Fowl Weather (15 page)

I rattled through the top floor of the barn until I located another section of wire screening. Once again I fetched the tin snips and a spool of wire to belatedly remedy a problem. The boys' enclosure itself was secure. However, we'd added a storage shed behind the pens that was intended to function as winter waterfowl housing. The girls and boys could walk through a pair of corridors and enter separate enclosures in the shed to escape subzero outdoor temperatures—but even in the coldest weather they preferred frolicking in
their wading pools instead. The builder who had constructed the shed hadn't secured the corridor on the boys' side properly, and a raccoon had apparently dug under the fencing. I had known about the defect, but I hadn't bothered to fix it, figuring that no animal would be able to fight its way through our rock-impacted soil. I had also expected that our geese would raise a ruckus and wake us at the first sign of any attempted break-in. But they hadn't made a peep during the night. We found out later that birds often react in silence when they can't escape a predator in their midst.

In one respect, we had been lucky. If the raccoon had wandered into the shed after killing Stewart and Trevor, it could have climbed over a squat barrier to reach the girls' side of the pen and killed every one of them as well. But instead of consoling me, the close brush with a mass extinction plunged me into a deep hole, and I considered phoning my mom to postpone our lunch. “She'll understand,” Linda assured me, but I couldn't face the added guilt of standing her up.

“I'm just paying bills,” my mom told me when I walked into the dining room. Sure enough, her dining room table was coated with a thick paper icing of envelopes, bill statements, junk mail, old receipts, and folders that my sister Bett had labeled “Bills to Pay,” “Paid Bills,” “Auto Insurance,” “Health Insurance,” “Funeral Expenses,” and “Death Certificates.” The implied spiral from unpaid invoices to death seemed excessive, as did the amount of clutter for what turned out to be exactly three bills due: cable TV, natural gas, and a
Good Housekeeping
subscription. I wrote out three checks in record time. Using other people's money always energized me, and the exercise helped take my mind off the miserable start to the morning. As I cleared the table, it dawned on me that these were the same three bills my mom had been in the process of “paying” a week earlier.

“Why don't I just take care of your bills from now on,” I suggested.

“You don't need to do that,” she said, but I could tell that the idea appealed to her.

We decided on a neighborhood restaurant frequented by members of her church. As she ate a chicken-salad sandwich and hailed an elderly woman in a tweed dress whose face and clothing I remembered from the funeral home, I told my mom about the accident with our ducks. Although my affection for poultry perplexed her, she was genuinely sympathetic. “Try not to think about it,” she advised me, which was rather like advising an ant not to live underground.

We reminisced about my dad as we each ate a scoop of ice cream. This inevitably led to my favorite story, mainly because I steered her in that direction. Shortly after moving back to Grand Rapids from Washington, D.C., at the end of World War II, my dad had asked the clerk at Dodd's Record Shop for a copy of Sammy Kaye's song “Remember Pearl Harbor.” My father, who had worked for the Pentagon during the war, was as patriotic as anyone. “But he hated that song,” my mother chuckled. “He said it was commercializing on a tragedy.” Once he had paid for the 78 rpm phonograph record, he snapped it in half on the spot and politely handed the pieces to the clerk. I laughed out loud thinking of my mild-mannered dad acting so audaciously, but that wasn't the payoff to the tale.

“It must have been ten years later that your father went back to Dodd's to buy a different record. I think it was something by Steve Allen. When he brought the record to the front counter, the woman looked at him and said, ‘You!' “

I was hoping that my mom might follow this up with the improbable story about the time my dad had been hauled off to jail in his pajamas—but the memories of married life saddened her.
We drove home in silence, brooding about our respective losses, big and small.

L
INDA SURPRISED ME
by implicating a television program in our bad luck. She didn't exactly blame the show, which was about a woman who communicated telepathically with animals rather than space aliens. But I had just pressed play after feeding Moobie a heart-shaped cat treat when Linda interrupted the episode to tell me, “I had this horrible thought, and I feel like I have to say something about it. I can't get it out of my head that Stewart and Trevor might have died because maybe God was punishing us for watching a show about a psychic.”

I hit the pause key to underscore my puzzlement. “Now, what was that again?”

“The Bible says that God disapproves of divination and false prophets.”

My eyes darted from the freeze-framed psychic's friendly face to Linda's pained expression. Moobie's head popped up in expectation of another cat treat. “Does that mean we can never watch the show again? I thought you enjoyed it.”

From her faux-sheepskin rug on the living room floor, Linda considered the issue. Moobie walked over and tapped her leg with a front paw, demanding another heart-shaped goodie. “She's not exactly fortune-telling, I guess, when you come right down to it,” she decided.

“No,” I agreed. “Reading the mind of a kitten isn't the same as divining what the cat is going to do tomorrow, though with Moobie it would be an easy prediction.”

“‘Eat. Sleep. Drink water. Get petted. Beg for treats,” Linda muttered as she rose from the rug to snag the can of cat treats from the entertainment center. “I guess it's okay to watch it,” she said. “You
know how I am. When I get obsessed with something, it usually doesn't go away unless I say something. You're lucky you don't get obsessed with things.”

“That's one problem I don't seem to have,” I told her with a total lack of conviction. As a matter of fact, the snipping off of Bertie's tail followed by the snuffing of Stewart and Trevor had spooked me to such a degree that I inwardly flinched whenever I walked into the dining room, backyard pens, or barn, for fear of the disaster that I might encounter next. Whenever the phone rang, I worried that my mother might be calling to claim I had absconded with the gas cap for her snowblower.

“She certainly isn't doing anything evil,” Linda added. “She's helping people and animals.”

I pressed the play button as a way of signaling my concurrence and wondered if I could find other devices to do my talking for me. The next time I was angry, I might boil a pan of water. At any rate, I was relieved to start the show moving again. While staring at the petrified image of the psychic, I had briefly imagined I'd noticed a glint of malevolence in her eye.

I didn't know what I thought about the woman in terms of paranormal powers. When it came to human subjects, I believed that mind reading was the cheap stunt of carnies and evangelists, but my pessimism took a dive when it came to mental melding with a duck or beagle. The idea of someone speaking up for creatures that most people regarded as disposable possessions hit my emotional center with the force of a Muscovy charge. Anyway, I didn't suppose that God would fling his wrath upon folks who watched the wrong TV show, especially when sitting through most shows was punishment enough. But Linda had increased my general uneasiness. A possible connection between pet deaths
and television viewing gave me yet another reason to worry, no matter how illogical the cause.

After the finale of the show, in which the host relayed reassuring messages from pets frolicking in the next world to their former owners sobbing in the studio, I walked into the bathroom with Moobie hot on my heels. I didn't want an elderly, overweight cat breaking a leg hopping down from the sink, so I had broken her of the habit of drinking from the faucet by holding her water dish as she stood on the toilet seat. The plan had been to convince her to accept water from her own dish—and she would, as long I held the bowl aloft. Moving deliberately, I could even lower the bowl to within a millimeter of the floor as long as I clutched it in my hand. As soon as dish touched floor and fingers disengaged, Moobie would fix me with a withering expression that said, “How am I supposed to drink now?” Never mind that we had frequently caught her slurping muddy water from the pot of a freshly watered plant. Her own bowl was taboo unless I suspended it in space.

She raced me to the bathroom the next evening just before I headed out to the barn, exercising impressive fussiness by drinking first from one edge of the dish, then sniffing and shifting her head to several other carefully chosen spots in search of the optimal lapping experience. But I didn't let this prolonged annoyance bother me. My mood had jumped several notches as the bright sunshine of the day had dispelled the superstitions of the previous night. A catbird sang its scratchy song from a tree overhanging an abandoned cattle trough. A floral scent politely glossed over the smell of a spoiled and broken duck egg I'd tossed into our field a few days ago.

From the darkness of the barn interior, I strode merrily outdoors into Timmy's pen to shoo first him, then Ramone into their
bachelor quarters. I hunted for a while before happening upon chickens Buffy and Brenda crouching behind a wickedly pointy thistle. Brenda's sister Helen had inserted herself into the heart of a stinging nettle patch that had zero effect on her, but every nerve ending in my featherless hand hit the fire alarm when I brushed up against the leaves. After rousting her into the barn and determining that there were no more stragglers, I visited Richie's pen. When I stepped outside, the Pekin bobbled inside with annoyed wing flaps and grousing
duck, duck, duck
mumbling. Victor and the rest of the hens slowly followed. Hamilton refused to budge, which surprised me. He usually couldn't wait to launch himself at me, yet through a thicket of weeds I could just make out his upright form at the fence between the pens.

“Come on, Hamilton,” I called. “C'mon, buddy. Time to get your treat.” As I made my way through the bushes it became clear why he didn't respond.

His feet hung limply an inch or two above the ground. I couldn't simply whisk his body away with a towel, as I had with Stewart and Trevor. I had no alternative except to closely study the small but stabbing horror of his fate. It was as if the fence had grown around him. His neck threaded in and out of one heavy strand of wire, while his beak and the bottom of his skull were wedged into a second. I cursed and cried as I swept the flies off his bloodied head and struggled to pry him loose. His yellow eyes fixed me with a cold glare while I went about the grisly work of releasing him. I thought I might have to cut the fence apart.

We had moved Ramone to Timmy's pen a week earlier, when Hamilton's aggression toward the shyer Muscovy had escalated into violent explosions. We hadn't seen any harm in the two of them hissing at each other with a fence separating them. But an enraged Hamilton had apparently flung himself at his rival,
caught his head in the wire, and strangled himself as he fell. I finally managed to coax Hamilton loose. Buffy pecked the dirt near my boots, uncertain whether my activity ought to involve her. I laid him on the grass behind the barn and compulsively stroked his back. Nothing similar had ever happened before, but failing to foresee any possibility for injury, no matter how remote, was a serious breech on my part. I didn't know what to say to him. What can you ever say to a dead duck? Feeling entangled by my own body and caught inside an inexplicable cycle of loss, I steered myself toward the house to get a towel from Linda.

I
PUT OFF WATCHING
the next episode of the animal psychic as long as I could without being too obvious about my dread of the show. Two episodes in a row followed by two pet disasters had seriously undermined my faith in the laws of causality. Linda had tossed aside her objections to the show and started asking me when we were going to see it again. We usually watched only one TV program a night, preferring to read books or groan in exhaustion after a day of animal chores.

“There's a special on tonight about the history of the hamburger,” I told her. “Let's watch that instead of the psychic.”

“We don't even eat hamburgers.”

“Either that or I'd like to see
The World's Most Luxurious Truck Stops.
”

Had it been simply a matter of admitting my superstitiousness to Linda, I could have lived with it. Far more alarming was the notion that I had suddenly slipped into a world where dark undercurrents had risen to the top like worms after a rain, and the worms were now in charge. I'd had a taste of this deep anxiety over intangible but seemingly real forces in my college days—also known as my dodging-telephone-calls-from-extraterrestrials days. My friend
Cole had developed a fascination with his Ouija board, and we whiled away long hours giggling and transcribing gibberish from supposed spirits. On one fateful occasion, Cole challenged an entity who called himself Gatsby to predict which
Star Trek
rerun a local television station would air at eleven-thirty that night. The newspaper listing hadn't provided a description, so this seemed like a reasonable test for even the most menial of disembodied beings.

“
MOBSTERSPIECEOFTHEACTION,
” the board spelled out.

Neither of us could connect the underworld with the
Enterprise,
so taking this as just another of Gatsby's nonsensical missives, Cole guffawed, and I followed suit. We swallowed our mirth when eleven-thirty rolled around and the teaser at the beginning of the program presented Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and expendable crew members visiting a planet whose society was based on 1940s Hollywood mob films. The opening credits trumpeted the episode title as “A Piece of the Action.”