Coop

by Michael Perry

  When Dad hurt his knee, he went to the doctor’s office using his shepherd’s crook as a cane. The crook came to his shoulder so he kinda hung off it with both hands and hobbled along. If I was a twelve-year-old I would have been mortified at the image. In my forties I shake my head but feel secretly happy that unusual fellow is my father. He’s not sure if he’s going to lamb another year. If he does sell the sheep, it will be a big deal. He was gentle with all of his animals, but I suspect the sheep speak to him on a level the cows never did.

  One day I asked him if he had sheep because of their biblical significance. “I’ve had people ask that before,” he said. “That’s part of it…” But then he doesn’t elaborate. He is quiet for a minute, apparently reflecting on forty years gone by. “The sheep were always good to us,” he says, finally. “We couldn’t make a living on them, but we made a quarter, or a half. A lot of years, they were the difference.”

  Late March, and out of nowhere, we get an eighty-degree day. The winter has been low on snow in the first place, but with this absurd burst of heat, even the holdout patches are draining away. I take advantage of the temperature to begin establishing a pigpen in the overgrowth just downhill from my office. Somewhere in the wooded slash of valley below, a murder of crows calls as if spring is full-blown, but all the caw-cawing ricochets through leafless trees with an extra layer of reverberation that betrays the true season.

  I’ll scub the pigpen together as best I can. Until a few decades ago this was a working dairy farm, and the patch I’ve chosen for the pigs seems to be roughly where the barn once stood. The remnants of a paddock—weathered planks spiked to railroad ties sunk vertically in the earth—still stand along one edge of a long concrete slab that appears to have functioned as a feed bunk. The rest of the fencing is mostly teetering or collapsed. Several of the wooden posts are rotted off at ground level. But enough of one corner remains intact that I believe I can close it off and create space adequate to contain a pair of pigs.

  One little farmstead, and there is so much to learn. In the odd available moment, I make explorations. On a previous nose-around I discovered several steel cattle panels in the brush, and today I go about extracting them. It’s a sweat-making, itchy task. This early in the year there are no nettles or poison ivy, but the panels are trapped in skeins of wild cucumber and woody twists of grapevine deep within six-foot-tall banks of burdock. Furthermore, a few tenacious staples still hold fast to the posts. Diving in with my fencing pliers, I cut and yank and tug. I have always regarded brute force as an acceptable first option. Eventually I free the first panel. When I drag it out into the open I’m speckled with dirt and duff, and my shirt is so gnarled with burdock burrs it looks as if I’ve been swarmed by a horde of miniature hedgehogs. I dump the panel on the dead grass and burrow in after the next one. Once I get off my lard and rolling, I am a sucker for grunt work, where the most difficult problems are solved by getting a better grip and putting more heave in your ho. While the bones and meat wrassle, the mind is free to sort and ponder.

  The project goes well. In just under sixty minutes I have six panels flat on the dead grass of the paddock. Brand-new, these panels tally up around sixteen bucks apiece at Farm & Fleet. I congratulate myself on being self-employed at right around a hundred bucks an hour. Sadly, this fiscal spike is what your statisticians call an “outlier” and is unlikely to skew long-term results.

  With the panels at hand, I set about fashioning the pen. In the corner I have chosen, several panels are still upright and attached to relatively sturdy posts. A twist of wire here, a staple driven there, and they’re pig-worthy. In another spot a gaping hole has been torn in the panel—they are made from heavy-gauge welded wire, so it must have been someone careless with a front-end loader. Back in the brush I find a short section of panel that covers the gap to near perfection. I wire it in place with short lengths of electric-fence wire snipped from a tangle I found twisted around a decrepit plastic insulator tacked to one of the railroad ties. When the patch is in place, there is still a small vertical gap about the width of a piglet. Following another rusty strand of electric-fence wire into a patch of blackberry stalks, I find a deformed electric-fence post. It is bent in such a manner that I am able to weave it in and out of the panel on either side of the gap to form a rebar suture obstructing the hole. As much as I would like to have a spotless, squared-up operation, I need only look around the rest of my life to know it ain’t likely, and furthermore, having recently priced fencing supplies while resting in the bathroom with the latest Farm & Fleet catalog, I am getting hooked on the idea of salvage in terms of budget enhancement. I wiggle-waggle a steel post ($3.25 new) loose from the old fence line and drive it to extend the reach of the pen, the thaw having been such that the earth here is soft.

  I work well into the afternoon. By the time I decide to hang it up, I have formed a three-quarters-sided enclosure and am surprised to find my shoulders sunburned. I am snugging the last twist of wire down tight when a fly buzzes past. The sound is out of place for the season. Perhaps the world is changing. But there could be snow tomorrow. The fly should not get his hopes up.

  The culverts where Ricky and I played still remain. The tubes are sunk deep and solid. Should you run that stretch of Beaver Creek Road, you will detect no change in the hum of your tires as you pass across the blacktop above. Depending how fast you’re flying, you may fail to even note you’ve crossed the eponymous creek. When Ricky and I heard cars coming we would scramble off the culverts and hunker in the ditch, below the sight line and hidden in the grass. No driver ever spotted us.

  In winter the ditches that fed into Beaver Creek were frozen solid, and in the summer they clogged and went to sluggardly soup, but during the melt the water moved with a pristine chuckle. Once while we were down out of the wind and the sun grew hot on our backs, Ricky knelt and drank deeply from the ditchwater, telling me to do the same. “Go ahead,” he said. “This is how you survive.” The water ran so clear above the tan sand, you could spot the individual grains. It’s pure, Ricky said of the water. You can see it’s pure. And so I drank too, and deeply. Later, when my mother heard, she told me about giardia and protozoa. To say nothing of dead skunks and Atrazine.

  Ricky had an army surplus shovel. He carried it everywhere. It had a stocky wooden handle like a billy club, and you could fold the spade back flat to make it even more compact. On the opposite side of the spade was a pick that folded out at a right angle. Ricky and I were forever digging forts and hideouts. I recall a buried culvert with a trapdoor, but surely this was one of Ricky’s dreams and not a reality. Although the memory is precise enough—I see it somewhere near the machine shed and up against a row of Norway pines—that if Ricky were here, perhaps he could tell me that indeed it was so.

  Once Ricky invited me to lunch. I called Mom and she said it was OK. I remember two things: there was a partially assembled large-block engine on the floor in the living room, and we had runny eggs. The runny eggs were a novelty for me. No offense to my mother, but I had never seen a fried egg presented in any manner deviating very far from vulcanized. I remember now that Ricky’s brother Alan was at the table with us. Alan wore old army jackets. Several years later, he killed a man. I read about it in the Chippewa Herald-Telegram. There was trouble involving Alan’s and Ricky’s sister. Alan put four bullets in the man’s chest and went to prison.

  I have always thought of my friendship with Ricky as spanning several years, but having gone back to look at photographs and having spoken with my mom, I realize the friendship was at its peak that single spring and was probably over by autumn. We never had a falling-out, and Ricky never told me to get lost. There was just a slow dissolve to other arrangements. I think it probably had to do with our age difference. Once the summer ended and we returned to school, Ricky was headed around the bend to high school, while I remained in the grade school wing. From his perspective I suspect the social gap was insupportable. My last memory of the young Ricky is sad. We were
on the school bus, headed home. I was in the seat ahead of Ricky, sitting sideways so I could talk to him. One of the rough boys, a stocky football player, barged up the aisle and demanded that Ricky move from the window. When he didn’t move fast enough, the bigger boy dove into the seat and landed on him, heavily. Ricky was holding that army shovel on his lap, and when the lunkhead dropped on him, the metal edge of the blade drove into Ricky’s thigh. It didn’t break the skin, but it hurt terribly. So terribly that Ricky burst into tears, and the big boy laughed at him. I remember trembling angrily at the big boy but being too small to do anything about it, and ashamed that Ricky—my older friend, my hero from the ditches—should have to cry in front of me.

  I work on the pigpen two days in a row. My brother John said I could have his old hog feeder, so I run up north to retrieve it, using the trip as an excuse to swing by Farm & Fleet, which, as a guy likes to say, is “right on the way.”

  It usually is.

  My favorite thing about Farm & Fleet has always been the smell of fresh tires, but the livestock corner holds its own with a potpourri of alfalfa cubes, Terramycin crumbles, horse vitamins, and the malty sweet scent of milk replacer mix. When I pass the stacks of rough paper sacks containing calf starter, the smell of moist grain and molasses reminds me that we ate it by the handful when we were kids. Dad called it “calf candy,” and it wasn’t bad. Most of it was fortified with antibiotics, so we rarely got the scours. Over in the feeder section, where the galvanized grain scoops and hay racks are for sale, I pick up a heavy rubber pan for feeding slop. Then, with a rough idea in mind of how I might construct a watering system for the pigs, I also load the cart with an adjustable spring-loaded spigot, some tubing, and a bagful of pipe clamps and plastic reducers. As I head for the checkout I pass a rampart of salt blocks piled on pallets just the way Dad used to store them. Each cube is roughly the size of a car battery. We used to drape ourselves over the stack side by side and lick the blocks. The salt was coarse against our tongues, like licking fine-grain sandpaper. If we kept at it too long, our tongues got raw. Dad always got the reddish brown blocks with trace minerals—there were no goiters in this family. I’d give the blocks a lick now, but I don’t want to freak out the guy watching the security cameras.

  Back home, I rig the waterer, using a plastic barrel I got from my friend Mills. I mount the waterer on a hastily arranged tripod, and the elevation is sufficient so that the water runs down the hose and out the spigot. I am not much of a talent toolwise, but this has gone well, so when I am done I stand back and give it the classic male postproject lookover and am satisfied. After two days shirtless in the freak March sun, I am deeply burned. This is medically foolish, but here up north we worship the sun in big gulps.

  A week later, and it is a gray, mist-spitting day. The warm weather has continued, with a moderation from ridiculous to mildly unseasonable. Amy and I are stacking firewood. She is expected to pitch in as standard procedure, but this time it’s a bit of a shanghai, as she is being compelled to stay home and work while Anneliese runs errands in town. This is the promised consequence of a recent in-store meltdown. She is weepy at the get-go, but then as so often happens if one maintains one’s parental resolve and resists either cave-in or eruption, about twenty minutes in we are happily chatting, and by the time we stack a half-cord, she is flat-out jabbering. “I’m glad I didn’t go to town!” she exuberates at one point, and it briefly strikes me that this calls into question the very efficacy of the punishment, but I abandon this train of thought as unproductive. Sweating as I always do when I do anything more physical than lift a pen, I tell her about my friend Frank, whose father taught him that firewood warms you twice—once when you split and stack it, and once when you burn it. I predict by the time Amy is nine, “Firewood warms you twice” will make her list of Top Five Phrases Most Likely to Make Me Roll My Eyes at the Old Guy. Somewhere from the piney draw below us comes a pheasant’s sore-throated squawk. Of course we cannot know, but we wink at each other, assuming it’s Mister Big Shot in hot pursuit.

  We work for two hours. Then we spend a little time picking up the usual bits of yard garbage revealed when the snow retreats. All the bare ground reminds me that I have promised Anneliese I will make a cold frame for the garden, so I wander around the sheds rustling up scrap lumber and an old storm window, a box of drywall screws, and two rusty hinges. In about twenty minutes I clatter together what could pass for the junior high shop project of a three-fingered monkey, but then I cut myself some slack and declare it evocative of a sculpture I once stumbled across in a stairwell at the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York City. Amy and I scratch up a patch of ground near the spot where Anneliese’s mother had last year’s garden, and then we plant lettuce, radishes, carrots, and some parsley. It’s a rush job, and we’ll see how it goes. The ground is heavily threaded with earthworms, and we discover a stand of garlic shoots already four inches tall.

  I set Amy free then. She runs off to play with Fritz the Dog, a German shepherd and one of two dogs we are sitting for friends. I walk across the yard to store my tools in the old granary. The day is still misty, and twinkling beads of precipitation hang from the underside of the apple tree’s slenderest branches. Down in the valley the pheasant is still squawking. In the yard, a male mourning dove drops groundward and lands just behind his female companion. He hops toward her tail, then flutters just above her until she flits briefly ahead. He follows, hops, and flutters again. A lighter-than-air tumbling act, they hopscotch each other all across the lawn until I come too near and they spook into a wing-whistling takeoff. At first burst, white bars flash from beneath their gray-brown wings; then they swoop to roost atop the granary, settling nervously atop the ridge cap, dipping their heads and side-glancing my approach.

  Inside the disused wire-frame corncrib just beyond the granary door, two juncos are chasing each other in abbreviated figure eights. Between flights the juncos drop to the circular concrete floor of the crib and scamper their own fluttery do-si-do, the rain-slick slab an impressionist mirror reflecting their jitterbug. Inside the granary I see barn swallows daubing a nest in the rafters. We live in a time when earth cycles are in question. I look at the yard—frost-free and soaked, already with an undertone of green—and the trees with their buds preternaturally frayed, and I think there is certainly evidence for discussion, but then I look at the evidence of all the birds this morning, and it is clear some cycles remain resolutely intact. Gray and wet it may be, but the birds are sunny in love.

  There are the usual deadlines, so I climb the path back to the office. I am squeezing all the pig-penning, wood-splitting, cold-framing, and daughter-consequencing in between the desk and road time that pays the bills, and looking around me at all the relentless evidence of time and seasons passing, I hear the little voice telling me that a guy ought to pare down. We are a breathless society. I love what I do and am grateful to do it, but I am hooked into short-winded cycles of my own, and a simple move to the country does not stop the clocks. It strikes me that this morning’s chores should have ended not with me checking the time and switching the computer on but with Amy and me taking a long stroll into the valley, to learn the land together. This room above the garage gives me a wide view of the place, and I can see her in the yard beside the granary, squatting in her pink rubber boots with her arms wrapped around her shins, nose to nose with Fritz the Dog, who is currently chewing on a dead rabbit. As I wait for the computer to boot, I watch Amy lean in for a better look as Fritz gnaws away at the rabbit’s hind leg. She turns her head this way and that, studying the carcass from every angle as the dog grinds through hide and muscle, working the skull back to his molars so he can crack it and taste the brains. When he curls his lip and pulls at the guts, Amy leans in so close I expect her to topple. With no other dog to compete, Fritz is eating leisurely. A good fifteen minutes pass before he is nosing the final morsel—a front paw—around in the grass between his own front paws, and Amy is still squatted there, transfixed. An
neliese and I constantly second-guess ourselves as parents. We wonder if we are sometimes too strict regarding issues such as the enforced wood-stacking. We wonder about the effects of me being on the road as much as I am. We wonder if we are projecting our idea of country living too heavily on her childhood. We wonder whether we are cheating her of our own happy public school experiences by homeschooling her. Whatever the case, I look at that little girl out there, now on all fours to watch the unlucky rabbit’s foot disappear down the dog’s gullet, and I think, well, it’s not like there’s nothing to do.

  Ricky died not so long ago. His obituary was a surprise, even thirty years down the road. There had been no contact, although I saw him a couple times in his truck, an old L-model International he had converted to four-wheel drive. I was in college at the time, and Ricky was helping Dad with odd jobs and logging. We said hello, but he was whip-thin and furtive, and the conversation didn’t go anywhere. Later I read in the local weekly that there was trouble at the grocery store and when the cops found Ricky walking afterward he had a gun, but he gave up quiet and went to jail. And then he was dead—not young, but too soon, and alone in a small apartment. I never asked how. I made it graveside and stood in the cold wind while one of his friends put a boom box on the headstone and played a song I should have written down because now I can’t remember. His daughter was there, with the same dark eyes I remembered from Ricky the boy. Hers were reddened with mourning, but she was wearing an army dress uniform, and you could see her standing tall because she knew it would have made her daddy proud. Afterward we went to the McDonald’s right across the street from the cemetery and we all had some coffee like Ricky had in that same McDonald’s every day for the last several years. Maybe he’d seen it coming clear back when we were kids. He had some sadness on him. It came built in.