Coop

by Michael Perry

  They snuffled at it a bit, and then the carnage began. They chomped it at opposite ends and ripped it in two. They crunched the bones. They gnawed the ears. They gobbled the guts.

  Gentle reader, I am not a fellow quick to fold his tent in the face of grotesquery. But as I watched Cocklebur bounce the last bit of rabbit ear on her lower lip like she was dandling a cigar, the bridge of my nose assumed the topography of a crinkle-cut fry. I found myself wondering if tularemia could be passed on via pork chops, or if I was very possibly contributing to the spawn of mad porkrabbit disease.

  I shot three more rabbits. I slung each one deep into the valley, where at night I hear the coyotes sing. There is more than one way to keep the circle unbroken.

  While the project is on hold until definitive research can be conducted, I presume there is nothing inherently dangerous about converting our excess cottontails to bacon. The real challenge lies in coming up with a marketing program to make the idea as palatable as that of grass-fed beef. Those “grass-fed beef” people are working from a point of real advantage, as the term conjures bucolic images of breezy green meadows and trim cuts of pure protein. In days past I paid the rent by writing an advertising slogan or two, and I have applied myself to this current challenge with diligence, but so far have only come up with the undeniably catchy but ultimately unusable “Stick a fork in our rabbit-fed pork.”

  Like flowing water and snaking flames, the movement of hay—off the sickle, off the rake, into the baler—is hypnotic. And there are the aromatic dimensions—the hay green-sweet or minty at cutting, tealike in the mow. When I drive past a freshly mown hayfield I anticipate the fragrant seep and ride it right back to my seat on the Massey-Ferguson. When I step into my father’s empty mow on a day when sunlight slants through the beams, the soft underbelly of my forearms tingles at the memory of the red dots and scratches left by the stem ends after a full day’s baling.

  And what better than haying to soothe the obsessive-compulsive beast? How clean the field looks when the last wagon departs. The stubble remains slanted in the direction of the last pass, and as on a checker-mowed lawn, you can read the bend of the stems and see how the day progressed. On tight corners the haybine always missed little bed-head tufts of hay. They bugged me like a collar sticking up, so sometimes I tried to trim them when I was done, but this plugged the sickle, so I’d have to shudder and drive home. But still: at the end of it all, you had the very green manifestation of summer swept cleanly from the field, pressed into cubes, and stowed in square corners against the winter. Every time I stack firewood, there is this moment at the finish when I step back and survey the neat row, and a yogalike calm fills me. It is the same with the hay pile. You look at it, and you think, Well, whatever the winter brings, we’ve got our hay up.

  I spare Amy the bulk of my hayseed memories, but I do teach her to twist the timothy and listen for the crackle, to gauge the dryness against her palm. When it is ready, we pack it tightly into a cardboard box, and store the box on a shelf in the pump house, up off the ground so it doesn’t reabsorb any moisture. The first day we fill the box maybe halfway. “There!” says Amy triumphantly. “If we’re going to feed Guinea all winter, we’re going to need at least three more boxes,” I say. Her head and shoulders immediately droop. I call this slumpage. Slumpage drives me nuts, and as such I recently decreed that all slumpage would henceforth cease. So much for the dictatorship.

  For all my talk of making hay and rites of passage, when my father calls and says he needs a hand getting the hay in this year, it is Anneliese who packs the kids and drives north, leaving me to write. Growing up in the valley across the way, she and her sister used to work on the hay crew for Tom, the old farmer down the road, so she can throw bales. We still visit Tom and his wife now and then, and he’s always got plenty of stories. Once early on before Anneliese and I were married but headed that way, Tom pulled me aside and told me Anneliese and her sister had outworked most of the boys he ever hired. “One day they told me they were tired of working with Stevie Wonder,” Tom said. “There wasn’t anybody on the crew named Steve, so I said, Who are you talking about? They pointed to this young fellow who wasn’t doing much.” He was grinning now, anticipating the punch line. “They told me, ‘Every time he puts down a hay bale, we Wonder if he’ll ever pick up another one!’“

  In late June we drive across the state for a family wedding and a working vacation. The wedding reception is held in a beautifully preserved old barn, and it’s fun to watch my dad and brothers standing at the edge of the dance floor scoping the timbers and speculating on how the barn was constructed. The next morning we drive up the Door County Peninsula and take a car ferry to Washington Island, where I am to give a talk and perform my first ever solo concert. I am nervous before the concert, as it is the first time I will have ever appeared with just my guitar and no one else to remember verses or play over my mistakes, but it’s a passable show and I enjoy it once I relax. Coincidentally, the show is held in a converted barn. Our hosts put us up in a log cabin beside Lake Michigan. There are sandhill cranes on the lawn and goslings at the dock. Our friend Dan comes by with a pink Washington Island sweatshirt for Jane, and we visit until after dark. I have a chance to write in the Red Cup Coffee Shop, and we take Amy to see the smooth stones of Schoolhouse Beach. It is a good couple of days, but there is also that jolt of realizing how much world there is to drink in, and how much I miss when I get stuck in the vortex of my own just-in-time commitments. At the concert Amy takes a picture of Jane sleeping on Anneliese’s shoulder as I sing. Later when I look at it I see Anneliese is smiling, her eyes bright, the way I remember them from the very first days of our courtship. Here lately with the baby and the insomnia but even more with my constant deadline-pushing, I have seen much less of that smile.

  On the way back off the island, we are the only family on the ferry and the captain allows Amy to stand at his position in the wheelhouse. She puts her hands on the wheel, and when I see the size of her smile I can tell it is good for her to get the attention. When the ferry gate lowers, we drive our loyal van up the ramp to solid ground and point for home. Within the first mile, Jane starts her brass-lung bawling. It is 290 miles from the tip of Door County to our farm in Fall Creek. A six-hour drive. With the exception of twenty minutes somewhere west of Green Bay and the times we stopped to check to see if her diaper was wet, or if she was hungry, or if her seat buckles were pinching her, or if she was just worked up over the subprime mortgage mess, she screeched nonstop until we took her out of van and into the house at home. Honestly, I don’t know how she did it without the aid of an oxygen tank. Clearly circular breathing was involved. Amy spent most of the ride with her hands locked over her ears. The next time someone suggests we put her in the car and drive around when she won’t sleep, I will hand them the keys and the car seat and the ear muffs and tell them to have at it. Very early in the trip the air conditioner threw a belt, which was nice because it gave us reason to run with all the windows down, the siren sound of our bundle of joy pealing out across the countryside and scaring cows.

  We’ve been holding off on getting the chicks from Billy and Margie until the Washington Island trip was out of the way, and now the big day has come. I spent the morning working with Mills, but since the coop is still nowhere near done, I used the time to build a chicken tractor. A chicken tractor is basically a portable enclosure with an open floor that allows the chickens to pick and scratch—you will want to read Joel Salatin for the definitive take, although this is the age when Google met chickens, so a profusion of examples are a split-second click away. Once they’ve worked the area over, you move the tractor, and they move with it. You can get as carried away as you like, but I kept mine simple. I built a wooden frame roughly the dimensions of a twin bed, incorporated a roost and a hinged door that doubled as a ramp, and even remembered to build a small shelf in the corner on which to place and secure the waterer. I put the whole works on two elevated skids and attached heavy rubber
flaps along the bottom of either end. The skids allow it to be dragged from place to place, while the rubber flaps seal the gap at either end. The rubber is heavy enough to keep small chicks in and all but the most serious predators out, and because it can flap both ways, the tractor can be dragged from either end. Mills dug the rubber out of one of his Sanford and Son piles, smiling triumphantly. Nothing makes him happier than to put something he scavenged to good use. To finish off, I rigged hooks at either end of the skids so I could put loops in a rope and tow it either way.

  I’m pleased with how it turned out. It’s square and sturdy, and I managed to avoid idiot do-overs. In fact, with my sad record for building things, this went amazingly well, with only one head-knocking moment: because the pickup truck had been unavailable, I removed all the seats from the fambulance and took that. In a rare moment of prescience, I measured the inside width of the van’s hatch and made sure to cut the chicken tractor cross-members a good inch narrower so it would fit in when it was done. Unfortunately, I overlooked the fact that the cumulative width of the finished product would include the vertical supports, and when I tried to put the finished product in the van, it was exactly two inches wider than the interior of the vehicle. I took this in relatively good humor, mostly because Mills was right there, and among handymen it is considered impolite to throw another man’s tools.

  But I was kinda stuck. I needed that tractor for the chickens I was picking up on the way home.

  Miller looked at what I’d done, hooted, and said, “SWEET MOTHER-OF-PEARL!” Then he brightened. “Say! I’ve got a trailer! I got it at a thrift sale! I’m going to use it to haul wood behind my four-wheeler! It’s right out back!”

  Mills led me out behind the barn past several of his salvage piles and then pointed proudly at what appeared to be the remnants of a lawn-tractor accident in the weeds. Upon closer examination I identified the wreckage as a trailer because it had a hitch and two rubber tires, but the frame was bent, the plywood bed was delaminating, and the taillights were shattered. You could just envision the cop who pulled me over flipping his notebook open and getting comfortable before writing up all the violations embodied in this one little tangle.

  But I didn’t have much choice. We hooked the trailer to the van, strapped the chicken tractor to it, and I went on my way. Before I left, Mills and I came to an agreement on our story should I get stopped. I would tell the officer I had just purchased the trailer and was taking it home to make repairs. We actually rehearsed our story and the price—$85. You know, in case I got pulled and the officer decided to check my story. Contingency planning, you know. I like to think I respect the law enough not to feed them some silly half-baked story. I also strapped and re-strapped. I call this the “I-tried” strapping method. Yah, it’s a tenfold rolling violation, Officer, but I tried.

  I kept checking my rearview. In Mondovi I stopped at the hardware store to buy a chicken waterer and a feeder designed to be screwed on the bottom of a mason jar. Outside, noticing a couple of big-rig truckers checking their loads, I did a little circle around mine, snugging and twanging at the straps and checking the tires. I appeared pathetic and responsible.

  Despite the scrap-yard trailer, the chicken tractor rode well, and soon I was at Billy’s place. He was out back working on a chicken coop of his own. Several weeks ago Billy had bragged to me about his big score: just when he was trying to decide how to go about building a coop, someone whose kids had outgrown their backyard playhouse said he could have the structure. “It’s free!” he said at the time. “All I gotta do is move it over here and drag it out back.”

  Well, yes. That was weeks ago. He decided to put it on a concrete pad. He decided to insulate. He decided to redo the roof. He decided he should repaint the siding. He and his wife painted the interior, then decided the color was chicken unfriendly and repainted it. When I get there today he is burying chicken wire in the dirt to prevent predators digging under. He is shirtless and pouring sweat. Billy is a big man and not well suited to heat. Since he got his “free” coop, he has made more trips to Menards than your average subdivision contractor and has had at least one nasty incident involving tin snips. Billy is one of the gentler friends of my acquaintance, but when I find him out back today, sweaty and sticky beside the free coop that has now easily cleared four figures, he looks at me and hisses, “I am ready to stop preparing for chickens and just watch chickens!” I have abridged the quote, leaving out at least one contraband word.

  He and Margie lead me to the garage, where the chicks—I’m not sure if you could still call them chicks; they are a month old, and mostly transitioned from fluff to feathers—are in the same plastic wading pool where I saw them with Amy, only they’ve grown and gotten more rambunctious and hard to keep in the pool. We transfer our dozen to a cardboard box lined with wood shavings. I load them in the back of the van and am on my way.

  The trailer holds up fine, and I make it home without being arrested. Amy is visiting relatives and the baby is asleep, so it is just Anneliese who comes out for a look. It’s late, so rather than try out the chicken tractor, we just transfer them to the old pump house (where I’ve rigged a temporary cage and roosts), give them feed and water, close the door, and leave them be for the night.

  In the morning the fog is so thick I can hardly see the old granary across the yard. One by one I put the chickens into the tractor, then latch the trapdoor behind them. Leaning into the rope, I pull them onto a patch of green grass, and within seconds they are scratching and pecking like it’s all they’ve ever done. Similar to the pigs—all their life in a plastic wading pool with wood shavings, and they know immediately what to do when put in contact with the earth. I lift some rocks and find a pair of angleworms. When I toss them in, the carnage is immediate. I go to the garden and pluck a couple of potato bugs—we’ve had a heavy infestation this year—but am disappointed when the chickens ignore them. We could use some potato-bug-eating chickens. Then one of the birds stretches, one leg and one wing back in the manner of a ballet dancer warming up before the barre, and I straighten and stand back just to watch for a while. It’s dead calm here, the grass wet green, everything cottoned in stillness by the fog, nothing visible except a hazy semicircle of yard, half our house, and there in the middle of that yard, our chickens. When I return to the house, I meet Anneliese coming out.

  We turn and stand together on the steps, looking at the scene. We have chickens. I move behind and put my arms around my wife, beautiful in one of my old flannel shirts.

  Baby, I tell her, another dream has come true.

  I am joking mostly, but standing there on our little patch with Anneliese in my arms, I hear the snap of the flag we are flying beside the driveway on this, the fourth day of July, and I think we have been blessed with a lovely little dream indeed.

  All day I work in the office with a clear view to the chickens below. Up here in my swivel chair, I feel like a rancher of old, surveying my entire operation: two pigs, twelve chickens, one guinea pig (Amy puts him outside to graze). The fog burned off by mid-morning, and now it’s a fine day, peppered by the sound of a few early starters shooting off fireworks. Anneliese and I watched the chickens for a good while this morning, and I have gone down several times to move the tractor and feed them bread crumbs from our pig bakery stash. I throw in some windfall apples, but after a few tentative pecks they ignore them as they did the potato bugs. Later I will learn that if I slice the apples in half, they’ll eat them quite well. When Anneliese brings Jane out and parks her stroller beside the chicken tractor, Jane regards the birds gravely and at great length, her chin tucked so that a second chin pops out. This is a mix-and-match batch—Black Australorp, Buff Orpington, White Rock, Speckled Sussex, Rhode Island Red, Partridge Rock, Barred Rock, Golden Laced Wyandotte—and they are relishing their relative freedom, every now and then exploding into short-lived but aggressive bursts of flight, and sometimes sprinting from one end of the pen to the other.

  When evening comes
with a storm threatening, I put the chicks back in the pump house. Amy’s timothy is in there, boxed up and stacked for winter, and at the smell of it all my hay-making memories flood back. The sense of accomplishment when the hay was all baled, the wagons all emptied, the field all stubble. When I step outside into the lowering light, I remember how it felt to stack the last bale in the mow and to slide down the elevator rails, through the cool night air.

  I hope I’m not working my poor daughter just to work her. I hold out hope that there are long-term benefits in assigning a child tasks that don’t pay off with an immediate Dilly Bar. And while this life we are trying for here is a far cry from real farming, it does present opportunities for edification. This sort of thing can easily be overdone. I think of childhood friends who came to school only after several hours of choring, and how they were essentially unpaid help. And then there is the other lesson, the one that Anneliese is better at drawing out than I am—that not all tasks are completed on your own behalf. One late-summer evening I remember helping Dad and Mom push the year’s last load of hay into the pole barn. The next day I would go back to school, and I remember how it was to stand there for a moment beside my parents, knowing that a winter’s worth of forage was safely under roof, and that I had played a part in that. It wouldn’t make me any cooler at school, but I had the sense that I had been an integral part of something worthwhile, something that paid an intangible dividend.

  You won’t find many hay-baling songs out there, but Fred Eaglesmith wrote a dandy called “Balin’ Again,” and there’s a line in there about a man surveying his hayfields while having an imaginary conversation with his father. Sure could use your advice on how to raise a couple kids, he says, I’m tryin’ to raise ’em just the way you did.