Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  “Toby?” That was a kid Calvin knew. “How’d he get dragged into this?”

  “I dunno.”

  I waited to see if he had anything else to say, but he was quiet. “You know that won’t happen, right?”

  Calvin shrugged. Why would he know that? He’d been drilled for the day a homicidal loon would shoot up his school. He’d practiced for it, too, knew where in the classroom he was supposed to curl up until the shooting was over. It’s a wonder he got out of bed in the morning, really.

  I tried again. “Well, dads don’t do that. I promise you. I know it sounds scary, but grown men don’t go around shooting kids—”

  “What about that man in Norway?” he said. The words came out fast, and the last syllables got tangled in the choke of a sob. Then he burst into tears, a great sudden deluge spilling out, as if a retaining wall in his tear ducts had collapsed.

  I was startled by the ferocity. I pulled him close, a reflex, and felt him heaving against my chest. Shit. He wasn’t supposed to know about the man in Norway. I’d always been vague with the boys about work, and for this exact reason. They knew I went places to write about things that had happened and that some of those things were sad and that sometimes people had even died. They would ask questions, and Louise and I never technically lied. But we left out a lot of details and deflected, we thought, masterfully.

  Calvin began to calm down, his breathing slowing. He kept his head pressed against me. Norway had been months ago. I’d brought him a hockey jersey from Oslo, but I had no idea what I’d told him about the rest of that trip. He must have picked up snippets, overheard Louise and me talking through the story, plotting structure and pacing and tone. The man in Norway killed seventy-seven people: eight with a bomb in Oslo, sixty-seven he shot at a youth camp on an island in a lake west of the city, and two who died trying to get away, one by drowning and the other after falling off a cliff. I was in Norway about a year after the fact, during the man’s trial, reporting what turned out to be an unusually long magazine story. I spent a lot of time with people who’d been on the island, who’d been wounded, who’d pulled panicked kids out of the lake. A police officer remembered being in a boat hours after it was over, hearing chirps and trills and snippets of pop songs from the cell phones that parents were calling and no one was answering. They were scattered all across the island, he said, blinking like fireflies. A man named Freddy told me, over several hours at a sidewalk café, how one of his daughters had called him from the island. She didn’t say anything, just screamed for two minutes and seven seconds until the line went dead because the man shot her in the left side of the head and the bullet came out the right side and destroyed her phone. Freddy figured that out by studying photos from the place where his daughter was murdered.

  Calvin was seven years old. I definitely didn’t tell him that.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “What about the man in Norway?”

  “He killed all those kids.”

  Oh, hell, did I tell him the number? No, I wouldn’t have done that. Probably not. Would it matter? Anything in double digits sounds like a statistic, doesn’t it?

  How long had that monster been under the bed?

  I leaned back enough that he could see my face. “Yes, he did,” I said. “He’s a really, really bad guy.”

  Honesty seemed like a good approach. Acknowledge my son’s fears. I was scrambling for the next line. What words make mass murder not scary? “There was only one of him,” I said. “Do you know how many people there are in Norway?”

  He shook his head.

  Dammit. I didn’t, either. “A lot. Millions.” I was improvising. “After that one man—the one bad man—did that, thousands of those other people put flowers all over the city, giant mounds of flowers everywhere, because they were so sad and mad. There was that one bad guy, but everyone else tried to take care of each other.”

  “Okay?”

  I guessed he was thinking the same thing I was thinking, which was: So what? The goodwill of the average Norwegian was useless in a North Carolina elementary school. Also, the dead people were still dead.

  “What I mean is, there are very, very few bad guys in the world,” I said. “And bad things happen, but very, very rarely. That’s why I write about them, because they’re so unusual.”

  He looked skeptical. His eyes were still moist.

  “The man in Norway has nothing to do with your school,” I said. “And this kid’s father isn’t one of the bad guys. Promise. Okay?”

  Calvin nodded weakly.

  He rolled on his side. His eyes were still open when I switched off the light. I stayed on the edge of the bed in the dark until he fell asleep, watching him and wondering what other terrible things I’d left in the shadows.

  * * *

  Louise and I were more diligent after that, always aware that one of the boys might be in earshot. We would preemptively explain what I was working on in slightly more detail, especially if it involved an event they might see on the news or hear about from their friends, but we dulled the sharp points, softened the focus. We would ask if they had any questions, but they rarely did. For the most part, my work to them was something that happened in faraway places. They did not need to know how much of it went on in my head.

  In the weeks before we got the peacocks, I was writing about a dead soldier and his family. That task was not appreciably different from dozens of other projects, except I was having a terrible time of it, writing and deleting for days. Killing the soldier on the page wasn’t difficult, though things I had learned about him when he was a boy reminded me of Calvin. Tiny details, quirks and mannerisms and such, but those are the ones that resonate; the soldier was familiar to me in ways that none of the other dead had been. And so I was dreading the paragraphs that had to come next. Unlike death, grief is extremely hard to write. It has no boundaries or shape, nothing physical to anchor the words. The temptation is to force it into view with adjectives and platitudes, and the danger is in slipping across the filament between moving and maudlin. Getting it right requires an intimacy that can’t help but feel invasive, and it has to be right because it is so intimate.

  Until the soldier, I had been able to stand outside of other people’s grief. I could study it from a safe distance, close enough to see the details and feel the edges but still at a remove, as if from behind a sterile membrane. But because I could see my own child in the soldier, the barrier dissolved. Writing that father’s grief, I finally figured out, was more visceral experience than intellectual exercise.

  I discussed this at length with Comet and Snowball. I worked in the yard with them in the late spring, before the pecans had leafed out, moving my mildewed camp chair every so often to keep the sun off my screen and basal cells from sprouting on my pink Irish skin. The ladies would cock their heads while I read them sentences and paragraphs, staring at me with one orange eye each, not really listening, of course, but putting on a pretty good show of it. They looked like they were paying attention. When I got completely stuck, which was often, I sat in the grass and fed them blueberries. After a few days of this, I taught them to jump for treats. I was astonished that a chicken had a fourteen-inch vertical.

  Louise found me on the lawn with Comet and Snowball one afternoon when she came home from her office. The chickens were leaping higher and higher, each patiently taking a turn. My laptop was open on my chair, and my notebooks were on the ground, a breeze rippling the pages. “Watch this,” I said over my shoulder.

  She knew I was late on a deadline. “Ah,” she said with a pitying smile, “I see you’ve got yourself some therapy chickens.”

  I ignored her. She’d said the same thing about the bunny in the early spring. When I was stumped then, I’d sit on the steps and wait for the bunny to hop out of the boxwoods and into the irises, where I would toss him scraps of salad and watch him nibble until I wasn’t stumped anymore. It was an efficient and mutually beneficial system until the night we heard a piercing shriek and
saw one of the barn cats streaking away. My therapy bunny was under a boxwood with his belly slashed open. “It’s a flesh wound,” I insisted. Louise bundled him up in a towel and I drove to the all-night emergency vet, who thanked us for bringing in a young rabbit to be humanely put down, which wasn’t my intent at all, but we were presented with no other options. We never mentioned the bunny after that.

  The peacocks, within a couple of weeks of their arrival, had replaced Comet and Snowball as an audience for my more serious work conversations. They had the advantage of being physical captives, unable to wander away if they grew tired of me droning on, as the chickens occasionally did.

  “If we start with the dead lawyer,” I said to the peacocks one afternoon, “that’s kind of backing into it, right?”

  Ethel tipped her head to one side but did not betray an opinion.

  “The airport scene with the live lawyer makes much more sense, I think. I mean, she’s the one in the middle of all this.”

  Carl and Mr. Pickle stood a safe distance behind Ethel, shy slackers in the back of the lecture hall. They were excellent collaborators, never interrupting or criticizing, patiently listening to me sort out my thoughts, which was easier to do if I heard them out loud. Tater was much too excitable for such matters, and I felt less silly talking to a trio of large birds than to myself. Plus, the boys might always be close enough to hear me if I walked around muttering disjointed fragments about dead lawyers and airports.

  All three peacocks watched me intently, as if expecting to hear something profound. They were actually expecting blueberries. Whenever I sat down inside the coop—I’d put a cinder block in there after the first bale of hay was scattered—they understood that I would produce blueberries or tomatoes or blackberries, whatever was abundant in the garden or cheap at the grocery. Yet they were still skittish enough to wait for treats, not cluck and hop and grab at my fingers like the chickens. It was easy enough to reframe their timidity as interest.

  The tomatoes were always cut down to the size of large blueberries, and even some of the bigger blackberries were halved. I didn’t want them to choke, which seemed to me conscientious and, more likely, moronic: Surely they were smart enough not to gobble things they couldn’t get down their throats. Any species too stupid not to gag to death never would have evolved. Sometimes I’d leave a hunk of watermelon for them, a lavish gift that had Comet and Snowball stamping at the wire, and I’d scatter scraps of kale or the outer leaves pulled off of Brussels sprouts. They liked peanuts and sunflower seeds and dried mealworms. The only thing they refused to eat, for reasons I would never figure out, was strawberries. Even Tater ate those, green tops and all.

  There was a limit to their patience, though. I rambled on for five minutes, maybe six, which is a very long time when you’re rambling but not so long at all when you’re trying to piece together a month of reporting. Carl got bored and looked out at the yard. Ethel took a single step toward me and stopped, a mildly insistent move, a soft demand for a blueberry.

  “All right, then,” I said. “We’re all agreed, start in the airport, then circle back to the dead lawyer in the next section. Good?”

  Ethel blinked.

  “Yes, good.” I pulled a blueberry out of the carton and balanced it at the tips of my fingers. Ethel watched it carefully, waiting. She knew I’d let it roll off into the straw soon enough.

  None of them would eat out of my hand, though, which was slowing down my plan to release them into the yard. I was still hoping Burkett was wrong, that my peacocks were the exception to the fly-away rule. I’d read about peacocks staying on farms and in neighborhoods for generations. Martha Stewart allowed a couple of her big males to wander her property, and they hadn’t escaped. Granted, she was working with 152 more acres than me. But my three supposedly were an established social clique—I was aware that I was being selective in the absurdities I chose to believe—so I thought there was a fair chance they might stick around.

  We’d made progress. Ethel would march up as soon as I sat down, position herself no more than two feet away, close enough to touch, and wait. Mr. Pickle was running about two weeks behind Ethel, working up the courage to get close. The first time he moved in, I froze for an instant, then moved very delicately. Mr. Pickle and I were almost exactly eye to eye. He made no menacing movements, but from that angle, up close and sharply defined, clearly hungry, he seemed less like a regal bird of kings than an omnivorous jungle raptor. Neither bird would eat anything until I dropped it in the straw. Even Carl was getting brave, edging up behind Ethel and no longer startling if I threw a blueberry at his feet.

  They were vocal by then, too. Nothing piercing, no screams or shrieks. There were soft trills and gentle clicks from Ethel that I took to mean she was content or curious, and a mild melodic hoot from Mr. Pickle, as if he were announcing himself at a cocktail party. Mostly, there was a deep honking, like gravel-throated geese, occasionally followed by a descending squawk. I heard it from Ethel initially one afternoon near the end of July. She had her neck puffed out like an oversized pipe cleaner and was staring into the bushes beyond Cosmo’s grave. Mr. Pickle joined in, then Carl, all of them watching and honking and fluffing their necks. They were clearly sounding an alarm, but of what I had no idea; I could see only green leaves and dark shadows.

  The honking would commence a couple of times each week, never lasting longer than a few minutes. Sometimes they were directing it toward a squirrel foraging for spilled chicken feed and sometimes at the neighbor’s cat sleeping under the forsythia. Those intruders were plain to my mammalian eyes. But peacocks, like chickens and most other birds, have different and in some ways much better daytime eyesight. They have extra cones in their eyes that allow them to perceive a broader spectrum of light, including ultraviolet, as well as a double-cone structure that detects brightness. Birds as a general rule also have superior hearing to humans. There’s probably a continuous background of crunching and buzzing and crackling, and their visual world has colors that we can’t see. But the advantage for a large bird that spends most of its life on the ground is that it can more easily see and hear predators.

  The evolutionary trade-off, because there’s always a trade-off, is that birds such as peacocks and chickens have terrible night vision. Peacocks in the wild roost high in trees, and the chickens in my backyard get locked up every night because they can’t see what’s coming to kill them. The reason is that they evolved with and from dinosaurs; the distant ancestors of chickens weren’t hiding from Tyrannosaurus rex because they were T. rex. They weren’t waiting for the big reptilian killers to fall asleep before scurrying around in the dark for food and sex. Mammals did that, which is why their eyes developed rod-shaped photoreceptors that function in low levels of light. Sixty-eight million years later, I can walk up on Comet in the night and she’ll barely see me coming.

  I never saw anything in those bushes, though. Ethel would start honking in that direction every now and again, and I’d wait and watch, thinking I might catch the jiggle of a branch, the slip of a shadow, some creature darting away. But nothing ever moved, nothing made sound, so there was really no point in worrying about it.

  * * *

  Mr. Pickle’s train began regrowing almost as soon as we’d collected the last jar of feathers. By Thanksgiving, his coverts had grown out enough to almost cover his tail feathers. He displayed them about half as frequently as he had in July, and they fanned out thick and lush but very short, like a bonsai train. Carl’s coverts had come in, too, but in an abstract and sickly sort of way. They were the blurry beige and black of the summer, albeit longer, with wide, airy gaps between them. He’d sprouted a single bright feather with an ocellus at the end, and it launched hard to the left, drooping like a broken antenna.

  The coop was barely wide enough for Mr. Pickle’s fully expanded train in the summer, and that’s when it already was beginning to fall out. If Carl grew anything of note, there wouldn’t be room for the two of them. Plus, Burkett had told
me they’d need to be separated in the spring, and I couldn’t split the pen as it was: The birds would each technically have enough space, but only in the way that prison inmates in solitary have enough space in their cells.

  There were enough of the long boards left to double the size of the enclosure and, by incorporating the cedar posts holding up the roof, finally frame a separate coop for Comet and Snowball. It wasn’t fancy, basically a chicken-wired closet, but big enough for their little mail-order hutch and the small table on which we kept a bucket of daffodil bulbs. The ladies had commandeered the bucket months ago as their laying spot, and we kept the little coop so they’d have a cozy space to huddle against the cold.

  Which came on hard and fast. New Year’s Day was seventeen degrees before sunrise, and the temperature dropped all week before bottoming out at seven degrees the following Sunday, with the wind making it feel like zero. I knew chickens and peacocks could tolerate the cold—they’d lived wild on Danielle’s farm for decades—but teens and single digits were extreme in North Carolina. The day after the cold snap began, I started devising an arctic-weather-mitigation plan.

  I needed a heat source, like what we had for Cosmo, only bigger. I couldn’t have any open flames, obviously, and space heaters also were out. I could easily see Mr. Pickle’s feathers catching fire, him running around in a panic, lighting straw and century-old barn wood on fire. Heat lamps probably wouldn’t get hot enough to ignite anything, and I could suspend them away from anything flammable. The extension cords were all in good shape, and the entire run, from outlet to coop, was sheltered.