Fowl Weather (6 page)

“I'll bet a U of M graduate would love to get his hands on this,” said Bett, who had been the only member of the family to share my dad's interest in college sports. The sound of my dad hooting and laughing at successful plays had reverberated through the house for decades and startled several of my friends. “Do you mind if I keep this?” she asked.

“He'd want you to have it,” said Joan.

“Not that I know what I'll do with it.”

When I sat back down on the living room couch, I realized that the pen I had borrowed from Bett was missing. After a search of the floor came up empty, I removed one of the couch cushions to receive another jolt. Staring me in the face was the copy of the
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather
that I had given Bett's husband, Dave, for Christmas. Apparently he had brought it with him from Fort Wayne to thumb through in between funeral-home visits and had forgotten where he'd put it.

So the book imp had restored the same book title to me twice within five hours. As borderline paranormal performances went, this was a solid tour de force.

I
N VARIOUS SECTIONS
of my dad's desk I excavated songs he had written in high school complete with his own musical
notation system, memos from his job as a civilian engineer for the Department of the Navy during World War II, a hand-drawn floor plan of the bathroom, a list of personnel in Bob Crosby's Bobcats, a complete set of Keeler Brass Company pay stubs from the 1960s, letters from his sister Aba, a journal of dizzy spells including dates and descriptions, ancient instructions for my mom on how to start his Studebaker, a heavily underlined Shell Oil Company ad torn from an issue of
Time
magazine, and the names of friends and family members who had seen his slides of Egypt, Thailand, Morocco, and Mexico. I hated the thought that the only written record of his life was this nonnarrative diary.

“How did it go?” Linda asked as I slumped through the front door of our house holding a few of my father's big band CDs, his slide rule, and a cassette tape on which he had introduced his favorite Duke Ellington Orchestra soloists.

“Moobie, get out of the way.”

She had planted herself directly in my path and, because I was far less intimidating than Agnes, she refused to move. I had to walk around her—and considering her size, it was quite a walk—to deposit the small heap of my father's things on the carpet in front of the entertainment center. She followed me into the bedroom for a nap. As I slept, she lay beside me, pressed against my leg. She didn't once bat my head with her feet and demand that I pet her, though upon awakening I was ordered to accompany her to the bathroom sink and adjust the trickle of water just so.

“Pest,” I said in a low voice so that Linda wouldn't hear. And that reminded me.

“I still can't get over it,” I told Linda after describing the second appearance of the book.

“Remember when I was reading
The Outline of History
?” Linda asked. “I couldn't sleep one night, so I took it upstairs and set it
on the floor in Penny's room. The next night it was gone. I looked everywhere. Remember, I asked if you had seen it? Later it was right in the middle of the floor again. Are you sure you didn't put it there?”

I shook my head. “The book imp,” I told her.

“How does he know where everything in the house is?”

“What do you mean?”

“He has to know where everything is in order to put it back again in the right place.”

I thought about that for a while and drew the usual blank. As far as I was concerned, his choice of books, eyeglasses, and coffee mugs was the least impressive aspect of his craft. The essential mystery was where things went when they were taken from us—those things that were so well accounted for but then one day simply vanished. Where was my
National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather
before it reappeared on my parson's table? And where had my dad gone? I kept looking at his things next to the entertainment center, but I couldn't find a clue.

Absurdity loves company. That's an elusive yet immutable law of nature, like gravity or the seventhinning stretch. A few months after my father's death, the solemnity of his passing surrendered to an unprecedented barrage of silliness. As if to mock his levelheadedness, people who should have known better cropped up to offer pointless comments, proffer worthless advice, or just generally torment me.

My mom was in her front yard watering the impatiens when her longtime across-the-street neighbor Judy Teany strolled up the driveway to tell her, “Don and I really hate it that you have to eat dinner alone.”

Thinking that an invitation for a meal was in the air, Mom answered, “It's just not the same without Bob. Sometimes I think God took the wrong person.”

Mrs. Teany clucked sympathetically. “Whenever Don and I sit down for dinner and look over and see your kitchen light and know you're by yourself, we feel terrible. So we've been having dinner in the basement.”

My mom reported this story to me over the phone.

“She said
what?”
I sputtered. I couldn't believe I had heard the conversation correctly. But she repeated it, leaving me to wonder why her good friend Mrs. Teany was delivering lines out of a bad TV sitcom. A couple of weeks earlier, my mom had reported talking to a friend in West Virginia who had been planning on visiting that summer with her husband. According to my mom, once Mrs. Dorst had heard the news about my dad, she told her, “Gee, Bette, I don't think we'll be keeping in touch anymore. Now that Bob's not around, Gene won't have anyone to talk to.”

“Was that for me?” asked Linda as I stood next to the phone, trying to figure out my mom's friends. It never dawned on me that there could be a different explanation for these remarks. But that explanation wouldn't become apparent for another few months.

“It was my mom with an incredible story.”

“I thought it might have been someone responding to my ad.”

“Ad?” I immediately blanked out the conversation with my mom.

For ordinary folks, the first batch of crocuses poking their heads above the cold ground signified the arrival of spring. For Linda, as soon as overnight temperatures struggled above freezing and the first few migratory birds straggled into our yard, it was time to start placing a barrage of classified ads in the local weekly newspaper for gardeners, barn cleaners, duck-pen gravel changers, rubbish haulers, and animal-enclosure builders—things she couldn't do herself because of chronic back problems and I wouldn't do out of chronic laziness. Linda's ads addressed more esoteric topics, too. She sought people willing to drive her to her Grandville chiropractor, asked gardeners to share their “rare and beautiful perennials,” offered to pay for a dependable spot for finding morel mushrooms, and rather hopelessly solicited pet sitters
for boisterous animals with complex morning, noon, and nighttime schedules.

If I didn't get stuck fielding endless phone calls from people who had misread the ads, I wound up having to meet a number of highly questionable respondents. When Linda advertised that she was available to do odd jobs for the elderly and housebound, teenage girls would call to apply for the nonexistent helper position. When Linda asked for volunteers to write letters on animal rights topics, a reader might phone to find out if we wanted a duck. And a person who sounded reasonable over the phone more often than not exhibited an ominous twitch or disturbing character trait in the flesh. One fellow who called about yanking three sick shrubs out of our front garden obviously didn't have the strength to yank a fleck of lint off a sweater. He wheezed like a cracked boiler as he staggered around the yard to appraise the work, and merely talking while standing up seemed to tax his lung power. Linda finally told him we were just taking names at that moment, but if we didn't call him for this job, we would probably use him for something else. I had an envelope that needed licking, but he left before I could suggest it.

I brightened slightly at the thought of the ads. “Was one of them about Moobie?”

“I've been running that one for three weeks. But I do have good news.”

“You found a home for her?”

“I found a master gardener,” she beamed. “He's stopping by on Saturday to test our soil and tell me which plants would do best in which gardens.” A perplexed expression passed over her face, resembling the one that had just left mine. “There was something really odd about his telephone. I had to keep saying ‘over' when I was done talking, and we couldn't both talk at the same time. And
I can't call him back. If I want to get hold of him, I have to leave a message with the Just Around the Corner Bait Shop and Ammo Shack.”

“That isn't a good sign at all.”

“He knows a lot about plants and soils. He's a certified master gardener. But I didn't understand something he said something about having strokes.”

“He's had a stroke?”

“Not ‘a stroke.' He said he has some strokes every day.” She thought for a moment. “I think the word he used was ‘numerous' strokes. He said he has numerous strokes every day. He might have even said hundreds.”

“Please don't let him come here,” I begged. “Call the bait shop, and get us off the hook.”

O
UR CHARCOAL GREY
bunny Bertie lay stock-still in his cage. “Bertie?” I said. “Bertie?” Sometimes when he slept flat on his side facing the wall, I couldn't see him breathing. Because of his advanced age, this had started to unnerve me.

“Bertie,” I called again, but he didn't move. I bent down into a crouch. “Bertie, are you all right?” The instant I started to unlatch his cage door, he was up on all fours staring at me sideways, alert and ready to bolt from Bob the predator.

“It's okay,” I told him. “Sorry. Go back to bed.”

As I straightened with a groan, activity at the hummingbird feeder outside the window caught my eye. But hummingbirds weren't humming around it. Our hummingbird feeder had turned into a yellow jacket feeder. Leaving Bertie to wend his way back to the Land of Nod, I slogged downstairs and through the basement door to watch wasps flying back and forth between their food source and a nest in the ground next to our house.

In an overhang beneath our dining room was a small pile of decaying wood left over from my feeble attempts to harvest logs a full ten years earlier. Armed with a terrifyingly loud and, in my hands, dangerous twelve-inch chain saw, I had left no deadfall in our woods intact—unless the trees involved were larger than saplings, lay more than a few steps from the backyard fence, or their sawn products might challenge the loose musculature of my arms, shoulders, back, or demi-chest. The glorified sticks that eventually formed a pathetic hump against the house didn't even make good kindling for our woodstove. They went up as quickly as matches and burned about as long. Scraps of plywood abandoned in the barn by the former owners of the house worked much better. Once we began accumulating pet birds, I had my excuse to stop accumulating twigs. Wood smoke interfered with avian breathing passages as surely as exercise interfered with my lifestyle. So I left what remained of the pile to rot and form a habitat for ants. But without informing the ants, the yellow jackets had moved in.

I took down the feeder to rinse it off. One of the wasps buzzed around my head, grew bored with the uninspired scenery, and returned to the burrow. A few more streamed out, but they were more concerned with foraging than with sightseeing at Mount Bobmore. Gingerly I edged toward the woodpile and nudged one of the sticks with my boot. A couple of dozen yellow jackets shot out to investigate. I jumped back, brandishing the hummingbird feeder in self-defense. Although I hadn't laid bare much of their lair, I could see that a significant hive hid just below the surface. This was bad news, considering that the water spigot we used for duck-pen chores in temperate weather—and to water Linda's countless vegetable, flower, herb, and woodchuck-buffet gardens—was right above their nest.

Under normal circumstances, Linda would place a classified
ad, and within a week a swarm of cranks would phone asking if we had honey for sale. But there was no time to lose. Linda had to find a crank right away. A display ad in the local paper depicted a cartoon termite and wasp with maniacal grins chasing a person half their size. “Pest Problems? Ask an Expert,” urged the headline. Linda dialed the number in the ad instead.

“I'm in the process of ripping down a guy's wall right now,” grunted Mark the pest-control expert from his cell phone. “I won't be able to get over there for a while.”

“One thing,” said Linda. “Can you move the nest without hurting the bees?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“I don't want the yellow jackets killed. I just want them moved, if possible.”

“We don't do that, ma'am. I wouldn't know how to do it. It's far too dangerous.”

“How about if you came in the morning when they weren't moving around much because of the cold?” Linda asked. “Couldn't you just scoop them up while they were sleepy and move them out into our field?”

“Cold has no effect on yellow jackets,” he said.

“How come they're so subdued in the morning when it's cold?”

“Cold has no effect,” he repeated. “It's the dew. The morning dew gets their wings wet, and they can't fly around as well.”

“He said
what
?” I asked Linda when she recounted the conversation. “He actually said it was the dew?”

“Well, anyway, he's coming tomorrow sometime, he thought. He was kind of vague about everything—except about the cold having no effect on them. It might not even be tomorrow. But he said we're on his list.”

Later that evening, temperatures had fallen enough that I figured the well known “dew effect” would make the yellow jackets comparatively inactive. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to indulge in the classic mistake of prodding a wasp net with a broomstick. I decided that I could easily get back inside the basement before the sluggish squatters drew a collective bead on me, and I needed to see how difficult it might be to dislodge them.