Fowl Weather

by Bob Tarte

  Matthew, the new white female Embden, and the new white-and-grey male Embden briefly chased and pecked one another before settling down to probe the soft soil. The other ducks and geese poured out of the pens to join them in yard-destroying revelry.

  “I guess they like it here,” said Marcia. But the new male concerned me. The primary feathers of his right wing stood out from his body at a right angle, as if he were signaling to make a turn, in a harmless condition known as angel wing—often caused by a vitamin deficiency in a waterfowl’s innocent youth. Birds with any obvious peculiarity were often picked on by stronger members of the flock. While Angel, as we soon called him, outweighed Matthew, I doubted he’d succeed in dominating him.

  “Kate would like Lulu to live somewhere else,” Eileen told us once the clamor had quieted down and our ears had stopped ringing.

  “She’s perfectly fine here,” I answered.

  “What goose or duck wouldn’t love it?” Marcia asked.

  “I spoke to her yesterday, and she feels Lulu would be happier with Henrietta, who just spent twelve thousand dollars on a duck pen.”

  “Twelve thousand dollars!” exclaimed Linda. “Are the fences made of gold?”

  “No, but she had special chain-link fencing custom-made for the exercise pen so that a raccoon can’t fit a paw through it. The roll of fencing was so heavy, it took seven men to carry it into her yard. Her ducks have also got a fully insulated Cape Cod – style cottage for their sleeping quarters that includes a fold-down bed for Henrietta. She can spend the night out with the ducks when she misses them. And there’s a two-way closed-circuit TV system so that Henrietta can see them and talk to them from the house, and they can see her face on the video screen.”

  “Is there room out there for me?” I asked. “It sounds like quite the life.”

  I pulled Linda aside, and we conferred in quiet quacks. When Kate had first brought Lulu to us, she’d told us that she might be back for her one day, so we didn’t really consider her to be our duck. Linda decided that she would have to check with Kate, and if it was okay with her, Eileen could come back for Lulu. After Linda explained this to Eileen, I caught myself on the verge of asking my former grade school classmate how she had hooked up with Henrietta—or, for that matter, Marcia—but realized that the convoluted answer would only depress me. I did put a question to Marcia, though. “After hearing about the golden duck palace, are you sure your geese will be happy here?”

  “Are you kidding?” Marcia laughed. All five geese, including Africans Liza and Hailey, had worked their way to the garden alongside the house and begun pruning the hyacinths and daffodils.

  “No, no, no,” said Linda. “You leave that alone.”

  Eileen shaded her eyes with her fingers and gazed off into our swamp. “Where’s that path of yours you’ve been bragging about?”

  “Underwater.”

  She snorted. “That didn’t work out very well, did it? I could put in a good word with Henrietta’s contractor, if you’d like to build a boardwalk.”

  “Totally unnecessary,” I assured her. “Why walk to the river when the river can come to us?” That gave me an idea for Henry Murphy’s laundry, and I made a mental note to mention it to Linda later. We could tie a few of his checkered shirts to a tree trunk and give them a thorough soaking.

  WE REALIZED THE flooding would be much worse than usual the morning Roswitha nearly lost her footing as she slogged along her gravel road. “The water’s well above her knees,” I told Linda at the breakfast table. Along with the rising river level came a wicked current that did its best to sweep our neighbor off the raised roadbed and topple her into the swamp. Dressed in hip waders and a nylon jacket, she used a broom handle as a walking stick to steady herself as she plodded forward.

  “Whoa. She almost went over that time.”

  “Did you see that?” Linda asked. “A huge fish just jumped out of the water.”

  I lowered the binoculars. “It must have scared her.”

  “Don’t let her catch you looking at her with those.”

  The next morning I scanned her road for the metal post that normally came up to my chin, which made it just over five feet tall. But the post was completely submerged. I watched through binoculars as Roswitha stood in an aluminum rowboat and poled her way up her driveway with an oar. I lost sight of her as she drew even with the poultry pen behind our barn, which so far had stayed above water.

  “When is the river supposed to crest?” I asked.

  “They said tomorrow afternoon on Channel 8 news.”

  “I’d better go down and see if the chickens need to take swimming lessons.”

  I met Roswitha on our porch as I was about to go outside. In order to maintain the dry-land portion of her amphibious lifestyle, she kept her car parked in our driveway. She was luckier than most of the people along the river. She managed to escape the worst effects of the flooding by living in a house whose habitable portion was confined to the second floor. But that didn’t make things easy for her. I could just imagine the process of trying to step onto her outside stairway with a load of groceries without capsizing her boat. She had never struck me as a hardy soul. In another life and with a shift of a few degrees, she might have been a high-society denizen, just as I might have been a nematode. Yet she poled her gondola without complaint, and for years had taken care of her husband after his disastrous heart attack.

  “How are you making out down there?” Linda asked. “Do you have time for a cup of coffee?”

  “No, I’ve got to get to the dentist. I just stopped to see how my pigeon is doing.”

  “We’re about to put her on the porch for the day,” said Linda. “She’s way too wild to keep with the other birds, but she’s not happy out on the porch either. As soon as it warms up a few degrees overnight, we’ll be able to let her loose.”

  I slipped past Roswitha, feeling slightly like a Peeping Tom with the binoculars around my neck, but I intended to squeak in a little bird-watching after visiting the poultry pen. The sheer volume of water was impressive. Only ten days earlier, when it seemed as if we wouldn’t get our usual spring rains, I had wandered among the puddles and ponds of the swamp sowing biodegradable mosquito pellets in hopes of staving off the annual bloodletting. Larger areas of water got treated to a doughnut-size anti-mosquito ring, but the mud tried repeatedly to swallow my boots instead. Now, in place of the scattered bits of wet lay a fast-moving widening of the river, and I envisioned my pricey larvae-poisoning snacks—harmless to other wildlife—enjoying an all-expense-paid voyage to scenic Lake Michigan.

  I couldn’t circumnavigate the pen behind the barn. The flooding blocked my regular route through the brambles. I cut around the front instead, patting my old friend the satellite-TV dish good morning before angling down the bank to Roswitha’s road. The water curled around the high ground of the barn. If the river rose another six feet, we’d have to consider relocating the chickens. Even if nine-tenths of the pen stayed dry, I couldn’t depend on Buffy to avoid drowning in a teaspoonful of water.

  I stepped into Roswitha’s rowboat, which safely sat half in and half out of the river. It wasn’t going anywhere without her. The stern rested solidly on familiar ground, while the bow pointed toward if not exactly terra incognita, then certainly terra indefinite. It felt strange to lose sight of the gravel driveway along with the familiar dips and ridges of the woods. It also made me claustrophobic to be barred from land I often walked. When neatly tucked within its banks, the Grand River was a marvelous companion. But for the river to awaken with a yawn, stretch its limbs, and matter-of-factly abuse its power was like discovering that the nice fellow who lives next door is actually an insurance adjuster. Fortunately, the flooding affected only the cosmetics of our property. Hundreds of people along the riverbank lived under a serious threat. I didn’t understand how Roswitha could cheerfully remain in a house that had become an island, even if she stayed high and dry. Putting up with the inconvenience was one thing, bu
t how could she possibly adjust to the strangeness?

  A kingfisher on the telephone wire above my head cursed the bad fortune of trying to dive for fish in a tree-choked bayou, and his complaint pinged across the water. Raising my binoculars, I searched the brush ahead of the boat for other birds. To my left I heard the cluck of a red-winged blackbird’s call note. I ignored the commoner, hoping for a glimpse of warbler royalty through the leaves. The caller persisted. He must be related to Eileen, I thought. Turning toward the noisemaker I was shocked to see an olive-backed bird with a yellow breast and a jet-black mask across his eyes. During the hot days of summer, the witchity-witchity song of the common yellowthroat warbler often sounded in our woods, but I had never laid eyes on the singer before. The flooding had flushed him out of the thicket and perched him on the top of the poultry pen, like Stanley Sue on Walter’s cage. He regarded me warily before sailing away to cluck from someplace else.

  AS I OPENED THE front door, Bette Ann asked brightly, “Are we having a rummage sale?” Deprived of space in the bedroom closet, Linda’s dresses and blouses had migrated to a clothing rack on the porch, whose cement floor also provided a gathering place for bags of rabbit feed, parrot seed, and kitty litter, plus the recycling bin, an exercise bike with a pigeon on its handlebars, a pair of pet carriers, and a pile of rocks.

  “No, we just live like hillbillies,” I told her.

  “You need a bigger house.” She shielded her face from Roswitha’s bird as it took off from the exercise bike to flutter against a window. “Where did that pigeon come from? You’re not keeping it, are you?” Linda detailed the story of the bird that taps on doors while we inched toward the dining room just in time for Howard to land on my head and coo. I lifted my hand and stroked his satiny back with a finger.

  “Stanley Sue isn’t out?”

  “I put her in before letting Howard go,” I said.

  “Can’t they both be out of their cages at once?” Bett asked.

  “They’re feuding,” I explained. “A few years ago, Howard flew into Stanley Sue’s empty cage and started eating her seeds. Stanley surprised Howard and tore open his back. I thought he was dead when I found him.” I shook my head to think of it, inadvertently dislodging the dove. “Sorry, Howard. After Howard recovered, the first chance he got he came after her, but it’s like a minnow attacking a barracuda. Stanley’s got a wicked beak and claws. Howard’s got nothing. The best he can do is beat her with his wings.”

  “I don’t know how you keep up with them,” she said.

  I could never keep up with Bett. Though eleven years my senior, she effortlessly surpassed me in youthfulness and energy—as would a three-toed sloth, of course. She matched an uncomplaining nature with boundless enthusiasm, which raised inevitable sticky questions about her parentage versus mine, as did her ambivalence toward pets.

  Stimulated by our voices, our canary Elliot erupted in glorious song. He began with flutelike glissandos reminiscent of a cardinal, then launched into a series of ecstatic trills. His gorgeous voice never failed to garner compliments from visitors.

  “Be quiet! We’re trying to talk,” Bett told him with exaggerated sternness. “I brought a couple of documents from the lawyer.”

  “I think Linda made some cake. Why don’t we have that first?”

  “Just a small piece, Linda,” said Bett. “Small,” she repeated. “I brought the durable power of attorney and the patient-advocacy forms.”

  “I’m glad you know what those are, because I don’t. You certainly got extra practice with Aba’s estate.”

  After my father’s death, Bett had guided our family through the thicket of legal issues initiated by the complicated trust account he had set up. More recently, when my dad’s sister Aba died, Bett discovered that she had failed to leave a will. Bett immediately flew to Washington, D.C., to manage the affairs of our eccentric aunt, who had had the habit of cutting off communication with any relative who crossed her in the smallest way. Bett’s sin of sending Aba a small bouquet the Christmas following my dad’s passing—in violation of a no-gifts tradition—had caused her to add my sister to her zipped-lips list. Despite this, Bett had cheerfully put our aunt’s final affairs in order.

  “I’ll bet if Aba’s looking down from heaven, she’s really steamed that I went through her apartment,” Bett joked.

  “So how did things go with Mom this weekend? How did she seem?”

  “I broached the subject of selling the house,” she said as Linda plunked down servings of spice cake the size of small office buildings. Neither Joan nor I would have been so bold as to mention the idea of moving, but Bett could get away with it. While I may have allegedly had my mother’s electric trimmer and anniversary watch, Bett definitely had her ear.

  “I’m supposed to eat all this?” she said to Linda.

  “It’s mostly air,” said Linda.

  “What did she say about the house?”

  “She said, and I quote, ‘I’ll think about moving when I start to lose my faculties.’ “

  “So how will she know when she reaches the point where she doesn’t know what she’s doing anymore?”

  “That’s an excellent question, Bob. I did get a chance to check her out in the car. She drove me to Mass in the Buick, and she did fine. I’ll tell you something else: she whomped me at cribbage last night.”

  “Maybe she’ll be okay in the house for a few more years.”

  “Who’s that on my head?” Taking his cue from the house-cat playbook, Howard inevitably gravitated toward the very people who least desired intimate contact with him. Bett was gracious about the intrusion, patiently waiting until I scooped him off her head and plunked him back into his cage.

  With the dove dislodged, Bett ducked into the living room and came back with a pair of file folders. “Here’s the durable power of attorney form, and here’s the patient-advocacy form. I explained both of them to Mom, and she agreed to sign them. These copies are for you. They’re pretty self-explanatory,” she added, but because I had trouble comprehending the legal text on a postage stamp, she was good enough to explain them to me.

  The context of Bett’s visit to our house on her way back to Fort Wayne was Dr. Doering’s recent diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease following Mom’s latest mental-acuity test. While the diagnosis hadn’t come as a surprise to Bett, Joan, or me, it did demand a significant shift in our thinking. It was no longer a question of wondering how bad Mom would get. Instead it became a question of how bad, how soon. We decided not to share the doctor’s report with Mom, since she wouldn’t have accepted it anyway. She would only have insisted that she would be just fine if people would stop taking her things. This ignorance was the saving grace of an illness that mercifully tended to conceal itself from the sufferer.

  As Stanley Sue squawked in vain to be let out of her cage, we tried to make headway with the huge mounds of cake Linda had given us. “Good heavens, you’ve got more critters coming for a meal,” said Bett. At the bottom of the hill, the first wood ducks of the season swam toward the water’s edge, trailing V’s behind them. When the six ducks finished fighting over the scratch feed that Linda had set out for them, we three humans waddled out to the backyard and stared at the water for a while. I wondered if Bett was having the same thoughts that I had about being inundated by worry, but I decided not to burden her with a cliché.

  WHEN IT RAINS, IT POURS. I should have told that to Bett, too. A scant few hours after my sister left, Linda made an unhappy discovery about Walter. “What’s wrong with his front leg?” she asked me. “It looks like he’s got an abscess. I don’t know why I didn’t see that before.”

  I couldn’t, in fact, see anything. Whether hunkered down or in blobby motion, Walter resembled a furry gel-stuffed pillow with front legs that were occluded by generous folds of flesh. A similar description might apply to Moobie. The two were nearly the same size, though he survived being momentarily mistaken for our massive cat thanks to the Rorschach inkblot pattern interrup
ting an otherwise white coat. I rarely found myself caught in a dark mood that couldn’t be lightened by a glance at Walter, who seemed to exude foolishness from every pore, though he held the highest opinion of himself.

  I got down on all fours on the living room rug, unintentionally encouraging Moobie to begin her campaign for a kitty treat by rubbing up against my face. As I moved toward Walter with watchful eyes, he ducked behind the chair. I curled up on the floor and waited. He thundered along the wall toward the safety of the plant stand. A couple of minutes later, large black eyes, a wiggling nose, and alert ears popped around the dragon tree to assess the threat level. Determining that I presented a target for a quick toe-biting foray, he galloped toward me making happy buzzing noises. Following a nip at my sock, he retreated to the safety of the chair.

  “That right front leg is a little swollen,” I agreed.

  “He’s got to go to the vet right away. We don’t want to take any chances with an abscess.”

  We had once lost a sweet French Lop bunny named Bea during surgery to remove a virulent abscess that spanned her neck, shoulder, and leg, and we didn’t want Walter to suffer a similar fate. Our vet, Dr. Fuller, specialized in “exotics”—the pet industry’s term for any animal other than a cat or dog, including the rare and seldom-glimpsed parakeet—and had saved several of our animals from premature demise, including a turkey attacked and temporarily blinded by a flock member, and a goose that had contracted a tuberculosis-like respiratory disease. After checking Walter’s leg, Dr. Fuller told me that the mass didn’t have the yielding feel of an abscess. He recommended an X-ray and biopsy.

  A few days later he phoned with the results. Walter had a malignant tumor on his leg, and because the growth lacked clearly defined boundaries, surgery could be long and difficult. “And even then, I wouldn’t know with absolute certainty that I’d removed it all,” he told Linda. “The other factor to consider is that it might already have invaded the bone.”

  “He’s an old rabbit. I’d rather not put him through surgery,” said Linda. “It would probably be too much for him.”