Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  But you open up your heart to an animal at your peril. On the positive side are the purrs, licks, contented quacks, the gleeful hops onto your lap, and the electricity that leaps between their eyes and yours. A dove flies to a chair to bow and coo his love for you. A duck roosts on your shoulder. A starling hangs from your hand. A parrot drinks from your juice glass, and a parakeet nibbles your cheek. An injured turkey struggles to her feet when she hears the sound of your voice. The goose on the porch that may not make it through the night honks softly because she wants you near, while the rabbit in the living room tears across the carpet. He jumps straight up, spins around in midair, and runs off just because he can. Just try and put him back into his cage.

  On the downside are the disappointments—not to mention the inevitable deaths. It’s the parrot that hates you, of course, and the cat that hides under the bed. It’s the trust that never comes, and it’s the other broken bonds. The pampered turkey blinds her sister. The gentle parrot slashes open a dove. The starling you saved leaves without a glance good-bye. And the ducks and geese you cherish, feed and water every day, nurse through sickness, and try to keep safe still shy away as if you were a predator, simply because you tower above them. These misunderstandings can never be resolved. But find a clump of grass the ducks haven’t flattened, plop down on it, and speak with a soft voice, and you might be rewarded with the close approach of a goose. She might even let you touch her. And you had better treasure the gift. Too suddenly and too often, they leave us. It’s then that we realize most sharply the subtle comfort of our animals’ companionship. It’s then that we know that we can’t live without them, even though we sometimes must.

  THAT SUMMER, LINDA and I took a break from the pets to visit her cabin in northern Michigan. We hadn’t been up there in over two years, and I had forgotten the intimate details of the two-room cabin overlooking algae-choked Morley Pond. Walking into her tiny kitchen evoked an overwhelming sense of nostalgia as palpable as running nose-first into an ancient wall. At first I thought I was pining for the last bloom of my youth, but I had met and married Linda in my mid-thirties and had already been a crotchety old man in spirit for decades. So that wasn’t what I was feeling. Stepping out her back door, I nearly tripped over the remains of a chicken-wire pen where Linda had occasionally kept Binky during the first few weeks we had owned him. I remembered buckling the struggling bunny into a purple harness, carrying him out to Linda’s field, and trying to take him for a walk with no understanding of how poorly he would do on a leash. Those days marked the end of a kind of innocence about animals. The comings and goings of so many pets added richness and complexity to the years that followed. Our enslavement to ducks, geese, rabbits, parrots, turkeys, cats, starlings, parakeets, doves, and canaries helped teach me a smidgen of patience, tolerance, and respect that I even applied to people from time to time. But this gain came at the expense of a certain lightness of being. We became wiser but sadder, and not really all that wise.

  But I couldn’t turn back time—especially if it involved diddling with a digital clock. As a realistic alternative, I decided to stop taking Dusty for granted as an adversary and start noticing his finer points. An example was quick in coming. I strode into the dining room late one afternoon while Howard was chasing the smaller birds from the plant hanger to the refrigerator top and noticed to my horror that our parakeet, Sophie, had squeezed between the bars of Dusty’s cage. She flitted about like a moth touring a chandelier, flicking against him with her wing tips until she finally settled on his bowl and helped herself to his exotic seeds. As we had learned from previous unpleasantness with Howard, Stanley Sue would have made mincemeat of any intruder in her cage. Dusty was generous about the visit, however. He gazed at the yellow parakeet with avuncular affection and never made the slightest move in her direction.

  He seemed to demonstrate similar fondness for the starlings we raised that summer. “Aww,” he would coo in Linda’s voice, when she brought the baby birds to the dining room table for feeding. Once we had released the batch, a few of them hung around our yard to beg for food at regular intervals. “They’re here,” Dusty announced one morning. We hadn’t heard him use that phrase before, and we hadn’t mouthed it ourselves. A glance out the window revealed three birds on the backyard gate clamoring to be fed. “They’re here,” he told us again and again over the next few days. Then the starlings left us, and the phrase flew from Dusty’s repertoire, never to be repeated.

  More than any other factor, Dusty’s keenly honed sense of humor was what finally won me over. He loved exploiting his talking and mimicry talents to lord it over the other animals and make fun of us. Whenever we released Howard from his cage, immediately after lighting upon the back of a dining room chair in front of the parakeets’ cage, Howard would hurl his swaggering hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo call at them. The unvarying nature of this event wasn’t lost on Dusty, and neither were the intricacies of timing. One day when I opened Howard’s cage door, Dusty waited patiently for the dove to spring into the air, arc across the table, and flutter toward a landing on the appropriate chair. An instant before Howard’s feet touched the wood and while he was still gearing up for an impressive hoot, Dusty beat him to the draw with a louder version of the dove’s own call. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo! Deflated, Howard was forced to face the parakeets in silence. Later he hooted at them, but a parrot had already tarnished his perfect moment.

  Within a half hour of finishing dinner, we always rounded up the birds that weren’t hand-tamed by clapping and shooing them into their cages. Dusty contributed after his own fashion. “Time to go back,” I would remind the three parakeets and our canary, Elliott, as Ollie watched from Linda’s shoulders. They typically snubbed my request. “Go on!” Dusty urged them in Linda’s voice, followed by an imitation of our bird-herding handclaps that came just as I was about to put my hands together. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, I felt like telling Dusty.

  He showed the same sarcastic consideration for our cat. Before I could even clomp all the way down the basement stairs to call Agnes into the house for her after-dinner treat, Dusty would anticipate my routine by unleashing the mocking cry, “Agnes!” with perfect mastery of my dulcet tones. Later in the evening, after we had switched off the lights in the kitchen and dining room, we always kept the noise level low lest we disturb the sleeping birds. The penalty was facing a domino effect of complaints. If I crept into the kitchen and inadvertently crinkled a bag of tortilla chips while removing it from the cupboard, the caged and covered Howard would emphatically hoot his disapproval. Annoyed at being awakened by Howard, Stanley Sue would raucously throttle her bell, prompting Dusty to exclaim in my voice, “Stanley, be quiet!” The only thing missing from this chain reaction was a salivating dog.

  Linda and I were away from the house during Dusty’s most outrageous verbal performance. While we vacationed in Tennessee, our pet-sitter Rhonda was having trouble convincing Dusty to return from his constitutional across the living room rug. Following the instructions Linda had left her, Rhonda dropped a towel over the parrot to minimize the chance of falling foul of his beak, picked him up, and deposited him inside his cage. As she closed his door, Dusty shot her a piercing look and cursed her with the epithet, “Bitch.”

  “That’s what he said,” Rhonda reported later. “He said it loud and clear.”

  “He’s never heard that word from us!” Linda exclaimed. “He must have heard it at his previous owners.”

  “Don’t look at me,” I insisted.

  “Well, I just froze when I heard that,” Rhonda told us. “Then I burst out laughing, he imitated my laugh, and we got along just fine from then on.”

  As I became more appreciative of Dusty, Dusty became more tolerant of me. He stopped making a beeline for my feet when he crawled down from his cage in the evenings. While I sat in a battered dining room chair rubbing the head of Stanley Sue, who crouched beside me on the cushion, he would often strut right by without so much as a threatening glance in my direction. The pillow on the
floor blocking my feet might have helped, though no armor had ever dissuaded him in the past. I still couldn’t follow Linda’s lead and feed him lukewarm licorice tea from a coffee mug without inviting a lunge for my hand. But once he was back inside his cage, Dusty would accept a peanut from my fingers with such ethereal delicacy, I was rarely certain it was the same beak that had tattooed my flesh. En route through the dining room to take care of our backyard animals, I’d pause at the door, turn, and talk to Dusty, only to find myself favored with his soft eye peering back at me.

  Outside in a burst of clear grey light, as clouds lingered between gathering and dispersing, I sloshed dirty water out of a plastic swimming pool. Ducks and geese nibbled noisily at the lawn. Across our lot and behind the barn, one-eyed turkey Hazel and her former tormentor, Lizzie, sat together on opposite sides of a fence. A mosquito threatened my neck, as flecks of mud and manure accumulated on my pant leg. A goldfinch sang a song that celebrated his freedom from the burden of keeping pets. I breathed hard walking up the hill to shut off the hose. I lumbered back down carrying two pitchers of scratch feed. I just wasn’t built for manual work. But still, I could be seized by the mindless certainty that I was doing exactly what I should be doing with my life, and for a little isolated instant in time, everything felt essentially right about the world. Even if another animal disaster lay just around the corner, clacking its beak.

  Acknowledgments and Culpability

  MY POOR WIFE, LINDA, was forced to hear about this book on a daily basis for the past three years, and I thank her for her unflappable enthusiasm. She could easily have written her own book with herself at the center of events, and it would have been truer than mine.

  My agent, Jeff Kleinman, and my editor at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Kathy Pories, both bear the blame of contributing ideas that helped shaped my narrative. My good friend Bill Holm joined me frequently at a sparsely inhabited Chinese restaurant and helped me work through story ideas. I would compliment him as an excellent sounding board, but that’s unfair to boards in general. He also read every chapter and made seemingly endless suggestions.

  My sister, Joan Smith, and her husband, Jack, are among the many animal lovers who have helped Linda and me with our menagerie. Their ferrets, cats, dog, fish, and house sparrow are even more spoiled than our critters. Peg and Roger Markle gave us valuable bird-parenting advice, and their wildlife rehab work is awe inspiring. The veterinarians who have provided lifesaving care for our animals include Richard Bennett, John Carlotti, Alice Colby, Edward Farnum, Owen Fuller, Michael Hedley, and Raymond Leali. Extraordinary pet-sitters Jamie Beean, Betty MacKay, Mary Vaught, and Rhonda Delnick allowed us to escape from it all once in a while. Ron Biermacher gave me excellent, if not amusing, parrot-keeping advice.

  A special thanks goes to Wayne Schuurman, president of Audio Advisor, Inc., who generously provided a flexible work schedule that allowed me time to write this book. A chain of gratitude is due my friend Rhonda Lubberts, who introduced me to Mary Jane Pories, who introduced me to Kathy Pories, who introduced me to Jeff Kleinman, who sold my book to Algonquin through Kathy Pories, who lives in the house that Jack built.

  CC Smith, editor of The Beat magazine, encouraged my writing over the years as did my Beat co-conspirator, Dave Hucker, and his wife, Kim. They all commented on various chapters, as did Carol Holm, John Storm Roberts, Lorraine Travis, John Brosky, and Mike Bombyk.

  Thanks also to my supportive sister, Bette Worley, her husband, David, my mom, Linda’s mom, and my late dad. And to everyone who buys a copy of this book, thanks for keeping the memory of our animals alive.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2003 by Bob Tarte. All rights reserved.

  While the people, places, and events described in the following pages are real, location and human names have been changed for the sake of privacy.

  ISBN 978-1-56512-730-2

  Praise for Enslaved by Ducks

  “All of us who feel a deep emotional connection with animals will respond to this book. As Bob Tarte realizes, there is no drug or therapy as effective as an animal who loves you.”

  —Jeffrey Masson, author of When Elephants Weep

  “A beautiful, honest, hilarious, and touching book about the subtle and blatant ways animal companions take over our lives. It’s impossible to read Enslaved by Ducks and not fall just a little in love with Bob Tarte, his charming, heroic wife, Linda, and their menagerie.”

  —Jana Murphy, author of The Secret Lives of Dogs

  “As the adoring owner or former owner of dogs, cats, parrots, rabbits, and six hundred gallons of saltwater fish, I was utterly delighted with Enslaved by Ducks. Bob Tarte profoundly understands and brilliantly articulates the extraordinary connections between humans and animals.”

  —Robert Olen Butler

  “If you thought one backyard duck was much like another, wait till you meet the tiny, indomitable Peggy, who laid down her life to save her fellow ducks. What May Sarton did for cats in The Fur Person, Bob Tarte does for ducks. And destructive parrots and fierce rabbits and a talking baby starling and a whole house and yard full of demanding oddballs that, by comparison, will make you feel better about your own domestic life.”

  —Barbara Holland, author of They Went Whistling

  “I started to read a page and ended up reading the book! … As Bob Tarte shows, with animal after animal, it’s not enough in the end to provide just the basics of food, water, and shelter; you have to love them like family. And he’s right: if you are an animal lover, your bond with animals goes far deeper than just companionship. It really is a way of life.”

  —Marty Becker, D.V.M., Good Morning America

  “In his hilarious debut, Tarte—a city boy at heart—chronicles how his blissful, animal-free life took an unexpectedly raucous turn when his nature-loving wife decided to share their spacious, early-twentieth-century Michigan farmhouse with a menagerie of furry and feathery friends: a malicious bunny with an appetite for live wires, a homicidal turkey, a horny ring-necked dove, a trash-talking African grey parrot, and more than a dozen other quirky creatures. Though each new animal is wackier and more demanding than the last, Tarte rebels against his urban instincts and learns to love his personal zoo. After reading this delightfully punchy account, you may never look at Fido the same way again.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Hilarious and poignant … not just for animal lovers, but for all who have loved another living thing.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “The wholly disarming story of a music reviewer’s move to the country, where he gradually, inexorably gathered about him a ragtag band of animals…. His furred and feathered companions took Tarte out of himself, gave him a satisfying flinch of pleasure, taught him to live within chaos, introduced him to the strange ceremonies of animal care. As well, they pulled his chain, broke his trust, ate up his time and patience, showed him a thing or two about violence, and died on him. His chronicle of those processes ties them all neatly together, and it sounds like love. ‘Why didn’t anyone warn me?’ Tarte asks about the consequences of sharing a home with animals. It’s a good thing they didn’t, or we might not have had this affecting debut.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “This rich and funny personal account of Bob Tarte’s noticeably never-ending (and largely inadvertent) acquisition of pets will warm your heart…. For anyone who has ever opened heart and home to an animal or experienced the love-hate relationship of being owned by pets.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “With dead-on character portraits, Tarte keeps readers laughing about unreliable pet store proprietors, a duck named Hector who doesn’t like water, an amorous dove named Howard, a foste
r-mother goose, patient veterinarians and increasingly bewildered friends. Tarte has an ordinary-Joe voice that makes each chapter a true pleasure, while revealing a sophisticated vision of animals and their relationship to humans.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Here’s a challenge: Try reading Bob Tarte’s Enslaved by Ducks without laughing out loud over and over. Even if you’re not a pet person, it simply can’t be done.”

  —Sanford Herald

  “Bob Tarte’s deprecating humor, honesty, sarcasm and fine style will keep you turning pages as you fall in love with the animal family he and his wife, Linda, have adopted. You’ll be thankful Tarte endured the domestic chaos that comes with being owned by a multitude of pets.”

  —Grand Rapids Press

  “Hilarious…. Part Gerald Durrell and part Bill Bryson, this heartwarming book will find many readers among Rascal and That Quail, Robert devotees.”

  —Booklist

  “A book that will be enjoyed by pet owners, animal lovers, and anybody who knows what it’s like to have room for more than one critter in his heart.”

  —Council Bluffs (Iowa) Daily Nonpareil

  “Highly recommended for those who appreciate the value of good humor and a positive outlook on life.”

  —Library Journal