Fowl Weather (37 page)

He tolerated my presence; then his tolerance turned to interest. While I cleaned the floor of the barn with water and a push broom, he would step inside and, with his bright blue eyes,
supervise. One evening, on a whim, instead of shooing him into the barn I called his name, and he trundled in. To make sure that this wasn't a coincidence or his reaction to the mere sound of my voice, the next evening I called, “Buffy! Victor!” Matthew didn't stir from the outdoor pen. But when I wailed, “Matthew!” he waddled in and fixed me with his glittering eye, shaming me into tossing an extra treat in his direction.

Matthew was the last bird I'd consider hand-feeding. A small strip of fencing indoors separated Matthew's side of the barn from the middle section where the ducks and hens meandered, and I noticed him standing next to it in anticipation. Carefully I poked a piece of kale through the wire, keeping my digits on my side. He took it without drama. In an uncharacteristic fit of boldness, I leaned over the fence and offered him the kale from my unprotected fingers. With a gentleness that equaled his earlier unchecked ardor for his girls, he delicately plucked the greens from me, pausing once to tenderly nibble my hand as if to exercise his curiosity.

This soon became a nightly ritual. He'd come inside to watch me clean, or stay out until I called. After I was on the other side of the fence, he'd pad over and accept his bread and greens from my bare hands. I enjoyed these encounters so much that when the mating frenzy had died down throughout the flock, I carried him back to the goose pen with a heavy heart. I knew that his reunion with the girls would close the door on our close rapport. But I had Linda. I had my other birds. I had rabbits. I had cats. So I let Matthew have his harem and forget about me.

He surprised me the following week. While the geese foraged in the yard, I pulled up a few acres of dandelion leaves, which our tamer geese Liza and Hailey loved. They took the leaves from my hand as Angel, Patty, Matthew, and the ducks muttered to themselves
in the background. But after a moment Matthew joined the two African geese and snatched the greens from my fingers. He did this with a degree of reluctance, not wishing to compromise his top slot in the pecking order, but that he did it at all was the supreme compliment.

O
N MY DRIVE
home from work, I spotted a coyote. Though I'd never seen one in situ before, I recognized it instantly. With its head hung low, mouth open, lolling tongue, and outstretched tail, it trotted across a field about a mile from our house.

A ripple of concern passed through me, but I knew that our ducks, geese, and hens were in no danger as they puttered around in their pens. Then I started thinking that if a coyote roamed this close to us, five years ago it could have stood in the woods in the moonlit shadow of our bedroom, raised its head toward the starry sky, and blasted me awake with a bloodcurdling howl. At the time, I'd sworn that there was nothing canine about that howl—but in retrospect, I wondered.

My mother dealt with misperception in her own unique fashion. After Linda and I had taken her out for ice cream one Saturday afternoon, we returned from watching the geese at a neighborhood park to stroll the carpeted corridors of Testament Terrace. “That sure is an attractive bouquet,” Linda remarked as we approached an artificial floral arrangement topping a round table. “They keep everything looking so nice around here.”

Mom beamed. “Bob helps me with the housekeeping,” she said, referring to my departed dad.

I told Bett about this on the phone, and mentioned that it must console Mom to occasionally think that Dad was still alive. “I miss hearing her talk about the old days, but that's pretty much gone. I wanted to hear that story about Dad being arrested.”

“Dad was arrested?” Bett asked. “When was he arrested?”

“You've never heard that story?”

I didn't have the details, which made me sorry that Mom couldn't fill them in. But I did remember Dad telling me that—years before my presence glorified the world—he had gone out on the porch in his pajamas one Sunday morning to get the newspaper just as a police car made a U-turn and pulled over across the street. Dad walked up to the parked cruiser and informed the officer that his driving maneuver had violated the law. In response, the cop hauled my dad off to jail, and he sat there in his pajamas until my mother bailed him out.

“Dad must have told me that story three or four times,” I said to Bett. “But I haven't heard it since high school.”

“I've never heard it before.”

“Well, how about the time he bought a 78 record called ‘Remember Pearl Harbor' and broke it in half at the front counter of Dodd's Record Shop?”

“No,” she chuckled, “I don't know that one either.”

This came as something of a revelation. While I'd expected the three of us to remember our father in different ways, I'd never considered the possibility that he might have told each of us different stories about his life. The next time we got together, I decided, I would ask Bett and Joan for their favorite anecdotes from and about him. I might actually learn something.

I had definitely learned something from Matthew the goose, and from the other animals, too. The mixture of wildness and comfort they brought to my life was life itself in miniature. There was no arguing with a gander—or with a parrot that bit off a bunny's tail, mice that nested inside the dining room chair, creatures that shrieked in the middle of the night, or a crazy former classmate. There was no reasoning with death or Alzheimer's disease. I
could resist them, ignore them, or gnash my teeth over them, but I couldn't prevent them from occurring. My likes and dislikes all rolled together didn't add up to a golden orb weaver's egg when it came to stopping the spinning, seasonal procession of events. Weather fair and foul ruled. The ice storm didn't care if I objected. Floodwaters chuckled at resistance. Snow made sport of rainforest dreams. The saucer people faded in and out, but occasionally they used the telephone. So I might as well accept the call.

J
ULIE PHONED ME
with the bad news that her Timneh egg had turned out to be a dud. But she told me about a friend of hers, Susan, who had bought back a female Timneh from the people she had sold her to, because their children kept bothering the bird. Julie assured me that Susan was so conscientious that when Julie's husband had been in the hospital, they had trusted their Quaker parakeet Koko to Susan's care. Julie e-mailed me a photo of the Timneh gnawing a pad of sticky-notes that was eerily reminiscent of the photo of Stanley Sue chewing a raisin box that had originally convinced us to buy her.

I phoned Susan and, through the shrieks of macaws in the foreground, managed to decipher the directions to her house in Belleville and learn that the Timneh's name was Bella.
Bella from Belleville, said Bobo.
I repeated this to myself around ten thousand times through the course of my three-hour drive across the state. It sounded sort of propitious—and obnoxious enough to bore itself deep into my brain, not unlike the chorus of the Little River Band's “Reminiscing,” which tormented me from an oldies radio station for a full nanosecond before I managed to wallop the off button.

I discovered that Susan had surrendered her sunroom to her parrots. Sidling toward a wicker chair for an introduction to Bella
meant attempting to avoid a pair of pterodactyl-size macaws leaning out from a couple of birdie play stations. Cayenne and Hannah may have only been teasing, but most birds can't resist bullying less courageous creatures—and they revel in giving cowards such as myself an extra tweak. Squawking fiendishly, they brandished their gargantuan beaks as I ducked and dodged my way through the feathered gauntlet. Cayenne's pincers flashed uncomfortably close to my shirtsleeve, and I braced myself for the groan of tearing fabric.

I learned that gaining a seat didn't mean that I had achieved sanctuary. “These wicker chairs belong to the birds,” Susan informed me as her Congo African grey parrot Gracie strutted across the floor and began scaling the front of the chair in which I had parked myself.

“Is she friendly?” I asked as I hopped to my feet, taking care not to step within reach of the macaws. I didn't trust the mischievous glint in Gracie's eyes, though I was pleased when she stood on the armrest and told me, “Nice shoes.”

“She'll trick you into picking her up,” cautioned Susan. “But I'm not sure if I'd try it.” I took the warning to heart as Gracie proceeded to excavate the well-gnawed front of the chair's arm. “Bella's different. I had a houseguest from South America last summer, and she told me, ‘You have to watch these other birds, but I never have any trouble with Bella.' “

I still felt timorous about taking the Timneh from her. “Does she bite?” I asked, expecting an immediate denial as I extended my hand toward the bird.

Her thoughtful pause halted my forward momentum. “Bella has a mind of her own. She might pinch your finger if you're holding her and she wants to go somewhere else, but she won't hurt you. She's a very sweet bird.”

While I'd been excited for hours about the prospect of meeting Bella, I still wasn't prepared for the jolt I received when she stepped onto my hand—thanks to her sharp toenails digging into my flesh. “I meant to trim those,” Susan said as I winced.

While most Timnehs look like other Timnehs, Bella had an expression all her own. A fold of skin above each eye made it seem as if she were slightly lowering her lids in a laid-back but decidedly playful attitude. When I brought a finger near her head to see if she might let me stroke her back, she opened her beak and clicked a friendly admonishment that sent my hand scurrying to the safety of my pocket.

“What do you think?” I asked Susan. The purpose of the visit was for her to appraise me as a prospective owner while I appraised Bella, who considered me with a soft look quite unlike the usual steely stare of a grey.

Susan shot a photo of me holding her bird, then packed Bella into the pet carrier I had brought, along with wedges of orange and apple for fortification on the road. I daydreamed about snitching some fruit for myself as a prelude to ransacking the rest of the house, but I was too excited by Bella to revert to crime.

“S
WEETIE, COME HERE,
come here quick!” Linda called from the dining room. “Come here and look outside.”

In an attempt to expand my intellectual scope, I'd been reading John A. Keel's book on strange phenomena
The Mothman Prophecies
—but for only the fourth time—as the home-redecorating show
While You Were Out
tootled in the background. Grumbling, I set down my learned tome on the coffee table, stepped over Moobie, who had already started her evening shift of begging for countless cat treats, and shuffled toward Linda's voice.

“You'll never guess who's out there!”

“The aliens?” I asked just a bit hopefully.

“Skunky.”

“She'd better not be back.”

“Why not?” Linda asked as I joined her at the window to watch a skunk root beneath our bird feeder.

“I thought you meant Eileen.”

“Isn't that Skunky down there?”

“Looks like it,” I said.

On the evidence of my nose, I knew that skunks visited us after dark once in a while, but in the fifteen years that I'd been living in our farmhouse, I had never actually laid eyes on one. As far as seeing skunks, I'd been skunked. Thus, it seemed reasonable to assume that Skunky had indeed stuck around to raid the spilled-sunflower-seed spoils since escaping our barn. Hoping to capitalize on our brief but successful relationship, I braved a spraying by tiptoeing out the basement door clutching a bag of grapes to my cadaverous chest. But the skunk took umbrage at having small pieces of fruit tossed in its direction and skittered away into the evening gloom.

Just before we went to bed, Linda checked for the visitor again by shining a flashlight through the dining room window. A quavering oval spotlighted an obese possum ill-advisedly squaring off against the skunk. “You shouldn't be doing that,” Linda muttered. The first time old pointy nose snapped at the polecat, the skunk simply backed off and continued foraging under the feeder for seeds and bugs. But when the possum exhibited its bad buffet etiquette again, the bombardier spun around, reared up its back, and raised its tail to high heavens.

“Did Skunky just spray Possy?”

“It sort of looked that way, but I don't smell anything.”

I had spoken a moment too soon. A wall of skunk scent slammed
into the house like a stinky eighteen-wheeler. The skunk stomped off but, with barely a wrinkle of its nose, the possum continued consuming every seed within reach. Either he lacked a sense of smell or personal hygiene ranked at the bottom of his priorities.

I had never been at ground zero of a skunk blast before. The effect was, to put it mildly, impressive. The gas attack stripped the finish off our furniture. The living room carpet curled up and ran out the front door. “It's not so bad,” I coughed as I groped my way toward the bedroom through the low-hanging cloud, only to find myself in the back seat of the car talking to the transmission hump. Back inside and safely under the sheet, which kept floating to the ceiling, I writhed and tried to sleep. Finally, with a T-shirt knotted across my nose and mouth, I either succumbed to the fumes or passed out from lack of oxygen.

A merciful wind outdoors and a battery of electric fans in the house dissipated the smell by the following evening. We had just settled down for an odor-free night on the living room couch and floor, reading our respective books, when Linda sniffed loudly and announced, “Guess who's back.”

“I'll try the grapes again,” I told her. But when I stuck my face against the dining room window, I didn't see Skunky beneath the bird feeder. It was Possy, wearing Skunky's cologne.

“Oh, great,” Linda said. “Now we've got two smelly animals.”