“Here come the jaws of life!” the off-camera narrator announces, as hydraulic pincers crack open the side of my old van like fangs through a soft-boiled egg. It feels like my own ribs are being spread apart.
This is only a car, I tell myself. Just a thing, an object with no soul or feelings, a hunk of inanimate steel, plastic, wires, and rubber. But that doesn’t make me feel any better.
Because it was also once a symbol to me of motherhood, a symbol of having children to ferry around safely. It once carried my sons and me wherever we needed to go, along with firewood and baby chicks, hay bales and tomato seedlings, guitar amplifiers and library books. Now it’s just a container for everything I’ve lost.
And it is burning to the ground.
“All things, O priests, are on fire,” Siddhartha said, before he became the Buddha. “The eye is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire.”
Is this my shot at enlightenment? Somehow I doubt it, and I want to shut my eyes to it but I’m riveted. A dummy in the front seat and a smaller dummy in the backseat are cut free from their seat belts and dragged to safety before smoke and flames engulf the green van entirely. A smiling but sooty firefighter is interviewed, the program ends, and I turn the television off.
“Parents should not jump to conclusions before getting all the information,” advises my SMILE handbook. “A parent should not ask children what goes on in the other parent’s home. This is a violation of children’s trust.”
Whatever.
“What’s going on with the green van?” I ask Luke the second I get him alone.
He and his brothers walked over from across the road this afternoon instead of being dropped off in the van by Mr. Wonderful, providing me with an innocent enough reason for asking about it. Owen reads me like a billboard, and Will isn’t always aware of events beyond his nine-year-old world, so when I am at my worst and use one of my sons for my own devices, it is easygoing Luke I violate.
“Oh yeah, so this is pretty cool,” he tells me, eyes sparkling. “The transmission broke, and dad said it would cost too much to fix it, so he donated it to the fire department. They burned it. It was awesome.”
Because of his father’s good-hearted charity, Luke explains proudly, if a mom and her kids are ever trapped inside a burning minivan, our local firefighters will all know exactly how to save their lives.
And that’s when the hottest, still-glowing embers of bitterness smoldering in my heart go out, just like that.
13
July 2006
MAN IN THE MOON
No one, including me, especially anymore believes
till death do us part,
but I can see what I would miss in leaving—
the way her ankles go into the work boots
as she stands upon the ice chest;
the problem scrunched into her forehead;
the little kissable mouth
with the nail in it.
—TONY HOAGLAND, “Windchime”
The Big Valley looks different to me now. Like a photograph carefully edited, the definition and color-saturation levels cranked up as far as they will go. It’s ours now, ours!, and the frantic work that has been my refuge over the past year is my daily security now. Today, this work is even a joy, and there’s a sense of purpose to our labor that I haven’t felt since Major died.
I’m smiling at this, pulling on my boots and about to head out to water the garden, when Owen comes inside with a pronouncement.
“One of your chickens is gay,” he deadpans.
“What!?” I squawk.
“See for yourself,” he offers, opening the mudroom door and making the knowing gesture of a carnival barker at the curiosity tent.
I have heard of the fluorescent pink sheep, the world’s largest pig, and the two-headed cow. But the gay chicken? This I have to see.
The Meats are lumbering around outside the garden fence, trying to get in and peck the tomatoes, but the hens are all inside their pen, right where they’re supposed to be. Nine of them scratch along the edge of the coop for worms and bugs, or squat down on the ground and fluff their feathers in the dirt.
But the biggest hen of all, the one I’ve begun calling Alpha Chick, because she is a little bit of a bully, is standing on top of the water trough. She is arching her back and stretching out her neck as far as it will stretch. She opens her beak, almost as if she were trying to tell us something, and holds the pose for several seconds, but no sound comes out.
“Her?” I ask
“That’s the one,” Owen confirms.
Upon closer inspection I see that Alpha Chick has started to grow a red appendage on the top of her head that looks like a half-chewed gumball. There are a couple of emerald-green feathers sprouting from her backside that I haven’t noticed before, either.
The rest of the hens are still uniform in color, a soft and lovely tan. I narrow my eye in Alpha Chick’s direction, but before I can point out these physical changes to Owen, she hops off the water trough, runs straight at one of the hens taking a dirt bath—I think it’s Pink Ranger—and humps her.
“Oh my God!” I yell.
“I’m telling you,” Owen says, nodding.
The coupling is over quick, then Alpha Chick communicates her dominance verbally—or at least vocally. She stretches up her neck and opens up her beak again, but this time she actually speaks. And what she says is unmistakably “Cock-a-freakin’-doodle-do!”
Alpha Chick looks suspiciously like one of the roosters in Larry’s poultry catalog. Alpha Chick isn’t gay, I realize, because she isn’t even a chick—she’s a dude! As I watch her make a mad dash for Cher, I’m pretty sure that Alpha Chick is actually Alpha Chap.
“That’s no lesbian!” I blurt out to Owen. “That’s a rooster!”
“Whoa,” he says. “For real?”
Yes, as we will all be made aware of in the coming days, for real. For very, very real.
I have learned some things in the past year about moon phases, and vegetable gardening, and, yes, even about chickens. I’m not quite so naive about all this anymore. And I know that when it comes to raising chickens for eggs or meat, roosters are nothing but an extraneous and aggressive annoyance. Hens lay just as many eggs with or without them. You need roosters if you want to hatch fertilized eggs to raise your own chicks, but other than that they’re just a menace.
Over the next few days our rooster flapped his big wings and strutted, jumped the hens at will, and attacked every hand that tried to feed him. Caring for the chickens—tossing in the grain, refilling and cleaning out their water trough, raking the manure out of their pen—was a chore shared by the boys, so they were the ones taking the brunt of our rooster’s testosterone flares.
And each of my sons devised his own method to outwit or outmatch him. Owen kept big rocks handy. He’d throw one at the side of the coop to create a distraction, then toss in the feed and slam the pen gate shut. If the distraction didn’t work, he’d throw the rock at the rooster instead.
Luke was more of a chicken-wrangling stylist, and wore my tall rubber muck boots to protect his legs while waving a beach towel or a belt in figure eights like a matador, successfully fending off the bird’s air attacks as well as those aimed at ankle height.
Will took his inspiration from medieval times and donned a suit of armor he cobbled together out of a cardboard box, a skateboard helmet, a wooden sword, and a trash-can lid.
“Back!” he’d order, opening the pen and striding inside, shield first. Leading with his beak or the fanglike spurs that had recently popped out of the back of his legs, the rooster never tired of attacking Will’s shield. Maybe the shine infuriated him, because the ping! of beak on galvanized aluminum soon became a familiar sound.
“I got a name for our rooster!” Will yelled, running into the house one morning after another battle with the bird. “Pecker!” To emphasize that he had earned these naming rights, he held u
p his little hand, showing off the latest battle wound. Blood dripped from a V-shaped cut near his knuckle.
The double meaning of the name “Pecker” was lost on Will but not on my poor hens. With no armor, no weapons, and no chance of a diversion, they had no way to protect themselves from the gender traitor in their midst. The rooster terrorized their pebble-sized brains and their melon-sized bodies, and it was all day every day with the humping.
Pecker attacked the UPS man when he walked up the driveway to deliver the onion sets I ordered. He attacked the Meats whenever they were within range, even though they had grown to almost twice his size. He attacked leaves blowing across the yard, joggers getting in some rural miles, and two Jehovah’s Witnesses whose only crime was to walk up on our porch bearing pamphlets promising, “The End of False Religion Is Near!”
As these two navy-colored suits hopped back onto their bicycles and fled, I understood another thing about roosters. If Pecker wasn’t stopped soon, I could get sued for assault with a deadly chicken. Something had to be done, but what?
The next day, as I watched him run toward Gladys, I considered my options. Shoot him with the BB gun, beat him to death with that old golf club, or run him over with the minivan? Sic our big dog Super on him, put antifreeze in his water, slam the coop door on his head? Drop a cement block on him, light and toss some well-aimed firecrackers, microwave his ass?
I dismissed all of these options as the revenge fantasies of a temporarily unbalanced woman, and the boys and I gathered to brainstorm a humane end for Pecker. Execution was not off the table; we just had to devise a painless way to do it.
“Even PETA would want to kill that crazy bird,” Owen says.
Despite his animal-rights stance, my oldest has been attacked one too many times, is running out of rocks, and votes in favor of Pecker’s death by pretty much any means we devise.
“Yup. I vote for death, too,” Will says.
His vote is contingent on two things: not having to participate in the assassination or be a witness to it.
Luke has been uncharacteristically silent during our discussion, and so I ask him what he thinks should happen to Pecker. Surprisingly, he votes for clemency, and though he doesn’t exactly say why, it’s probably because he’s the one of the three who saw the aftermath of our pig’s death.
“He doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong,” Luke explains. “He’s just being what he is. And I don’t think he should have to die for it.”
We can respect that, and so we all agree that Luke has a week to come up with a way to spare Pecker’s life, or else I will plan a humane execution. The “how” of that task is left open, and I think of the old golf club still leaning up against the barn and cringe.
So I’m relieved when the end of Pecker’s reign of terror comes not with a BB-gun blast, a snap of the neck, or a tee shot, but with a whimper. Or at least the closest thing to a whimper I can imagine emanating from our rooster’s abusive beak.
Luke’s friend with the free-range chickens, the one who helped us move the playhouse and turn it into a coop, lives just a few miles away. In addition to chickens, his family also keeps ducks, guinea fowl, and even a peacock. If we can arrange to transport our rooster, and will throw in a bag of feed, they will adopt Pecker.
And so one weekend morning we lure the beast into Super’s big wire dog kennel using green tomatoes as bait, then latch the kennel door shut and load him, lunging and squawking, into the back of the minivan. On the short drive, Pecker whirls and flops around inside the cage like a Tasmanian-devil chicken, but we arrive with him safely contained, unload the kennel, set it down on the ground, and watch as Pecker’s new flock bobs on over to investigate.
Luke opens the kennel door; Pecker charges out to attack and is immediately set upon by two roosters much smaller than he is but with, we gleefully see, an obvious home advantage. Pecker fends them off, but not before losing a few feathers and taking a bloodletting beak-shot to the leg. This is exactly why it’s called “pecking order,” and I am satisfied to see that our rooster has been taken down a few notches. By the time we leave, Pecker is no longer trying to attack anything or anyone; he is cowering under a shrub.
Our weekend errand successfully completed, I drop the boys off at their father’s before I head home to check on our hens. I thought they’d be clucking around happily in their chicken yard, doing their hen things, but instead they’re scattered around the property, looking frightened and lost.
With Pecker gone, the Meats have wasted no time in pushing the hens out of the coop and taking over the nesting boxes and the fenced-in chicken yard. As usual, it looks like in trying to solve one problem, I’ve only succeeded in trading it in for a whole bunch of new ones.
Chicken drama will just have to wait a day. Plenty of people let their chickens range free, and tonight I just don’t have time to battle the Meats. Because tonight, for once, I actually have plans.
Pete will be joining me for happy hour on the porch, where we’ll discuss him finishing the remodeling project he started more than a year ago. Some of the money from the land sale will go to pay for this, but I’ve also been making more from my writing and editing assignments, too. The bill folder is empty, I’ve got a small savings account, and the well is more than half paid off.
Tonight isn’t exactly a date, I don’t think, because we’ll be discussing business; but it isn’t just an appointment, either, because I also invited him for drinks and dinner.
So what is this get-together, exactly? And why do I need to give everything a label? Farmer vs. gardener; Christian vs. Buddhist; builder vs. boyfriend. Why can’t I just be and let life unfold?
“To conquer oneself,” the Buddha said, “is a greater task than conquering others.”
I thought I had conquered myself, at least the part of myself that enjoys male company, when I donated my wedding dress to Goodwill. Is that the act of a woman interested in another romantic relationship? I don’t think so. And yet here I am, doing something I swore I’d never, ever do again: inviting a man over.
I could have discussed the remodel with him over the phone; I didn’t have to throw in dinner and drinks.
Friday happy hour on the porch is an every-other-week ritual that I am used to observing all alone, often beginning one second after the boys go to Mr. W’s for his “parenting time.” And yet today, I have company.
There is a man leaning back in one of Grandma Link’s lilac porch chairs, looking real comfortable, and watching me stride across the yard to feed the chickens. And God forgive me if I don’t give him a little wiggle as I go.
What am I doing?
“Hello, girls,” I say to the hens as I fling their feed in the grass. I open the door to the coop, humming, and try to shoo out the Meats, but they just run back in. I scoop chicken feed out of the metal bin and toss it on the ground; the hens cluck out their contentment, stroll back over to their pen, and peck at the yellow grain.
The Meats see the feed I’m tossing down and thunder toward me, jostling each other shoulder-to-shoulder like a pack of feathered wolves closing in. The hens flee in terror, taking cover near the barn. Something is going to have to be done about the Meats, and soon, but I already know that when the time comes, I will not be able to kill them.
I look at Pete relaxing on the porch, then back at the Meats. Pete … Meats. Pete … Meats. And I wonder.
Could he butcher chickens?
He bow-hunts for deer, he ice-fishes, he has a boat just for catching salmon out of the bay, so the answer is probably yes, and I imagine how this might go down tonight, after we’re finished discussing our remodeling business and when the not-exactly-a-date part of this evening begins.
Mardi: “What do you want to do?”
Pete: “I don’t know, what do you want to do?”
Mardi: “Oh, I don’t know. Wanna butcher some chickens?”
Pete: “I thought you’d never ask!”
At which point in this fantasy he’d drop to
his knees, clasp his hands together in prayer, and exclaim, “Thank you, Jesus, for delivering unto me the perfect woman.”
Yeah, right.
If you count the Uncle Kracker concert and the half-dozen times Pete has anonymously plowed my driveway and the other times he’s stopped by, this happy hour on my porch might qualify as a second date. Chicken butchering seems more like a sixth or seventh date, doesn’t it? Or maybe even more serious than that. Maybe it’s an activity reserved for a relationship that has advanced to the boyfriend/girlfriend stage.
It’s no wonder I discard the idea, then. Because Lord knows, I do not want a boyfriend.
· · ·
The sound of panic from somewhere outside wakes us up. Pete sits straight up like a catapult, and even half asleep I almost expect something—a boulder, a ball of flame—to be flung into the center of the bed. To be hurled our way in some form of punishment.
Not only did I invite a man over who is not my husband, and not even my boyfriend, I asked him to stay.
It’s almost a full moon, and we left the windows open so a near-perfect breeze comes into my silvery bedroom. But along with this breeze comes the sounds that woke us. Frantic screeching and wings flapping.
“My hens!” is all I can yell.
But Pete is up out of my bed and halfway down the stairs in his underwear. By the time I’ve bolted out the front door, he is already jogging around the outside of the coop.
“I can’t see anything,” he yells, “but your chickens are going nuts!”
What I see are my hens, my light-brown hens, seeming to throw themselves three feet up in the air against the chicken wire. As soon as their feet touch the ground, they jump up and kamikaze again. The Meats are inside the coop, won’t give up the nesting boxes, and have bullied the hens into the chicken yard.
The moon casts an eerie glow but not enough to see by, so Pete runs to his truck, starts it up, flips on his brights, and angles it so that the headlights shine directly at the coop. Framed in the fluorescent glare are fangs, two glinting eyes, and bloody feathers.
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