Enslaved by Ducks (15 page)

If the varieties of waterfowl were bewildering, the range of chickens wandering free-range or cooped up in the disconcertingly backward-leaning barn truly boggled the mind. We witnessed chickens whose feathers curled up like chrysanthemum petals, chickens with pom-poms on their feet, chickens with bald heads and necks, mouse-size chickens, mastiff-size chickens, and chickens whose complex color patterns turned them into optical illusions with beaks. A flock of what he termed “fancy pigeons” with feathered britches in place of naked legs scattered as he took us to the back of the barn to show us an inch-long, vitamin capsule–shaped white object. “Do you know what some fellows call these?” he asked us.

“I wouldn’t know what to call it,” I admitted.

“Some fellows call them rooster eggs. But they’ve never seen a
rooster lay one.”

“What is it?”

“It’s an egg. But roosters don’t lay any kinds of eggs,” he explained with a wise grin.

After viewing various turkeys, pheasants, guinea fowl, grouse, and goats, and after stooping to pet a couple of barn cats and an old dog in a bandana, we followed Rupert Murdoch back to the duck ghetto. While Linda decided which duck to take home, I mentally recounted the plot of every episode of
Hogan’s Heroes
I could remember and was almost through the series run of
The Prisoner
when she finally picked out a female black and white Cayuga. “She’s a show duck,” the farmer warned us. “Costs a little more than your White Pekins or Khaki Campbells.”

“She would have to,” I agreed, unsure what either of those animals were but bracing for a bite to the wallet. The cheapest parrot, after all, wore a two-hundred-dollar price tag, cockatiels flew as high as one hundred dollars, and hand-raised parakeets at Jonah’s Ark commanded eighty dollars.

“Have to charge you ten dollars,” he insisted.

Using a long-handled net from a catfish farm, Rupert Murdoch dipped into the Cayuga pen, cornered the female, and with a twist of an arm, scooped her up. “You don’t want her flying nowhere,” he stated. When we nodded our agreement, he deftly plucked five primary flight feathers from her right wing. The duck never even flinched. “That will keep her on the ground.” As I helped him put the Cayuga in a cardboard box and tape it—this seemed to be the preferred method of transporting birds of every ilk—Linda shouted to me, “Sweetheart, come quick and see a little white bathtub duck.”

“That’s what you call a call duck,” Rupert told us.

“Another of your show ducks?” I asked.

He nodded. “It’s all the bigger they get.” I felt the pressure of Linda’s eyes. I shrugged. I nodded. The farmer netted a fourteen-inch-tall pure white duck with an orange beak and orange feet, and popped her in another box. If I knew how to whistle, I might have. No anxiety gnawed at me. We had a spacious pen capable of easily absorbing all three birds. We had a large fenced-in yard. We had a big bag of scratch feed. I had finally adjusted to my Zoloft dosage. Calmer and less crabby than I had been for years, I had nary a care in the world. Everything seemed, well … everything seemed just ducky.

Aren’t your ducks supposed to be in the yard?” Shirley piped up, as Linda slid falafel patties onto our plates.

“They’re probably behind the spirea bush sticking their beaks in decayed leaves,” I said, attempting to infuse even these odd words with a sense of welcoming.

A bowl bisected by an oversize spoon crashed into a crock of mashed potatoes. “This is a cucumber dressing,” Linda explained.

“Should we avert our eyes?”

Shirley stopped squinting out the windows and slid back into her chair. Her light skin and short curled hair were almost exactly the same shade of beige, and I kept losing track of her eyebrows as she talked. “You wouldn’t believe the people that come into my flower shop and have no idea how much work goes into flowers,” she was telling Linda.

“They must think they grow on trees,” I quipped.

“They expect to get them for free.”

“For free?” Linda shouted. “They want them for free?”

She didn’t really own a flower shop. It was actually a flower refrigerator, and the refrigerator didn’t even belong to her. The owner of a produce store in Hubbs had subcontracted Shirley to keep a cooler in his store stocked with cut flowers in an attempt to win some customers. The business wasn’t doing well, but no new business did well in our area. If a restaurant or store managed to hang on for a couple of years through sheer force of will, the locals might begin trickling in. Our own front-porch pottery shop, designated by a sign in the front yard as Pink Pig Pottery, attracted about six visitors a month, and most of these balked at the eight-dollar price tag on our hand-thrown, one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-duplicated coffee mugs and off-center bowls.

“Those are some of your flowers in a vase Bob made.”

Sharing centerpiece duties with a heaped dish of rice, a vaguely bottle-shaped vessel surprisingly thick and heavy for its size supported a graceful trio of lavender Peruvian lilies. Linda had bought the flowers from Shirley partly as a means of getting acquainted. She was drawn to Shirley’s enthusiasm for gardening along with her professed love of “talking about the Lord.” Excited that she had finally made her first Lowell friend, Linda had asked the flower-refrigerator lady over for lunch. But Shirley, we learned, wasn’t a local at all. She commuted forty-five miles from a village near Lansing, where her husband worked in a butter factory. And rather than being a source of joy, as Linda’s Christian zeal was, Shirley’s religious faith was bitter solace for a spouse whom she suspected was cheating on her, a daughter who belonged to a New Age cult, a trailer that suffered from mice in the walls, and people who didn’t appreciate the value of her flowers.

“One of these days, I’m going into their yards and start helping myself to their roses, and if they say anything, I’ll just go, ‘Well, you told me in the store they’re not really worth anything.’”

“Oh, my gosh,” exclaimed Linda. “You really wouldn’t do that, would you? You really wouldn’t pick someone else’s flowers.”

Shirley swiveled to face the parrot’s cage. “Stanley wouldn’t act like that,” she declared in a little girl voice. “Stanley’s too nice a boy to pick on me.”

“Careful,” I admonished, as her fingers strayed perilously close to the bars of Stanley Sue’s cage. “She’s not what you’d call a people bird. She will definitely bite you if she gets the chance.” I emphasized Stanley Sue’s correct gender along with the warning.

“Not a nice boy like Stanley. He wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

“She would.”

Shirley began expounding on her family problems, and my mind naturally migrated to my own misfortunes.

A bad winter even by Michigan measure had tossed cold water on our assumptions that keeping ducks would be a cinch. Daily chores kicked off each morning with our bundling up from head to toe, trudging across an arctic landscape, and struggling to get inside the duck pen. Since the frozen outdoor spigot on the back of the house was unusable, we were forced to drag a long hose down the hill from the leaky laundry sink inside the basement. By midwinter, the backyard snowpack had compacted to a treacherous glaze, and we took to strapping metal cleats designed for ice fisherman onto our boots. Snow and slush from the previous day delighted in hardening overnight and blocking the pen’s wooden door. Tired of chipping at the ground with a shovel, I twice raised the bottom of the door by hacking off the planks, but I still had to shovel, sweep, and chip to free it most days. Once inside the pen, changing the water in the plastic wading pool involved first breaking up the half-inch-thick surface ice and sloshing out the chunks with a push broom. Liberating the largest icebergs meant plunging
our hands in the pool and wresting them out, ending up with soaked arms and with bodies chilled to the nubbins.

I hated the exertion. The frigid temperatures depleted my tiny energy reserves, but they didn’t daunt the ducks, who merrily took to the pool even when the television weatherman gloated that the thermometer had bottomed out below zero. In the throes of a howling blizzard, as Linda and I stood shivering, wrapped in blankets as the furnace labored to keep up, we would peer outside through the blowing snow to find all three ducks trolling in the water. Taking to a pool in icicle weather baffled me until I realized that the coldest water was still tens of degrees warmer than the ground and air temperatures. The swimming pool was a kind of low-grade sauna. Even the hydrophobic Daphne splashed around with enthusiasm. But because of her underpowered oil gland, her belly feathers accumulated ice crystals that could grow to Christmas tree ornament size by night. “Do you know where the blow-dryer went?” Linda would ask me. “I have to defrost Daphne again.”

Spring came as a great relief, but not immediately. Throughout winter, we had scattered straw on the pen floor to insulate the ducks from the ground. When the straw-and-ice sandwich melted, the accumulated droppings and spilled food grew redolent in the sun. I had never regarded straw in any quantity as a material of consequence. Even a bale the size of a file cabinet was easy to lug one-handed across the yard. But an armload of this soggy, compressed, waste-laden mulch was staggeringly cumbersome for the weak of frame such as myself. Transforming the smelly pen-floor burden from a biohazard to potential compost necessitated my wading deep into the pit of rural life by wielding an actual pitchfork. Added to this was the indignity of donning rubber work gloves and hitching myself to the back end of a wheelbarrow that
I had always sniffily regarded as a useless curio. I carted countless loads from the pen to the back fence, holding my breath as I pitched the fetid debris into our field. Afterward, I lay panting as Linda effortlessly brought the ducks a brand-new layer of light and airy fresh straw bedding.

Simple drudgery followed, as the season matured. Although I avoided duck duties weekday mornings by dint of a freelance job away from home, when I returned in the afternoon, I couldn’t escape Phoebe’s continual clamor to be let out of the pen. Muscovy Daphne emitted little noise. Tiny white call duck Peggy quacked an agreeable whispery purr. But black and white Cayuga Phoebe unleashed an atmosphere-cleaving series of complaints. Like Ollie, she was unrelenting. We began to give the trio the run of the yard as soon as either Linda or I pulled into the driveway. We would leave them out for hours, rarely glancing in their direction, reasoning that farmers like Rupert Murdoch gave their ducks, geese, chickens, goats, and pigs free run from morning to dusk. And we had the advantage of having a fence around our yard that would keep our ducks from straying.

“A
REN’T THOSE YOUR
ducks just beyond the fence?” Shirley asked, once Linda had finished a lengthy grace that blessed our food, each of our animals, and the majority of our living relatives by name.

I was out the side door on Linda’s heels before my napkin could hit the linoleum. At the bottom of the hill, Daphne paced back and forth on the correct side of our fence only because she was too fat to wriggle through and join the two escapees. Peggy and Phoebe flickered in and out of sight amid a tangle of wild black raspberry bushes. As I flopped over the fence, Linda galloped across the grass and yanked open a crude metal gate on the far side of the yard. “Try to herd them this way, I’ll shoo them back in,” she hollered. At the
top of the cement steps one stride outside the kitchen, Shirley towered with her arms crossed high on her chest. She was chewing and held a fork in her fist.

Shielding my face, I plunged through stubborn foliage that mustered the full strength of its xylem and phloem to resist my passage. Flashes of white and black feathers ahead of me indicated that the ducks were racing forward alongside the fence. I took this as a hopeful indication that they were searching for a passage back inside the yard, preferring their plastic pool to the seasonal pond that glittered in a greening vista between our backyard and the river. Urging the ducks eastward as plant life stung my skin, I fought to keep my feet in view to avoid a tumble down the boulder-strewn slope. Unhampered by height, the ducks moved nimbly through narrow openings at ground level below a maddening thicket of whips and razor wire masquerading as branches.

I broke through the bushes, catching sight of Linda seconds after the ducks had noticed her. She had hoped to get below them on the hill and turn them toward the open gate, but wife and waterfowl intersected at the edge of the woods just beyond our property. Linda made a leap for Phoebe, barely missing her. I chased the ducks through the trees, unable to catch up until Phoebe changed direction and headed due south for the water.

Born of virile late-spring rains, the pond was no less than fifty feet wide and seductive in its sheltered calm. Its length stretched an unknowable distance east through tracts of trees that guarded a boundary of leg-enveloping muck. If the ducks reached the water, we would have no chance whatsoever of retrieving them. Fortunately, the truants paused long enough to contemplate the majesty of the pond for me to stumble down the slope and cut them off. Wildly waving my arms, I sent them zigzagging back toward Linda. This time a flying tackle successfully nabbed Peggy.

“Put her back in the pen,” Linda panted, thrusting the football-size
duck into my hands. “I’ll get Phoebe.” I saw great wisdom in this. My fear of self-injury put me in an altogether different class than my self-sacrificing spouse. Plus, my long hours sitting in chairs were poor preparation for tearing willy-nilly through the scrub, and I was quickly running out of steam.

At the open gate I met Daphne, poised to start her own wilderness excursion. She ambled back to the duck house a few steps ahead of me. I dumped a complaining Peggy in the straw, latched the pen door, and walked toward the gate, expecting Linda with Phoebe. Instead, I heard a call whose plaintiveness rivaled the horn of a distant freight train.

“Phoebe! Phoebe!”

I joined my wife in the woods. She had come within an arm’s length of the escapee when a log had intervened. The nearly flightless duck had sailed over the obstruction, which halted Linda with a blow to her shin.