservatory on weekends, when members of the Great Lakes Aviary Society showed off their pet parrots against an ersatz jungle backdrop. One Sunday we had been admiring a sulfur-crested cockatoo with a louder voice and far more demanding personality than Ollie’s and were gleefully reminiscing about the sad expression on the owner’s face as we started back home. No sooner had we pulled onto Bradford Street alongside the Gardens when Linda blurted, “Pull over! Pull over! Right here! Don’t you see them?” Remarkably, I hadn’t. On the side of the road, a trio of black and bronze–colored turkeys with flashes of green iridescence on their backs surrounded a fourth turkey huddled on the ground. They yipped like dogs as we rolled to a stop.
My only experience with wild turkeys had occurred a couple of months earlier at the house of our friends Tam and Steve on the Flat River. Squatting in their living room, we had peeked through a window at turkeys so shy, they scattered at the movement of a curtain. These, on the other hand, refused to budge when Linda and I climbed out of the car. Instead, the three standing turkeys advanced on us as Linda knelt next to the downed bird. Two made warbling cooing sounds while the third pecked insistently at my shoe. If their behavior was unlikely, so was the setting, which favored neither wild nor domestic poultry. Though evidence of woods and meadows lay all around us, their habitat was broken up by a subdivision. Behind a stand of trees that at first glance appeared to be a woods, the newest homes concealed their wealth. An elderly woman across the street watched the turkeys mob us as she tended a neatly coiffured hedge. Linda trotted up the front walk, and with her usual enthusiasm, inquired whether the woman knew anything about the birds.
“Oh, them,” the woman chuckled. “They make their rounds every day. They like to go from yard to yard and visit us. They’re crazy about people.”
“Where did they come from?” asked Linda.
The woman gestured vaguely toward the thicket where the turkeys were gathered. “The Oostdykes. They had a lot more of them, but these are all that’s left.”
I had tentatively moved toward the conversation, then backed off for fear that I might end up in the backyard touring a ceramic-frog collection. After a long interval during which civilizations rose and crumbled to dust, Linda finally returned to fill me in on the story. A young couple called the Oostdykes had spotted a few wild turkey stragglers upon moving to their upscale suburban neighborhood and decided it would be great ecological fun to supplement their number. They bought thirty-six turkey chicks, hand-fed them for several weeks in their cavernous garage, and when the birds got too large to handle, unleashed them upon the world. The young toms and hens explored the area but did not successfully colonize. Within three months, the three dozen had dwindled to the four individuals here on the shoulder of the road. Contributing to their troubles in the wild, we later determined, was their lineage as hybridized birds bred for dinner-platter delectability. Engineered for maximum body weight and minimum initiative, they had about as much chance of making it on their own as our pasta-eating parrot, Ollie.
“John—that’s the husband—said that foxes got most of them. Some broke their legs falling out of trees,” Linda told me. She grimaced. “He ended up shooting them. We better see if we can get the injured one some help.”
I often find myself wondering how my college-age self of the 1970s would regard what I have become. He might have forgiven my move out to the country. He would not have accepted my adoption of ducks and geese. And if a time traveler from the 1990s had materialized in front of College Bob to play him a video of Married Bob struggling under the weight of a thirty-pound turkey, while three more turkeys followed him up a curved driveway behind a scrim of trees, it’s safe to say that I/me/he would have joined a Tibetan monastery to prevent such a catastrophe from coming to pass.
While I did my best to hide behind the unexpectedly placid turkey, Linda rang the Oostdyke’s bell. It resounded with an authoritative Westminster chime designed to signal that we were darkening the doorstep of people with oodles of money. The three turkeys pecked at the lawn near a Tiffany gas lamp, where remnants of scratch feed showed signs that the area served as a feeding station. They didn’t seem inclined to wander, so I set down the fourth upon a bed of exotic Sulawesi Island hardwood mulch. Extracting a sales slip from her purse, Linda wrote a note explaining that we were willing to take the turkeys, added our phone number, and wedged the folded note into the solid platinum doorframe.
AGAINST ALL ODDS, I genuinely liked turkeys. Shortly after we were married, Linda and I took her mom to the Kellogg Bird Sanctuary near Battle Creek. As we walked from habitat to habitat watching swans, geese, and ducks, a turkey tagged along for no apparent reason other than that it enjoyed our company. Staying just behind us on the walkway, it even ignored the corn we flung at the waterfowl. More recently, Linda and I had stayed overnight in a blue caboose at the Choo-Choo Motel in Strasbourg, Pennsylvania, in the heart of Amish country. A de facto petting zoo on the premises included turkeys that perched unperturbed on a split-rail fence as I posed among them for a snapshot. The turkeys were far more trusting than any other bird I had ever encountered, and I found an unexpected sweetness in their faces. Their large eyes, miniscule heads, comically massive bodies, and clumsiness when attempting to do anything other than standing in one spot struck a responsive chord.
Although I was eager to help the Bradford Street turkeys, I was uneasy about taking on a full quartet. For one thing, we had no clear idea where to put them. The barn seemed like the natural place, but they couldn’t live entirely indoors. Our fenced-in backyard was a good three hundred feet from the closest entrance to the barn, and I knew that the turkeys wouldn’t herd any better than the indomitable Hector. I also wasn’t keen on acquiring an injured bird in need of immediate medical help. That matter, at least, was cleared up to Linda’s satisfaction when Nancy Oostdyke called her the same night.
“I would be absolutely thrilled to have you take the turkeys,” she told Linda. “They’ve become real nuisances, chasing the children around the yard. There’s only one problem.”
“I wanted to ask you about that,” said Linda. “What happened to the turkey that can’t walk?”
“Which one can’t walk?”
“The one we left laying down next to your yard light.”
“They were all walking around when we came home from the cottage. They wouldn’t leave the kids alone.”
I was thunderstruck when Linda reported this to me. “What does she mean all four turkeys were walking around? Did she actually see them walking around?”
“I asked her about it twice. I said, ‘Are you sure all four turkeys are okay? Are you positive?’ And she told me there wasn’t anything wrong with them as far as she could see.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I complained. “Unless they’re just trying to dump an injured turkey on us.”
“That’s not it,” Linda said. “The husband doesn’t even want us to take them. Nancy—that’s the wife—has to talk to John and get back to us tomorrow. He wants to keep them, but she thinks she can convince him they’d be better off with us. And she also said they’d only give them to us if all of them were healthy,” she added, to forestall further pointless arguments from me about the fourth turkey’s ability to walk.
Later that night, Nancy Oostdyke called Linda back and agreed to give us the turkeys. John would even bring them over himself. It turned out his reluctance to part with them had little to do with attachment to the birds. His kids had their hearts set on taking a turkey to school for show-and-tell when Thanksgiving week rolled around, and we had to give our word to lend them one for the occasion.
“Did you ask her again about the injured bird?”
“Her husband said the turkey was fond of lying down.”
“Fond of lying down?” I sputtered. “That’s ridiculous. It couldn’t even stand up.”
“We’ll see for ourselves tomorrow when Mr. Oostdyke brings them here,” she told me, in the patient tone of voice used with a slow-on-the-uptake child.
John Oostdyke arrived right after dinner with a refrigerator-size cage containing all four turkeys in the bed of a gleaming dollar bill–green pickup truck. Not only was he filthy with money, but he was also sickeningly healthy. I didn’t realize what a big guy he was until he stood next to me and took my robin’s foot of a hand into his massive paw. While I had struggled under the load of a single turkey, Oostdyke grabbed two of the birds, pressed one under each arm, and whisked them down to our duck pen. He carried them as easily as one would two bags of groceries, with almost as much regard for his cargo. Two children trailed behind him. I hadn’t seen them earlier, presumably because they had been engulfed by his shadow.
“That’s the four of them,” he boomed, as he released the last two birds. Our ducks and geese huddled together in a corner on the far side of the pen. Even Hector seemed cowed by the bustling visitor.
“Daddy, it’s a goose,” the blond-haired girl observed, as she pointed at Liza.
“All of them standing,” he offered, with a generous smile in my direction.
“Are those your geese?” the girl asked me. The boy entered the pen to bid one of the turkeys farewell by stroking its neck. Then he jumped back, shielding his face as two of the turkeys flapped their wings and hopped clumsily to the top of a squat shelter resembling a failed bookcase that I had built for the ducks.
“Come on kids, Mom’s expecting us.”
“Thanks so much for the turkeys. We’ll take good care of them,” Linda assured him. “Call us before Thanksgiving if you want to borrow one.” The little boy nodded happily as his father grasped the cab of their pickup truck, lifted the vehicle to shoulder height, shook open both doors, and set it back down on the gravel—or if he didn’t actually do that, he looked as if he could have. With a couple of toots of the horn and strands of blond hair trailing out an open window, the Oostdykes were gone.
“We’ve been visited by a god,” I mused, but Linda was already down at the pen yelling at me to come quickly.
Imagine a square divided into four smaller squares. The boys’ enclosure consisted of a single square with its own door to the outside, while the more numerous girls occupied the remaining L-shaped enclosure. To accommodate the turkeys overnight, I had blocked the leg of the L at foot level with a board. Higher up, I had stretched an old wool blanket between two vertical pen supports to discourage border transgression by flight. The cobbled-together divider would have worked fine with a duck, because a duck would never try to breach what appeared to be a solid barrier. However, I had vastly underestimated the strength, stubbornness, and unusual worldview of a turkey. The gobblers completely ignored the flimsy blanket in favor of launching themselves at the wire pen walls like feathered cannonballs.
“They’re not used to being cooped up,” Linda told me, as the entire pen shook around us. Each time a turkey threw its weight against the wire, it sounded as if a monstrous tennis racquet had served up a wet Saint Bernard.
“We can’t let them roam loose!” I said. I had to holler to hear my own voice above a cacophony of turkey yips and goose honks.
“They can’t stay in here, either. They’ll wreck the pen.”
“We’ll have to put them in the barn.”
“They’ll hate that even more. But at least they can’t knock it down.”
“We’d better do it now!” I urged Linda, gallantly allowing her to precede me into the poultry maelstrom. Fortunately, the turkeys’ unruliness was wholly directed at the enclosure. They probably regarded us as fellow prisoners pitching in to help them escape. Linda and I each picked up a bird. They protested no further than to make a few pro forma flaps of the wings and some halfhearted foot-thrashing as we toted them out to the barn, into the same enclosure that Daphne had hated so much. But instead of massing for a punishing attack on the plank walls, the turkeys settled down and acted right at home, as if a propensity for barns had been lurking in their genes all along. One by one they half-hopped, half-flew up to the wooden stanchion rails and settled in for a peaceful snooze.
That left us with the problem of what to do with them during the day. In the back of my mind stirred the idea of somehow shuffling the ducks around and acclimating the turkeys to a section of their pen. Then they could amble around the yard while the ducks strip-mined our few remaining patches of healthy lawn. This seemed to be the easiest solution. They certainly couldn’t lead a dual life on the eastern and western extremities of our property with terra turkey incognita in between.
After the turkeys had assembled in the backyard to suitable arm-waving and shouted encouragement from us, we released the female ducks and geese. Disaster was immediate. As soon as the birds had waddled out of their pen, the turkeys took off after them. The fury they had shown the previous night toward the walls of the duck pen was nothing compared to the vigor with which they lit into the waterfowl. While I didn’t witness them actually land a single peck, the terrorism of their pursuit was punishing enough. The ducks and geese must have felt like Roman soldiers upon seeing Hannibal’s elephants bearing down on them. Hollering for them to stop, Linda and I added our bodies to the mêlée. College Bob would have abandoned all hope for the future at the sorry spectacle of Married Bob chasing turkeys that were chasing ducks, and sympathy stirred in my bosom for me/us. Once again, the turkeys didn’t struggle when we caught them. They were grateful to be removed from the company of their inferiors and happy to return to their beloved barn. Clearly they would have to live there, and clearly I would have to add another round of fence-building to my résumé.
Just in time, the following Saturday, to prepare for Bill Holm’s appearance as my caustic construction assistant, I had my first visit to Psychiatric Professionals for the renewal of my Zoloft prescription since Dr. Glaser’s departure. Dr. Jerold Rick could hardly have been more different from his predecessor. He introduced himself with a hearty handshake, tarried in the doorway of a kitchenette to ask if I wanted a cup of coffee, then led me to an office whose picture-covered walls had more personality than I did. Dr. Rick opened our session by devoting a couple of minutes to giving me his background: College in upstate New York in the late 1970s. Travels in Central America and Eastern Europe. Medical school in Illinois. Primary practice in Okemos, just outside of Lansing. Gig at Psychiatric Professionals two days a week. House in the country. Passionate about woodworking and music. As he talked, I read the driftwood-framed Thoreau quote above his head, admired a Martin guitar nestled in a metal tripod near his desk, and examined the picture on his computer screen of an Amish barn raising for any sign of Johnny Castaway–type activity.
Dr. Rick slouched in an overstuffed chair with his legs crossed. I could easily imagine his curly, greying hair extended to shoulder length and his fingers pinching a fat doobie. Appearances to the contrary, he turned out to be anything but laid-back. Unlike the pharmaceutical companies’ best friend, Dr. Glaser, he immediately expressed an antipathy toward a pill-popping approach to mental health.
“How long are you planning on taking the Zoloft?” he asked abruptly.
“As long as I need to,” I told him. He had not made it sound as if the Zoloft were my best friend.
“It doesn’t bother you that you could be taking this drug for the rest of your life?”
I shook my head. “I don’t consider myself any different than a person who needs thyroid medication. Besides, I’m taking an awfully low dosage, so I don’t think I have to worry about long-term effects too much.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “What makes you think a low dosage of Zoloft would have fewer long-term effects than a higher dose? There hasn’t been any long-term research on Zoloft or Prozac or any of the other SSRI drugs, because they haven’t been around long enough for extended studies.”
“So you’re saying I should stop taking Zoloft even though it’s helping me,” I said, as a flush of anger rose to my face.
“No, I’m not saying that at all. I just wanted to understand your attitude toward the medication.”
“Would you like to recommend an alternative?”
“Relax,” he told me. “No, not at all. You’re doing fine.” But he left me feeling unsettled and confused, which is probably how a clever psychiatrist guarantees repeat business.
The prospect of assembling yet another fence did little to lift my spirits. The armload of fence posts needed for a six-foot-high, dog-proof enclosure filled the interior of my car from its back deck to the dashboard, and the sharp metal ends of the posts gouged figure-eights into my glove-compartment door as I trucked them home. I first tried to carry, then ended up rolling, two heavy bails of fifty-foot fencing from our driveway to the barn, gasped for breath at the exertion, and was splashing my face with water from the pump when Bill Holm arrived.
“Sink broken? Or are the turkeys using your bathroom?”
“They’re just over there,” I told him, pointing to the enclosure. “Go on in and introduce yourself.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. They like people a lot.” I neglected to mention that their expression of affection included launching amorous pecks at the arms and legs of admirers. Each turkey was the equivalent of Hector with a sharp beak, and commingling with four at once kept a person on his toes. “They love being petted on the head,” I suggested.
“They are kind of pretty up close,” he called back. “Aren’t you beautiful?” he cooed to one of the girls. Linda and I had determined that all four birds were females by studying pictures in our birding field guides and noting the absence of fleshy dewlaps. It didn’t take long for Bill to experience the full glory of turkey behavior. “Ouch!” he hollered. “One of them’s biting me. Yowch! Two of them. Stop it! How do I get out of here? I’m surrounded!”
“They’ll do that,” I told him blandly, as I left the barn and headed for the basement to fetch the tools.
In theory, putting up a poultry fence was simple. You mapped out the shape of your enclosure, pounded in the metal posts at three-foot intervals, and hooked the fencing under the tabs on the posts, unrolling the bail as you went. Then you gave each post a couple of final whacks with a hammer to tighten its grasp on the fencing. But success depends on being able to sink your posts more than an inch into the ground. The barn seemed to have been built on top of a heap of boulders sprinkled with a cosmetic layer of dirt. As a result, Bill and I were forced to significantly alter the enclosure shape. I would begin by positioning a post at an ideal location, beat on it in vain with a hammer, then shake my head to relieve the ringing in my ears produced by metal striking rock. With the greatest optimism, I would move the post two inches in each compass direction. In the end I would have to deviate a foot or so off the parallel before I managed to slip the post into a crevice between adjacent boulders.
“Weren’t we trying to make a rectangle?” Bill snorted.
“This follows the natural contours better than a static rectilinear form,” I said.
“‘Natural contours’ is right. It’s shaped exactly like your head, if you can call that natural.”
I shushed him. “Hold it a second.”
“What?”
“You hear that?” Off and on throughout the morning, the turkeys had erupted into doggy yips from the other side of the barn door. “Somebody’s looking for you,” I told him. “You better go to her. But this time don’t lead her on with talk about how beautiful she is unless you plan on making an honest turkey of her.”
The turkeys took to their outdoor pen at once. It was large enough that they didn’t experience the kind of anxiety attack that had gripped them in the duck pen, which was fortunate. I didn’t think I’d have much luck convincing Dr. Rick to give me four more prescriptions for Zoloft. Even though they now had three hundred square feet of weed-infested, stony ground to explore, Linda was afraid they’d miss the rambling lifestyle of their Bradford Street days. Their love of the barn outweighed their wanderlust, however. Some days, in fact, even after Linda pushed open their door, they didn’t bother to hop down from the stanchion rails until she went back to the barn, shooed them to the floor, and hustled them outside.
Because the turkeys were essentially self-contained—coming and going from barn to pen as they pleased—I didn’t expect that Linda would have an opportunity to spoil them. But she managed. She decided that apples would be good for their health. At night after she had closed up the barn and the turkeys were on their perches, Linda would go from bird to bird holding an apple in her hand, allowing each turkey to peck at it. One evening she told me, “I don’t think the girls are happy about having to bite into a whole apple.” I had no suitable response. I merely watched as she diced the apple and put it into a bowl, which she presented to their highnesses in turn. And to insure that no turkey felt left out, she would offer each bird only a bite at a time so that she could make several rounds. The fussier turkeys might let the bowl pass them once or twice before they deigned to take their treat.
One night after she came in from the barn, I told her, “I can’t believe anyone thinks turkeys are stupid.”