Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  The closest bird broke for the middle of the lawn, snatched a bit of fruitcake. “They pick up from the way the first one eats how good the food is,” Rhoderick went on, throwing the last of the fruitcake across the grass. Another peacock followed the first, and then birds raced from the fence line and the hedgerow and up the slope behind the oak, all of them skittering about for crumbs while Lord Moncreiff brushed off his hands in front of his manageable Scottish castle. “They like the sun,” he said, and he seemed pleased to have brought them into the light.

  Eleven peacocks and four hens clustered on Tullibole’s lawn. I had never seen so many in the open before; in Palos Verdes, they were constrained by houses and cars and horses. Here they had room to move for long stretches, and I had time to watch closely. For millennia, the peacock has been accused of strutting, of employing a haughty walk to harmonize with his purportedly haughty train and, for good measure, his haughty crest. It is a pejorative word, strut, much as peacocking, the verb, is pejorative. I had never noticed my birds to strut, but that didn’t count. They were in a garbage coop and, presumably, demoralized.

  Yet here, in the open, it was plain to see that a peacock does not strut. It walks like any large ground bird. A peacock, to my eye, walks much like a chicken, the head bobbing forward in rhythm with the steps, the movements mildly exaggerated because a peacock’s legs and neck are longer, but not fundamentally different. The motion at slow speeds is almost the opposite of a strut, more of a mindful high step, as if the bird is avoiding a squish of mud or especially sharp stones. When they run, it is with the same silly exuberance as Comet and Snowball, their budding trains stabilizing, but not eliminating, the rolling hint of a waddle. Lord Moncreiff’s birds, scampering for a ration of fruitcake, were not arrogant. They were hungry, and they just happened to be beautiful while racing for crumbs.

  Lord Moncreiff was inviting me into his castle, but I really wanted to stay on the lawn. The December sun was warm on my back, and two blue dots were approaching from down near the stream, moving slowly over a wide green lawn, curious, deliberate. I wanted to wait for them, and I could have done so for hours.

  Part Three A PEACOCK IN AUTUMN

  Chapter Sixteen

  Five days after Carl came home, Emmett had another day off from school, a teacher workday, which is generally a parent not-workday. Louise was at her office and Calvin was at school, so I let Emmett sleep while I did the morning routine. I walked Tater, and then he sniffed around the bird pens while I let the chickens out—having learned months ago that they did not enjoy playing chase, Tater settled for a polite nod of a greeting—and checked on the peacocks.

  That morning happened to be the first they’d woken up on sand. I’d had it delivered the day before, eight tons, and spent hours moving it into the pen with the guys who brought it, one wheelbarrow after another. None of the birds feinted toward the door, no matter how long it was left open.

  The pen looked good, but my shoulders were sore and I had a vague feeling of shame. The world is running out of sand, a phenomenon so outlandish that I’d been mildly obsessed with it for a couple of years. Sand is the most heavily mined commodity on earth, the most exploited natural resource after water, and the demand, mostly for construction, has long outpaced legitimate supply. Sand thieves were stripping beaches in Morocco, and a sand mafia—mafia!—was killing people in India. And here I was, hoarding eight tons for three birds so they wouldn’t eat poisonous trinkets that I was too lazy to dig out of the ground. Construction-grade sand, too, the good stuff that could have been used to build a school or an orphanage or a school for orphans.

  It’s almost physical sometimes, the effort to chase away the guilt when it comes creeping. “You’re a neurotic fucker,” my shrink friend, the one with the breathing exercise, told me once. “And I don’t mean that Woody Allen dickhead bullshit. I mean you worry about shit you can’t control. Stop it.” He was not an orthodox therapist, but he was right. Emotional energy, like water, finds the path of least resistance, and it is always more convenient to worry about what you can’t control because it’s never your fault when it all goes to shit. My effect on the global sand trade, I reminded myself, was negligible to the point of irrelevant: If my peacocks weren’t walking on those specific tons of sand, they would be under the pavers of a new patio or stirred into the concrete of another big-box store that peddled sick snakes. From that perspective, my use of it was not illegitimate.

  Early that afternoon, Emmett and I were at the kitchen table, the parts of a radio-controlled monster truck arranged in front of us. It had been a birthday gift the year before, and he’d decided to use his allowance money to make a few upgrades, starting with the suspension, specifically the oil-filled front shock absorbers. He’d bought tiny aluminum caps to replace the tiny plastic caps on the shocks and a tube of slightly heavier oil to refill them. The truck came apart easily enough, but we were stalled because one of the caps wouldn’t unscrew. It was stuck too tightly for Emmett’s fingers to twist it, and mine were too big to get a grip. We kept at it, passing it back and forth, before I finally told him I’d get some needle-nose pliers from the barn.

  I went out the kitchen door and across the driveway. At the corner of the barn, where stairs run up to the old hayloft, I saw a blur of movement. Something brownish, bigger than a cat, a mangy thing that bolted between the bottom and the second steps and ran toward the bushes beyond Cosmo’s grave.

  Since it was the middle of the day, it took me a moment to recognize it as a fox.

  A queasy panic rose quickly. I looked in the direction the fox had come from, the far corner of the barn where a honeysuckle vine chokes the garden gate. There was a pile of barred black-and-white feathers. It was one of the girls, Comet or Snowball, though which one I couldn’t tell because her head had been torn off and dropped two feet away. But there was only one. I called both of their names. They always come when called. I eyed the Japanese maple by the steps where the girls would fly up if they got spooked; I’d plucked them out of that tree more times than I could count. It was empty. I said their names again, more of a stage whisper this time because I didn’t want Emmett to hear.

  Oh, hell, Emmett. What if he came out to find me? What if he saw the feathers, the pieces?

  I ran back to the kitchen door, looking around for the other girl. I suspected the fox had her. “Emmett?” No answer. I went farther into the house. “Emmett?” Shit. He’d already slipped out.

  “Yeah?” he yelled from his room.

  I called up from the base of the staircase. “Hey, I’m, uh, having a hard time finding these things. Just wait here for me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I did a quick check of the bird pens. The peacocks were agitated, pacing. Ethel started honking, somewhat tardily, I thought. I looked behind the woodpile, in the old cabinets screwed to the back wall, in a steamer pot on a shelf, all places Comet and Snowball had hidden before. Then I followed Ethel’s stare toward the bushes. The girls hardly ever hung around that area, but that was where the fox had run.

  The fox was still there, behind the shrubs; I could see his fur at the edge of the branches. And the feathers of the other lady. He heard me and darted into the underbrush of the neighbor’s yard, leaving the corpse behind. He’d eaten more of this chicken. I never found her head.

  I felt sick, in that anxious way where my chest gets tight and my arms get tingly and light, as if they might float. I should have known foxes might be lurking about. Deer were as rampant as flies. There were raccoons and possums and squirrels and rabbits and voles and hawks and vultures and bats and mice, all of which we could see every day if we cared to pay attention. Of course there would be foxes.

  Oh, fuck. I did know there were foxes, knew for certain, because I’d seen them before. It had been years, six or seven, early spring. I was in the garden, closer to dusk, thinning out a radish patch when I heard a rustle to my left. There was a gray fox not ten yards from me. We both froze for a second or two un
til it walked calmly away and hopped through an opening in the side of the barn. I followed and saw her inside, or maybe him, under some scrap wood with four kits.

  I had warned the boys at least once a week that the chickens had to be locked up at night because an animal would eat them. Had I never considered the daylight hours in springtime, when foxes are trying to feed their hungry offspring? No, I had not. I left the ladies wandering the yard like a plump buffet, free-range and one hundred percent organic.

  I cleaned up the girls as respectfully as one can with a shovel and a trash bag. I put the bag in the garbage can because I didn’t want Emmett to see what was left of the bodies, and I put a rock on the can so the fox or a raccoon couldn’t drag them out again. Then I went inside to tell my son about two more dead pets.

  He was still up in his room; my initial self-loathing and disposal had required barely five minutes.

  “Pup? I need you to come down for a minute.”

  I had no idea what to say. There was no snake vet here to bail me out. Louise wouldn’t be home until after dark, after Emmett was supposed to put Comet and Snowball safely away for the night. I was flying solo.

  Emmett appeared at the top of the stairs, paused, then came down slowly. He stopped on the landing three steps from the bottom. I was leaning against the wall. “You should have a seat,” I said as evenly as I could.

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “What? No, you’re not in trouble,” I said, lowering myself to his level and reaching for his hands. But holy hell, that stung. I’d come to tell him I’d just let his chickens get killed, and he heard my comforting tone as menace? Did I sound that callous about death, if only out of habit? I didn’t know that while I was cleaning up dead pets, he’d been ripping open the chocolate chips we were saving to bake cookies, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Nobody was in trouble but me.

  In through the nose, out through the mouth.

  “We have a fox,” I said. “And foxes are wild animals.” Ease into it, cast the villain, set the stage, same way any good murder story gets set up. “And they, you know, hunt other animals. That’s nature.”

  Stalling. He looked puzzled.

  “I’m so sorry, pup, but he got the chickens.” Rip the bandage off. But say chickens, impersonal, blunt the edge, if only for an instant.

  “Comet and Snowball?” And the instant was gone. His eyes flooded with tears. “Are they dead?”

  Now my eyes were wet. I couldn’t get words around the rock in my throat. I nodded and pulled him close, and we stayed like that, softly crying, until I could swallow again and tell him what happened.

  Emmett listened, moist-eyed and sniffling, while I recounted everything, from the blur by the steps to the dash into the underbrush, but without most of the gore. “It would have been quick,” I said. “I’m sure they didn’t suffer.”

  I wasn’t sure of that at all.

  He asked if he could see them, and I said that wasn’t a good idea, that it was better for him to remember them as live chickens, the way they sat on his shoulder and jumped for blueberries. He asked if we could bury them next to Cosmo, and I told him that wasn’t a good idea, either, because it would be awful if the fox or a stray dog dug them up. I didn’t want to be aging them, like prosciutto.

  He wanted to see where it happened. We went outside. Somehow I hadn’t noticed the feathers scattered from the barn to the bushes, past the silver maple and Cosmo’s grave, across the dirt patch we needed to reseed but didn’t because Comet and Snowball ate whatever seeds we scattered. Emmett gathered up two big handfuls of feathers and walked to where we’d buried his pet snake less than a year earlier. He found another broken slate nearby, wedged it into the dirt like a tombstone, and piled what he had left of his chickens in front of it.

  * * *

  I called animal control to let them know a chicken-killing fox was rampaging through my neighborhood. The lady who answered was not sympathetic. “That’s what foxes do,” she said. I told her I was plainly aware of that fact. She took my number, and a sheriff’s deputy called back shortly after. He was very sympathetic. A chicken man himself. Laughed when I referred to the fox as “that little fucker,” though he knew I wasn’t making a joke. “I get it,” he said. “But, you know, you do have the right to protect yourself and your property, and chickens are property. So you’ve got options.”

  I took his point, yet there were no options, not really. When the family of foxes had moved into the barn years earlier, I’d called a trapper to get rid of them. He gave me a price and we scheduled a time, and just because I was curious, I asked where he took them, if there was some forest preserve teeming with foxes hauled out of residential neighborhoods. “Uh, no,” he said in a weary tone, as if he’d had this conversation before and knew how it was going to end. “We have to put ’em down. It’s a state law.”

  I canceled our appointment, waited for the foxes to leave on their own, then bug-bombed the bejeezus out of the barn to get rid of the fleas. It wasn’t their fault they were foxes. Maybe one of those kits, all grown up, had come back and killed our chickens. The lady was right: That’s what foxes do. I’d just made it easier by leaving our two very trusting, utterly domesticated, and well-fed pets alone and out in the open for easy hunting. No, hunting would have been more of a challenge. Our yard was an abattoir.

  Emmett took it upon himself to tell Calvin when he came home from school, and Calvin seemed rattled as much by the realization that toothy, bloody nature was occurring on the other side of the kitchen door as he was by the dead chickens. I didn’t think he’d ever seen Comet and Snowball fight over a baby snake or peck a slug to death on the hot brick walkway. Funny how I never felt bad for the snakes or the slugs.

  “They had such a happy chicken life,” Louise said that night. The four of us were in the living room in what amounted to a subdued Irish wake. “I know they would have lived longer if we’d kept them locked up, but they wouldn’t have been as happy.”

  There was no disagreement. We spent an hour or so telling funny chicken stories, which, when you think about it, is a tremendous amount of material for a pair of barred rock hens to generate.

  “I hate to use the phrase ‘a fate worse than death,’ ” Louise said, “but, really, can you imagine if one of them had survived by herself? How lonely she would be? They spent every moment together.”

  Yes, I thought but did not say, I could imagine that with great clarity. One of them would not be dead. We would believe that she was sad, which might be true or might be us projecting emotion onto a species that we otherwise slaughter by the tens of billions, that our own family eats in one form or another twice each week if not more. The surviving Comet or Snowball might be perfectly content with simply being not dead. I felt queasy again. “She would have been miserable,” I agreed. But I wondered if a long life in a big pen was really worse than a short one picking bugs out of the grass.

  * * *

  An interesting thing about chicken wire is that it is meant to keep chickens contained rather than protected. That is, predators, including the foxes and raccoons miserably evident in the yard, can chew through it without much difficulty. Professionals know this, as would anyone remotely observant in the fencing aisle at Home Depot: The material we laymen call chicken wire is actually labeled with the far less robust title of poultry netting.

  I learned this the day after Comet and Snowball were killed because it occurred to me that the peacocks were vulnerable, too. They might be big enough and feisty enough to defend themselves during the day, but if some critter slipped in past midnight, when they were dozing and half-blind? Carnage. The pen, proudly assembled from leftovers and scraps, needed to be fortified with store-bought hardware.

  My neighbor, the one with the goats and the miniature horse, offered to lend me the electric fence ribbon that he staked in the front yard now and again to let Chief graze outside the paddock. That seemed ideal. A strip across the bottom and another near the top would painfully but not
lethally punish any animal that tried to eat my peacocks. Upon further consideration, though, it was apparent that I, too, would be painfully but not lethally punished every time I forgot to turn it off before I went into the pen, which would be more than once and, thus, too often. There was also the nontrivial possibility that one of the birds, likely Carl, would manage to take a peck at it, which could be lethal.

  After a day of dithering, I decided to cover the pen with goat fencing, a heavy-gauge wire welded in two-inch-by-four-inch rectangles, held in place with screws and inch-wide washers. Anything big enough to chew through poultry netting, I hoped, would be too big to squeeze through the goat wire. It went up pretty quickly. I had the pen covered in about an hour, and then I went back with more screws and washers, probably more than I needed. I’d saved Carl twice, once (maybe) from an owl and once from a grommet. I wasn’t losing him to a fox.

  I put a final, excessive row of screws and washers at the very bottom, where the goat wire touched the dirt, then stood up and grabbed the wire with both hands. I tugged once, then a second time, harder, with what I estimated to be the force of a dozen especially savage and well-coordinated racoons. The wire barely moved. It was taut, secure, possibly impenetrable. I took a few steps back to admire my ingenuity, then heard the familiar rattle of Mr. Pickle vibrating his train.

  “Yes,” I said, shifting my focus from the wire to the inside of the pen, “you’re very welcome.” Except I couldn’t see him. Sunlight sizzled from the goat wire and the washers and screws, a blinding pattern of long lines and big dots. The brilliance of the wire made everything behind it seem darker, screened in shadow.

  I leaned my face against the cage, blinkered my eyes with my hands. Mr. Pickle was in full blossom in the center, and I could see Carl and Ethel off to one side. I stepped back again. The birds were only shadows behind bright lines and dots.