The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (22 page)

“Who in the world is going to work for you?” Mom asked.

“Your mother, for a start,” Dad said.

That got us. We all stopped fidgeting, even Mom. “In the gerbil building?” I asked, trying to picture Grandmother, perfectly coiffed and outfitted in one of her proper tweed suits, taking that long walk up the dirt road to scrub out pee-soaked cages.

“No, of course not,” Dad said, irritated that we were all giggling, even Mom. “I’ve made Grandmother our new company secretary.”

“Oh, thank God,” Mom said. “I’ve been fired at last. I don’t suppose there’s any severance package, though. Ah well.” She stood up, carrying her coffee mug with her.

“Where are you going?” Dad asked in alarm.

“I assume that my presence is no longer required at company meetings, now that I’ve been given the boot,” Mom said, and left the room without even waiting for permission to be excused, grabbing her book off the sideboard as she made her getaway.

O
NCE
he’d added Grandmother to the gerbil payroll, Dad put a telephone extension in her apartment so that she could field orders from customers while she continued to cook, sew, do housework, and take care of Philip when Mom was busy. Occasionally I’d wander into Grandmother’s apartment
and overhear her taking down a message in her tidy retail clerk’s hand on the pad next to her new flesh-tone telephone. Grandmother’s keen interest in people, retail experience, good manners, and vaguely British accent made her the perfect public relations representative for Tumblebrook Farm. She’d chuckle over a Swedish researcher’s joke, or ask a Maryland scientist about his daughter’s wedding, and then she’d get right down to business, persuading scientists around the world that they really didn’t want to be caught short on gerbils, so it was always best to order a few spares.

“What do you tell your friends about your new job, Grandmother?” I asked her one afternoon. “Do they know what Dad does?”

“Of course they know,” Grandmother answered crisply. “I’m not the least bit ashamed. You shouldn’t be, either. I think your father’s done very well for himself. So does the rest of the family. Your uncle Skip and uncle Don both say they’d give their eyeteeth to build a business for themselves the way your father has. Most people don’t have the nerve to start a business from scratch.”

“But do you tell your friends at church about the gerbils?” I pressed.

“Oh, my, yes,” she said, tearing a message off her pink telephone pad. “And let me tell you, they’re all very impressed. They’ve never heard of gerbils, most of them, you know. They can’t even begin to imagine how we have thousands of them up here. But not one of my friends has ever expressed any reservations about it.”

“Nobody?” I asked, surprised.

“Oh, well, once in a while, I suppose,” Grandmother said,
patting her hair. “But then I point out how very useful gerbils are for the different diseases these scientists are working so hard to cure, like cancer and epilepsy, and people understand that.”

“They do?”

“Of course they do!” Grandmother stood up and went over to the refrigerator, where she began pulling out ingredients for a shepherd’s pie. “Not that I tell just anyone,” she admitted. “When Laura and I took the bus to Boston with the senior citizens’ center, the bus driver asked me if I was retired, because I’m so young looking.” Here Grandmother paused, savoring that comment and patting her hair once more before going on. “I told him, ‘Oh, my, no, I’m not retired. I still work as a telephone secretary.’”

I laughed, trying to imagine what the bus driver might have said if she’d told him about the gerbils. “That sure was quick thinking, Grammy,” I said.

She nodded.
“Yes
, well, not everyone needs to know our business, do they?”

W
ITHIN
a year of incorporating Tumblebrook Farm, Dad was able to complete construction on his second building. We now had more than two thousand gerbils, many of them producing new litters every month. We were shipping gerbils to university research laboratories, medical schools, government scientists, and pharmaceutical companies all over the world. This meant that we were not only cleaning cages, feeding, watering, and weaning animals but also boxing them up and driving them to the airport once or twice each week.

To keep up with business, Dad began hiring maintenance
workers and animal caretakers. Donald and I met Dad’s first outside employee, Jack Baptiste, when we showed up at the gerbil building one Monday afternoon to clean cages. “This is our new animal caretaker,” Dad said, clapping Jack on the shoulder with the zeal of a feudal lord congratulating a peasant for fields well plowed. “He’ll be helping your grandfather, too, with all-around maintenance handiwork, trips to the airport, and whatnot.”

Jack was a tall, knock-kneed man whose face was a road map of burst blood vessels. His skinny arms bulged with ropy blue veins and Popeye muscles. He wore a faded pair of blue work pants and black boots, but his tattered denim shirt had been starched and ironed with knife-edge creases. For the ten years that Jack worked for us, I never once saw him without a crisply starched shirt.

But Jack’s single most unique feature was his nose, or rather, his lack of one. Where his nose had been was just a flap of skin between two nostrils, giving Jack the pinched look of a flounder glaring up at you from the bottom of the ocean.

“You see how I am so strong?” he asked me in his heavy French accent that afternoon while we worked together, cleaning cages and feeding the gerbils. “Me, I was a logger in Quebec.” He made a muscle to show me how he’d felled trees, possibly without an ax.

I focused on Jack’s bulging muscle to avoid staring at his nose. “You’re very strong,” I said.

“Strong like mad bull,” he agreed with satisfaction.

“Why did you stop logging?” I asked.

Jack shrugged. “The trees, they all go away, too many. And it is so cold in Quebec, you know? You always need your
dancing to keep you warm. Dancing and a fiddle, and a crossbow to keep the bears away.”

“Was your wife living up there with you?” I asked.

“No, no, no! No women in the woods of Quebec,” he assured me. “They bleed, the bears come. No good. But you dance with the other loggers, you can stay warm anyhow.”

Before coming to work for my father, Jack had been an animal caretaker on a chicken farm. “I quit there, because they have this buyer, he come to buy the sick or dead birds for the soups because they so damn cheap,” Jack said. “That is bad thing to do, I know that, so I quit.”

Eventually Mom took notice of Jack’s shirts and began taking some of her laundry to Jack’s wife, Louisa. I loved driving over to Jack’s house with my mother because it was like no other place I’d ever seen.

Jack and Louisa lived on a potholed dirt road in a crooked cartoon house with a stovepipe chimney and red asbestos siding. They kept their own little animal colonies on the side. They sold rabbits for meat. They also bred domestic animals to sell as pets: Maine coon cats, with tufted ears and broad, Cheshire-cat faces; foxy-faced Pomeranians with plumed tails and barks that could shatter glass; and homing pigeons that Jack kissed on the tops of their little heads before setting them free to fly who knew where. Mom called their farm “the little French village.”

Louisa was built like a bullet and smelled of cat piss and dandelion wine. Because she made a living by taking in other people’s laundry, their yard was a spiderweb of laundry lines with clothes that flapped and slapped at your face and shoulders
whenever you tried to make your way to the front door. Louisa also crocheted sweaters and blankets in color combinations that made you squint: yellow with purple and orange, brown with orange and green, orange with mauve and pink. Orange was the one consistent color theme in that house.

Each time we visited, Louisa showed us her handmade items, sliding her creations out of clear plastic bags as tenderly as if they were babies being unwrapped from layettes.

“You like?” she asked every time, hopeful of a sale.

Finally, I felt so sorry for her that I bought a sweater with my babysitting money, a brown and green and orange cardigan.

“You’ll never wear that thing,” Mom said as we drove away. “It doesn’t pay to feel sorry for people.”

“You don’t know,” I argued. “I might wear it on a really, really cold day.”

“Let me know in advance,” Mom said. “I’ll want to take your picture.”

But cold weather came and went, and I never did put on that sweater. Louisa’s creation remained in its plastic sack under my bed until I went to college, its brown bulk as shiny as a bear, startling me each time I looked under the bed for something else and reminding me of Canada and the men who danced together there, trying to stay warm.

I
T TURNED
out that Jack Baptiste was a lucky find. As Dad’s gerbils increased in number and he began looking for other animal caretakers, he discovered that it was nearly impossible to attract and keep responsible employees. If you looked in the
local weekly paper, there were always three ads sure to be found under the jobs column: dishwashers at the local inn, line workers at the wire factory, and animal handlers at Tumblebrook Farm. This never changed in the twenty-five years that my father raised gerbils.

Dad did everything he could to beat good people out of the bushes. He tried offering more than minimum wage. He even paid for employee health benefits over Mom’s protests.

“That’s crazy. You won’t even let me buy curtains for the family room,” Mom said. “How can we afford to pay other people’s doctor bills?”

“Some of these people have families,” he told her. “What are they supposed to do if their kids get sick?”

To sweeten the deal, Dad offered his workers an added incentive: a quarter more per hour if they stopped smoking, despite the fact that he continued to run through a couple of packs of Camels a day.

Still, despite these perks, our employees were not always the top-quality individuals that Dad might have hoped for. Picture the people you see every day working the counters of your favorite fast-food places or sweeping floors at the mall. Now double or halve their ages, give each one a drug or alcohol habit, dress them in Salvation Army finds, add a twitch here and a blind eye or a limp there, and that would pretty much describe most of the employees at Tumblebrook Farm.

We hired thieves and wife beaters, the wives who got beaten, junkies and alcoholics, hitchhikers passing through, and teenagers whose cars roared like lions and were held together by duct tape. Dad’s employees typically were, as Mom so succinctly put it, “beneath the bottom of the barrel.”

Most employees gladly accepted the quarter-an-hour quit-smoking raise and then stood around smoking under the ceiling fans in the gerbil buildings to avoid detection whenever they lit up. Among the men, one was an ex-junkie who added a dozen spoonfuls of sugar to each cup of coffee and was perfectly happy carrying on conversations alone. Another was a Civil War buff who occasionally showed up to clean cages dressed as Johnny Reb, while a third fellow was a self-described “unemployed environmentalist” who wrapped himself naked around a tree in order to keep a local farmer from cutting it down.