Enslaved by Ducks (26 page)

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.

A
GAINST 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.