Fowl Weather (13 page)

As the phone kept ringing and the answering machine kept answering, Marge provided us with a running commentary. “Call the humane society,” she muttered to herself as a caller droned on about a cat in a tree. “A rabbit person for you,” she shouted to Chris above the labored whine of the vacuum cleaner and the cheery whine of a teenage girl. “I can't be everywhere,” she informed me when a man with a cigarette voice requested help catching a duck some eighty miles away. From past experience, I knew she would get back to most of the callers, but not before she had explained to
us why one of the four Baltimore oriole fledglings wore a snappy adhesive-tape legging.

“Oh, listen to that,” she told me as their clamorous two-toned peeping abated only after she'd fed the lot. “This one has to go back to Dr. Hedley later in the week to get his cast removed. He had a fractured leg but seems to be doing nicely.”

W
E SET THE ORIOLES
on our dining room table, and their tree-frog peeps filled the downstairs. Stanley Sue paid no attention to the quartet. Perhaps because they were closer to his end of the room, Dusty studied them with cocked head and cool intelligence blazing in his black pupils. While he typically enjoyed nothing more than sinking his beak into my ankle, he showed unique tolerance toward smaller birds, even to the extent of leaving unmolested a parakeet that would wedge herself through the bars of his cage to explore his food dish. In fact, he often imitated Linda's sighs of affection for the starlings and other baby birds, commenting, “Aw!” when she fed them within view.

I often puffed myself up and told people that garden-variety starlings deserved rescuing every bit as much as colorful and melodic songbirds. “No bird's life is worth any less than any other's,” I'd proclaim. Yet I fell deeply in love with the orioles, and so did Linda. We both declared them to be our favorites of all the birds she'd raised. In stark contrast to the starlings—or even baby blue jays, which are unexpectedly well mannered—the orioles didn't shriek at feeding time. Nor did they flap frantically around inside their cage as starlings did, in the manner of bats swirling out of a cave. They patiently waited for their turns like people in line at the savings and loan.

You certainly couldn't accuse a young oriole of gluttony. After the tiniest squeeze of the syringe, the bird would snap shut
its beak as if to say, “Oh, really, no, I couldn't swallow another dollop,” then retire genteelly to its perch for a peep and a spot of beauty sleep. And what a beauty a baby Baltimore oriole was, with its olive-brown head, barred black-and-white wings, and patch of burnt yellow on the breast. And that's not to mention the white strip of adhesive tape that adorned the bird that Marge had dubbed Gimpy.

W
HEN
I
WALKED
into the barn that evening, I formulated a new hypothesis about the strange animal noises of the preceding winter. I hadn't heard mysterious creatures whooping after all. They were crying, “Poop!” and preparing our hens and ducks for a late-summer poop-up-the-barn contest. The coaching had certainly worked. Even though they had full access to the outdoor pens, the fowl had fouled the cement floor instead, and they had done so with such gusto that I vacillated between clearing out the dung with a push broom and hiring a crew with bulldozers. On my own I managed to slop the slop into the center trough and slosh it down the hill before the EPA showed up with a cleanup order—and just as the hens began to wander inside to cluck their complaints about the treats I'd brought them.

I was pleased to see that Victor had finished his molt and beamed resplendently in fresh wing plumage. Still a bit weak from the energy-sapping process of shucking off old feathers and growing new ones, he hung back from the other barn birds as I doled out veggies and chunks of bread. Hamilton hissed, panted, and stalked me in alpha-bird mode, even attacking the head of the broom when I interpolated it between us. Frustrated at his failure to reach me, he feinted in Victor's direction then clicked his jaws at Ramone, who managed to lurch out of his way and keep his tail feathers intact. If Hamilton's anger-management skills continued
their sharp decline, I'd have to switch Victor and Ramone to the smaller pen where white Pekin Richie's randy son Timmy lived. I might be forced to house Richie with them, too, and hope that Timmy wouldn't go romantic on him. Though Hamilton usually contented himself with tormenting his fellow Muscovies while leaving the others alone, lately he'd started launching himself at any creature that wandered too close. Not even a chipmunk was safe.

A fluttering at the window caught my attention. Two large butterflies—an eastern tiger swallowtail and a giant swallowtail—flicked their wings against the pane of glass, struggling to get outside, presumably before Hamilton picked on them. I had seen these species only once in the last few years and certainly not practicing the buddy system. How they had teamed up and managed to founder like Laurel and Hardy inside the barn mystified me. This sort of trifling but genuinely flashy event was tailor-made for interpretation as an omen. Trouble was, I had no notion of what two butterflies trapped against the glass meant, especially since I intended to intervene and save them. Was this a cosmic truism about the fragility of life or a signal that the barn windows needed a good scrubbing? Was it an obscure warning about my mom or a hint that we needed to keep a butterfly net with the hens?

Armed with my plastic pitcher, I gently scooped up the swallowtails and set them loose in the field. The tiger flew off with vigor, but the giant wearily flapped to a ground-level leaf on a sprig of wild catnip, adding layers of complexity to the symbolism.

I was musing about whether we should expect Moobie to sprout wings anytime soon when I walked into the barn and spotted trouble brewing. Hamilton was dogging Victor, preventing him from getting to the nightly treats in a repeat performance of his tormenting
of Richie. When I stepped between the two Muscovies, Victor demonstrated his mental superiority to a White Pekin by advancing upon my slight but towering form to lustily scarf up every piece of bread located within the radius of my broom. Hamilton hissed and glowered at us from a distance.

“You are one smart duck,” I told him. “How would you like to come and live indoors?” He answered my query by leaving a significant deposit on the cement.

L
INDA HANDED ME
the phone when I came up through the basement. “It's your mom,” she told me with a glint in her eye that added: Watch out.

“You didn't happen to see my keys when you were here,” my mom said.

“You called me about that earlier,” I reminded her. “We decided you had probably put them in your purse.”

“Where's my purse?”

I looked to Linda for moral support, but she had wisely retreated to the shower. “As of this afternoon, it was under the couch cushion.”

She set the down the phone and made a quick search. “It isn't there.”

“You lifted up both cushions?” I asked. At least she didn't run the risk of uncovering a mouse nest. “Then try next to the humidifier at the bottom of the stairs.”

The phone clunked against the tabletop.

“No, I don't see it.”

“Check the bread drawer in the kitchen,” I suggested. “That's the latest hiding place.”

The phone took another bounce.

“I don't know where I put it,” she lamented.

“The only other spot I can think of is the bottom shelf of the china cabinet.”

This time the receiver tumbled to the floor and thunked twice as it hit the side of my dad's hi-fi cabinet.

“It's there,” she told me after a moment. “I'm really glad I called you.”

“And are the keys inside your purse?”

“The what?” she asked.

“Your house keys. The keys you're looking for.”

Once we had confirmed that my mom's keys were safely safety-pinned to the lining of her purse, her voice took on an uncharacteristic edge. “I don't mean to criticize you, but I would like you to bring back the electric hedge trimmer you borrowed without asking. I want to touch up the shrubs in the front.”

This time it was my turn to ask, “The what?”

“The electric hedge trimmer. You took it over a week ago.”

“Gee, no. I did borrow the trimmer last fall so that Linda could hack away at our spirea bush, but I gave it back to Dad a couple of days later. I haven't taken it since then.”

“Well, I think you did,” she answered sharply. “Don Teany saw you putting it in your trunk, and I need it back.”

“He did not!” I exploded. “Don never told you that.”

I only lose my temper every few years, push-broom tussles with ducks aside. But quite inexplicably, my mother's accusation threw me into a rage, and the overstimulation short-circuited my brain. It was if another person, one I couldn't hear distinctly, were shouting at my mom. If any of the words registered with me, I forgot them as rapidly as they sputtered out of my mouth and disappeared into the soupy black neocortical muck. They involved some blather along the lines of how could you accuse your one and only son
of stealing from you, what would Dad think if he could hear you now, and other such bellowing of a wounded beast. The outburst literally shook me. I could barely hold the phone steady.

With tears in her voice my mother asked, “Honey, what did I possibly do to hurt you this much?”

“What do you mean, what did you do?” I sniveled. “You accused me of stealing your hedge trimmer.”

“Oh, honey, I would never say anything like that.”

“You did. You said I took your hedge trimmer.”

“I would never say anything like that,” she repeated.

“You did,” I insisted with decreased enthusiasm.

As the fog of emotion began to slip away, I realized that my anger had been triggered by fear. Since my father's death I had cheerfully repressed the increasingly obvious signs that something was wrong with my mom that couldn't be shrugged off as the short-term effects of grief. Forgetfulness was one thing. Most people over forty grapple with their own name from one hour to the next. But fabrication was far more serious, and so was her increasing paranoia that people were walking off with her possessions. As best as I could, I made my apologies for being a wretch, and she graciously accepted them. It bothered me that I'd exhibited more patience with a duck than I seemed capable of extending to my mother, and I couldn't quite figure out the reason why.

Fortunately, Linda had been singing “Camptown Races” in the shower and had missed my darkest hour except for a dull rumble beneath her chorus of doo-dahs. After I'd calmed down a little, I phoned my sister Joan. She phoned my sister Bett. My sister Bett phoned me. And we all faced the sad reality that my mom had fallen down a rabbit hole and the bottom was nowhere in sight.

• • •

I
HELPED
L
INDA
release the Baltimore orioles, though they weren't exactly chomping at the beak to join the world of the wild. I carried the cage outdoors, climbed the stepladder to the top of the milk house, set the cage upon the flat roof, and opened the wire door. Polite as ever, each bird waited for the others to exit first. “After you.” “Oh, no, I wouldn't think of it.” “Age before beauty.” “I may just call a cab.” When it became clear that they wouldn't budge without encouragement, I waved my hand “good-bye” behind the cage to scatter them. One at a time the orioles hopped out and flew up to the tree overhanging the milk house. Gimpy, now lacking his leg bandage, left last, after a wistful survey of his enclosure. We had always been able to tell him apart from his siblings by a tentativeness to his movements, and it now expanded to full-blown uncertainty as he clung to a cluster of leaves and refused to go any farther.

The other three birds leaped from branch to branch, peeping as they moved from the heart of the tree to its spindly extremities. The bravest oriole teetered for a moment at the end of a woody finger that pointed toward our swamp, then flung itself into space as if from a diving board. Two more birds followed in wobbling flight and disappeared into foliage at the bottom of our hill.

“Maybe the babies know that the grown-up orioles are by the river,” Linda said. “But I wish they would have waited for Gimpy.”

Whenever we released birds in our yard, we would leave the cage on the roof for the entire day with a plastic jar lid of food sitting next to it. Most of our orphans had grown so sick of motel food that they didn't hang around for the buffet. But after making himself at home on a small section of tree limb, Gimpy worked up his courage sufficiently to flutter down and peck at diced grapes and whole mealworms. By evening, he still hadn't budged from the security of the milk house and tree. As darkness descended, so
did he. When Linda went outdoors to bring in the cage, she found Gimpy perched on top of it.

“I think he wants to come in for the night,” she told me.

But if leaving his cage had required significant coaching, entering it again was beyond the oriole's expertise. Twice I climbed the ladder in hopes of luring him through the door with food, but each time my head popped into view, he flew back up into the tree.

“I don't know how we're going to get him,” I complained. “And considering how he's acting, he definitely shouldn't spend the night out here.”

“Gimpy!” Linda called. “Come on, Gimpy.”

I gave her a you-gotta-be-kidding-me look. “He has no idea his name is Gimpy.”

“Gimpy!” she called again, ignoring me.

I was about to get the trout net from the basement when, right on cue, Gimpy landed on the ground a few feet from Linda. He readily allowed her to scoop him up and put him in his cage, and he ate heartily once she had carried him upstairs to the dining room.

“He's not afraid of living in the wild,” I said. “He's afraid of missing out on the deluxe shuttle service.”