by Bob Tarte
Certainly I should have been more attentive to him. After I had returned from graduate school in San Francisco, we had sat down one evening and listened to an LP of a Benny Goodman concert at Carnegie Hall. But the only music that I had cared about at the time projected chaos, rage, and gloom, so the carefully orchestrated big band performance had slipped right through my synapses. In recent years, as free-floating anxiety had replaced existential anger, I had come to appreciate the jumpiness of my dad’s music. I had occasionally thought of repeating the listening session and now regretted never having bothered to actually do it.
Hardly a day went by since my father’s death that I didn’t want to phone him with yet another question about some subject that had never germinated with me. He had been my resource for questions about any aspect of home repair that didn’t involve plumbing, plastering, electrical work, roofing, drywalling, or sawing more than a couple of boards, but he could always recommend the correct service professional to hire. He could wallpaper, if you gave him a week to do a room. He was a demon with a screwdriver, too, regaling me as a boy with his skill prying open a paint can or jimmying loose a stuck storm window, and few could match his sidewalk-edging diligence. As a teen, I briefly tried to shovel the walk with a level of thoroughness that left nothing for him to touch up when he came home from work, but every attempt was futile. He always found enough stray flakes to shove around until Mom called him in for dinner.
I hated to admit it, but for every memory of my father from my youth, I had at least ten of my mother. The reason probably had to do with my own low-key personality, which had absorbed my dad’s talent for remaining in the background but couldn’t reproduce his glow. While he had been a quiet source of strength and stability to my more easily irritated mother, his generous nature had decided to skip my set of genes. And the sourness that occasionally visited my mom was a permanent boarder with me.
I remembered him once coming into my bedroom to comfort me during a thunderstorm even though my mom had suggested—in a manner consistent with her upbringing in a large German-American family—“Just let him howl.” The few moments spent tucking me in had delayed my parents’ departure to their monthly cribbage-club dinner by an amount too insignificant to clock, but that brief encounter had stayed with me for a lifetime. My mom, of course, had been kind to me, too. I had fond recollections of her pulling me in a red wagon to the A&P grocery store down the street—probably hoping to exchange me for a half-pint of whipping cream.
Now it was my mom who needed comforting. Nothing brought her joy anymore. The presence of friends and family, the absence of friends and family, brilliant sun-drenched days, miserable storms, TV shows, Sunday Mass, and pestilence only served to remind her that her husband was every bit as gone from her life as he had been at the moment of his death. I tried mentioning that a grief support group sounded as if it might be fun. My comment got the reception it deserved.
I thought deeply about these things—if thought is the right term for wheel spinning that accomplished nothing except keeping me awake—until Moobie wandered up and charitably licked my hand. She collapsed in a heap, allowing me to pet her until she was purring like an overweight dynamo and my mental battery began to discharge. A car shot by. The hum of its tires gradually faded as the car clung politely to the asphalt.
I FELT WOOZY from yet another night of not getting enough sleep. I was glad that it was a Saturday, and Moobie had allowed us to slumber until seven A.M. “No she didn’t,” Linda said as we drank our coffee. “She jumped up on the bed at least five times this morning. I had to swish her off with my feet.”
The geese erupted in happy honks when I let them loose in the yard, and their bugling helped dispel the low-hanging clouds that persisted from the previous night. Rarely was I stuck in a gloomy mood that a few minutes with Liza and Hailey couldn’t brighten. After filling their dishes with food, I stepped over the backyard fence and trudged down the hill toward the seasonal pond, setting out little piles of scratch feed for the visiting wood ducks, who flew off with nervous whistles. We had started feeding the wild ducks when Linda was rounding up our brood one spring day and noticed two skittish extra mallards. The next few afternoons, she left food on the lawn for them. But after watching them pace back and forth like mechanical shooting-gallery ducks just beyond the backyard fence, Linda decided that they probably preferred dining at a farther remove from us.
To our surprise, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard began sharing their evening meal with a male wood duck. In the ten years that we had lived in our house, we had only briefly glimpsed these spectacular birds, whose crested iridescent green heads with bold white stripes looked as if they had been meticulously hand-painted to suit the tastes of a Chinese mandarin. Before we knew it, up to fourteen male and female woodies crowded our hillside buffet. To reduce squabbling among the patrons, we distributed the scratch feed in numerous small servings. But even this didn’t prevent a pugnacious male from staking out the center of the restaurant and doing his utmost to chase away all comers except his mate. Wisely, the macho wood duck avoided showing up in the afternoon, when his actions wouldn’t have impressed the wild turkeys that had also discovered alfresco eating.
Slapping a mosquito that was supping on my forehead, I climbed back into our yard just in time to see a man bending over Linda’s sunflower patch.
“Hope you don’t mind me just dropping in,” master gardener Henry called with far more enthusiasm than the early hour warranted. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap, so here I am,” he quipped.
Liza and Hailey bolted across the yard toward the unfamiliar voice, necks outstretched, wings flapping, and raising an unholy cacophony. By the time their complaints had died down, I’d eliminated the shouting distance between Henry and me. I didn’t get close enough, however, to determine if hops and yeast played a role in his morning regimen.
“I had a little trouble with the soil tests,” he told me.
“What’s wrong with the lab?”
“Oh, I’m doing them myself. But the soil sat in my sinks all day without settling enough for me to do the tests. It makes me think there might be something odd about your soil.”
“You’ve got special sinks for soil testing?”
“No,” he said quickly, “just the ones in the kitchen and bathroom. If I get another customer, I’ll have to use the bathtub.”
I nodded as if this were the kind of conversation I had with people all the time and edged back toward the house for breakfast, wishing I could give my dad a call to hear his dry chuckle as I told him about this guy. But the day’s annoyances had just begun, and I needed all the nourishment I could get. A couple of hours later, I was outdoors again greeting my old classmate Eileen, her friend Kate, and Kate’s spoiled house duck, Louie, then standing aside as Eileen barged past me toward the house, leaving Kate, spoiled house duck Louie, and me on the front lawn.
“So where are all the little ones?” Eileen asked as I hurried to catch up with her.
Although she had never been in our house before, Eileen simply followed her ears to locate the dining room, where the pets lived. Dusty called out a hearty “Hello” when he heard the front door slam shut and added a howled “Woo!” Ollie had already been squawking his usual high-pitched chirp. Howard complained about the noise with a steady round of cooing.
“That’s Bertie over there,” I told her, trailing behind.
“Peewee!” she exclaimed.
“He is little, isn’t he?” I stammered, taken aback by her exuberance. While Eileen unfastened the cage door to pet the bunny that had been sleeping peacefully, I mentioned to Linda that a woman named Kate was standing in front of our house looking sad and clutching a duck. I continued the introductions by pointing to the Checker Giant rabbit one cage over from Bertie. “This big fellow is Walter.”
“Peewee!” Eileen cried again, flaring her nostrils and baring her teeth in a way that made me wonder if the bun on the back of her head was wound too tightly.
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�And this is my good friend Stanley Sue,” I ventured.
“What a little peewee!” she shouted.
Eileen met the rest of the birds, excitedly peeweeing each of them in turn. While these short outbursts were a welcome change from extended ramblings about old grade school classmates, I didn’t know how to process them. “It’s good to see you again, Eileen,” I finally told her in my best bland funeral-home delivery. I almost asked her what was new, until I realized that I’d be throwing opening the door to a vast storeroom of information tethered to my distant past.
“Did you ever get a chance to visit my mom?” I asked. “To watch a television program with her? Remember that?” When she treated me to a blank and somewhat chickenesque stare, I said, “There are several more peewees outdoors, if you’d like to see them.”
“Kate brought her duck.”
“You told her that we were only meeting Louie today, didn’t you? We talked about that on the phone. We weren’t planning on keeping Louie.” The question answered itself when I looked out the window just in time to see Linda guiding a thirty-something woman cradling a large white duck into our backyard pen. As soon as Kate set down the duck and tried to walk away, it ran quacking toward her through the pen door.
I led Eileen down the porch steps and stood back as she ecstatically greeted our ducks and geese. “I guess Louie would rather be back home,” I told Kate.
“Louie’s a Lulu,” Linda informed me.
“The neighbors won’t let me keep him,” Kate said.
“How do you know?”
“She quacks like a girl,” Linda said.
“They complained to the landlord. We live in an apartment, and Louie has gotten too loud for the bathroom.”
“It’s the girls that are loud,” Linda explained.
“I’ll say.”
“Eileen told me how nice your ducks have it, and this is better than I ever imagined.”
“Eileen hasn’t seen them before, but thanks,” I said.
“I won’t worry about him so much knowing he’s here.”
“You can visit her whenever you want,” Linda said. “You don’t even have to ask.”
“No point in that,” I added with what I hoped was an edge to my voice.
With Linda’s help, Kate succeeded in shutting the unhappy Lulu inside the pen. Never having witnessed a duck tantrum before, our two female geese and six female ducks gave the newcomer a wide berth as she churned her legs and struggled in vain against the first fence she had ever encountered in her life, wondering why she couldn’t just walk through that which she could see through. Male ducks Stewart and Trevor in the adjacent pen enjoyed the spectacle and chattered happily about the arrival of a bodacious waterfowl babe. When Lulu unleashed the most plaintive series of quacks ever to simultaneously pierce my heart and eardrums, Kate turned without a word and headed back toward her car.
“I guess it was too much for her,” Eileen observed with a rueful smile.
While I was still debating whether or not to go after Kate and see if she was okay, Linda reacted at once. “Everything’s going to be fine,” she promised, stooping down to console the distraught white duck. But Lulu regarded Linda as an impediment, not a comforter. She darted to the front of the pen, where Linda wasn’t blocking her view of the weedy vista where her owner had last been seen. Spurned, Linda murmured a few more phrases of encouragement before disappearing through the backyard gate in search of Kate.
Just to divert my attention from Lulu’s pleas, I found myself asking Eileen, “So how is it that you know someone who keeps a pet duck in her bathroom?”
“I met your sisters at your dad’s funeral, and one of them told me about your ducks.” She winced and stepped away from the squawking commotion. “I had lunch with Mary Vielbig the following Wednesday—Mary from your freshman German class at CC. I told her about running into you at the funeral home just like that, and I asked her if she knew anyone who had pet ducks, but she’s too upset about her divorce to even think about anything else. ‘Ask me about lawyers,’ she told me. But she thought her brother-in-law might know somebody, and she gave me his phone number. He’s the manager at a Home Depot, and he told Mary that farmers go in there all the time. But it was really funny, because it turns out that the guy who lives across the street from him is related to Kate, and that’s how I happened to meet her, just sort of by accident.”
“You could almost call it a coincidence,” I replied, though I had ended up concentrating on Lulu’s misery after all and hearing my father’s voice in my head saying, Now that’s what I call a duck out of water.
Eileen’s arcane web of interpersonal connections baffled me as much as her sudden interest in us. Most people had innocuous hobbies like stamp collecting or window peeping. Hers was pitching a tent in the past. A flick of her head indicated that Linda had rounded the corner of the house with Kate, who was carrying an awkward bundle in her arms. I feared it was another duck, until she began unwrapping it.
“These are Louie’s things,” she told me with a heavy finality. She passed me a padded blanket. “This is the bed he sleeps on in the corner of the bathroom next to the register, and this is his stuffed bear, Peabody.” I handed blanket and bear to Linda, since I needed both hands free to receive a thirty-inch-tall mirror with a yellow pine frame. “He loves to look at himself, especially in the morning when he first wakes up.” At the sound of Kate’s voice, Lulu ratcheted up the intensity of her quacks. She darted from one side of the wooden door to the other, trying to figure out how to get to her.
The cloth items smelled of fabric softener, and the mirror was spotless except for my sweaty fingerprints. I was on the verge of telling Kate that if we put Lulu’s possessions inside the pen, they would be soaked with wading-pool water and streaked with mud within the hour. But giving us custody of her house duck was as serious to her as it was incidental to the mysterious Eileen. I kept my mouth shut long enough for Linda to ask, “How did you ever end up with such a darling duck?”
“My daughter Geri and I were touring a farm in Indiana where you can bottle-feed baby pigs and goats. There were ducks and chickens wandering all over. As we were leaving, she found an egg sitting all by itself in the grass near the parking lot. She ended up taking it home, and it was her idea to try to hatch it.”
“Did you know it was a duck egg?” Eileen asked. “I wouldn’t know a duck egg if you broke one on my head.”
I made a quick scan of the yard to see if one was handy.
“We had no idea. I certainly didn’t expect it to hatch, but I borrowed an incubator from Geri’s school, because she was so into the whole thing, and before we knew it or were in any way prepared to be duck parents, Louie hatched.”
“Aw,” said Linda. “She sure thinks a lot of you.”
“I think he wants his mirror. That usually calms him down.”
“I think she wants you,” Linda said.
Kate’s body language told me that she was an animal person. It wasn’t just that she crouched down to duck level to talk to Lulu and introduce herself to the curious geese. You could see that she had handed herself over to the birds. Her pupils dilated, she smiled, and everything about her manner expressed openness. I saw nothing of this in Eileen, who clearly loved drama more than people or animals.
I opened the pen door just wide enough for Kate to dart inside. Even though Lulu had been frantic for a reunion, Kate had to chase her through a flurry of complaining geese and ducks, who were sure that she was after them. But Lulu relaxed as soon as Kate picked her up and started stroking her orange beak. I leaned the mirror up against one of the posts while Linda arranged the blanket and the bear around the mirror. The items struck me as a sad tableau of a classic “odd duck” story.
“Geri has been quite adult about all of this, and she’s only ten,” said Kate. “She was the one who told me, ‘Mom, Louie shouldn’t have to live his whole life in the bathtub.’ I think I’m having a harder time with this than she is. Eileen told me
what wonderful people both of you were. She said she’s known Bob for years and years.”
“With one or two small gaps,” I pointed out.
THAT SAME EVENING, a different sort of duck problem reared its head when Victor bit me on the leg. He had been shadowing me ever since I’d shooed the ducks and hens into the barn and made my rounds doling out fresh food and water. I had positioned the push broom between us, fending him off in the same manner in which a lion tamer wields a chair. But Victor sidled up behind me while I was preoccupied with Linda’s discovery of a broken reflector post on the shoulder of the road.
I was thinking about the accident from the previous night, hypothesizing that a cousin of Eileen’s named Elmo was driving home after an exhausting evening guzzling beers and bragging about a dove-hunting trip. He’d managed to keep from nodding off until his cell phone rang and Eileen began excitedly relating an anecdote about a friend of an old kindergarten friend. The road took a turn, but Elmo’s car did not. He awoke when his tires hit the gravel, just in time to drop the phone, slam on the brakes, snap a reflector post, and holler, “Jeepers!” as the headlight of his SUV disappeared in a mist of shattered glass. “I know, I couldn’t believe it either,” Eileen’s voice replied from the floor. Veering sharply back onto the asphalt, he braked again to avoid repeating the mishap on the opposite shoulder, and then in a state of heightened wakefulness continued on his way as the chattering Eileen continued on hers.
I decided that this was how the accident must have happened, even if I couldn’t prove that one of Eileen’s relatives was actually involved. But my reconstruction failed to impress Victor, who seized the opportunity to indiscreetly seize my calf.
You might think that a duck bite is an inoffensive nip. Certainly a Muscovy’s beak doesn’t compare with the jaws of a crocodile, pit bull, or African grey parrot. But there’s a lot going on behind it. Other domesticated ducks—from the practically goose-size White Pekin to the diminutive Call Duck—are shy offshoots of the familiar wild mallard. But except for a few changes in coloration, the Muscovy barrels into the barnyard with his primal wild Muscovy roots intact. He’s a nightmare version of a duck, a Frankenstein’s fowl with a lurching, menacing walk, heavily clawed feet, muscular wings, and a thuggish demeanor that fits his fleshy red face mask. He hisses like a snake, pants like an obscene phone caller, thrashes his thick tail like an alligator, throws back his head and grins like a horror movie villain, and likes nothing better than to sneak up on you and inflict a painful hematoma. And we had three Muscovies: Victor and Hamilton, who traded places as top dog, and Ramone, who showed surprising reserve with us despite his bluster.