Coop

by Michael Perry

  Today Don and Migena have both gone to college and found good jobs. They have endured tortuous paper chases in order to maintain their legal status, with my parents filling out form after form and vouching for them with government officials as necessary. They show up at birthdays and holidays, and once even managed to get some of their relatives into Wisconsin to go deer hunting with us. I am proud to call them brother and sister. “How many kids are in your family?” people still ask, and now you know why I never have a number. We’re all spread out now, over geography and vocation. I have a sister Lee in Montana. My sister Suzy served in the army and is now raising a son and taking college classes. Jud lives in a group home and I haven’t seen him in years. Somewhere out there I hope Eve is well and Larry is walking strong. Back home, Mom and Dad are living the empty-nest syndrome writ large. Dad doesn’t seem to mind. Shortly after Kathleen and Migena graduated, I visited the farm. “I got up the other morning and a miracle happened,” said Dad. “For the first time in forty years, I was first in line at the toaster!”

  Once I asked Mom what drove her and Dad to start taking in children all those years ago. I was expecting some philosophical and possibly faith-based answer. Not so. “When we were still dating, your dad told me he wanted sixteen kids,” she said. I chuckled. “No, really!” she said. “I said, No sir! Six, maybe, but not sixteen! So we decided we wanted to have some of our own kids, adopt some, and take some in through foster care. It was just always our plan.” Her own parents had begun taking in foster children when their youngest daughter—my aunt Annie—said she wanted a younger sister. Mom says she was reading the newspaper at the time and found an ad seeking local foster parents. She showed it to her mother—my grandma Peterson—and shortly they took in their first foster child. Grandma kept a photo album of each child she and Grandpa fostered, and when she died there were twenty-eight children in the book.

  Even with the baby yet to be born, Anneliese has brought up the subject of adoption and foster care. I once heard a man say that when a woman asks, “Honey, do you think we should have another baby?” he might as well start setting up the crib, but I’m not sure where this will go, or if. It has not been one long gauzy shot for my folks. You cannot take in that legion of children over the years and find joy with every one. Many arrived with their own history of troubles. There were the runaways. There were the children returned to abusive homes through error and faulty oversight. On the upside, I think my siblings would mostly agree that our full house seasoned us to accept the unusual as usual. We were often perplexed by people who were uncomfortable or even fearful in the presence of an obviously mentally disabled individual, since we had learned to assume that if someone was barking at their macaroni, they always barked at their macaroni. Then again I also learned hard lessons about my own character, angrily sticking up for my one of my sisters when a kid in the library teased her about her disfigured eye one day, then mocking and tripping her cruelly the next. In the ever-changing cast of tykes carrying damage—congenital, traumatic, physical, emotional—we came to see that even in the midst of our own warm childhood, all was not well everywhere.

  There is every reason for me to emulate my parents, but I am hesitant because after watching them for my lifetime I know exactly what the workload entails, and I’m not sure I’m up to it even on a small scale. I am keenly aware of what it cost to provide us that rich life. My sister Rya arrived on a day when we were making lumber. I remember walking in for lunch with the rest of the sawmill crew, standing on the porch steps sweeping sawdust off my jeans, then walking into the kitchen to find a tiny blue-tinged baby asleep in a bassinet beside the table. Rya had Down syndrome, and the blue tinge was caused by a congenital heart defect common in Down syndrome children. In Rya’s case, the cardiac issues were further complicated by a lung disorder.

  For the next five years, as Rya underwent a series of surgeries and hospitalizations, our house took on the trappings of a pediatrics ward. Green oxygen bottles lined the porch. A lazy Susan on the counter was covered with medication bottles and there was digitalis in the refrigerator. Mom was forever coming from and going to doctor appointments and blood draws. Some of Rya’s more serious surgeries were done in the University of Wisconsin teaching hospital in Madison. I accompanied Mom on many of these trips while Dad stayed back to milk the cows and care for the rest of the crew. Once when Rya took a precipitous turn for the worse I remember holding oxygen on her as Mom drove through a blizzard to the emergency room. In addition to changing Rya’s diapers, we kids learned how to change her dressings and inspect the sutures for signs of infection. When my sister Kathleen was a toddler in footie pajamas she would tip Rya across her lap, cup her hands, and clap up and down Rya’s upper back to loosen the congestion, just as she had seen Mom and Dad do.

  Rya learned to speak only a modest few words, and even those were difficult for anyone outside the family to understand, but Mom expanded her ability to communicate by teaching her some sign language. She loved to clown—after going to a high school track meet, she would stand by the kitchen sink, raise one finger to the sky, go “bang,” and then do a high-speed toddle across the kitchen floor, laughing all the way. She entertained us as much as her heart and lungs would allow.

  In the end, it was her lungs that failed her. She needed more and more oxygen. When she could no longer get enough air to sleep lying down, Dad built her an inclined bench from boards he had sawn himself and she took to sleeping sitting up, resting her head on her thin arms, her favorite doll by her side with its own oxygen mask. In the background the oxygen humidifier bubbled with a sound that suggested a brook in a meadow. The doctors said there was nothing more to be done, and finally they were right. Soon she required round-the-clock care. Dad sold the cows—the family’s only source of regular income—so he could split shifts with Mom. The night before she died, we were all in the living room around the couch that had become her bed. She was smiling widely and enjoying our company. At one point I went to the kitchen, and when I looked back in the living room I saw that she had removed her oxygen mask and clambered down from the couch. She was making the rounds of the room, spending a moment with each sibling. Eventually she toddled into the kitchen and found me. We went back in the living room then, and that is what I remember, our whole family gathered around and Rya with her mask back on, her breath a pulse of fog against the transparent green plastic, and in the morning she was gone.

  On August 8, 1977, I rose from a metal folding chair in the basement of the Moose Hall in Barron, Wisconsin, during the closing verse of “Close Thy Heart No More,” and committed my life to Christ. Sometimes when folks professed they rose with joyful weeping. Other times their faces would be twisted in some combination of relief and holy fear like Sam at the end of Robert Duvall’s The Apostle. But although my heart was beating high I was composed, because I had been thinking about this for a long time, and I was ready. The conversion had been under way since the day I read “The Hell-Bound Train” and gave up cussing, and was herded to its conclusion by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse during a stretch when I got to reading The Revelation of St. John the Divine in bed alone at night. To paraphrase Townes Van Zandt on the blues, after Revelation, everything else is just zippity-doo-dah.

  I believed, and believed fully. And when—many years later—my belief turned to doubt, I left the church the same way I came in—quietly, over time. I have no cataclysmic story to tell, no single precipitating crisis. I can summon a little residual crankiness over the usual anecdotal complaints—workers running folks off over matters of hemline and haircut, pious elders with televisions hidden in the armoire—but I would never cut it as a bitter heretic. By and large, the people I worshipped with were a humble, tolerant bunch, content to pursue quiet example over thunderous harangue. So much so, in fact, that when in my wandering I hear someone snarking on fundamentalist Christians, my first thought is, Hey—those are my people you’re talking about.

  When you drift as I have, the Frie
nds call it “losing out.” Lately I wonder if I was out before I was in, if the voice of Paul Baumer put an existential whisper in my ear, casting shadows between black and white. I wonder too what sort of self-pitying train wreck I might have become had I not been raised by two people whose daily actions transcended my dogmatic quibbles and still do. Sometimes Mom apologizes to us kids, saying she and Dad took on too much, and that we suffered as a result. She says this, and I think of all the books, and prayers before meals at the big table, and the parade we made trooping up the stairs to bed while Dad played “On Top of Old Smoky” one more time, and how cozy it was with ten of us crammed in the Volkswagen after gospel meeting on a winter night. Or how after twenty years of opening my emergency medical kit, the first thing I think of when I see that green bottle is Rya on her last night bravely beaming.

  Anneliese and Amy have bundled up and gone cross-country skiing out the ridge. Two days ago we had a blizzard that laid down a thick batting of snow. The spruce tree limbs remain bent beneath daubs of white, and the wind has pushed a four-foot drift around the garage and right up to my office door. While the flakes were still dropping, Amy celebrated with repeated swan dives from the top step of the office stairwell, planting her face in the peak of the drift and chewing snow.

  I can see them now from my office window, gliding back to the yard in the fading light. Amy is leading in her blue snowsuit and goggles and Anneliese coming up behind, her current state betrayed by just a hint of top-heaviness beneath all the bundling. Moments like this, when I see the two of them together at a distance, I often think of the three years of history they have on me. It’s not unsettling; it’s just one of those hiccups in perspective that can leave me momentarily disoriented. I shut my computer down and head for the house. We’ve planned an evening together, watching Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on Satan’s glowing box. In the kitchen Amy is apple-cheeked and giddy. “Watching” is a rare treat, and she bounces back and forth between the refrigerator and the counter, helping me put together a tray of cheese and vegetables while Anneliese pops corn.

  Upstairs we settle in on a mattress, our backs propped against a stack of pillows. Amy snuggles in between us, trilling with happiness. After three years of being a visitor in this house, I’m still getting used to the idea that we live here now. I think of my parents in that ’56 Chevy, leaving Nekoosa. As the movie begins and Amy turns her attention to the screen, I reach an arm around Anneliese and pull her closer, squeezing Amy between us.

  CHAPTER 4

  Winter is on the fizzle, and Mister Big Shot is looking for love.

  Mister Big Shot is a cock pheasant. He has been appearing at the edge of our yard nearly every morning for several weeks now, and he is plainly addled by love. He sports a glorious set of head feathers: blood-splash eye patch, bottle-green Batman cowl, a pristine white collar. The colors startle the eye, bright in the brown weeds like scraps of birthday balloon. Sadly, once he follows his beak out of the weeds, Mister Big Shot reveals the limits of his machismo, because somewhere along the line the poor bird lost his tail feathers. You have to figure the bobtail is a drawback on the dating scene. Like a bachelor with a bald spot, he must find ways to compensate. And so he inflates his chest, struts the perimeter of the yard, and crows blusterously.

  Thus we call him Mister Big Shot.

  The first time I saw him, I was stepping out the front door after breakfast. He had emerged from the row of spruce trees beside the pole barn. I froze and whispered over my shoulder to Amy, “Come here, look, look!” I cautioned her to move stealthily, not wanting to scare him off.

  Turns out we couldn’t scare him away short of a shotgun. The relationship has gone from breathtaking Animal Planet moment to There’s that knuckleheaded pheasant again. For all my would-be woodsy knowledge, it took me a few sightings before I caught on: Wait a minute…isn’t he supposed to have tail feathers? We didn’t have a lot of pheasants around when I was growing up, so I tracked down some pheasant photographs on the Web to check myself. Sure enough. Most male pheasants have grand plumage sprouting out their hinders—sweeping quills of the sort you might use to sign ceremonial parchment, or to accessorize your Robin Hood cap. I wrote to a wildlife biologist and asked what might have gone wrong. He told me the feathers could have been snatched by a predator in a near-miss. Also, he said, sometimes the tail freezes to the ground during cold snaps, and when the pheasant takes flight, some of the feathers remain fixed. I picture the pheasant windmilling like mad, getting zero lift, then—puh-luck!—he blasts wide-eyed skyward. The biologist also said if the pheasant was pen-raised, it might have broken its tail feathers while tussling with other pheasants. Mister Big Shot does seem a little too tame for his own good (we can get pretty close before he bolts), so perhaps he was raised by humans. On the other hand, the biologist said only 10 percent of released birds survive the winter, so in that case Mister Big Shot would have earned the right to strut.

  In the process of our speculation about the missing tail feathers, I tell Amy the legend of how the bear lost his tail: Bear’s friend Fox convinces him he can catch a fish by dangling his tail through a hole in the ice. Bear sits there all night long. In the morning he feels a nibble, but when he leaps up, his tail—which has frozen in the ice—is pulled off. A gruesome story, as many fables are. Amy draws a connection to the plight of Mister Big Shot, and we discuss whether or not he might have been ice fishing. Then Amy asks me to pretend I am Mister Big Shot at the moment he did the power-molt. I flap my arms, wince with feigned effort, then holler “Yee-owch!” and look behind me in dismay and wonder. Amy laughs and asks me to do it again. But then she goes sober on me. “Will he ever get his feathers back?” I tell her the biologist said they would grow back in August. Until then, we will know the bird when we see him.

  Long before my father had cows, he was a shepherd.

  One of the Friends by Nekoosa had sheep, and Dad says that’s where he got the bug. When he moved to the farm in 1966, he began to gather the flock. He got four ewes from his brother-in-law over by Hillsdale, and bought another four from a local man named Earl. Earl wanted thirty-six dollars. Dad wrote a check. Earl looked at the check and then he looked at Dad, and then Earl said, “This better be good.” Dad reminded me recently that this used to be sheep country. “Lots of people used to have sheep,” he said. “The Mareses, Norths, Skaws—they all had sheep.” He’s right. I tend to recall my farm childhood through the frame of my youth—when it was dominated by classic family dairying. I had forgotten the early days when farming was still a patchwork endeavor holding the line against the narrower specialization to come. I start working my way around the repurposed or vanished farmsteads all around the township, and sure enough, I do remember these people having sheep. “You sold your milk all year round, in the winter you logged, and in the fall you sold your lambs,” says Dad. In other words, you kept a diversified portfolio.

  Ask my father what he “does,” and nine times out of ten he will reply, “I’m just a dumb sheep farmer.” But listen to a dumb sheep farmer for long, and you’ll realize the self-deprecation (rooted in the relative unlikelihood that sheep will put you on the fast track to the Forbes 500) does a poor job of masking some underlying affection for husbandry. My dad, a man not given to pet names, often refers to his “woollies,” and once when someone suggested that sheep weren’t too bright, Dad responded with a question and answered it himself: “Y’know what you get when you inflate a sheep, paint it black and white, add two faucets, and remove its brain?”

  He waits a beat. “A cow.”

  From my largely oblivious childhood perspective, Dad’s sheep were a sideline, whereas cows required our daily attention. When you weren’t working with the cows you were working on chores predicated on cows. The sheep were just always there. Gray lumps in the distant pasture, only remembered a couple times a year when we rounded them up for worming, or shearing, or when we cut the buck from the flock.

  In the early part of the year
, however, the sheep begin to wedge their way back into the schedule until they dominate. In February Dad sets up the pens and feeders and gathers the flock to be shorn, after which—having lost their winter coats—they take up permanent residence in the lambing shed until spring and the grass return.

  Lambing season amounts to a month of insufficient catnaps. You tromp to the sheep shed every couple of hours, around the clock, four weeks straight, until the last ewe delivers. The thing you’re looking for is a sheep showing signs of imminent birth. She may be pawing the straw, circling, or simply looking distracted. A ewe experiencing the early twinges of labor will sequester herself off along a wall or in a corner. At the onset of a contraction an otherwise placid animal will extend her neck, raise her head, roll back her upper lip, and wrinkle her nose. A laboring ewe will grunt softly, as if she is being nudged in the belly (I hear a chorus of female voices: As she is, Einstein!). Another means of early detection: Put out fresh hay. As her compatriots rush the feeders like woolly pigs, watch for the ewe who remains apart—she’s next.