by Bob Tarte
We continued reminiscing for a while, recalling the stark or pastoral names of neighbors who had moved away or passed away: Gray, Glass, Edge, Rotz, Meadows, and Greenfield. Finally I asked her, “I was wondering if you’d seen my mom recently.”
With a deep intake of air, she raised her large body from the couch as if the subject was too important to address while seated and headed toward a window. “We just think the world of Bette.”
“She mentioned something to me about a grass-seed spreader.”
“Anything of ours she’s free to use, of course.”
“You don’t have one of hers?”
“No, but Don could spread some seed. We’ve got a regular hardware store in the basement. He should be home any moment if you want to ask him for help.”
I joined her at the window. When she pulled back the curtain to gaze out at the curb, the daylight nearly blinded me. “You don’t eat dinner in the basement, do you? The one with the hardware store.”
“Why, no.” She let the curtain slip through her fingers.
I pulled it open again. “You can’t even see her kitchen from here, can you?” I squinted at the bright stripe of Judy’s front sidewalk.
“What’s that, dear?”
“My mom’s kitchen. You can’t see into her kitchen from here.”
I noticed her attitude shifting from one of concern over my mother to vague wariness about me, but I didn’t feel comfortable repeating the quote from my mother. “I just meant, I was wondering if you could sort of keep an eye on her.”
“We always do,” she beamed. “We liked your dad so much. It’s sad thinking about your mom all alone now over there.” She astonished me by making a clicking sound as she pretended to turn off a switch on the side of her head. “So I just don’t think about it.”
I CAME HOME CONFUSED. Maybe Judy Teany had swiped my mother’s grass-seed spreader after all. My parents hadn’t used the grass-seed spreader for years, and my mom certainly didn’t need it now. So why would she concoct a fantasy about the underemployed, unloved grass-seed spreader instead of the far more popular hose, rake, broom, string trimmer, hedge clippers, bucket, hoe, or shovel? My head hurt to think about it. Fortunately an endless succession of animal chores prevented me from probing the bottomless pit of my mom’s and Mrs. Teany’s idiosyncrasies too deeply.
As soon as Linda cleared the table after dinner, I sat down on the plush and beaten chair next to Stanley Sue’s cage, never imagining that the chair was keeping a secret from me. Stanley Sue dropped the peanut that she had been cracking, climbed down from the top of her cage, and stepped onto the arm of the chair. Using her beak to anchor her upper body, she clambered down to the cushion to stand next to my leg. She could have flown the same distance in one-tenth of the time, but she always chose the mountaineer’s approach.
“Would you like me to scratch your head?” I asked her. She bent her head as if to let me, and when my hand descended, raised it again as if to bite. This was all part of a nightly ritual, but the unusual activity inside the chair was not.
Across the room, Linda admonished Dusty, “Be nicer to your Donald” as he lunged at the vinyl Donald Duck figure he had long ago decapitated. “Who’s this?” she asked, squeaking a barbell-shaped dog toy with a monkey’s face on each end. “Is this your Opie?”
I sat forward in the chair. My attention was riveted on Stanley Sue, who had begun to preen with precise jerking motions that reminded me of our failed mechanical bird sentry. She showed impressive control over her feathers. She spread her tail as easily as I would spread my fingers, reached back with her beak to grab some oil from her preen gland, then applied it to the feathers on her back, which popped up like rows of shingles in a windstorm. With quick strokes she smoothed and arranged one feather after another. Finally she lowered her head in a sign that she would allow me to rub her neck. As I brushed her skin with my fingertip, she made nibbling motions in an expression of satisfaction. I started to lose myself in her. I fell into the fish eye facing me, jumped to the curved plane of her upper beak, and was about to wrap myself around her grey reptilian toes when Linda cried out, “A mouse, there’s a mouse running up your chair!”
Hopping up, I extended my hand to Stanley Sue and spoke the command that every parrot owner recognizes and that every parrot must obey. I said, “Step up,” ordering her to step onto my hand. She ignored me, turned, and climbed the chair arm, then scaled her cage bars to the door and popped inside to eat a sunflower seed.
I’d gotten over my fear of mice the year I had moved to this house and discovered that the basement was a favorite sightseeing spot for hornets, spiders, earwigs, snakes, chipmunks, squirrels, the occasional well-traveled Norway rat, and, most of all, mice. I still hadn’t embraced the concept of vermin jumping out at me, though. So I lifted the cushion warily, beheld an unpleasant secret inside the chair, and felt the blood drain to my feet.
“What?” asked Linda. “What?”
A writhing mass of tiny pink bodies beckoned “hello” from a hole in the upholstery that mama mouse had excavated. For all I knew, the entire chair was stuffed to the bursting point with wriggling, sightless entities that resembled mammalian slugs. I replaced the cushion and turned toward the rain that was rolling off the leaves of our hackberry tree and had darkened the plumage of the goldfinch on our feeder.
“A mouse nest,” I stammered, though this failed to do justice to the extraordinary sight. Had the mice been dead, my shock wouldn’t have been so great. It wasn’t just that a test-tube culture of rodents bloomed in our dining room. It was that I’d seen the creatures in a distressingly helpless state of being. I’d inadvertently glimpsed an unpleasant process usually hidden from human eyes, like the secretion of bile by the liver or the production of canned cat food.
“Don’t hurt them.”
“I’m not going to hurt them. I don’t want anything to do with them. But they can’t stay here.”
Linda looked at me in shock. To her way of thinking, if there was anything worse than stumbling upon undulating, pop-eyed, furless larvae in a dining room chair, it was depriving the pop-eyed, furless larvae of their opportunity to undulate. “Well, we have to let the mother finish raising them, at least.”
A tinkling crash came from behind us. We knew the sound, so neither of us took any notice. Dusty had climbed from his cage top to the plant hanger attached to the windowsill, snagged the much-abused wind chime, and thrown it to the floor. He would do that two more times before calling it a night.
“You do see a problem with that, don’t you? When she’s finished raising them, they’ll make themselves at home, and the next thing you know, we’ll have mouse nests in our mattress.”
Linda put her hands on her hips, eliciting a squeak from Opie between her fingers. “We can’t let them just die.”
“How about if we move the nursery to the barn?”
Linda decided that this would be okay as long as she tagged along to make sure that mother mouse didn’t abandon her chair in transit. I hadn’t seen the mom when I’d raised the cushion, and by the time I flipped the chair sideways to fit it through the front door and lurched it down the porch steps without a sign of her fecund form, I decided she must have high-tailed it while I’d been begging Stanley Sue to step up. We moved briskly over the slippery grass, but just as I huffed and puffed my way around the massive evergreen within sight of the barn door, Linda hollered, “Stop, stop! There she goes, put down the chair.”
I was happy to oblige. Although the chair wasn’t exactly heavy, I was even more of a lightweight and gratefully set it down. The rain increased intensity, gleeful for the chance to drench a pair of mouse abusers.
“We have to leave it here so that she knows where it is,” said Linda.
“In this?” I flicked the wet hair from my eyes. “For how long?”
“At least overnight.”
I couldn’t really argue with her, since I didn’t see the value in returning a mouse-infested chair to the
dining room. The next thing I knew, Linda had taken my hand. “Dear Lord,” she said, closing her eyes and bowing her head. “Please let the mouse find her babies in the chair.” The enormousness of the moment humbled me. Despite all of the people who had preceded us over thousands of millennia of human history, I was confident that no one had ever spoken such words in prayer before.
THE BABY MICE would probably stay dry. Their nest was deep within the chair, and the rain had started to taper off. But some of the hens in the pen behind the barn stood outside complaining about the downpour instead of marching through the open door. During pleasant, sunny weather, these same contrarians typically huddled indoors in the gloom, muttering to themselves. The worst offender was a buff-colored Buff Orpington named Buffy. After I had shooed the other soggy chickens into the barn, Buffy remained perched on a rock, wearing a quizzical expression that revealed either profound philosophical insight or vacuity noteworthy even by poultry standards. She finally straggled in just before I closed the doors and began scattering kitchen scraps on the cement floor. The other birds fell upon the treats with gusto, but Buffy sauntered through the lettuce, peas, and macaroni working out algebraic equations in her head. Then she turned and pecked at a bar of light from the window.
Hamilton the Muscovy darted from the shadows to try to attach himself to my calf. He was the new king of the barn. My old nemesis Victor had started to molt, and Hamilton was taking advantage of Victor’s depleted energy level by crowning himself and banishing his rival to the back of the barn. I discovered Victor hiding behind our old pottery kiln. His scraggly wings bristled with quills that would soon flower into pure white feathers. Squatting beside him, I took a sandwich bag from my shirt pocket and turned it inside out to deliver a few chunks of watermelon. He ate the fruit greedily and with a tolerance for my presence that I half took to be gratitude. If he recalled our recent brawl with the push broom, he didn’t let the memory get in the way of his favorite treat. But I didn’t stay too close to him, out of respect for his pride—and his reach.
A scuffle brought me to my feet. Shy Muscovy Ramone was running panicky figure eights in the center of the barn with Hamilton’s beak clamped to his tail. Even Buffy took notice and flapped to higher ground. Blocking their progress with my infamous broom, I managed to grab Hamilton, pull him off Ramone, and pin his wings to his body so that he wouldn’t knock me out when I picked him up. Snaking his neck backward, he put a vise grip on a fleshy fold of my forearm before I could safely set him down again. I shook the arm that he had bitten, and he took the movement as a provocation until I stepped back and reached for my plastic pitcher. I distracted him by scattering bits of bread. As the other ducks and hens converged on the fresh goodies, Hamilton came up with the idea of terrorizing Richie by preventing him from getting to the food.
I tossed a handful of bread directly under Hamilton’s beak, then flipped a few pieces over Richie’s head. Hamilton ignored the bread near him and advanced on Richie’s share instead. I stepped between them with the broom, then turned to present Richie with a private helping. But in the waterfowl world, big birds just don’t help smaller birds. Instead of viewing me as his rescuer, he sized up my height and my general birdlike characteristics as evidence that I was bent on chasing him as well. He retreated, softly quacking Pekin curses at me.
I said good night to Victor behind the kiln, leaving him the last few morsels of bread before snapping off the barn lights. I hadn’t intended to revisit the chair under the evergreen, but it exerted an irresistible pull. I had all I could do to keep myself from lifting the cushion to determine the fate of the wrigglers. But some secrets were better left concealed, especially when they presented me with a minor moral dilemma.
If I lifted the cushion and discovered that mother mouse hadn’t come back aboard, out of a misguided notion of truthfulness I would feel compelled to report the bad news to Linda, and it would bother her all night. And if the mother mouse had returned, lifting the cushion might spook her and cause her to abandon the nest for good. I couldn’t completely disregard a third possibility, either. If I lifted the cushion and somehow found yet another copy of the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather, it would be as serious as seeing a peanut-shaped spaceship piloted by an African grey parrot. I’d never be able to go back into the house and resume a normal life. So rather than lift the cushion and risk disappointing Linda, disturbing the mouse, or displacing myself from my home, I imitated Buffy instead. I stood near the chair in the rain and quizzically regarded the cushion with what I hoped would be a thoughtful look, though the dim expression on my face probably wouldn’t have fooled anybody.
WE WERE GLAD to be rid of one batch of babies. The starlings had finally left, which made Linda happy. The orphans had come to her in plastic margarine tubs from rehabber Marge Chedrick, graduated to a small cage on the porch, and ended up in a tabletop flight cage at the foot of the basement stairs. Dark grey blurs shot back and forth behind the wire whenever Linda charged down the steps. You couldn’t count the dark grey blurs, but occasionally one would perch and turn into a bird. Screeching and vibrating its wings, the starling would beg for food with its beak wide open. Just as Linda guided the syringe into its mouth and began squirting in the feeding formula, the bird would jerk its head away and get slimed with ocher goop. One by one each bird was fed and cleaned. Two hours later, the whole process started again.
To thwart mealtime escapes, Linda would drape a sheet over herself and the cage while she crouched with the feeding formula. “Say cheese!” I’d say, since she reminded me of an early-twentieth-century photographer. Despite her precaution, a bird often slipped through the cage door and past the sheet to motor misguidedly around the basement. Pet carriers, a discarded vacuum cleaner, heaps of clothes, a forgotten juicer, boxes of Christmas tree ornaments, and two circular knee-high fences defining rabbit exercise areas hindered the recapture despite Linda’s deft swishes with a trout net. Inevitably the escapee would gravitate toward a small cutout in the perennially unfinished drywall and vanish behind the west wall. Twice I’d tacked a screen over the opening, and twice the screen and tack had fallen down, due to an elusive invisible force called sloppiness.
Eventually the bird would reemerge and fly to another inconvenient part of the basement—such as the clothesline that held our winter clothes—and from there flit to the pipe above the washing machine or the windowsill near the pottery supplies shelf, with Linda close behind. When the starling grew tired of its separation from the others but couldn’t work out the matter of getting back, and when Linda was on the verge of giving up the pursuit, the bird would suddenly shoot past her just as she had raised her net into the air, and a soft but satisfying impact plus subsequent squawk would indicate that she had caught the escapee. Two hours later, the whole process started again.
“You’re going to Marge’s to get more birds?” I asked Linda as we ate Saturday breakfast. “You just got rid of these.” She’d had three batches of starlings over a period of five weeks, and had just begun reclaiming the chunk of her life that they had eaten up.
“She’s not giving me starlings this time. These are Baltimore orioles.”
That made all the difference in the world. The most beautiful bird song I had ever heard had issued from the double syrinx of a Baltimore oriole. While his peers were also in splendid voice as they defended their breeding territories, this particular bird was the operatic tenor of the yard, with a gliding, flutelike, harmonically complex arc of notes that would stop me in the middle of my chicken chores as I scanned the treetops in search of him.
A VISIT WITH MARGE was always so intensely chaotic that it made our place seem about as exciting as the Department of Motor Vehicles. At first glance, George and Marge’s house was of a piece with the other 1930s-vintage homes in their urban neighborhood. But to stroll through the gate to the Chedrick’s backyard was to leave behind a typical community where the squirrels ran up a tree as soon as you got out of your car
, and blue jays squawked harsh warnings that you had intruded on their space—and to enter a tiny raucous world where squirrels scampered unconcerned across your feet, and blue jays squawked as they landed on your head.
A flock of Canada geese honked hello. We made a wide detour around the swan that was justifiably pissed off to have swallowed a fisherman’s hook, line, and sinker, which had festered in its throat until the kindly zoo vet Dr. Hedley surgically removed the mess. We were also on alert for a nervous wild turkey or an abused emu with a grudge, though the current fraction of the twelve hundred birds and mammals that the Chedricks took in, nursed, and released over the course of a year prowled the property at ease.
“Watch it,” Marge warned as we caught up with her in the building behind the house. I assumed that she was cautioning the person on the other end of her cordless phone until a flash of wings propelled a gangly being from its roost on top of a towel at the window to the moving platform of my shoulder, and an impossibly elfin green heron probed and pecked my hair with its sharp forceps of a bill.
“He’s imprinted on people. I don’t know what we’re going to do with him.”
With a thrust of his pipe-cleaner legs, the pigeon-size heron hopped from my shoulder to Marge’s, and she reached behind her to pet his neck. “Near the mouse food,” she told her caller. “See the rat food? Now look next to it.”
I couldn’t guess the context of the conversation. Before I could open my mouth to ask, she disconnected caller one to talk to caller two about picking up an injured Cooper’s hawk. “Careful,” she said as the heron popped back onto my shoulder. “He’ll go for your eyes. He likes anything shiny.”
“Are you talking about the hawk?” I asked. She vigorously shook her head. I vigorously shook mine, and the putative eye plucker puttered back to his window seat.
Linda slipped into the room next door to coo at a white racing pigeon that had crash-landed in someone’s backyard. Marge followed with the phone to make sure that Linda didn’t stick her finger through the bars to pet a recuperating muskrat in another cage. “We wear gloves with that guy.”