by Tarte, Bob
Before bedtime, the two of us crept downstairs to dowse the lights, only to find the Muscovy dunking her head in the water, splashing the room and ruining a second helping of scratch feed.
“We’ll have to buy a pool for the barn,” Linda announced.
“A pool?”
“A plastic wading pool. I saw some up at the dime store.”
“They’ve got them at the hardware store, too. Half price. End of summer sale.”
Linda shook her head. “Those are with the stupid Ninja Turtle patterns. I don’t like the way they look.”
THE NEXT MORNING, I volunteered to carry the Muscovy, which Linda had named Daphne, to the barn while Linda cleaned up the disaster area that had formerly been our workroom.
“Be careful,” she cautioned me, when I bent over to pick up the duck.
“Do you think she’ll bite?”
“It’s her wings you need to be careful of,” she warned, relating the story of how a goose had almost knocked her out with a pinion to the jaw years ago.
I encircled the duck with both arms, clutching her tightly to my chest, but aside from managing a couple of energy bursts that gave me an indication of her strength, she didn’t put up a struggle. Once I was inside the barn, the thought struck me that I was actually using the building for its intended purpose. Previously I had viewed the barn the same way a visitor to Italy might view the ruins of Pompeii—as a relic of a lost way of life. Surveying the architecture of cow stanchions and smaller pens had never failed to fill me with a grateful superiority to the agrarian beings who had come before me. Now I was one of them.
When I followed Linda back to the barn later that afternoon, we were surprised to find Daphne perched on top of a wooden stanchion four feet off the ground. “My chickens used to roost in trees every night,” Linda told me, adding to my storehouse of information I could never use. As she spun the plastic pool into the duck’s part of the barn, I attached a hose to an all-season hydrant that had waited its entire life near the middle door of the barn for this very moment. The duck watched with disinterest as we filled the blandly blue non–Ninja Turtle pool, then flapped heavily to the cement floor when I wandered over to check the progress of the water. Linda’s gleeful smile faded as the moments ticked by without the portable pond attracting Daphne. Linda opened the waist-high gate to urge the duck to take to water, but almost instantly this act evolved into Linda’s chasing the duck around the pen and in and out of the pool. Of the gallons of water displaced by Daphne’s plunges, the majority was absorbed by Linda’s aqua dress.
“At least she knows where the pool is now,” I pointed out.
A couple of hours later, we checked on the duck again. The floor was dry, the pool unused, her food uneaten. “She’s not happy in here,” Linda decided. “She needs an outdoor pen.”
I didn’t like the way this was going at all. “We’ll let her run around the backyard during the day and put her in the barn at night.”
“Who’s going to catch her and carry her back and forth?” That gave me pause. “And what if a dog got in our yard during the day? A large dog like a German shepherd dog could jump right over our fence and kill her.”
Other than the dogless family that lived behind us on the river, our nearest neighbor was almost a mile away. “And where might this German shepherd dog come from?”
“We can use Binky’s old pen. We’ll hire a handyman to fix it up. Unless you want to do it yourself,” she added.
“A handyman,” I sputtered in thickening despair, envisioning an otherwise unemployable eccentric with a prison record and hair sprouting from his ears.
In the main, my fears seemed to ring true. After Linda placed an ad in the local shopping newspaper, we were deluged with disconcerting phone calls. A gravelly voiced man wanted to know the name of our business and what kind of benefits we offered. A fellow who was friendly with the bottle wondered if we could offer him night work. Three people were confused as to why they had called our number, two were abusive when I explained we wanted a duck pen, and another phoned to hone his English-language skills. Anyone remotely qualified wouldn’t touch a job so small. “Let me see that ad,” I demanded, convinced that Linda must have written a wildly misleading description of a Mackinaw Bridge–scale project, but her prose was on the nose. Just as we were giving up, a chipper and plain-spoken fellow named Dell asked to come over and look at the job, surprised us by showing up, and then shocked us by quoting a reasonable price.
I learned fast to stay out of Dell’s way. It wasn’t that his attitude was unfriendly. He spoke to me with a pleasant singsong delivery I accepted as his natural voice until I heard him engaged in clipped dialogue with his son. An ex-missionary in his early sixties who had spent years among the Yanomami people in Venezuela, Dell had seen a little of everything in life, but nothing as ridiculous as this fish-out-of-water city boy and his duck-pampering wife. “Sure, we can fix it so that the snow won’t pile up on top of the pen and cause it to collapse,” he responded exuberantly. “Of course, we wouldn’t expect too much snow to accumulate on top of a wiremesh roof, now would we, Bob?” His excessively affable tone suggested that he was talking to an idiot for whom everything had to be clearly laid out in the most positive terms possible. “Can we put a latch on the door?” he exclaimed so forcefully on another occasion, mocking a question I had asked, that I took a startled step backward, nearly knocking down the fencing he had tentatively tacked in place. “Sure, we’ll put a latch on her. You bet we’ll do that, Bob. But how about if we wait until we put the door up first?”
Once the door was hung, in a mistaken attempt to ingratiate myself, I complimented him on how well it fit. “That’s fantastic,” I simpered. “You can hardly see a sliver of daylight between the door and the frame when the door is closed.”
“Cut it out, Bob,” he growled, with only a trace of a smile.
Though Dell and I stood on opposite sides of the personality fence, he got along famously with Linda, apparently recognizing a fellow generous-hearted soul who was forced to put up with me. He complimented her on the morning glories climbing the side of our house in the brisk fall weather. He talked effusively about his family, joked about retiring to a warmer climate, and told stories about his missionary days in South America. Even after his tools were neatly put away and his son waited silently in the truck, Dell stood chatting with Linda in front of our open basement door, never once answering a question with a quip like, “Where does this kind of wood come from? I don’t know, Bob. I think it comes from a tree.”
Some of Linda’s success with Dell came from a natural-born ability to talk that she had honed to a fine sheen through unflagging exercise. She would talk to anyone anywhere, as I learned early in our relationship. On a trip through Michigan’s “thumb region,” we visited the Lake Huron town of Grindstone City, which in the early 1900s had been a bustling millstone-manufacturing center. A friend of mine had enticed me there with a surreal photograph of a beach littered with massive defective grindstones dumped at the last minute while being loaded on a ship. “The whole town is like that,” he had insisted. “You’ll see grindstones everywhere,” but we saw none at all. Nonplussed, Linda marched to the door of the first house she saw. Five minutes later we were sitting on a porch swing poring over a Grindstone City scrapbook with an elderly woman as loquacious as my wife.
But that was merely a warm-up. Years later on a bird-watching jaunt to Ontario’s Point Pelee National Park, we overnighted in the tomato-producing town of Leamington. Deciding to take a walk after dinner, we trundled down a one-block street in back of our motel. The outing was uneventful until Linda noticed a woman tending a garden. A full half hour later, we broke free of her backyard pond and ceramic frog collection only to encounter another woman with a hose and a patch of flowers. Two doors down and twenty minutes later, a young couple en route to their house from their station wagon was waylaid by my wife. Finally, with most of the block still stretching before us, I told Linda, “
I’m sure several families have called the police by now to tell them about the suspicious characters casing their neighborhood.” Though our Canadian vacation had included visits to spectacular waterfalls, charming zoos, a historic basilica, and a whale-watching cruise, Linda would refer to the Leamington walk as “almost the best part of the trip.”
Three days after starting the job, Dell closed his toolbox for the last time, and I shamed myself by studying Daphne’s new home. I had originally based Binky’s pen around the leftover structure of a rectangular play area and sandbox. To transform the cozy rabbit pen into a raccoon-proof villa for Daphne, Dell had merely planted a few posts in the ground to extend the walls toward our back fence, covered the sides and top with wire, and added a wooden door. Even with my nonexistent construction skills, I should have been able to do the same. Little did I realize that our duck population was destined to outgrow the pen.
Once we transferred her from the gloomy interior of the barn to the fresh air and hazy sunshine of her pen, Daphne was a changed duck. She showed her appreciation by consuming great quantities of the scratch feed she had previously ignored. But the swimming pool went untouched. Neophytes to waterfowl, we didn’t know that Muscovies shared neither water pool nor gene pool with American domestic ducks that trace their roots to the common mallard. Unlike the Mallard derivatives, whose lives revolve around the pond, the tropical-born, marsh-dwelling Muscovies have comparatively underdeveloped oil glands and aren’t very waterproof. Consequently, they are poorly adapted to swimming. Because we were ignorant of these facts, Daphne’s failure to take advantage of the local pool facilities struck Linda as a wrong that demanded righting, a failure of nurturing whose blame we had inherited.
“She needs a little friend to show her how to swim,” Linda told me.
“You showed her pretty well a couple of days ago.”
“Ducks are very social. They aren’t happy by themselves.”
“Then,” I heard myself tell my wife as if through another person’s ears, “we’d better get her another duck.” In truth, I couldn’t think of a single reason not to. Having already bought the proposition that one duck was no trouble at all to keep, no trouble times two still equaled zero bother. How could it be otherwise? The ducks would live outdoors rather than gnaw at our woodwork, eat when stirred by hunger rather than dominate our meals, and wander our yard unsupervised rather than require complicated, coordinated periods of freedom.
With ruthless efficiency, Linda located a source for a companion duck in the person of a farmer a few miles north with the remarkable name of Rupert Murdoch. On the evidence, I decided that he probably wasn’t the infamous media mogul. Though his house was in no worse shape than ours and of similar vintage, the matchstick barn barely hung together, and the denuded yard of hard-packed mud boasted indescribable clutter. Duck pens claimed the area, but these were nothing like the roomy, open-air living quarters that delighted Daphne. The two dozen or so wooden-sided, side-by-side, four-by-six-foot pens each contained a flock of ducks or a gaggle of geese of heretofore undreamed of breeds. “That’s a black and white Cayuga,” the elderly Rupert Murdoch drawled, elongating the word “Cayuga” into poetry at odds with the squalor. “That one’s a Blue Swede,” though it appeared neither blue nor Swedish.
If the varieties of waterfowl were bewildering, the range of chickens wandering free-range or cooped up in the disconcertingly backward-leaning barn truly boggled the mind. We witnessed chickens whose feathers curled up like chrysanthemum petals, chickens with pom-poms on their feet, chickens with bald heads and necks, mouse-size chickens, mastiff-size chickens, and chickens whose complex color patterns turned them into optical illusions with beaks. A flock of what he termed “fancy pigeons” with feathered britches in place of naked legs scattered as he took us to the back of the barn to show us an inch-long, vitamin capsule–shaped white object. “Do you know what some fellows call these?” he asked us.
“I wouldn’t know what to call it,” I admitted.
“Some fellows call them rooster eggs. But they’ve never seen a rooster lay one.”
“What is it?”
“It’s an egg. But roosters don’t lay any kinds of eggs,” he explained with a wise grin.
After viewing various turkeys, pheasants, guinea fowl, grouse, and goats, and after stooping to pet a couple of barn cats and an old dog in a bandana, we followed Rupert Murdoch back to the duck ghetto. While Linda decided which duck to take home, I mentally recounted the plot of every episode of Hogan’s Heroes I could remember and was almost through the series run of The Prisoner when she finally picked out a female black and white Cayuga. “She’s a show duck,” the farmer warned us. “Costs a little more than your White Pekins or Khaki Campbells.”
“She would have to,” I agreed, unsure what either of those animals were but bracing for a bite to the wallet. The cheapest parrot, after all, wore a two-hundred-dollar price tag, cockatiels flew as high as one hundred dollars, and hand-raised parakeets at Jonah’s Ark commanded eighty dollars.
“Have to charge you ten dollars,” he insisted.
Using a long-handled net from a catfish farm, Rupert Murdoch dipped into the Cayuga pen, cornered the female, and with a twist of an arm, scooped her up. “You don’t want her flying nowhere,” he stated. When we nodded our agreement, he deftly plucked five primary flight feathers from her right wing. The duck never even flinched. “That will keep her on the ground.” As I helped him put the Cayuga in a cardboard box and tape it—this seemed to be the preferred method of transporting birds of every ilk—Linda shouted to me, “Sweetheart, come quick and see a little white bathtub duck.”
“That’s what you call a call duck,” Rupert told us.
“Another of your show ducks?” I asked.
He nodded. “It’s all the bigger they get.” I felt the pressure of Linda’s eyes. I shrugged. I nodded. The farmer netted a fourteen-inch-tall pure white duck with an orange beak and orange feet, and popped her in another box. If I knew how to whistle, I might have. No anxiety gnawed at me. We had a spacious pen capable of easily absorbing all three birds. We had a large fenced-in yard. We had a big bag of scratch feed. I had finally adjusted to my Zoloft dosage. Calmer and less crabby than I had been for years, I had nary a care in the world. Everything seemed, well … everything seemed just ducky.
CHAPTER 6
A Wild Duck Chase
Aren’t your ducks supposed to be in the yard?” Shirley piped up, as Linda slid falafel patties onto our plates.
“They’re probably behind the spirea bush sticking their beaks in decayed leaves,” I said, attempting to infuse even these odd words with a sense of welcoming.
A bowl bisected by an oversize spoon crashed into a crock of mashed potatoes. “This is a cucumber dressing,” Linda explained.
“Should we avert our eyes?”
Shirley stopped squinting out the windows and slid back into her chair. Her light skin and short curled hair were almost exactly the same shade of beige, and I kept losing track of her eyebrows as she talked. “You wouldn’t believe the people that come into my flower shop and have no idea how much work goes into flowers,” she was telling Linda.
“They must think they grow on trees,” I quipped.
“They expect to get them for free.”
“For free?” Linda shouted. “They want them for free?”
She didn’t really own a flower shop. It was actually a flower refrigerator, and the refrigerator didn’t even belong to her. The owner of a produce store in Hubbs had subcontracted Shirley to keep a cooler in his store stocked with cut flowers in an attempt to win some customers. The business wasn’t doing well, but no new business did well in our area. If a restaurant or store managed to hang on for a couple of years through sheer force of will, the locals might begin trickling in. Our own front-porch pottery shop, designated by a sign in the front yard as Pink Pig Pottery, attracted about six visitors a month, and most of these balked at the eight-dollar price tag on our hand
-thrown, one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-duplicated coffee mugs and off-center bowls.
“Those are some of your flowers in a vase Bob made.”
Sharing centerpiece duties with a heaped dish of rice, a vaguely bottle-shaped vessel surprisingly thick and heavy for its size supported a graceful trio of lavender Peruvian lilies. Linda had bought the flowers from Shirley partly as a means of getting acquainted. She was drawn to Shirley’s enthusiasm for gardening along with her professed love of “talking about the Lord.” Excited that she had finally made her first Lowell friend, Linda had asked the flower-refrigerator lady over for lunch. But Shirley, we learned, wasn’t a local at all. She commuted forty-five miles from a village near Lansing, where her husband worked in a butter factory. And rather than being a source of joy, as Linda’s Christian zeal was, Shirley’s religious faith was bitter solace for a spouse whom she suspected was cheating on her, a daughter who belonged to a New Age cult, a trailer that suffered from mice in the walls, and people who didn’t appreciate the value of her flowers.
“One of these days, I’m going into their yards and start helping myself to their roses, and if they say anything, I’ll just go, ‘Well, you told me in the store they’re not really worth anything.’”
“Oh, my gosh,” exclaimed Linda. “You really wouldn’t do that, would you? You really wouldn’t pick someone else’s flowers.”
Shirley swiveled to face the parrot’s cage. “Stanley wouldn’t act like that,” she declared in a little girl voice. “Stanley’s too nice a boy to pick on me.”