The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (30 page)

“No. Dad’s just going to gas it anyway,” I reassured her.

That very afternoon, as if to prove my point, Dad found
a white gerbil that had escaped our notice. He carried the weanling by its tail over to Angeline. “Here’s another defect,” he said, and handed it to her.

Angeline plucked the gerbil out of Dad’s fingers and cradled it between her palms. I didn’t dare meet her gaze.
“Yes
, sir,” she said, and carried the gerbil into the room with the gas chamber. I kept Dad talking so that he wouldn’t hear her disappear through the side door and out to her car.

Every now and then, I’d find a favorite gerbil and save it, too. I couldn’t bring gerbils into our house, but I began hiding them from Dad. The most remarkable of these was a male with a stunning shock of soft blond hair growing right between his ears.

“Look!” I said, showing him to Angeline. “A blond gerbil! Can we save him?”

She grinned and nodded. Angeline and I managed to move the blond gerbil from rack to rack, from room to room, between the gerbil buildings. It was a small, mutinous gesture that my father never noticed at all. But it was something.

pany meeting and summarized the state of affairs at Tumblebrook Farm, reading from an agenda printed on blue paper.

I recognized the paper as the recycled backside of a page from one of the latest issues of the
Gerbil Digest
. Dad’s office, along with our basement, attic, and family room floor, was stacked thigh-high with these papers, along with anything else that might come in handy: old
Time
magazines, empty mayonnaise jars of screws, bits of old crown molding, cardboard boxes filled with glass shards, heaps of rags, and emptied cans with the labels removed. Each time Dad used an item from this collection he would sigh with satisfaction and remind us of how we might have thrown it out if not for him.

“At this point in time,” Dad announced, his blue eyes lingering on each of us in a sales technique he’d learned by reading a marketing textbook purchased at a yard sale, “Tumblebrook Farm has left its competition behind and continues to produce more gerbils than anyone else in the world. We’re charging fixed prices with absolutely no discounts, and I have set gerbil prices as high as the market will bear. Orders are
ranging in size from 2 to 450 animals, with the average being between 25 and 100 animals per order. Customers continue to pay for boxes and shipping charges to keep our overhead as low as possible.”

“That’s good, Dad, right?” I asked.

He nodded and lowered the paper to the table. “I am also pleased to add that company morale is at an all-time high.”

Mom lit a cigarette. “We’re going to miss
60 Minutes
if we don’t wrap this up soon,” she reminded him.

“This is important, Sally.” Dad picked up his agenda again and pointed at the last two bullet points. “We have reached a critical juncture at Tumblebrook Farm,” he went on.

“A what, Dad?” Donald asked. He was bouncing a baseball under the table. Baseballs don’t bounce, but that didn’t stop him from trying.

My father ignored him and continued reading over the noise. “I am pleased to report that we have a diverse customer list and reasonable expectations of steady growth as the species continues to gain broader acceptance as a test animal. However, we don’t want to limit our viability in the future.”

“Our what, Dad?” Philip asked. He was using one of the cloth napkins to play tug-of-war with the dogs under the table.

“He doesn’t want to put all of his eggs in one basket,” I translated.

Dad nodded. “I have therefore decided that this is an appropriate time to add a new species to Tumblebrook Farm, and I’d like to put that to a company vote.”

“Not lizards,” Mom said. “Please, for the love of God. Not lizards.”

“I know. Snakes!” Donald yelped. “Let’s breed boa constrictors!”

My father had remarkable powers of concentration. He continued as if nobody had spoken at all. “I was considering chinchillas,” he mused. “And I certainly haven’t ruled out the colonization of tree shrews and degus, as these animals seem to be gaining in popularity among researchers. However, given our current facilities and manpower, I have decided that African pygmy goats would be the best possible addition to Tumblebrook Farm in the short term.”

“Oh, sure, great idea,” Mom said. She stood up to clear away the coffee cups. “That way, I get to take care of them at the barn. Am I right? Admit it. That’s what’s going through your devious little mind.”

“Sally, please sit down. I’m not finished here,” Dad said.

“Send me a memo,” Mom snapped.
“60 Minutes
has already started. Better yet, how about a show of hands, kids? Who votes for an early adjournment, with the discussion to be continued at some future date, after I have a private word with your father?”

Dad was the only one who didn’t raise his hand.

M
Y FATHER’S
herd of African pygmy goats consisted of eight does and a buck. Not one of them stood higher than my kneecaps. The does were black and white, with sweet tufted beards and gentle dispositions. But the buck had a devil’s horns and protruding gold eyes with slit black pupils. He patrolled the yard with a drunk’s confident swagger and had a signature stink, like a roadkill muskrat three days old.

Grandfather built a shed for the goats behind the horse stable. We penned them in at night to keep them safe from coyotes, but the pygmy goats were free to graze the farmyard during the day. The little does were easily spooked by our dogs; they’d bleat in distress and bolt into the pasture if the dogs started barking at them. We’d spend hours beating back the tall weeds in the pasture until we found the witless, stubby-legged creatures and led them back. Dad took no part in any of this. Whenever Mom complained about the goats, he’d remind her that the gerbils were “more than full-time, Sally, since I’m chief cook and bottle washer. Get the kids to help you.”

About six months after the goats arrived, one of the does was bitten by the buck during a romantic tryst. This love bite caused an abscess in her neck that swelled to the size of a Georgia peach. I cradled the goat in my arms while Mom ex-pertly lanced the lump with a needle. We drained the pus into an empty coffee can until the wound ran clear, and kept the doe in a playpen in our kitchen for several days until she healed completely.

When she seemed frisky again, I carried the doe back to the barn to reunite her with her sisters. She never made it. Along the way, the dogs jumped up at the goat in my arms, barking furiously, and gave her a heart attack. The goat gasped and died, her head lolling back over my arm.

The prancing little buck met an even worse end. Mom and I went up to the barn one morning to feed the horses and discovered that he had hung himself in a bucket. He’d tried to take a drink by putting his head through the bucket handle and broke his own neck while twisting to get free.

“I’m sure it was intentional,” Mom said, surveying the
death scene with a sigh. “In any case, that’s it for me. I’m done with goats. You can tell your father that for me at the next company meeting.”

“Can I have the buck’s body Mom?” Donald asked.

Mom waved a distracted hand. “Just get it out of here,” she said. “It’s stinking up the stable.”

Donald carried the buck out of the barn, and I watched him hike across the street to the old dry well and drop the goat into it.

A few months later, Donald attached a hook to a rope and lowered it down the well to fish out the goat’s skeleton. He sawed the skull off and brought it back to his bedroom, where he put it on his bureau with a couple of Ping-Pong balls painted bright green and glued into the eye sockets.

R
EBELLIONS
became increasingly commonplace on our farm after that, beginning with my own brothers. Now fifteen, Donald had gotten himself a girlfriend, a bona fide hippie with waist-length blond hair, a wispy voice, Indian-print skirts, un-shaved legs, and a passion for creating her own costumes. Her best effort was a gauzy yellow skirt and top that she’d accessorized by punching holes into pennies and sewing them onto the fabric. She shimmied around our yard in that getup at one of my brother’s parties, clinking and clanking, belly button winking, until Mom made her come inside and have a cup of coffee. Donald began sneaking out of the house every night to pay her a visit, stealing my parents’ car to drive the five miles despite the fact that he was a year short of a driver’s license.

Occasionally, Donald rebelled against farm chores, too. Once, as he was lying beneath one of the old Triumph roadsters he was always fixing up, Dad asked him to empty the manure cart out at the stables.

Donald told him to go empty the cart himself. “Or have Holly do it,” he suggested. “She’s the horse nut.”

“That’s no job for a lady,” Dad reminded him.

“Well, those horses weren’t my idea,” Donald said. “I wasn’t born to shovel shit.”

“I don’t care. I asked you to do something. Now stop whatever dumb thing you’re doing and give me some help,” Dad demanded.

Donald hammered at a pipe beneath his car without bothering to answer.