The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (31 page)

“And that’s an order!” Dad growled.

The more Dad tried to order him around, the more Donald ignored him, goading my father until he finally threatened to punish him. “I’ll take the belt to you,” Dad said. “See if I don’t.”

“Oh, yeah?” Donald slid out from under the car and stood up, nearly as tall as my father. “You can’t punish me if you can’t catch me, old man. And we both know you can’t catch me anymore.”

With that, the race was on. Dad chased Donald around and around the house. Mom heard the commotion and brought out a pitcher of lemonade and some glasses. She and I parked ourselves on the shady patio to watch my father and brother do laps around the farmhouse. Each time he came around to our side of the house, Donald grinned and waved, then disappeared again just as Dad rounded the corner.

After a few minutes of this, Dad was gasping for breath and nearly limping. “I need a cigarette,” he complained.

“Here. Have one of mine. Why don’t you sit down?” Mom said, and coaxed him onto the patio for a calming smoke and a cold glass of lemonade.

Donald went back to his car. But after a few minutes, he joined us on the patio, too. “All that running made me sweat,” he complained. “Now I’m thirsty.”

Dad shook his head. “Maybe you should join the Navy,” he suggested, while Mom poured out another glass of lemonade. “The Navy will show you how to sweat for real. You should go to Annapolis and have some respect drummed into you.”

Donald scoffed at this idea. “Why would I want to get up at five in the morning and do push-ups?”

“Well, then you’ll have to take over the gerbils.”

“God, no,” Donald said. “I’d rather join the Navy.”

Dad looked at me. “I don’t suppose you’ve changed your mind?”

“No, Dad. Sorry. It’ll have to be Phil,” I told him.

Dad sighed. “I’ll be dead by then.”

It was true that Phil was still little. But even at six years old, he was having a few rebellions of his own. He was especially frustrated in school, where he told us that the other children were stupid, “like three grades dumber than me.” Later, an IQ test proved that he was most likely right.

One day, Mom went to pick Phil up early from the elementary school and discovered that the teacher had tucked my little brother into the basement therapy room with other
“special” students after he’d corrected her once too often on her spelling. Phil was finally happy, sewing together leather wallets and comb cases, but Mom yanked him out of that school and sent him on to St. Mary’s Catholic School in nearby Ware, a mill town best known for its motto, “The town that can’t be licked.”

“Let’s hope the nuns knock some sense into that kid,” she said. “If nothing else, he’ll learn how to pray.”

The animals, meanwhile, were also raising Cain. In retaliation for the goats, Mom had gone against Dad’s wishes and brought home several pairs of exotic birds. The first to inhabit our stable yard were two pairs of peacocks. This was a mistake. The peacocks had brain-numbingly beautiful feathers but regularly issued cries as earsplitting as the air horns on semi trucks. Mom also bought Chinese golden pheasants and guinea hens; the pheasants were pleasing to have around, like plumes of sunlight beneath the hedges. But the chubby, black-speckled guinea hens terrorized the dogs and children around the barn by darting out at them from unexpected places. After each attack, the birds cackled and regrouped under the bushes again, huddling in wait for their next victim.

Grandfather had always wanted geese, so he installed half a dozen gray and white geese on the small pond beside the driveway. Grandfather built a little A-frame house for them, complete with fancy gingerbread trim. It looked like a shrunken Swiss chalet. In summer, the goslings sometimes kept my little brother Phil company, leaving their weedy pond to paddle about with my brother in his wading pool.

Occasionally, we lost a gosling to a snapping turtle. One
minute, it would be happily trailing after its mother in the pond. The next, there was nothing but rings of water where the gosling had been dragged under.

But most of the geese lived long, noisy lives, and they were a menace. Whenever someone parked in the driveway and tried to emerge from the car, the geese gave chase, running neck first, beaks open wide to hiss and show their red snake tongues. We kept a broom by the sundeck in case we needed to beat them off.

Mom loved sheep, so these were our next acquisition. “Why not sell wool?” she asked Dad one night at dinner. “How hard could that be? All we’d have to do is let them eat what’s already here and shear them once a year.”

For once, the entire family was in agreement, envisioning a field of fluffy white lambs cavorting in purple clover beside their even fluffier, money-making mothers. What none of us had anticipated was the overwhelming stupidity of sheep.

We installed a flock of ewes with one ram, white with black ears, and were thrilled to see them grazing in the side yard next to the geese, where handy Grandfather promptly built a sheep shed and a fence. However, the sheep proved to be impossible to contain. They constantly tried to escape through the fence, and we spent hours untangling them from the barbed wire.

The lambs were born in the spring, and this was fun, except for the bit where we had to wrap rubber bands around their tails to cut off the circulation and make the tails fall off. This tactic was meant to keep the wool around their hind ends cleaner, but not one of us had ever imagined the tedium of
having to clean up lamb tail stubs that lay like fat cigarettes all around the sheep pen.

One depressed ewe refused to care for her twin lambs at all. We brought the wobbly newborns into the kitchen and kept them in a cardboard box lined with towels next to the kitchen table. The lambs were cute, but the novelty of having to bottle-feed them every two hours finally pushed us over the edge. We sold the entire flock of sheep at an auction scarcely a year after buying them.

“Nobody wears wool anymore, anyway,” Mom sniffed as we helped her lead the sheep out to the truck that came to collect them. “It’s all about polyester these days.”

G
RADUALLY
we added more pets to our household. We still had Beau, the black poodle we’d brought from Kansas, and Yankee, our collie/shepherd mix, who my grandparents had kept in Virginia and brought with them to Massachusetts. We rapidly added more dogs until we had a motley pack. Mom picked up Chrissy, a grinning shepherd mix, from a nearby dairy farm, and Donald brought home Sassy, a miniature Yorkshire terrier puppy small enough to tuck into the pocket of his jacket.

However, Mom still wasn’t satisfied. One day she went out on a long drive by herself with no explanation. She came home with a dog from the pound, a shaggy-haired Russian wolfhound. The dog was cream-colored and pointy-nosed; from some angles it looked noble. From others, it looked like a collie that had been run over by a truck. Mom named him Yuri.

Yuri had a temper. Twice, the wolfhound bit visitors to our farm, and he would have happily tasted more if Mom hadn’t kept him chained to a post by the back door, from which he lunged at anyone who passed and snapped his long, skinny jaws like a crocodile.

At about the same time, Mom also developed a passion for parrots. We didn’t have the money to buy one, so she got a yellow-headed Amazon in the same way we acquired most of our animals: for free, from someone who’d gotten tired of taking care of it. Mom named the parrot Max and kept him in a cage next to the kitchen table, where she fed him bits of bacon and egg every morning from her own plate.

Max and Yuri had twin dispositions. You could only handle Max wearing a thick work glove, and passing Max’s cage required a quick dip of the shoulder to avoid being bitten.

All in all, between the guinea hens, the geese, the wolf hound, and the parrot, entering our house became a real challenge. Some people might have thought we didn’t want visitors at all.

blebrook Farm, Dad spent an entire month painting our square house on the hill a deep dirt brown. With so many outbuildings crowded around it, our poor farm now looked like a dark lord’s castle surrounded by a feudal village.

To this scene my parents added a swimming pool the summer before my senior year of high school. Gerbils paid for that shimmering blue rectangle, which Dad centered smack in the middle of our property between his metal buildings gleaming in the distance and Mom’s stable. My parents spent their summer days tending to their respective animals. Then they retired poolside each evening for cocktails, cigarettes, and summit meetings on neutral turf.

Other than these evening powwows, Dad rarely approached the pool. He did buy himself a new bathing suit, though, a brown bikini Speedo that matched the house paint and emphasized his heron’s legs and farmer’s tan. I saw him swim maybe twice during my entire adolescence, but he wore that bikini whenever weather permitted. Dad mounted the tractor to mow the lawn in that bathing suit. He washed the
car in it. He sawed wood in his Speedo, setting up his table and chain saw close enough to the pool so that flying chips of wood dotted the water’s surface like dead beetles. Dad even put his Speedo on to heave gerbil boxes into the back of the station wagon.

“I wish to God you’d put some clothes on,” Mom scolded Dad at one point. “You look like a French Canadian tourist in that thing.”

“Really it’s the most comfortable article of clothing I own,” Dad said. “I’d wear this everywhere if I could.”

One hot July day, Dad donned his new Speedo and asked me to help him carry his thermal rods. Thermal rods were my father’s newest obsession and business brainstorm; these were six-foot-long black plastic pipes, six inches in diameter and filled with salt crystals.

“You can install these rods anywhere inside the wall of a building,” Dad told me that afternoon as I helped him ferry a stack of rods from the enormous truckload dumped next to the driveway over to a pile by the riding arena.

“How do they work?” I asked.

“When the sun hits the wall, the salt substance absorbs heat and turns liquid, dispersing the heat into tubes,” Dad said. “At night, when the sun goes down, the heat is exchanged into the room as the salt inside the rods solidifies.”