Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  Burkett used to have four peacocks himself. Predators got both his hens, all of them, not just the heads. The black-shoulder male flew off, and he gave away the lone survivor, a white male. He knew the perils of owning peacocks firsthand.

  “But she said it was an owl,” I protested.

  Another awkward pause. “Where’d you say you got these birds again?”

  “A horse farm. Off 70.”

  “Woman named… Denise? No, not Denise. Danielle?”

  “Yes! You know her?”

  Burkett curled his mouth into a thin smile. He chortled, which I realized was an overused word when I heard a genuine chortle. “Hell,” he said, “Danielle’s been trying to get rid of those goddamned birds for years.”

  Chapter Six

  In hindsight, it was apparent that Danielle was trying to get rid of her birds. Had we met under different circumstances, I would have recognized that, too. If, for instance, an editor had dispatched me to root around her peacock fire sale, I would have suspected as much within an hour, and I would have been all but certain by the next morning.

  An owl? Seriously? For forty years there were no owls in the woods surrounding her exurban horse farm, and then one shows up that tears off peacock heads and leaves all the meat? That doesn’t sound like a very sensible owl. I could have called an expert in avian behavior, probably Dr. Burkett himself, and he would have chortled at me that afternoon. He also would have suggested that two males and one female were not an unbreakable social clique but, rather, a sex-fueled cage match waiting to happen. And isn’t first come, first served an odd way to sell any animal that isn’t going to be eaten?

  If I’d been working, I would have asked all of those questions. I’m curious by nature and tenaciously so when I’m getting paid. I would have been very pleasant about it, too. Aggressive interrogation is a lousy tactic if you actually want to learn something because it puts people on the defensive and no one should be defensive when discussing a topic as delightful as peacocks. Besides, I liked Danielle straightaway, and I still would have liked her when she stuck to her preposterous owl story. More, probably. She would have known that I knew she was bending the truth, and we both would have silently stipulated that it was a charming, harmless ruse, more of an interesting backstory she included for free with every bird purchase.

  But I was not working, so I did not bother to consider that a woman who was finding homes for imperiled peacocks might not be entirely forthcoming.

  Partly, that’s because I have an unusually optimistic faith in human nature. Given the chance, most people will choose to be decent and kind, which, ironically, is something I’ve come to believe because I’ve waded through the aftermath of so much indecency and cruelty. It’s a simple numbers game: I’ve spoken with many hundreds of people in the process of reporting many dozens of tragic stories, and only a tiny few were dishonest, malicious, or criminally inclined. The bad guys are outliers, the contrast to which everyone else can be compared: The Yosemite handyman who cuts off a woman’s head throws into high relief the thirty-nine million Californians who’ve ever hurt anyone.

  That’s what I tell myself. Honestly, though, that whole theory could be horseshit. I might have come to the same conclusion about human nature while writing about municipal finance or minor league baseball. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe twenty percent of the population is three drinks shy of a murder spree, and I’ve mistaken sobriety and restraint for decency.

  Whatever the reason, my faith in the basic goodness of most people is sincere, and my default inclination was to take Danielle at her word. But that does not mean I am a dope. I am not a passive vessel for self-evident codswallop (which, unlike chortle, is a word not used often enough). Burkett had not revealed anything to me so much as forced me into an admission: I didn’t question Danielle because I didn’t want to.

  I did not want to know how long she’d been trying to get rid of her goddamned birds, and I did not want to know if she was white-lying about the reasons. What I wanted was a peacock. I wanted one of those glistening creatures to stake a claim to our yard, to be an elegant hallucination roosting on the barn, a cerulean sylph posing against the butter-yellow clapboards of the house. Why hardly seemed worth considering because, really, wasn’t it obvious? A peacock is a thing of singular beauty. It was true that wanting one was impulsive and, possibly, greedy and selfish, but there was peril involved. Coveting a peacock is vaguely distasteful, but rescuing one, rescuing three, is noble, almost heroic. So, sure, tell me more about the head-ripping owl.

  Probably shouldn’t have gotten two males, though. I could see Burkett’s point on that one.

  * * *

  Mr. Pickle and Carl did not fight. Burkett had told me that they probably wouldn’t this time of year, seeing as how it was already the middle of July and the breeding season was over. Come springtime, though, they’d need to be separated unless I wanted to bring one in to get stitched up. Peacock battles are more performance than serious combat, he said, all that plumage flapping and flailing, but large birds are still jumping at each other, and sometimes a talon slices into a thigh or a breast. There’d also be more of a risk of that in a confined space, where they had less room to maneuver.

  If Carl and Mr. Pickle ended up in one of these aggressive dance-offs, it would be comically one-sided. I doubted Carl would even have the confidence to put up a fight. Surely he must be as awed by Mr. Pickle’s train as we were. Louise and the boys had seen it unfurled not long after I had but, oddly, never when they were together; the display was always for a solo audience, as Mr. Pickle seemed to worry that two or more humans might distract each other with their oohing and aahing, take the focus off him. Carl, by comparison, appeared to have stapled a worn-out duster to his backside. His train feathers were maybe a foot long and tilted at drunken angles, each one a few degrees off from the rest, and the colors were still muddy. It was an adolescent tail, the equivalent of pale fuzz on a teenage boy’s lip, merely a promise of virility.

  Carl was about two years old, maybe a yearling, definitely not yet three. I’d figured that out from some basic Googling I finally got around to—a peacock’s train grows out in his third year. I was pleased to discover that I’d been using the right word: Collectively, those long feathers are called a train, not a tail. Individually, they are called coverts—because they cover other feathers, and near as I can figure, someone added an extra t to the word because cover feather sounded too simplistic.

  The sprouting crown on the head, however, is not called a toodle. It is a crest.

  Carl and Ethel were plain India blues, the autological name for the most common type of peacock, being that they are native to India and their breasts are that surreal blue (green peacocks, meanwhile, are endangered, and Congo peacocks are vulnerable, a slightly less perilous designation). Mr. Pickle was a marginally more exotic India blue: His black shoulders were a natural pattern mutation, sort of like red hair among humans. Pied, like that first hen I’d seen, is a bird splattered with white, which is a pattern mutation as well. Peafowl breeders had developed other mutations to produce birds with novel colors and patterns—midnight, peach, taupe, silver-pied, white-eyed, and so on—though I did not bother reading deeply into such obsession. How anyone thought an India blue, black shoulder or not, could be improved upon was beyond me.

  * * *

  Ethel was the least skittish of our peacocks, yet even she kept a practical distance from me, never coming close enough to be grabbed and stuffed in another feed sack. Time and blueberries, I assumed, eventually would close that gap. Someday they might even be as sociable as Comet and Snowball. Curious and fearless, the chickens would hop up on my chair and then my shoulder to pluck a ladybug from the brim of my hat. They tilted their heads when I talked to them and seemed to enjoy being handled in small doses. Emmett hugged them with such zeal sometimes that I worried he might break one of their tiny bones. What would Burkett think if the dipshit with the mismatched peacocks brought in a wounded chicken
that had been hugged nearly to death?

  Each night before dinner, one of us called the chickens to lead them back to their coop. “So they don’t get killed,” I’d remind the boys if I wasn’t around to do it. “If they don’t get closed in the coop, something will eat them.” I usually pulled lockup duty, as I found the ladies to be pleasant evening company. They always came running when they heard my voice, a wobbly tandem of pure chicken giddiness. Most nights I had a treat for them, blueberries or kitchen scraps, and if I paused to pull a few weeds, they would frantically descend on the little dimple of fresh dirt I’d exposed and pluck out whatever unsuspecting insect had just been disturbed. If I detoured to rub Chief’s nose, Comet and Snowball would stop at the fence with me. Then we would make our way to the peacock pen, next to which I’d moved the mail-order coop. The pen remained strangely quiet for a three-bird home. I would stand there watching while the chickens clucked around the perimeter, free and happy and chatty. Sometimes Louise or Calvin or Emmett would join me, and we’d silently stare at our strange new birds together, through the barrier of wire mesh, thinking the same thing, probably, though no one ever said it out loud: Now what?

  After my appointment with Burkett, I told Louise what he’d said about not letting them roam free.

  “So… they stay penned up forever?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s wrong. They were running wild on the farm.”

  We were in the kitchen cleaning up the dinner dishes. She topped off her glass of wine and leaned against the counter, thinking for a moment. “Did I ever tell you about my mom’s pet duck?”

  Yes, in fact, she had. I hoped she was bringing it up now in the spirit of finding a solution to a problem none of us wanted to name. And yet this particular story suggested a gruesome end for Carl and Ethel and Mr. Pickle; not every creative idea is a solution. As a child, Louise’s mother had wanted a dog, but her sister had terrible allergies, so animals with fur were out of the question. Instead, one Easter she got a duckling and named it Cleo. By summer, Cleo was a full-fledged duck, and his owner, being seven, thought he might like to go on long walks in the neighborhood. She fashioned a special leash for Cleo, and they would take off down the hot pavement. It wasn’t long before Cleo’s tender webbed feet blistered. Here the story loses its specificity, but oozing infections were involved, and it ends with Cleo being dead.

  “I think I’ve seen a picture of an emu on a leash,” I said. “But we’re not going to do that.”

  “Who knows what we’re going to do,” she said. “What does one do with peacocks, anyway?” She looked at me expectantly, as if she seriously thought I had something sensible to say.

  “Well, I suppose—”

  I had nothing to finish the thought. Look at them in a garbage cage? That was hardly a satisfying answer, for us or for the peacocks. I didn’t suppose anything because, as was suddenly and uncomfortably apparent, I didn’t really know anything. My preliminary research had begun and ended with asking Danielle how much she wanted for three birds. Hell, I hadn’t even haggled. And I hadn’t learned much more than feather basics since.

  It was an excellent question, though: What does one do with peacocks? I could probably come up with an answer. My job, after all, is to tell true stories, to ask questions until I understand a particular subject or event well enough to explain it on the page. Surely I could, in time, explain peacocks to my own family. Researching the natural and cultural history would be no different than, say, deciphering the guidance system of a commercial airliner or the shifting alliances of warring tribes in Papua New Guinea. There would be travel involved—visits to people who do know what one does with peacocks—because reporting is always more fruitful when you show up. People are more open with a person who’s come to visit than they are with a voice on the phone, and a Chilean desert or a Thai cave can be more accurately described if you’ve actually been there.

  “I have no idea what one does with peacocks,” I said. “But I think we can figure it out.”

  Part Two MOLTING, MATING, AND MURDER

  Chapter Seven

  The morning was warmer than New York should be in October, and the sky was blue and clear, unseasonable weather that seemed to be a gift for the faithful and the curious on Amsterdam Avenue. There were many dozens of people waiting there, certainly hundreds, and they had with them dogs on leashes and birds in small cages and rabbits and hamsters and cats and turtles to be blessed in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

  The cathedral is an Episcopal church on the west side of Manhattan north of 110th Street, and it is somewhat famous for blessing animals, which it does on the first Sunday in October because the feast of St. Francis of Assisi is October 4, and he is the patron saint of animals and the environment. The service was as much pageantry as worship. It featured dancing and giant airy puppets and music composed with the sounds of seals and wolves and humpback whales and, after the Eucharist, creatures and beasts processed through the nave: a camel and a horse and a miniature horse like Chief and ducks and geese and barred rock chickens like Comet and Snowball and a bright pink chicken and an ox and a donkey and, pulled on a cart, a tortoise the size of a pitcher’s mound. A tortoise should be lethargic in autumn, but the temperature was pushing eighty degrees and had him all jumped up. An acolyte sat on his back to keep him from getting too frisky.

  There was a single peacock in the procession, white as snow and cradled in the arms of a handler who followed a few paces behind two men with raptors on their forearms. A peacock was almost obligatory, as they are one of the other things for which St. John the Divine is somewhat famous. The one in the procession was a visitor, but St. John’s has three of them—Harry, Jim, and Phil—who live on the close, which is what the church property surrounding the cathedral (as it is close to it, if you will) is called. Peacocks have been roaming the grounds since the nineteen eighties, when the Bronx Zoo and a Cathedral trustee donated four chicks, but the current three were gifts in 2002 from the graduating eighth-graders of the Cathedral School. The birds have the run of the place, and there is a shelter for them around back that resembles a miniature cathedral because it was designed by associates from the same firm that does the cathedral’s other architectural work. St. John has architects, because almost 130 years after the cornerstone was laid, it still is being built, and probably will be centuries from now, too; monuments to God often are works in perpetual progress. As it is, St. John the Divine is already most famous for being one of the largest cathedrals in the world, a Gothic cavern of stone and flying buttresses. The facade on Amsterdam is more than two hundred feet wide, and the building runs more than six hundred feet to the east. The ceiling of the nave, 124 feet above the slate floor, is held up by granite arches the size of sequoias, and the air inside appears to generate its own atmosphere. There is a soft haze to the place, light sifting through stained glass from both sides and, from Amsterdam Avenue, ten thousand pieces of glass fitted into a rose window forty feet across.

  Before the service, Louise and the boys wandered the grounds with me looking for peacocks, which is fairly strange if you think about it too much—semi-wild peacocks cavorting about on the Upper West Side. But an urban church seemed as good a place as any to start sorting out the point of our own caged creatures, which was why I’d come once before and then brought Louise and Calvin and Emmett for the blessing of the animals. The boys had never been to New York, and a peacock hunt outside the world’s largest Anglican cathedral seemed like one of the better reasons to miss a day of school.

  Phil was easy to pick out in one of the gardens, as he is solid white, like the one in the procession. Not albino, which is a complete lack of pigmentation, but leucistic, a color mutation in the feathers that is fairly common among peacocks. We gave up looking for Harry and Jim; there were too many alcoves and nooks and secret peacock hideaways on an eleven-acre campus, and besides, we’d gotten distracted by the menagerie gathered along Amsterdam.

  The Right Reve
rend Clifton Daniel III was slowly working his way along the sidewalk in a purple cassock. He is the dean of the cathedral, a tall, slim man in his early seventies with very little hair and a slightly crooked smile, and he appeared to be trying to personally welcome as many people as possible. He did not hurry. He has a deliberate, gentle manner, and when he said good morning or asked where you were from and why you were there, he did so at a pace and cadence calibrated to a calm, resting heart rate.

  Someone asked him if there would be snakes in the service. “Undoubtedly,” he said. All of God’s creatures are welcome in the cathedral, and the serpent is no less one of His than is the fidgety tortoise in the nave or the white peacock in the garden.

  * * *

  The peacock has been entwined with the divine, with the eternal and the mystical, since as long as shamans and priests have been interpreting the universe through fantastical stories. How could it not be? The peacock’s role in the epics of gods is a matter of form providing the function. To see a peacock, to look upon its blue breast and the thousand fleeting, shifting hues of its train, is to see, if one is so inclined, the pure work of the Creator. The peacock did not need to be invented from the imaginations of holy men and fabulists. It did not require mismatched parts, like the wings of Pegasus or the lion’s body of the Griffon or the human arms of the golden Garuda, the mythological bird from whose feather, in Hindu lore, the peacock was created as a gift for the god Skanda. Even conjured from a feather, the peacock was delivered fully assembled, like the Milky Way or the sun.

  In the older, Eastern traditions, the peacock was an accessory to the gods, and a malleable one at that. With his fierce claws and massive wingspan, he was a reliable mount for Skanda, the god of war. At the same time, Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge and the arts, was sometimes depicted riding on the back of a decidedly less ferocious peacock. In still other versions, Saraswati chose to ride a swan because the peacock was said to change its mind with the weather, thus representing indecision and fickleness, hardly useful qualities for either acquiring knowledge or conducting warfare.