It hardly seemed that a mere eight years separated my love-hate relationship with Binky from my embrace of all manner of feathered creatures and a few furred ones. I had gone from railing at a rabbit who hid placidly on the other side of a plasterboard wall to barely raising my eyes from a joke in Reader’s Digest to mumble to Linda, “It sound’s like Stanley’s chewing up the cupboard door again.” Where our pets were concerned, chaos just didn’t bother me the way it used to. The ceaseless demands of Ollie had long ago raised my threshold for tolerating noise and property destruction, while matching wits with bunnies, doves, and ducks had taught me the foolhardiness of trying to exert my will upon even the most seemingly innocuous creature. In the end, the intensive bother of dawn-to-dusk animal care had become so deeply embedded in my daily routine that from time to time it all felt like coasting.
And along the way, I had lost a good deal of the squeamishness that had dogged me since earliest childhood, when I had chickened out of fishing out of revulsion at having to touch a worm. When I was a teenager, a mouse nibbling on an issue of Playboy hidden behind my dresser had kept me awake in terror until I had finally collapsed in exhausted sleep, or possibly fainted. In my thirties I’d used a pencil to transfer a clammy washcloth from the bottom of the bathtub to the laundry basket, lest I contract the smorgasbord of bacteria, mold, and mildew it had cultivated overnight. Nursing animals through sickness eventually sent most of my fussy phobias packing. My résumé included squirting anti-fungal medicine down a goose’s throat; draining bunny abscesses; swabbing Betadine on the torn-up back of a ring-neck dove blind-sided by our parrot; massaging the bright yellow oil gland above a Muscovy duck’s rump; clipping bird wings, nails, and parrot beaks; trimming rabbit teeth; plus administering assorted injections, nasal drops, eyewashes, ear medicine, and antibiotics. Bathroom humor still made me blush, but assisting with animals’ bodily functions had become second nature, as I routinely picked up, sponged off, and sprayed away animal droppings of all sizes and shapes.
It was tempting to credit the Zoloft with these attitude adjustments, but its effectiveness muffling the chattering of my nerves was dwindling over time. A sick pet was often enough to bring on the morning shakes. And occasionally I would wake up in the middle of the night and begin worrying about the animals in general. What was I doing with so many of them? Why did we keep taking in new ones? Three rabbits, two cats, three parakeets, a dove, two parrots, three turkeys, two geese, a canary, and nine ducks at last count were just about what Noah had started with, and he never brought his animals into the house. Once I started fretting about the pets, I would lie awake for an hour or more trying to shut off a deluge of nagging concerns that in full light of day seldom seemed serious. After a few months of this, I suggested to Dr. Rick that I might need a slight boost in my Zoloft. Rather than lecturing me again on the questionable long-term effects of the drug, he surprised me by immediately agreeing.
“Most people who take Zoloft for several years find they need to increase the dosage. Let’s double the amount you’re taking.”
“No, that’s way too drastic,” I said. “I’ve had trouble with large dosages before. Just bump me up from fifty milligrams to seventy-five.”
“They don’t make a seventy-five-milligram pill.”
“Do they make a one hundred fifty? Give me that, and I’ll just break it into two.”
“If we’re going to make a change, let’s make it significant,” he insisted. “I’m writing you a prescription for one hundred milligrams.” Reassured by the acoustic guitar chords that rippled from the speaker on his desk, against my better judgment I agreed to give the double-potency pills a try. It was tough to argue with a jazzy version of John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood,” complete with faux flamenco flourishes. “Call me in a month with a progress report,” he told me, as he escorted me to the payment desk.
Oh, how I paid for my suggestion. Exactly as before, the drug at first enveloped me in a deceptive calm before summoning up a seratonin cyclone that battered every nerve-ending in my body. I was simultaneously hyper-caffeinated and drained of every last drop of energy, wielding just enough strength to lie lifelessly on the bed but too jittery to do so. The most humdrum occurrences suddenly seemed fraught with danger. A visit to the Food City produce department with its seductive leafy greens and round ripe shapes felt as unnatural as crunching broken glass beneath my shoes. The fluorescent lighting saturated the store in merciless uniformity, plunging all into a clinical blandness without shadows. The aisles had the gall of metaphor as they swept me toward an inevitable fate at the romaine lettuce bin. The sheer number of items that each blink of an eye took in troubled me with essential questions about separateness and individuality. When the checkout clerk spoke to me as my lettuce, bananas, cat food, and batteries silently rode the conveyor belt, I thought so hard about making an appropriate response, I barely heard what I was responding to. “No coupons today,” I answered, with a hopeful smile. Before the Zoloft could completely immobilize me, I cut back to fifty milligrams.
I phoned Dr. Rick at the end of the month and reported my poor reaction to the increase. Rather than clucking sympathetically, he barked at me. “You did this without asking me?”
“I didn’t know I needed your permission.”
“You should have called me up immediately and I would have prescribed another drug to see you through the transition.”
“I don’t even like taking one drug that alters my brain chemistry,” I told him. “I’m certainly not going to take two of them.”
“I’m not saying you did anything wrong,” he replied without much conviction. “I just wish you had let me do my job and help you out.”
Doing one’s job and job security were both iffy issues in the psychiatric field. Shortly after my conversation with Dr. Rick, I received a letter in the mail from the director of Psychiatric Services—Werner Klemperer, or something like that—informing me that due to skyrocketing health care costs, recent decisions by insurance carriers to deny coverage of previously supported mental health services, and the ever increasing difficulty of recruiting seriously silly therapists, Psychiatric Services was regretfully closing its doors. The letter signed off with a postscript inviting me to drive fifty miles to Okemos for the pleasure of continuing my relationship with Dr. Rick. Instead, I asked our family doctor in Lowell to renew my prescription.
It would have taken more than Zoloft to blunt the emotional impact of the cold April afternoon when Linda rushed me out to the barn. “Something terrible has happened to one of the turkeys,” she told me, as we hurried through the wet grass. “I don’t know what happened to her. I think she’s in a coma.” I had been working on my music column for The Beat and was in one of my usual stupors, running phrases over in my mind and wondering why none of them sounded any better than the CD I was reviewing. Heavy clouds hung low in the slate-grey sky. We hadn’t seen the outline of the sun for over a week.
I still wasn’t particularly engaged as I followed Linda through a wooden gate to the old cow stanchion that we had converted into turkey quarters. I had never developed the same close rapport with the turkeys that I had with our geese. I took pleasure in their repertoire of sounds, from classic gobbles to doggy yips, liked the way they would cluster around me when I stepped into their pen and showed them off to visitors with tongue-in-cheek earnestness. But I always thought of them as “the turkeys.” It was all but impossible to tell them apart. Their coloration was essentially identical, and the subtle differences we noticed seemed to change from week to week, such as a few extra bristly feathers flecking one bird’s knobby pink head.
I half expected to find the stricken turkey up and about and happily pecking at her plastic tub of scratch feed—the victim of nothing more serious than a nap. Instead, she lay stock still where Linda had left her on an elevated bed of straw against a fieldstone wall, her neck ominously limp and outstretched. I couldn’t see any signs of trauma at first. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I made the shocking discovery that her entire head had turned a smooth shade of featherless black, as if it were encased in a snug leather hood.
“She looks burnt,” Linda told me, as I gaped at the turkey in dis-belief. “I found her in the outside pen next to the fence. One of the girls was standing over her making crying noises, like she had done something to her and was ashamed of herself.”
The turkey’s breathing was so labored, I expected each breath to be her last. But when I noticed her eyes, or the puffy slits where her eyes should have been, I forgot about her breathing. I touched her face and was startled to find that the scabby flesh felt hot. Linda poured a trickle of water on the injured area. The air was cold enough that wisps of steam curled up from the bird’s head. I turned away.
I retreated through the Dutch door facing our neighbor’s gravel road and walked the perimeter of the turkey pen, searching for a clue to what could have happened. Our neighbor had complained of strange cars driving down the road at night and turning around just before they reached the house. Two miles from us, another farmhouse had burned to the ground, and I’d heard gossip at the feed store that arson was to blame. I scanned the remnant of last season’s weeds on both sides of the fence for matches, a Zippo lighter, a can of lighter fluid, a charred patch of dirt, or anything that might have suggested arson—if that’s an appropriate term for setting a turkey on fire. Mostly I was just killing time, hoping that the turkey would have quietly passed on before I returned to the barn.
“We’ve got to get her out of the cold,” Linda told me. “We’ve got to get her into the house.”
The turkey gurgled as I picked her up. I carried her across our property past a cluster of tiny rock-topped graves in back of our house marking the resting places of a rabbit, a duck, a canary, and a parakeet. Linda threw open the basement door. Unable to see my feet, I ran into a mound of unwashed clothes while walking well out of my way to dodge a collection of empty birdcages. Inside the largest of the three bunny-exercise pens, I placed the turkey on a nest that Linda hastily prepared from a bedsheet peppered with holes, courtesy of Stanley Sue. Under the sheet was a plush sheepskin sleeping mat that neither of our cats had taken to.
Our turkey was nearly unconscious, barely clinging to life, and we did what little we could for her. Linda dabbed her head with Betadine. Using a syringe, I coaxed her beak open and got her to take a few swallows of water. Linda phoned Marge Chedrick, a DNR-accredited animal rescue volunteer whose residential backyard concealed recuperating geese, ducks, squirrels, chickens, a white peahen, and a one-winged blue heron, all behind a stockade fence. Marge suggested we hang a light bulb a foot or so above the bird for warmth during the night. “She’ll move away from it if she gets too warm,” she told us. But our turkey showed so little awareness of her surroundings, I doubted if she would be inconvenienced by anything as trivial as a sixty-watt lamp.
During dinner we picked at our plates while our parrots ate voraciously. Taking advantage of our subdued mood, Stanley Sue and Ollie lorded it over their shell-shocked owners by demanding one variety of food after another and throwing corn, toast, bits of enchilada, and tapioca pudding to the floor with exuberant wastefulness.
“One of the other turkeys had blood on her beak,” Linda told me, as Stanley Sue mimicked gagging when I presented her with a spoonful of pinto beans. “It was the same one who looked guilty about what happened.”
“Why would she attack another turkey?”
“They get real territorial this time of year. When they find a spot in their pen where they want to sit, you have to just about pick them up to make them move, especially if they lay an egg. Maybe she was sitting in a spot the other one wanted.”
“That would explain the turkey we lost last year,” I said, trying to wrest the spoon from Stanley Sue’s grasp. She had fastened her beak on the handle just below the bowl of the spoon and was doing her best to dump the beans on my pants. “Something really went after her, and it was probably the same turkey that pecked the one downstairs.”
“But why would a turkey sit still and get pecked to death? I still think there’s a firebug in the area and somebody burned her head.”
“But why would anyone bother to set just the head of a turkey on fire? She’s not burned anywhere else, if that’s what’s wrong with her. And why would she sit still for that, either?”
Only one thing seemed certain out of all of this. It was silly to keep referring to “the turkey in the basement” when we finally had a way of positively distinguishing her from the others. Being awarded a name under such dire circumstances didn’t constitute much of an honor, but at least whenever we referred to her from then on—posthumously or not—we would call her Hazel, the name Linda suggested.
Around 10:30 P.M. we trooped downstairs for the final time that night to say our good-byes to Hazel. Her head felt hotter than ever when I brushed a finger pad against her face. I was tempted to give her another drink of water, but she was blissfully unconscious, and I didn’t want to awaken her to a world of pain. She raised her head slightly off the sheet when Linda draped a calico blouse over her body, then she sunk back into oblivion.
The next morning I lay in bed exhausted by a long, repetitive dream. Stanley Sue had escaped from a bamboo cage into a thickly forested version of our backyard. She kept flying within arm’s length before taking to the trees again whenever I approached too closely. As I tried to put the dream aside, Hazel’s injury came crashing back like a steel door blocking my release. At least, I thought, the gravely injured turkey would have died quietly while we slept. In stocking feet I walked down the bare wood basement stairs for an official check on her status before delivering the news to Linda. But the poor bird was alive and breathing, making a watery noise resembling a drinking straw chasing liquid around the bottom of a glass. She had rotated a quarter of a turn during the night and had managed to throw off Linda’s blouse. Then I saw something else that made me turn and bound back upstairs.
“Linda!” I called from the living room. “Linda.” She was just getting out of bed. “Come down and look at this,” I told her.
“What?” Her voice was tinged with dread.
“Just come here and look,” I hollered, as I trotted back to the turkey.
As Linda stood warily at the bottom of the basement stairs, I held out an object at arm’s length. It was oval shaped, exaggeratedly pointed on one end. White, almost beige, and spattered with brown speckles. It was the egg that Hazel had laid during the night, in a totally unexpected affirmation of life. Upon hearing Linda’s delighted laugh, the turkey surprised us by struggling to her feet. I raised a water dish to her chest and urged her head down until her beak met water. She took a couple of swallows, then sank back to the floor.
“Maybe she’s going to be okay,” Linda suggested, though we both knew Hazel’s chances for survival were almost nil. The black scab that covered her entire head had sealed up her eyes, except for two small openings that expelled a milky substance. Using cotton balls, we carefully dabbed her eye slits dry without holding any hope for the damaged tissue behind them. I could see that she was totally blind. She couldn’t even detect the light from the bare bulb I waved in front of her. More immediately alarming was the sound from her nasal cavity indicating she had come down with a respiratory infection. The infection could kill her within a day or two unless we treated her with an antibiotic; that was usually the way it went with birds. Unfortunately, it was Saturday, and Dr. Fuller’s practice was closed, as was Dr. Carlotti’s.
But Linda got an answer when she phoned Dr. Colby, the vet who had treated Bertha. The receptionist balked at the idea of the doctor seeing or even discussing a turkey. “Dr. Colby just doesn’t have any time this morning,” she told Linda. “I’m very sorry about your turkey, but there’s nothing we can do for you.”
As I sat frowning into my oatmeal, a drastic change overtook me. Shucking my well-studied philosophy of life, I decided to take action for once, and confrontational action at that. “She may not be willing to see Hazel,” I told Linda. “I wouldn’t want to move her anyway. But she’s going to give us an antibiotic.” The fact that a turkey, of all our animals, had motivated me to assert myself was one of those ironies that I just had to accept. But I found it impossible not to fight for Hazel. She exhibited a will to live that I lacked on the sunniest, Zoloft-inflated day, and the least I could do was cop the chemicals she needed.
I fumed all the way to Colby’s Animal Clinic, barely hearing NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon over the drone of my interior monologue, as I practiced what I was going to tell the vet. The steep green hills, winding curves, and rain-filled air conspired with a construction crew setting up orange traffic cones to keep me from organizing my thoughts. The best opener I could come up with—“Exactly why is a common meat-production turkey any less deserving of your care than an AKC registered pure-bred champion Jack Russell terrier?”—seemed to lack the proper sting. But striking a tone of justifiable outrage was what really mattered, I told myself.
Just past the village of Hubbs, I overshot the gravel road that led to Colby’s Animal Clinic, turned around in a convenience store parking lot, crossed a culvert bridge barely longer than my car was wide, and navigated the brush-choked driveway to a boxy farmhouse on the edge of a horse pasture. A side door marked CLINIC opened straight into a vestibule, where a knee-high accordion gate blocked me from continuing into the family’s laundry room. A handwritten sign directed clinic visitors sharply to the right and down a precipitous flight of stairs.
Except for the college-age receptionist who had taken Linda’s phone call, I was the only person in the pine-paneled waiting area when I presented myself unannounced. If only to spare herself prolonged contact with a man demanding medicine for his pet turkey, the receptionist raised the hinged section of the front counter and ushered me inside the sole examination room.
Before I had a chance to inventory the glass display case packed with Beanie Baby animals, I heard the scrape of footsteps behind the wall as Dr. Colby came through the door from the adjoining lab. “What can I do for you today?” she asked with politeness, smoothly concealing her annoyance.
I faced her with rising indignation and mental fingers poised to clutch a rational argument as I suddenly found myself fighting back tears. I lost further ground as I struggled with the truth that the emotional outpouring wasn’t in defense of the grey parrot whose head I had rubbed each night for years, the green parrot who snuggled against my neck in between bites to my shirt collar, the cats that rolled on my carpeted floor or cement slab as I bounced baby talk off them, the dove who loved to perch upon my head and coo at me, the fat black rabbit who sat on my lap licking my hand when I wasn’t petting him, or even the goose Linda and I had nursed through a deadly illness on the porch—but of a turkey that until two days ago I couldn’t have picked out of our group of three.
“It’s about our turkey,” I answered, my voice starting to crack.
“I’m sorry,” she told me in a way that suggested she regretted my visit more than my turkey’s ill health.
“She’s been injured. Either pecked very badly by the other turkeys, or someone burned her head.”
“I see.”
“That’s okay,” I stammered stupidly. “It’s her respiratory infection I’m worried about. If we don’t get her on antibiotics, I’m afraid she’ll die.”
Looking at me steadily, Dr. Colby asked, “And what would you like me to do for you?” as if I’d ventured into the tire center in the middle of town by mistake. I reminded myself that this was the same vet who wouldn’t let us have deworming pills for our cats unless we brought in a section of the worm. Either she suspected us of hoarding deworming pills, or she was collecting feline tapeworm segments for mysterious purposes of her own.
“I’d like to get an antibiotic for my turkey.”
“How much does she weigh?”
While I thought about it, I looked down at her arm. A fresh scratch joined a myriad of hairline scars revealed by the fluorescent light. “Well, she’s big. Turkey-size big.”
She nodded wearily, turning her back to reach for a bottle of medicine. “It’s important that I get an estimate of weight in order to calculate the dosage.”
Comparing Hazel to a sack of black oil sunflower seed, I told her, “More than twenty-five pounds, less than thirty.”
“So between twenty-six and twenty-nine pounds, you think. I’ll prepare a broad-spectrum antibiotic to give her orally twice a day—if you can do that,” she said with a questioning look.
“I did this,” I sniffed, glumly basking in my minor triumph.
As I waited for my prescription in the aptly named waiting room, I saw no hint of the flurry of patients that had supposedly prevented me from bringing in the turkey. One woman breached the steep stairs to inquire about boarding rates for her Lhasa apso and was speedily dispatched with a rate card.
The receptionist handed me the antibiotic and uttered a phrase that she undoubtedly had never used before: “I hope your turkey feels better soon.” I almost gave her the phone number of Matty the pharmacist at Park Hills Drug Store so that the two of them could commiserate, but I beat a hasty retreat instead.
Hazel certainly didn’t feel good about taking her medicine. The procedure was fairly straightforward. Get the bird’s beak open, then carefully push the syringe down her throat and into her crop to administer the antibiotic. We’d had previous experience dosing Liza. But Hazel weighed more than twice as much as Liza, wielded wings that could knock us across the room, and possessed a formidable beak that was already well acquainted with our flesh. Even in her weakened state, she had little difficulty dragging me around her basement pen as I hung on for dear life. When I tried pressing her down into a sitting position using both hands, I ended up splayed on the floor. Linda helped by bracing herself against a hefty support pillar and clutching the turkey to her body while I applied my feeble musculature to restraining Hazel’s head and working the syringe between her mandibles. We soon learned to mix the powdered antibiotic with as little liquid as possible, since one shot was literally all we got each session. Though she proved to be an expert in passive resistance, she never once pecked, nipped, bit, clawed, or otherwise throttled us. I wondered if she understood our intentions despite the discomfort they inflicted.
Successfully administering the antibiotics solved one problem. But Hazel hadn’t eaten a speck of food since her injury. She needed sustenance to fight off her respiratory infection, but offering her scratch feed was out of the question when she couldn’t see to peck at her dish. Since she would occasionally, with coaxing, drink water, our strategy was to concoct a nourishing liquid of some sort. My efforts at mixing water and scratch feed created a grainy sludge of no interest to anyone except a bricklayer. Acting on Marge Chedrick’s suggestion, Linda picked up a powdered rice cereal for infants along with Pedialyte, an electrolyte-packed liquid, in the “Baby” section of the supermarket. (A “Turkey” section was strangely absent.) Hazel drank a smidgen of the watery gruel, but she wouldn’t slurp up enough to fill her stomach. Hazel had to go to the veterinarian. I called in sick, feigning a nonspecific stomach ailment and sparing my coworkers the particulars of my increasingly eccentric existence. No way would Hazel fit in our goose carrier, so we set her inside a curbside recycling bin that apparently had a poor effect on her morale. Hazel’s head was just about the same size as Stanley Sue’s, and the brain inside her thicker skull was no larger than an acorn. Keeping tabs on the geographical location of the various feathers and appendages attached to her massive body left her precious little cranial activity to waste on reason and common sense. Despite this mental handicap and her blindness, she still recognized the insult of being conveyed via a trash receptacle. By the time we lugged her into Dr. Fuller’s clinic, Hazel’s neck hung limply and she showed little interest in staying conscious. Her depression was contagious. No sooner had Dr. Fuller swept into the examination room to relish his first ever turkey patient than the wind was expelled from his lungs by her distressing state.
Linda described how she had discovered Hazel in her pen and the treatment we had given her so far. Dr. Fuller discounted the theory that a vandal had set her head on fire by explaining that her injuries were consistent with a pecking attack by the other turkeys. “They were definitely going for her eyes,” he told her.
“Why would they hurt her like that?”
“Chickens and turkeys do strange things when they get upset. It could be that a hawk flew over their pen, causing them to panic, and they attacked her.”
“Or maybe a stranger scared them,” suggested Linda, a version of the firebug still dancing in her head.
I was relieved when Dr. Fuller suggested that he keep Hazel overnight to tube-feed her and give her a booster shot of antibiotics. The seriousness of her condition actually filled me with a peculiar confidence. Two years earlier, at the moment that I had walked away from the clinic leaving our goose Liza in Dr. Fuller’s care, I didn’t believe that she would die. This time, I didn’t believe that Hazel would survive. These opposite poles somehow seemed equivalent, and with a tremor of calm and no nagging expectations, I smiled at Linda, assured that we had finally done all that could be done.
When I returned to pick up Hazel on Tuesday afternoon, I found a changed bird in her place. She stood straight up in her recycling bin, head erect and turning from side-to-side as she tracked sounds in the examination room. Her nasal cavities barely whistled when she breathed. Dr. Fuller told me that the antibiotics from Dr. Colby had probably saved her life, but he wanted her on a different antibiotic for another ten days. “The good news is that I don’t see her sinus infection as being a significant problem now,” he told me. “But I’m afraid her long-term outlook isn’t good. She will probably never regain her eyesight, though we won’t know for sure until the scabs come off. The problem with birds is that they are so visually oriented toward their food, they don’t like to eat what they can’t see.”
“Couldn’t we learn to tube-feed her the way you did?” I asked.
“You could,” he answered hesitantly. “But if it comes down to that, you really have to ask yourself what kind of quality of life she’ll have. Under those circumstances, it may be best to euthanize her.”
Although I could hardly consider Dr. Fuller’s message upbeat, Hazel’s progress so delighted me that I sailed home above the rush hour traffic on a pair of turkey wings, buoyed by the realization that for the first time since her accident, she wasn’t in imminent danger of transitioning to the big roasting pan in the sky. Keeping her anchored in our world wouldn’t be an easy job, I knew, but I figured we had a grace period of a day or two before worrying about finding a way to get her to eat. From the condition of the bottom of the recycling bin by the time I pulled into our driveway, I could tell that the animal clinic had filled her with plenty of food. I had imagined that they would treat her to an exotic high-protein wonder formula, but according to Dr. Fuller they had given her the same scratch feed that we had fed her in the barn. Tube-feeding her the scratch feed had done the trick. In fact, it was like priming the pump.
SHORTLY AFTER THE homecoming fanfare wound down and we reinstalled Hazel in the basement, I presented her with the Pedialyte-and-rice-cereal mixture, gently lowering her head until her beak touched the liquid. She wouldn’t drink it. Without a hope of success, I grabbed the metal bowl containing her scratch feed, shook it to tantalize her ears with the seductive scrape of cracked corn and grains upon curved aluminum, and placed the bowl under her head. To my astonishment, she immediately pecked at the food. She raised her head to swallow and, not being able to see the bowl, lowered her head and pecked in a different spot, missing the bowl and forcing me to quickly shift the food to meet her beak. Each time her head rose, I tried anticipating where it would land next time, so I could be there with the bowl. Popping the bowl back and forth provided a nice visual metaphor for the excitement I was feeling that our never-say-die turkey had cleared another serious hurdle.
“She ate feed from her dish!” I announced to Linda in the kitchen. “She ate the scratch feed,” I added for clarification, when Linda failed to perform handsprings on the linoleum.
“I know. She ate some for me a little while ago. She drank her Pedialyte, too.”
“But she really ate for me,” I told Linda, as my altruism turned to pettiness. “She ate so much, she didn’t have room for your Pedialyte. She really ate a lot.”
In the days that followed, I tried imagining a system that would allow Hazel to feed herself, but there didn’t seem to be a substitute for the handheld metal bowl. I mentioned one idea to Linda. “What if we build her a long, narrow pen out in the barn that barely gives her room to turn around. But she’d have plenty of space to walk up and down.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Along both sides running the entire length of the pen, there would be a trough full of scratch feed. And that way, she could peck almost anywhere and never miss her feed dish. What do you think?”
“What’s she going to do about water?” Linda asked.
“I don’t know.” I considered the problem. “We could flood the barn.”
Even if my inspiration wasn’t up to snuff, my motivation was solid. After all, a turkey didn’t exactly make the ideal house pet. Linda kept the washer and dryer running almost constantly in an attempt to keep up with the number of clean sheets we needed for her bedding. Still, it took far less effort to gather up a sheet and shake off the turkey poop than it did hosing down, scrubbing, and disinfecting the cement floor every twenty minutes. We tried spreading straw inside her pen, but it continually needed changing and tended to scatter throughout the basement, cling to the bottom of our feet, and appear on the living room rug. No matter how hard Linda worked keeping Hazel’s quarters clean, a turkey smell pervaded the basement and occasionally invaded the upstairs, and that strong, sour odor made me long for the comparative perfume of the duck pen.
On the first sunny day after Hazel’s strength had returned, Linda decided we should put her outdoors in the bunny pen where she couldn’t wander off or run into anything that might hurt her. “A little while in the fresh air will do her good,” she said.
Lowell only gets around sixty days of cloudless sunshine a year, and the sky was such an oceanic shade of blue, I could imagine the dome of stars huddled behind it waiting jealously for night to fall. The birds were unusually silent in the trees. The titmice, cardinals, orioles, and song sparrows were too dazzled by the gorgeous afternoon to sing. I set Hazel down in the grass, wishing that she could enjoy her surroundings as much as I was. But the scab that enveloped her head and hid her damaged eyes sealed her in a total eclipse. She took a few steps forward and lurched to the left until her wing pressed against the fence. She raised her neck and cocked her head. The wisp of a breeze carried the scent of our freshly cut lawn to her nostrils, along with the bacterial decay of the evaporating pond just down the hill. She twittered nervously.
“You okay?” I asked her.
She erupted in a string of piercing yips. Everything was quiet, and then she started barking again. Maybe being outdoors was upsetting her after weeks of security in our basement. I was about to bring her back into the house until it hit me what was going on. She was calling to our other turkeys. If Linda hadn’t found Hazel in the barn shortly after her injury, and if it hadn’t been for our subsequent struggles giving her the medicine, food, water, and all of the other treatment she desperately needed, she would have died. Despite this, Hazel’s feelings for us didn’t run particularly deep. We barely existed in her world, because her world was her flock. Unleashing another volley of barks, she called again to our other turkeys, the very same turkeys that had nearly pecked her to death. I was horrified. From the opposite end of our property, a turkey answered her. Hazel called back with unbridled passion. I walked into the house and shut the door.
While Hazel continued to improve, the scab on her head was stubbornly slow to heal. Rather than crumbling away in patches, the sheath of thick, dead skin began to loosen around her chin like a hood that had been unlaced. One afternoon as I was feeding her, I noticed that I didn’t have to move the dish around as much as usual. She pecked her food with surprising accuracy while I held the bowl in place. Crouching on my hands and knees, I peered up into the gap between the clinging scab and the left side of her face and thought I saw an animated glint. I ran upstairs and grabbed a small pair of kitchen scissors. Holding her head as best as I could, I cut an arc of dead skin from the bottom of the scab, then another, then another, until a naked eye surrounded by pink flesh looked back at me. I drew my hand toward it. She pulled her head away. I picked up the bowl of scratch feed and out of sheer habit shook it. She blinked and regarded it blandly.
Hazel could definitely see.
The orbital tissue was misshapen and her eyelid drooped, but the eye itself worked fine. The scab on the right side of her head—the side that had been more severely injured than the left—hadn’t loosened enough for me to risk a trim. But one good eye was fine. No, one good eye was great. One good eye made all the difference between a turkey we would have to wait on hand and foot and a turkey that could live a nice life on her own. And a good eye it truly was. I sat down on the basement floor beside her, marveling at its beauty and amazed by the fact that an event involving a turkey somehow added up to one of the happiest days I could remember. I definitely needed to get out of the house more often.
“You don’t want to put her with the other turkeys,” Dr. Fuller told Linda when she phoned him a week later. I had finally succeeded in cutting away a section of the scab on the right side of Hazel’s face, uncovering the remnant of an eye that seemed to respond vaguely to light, but was useless for resolving objects. “A turkey that’s blind in one eye is susceptible to further injury,” Dr. Fuller warned. “You want to keep her by herself.” That had been our thinking, too. I sectioned off a separate pen for Hazel in the middle of our barn leading to an outdoor pen of her own, adding two more entries to my fencing résumé. Just like our three bunnies, who couldn’t bear to share the same room but cuddled through the bars of their cages, Hazel would often sit close to the fence while her sisters parked themselves nearby on the other side of the wire.
It took me weeks before I could walk down to the basement without expecting to find Hazel on her blanket in the bunny pen. Although caring for her had involved an impressive amount of work—most of which I was thankful Linda had undertaken—I still missed Hazel’s presence in the house. I missed the way she would stand up when she heard our footsteps on the stairs and occasionally talk back to us with soft warbling sounds. I missed her enthusiastic stabs at her bowl of scratch feed. I missed the turkey feathers I carried to work on the seat of my pants. And I missed the quizzical eyebrows of the men who delivered our water-softener salt. Because I found myself missing Hazel, I visited her in the barn, and she still enjoyed it when I held her bowl while she ate. It was the least I could do. Linda and I may have provided the care she needed at a crucial time, with important help from Drs. Fuller and Colby, but Hazel alone had supplied the courage and patience that had pulled her through.
One afternoon about two months after we had moved Hazel from our basement to her new pen, Linda found one of the other two turkeys dead on the barn floor. She lay sprawled on the cement with her wings outstretched, suggesting she had leaped from the stanchion rail, missed the cushioning straw, hit the floor wrong, and died on the spot. That left us with only Hazel and one other turkey. That turkey needed a name, and because Linda identified her as the bird with blood on her beak the day of Hazel’s injury—and also because we figured she was behind the fatal attack on our other turkey the previous fall—I dubbed her Lizzie. Lizzie Borden. Considering the suffering that Lizzie had caused Hazel, I made a feeble effort to dislike her, but even that didn’t last.