The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (20 page)

I
N THE
steady dauntless way of pioneers, we slowly began to make the farm feel like home. Grandfather planted a huge garden behind the house, one-half of which was devoted to tall, brightly colored flowers—Grandmother adored gladioli, so we had more of those than anything else—while from the other half we reaped peas and beans, tomatoes and cucumbers, lettuce and squash.

After dinner each night, Grandfather patrolled his garden for weeds and evidence of rabbits or woodchucks, a pipe in his mouth. Sylvester, a Siamese cat he and my grandmother doted on like a favored son, tagged along at Grandfather’s heels and rubbed up against an occasional cabbage, so cross-eyed that the rabbits could hop about anywhere they liked, unhindered by the cat’s presence.

Grandfather’s vegetables were so extraordinary in size and color, so unlike anything we’d ever brought home from the commissary, that they looked like the irradiated food I’d read about in science fiction novels.

“How do you get the squash to grow this big?” I asked one day as we collected gourds with the size and heft of artificial limbs.

“Oh, that’s an old family secret.” Grandfather filled his pipe and lit it, then leaned forward to whisper, “It’s all about having enough horseshit to go around. And there’s no shortage of
that
in this family.”

S
EIZED
by the pioneering spirit, I decided to build a house of my own. I went to the West Brookfield Library and checked out a book called something like
How Even the Dumbest People Can Build Houses
. I drew up house plans that depended on using salvaged wood from the dairy barns across the street—there seemed to be an endless supply—and the old windows from the three-sided greenhouse that had once been attached to our farmhouse and now lay in random piles behind the duck pond near the road.

On horseback, I’d found the perfect spot for my endeavor: a small hollow overlooking a shallow green pond noisy with frogs and songbirds. “Can you help me build this?” I asked Donald one night, speaking directly to his knees and calves, since the rest of my brother’s lanky body was hidden beneath the body of a rusted, ancient Triumph he’d convinced Mom to buy from Whitey.

Donald slid out from beneath the car on the little wheeled cart he’d built himself for just such a purpose and examined my plans. “A house, huh?” he asked.

For once, I’d gotten Donald’s attention, a rare thing for anyone, since he generally thought most people were too stupid to live. “Just a cabin,” I corrected. “A place to think.”

“A place to screw your boyfriends, you mean,” Donald said, but he agreed to help.

He drove me across the street in the rattling jeep, so rusted in spots now that it looked like a camouflaged Army vehicle, and we collected scraps of wood from the barn. Next, we piled on the old glass windows from the greenhouse; I planned to
use these as walls so that I could see the pond from any angle, despite Donald’s assertion that I’d “sizzle like a steak.”

With the jeep loaded and ready, we careened down the logging trail in back of the house, spooking the horses and dropping occasional panes of glass and pieces of rotted lumber as we bounced over the rutted road. Donald drove fast enough so that low overhanging branches snapped against the hood of the jeep and broke right off.

“Might as well clear the trail while we’re at it,” he said when I urged him to slow down.

At the pond, we unloaded what was left of the lumber and glass, and then Donald took off, leaving me alone in the woods with the deerflies, gnats, and mosquitoes feeding on my neck and arms, and only a hammer and a box of salvaged rusty nails for tools. I’d chosen the biggest nails I could find, nails longer and fatter than pencils. In my mind, the bigger the nails, the sturdier the walls.

I devoted myself to building my house every day after school for three days, bruising my thumb with the hammer, embedding splinters in my hands, and developing a case of poison ivy that left my face swollen like a doughnut.

I quit when I had a floor and one wall. I’d succeeded in building my own window onto the pond, and every now and then I’d ride one of the horses up that rutted trail to sit there and stare through the glass at the weeds and water, swatting bugs off my neck.

D
URING
our first year in Massachusetts, Dad and Donald made about fifteen trips to Brant Lake to gather gerbils and
gerbil-growing supplies. My father didn’t want to waste pennies on a motel, so he did the ten-hour round trip to Brant Lake in a single day, leaving home early on Saturday and arriving in time for Mildred Schwentker to feed them sandwiches.

On the way home, if Donald begged hard enough, they’d stop at a McDonald’s, sideswiping curbs with the U-Haul trailer full of rattling metal gerbil cages and shelves as Dad wheeled in and out of the parking lots. They never once ate inside a restaurant, because Dad always believed that sitting in a fast-food place defeated the true purpose of its existence. Besides, time was money.

By the time we’d accumulated a few hundred breeding pairs in our basement, Dad was ready to build his first gerbil building. He presented his design on paper one Saturday night over plates of spaghetti.

“Just how do you propose paying for this little empire of yours?” Mom challenged. We were all quiet, seeing who could suck down the longest noodle without chewing, little Phil occasionally choking as he tried to outdo Donald.

“The same way I buy socks, refrigerators, and anything else we need,” Dad said. “With my Sears card.”

“How much?”

“Probably about ten thousand,” Dad said, pulling a second piece of paper out of his briefcase and showing the numbers to her.

“My God,” Mom said. Her face went pale. “We’ll be in debt the rest of our lives.”

Dad scoffed at this. “I have a business plan,” he said.

Mom pushed her plate aside. It was still piled high with spaghetti; she’d been eating less and was thinner than I’d ever
seen her. I pulled her plate over to my side of the table and dug my fork in. I was growing taller, and I was even thinner than my mother; I was so hungry all of the time that Mom accused me of having a tapeworm.

Now Mom sighed and said, “You know, I never minded it that you wanted to keep a few gerbils. You get such a kick out of them, and I thought they’d keep you busy when you got out of the Navy. But I wasn’t really thinking of gerbils as a second career.”

“You never were much of a planner,” Dad said. “What did you think I was going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Mom admitted, raising her hands in surrender. “I guess it was all sort of nebulous until now. Now it’s happening.”

“Darn right,” Dad said.

Mom sighed. “Just promise to put your building where I can’t see it from the house. I don’t even want to
think
about gerbils.”

P
ARTLY
to appease my mother, but mainly to hide what he was doing, Dad chose the far southwest corner of our property for his first gerbil building, a spot hidden from the world by a thick stand of maples and oaks. An excavator came and created a long dirt road, and we all hiked the length of it to marvel at the barrel of the concrete truck spinning around and around to spill an endless waterfall of liquid cement into the frame Dad had built on the ground.

Later that month, a Sears truck delivered stacks of iron beams, sheet-metal siding, and fifty-pound bags of bolts. Dad
hired a mason to put bolts in the beams at prescribed intervals. He also hired a plumber and an electrician. But he put up the bulk of the building himself, working alongside Donald and Grandfather every weekend to turn the piles, boxes, and bags of metal into a long, low structure about the size of our old ranch house in Virginia. He worked even through the start of deer hunting season, when hunters were stomping about in the state land around our property in their orange vests, firing bullets into the trees. The hunters seemed to have trouble distinguishing between deer and horses, or even between deer and chickens, because bullets were fired at our animals more times than we cared to count. Mom made us all stay inside the cleared areas of our stable and garden.

Once, a bullet came zinging out of the woods and ricocheted next to Dad as he straddled the very top of the new gerbil building, screwing on the metal roof. Mom happened to be standing below him because she’d brought his lunch.

“Will you please get down!” she yelled at Dad. “You’re like a sitting duck up there! At least wait until Sunday when the hunters aren’t out!”

“You never know how long good weather will hold,” Dad argued back, and kept putting in screws.

It took nearly two months to complete the building. “Gosh, that wasn’t too bad,” Dad said as we all stood around to admire it. My father pulled a Navy handkerchief out of his back pocket and swabbed the sweat off his bald, sunburned head. “Good thing I played with so many Erector sets as a kid.”

A year after our arrival in Massachusetts, the gerbils finally had a home of their own.

Raise Gerbils as Pets, Laboratory Animals
, my dad’s post-Navy business plan sounded simple: “Starting with two pairs of gerbils and two cages … you are ‘in business’ if the gerbils breed and you can sell them.”