Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  A Montana peacock, I told Danny, will never be written into a fairy tale.

  “So what?” Danny said. “Still a gorgeous bird. And really, isn’t this something?”

  * * *

  On the last night of the convention, I met a man named Ray Watts from Macon, Georgia. We were in the bar of the Four Points, Ray and I and an Oklahoman named Mark with big hands and many stories of turkeys and loose dogs. I told them about Carl getting sick and how Burkett had told me to sneak up on him in the dark on a ladder.

  “I use a catch net myself,” Ray said. I made a mental note to thank Uncle John again. “And I don’t like to go in the pen at night because I’m afraid of snakes.” I made a note to check for snakes in the dark.

  Mark told me he was a retired firefighter, and I told him I’d written a few stories about firefighters over the years, and our conversation drifted far from peacocks. Ray sat quietly, as if concentrating on something important.

  “I sold some birds to another writer once,” he said finally, partly to us and partly, it seemed, to jog his memory.

  “Really?” I said. “Anyone I’d know?”

  “Maybe. Kinda famous,” Ray said. “Funny name. Real funny name. Up in Milledgeville.”

  I was lifting a beer but stopped, set it down gently, peered at Ray. “Any chance,” I said, “the name was Flannery O’Connor?”

  Ray’s face lit up, and he slapped the table. “That’s her!” He settled back, triumphant. “She was dead, of course. But I sold a pair of peafowl to the place she used to live. It’s a museum now.”

  Louise and I kept planning to go to Andalusia, the O’Connor family’s farm that’s now a museum. We hadn’t made it, though, not yet. Life gets busy, and slipping away for a weekend in Georgia is harder than when we had one cat and no kids. Besides, there weren’t many peacocks to see there anymore, just the ones Ray delivered. We had our own birds to keep us occupied.

  When O’Connor was alive, dozens of peacocks roosted in the trees and on the buildings and the sagging gateposts. She decorated letters and gifts with feathers, which she also gave to the ladies of Milledgeville to put in their hats. She tucked the birds into her stories as scenery and symbols and acid tests of character, like she did in “The Displaced Person.” O’Connor and peacocks are so iconically entwined that the cover of one of the paperback editions of A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a drawing of a somber, hollow-eyed woman in a long skirt and black hat with a fan of blocky peacock feathers arranged on her backside.

  O’Connor bought her first peacocks, a mating pair and four chicks, in 1952, and by the time she got around to writing about them nine years later, she had at least forty at Andalusia. “The population figure I give out is forty, but for some time now I have not felt it wise to take a census,” she wrote in a 1961 essay for Holiday magazine that was later republished as “The King of the Birds” in an anthology of her work. “I had been told before I bought my birds that peafowl are difficult to raise. It is not so, alas.”

  She, too, began with chickens, when she was five years old, in particular a buff Cochin bantam that walked backwards. Pathé News caught wind of her chicken’s curious ability and sent a cameraman to film a short newsreel. “Here’s Mary O’Connor”—Flannery was her middle name—“of Savannah, Georgia, holding the only chicken in the world that actually walks backwards,” the narrator said in that nasally patter of thirties hucksters. “When she advances, she retreats; to go forward, she goes back,” and so on.

  It was a bit dubious. Surely other chickens were capable of walking backward. But O’Connor’s was the one that went Depression-era viral, and after that minor burst of fame, she began collecting all manner of fowl: pheasants and turkeys and swans and ducks and quail. “My quest, whatever it was actually for, ended with peacocks. Instinct, not knowledge, led me to them,” she wrote, which wasn’t so different from how Mr. Pickle and Carl and Ethel ended up in my yard. “I knew that the peacock had been the bird of Hera, the wife of Zeus,” she continued, “but since that time it had probably come down in the world—the Florida Market Bulletin advertised three-year-old peafowl at sixty-five dollars a pair.”

  That is the most concise and accurate history of the peacock ever written.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I bought a peahen from nurse Valerie.

  This was not something I did with enthusiasm. Peacocks were not in my blood. I was not eager to expand our menagerie of ornamental, and unexpectedly expensive, birds. It was a concession to reality, a simple risk analysis of the looming breeding season. The confounding part was that I didn’t actually want the birds to breed. I wasn’t running a hatchery, and I had neither the time nor the space for the half-dozen chicks Ethel might produce. But nature doesn’t much care what I think. Peacocks evolved those magnificent trains for the sole purpose of convincing peahens to copulate; the display exists in service of breeding, and one can’t marvel at the former without tolerating the latter. Buy the ticket, take the ride, as they say.

  Because breeding is at root a competition, peacocks sometimes fight. Not viciously, but Carl and Mr. Pickle would be better off separated for a while. With only a single hen, one of them would be isolated. That would be young Carl, who I was sure was not yet capable of breeding. He insisted otherwise, throwing up his feathers with a fierce urgency since his return, pawing the sand like a two-footed bull. But it was a desperate, overwrought imitation of sexual maturity. He still had only the beginnings of a real train, most of it the barred feathers of a juvenile that, instead of creating a smooth arc, jabbed upward in random, spiky lengths that made it look like something he forgot to comb. A half-dozen eyespots had come in, but all on the left. Even at his most beautiful, he was lopsided.

  Was alone the same as lonely for a peacock? Would being physically separated from Mr. Pickle and Ethel have an emotional effect on Carl, and would that emotional effect manifest as a physical one? Was I overthinking the social and mental health of a bird?

  Yes, I was definitely doing that. But Carl was an investment now, and investments had to be protected. I couldn’t risk another injury, a bloody wound in a sex fight with Mr. Pickle or a psychic trauma from solitary confinement. Burkett didn’t cleanse that bird of three toxic metals just so Carl could mope himself to death.

  So I needed a second hen to keep company with Carl.

  Louise was not thrilled with the idea of adding to the flock. “We’re up to four,” she said. “More than that and you’re a hoarder.” The drama and expense of Carl’s illness was fresh on her mind, though, and the thought of Carl landing in Burkett’s operating room again was, I suppose, slightly worse than the additional honking and pooping of one more bird.

  I never told her how much three weeks in an avian hospital and at least nine hours of surgery had cost because it was embarrassing. That was the exact answer I gave her when she asked for a number: “Embarrassing.” Large enough that it wasn’t rude to negotiate. Not used-car-level negotiating, maybe, but that is not an imperfect analogy. I’d recently come into an unexpected lump of cash that covered the bill, so the financial hit was tolerable. Yet it had been a point of scruffy pride that my mythical birds were purchased for a flash-sale price and housed in scraps and trash that, if we’d ever gotten around to it, we would have had to pay someone to haul away. In the abstract, I could lie to myself, they were saving us money, using up all those old boards and rolls of rusty wire. And that was part of the wonder of having peacocks, that they were so cost-effective. The fantastical beauty of peacocks for less than the price of chickens! Until Carl ate a grommet. My birds now were precisely what they appeared to be, a lavish, impetuous indulgence.

  Louise did not push me for a number. She knew I wasn’t hiding it so much as I just didn’t want to say it out loud (or, for that matter, type it in a book). And I knew she had agreed to only two birds to begin with, not three.

  “Okay, okay,” she said, letting me off the hook. Then she narrowed her eyes a bit and her crafty smile emerged. “
In a marriage, each person gets one secret,” she said. “And you just used yours on Carl.”

  “Wait a minute! I didn’t know we got to have a secret.”

  “Too late! Don’t tell me.” She put up a hand.

  Didn’t matter. I’m terrible at secrets. Too neurotic. Had she pressed me for the vet bill, I would have produced it in shame, which she knew full well. “Well, what’s yours? We can just say them now, get it over with.”

  “Can’t,” she said with a shrug. “Don’t know yet. But I’m gonna live to be ninety. I’ve got lots of time.”

  I told her Valerie wanted fifty bucks for the new hen. She agreed that was a tolerable number to keep Carl, now our investment bird, safe.

  One of the few things I’d learned for certain from direct observation was that peacocks are social creatures. Ethel often roosted next to one of the boys—she didn’t seem to have a preference—and they moved as a loose group when I was in the pen. They appeared to take cues from each other: The day after Mr. Pickle snatched a blueberry from my fingers, Ethel ate them from my palm, and Carl took them out of my hand his first day back. Ever since, they’d lined up in front of me, side by side.

  Still, I had to ease the reintegration. Before I brought Carl home from the hospital, I blocked off a section of the pen with a panel of chicken wire, making a kind of penalty box. It might not have been necessary, as Ethel trilled and cooed to him through the wire and Mr. Pickle mostly ignored him. When I let him out on the third day, I called Valerie to thank her for the tip about the sand and ask if she knew where I could get another hen.

  “Craigslist,” she said. There was a pause. “You know what? I’ve got an extra girl you can have. She’s a Spalding. Fifty dollars all right?”

  I had no idea if a Spalding was the kind of hen we should have. Or how much one should cost. But this is apparently how I buy my peacocks—with as little information up front as possible.

  * * *

  The cross-bred product of green peacocks and India blues sounds exotic, but Spaldings are actually quite common these days, having been bred and rebred since the first half of the twentieth century. I mean, hell, I bought one for fifty bucks in North Carolina. Of the United Peafowl Association’s 225 approved varieties, 111 are Spaldings; for every cameo black-shoulder pied white-eyed, there is a Spalding cameo black-shoulder pied white-eyed.

  The hybrid is called a Spalding after the person who successfully developed the breed, who, since at least a 1959 issue of Modern Game Breeding and Hunting Club News, has routinely been identified only as “the late Mrs. Keith Spalding in California.” Occasionally, her husband will get clipped and she’ll be referred to as Mrs. Spalding, and sometimes she’s acknowledged to have been a bird fancier, which would seem self-evident. But for a woman who conjured a bird, she’s conspicuously cast as a mere footnote in peacock history.

  Before she was Mrs. Spalding, she was Eudora Hull Gaylord, a wealthy and public-spirited widow from Chicago. In 1905, in memory of her dead husband, Edward Gaylord, she founded and funded the Edward Sanatorium, an open-air sixteen-bed center for the treatment of tuberculosis, which at that time killed about four thousand people every year in Chicago, including her husband. “One of the most complete tuberculosis camps in the country,” a San Francisco newspaper called it, “the proposed camp is to be used for treatment of the poor only. Only incipient and curable cases will be received.”

  She was thirty-nine, a full decade older than Keith Spalding, when they married in 1906. He was another wealthy Chicago native, a manufacturer of steel products, and the son of Albert G. Spalding, founder of the eponymous sporting goods empire and, before he retired from the Boston Red Stockings at the age of twenty-six, the first pitcher to win two hundred games. (Albert was also president of the Chicago White Stockings, now the Cubs, from 1882 to 1891, during which time the team won three pennants; and he was one of the people who made up the story about Abner Doubleday having invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York. Albert is in the Hall of Fame, of course.)

  The two of them, Eudora and Keith, spent much of their time in California, where she had fifteen hundred acres of citrus groves and lima bean fields in Ventura County. Eudora’s father had bought what was left of a Mexican land grant called Rancho Sespe from the heirs of T. W. More, who was shot to death squabbling over the boundaries and water rights. Eudora’s father, in turn, left it to his two children, and Eudora bought out her brother, Morton, who later would spend a decade in Congress representing the second district of Illinois. There was a bunkhouse for single white males designed by the architects Greene and Greene, who were pioneers in the American arts and crafts movement, and separate quarters for the Japanese workers. The Mexican laborers, meanwhile, lived in a village on the ranch where they had plots to grow their own vegetables. By 1910, Rancho Sespe was one of the largest lemon groves in the world.

  Eudora and Keith had a yacht built in a Delaware shipyard, a 161-foot schooner called Goodwill, that Eudora, cradling a spray of roses, christened in 1922. Goodwill crossed the Atlantic and sailed the South Pacific and had a launch from which Keith and Eudora angled for big fish, a sport at which she excelled. She caught a marlin big enough to make the newspaper in 1937, and that wasn’t even her biggest catch: She once reeled in a monster broadbill that weighed 426 pounds. Zane Grey, the famous author of Western novels, talked smack about her, arguing months after the fact that she couldn’t possibly have the strength to land such a huge fish. Jealousy, plain and simple.

  There are no public accounts of Eudora and peacocks, let alone any acknowledgment that she created a successful hybrid. But she was indeed a bird fancier. Mrs. Keith Spalding is mentioned, again in passing, in at least one brief history of pheasant breeding, and The Catalina Islander in May 1933 noted her tour of the island’s Bird Park “in which she is keenly interested… Both Mr. and Mrs. Spalding consider the Bird Park the finest and best arranged it has ever been their pleasure to visit.” In 1929, she and Keith donated the first California condor to the San Diego Zoo after it showed up at Rancho Sespe with a crippled wing. Two years after that, she bought a pair of cassowaries that she kept in pens fifty feet wide and a hundred feet long, which is something only a hardcore fancier of birds would do because a cassowary is like an ornery emu with a helmeted blue head that might try to kill you. And no later than 1936, Rancho Sespe Game Farm was advertising five varieties of peafowl for sale in The Game Breeder and Sportsman: “Blackshoulder, Green, White, Blue and Spalding.”

  When she died in 1942, Eudora put the ranch in a trust to benefit the California Institute of Technology. Keith administered it, and gave Caltech money for the Eudora Hull Spalding Laboratory of Engineering, which was built on its Pasadena campus in 1957. It is the only building there named solely for a woman, and an oil portrait of her with brown curls and brown eyes and a Mona Lisa smile hangs in the foyer. There is no mention in the placard below the painting of her hospital or the ranch or the huge fish she reeled in or the namesake birds she created.

  Our new hen’s auspicious providence helped ease any tension that remained between me and Louise over my growing flock. There’s nothing Louise loves more than a fierce old lady with bold ambitions and eccentric hobbies. Had I done my research before committing to another hen, I would have led with Eudora.

  * * *

  Valerie lives about ten miles west of us, on the other side of the city, in a low brick house on a corner lot surrounded by chain-link fencing. I took the boys with me on a Sunday afternoon in late March, and we waited in the car while she pushed a button to swing open a wide gate. There was a sign warning us to watch for chickens.

  Valerie waved to us from a wooden deck attached to a three-season porch and next to an aboveground swimming pool that hadn’t been opened for the season yet. There were a couple of garden beds in the middle of the yard, and the lawn followed a shallow slope down into tree shade at the back of the lot. It was a fairly ordinary semi-suburban backyard, except for all the birds.

&n
bsp; There were too many to quickly count, which would have been difficult anyway because almost all of them were roaming free, a few of them madly scurrying, disappearing behind plants and tree trunks. There were chickens, big ones and medium ones and a swarm of miniature ones called Sebrights that had copper feathers laced with black, as if each one had been outlined with a thick felt pen. There were ducks, Indian runners and what looked like mallards and a white one with a poof on his head like a large cotton ball and another, bigger white one with a plain, regular head. Farther down the lot, under the trees, were coops and two pens made from fence panels, in one of which was a pied peacock and four hens. The yard wasn’t crowded, though, as if it had been overrun with feral poultry. It felt more like a sanctuary, which in many ways it was, for both the birds and Valerie.

  “I’ve read some of your stuff,” she told me once. “Our stories aren’t so different.”

  What she meant was that we both made a living amid misery and death, the real discrepancy being that her job was useful and noble, as opposed to mine, which I’d come to suspect was opportunistic and parasitic. Valerie for many years was a nurse in an intensive care unit and a neonatal ICU. Burnout is distressingly high for ICU nurses—in studies, up to eighty percent report suffering some symptoms—because the job is exhausting, physically and emotionally. Valerie retired young. By the time I met her, she managed a portfolio of rental property that had been in her family for years and was raising her son alone after a divorce. Graham is a quiet, bright kid with Asperger’s and, as Valerie describes him, sort of a bird empath. While he can find humans and their complicated social cues frustrating, birds for him are soothing, intuitive, simpatico.

  This started to become apparent in the early years of elementary school, when Graham brought the class finch home over holidays and long weekends. In second grade, he asked for a pair of birds for Christmas, and Valerie got him two zebra finches, tiny things too small to bite hard and too even-tempered to bother. She thought she’d bought a bonded pair of males that Graham named Tweet and Sweetheart, but not three months later, Sweetheart laid an egg. So Graham and his mom were now breeding finches.