by Sean Flynn
I muted a laugh. “Yeah, well, you’d be surprised.”
“Who doesn’t like a peacock?” Emmett suddenly wanted to know.
I decided not to tell him about Palos Verdes or any other gruesome episodes I’d come across. A few weeks earlier, I’d gone to Hawaii for a story about a false alarm involving an incoming ballistic missile. No one died, but more than a million people believed they would be dead in forty minutes or less, and I was interested in how people would spend those last moments. While I was there, I met a lawyer named Earle Partington who once defended an old woman after she beat a peacock to death with a baseball bat. There are peacocks all over the Hawaiian Islands. A New Zealander named Francis Sinclair brought the first ones in the 1860s—Princess Ka’iulani adored them; there is a statue in Waikiki of her feeding one—and there are some now in zoos and botanical parks. But there are also feral colonies, including one in a complex of condominium towers in Mākaha, on the northwest coast of Oahu. Most of the residents tolerate them, and many even enjoy having them.
Sandra Maloney, however, damn near lost her mind. She said she was sleep-deprived and depressed from the constant squawking and hooting and pooping. One afternoon in May 2009, near the barbecue grills, she grabbed a male by his train and swung at him with her bat. She missed, swung again, and connected with his head. The kill was not clean: The peacock stumbled around, one eye dangling out of the socket, and tumbled down a few steps before it died. Maloney said she was going to cook it, but a security guard called police before she could get the bird up to her condo.
She was charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty, pleaded not guilty, and hired Partington to defend her at trial. He argued to the jury that peacocks are pests and that there is no Hawaiian law against killing pests. “They’re essentially vermin,” he told me. “They’re rats with feathers.” (That is not an uncommon position: Thirteen months after Maloney bludgeoned one to death, Honolulu officials had eighteen of the birds killed at the Koko Crater Botanical Garden. “The purpose of the botanical gardens is to preserve native plants,” a spokesman for the city said, “not provide a home for nonindigenous peafowl that are noisy and relieve themselves everywhere.”) The jury found Maloney not guilty in less than two hours.
The law at the time was vague enough that, as a legal matter, it was okay to beat a peacock to death in Hawaii. Seeing as how most people find such behavior abhorrent, the law has since been tweaked to make clear that animal cruelty statutes apply to all living creatures, even pests and vermin.
I had plenty of other material, though. “That’s an interesting question,” I said to Emmett, having remembered something not bloody. “I was reading about this place in India where the farmers talk about ‘the peacock menace.’ It’s their national bird and it’s sacred and everything, but they’re wrecking the crops.”
Emmett looked skeptical. “Where?”
I searched notes on my phone. “This place, for one,” I said, pointing at Punjaipuliampatti on a map. Wild peacocks can strip forty percent of a field’s crop yield, I told him. “Trust me, it’s true. So not everyone likes a peacock.”
The African gray said “Oh shit” in a muted bird voice, and then the rooster crowed next to my ear like a siren.
“Carl isn’t a menace,” Emmett said when the racket subsided. “He’s Carl.” About that, he was spot-on. To be a menace, Carl would need to have much more going for him, starting with a full set of proper feathers and higher self-esteem. Carl in that little cage with his one keeling ocellus could just about break your heart.
* * *
A week later, Mr. Pickle inched toward me, stutter-stepping, moving one foot forward and back like a short loop of video. This was a new development. I had a blueberry at the tip of my fingers, and I was watching him from the corner of my eye. Maybe if I didn’t look at him, I thought, he’d see me as less of a threat, though really, that shouldn’t have been a concern anymore, even for a bird.
The berry rolled off my fingers. Mr. Pickle jabbed his head down, grabbed it, took two quick steps back.
I reloaded, held my arm out again, turned my head. Ethel was watching, shifting her stare from my face to my fingers and back. I’d always thought she’d be the brave one to take the first treat from my hand.
Mr. Pickle twitched in my peripheral vision.
I felt a firm peck on my fingertip, and the berry was gone.
Not a triumphant moment, exactly, but a satisfying one. Anything one tries to accomplish for seven months and twenty-four days will, in the end, at least be that: satisfying. I was going to share this development with Dr. Burkett later that afternoon, when I dropped off more blueberries and food, but I suspected he might not share my satisfaction. The more I thought about it, the more ludicrous it seemed, like I was a man with far too much time to kill. Martha Stewart wouldn’t waste that many hours coaxing a bird to take a berry from her hand. To have peacocks was probably enough; she didn’t need them to bond with her.
I said hello to Julie at her desk, and she waved me toward the cage room. “Hey,” Burkett called out cheerily when he saw me passing the doorway of the OR. He was seated at the far end of the operating table and was wearing a dark bandana printed with feathers tied around his head, and glasses with magnifying lenses and a bright light shining from the bridge, like any surgeon. “We got your bird in here.”
That was morbidly obvious. Carl was on his back on the operating table, legs up, wings flopping out to either side like long, warped shelves. His head hung down from the table, and a tube connected to a tank of anesthetic gas was taped to his beak. Two nurses monitored his vitals and retrieved tools and otherwise assisted. Blue surgical paper covered most of Carl’s breast and neck except for an opening at the base of his throat, where Burkett was starting an incision. I worked my way around to his end of the table, tentatively at first, like Mr. Pickle stalking a blueberry, until I was hovering over Burkett’s shoulder. I’d never seen a bird cut open that wasn’t already dead.
Burkett made a hole about the size of my thumb, through which he threaded a rubber tube about eighteen inches long. Then he used a syringe the size of a turkey baster to squirt water through the tube and into Carl’s gut. “Lavage,” Burkett said. “Washing out his stomach, see if we can force some of those stones out.”
Water sputtered back out almost immediately, as clear as it was going in. Burkett forced more through the tube, caught the return gush in one of those stainless-steel cat dishes. On the fourth or fifth squirt, a few tiny pebbles and undigested food trickled from the tube. By the seventh, the liquid was running a flat forest green, mostly acid and bile, I gathered.
Burkett was trying to hold a syringe, a tube, and a steel bowl all at once. He bobbled the bowl, tipped it a bit, and I snapped a hand out, steadied it to catch my poisoned peacock’s stomach juices. It crossed my mind briefly that Burkett and two professional nurses probably did not need my help or, for that matter, want an untrained hand suddenly darting into the surgical arena. But I chased that thought away. I’d trained chickens to jump, by God, and a peacock to eat from my hand, and now I was assisting in an avian procedure so complicated it had a French name. Lavage. I’d need to remember that word when I told the story to the boys.
The lavage water was coming back up mostly clear again. The big rocks were still down there. For the next four hours, Burkett rooted around in Carl’s stomach with a long cable that had miniature grabbers and a teeny camera at the end so he could see what he was doing on a computer screen. The blue surgical paper had fallen away, and the opening in Carl’s throat had expanded, a wet red gash against the deep blue-green of his breast. When Burkett inserted the grabbers, the light from the camera made Carl’s insides glow red, like a feathered jack-o’-lantern that had been carved with very little imagination. It was all very high-tech and labor-intensive for a bird who had poisoned himself in a garbage coop.
No one told me to move, so I didn’t. I texted Louise. Operating on Carl. Very cool. I’m helping!
>
Burkett pulled out as many rocks as he could, which was most of them, and then decided to sew up Carl’s throat. I assumed some of the feathers on the periphery of the incision would get in the way, so I silently volunteered my hand to hold them at bay. No one objected. As Burkett was putting in the final stitches, I asked how long it would be before Carl was up and around. “As soon as the anesthesia wears off,” he said. He was sewing, so he didn’t see me raise a dubious eyebrow. “He’s a bird. Birds don’t get to recuperate. In the wild, they’d get eaten.”
Carl started waking up almost as soon as the gas was turned off. There were a few little stones left in his stomach, but there were no bright points of metal when Burkett X-rayed him two days later, and his blood work came back clean. On the first Sunday in March—three weeks after I brought Carl in and twelve days after Emmett tried to feed him quartered grapes—Burkett called me to come get my bird.
Calvin went with me, a mix of Sunday-morning boredom and a twelve-year-old’s curiosity. The door was unlocked when we got there, but lights in the front were off because technically the place was closed. We found Burkett in the operating room hunched over a caique, a bird approximately the size of Carl’s head, which made me realize he must have an exceptionally precise and delicate touch.
There was a different nurse working with him, a sandy-haired woman about my age. Her name was Valerie.
“I heard about your bird,” she said, glancing away from a monitor just long enough to make eye contact. “The poor baby. You need some sand.”
“Sand? For what?”
“For his pen. Put down four or five inches of sand, and he’ll have something nice and soft to walk on, and he won’t be able to scratch anything else out of the dirt. And all the liquid, it filters down through the sand so you don’t have to deal with it.”
“Oh my. That’s brilliant. How did I not think of that? It’d be like a giant cat box.”
Valerie smiled and nodded. “And the liquid,” she said again, “it all… filters… down.” Another nod. “And sprinkle a lot of salt on the ground first. That’ll kill any parasites that might try crawling up.”
Calvin nudged me. He wanted to get Carl and go home, not talk peacocks with a stranger. We thanked both Valerie and Burkett and went looking for Carl in the room with avian patients in cages and crates. The naked macaw was still there, but Calvin’s eye caught Carl’s bright blue breast first. He smiled, slid down on one knee, said, “Hey, buddy, it’s us.” Carl did not move, but he blinked.
It was at this point that I realized I had no idea how to get a convalescing peacock out of a cage and into a feed bag. If he catches you good, Burkett echoed in my head, you’re gonna bleed a lot.
I sheepishly took a step back, leaned in to the OR. “Um, Doc? How do I do this again?”
His head bobbed with a small laugh. “Valerie?”
“Of course, darlin’, I’ll help you.” There was a rasp in her voice and a maternal warmth in her accent.
The trick, as I witnessed, is in speed and authority. Valerie bent down, opened Carl’s cage, and, without hesitating long enough to blink, reached one arm across his back, pulled him in tight to her side, grabbed his feet with her other hand, and stood back up. Carl made one instinctive thrash. “Settle down,” she told him in a tone that was soothing and firm all at once. Carl obeyed.
“That was pretty badass,” I muttered to Calvin.
“You learn. I’ve got five peacocks, a boy and four girls. Always happy to help. So call me if you need anything.”
Peacocks. Boy and girl peacocks. I liked her.
I looped twine around Carl’s ankles, just below the spurs, the way she told me to, and then held a Mule City bag while she maneuvered him in. His crest poked from the hole I’d cut, which I immediately realized was the same dumb mistake I’d made once. A properly bagged bird is subdued and defeated, but Carl was breaking for daylight. His head was out, followed by his entire neck. The hole tore slightly but held at his shoulders.
Valerie wrapped a length of nylon rope around the sack, pinning Carl’s wings and feet to his torso. “Now, one of you is gonna have to hold him,” she said, looking at Calvin, “and I’m guessing that’s you.” He laughed nervously. “No, really,” she said. “You have to hold him.”
In the parking lot, Calvin situated himself in the passenger seat while I held our trussed bird under my arm, not squeezing, exactly, but with a notable stiffness. “Ready?” Calvin nodded apprehensively. I slowly lowered Carl, holding him now with both hands, onto Calvin’s lap. “Put your hands right behind mine,” I said, “and push down, but not too hard. Just hold on to him.” He moved mechanically, rigidly, and the knuckles in his thumbs whitened.
I closed the door gently, as if a rough bump might startle Carl into a slashing panic. Walking around to the other side of the car, I wondered if this was terrible parenting, endangering my child by forcing him to hold a large wild animal. Then again, Carl was not exactly a honey badger. Actually, he was sitting as I’d initially imagined a bagged peacock would, his body restrained in some mysteriously efficient way yet his expression calm and regal, refusing to concede he’d been bundled up like produce.
Inside the bag, Carl was shitting profusely. So much that it leaked through the Mule City weave and onto Calvin’s leg. But the boy did not move. He kept his eyes on the back of Carl’s head, as if he was watching for the early warnings of a bird frenzy and wasn’t going to be caught unaware. I quietly declared this to be an enriching experience, a boy wrangling a peacock with his father. He relaxed his grip enough to give Carl a cautiously comforting pat with two fingers, and a burp of pride bubbled in me. My son was focused, calm, exactly the kind of partner a man needs when he’s transporting a shitting, sharp-taloned peacock in a hatchback.
Chapter Fifteen
The sixth Baron Moncreiff stalked the pebbled drive in front of his castle, waving a nubbin of fruitcake and calling his peacocks. He was hollering “C’mon,” but between his accent and his cadence, it came out as a single rounded syllable booming across Scottish fields that bent away into the distance. He bellowed from in front of his castle for a minute or so, shambled across the lawn toward the hedges to try over there, then returned to the drive.
He did not look like I thought a baron might. Nor did he look like a baronet—higher than most knights, lower than a baron—of which he is the sixteenth in a line winding back to 1626. Rather, Lord (as barons are somewhat confusingly addressed) Moncreiff—or, less formally, Rhoderick—had the rumpled insouciance common to people who’ve been landed gentry for so many centuries that they no longer fret about keeping up appearances. He was wearing, on this bright midday, corduroys that had gone shiny at the knees and a shapeless faded green sweater, and his white hair spiraled from his head in a shaggy approximation of a monk’s ring. He seemed just a kindly man of certain years who enjoys, among other things, feeding his birds.
That was why I had come to see him at his castle, which did not look any more like a castle than Rhoderick looked like a lord, even though it was right there in the name, Tullibole Castle. It is more of a moderately large and very old stone house decorated with the requisite accoutrements of a castle: a small tower, turrets pasted to the exterior walls, and what looks like a machicolation, which is an opening high up through which boiling oil could be poured upon marauders. Inside, a narrow stairway winds up to the great room, a boxy cavern the size of a community theater and bone-cold because the fireplace is unlit, and there are portraits on the walls of people who appear to have lived in several different centuries. “Ancestors and such,” Rhoderick told me, though with no enthusiasm to elaborate; the house had been in the Moncreiff family more than three hundred years, and it would have taken the better part of a week to get through all those biographies.
It occurred to me that Tullibole was a castle in the same way that my home is a farm: a reasonable, manageable facsimile. The lands surrounding Rhoderick’s castle are exponentially vaster, with fields and
woods and a moat-ish stream; and the outbuildings are substantially larger and more interesting than our sagging barn and old brick smokehouse in desperate need of repointing. But I convinced myself the basic comparison, one of scale, was workable. We weren’t so different, the baron and I.
Rhoderick suspects there were peacocks on the property long ago. “In a Jane Austen–y kind of period,” he said. But the basis for that suspicion is a single drawing that’s framed and hanging in the great room. The castle is in the center, flanked by towering oaks in full leaf. A woman and child, in what reasonably could be interpreted as Regency-era clothing, are walking toward the front door. A peacock and a peahen are in the left foreground, and another peacock is off by himself on the right. Rhoderick did not know, however, if that was an accurate representation of Tullibole or, rather, a landscape architect’s interpretation of what could be at Tullibole. Apparently, none of those ancestors and such bothered to conduct a census.
But peacocks for certain had been on the grounds of Tullibole for at least fifty years, since Rhoderick’s father, the fifth Lord Moncreiff, brought three to the castle in the nineteen sixties. At first he kept them in pens, long and narrow and peaked. “Imagine a twelve-foot Toblerone,” Rhoderick told me. He eventually released those three and they became a dozen and then two dozen, the population dipping with predation—herons, disappointingly, are a menace to peachicks—and rebounding with successful hatching seasons. Rhoderick isn’t sure exactly how many peacocks and peahens are loose on the grounds, there are so many.
Surely Rhoderick and his wife, Lady Alison, would have answers. Surely they would know what one does with peacocks.
“C’mon c’mon c’mon,” he was still calling from the drive. His peacocks did not come with the vigor and glee of Comet and Snowball. But then I saw a glint of blue moving in the field beyond the gate, slowly walking toward us. Already I was learning. Peacocks required more patience than chickens.