Enslaved by Ducks (32 page)

The next day Liza stayed behind once more while Hailey and the ducks fanned out across the lawn. Deciding it was probably time for her eggs to disappear, I urged her off her nest with a few encouraging words and a firm two-handed grab. After I had pulled her out of the doghouse, I was shocked to find a black and yellow puff of fluff racing back and forth and cheeping for the goose. I immediately let go of Liza. I could hardly have been more surprised if Howard, our dove, had laid an egg himself. Back inside the house, as I nursed a cup of coffee and tried to figure out how Liza had ended up with a baby, I remembered that just before Liza had taken possession of the doghouse, Marybelle had occupied it for a few days. Hidden among Liza’s baseball-size eggs had obviously lurked the fertilized product of an unholy tryst between Richie and our brown duck.

Too excited by the notion of a goose rearing a duckling to fade into my usual midafternoon nap, I planted myself in the living room, where I could keep an eye peeled for Linda’s return from a housecleaning job as I scanned the pages of
Entertainment Weekly
in vain for any dish about Pat Sajak and Vanna White. When my wife’s station wagon finally lurched into the driveway, I rushed to her door and greeted her with a malicious grin.

“What?” Linda demanded. “What’s going on?”

Grinning wider, I crooked my finger. “There’s a surprise for you out back.” Dropping her purse and keys on the front seat, Linda followed me out to the duck pen and gasped when I reached into Liza’s doghouse and presented her with a squirming, buggy-eyed duckling with enormous black feet and stubby gesticulating wings.

“Oh, my gosh!” Linda squealed. “Where did that come from?”

“Liza hatched it,” I told her. “She’s the surrogate mother. Richie’s the father.”

“Is that your baby, Liza?” Linda asked the goose and got a happy honk in return.

I wouldn’t have dared grab a duckling from a mother duck, but either Liza trusted me, or she knew that she was merely acting as a nanny. She didn’t try to bite me as Chloe once had and guarded the little one from the other females more with her sheer bulk than with any aggressive behavior.

Timmy, as Linda named him, definitely needed guarding and stuck close to the goose both in and out of the pen. Female ducks may be fanatical protectors of their own brood, but their maternal instincts do not extend to other ducklings. Any time Timmy stepped too far out of Liza’s shadow and a female was in nipping distance, he was in danger of receiving an unkindly poke from a beak. I thought that Marybelle might recognize the duckling as her own and volunteer as baby-sitter, but she was as ornery with him as the others.

I didn’t blame Marybelle for failing to recognize Timmy. Within a couple of weeks, he shot up out of pecking range until he stood only a tad shorter than his dad. By no stretch of the imagination did his coloration resemble either of his parents. His blotchy black and yellow down covering had yielded to jet-black adult plumage, with splotches of pure white on his breast. His feet, legs, and bill were also black, in contrast to Richie’s orange and Marybelle’s olive
brown accessories. We had seen a duck like Timmy at Jacob Lester-meyer’s farm and wondered where he had come from, since none of the other petting zoo/meat department ducks were black. Now we knew that black-and-white was the hallmark of a White Pekin–Khaki Campbell domestic mallard mix.

It didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But it seemed all of a piece with the complicated comings and goings of a year in which we had found and released a dove, given away a pair of Khaki Campbell mallard males, taken in a rabbit, lost a turkey to a mysterious animal attack, lost our parakeet Rossy and Muscovy Hector to cancer, gained a White Pekin duck, and ended up with a mixed-up duckling that had been brought up by a goose. In days gone by, if anyone had asked me if I owned any pets, I could readily rattle off their names. To answer that same question now, I would have to excuse myself, find a pen and sheet of paper, sit by myself for several minutes, and try to sort the problem out.

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.