Coop

by Michael Perry

  The day after the pigs arrive, Amy harvests two of the radishes that survived the excavations of Fritz the Dog. She holds them up to either side of her ears, and I take a picture. She is beaming, her front teeth still missing. Then she runs off to rinse and eat them. I remember doing the same thing at her age, rinsing a spring radish under the brass standpipe beside the garden. I remember the cold water made my knuckles ache, I remember watching the dirt dissolve and flush from the root hairs to leave them feathery and white; I remember the red skin shining beneath the film of water. I always nibbled the bland taproot first. And then that first full bite through the scarlet skin, the crisp crunch, the excitement of springtime snack food fresh from the ground. Over by our standpipe, Amy’s lack of front teeth put her at a disadvantage, but she’s gnawing assiduously, the radish jammed way back in a corner of her mouth so she can get at it with her molars. Her lips are pulled off-center, but I’d say the crinkle in her nose substitutes for a smile.

  Now that the pigs are in place, I am going to get serious about building that chicken coop. As is standard procedure when I say “I” am going to build or fix something of any size or substance, there is a technical adviser/handholder involved—in this case, my pal Mills. Mills is a good man, but he has regularly led me down the path to iniquity—it was he who got me started on carp shooting, and I have lost a ton of man-hours in the endeavor. He also got me hooked on auctions, and we do spend a little too much time on a certain popular online auction site. My weakness is anything to do with my hometown of New Auburn, Wisconsin, or pretty much anything sporting a vintage International Harvester logo. As for Mills, he is constantly on the prowl for anything to do with firefighting. He has an astounding collection of antique fire extinguishers, and his driveway is lined with discarded hydrants.

  Mills is especially valuable in an endeavor like building the chicken coop, because he has a lot of very cool tools—chop saws, nail guns, and so on—and he is quite handy. Even more important, he is a professional-class scavenger. I don’t mean a guy who picks something up at a thrift sale now and then (he does), I’m talking about a guy who goes to nearly every auction within a forty-mile radius; is an eBay power seller; knows the guy in the basement of the local grocery store who has all the free five-gallon buckets; can put a word in for you with the guy who handles all the scrap wood from the furniture factory; and—this is huge—is on a first-name basis with the dump guy! Mills owns a farmstead. His red barn is jammed with every conceivable form of potentially useful scrap and geegaw—steel barrels, discarded RV siding, plumbing supplies, secondhand plywood and discontinued signage, doorknobs, hinges, and used Styrofoam sheeting. Some of the best stuff is outside, hidden from sight behind the pine trees that ring the property. Mills calls these stashes his “Sanford and Son piles.” Treated posts, barrels, trailer frames, angle iron—you name it, somewhere out there in the brambles beneath a tarp, he’s got it.

  The other day I introduced Mills to Craigslist, and our relationship may not survive. Problem is, our geographic search parameters overlap, plus we regularly covet the same items. Having been on the lookout for a radial arm saw, I was excited when I spotted one on Craigslist for a most reasonable price. It was located south of me in the tiny town of Humbird. In the photo the saw was posed in front of a red garage and looked promising. I contacted the seller immediately. Too late, he said. Someone had already claimed it. Two days later, I ran into Mills. “This Craigslist thing—woo-HOO!” he said. (In conversation, Mills runs heavy to italics.) “I got an amazing deal on a gorgeous saw!” “Poacher!” I said.

  Lately I have been scoring stuff from Craigslist nearly every week. Rain barrels, fence posts, lumber. I even managed to find another radial arm saw. It was a newer model than the one Mills stole, and I paid less. “JINKIES!” he said when I told him. Nowadays we regularly consult with each other before making contact on Craigslist items. It is my understanding that the original purpose of Craigslist was to help people in San Francisco locate apartments. I am tickled to think it wound up causing two knuckleheads in Wisconsin to fight over used barbed wire and secondhand pickle buckets.

  Since Mills has all the equipment and most of the supplies, we decide it will be easier to build the coop at his place, prefab style, then haul it over to our place in pieces. So I am on my way to his house now, with Amy in her booster seat behind me. With my schedule over the past year, “our” efforts to homeschool Amy have quickly devolved into Anneliese doing all the day-to-day hard work while I provide the occasional off-kilter field trip—in this case a morning spent constructing a chicken coop in the company of two grown men whose greatest aspirations tend to center around finding any excuse to shoot arrows at overgrown goldfish.

  “Where does Mr. Miller live?” asks Amy as we drive. “Mondovi,” I say. “Is that a city or a state?” asks Amy. This is a recurring lesson. We keep two large maps on the wall of Amy’s bedroom so she can track me when I call in from the road. Despite our efforts, Amy struggles with the difference between city, state, and country.

  “Mondovi is a city,” I say. “It’s in the state of…”

  “Wisconsin?” says Amy. Tentative, but correct.

  “Yes. And Wisconsin is in what country?”

  Silence.

  “The United…”

  “…States of America!”

  “Where does your daddy work?”

  “Denver.”

  “Is Denver a country or a state?”

  “A state?”

  “No…”

  “A country!”

  The exasperation hits me immediately. I am ashamed at how hard it is for me to maintain my patience.

  “No! Denver is a city. And Denver is in Colorado. That means Colorado is a…”

  Silence. Then, quietly, “…a country?”

  Tasting the dust of my molars, I make a mental note to shake Anneliese’s hand when we return and perhaps print her up some sort of framable certificate honoring her persistence. She would actually prefer that I handle the spelling lessons for a day. The thing is, fifteen minutes later we meet Mills for breakfast, and as Amy jaws with him on a wide range of topics (central theme: horses), I feel the exasperation dissipate in the face of pride in how she comports herself—politely, and with poise beyond her years. It is good for me as a parent to see her with a little rope to run, a chance to operate in the big world with the skills she has. Cities and states can wait. Worse comes to worst, she can carry an index card for the rest of her life.

  Amy calls Mills “Mr. Miller” because that is what I call him in her presence. I am old-school in this regard. I believe it benefits the child to know who the grown-ups are. “Heavy on the ‘Mister,’” my dad used to say.

  When we arrive at Mr. Miller’s house, it looks like the place has been preset for a shoot with This Old House. Several work-tables are arranged on the blacktop drive in front of the red barn, and each is stocked with a wide range of saws, hammers, screwdrivers, drills, nails, screws, earmuff hearing protectors, safety glasses, and a generous selection of fitted work gloves. The chop saw is on its stand and plugged in, the air compressor that powers the nail gun is all set with hose neatly coiled, and in a truly elegant touch, bottled water is chilling in a cooler.

  First thing I do is strap on my tool belt. Gosh, I like tool belts. Just the very look of them confers competence. I like the way the belt hangs gunslinger low and loose, the hammer dangling in its loop, the handle gently tapping at my thigh as I walk. I like the heft of the nail pouch at my hip, and the way the big fat tape measure slips neatly into its special pocket. I tend to overdo it on tape measures. At last count, I owned seven of them. But the thing is, you’re forever needing a tape measure for this little project or that, and my level of disorganization is such that the only useful countermeasure is to throw one in the cart on every other trip to the hardware store and just sow them willy-nilly all over the place. At this very moment I have two in my office, one in my car, a pair in the house, and at least three i
n the shop.

  I fit Amy with padded kneelers, safety goggles, and work gloves, and then hand her a hammer. She grins when she hefts it and looks around for something to hit—evidence that while variations persist, the love of gear crosses genders. In truth, part of the lesson we hope to convey today is that girls can build chicken coops, too. In Amy’s case, the lesson will be redundant: when the light fixture in my bathroom needed replacing, my mother-in-law—she who supported her children by climbing telephone poles for twenty years—did the job because bare wires leave me frightened and confused. She also put the phone line into my office. Amy’s grandmother in Colorado raised five kids and ramrodded the farm for twenty-seven years after her husband was killed in an accident. By way of contrast Amy has watched me struggle for twenty minutes to get two corners of a four-sided cold frame to match up. The explication of gender roles is all well and good, but it is likely my hand in this will be light. (Although as a fellow who put himself through nursing school by working as a cowboy in Wyoming, I have addressed the subject previously.) I do anticipate a time when I will have to explain to Amy that while most men are happy to see a woman in a tool belt, it is sadly for all the wrong reasons.

  If the coop project is to go well, it will all come down to Mills. I am a loyal laborer, and will pitch in full bore, but even with proper guidance I tend to run off the rails. Part of it is a patience issue. Once I get started, I want to finish. This leads to rushing and improper material usage, to say nothing of improper application of hardware—say, trying to drive finish nails with a plumb bob. And even when I do slow down and read the directions, things have a way of going wrong. Remember that electric fence I hooked up for the pigpen? I did the whole thing exactly right—spaced and sank three grounding rods instead of settling for just one, linked them together, and clamped (rather than just wrapping) the wire as indicated…a month passed before I went to open the shed door and discovered that I had run the ground wire in such a way that the door couldn’t slide on its rails without cutting the wire in two. If life was a state fair, I’d have a giant shoe box full of green ribbons embossed with the word PARTICIPANT.

  I want the chicken coop mounted on skids, as we intend to move our chickens around. Also, because it does not sit on a foundation, it is not viewed as a permanent structure and will therefore not be taxed as such, or so I believe until the assessor tells me otherwise and I pony up. Since the skids will be in direct contact with the ground, I tell Mills they need to be made of treated lumber. He grins. “Come with me!” Dressed in his sleeveless T-shirt, ball cap, white athletic socks, and Crocs, he leads us up a trail into the pine trees off the side of the yard, past several Sanford and Son piles, and then, with the civilized flourish of a sommelier pulling back the velvet curtain shrouding a particularly pricey corner of the wine cellar, he strips back a tarp to reveal a stack of beautiful green-treated six-by-six timbers that will be perfect for the job. We lug them back to the yard, saw the ends off at an angle, and begin framing up the floor.

  I try to involve Amy wherever I can—when we trim the ends of the skids, I show her how to use a carpenter square to draw a pencil line at the proper angle, and in between, how to stow the pencil behind her ear. Because the skids have to be the same length and we have four six-by-sixes to choose from, I give her the tape measure and let her find the two longest, then determine how much we have to cut from the longer of those two to make them the same length. This leads to a discussion of inches and feet and how when you write measurements on a scrap of board, inches are denoted with a double hatch and feet with a single. When Mr. Miller fires up the saw, we put on our earmuffs and afterward discuss the importance of hearing protection. When we make a mistake, I show her how to pull a nail, and I show her how to extend the reach of the hammer claw by putting a shim beneath the head. Once we get going on the deck, it is mostly a matter of driving straight nails into flat boards, so she can really go to town. She whales away at a steady pace, bending a nail now and then but just as quickly pulling it and grabbing another from the plastic Folger’s can. To make it easier to hit the underlying frame I show her how to use a chalk line, and of course she loves this—snapping the taut string with a cottony twang and watching the elongated cloud of purple chalk dust float away and dissipate on the breeze, then reeling the line in to recoat it with chalk, just like a fishing reel with no pole.

  We work into the afternoon. I try to keep teaching without being overbearing. I let her measure and mark the boards to be cut. I give her little problems, like, if we need one board sixteen inches long and another board two feet long, can we cut them both from this one long board? I find myself experiencing none of the frustration I felt during the city/state/country grump-up, and Amy takes the lessons well. But mostly she holds her hammer in both hands and haves at ’er. Perhaps the finest thing I teach her all day is how to keep a couple of extra nails in easy reach by holding them in your lips. She loves this, and is currently well-suited: the nails fit nicely where her incisors should be.

  At quitting time we have finished the deck. It doesn’t look like much—just a wooden floor on two large skids. But it’s a start. Mr. Miller took our picture just before we finished. There’s me, a lumpy bald guy in cheap sunglasses with sweat darkening his T-shirt collar, resting my hand on the shoulder of a gangly little gap-toothed girl in shorts and pink Crocs, her head higher against my sternum than even a month ago, squinting in the sun and quite literally standing on a good day’s work, and—I hope—on a little piece of her education.

  Back home, I am walking down to check the pigs when a press of cold wind rushes the yard behind me, and when I turn to look back my heart startles, because a towering billow of pollen has spun from the pine crowns and is twisting up and over the house, so thick and yellow I actually think for second that the attic is afire. Majestic and surreal, right out of the blue. And then it is gone. Down in the pen, the pigs squeal and zigzag madly, kicking up their heels as the first drops hit. Now the wind is on a straight line, and the space between the house and granary goes white as it scours a blizzard of dandelion fluff from our overgrown yard. Then the real rain hits with its hiss and splatter, driving the pigs to their shelter and the dandelion fluff to ground. The land is dry, dry. Our yard is like a brick. We need this.

  It rains hard, but not long. In the wake, the sun is already poking through, and steam rises from the asphalt by the garage. A rainbow forms across the ridge. Amy is spinning across the yard with an umbrella. Just like she did, she tells me, “when I was a kid, and I was three.”

  You can really go off the rails with this scavenging business. While working on the pigpen as the earth has warmed, I noticed a number of seedlings cracking the dirt. Their cotyledons were fat and spoon-shaped on the order of a squash or melon. I assumed the previous owner must have tossed some garbage down here and figured what the heck, they’re off to an early start, I’ll transplant them. Take them as a gift of the good earth. So over a period of a week I spoon out the sprouts as I find them and place them in a careful row along the far side of the garden. Soon the first real leaves emerge. They are pointy, kinda like you might see on zucchini. I begin to get a little nervous, however, when I start seeing the things popping up all over the barnyard and around the outbuildings. Then while clearing out the pigpen tangle, I notice a pattern in the distribution of the sprouts and put two and two together: I have been transplanting wild cucumber. This is the equivalent of transplanting thistles. Honestly, I should get a plant book or something.

  Anneliese is taking the lead on the garden. I helped plant onion sets and some kale, but she is doing most of the rest of it. So far she has put in turnips, chard, more radishes, two rows of tomatoes, and several hills of potatoes. And in a touch missing from my bachelor gardening days, she plants marigolds at the end of each row.

  Lately Jane fights her bedtime with a ferocity that easily out-sizes her frame, and we have fallen into a pattern after supper in which Anneliese gardens in the remaining light while I tr
y to settle the baby. I am often surprised to find myself here, holding this teensy howling beast to my chest, catching the scent of baby powder, and contemplating how I have come to understand what a “onesie” is at this late stage in my life. Here I am buying diapers when most of my contemporaries are buying graduation cakes.

  The kid can really holler. People say that, but seriously: when I cradle her to my chest, invariably she’ll hit a note so pure it triggers my tinnitus—the ear nearest her mouth damps down and rings long after she is snoozing. For a while I did my best to ease her gently to sleep in a rocking chair just the way they do it in fabric softener ads, but the screeching went unabated. Then one desperate evening I sat on a giant rubber yoga ball Anneliese keeps in the bedroom and started bouncing. The baby’s cries softened. I bounced higher. The cries got softer. One does not wish to do harm, so I held her tight and close, steadying her neck and head in my palm, and went full-bore pogo-butt. I’m talking lift and clearance. Nothing gentle about it. And in five minutes, she was asleep. Now we bounce every night. Our bedroom window overlooks the garden, and for the rest of my life when I think of our first year on the farm I will remember my baby clamped to my chest and my beautiful beloved wife grubbing in the garden at twilight, working diligently to feed us over the seasons to come, my vision of her springing in and out of frame with every bounce.

  Soporific bouncing is not just for babies. I am looking at a photograph Anneliese took three nights ago. My feet are on the floor and my butt is still on the ball, but I have tipped over backwards on the bed. I am sound asleep and so is Jane, curled like a little possum on my chest, my hand still across her back as it was when I drifted off feeling her breath rise and fall.