Enslaved by Ducks (10 page)

No more animals,” I told Linda.

“We hardly have any.”

“A cat, two parrots, and a canary. That’s more animals than I’ve ever seen together at one time. And they all live in our house.”

“Well,” she shrugged, “I told you we should get some animals for outdoors. I can’t understand why anyone fortunate to own a barn like ours wouldn’t want a couple of cows or a donkey.”

Linda had always lived out in the country, and that was a big difference between us. Her past included subsistence living with a pig and several chickens in the Michigan north woods, while I had merely lived with Catholics in suburbia.

Antirural sentiments ran deep in the Blessed Sacrament Parish neighborhood of my youth, where no one would admit to watching
The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies
, or
Petticoat Junction
, though with shades drawn, such activities undoubtedly took place. During the five-hour trip from Grand Rapids to my mom’s hometown of Port Huron in the ancient pre-interstate era, whenever
we got stuck behind a poky driver on the sense-dulling cornfield-lined roads along the way, my good-natured father would inevitably grumble about “another damn farmer.” Branding a person a farmer was one of the choicest insults you could level at any hapless soul. In high school, we drew a line between the suburban high-steppers and the downtrodden yokels from outside the city limits. Even during the rebellious 1960s, however much I disdained the middle-class pursuit of manicured lawns bounded by smooth, rolling sidewalks, I considered life in the country a fearful remnant of Dark Ages chaos.

By the time I bought our 1907-vintage farmhouse in 1989, my attitude had shifted to the degree that I esteemed rural life as an escape from a series of apartments in crime-spattered downtown Grand Rapids. In a single year, thieves had broken into my battered Toyota so often that I installed old stove knobs on the in-dash cassette deck to demonstrate its worthlessness and left the doors unlocked at night to spare myself the cost of yet another broken window. Even so, some crack-crazed kid snatched the eighty-nine-cent notebook I used for jotting down business mileage, along with the stick-on digital clock my dad had gotten as a freebie with his subscription to
Time
.

Linda, who had been living in an ailing trailer with no phones, lights, or plumbing in northern Michigan, immediately loved the house on the outskirts of Lowell. And it answered my need for a yard where I could walk around without people looking out their windows and seeing that I was walking around a yard.

The first time I drove my parents out to see the house, their reaction to our little slab of rustic Shangri-La wasn’t particularly positive. When I proudly showed off the two acres of swampy thicket behind the back fence, my mother asked, “How are you going to get a lawnmower in there?” She gestured toward the rear door of the barn. “You’d better keep that closed,” she advised me, “Otherwise
an animal is liable to get in.” I should have listened to her.

To this day, the barn remains something of a puzzler. Earlier owners of our property must have found something to grow and harvest somewhere, unless the vast storage capacity of the double-decker barn was sheer whimsy. Steep, nonfarmable hills shoot up just across the road. What I suspect was formerly arable land out back has since become a swamp. I blame a century of industrial tinkering with the Grand River for the biannual flooding that forces our neighbor to resort to rowboat trips to reach his truck each spring and fall. Initially used as a lumber waterway, the Grand River was later exploited as a source of fill-dirt for the cities on its route, though it also conveyed the clam harvesters pursuing cheap mother-of-pearl shell substitutes for a button factory in Lowell. The clammers camped on the shores of our property in the years before World War I, announcing their presence with the hearty smell of bivalves boiling in great cauldrons and, no doubt, the shouted melodies of traditional clamming songs.

More recently, the folks who sold us our house had spent decades grazing cows in the cowslip and kept porkers that were wont to stray upon the porch. After I moved in, and as my lifelong immunity to animals shifted to susceptibility, I came to suspect that an
Amityville Horror
–like entity was drawing beasts to our house, and I was merely the spirit’s latest vehicle for pet acquisitiveness.

Certainly I seemed fated to house a procession of rabbits whether I sought them out or not. Bertha came to us unbidden. Linda rushed in one afternoon from a housecleaning job and told me, “You’ll never guess what I saw at Joyce Howell’s underneath her bird feeder.”

“A bird.”

“A little charcoal grey bunny with brown and silver highlights.”

“I thought wild rabbits were solid brown.”

Her eyes widened. “This was someone’s pet. Joyce said the poor thing has been eating sunflower seeds all winter. I opened the patio door and tried to feed him. He came pretty close before he ran away. He’s one of those tiny Netherland dwarf bunnies we looked at when we bought Binky. Joyce’s husband is going to catch him.”

“And do what with him?” Linda’s glee had aroused my suspicions.

“He’s been eating the lower branches of their shrubs, and they just want to catch it, that’s all.”

But I knew there was more to come. A couple of days later, George Howell caught the rabbit in a basketball hoop–size trout net and zipped it over to us. Someone had conveyed the idea to George that we would welcome a new rabbit, and that someone called me downstairs from my upstairs hideout to meet our new resident.

Wearing thick leather gloves capable of repelling eagle talons, George engulfed the tiny animal with his hands, extracted it from a cat carrier, and hurriedly plopped it in Binky’s old cage, which someone had carried from the basement to its familiar place in our dining room. “I hope he doesn’t bite you,” George enthusiastically warned us. “That guy’s been taking out branches thicker than my thumb. I think he’s part beaver.”

“Wonderful,” I said, giving Linda the evil eye.

“He looks just like a Beatrix Potter bunny,” Linda bubbled. “Can we let him out?”

“Wait till I get out of here,” said George, who was clearly anticipating bloodletting and rampant destruction once we uncaged the beast. Before George was back in his car, Linda was petting the rabbit she’d initially named Bertie after P. G. Wodehouse’s pampered and clueless protagonist. But we turned out to be the clueless ones, along with our new veterinarian, when Bertie pulled a gender switch similar to Stanley Sue’s. Examining our bunny, whom we learned was the escaped pet of an unconcerned neighbor of Joyce
and George’s, Dr. Colby initially sustained our guess that our rabbit was a male and suggested a second appointment to have him neutered. An intact male rabbit can earn its disproportionate title of “buck” through aggressive behavior toward people, furnishings, and female “does,” including occasionally spraying anything that moves or stands still. Having been hosed by Binky a couple of times, I was anxious to get Bertie snipped. But the day we dropped him off for surgery, Linda casually asked Dr. Colby just before leaving the examination room, “Are you sure he’s a male?”

The effrontery to veterinary science embarrassed me. “Dr. Colby already told us that he was,” I growled. Graciously our vet agreed to humor Linda by giving Bertie’s nether regions a second look. With some chagrin she pronounced Bertie to be the female we renamed Bertha.

Not long after, Linda came home from work with another sad animal story. “You know that lady, Terri, with the teenagers who just bought the tropical fish? They’ve got a really sweet parakeet, and no one pays any attention to him now. He’s all alone in a dark room, and his mate died a little while ago. He used to lecture the girl bird all the time, but now he just sits there and doesn’t chirp or hop around the cage.”

“That is a shame,” I told her, foolishly assuming that a show of sympathy would cost me nothing.

“I’m trying to talk Terri into giving him to us,” Linda concluded, as if we had already flung open the door to parakeet ownership.

Naturally, I was opposed to taking on another pet, but Linda convinced me that no less troublesome animal than the parakeet existed anywhere in nature, microscopic life included. I surrendered to the argument that an older bird wouldn’t even want to come out of his cage. Fortunately this turned out to be true with the blue-and-yellow Farley, whom Linda named after the Canadian nature writer Farley Mowat. On the sole occasion that Linda urged
our parakeet out, he flapped around the dining room in such a state of disorientation, we consequently left him contentedly behind bars.

Caring for Farley was easy indeed. But I hadn’t figured on the companionship aspect.

“He misses Lilly,” Linda told me. “Lilly was the mate who died. He needs a little friend.”

“You’re fairly little,” I pointed out.

“Oh, look how sad he is. It’s not right that he should spend the rest of his days all by himself.”

“I don’t know. I sort of envy him.” But I had a feeling this discussion would recur until I finally gave in.

T
HE GREEN-AND-YELLOW
budgie Linda picked out was so tame, she sat on Linda’s shoulder on the car ride home from Betsy’s Beasts. I illogically named her Rossy after a pop group from Madagascar. Within a couple of days, Farley’s personality did a 180-degree flip-flop. The old guy went back to the happy chattering of his peak parakeet years, and like an elderly bachelor who marries a young thing, he died a month later of sheer bliss.

“Rossy isn’t used to being by herself,” Linda reported a day after Farley’s demise.

“She can look at Stanley Sue,” I countered uselessly. “Or she can latch on to Ollie. Ollie’s her size, and he’s just a cage away. They can forge a strong platonic bond.”

“She needs a little friend.”

Powerless, I gave in to a chipper blue-and-white male Linda named Reggie, because she liked the way the name went with Rossy. But those two didn’t go together at all, avoiding one another in the cage with the steely deliberateness of Stanley Sue ignoring a new perch. A third parakeet, the yellow Sophie, added balance to the batch with her retiring personality. Before I had a quasi-say in the matter,
these most unobtrusive of all possible pets were flying around the dining room and kitchen, chewing on the upper-level woodwork, and sampling morsels from our plates. I worried that Ollie would make mincemeat of the effervescent budgies, but they were fast enough to tease him and steal food from his dish, too. Ollie and I could only watch and squawk. Rossy, who continued to spurn Reggie’s affections, followed my suggestion of developing a crush on Ollie. She enjoyed sharing his cage top at mealtime just out of reach of his beak.

“We can’t take in any more of these hard-luck cases,” I groused during a particularly beleaguering dinner. Stanley was refusing one food after another via the fling method. Ollie was exercising his vocal tract. Penny, our usually well-mannered cat, kept sneaking into the dining room to get within pouncing range of the parakeets, who buzzed my head like deerflies. Bertha had somehow wormed her way into the inner springs of a small couch and was dulling her teeth on the wooden frame. “It would be one thing if there was a limit to them, but every single person you work for has an animal they’re thrilled to foist on us.”

It’s difficult explaining why I hadn’t mustered more resistance to the new arrivals, much less to any of the animals. If Linda had put the question to me, “Sweetie, should we get a rabbit, canary, cat, two parrots, and three parakeets?” and my answer would have had a meaningful effect on the consequences, I can’t imagine replying yes, and I would never have taken the initiative to acquire any of these pets on my own—with the possible exception of a cat. I was essentially just going along for the ride, as I had with most everything in my life.

Back in my early college years, I’d been abstractly enthusiastic about saltwater aquarium fish, because my girlfriend, Mary, enthusiastically bought them for me. I loved the bright colors and fluidity of the clownfish and other reef fish, the strangeness of the anemones and other invertebrates, and the exclusivity of a hobby
that required safaris to neighboring towns.

I didn’t love my fish, but I loved the idea of having them. They were a logical extension to pawing copies of
National Geographic
and naively mooning over exotic alternatives to life in a bland suburban neighborhood that was more in line with
Reader’s Digest
. To my parents’ horror, my bedroom hobby expanded to fill several tanks, including a fifty-five-gallon aquarium whose water, salt, substrate, rocks, filters, pumps, and lights weighed over six hundred pounds and eventually cracked the ceiling plaster of the living room below.

Down the hall from my oceanarium was a second-story walk-out porch my family called the airing deck. My parents had replaced the original tar-paper surface with a flooring of loose, crushed white stone. Because this material reminded me of the bottom of my tanks, or because I was addled by a mixture of hormones and self-absorption, I decided that the porch made a convenient dumping ground for dirty aquarium gravel and the expended contents of aquarium filters. Leaves, seedpods, twigs, and sparrow droppings fallen from the huge maple that overhung the airing deck disguised my lazy landfill for several months. By the time my crime came to light, the organic medium had nurtured the growth of a tenacious layer of moss that no amount of bleach or careful harvesting could remove.

“Did I tell you about the Taylors’ French lop bunny, Bea?” Linda asked, as I chopped up a brussels sprout with my fork and tried to get Stanley to accept a bite.

“Whatever her problem is, we can’t take her,” I proclaimed, fully realizing that the firm line I was drawing could easily be erased. I was far more comfortable falling guilelessly into events rather than making decisions. I would endlessly second-guess my decisions if things went well, or blame myself if things went wrong. Letting circumstances wash over me was the way I navigated through life. It
was how I had acquired a steady freelance writing job, how I had blundered into co-owning a typesetting business a decade earlier, and how I had acquired a column in a national music magazine. I was lucky that nothing dark and sinister had ever presented itself to me with each nut and bolt perfectly aligned to the mushy contours of my weak will, or I might have absorbed a felony just as I had absorbed reef fish, invertebrates, rabbits, a canary, a cat, two parrots, and three parakeets.