by Tarte, Bob
“Careful,” I admonished, as her fingers strayed perilously close to the bars of Stanley Sue’s cage. “She’s not what you’d call a people bird. She will definitely bite you if she gets the chance.” I emphasized Stanley Sue’s correct gender along with the warning.
“Not a nice boy like Stanley. He wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“She would.”
Shirley began expounding on her family problems, and my mind naturally migrated to my own misfortunes.
A bad winter even by Michigan measure had tossed cold water on our assumptions that keeping ducks would be a cinch. Daily chores kicked off each morning with our bundling up from head to toe, trudging across an arctic landscape, and struggling to get inside the duck pen. Since the frozen outdoor spigot on the back of the house was unusable, we were forced to drag a long hose down the hill from the leaky laundry sink inside the basement. By midwinter, the backyard snowpack had compacted to a treacherous glaze, and we took to strapping metal cleats designed for ice fisherman onto our boots. Snow and slush from the previous day delighted in hardening overnight and blocking the pen’s wooden door. Tired of chipping at the ground with a shovel, I twice raised the bottom of the door by hacking off the planks, but I still had to shovel, sweep, and chip to free it most days. Once inside the pen, changing the water in the plastic wading pool involved first breaking up the half-inch-thick surface ice and sloshing out the chunks with a push broom. Liberating the largest icebergs meant plunging our hands in the pool and wresting them out, ending up with soaked arms and with bodies chilled to the nubbins.
I hated the exertion. The frigid temperatures depleted my tiny energy reserves, but they didn’t daunt the ducks, who merrily took to the pool even when the television weatherman gloated that the thermometer had bottomed out below zero. In the throes of a howling blizzard, as Linda and I stood shivering, wrapped in blankets as the furnace labored to keep up, we would peer outside through the blowing snow to find all three ducks trolling in the water. Taking to a pool in icicle weather baffled me until I realized that the coldest water was still tens of degrees warmer than the ground and air temperatures. The swimming pool was a kind of low-grade sauna. Even the hydrophobic Daphne splashed around with enthusiasm. But because of her underpowered oil gland, her belly feathers accumulated ice crystals that could grow to Christmas tree ornament size by night. “Do you know where the blow-dryer went?” Linda would ask me. “I have to defrost Daphne again.”
Spring came as a great relief, but not immediately. Throughout winter, we had scattered straw on the pen floor to insulate the ducks from the ground. When the straw-and-ice sandwich melted, the accumulated droppings and spilled food grew redolent in the sun. I had never regarded straw in any quantity as a material of consequence. Even a bale the size of a file cabinet was easy to lug one-handed across the yard. But an armload of this soggy, compressed, waste-laden mulch was staggeringly cumbersome for the weak of frame such as myself. Transforming the smelly pen-floor burden from a biohazard to potential compost necessitated my wading deep into the pit of rural life by wielding an actual pitchfork. Added to this was the indignity of donning rubber work gloves and hitching myself to the back end of a wheelbarrow that I had always sniffily regarded as a useless curio. I carted countless loads from the pen to the back fence, holding my breath as I pitched the fetid debris into our field. Afterward, I lay panting as Linda effortlessly brought the ducks a brand-new layer of light and airy fresh straw bedding.
Simple drudgery followed, as the season matured. Although I avoided duck duties weekday mornings by dint of a freelance job away from home, when I returned in the afternoon, I couldn’t escape Phoebe’s continual clamor to be let out of the pen. Muscovy Daphne emitted little noise. Tiny white call duck Peggy quacked an agreeable whispery purr. But black and white Cayuga Phoebe unleashed an atmosphere-cleaving series of complaints. Like Ollie, she was unrelenting. We began to give the trio the run of the yard as soon as either Linda or I pulled into the driveway. We would leave them out for hours, rarely glancing in their direction, reasoning that farmers like Rupert Murdoch gave their ducks, geese, chickens, goats, and pigs free run from morning to dusk. And we had the advantage of having a fence around our yard that would keep our ducks from straying.
“AREN’T THOSE YOUR ducks just beyond the fence?” Shirley asked, once Linda had finished a lengthy grace that blessed our food, each of our animals, and the majority of our living relatives by name.
I was out the side door on Linda’s heels before my napkin could hit the linoleum. At the bottom of the hill, Daphne paced back and forth on the correct side of our fence only because she was too fat to wriggle through and join the two escapees. Peggy and Phoebe flickered in and out of sight amid a tangle of wild black raspberry bushes. As I flopped over the fence, Linda galloped across the grass and yanked open a crude metal gate on the far side of the yard. “Try to herd them this way, I’ll shoo them back in,” she hollered. At the top of the cement steps one stride outside the kitchen, Shirley towered with her arms crossed high on her chest. She was chewing and held a fork in her fist.
Shielding my face, I plunged through stubborn foliage that mustered the full strength of its xylem and phloem to resist my passage. Flashes of white and black feathers ahead of me indicated that the ducks were racing forward alongside the fence. I took this as a hopeful indication that they were searching for a passage back inside the yard, preferring their plastic pool to the seasonal pond that glittered in a greening vista between our backyard and the river. Urging the ducks eastward as plant life stung my skin, I fought to keep my feet in view to avoid a tumble down the boulder-strewn slope. Unhampered by height, the ducks moved nimbly through narrow openings at ground level below a maddening thicket of whips and razor wire masquerading as branches.
I broke through the bushes, catching sight of Linda seconds after the ducks had noticed her. She had hoped to get below them on the hill and turn them toward the open gate, but wife and waterfowl intersected at the edge of the woods just beyond our property. Linda made a leap for Phoebe, barely missing her. I chased the ducks through the trees, unable to catch up until Phoebe changed direction and headed due south for the water.
Born of virile late-spring rains, the pond was no less than fifty feet wide and seductive in its sheltered calm. Its length stretched an unknowable distance east through tracts of trees that guarded a boundary of leg-enveloping muck. If the ducks reached the water, we would have no chance whatsoever of retrieving them. Fortunately, the truants paused long enough to contemplate the majesty of the pond for me to stumble down the slope and cut them off. Wildly waving my arms, I sent them zigzagging back toward Linda. This time a flying tackle successfully nabbed Peggy.
“Put her back in the pen,” Linda panted, thrusting the football-size duck into my hands. “I’ll get Phoebe.” I saw great wisdom in this. My fear of self-injury put me in an altogether different class than my self-sacrificing spouse. Plus, my long hours sitting in chairs were poor preparation for tearing willy-nilly through the scrub, and I was quickly running out of steam.
At the open gate I met Daphne, poised to start her own wilderness excursion. She ambled back to the duck house a few steps ahead of me. I dumped a complaining Peggy in the straw, latched the pen door, and walked toward the gate, expecting Linda with Phoebe. Instead, I heard a call whose plaintiveness rivaled the horn of a distant freight train.
“Phoebe! Phoebe!”
I joined my wife in the woods. She had come within an arm’s length of the escapee when a log had intervened. The nearly flightless duck had sailed over the obstruction, which halted Linda with a blow to her shin.
For the next half hour, we combed the woods, swale, and swamp, snapping our heads toward a suggestive ripple of sunlight in the weeds, an empty Jay’s potato chip bag trapped by deadfall, a white Styrofoam cup, the scrabbling of a squirrel, a red-bellied woodpecker spiraling up a tree, a headless doll, and the flutter of chickadees unhappy with our intrusion. We wand
ered as far as an unfordable stream splicing the Grand River to our pond. Changing direction, we trudged back a half mile until the pond petered out at the neighbor’s raised dirt driveway. Flip-flopping, we fanned eastward again. We shouted pointlessly for Phoebe, singing out the name of a duck who had never responded to anything but food, the wading pool, and the company of other ducks. “She’s always wanted a husband,” Linda announced, as we broke through to the busy road in front of our property and the billboard promising MCDONALD’S—2 SMILES AHEAD. We turned toward the house. “She wants to have babies,” Linda amplified.
“Maybe she’ll come home when she’s hungry.”
I never even considered what poor luncheon hosts we had been until I followed Linda into the kitchen to find Shirley sitting at the table. Several thicknesses of paper towel covered her index finger. A blush of blood stained the surface. “Stanley bit me,” she said. “I was just trying to make friends with him.”
Waving off our apologies, Shirley politely resumed her meal with us, stayed for coffee, joked about her injury as she tarried on our porch, and never visited us again. We saw nothing further of Phoebe, whose clipped wing prevented her from flying away. Linda swore she glimpsed a black and white duck on the pond two mornings in a row, but the sightings were too distant and fleeting to confirm. Since only mallards and wood ducks included us on their travel itineraries, the visitor might indeed have been Phoebe. Unless she was very lucky, our earthbound duck had little chance of surviving among the raccoons, owls, and foxes that lived in the woods, nor could she easily feed herself. But we liked to imagine she had waddled down to the river and floated with the current toward Lake Michigan, joining welcoming flocks of ducks along the way.
Our sadness at losing Phoebe hit me especially hard. It obliged me to reinforce our backyard fence to prevent continued escapes. That meant spending several hours on my knees fastening a two-foot-high length of chicken wire along the bottom of the fence for its full length. An unskilled male or female could have finished the job in a single afternoon, but my unique approach spanned days. Unrolling a bail of fencing the proper length a few yards ahead of my progress and balancing the bail just right consumed a distressing amount of time. If I didn’t unroll the bail far enough, it loved snapping back at me like a spring, or toppling over and jerking the wire from my hands. If I unrolled too much chicken wire, it tangled itself in the wild black raspberries and other revenge-hungry bushes that poked branches at me through the fence. I twisted finger-piercing stubs of bailing wire to the fencing every nine inches or so, staggering them from the top to the bottom of the chicken wire. Not until I was two-thirds finished with the project and my hands were misshapen into bleeding claws did I conceive of wearing work gloves and using pliers to twist the wire.
“Peggy and Daphne are lonely,” Linda informed me the Saturday afternoon I had finished the fencing upgrade. I had planned on spending the rest of the day unbending my back, but a car trip loomed instead. “They miss Phoebe. They need a little friend.”
We found Rupert Murdoch busily preparing for the first of countless county fairs that spanned the summer around our portion of the state. He waved when he saw us, but his grin wasn’t as sustained as on our last visit. “My wife says she’s tired of me spending so much time with my animals,” he lamented. “She’s making me cut back on how many I show this year.”
“How many are you taking to the fair?” I asked.
“Way less than normal,” he told us sheepishly. “Not more than two hundred chickens and ducks, all tolled.”
As Rupert gave Linda an updated tour of his duck pens, and Linda agonized over choosing a new duck, I wrestled with the fact that a septuagenarian with a limp easily outclassed me in terms of strength, energy, and ambition. Judging from his glacial movements, I figured it would take him an entire day to cage two hundred birds and load them on his truck. But at least he would get the whole job done. If working slowly was the key to accomplishing more, I wanted no part of that system. I gauged a successful day not by how many tasks I had finished, but by how much leisure time remained following a minimal show of effort.
“They call that one a Blue Swede,” he explained to Linda, when she had picked out a bluish-gray duck with a black hood and white trim. Extending his long-handled net into the small enclosure reserved for Swedes, he chased a half dozen or so birds back and forth until he had cornered the designated duck. Linda told him she wanted the fatter one near the feed trough instead, and he began the culling all over again. The process reminded me of goldfish-buying, when my wife would point out a particular individual in a tank of perhaps a hundred essentially identical carp, and the clerk would risk inserting his upper body in the water in pursuit of exactly the right fish.
As Rupert regrouped, I cast my mental net upon what I later learned was an Indian Runner Duck, an improbably tall and thin bird that resembled a wine bottle with wings. Bustling about its pen with a nervous pitch and stiff vertical posture, one of these, in fact, was nearly my identical twin. I fantasized herding myself around our yard and wondered if, like the salamander in Julio Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl,” I might identify so closely with the bird that we would exchange psyches. Before I could explain the possibilities to Linda, she had nixed the runner duck on appearance issues.
“Every time I looked at him, I would just feel sorry for him.”
“But you married me anyway.”
“What are you talking about?”
Rupert lifted up the Blue Swede for Linda’s approval. “Now she’s what you term a show duck,” he warned us, as he popped the bird in the requisite cardboard box. “They come a little more expensive than your White Pekins or Rouens.” The fee was exactly what we had paid for the black and white Cayuga, an affordable ten dollars, though the nuisance value of a duck was infinitely greater, of course.
Linda named our putative Scandinavian Martha, “because she looks like a Martha,” she said. The Swede got along fine with Daphne and Peggy right out of the box—once the usual formalities of pinning down the newcomer and showing her who was boss were dispensed with. Her temperament pleased us. She was less wild than Phoebe, more accustomed to people, and also every bit as noisy, which spared me the trauma of having to adjust to a quiet environment.
Though Martha was Daphne’s equal in terms of size, neither of the two matched Peggy in the feistiness department. The fearless little duck took charge of the flock without so much as submitting to a popular vote. Whenever we let them out of their pen, Peggy invariably took the lead. When it was time to shoo them back inside, she brought up the rear, herding them a few steps in front of me. She was first at the feed trough, eating unmolested while the others indulged their queen. She was first in the pool, too, clouding the freshly changed water by rinsing a small beak that held an impressive cache of backyard mud. While she generously allowed the others to swim alongside her, she might launch a peck at a wing or feathered back as a reminder of her authority. But Peggy didn’t merely boss her subjects. She seemed bent on protecting them. If I trespassed into the pen to check their food or change their water, she would insert herself between her flock and me. Then, as I was closing the door behind me, she would dart forward, quacking a hoarse stream of duck invectives as if to prove to Martha and Daphne that she had chased me out. “You’re lucky I’m letting you leave in one piece,” she seemed to boast.
We were crazy about Peggy, as were most people who laid eyes on her. “How’s that little white duck with the bright orange feet?” my sister, Joan, would ask me when we ran into one another at my mom and dad’s house. “I’ve got to see Peggy,” Linda’s friend Deanne would insist when she came by for a visit.
“One of these days, I’m going to pick you up,” I’d warn Peggy, though I never assaulted her pride by carrying out the threat.
“Let’s get a baby call duck and raise it to like being held,” Linda suggested.
Rupert Murdoch told us such things were possible. “The more you fool with them, the t
amer they get,” he counseled Linda on the phone. But he didn’t have any call duck ducklings. Or bush baby babies, presumably. Applying herself to the quest with her usual intensity, Linda located a matched pair of them at a business called Dorflinger’s, a few miles north of Rupert’s farm, between Rockford and Cedar Springs.
“Dorflinger’s?” I demanded. “That’s a nursery. Not a poultry nursery. It’s a greenhouse, isn’t it?”
“I stopped in to look at their perennials and got to telling Mrs. Dorflinger we were trying to find a baby call duck, and she said they had a couple in the back.”
“Wait, wait. Why would you tell Mrs. Dorflinger we wanted a call duck?”
She regarded me with amazement bordering on pity. “I always talk to people in stores, and that’s what we talked about.” And it was true. Linda measured the success of any commercial transaction less by whether she received fair goods at a fair price than by the length of time the store personnel spent chatting with her. She discussed the stickier aspects of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians with Eddie, the clerk at the Lowell Blimpie sandwich shop. She knew intimate medical details about most of the cashiers at the Food City supermarket and shared a stack of our Quebec vacation photos with Salvador of Salvador’s Pizza. Not long ago, I had been praising a fast-food joint whose gooey cinnamon rolls particularly appealed to me. “I won’t even go in there,” Linda huffed. “They’re not friendly at all. I was telling this one girl about how my windshield wiper fell off when I was driving. It was a very funny story that anyone else would have enjoyed hearing, but she just gave me a mean look like she couldn’t be bothered and asked me if I wanted to order anything.”
As it turned out, in addition to its advertised business selling flowers and shrubs, Dorflinger’s conducted a speakeasy-style side trade in ducks, chickens, and pygmy goats, but only if you were in-the-know enough to ask to see the pens behind the store.