Coop

by Michael Perry

  The pigs have eaten the bag of feed I got from the farmer, so today Amy and I make a run to the feed mill in Fall Creek. There is much that is similar to the New Auburn feed mill Dad patronized when I was a kid—the loading dock, the attached office, the dusty hand truck, and feed pallets all about—but the operation is much bigger than the one of my childhood, with towering bins and a radiating tangle of augers. Dad used to shovel our corn and oats into a howling subterranean grinder at the front of the mill, and then a few minutes later a man named Big Ed brought it back out the door in heavy bags that we wrassled into the truck bed. Today when the man wheels out our pig feed it is pre-bagged in paper sacks laced shut with pull strips, but when I stand at the edge of the dock and sling them in the truck bed, the soft heavy shape of the feed in my arms triggers a comfortable muscle memory. Inside the office the man rings us up on a computer rather than a notepad, but I am pleased to see a pair of farmers lingering and telling lies, just like in the mill of my childhood.

  The New Auburn feed mill is long gone. It changed hands several times, the farmers disappeared, and I was a member of the fire department when we burned it to the ground for practice. As we pull away from the Fall Creek mill, I tell Amy how after the New Auburn mill closed Dad used to go to the Chetek mill, where instead of shoveling the feed from the pickup he backed up until his front tires clunked into a bracket and then the man inside hit a switch and a winch lifted the whole front of the pickup into the air, tipping it higher and higher until all the corn and oats just slid right out. I can’t imagine such a thing is allowed now, but back then we kids were allowed to ride in the cab as it rose in the air. Amy’s eyes are wide. “Oh! Can we go to that feed mill?”

  On the way home we stop at the post office to mail a package to a friend serving a tour in Iraq. Amy drew him a picture and a note about the pigs. She asks, and so I try to explain war. As we drive through the tunnel of trees shrouding the last hill before our house she says we sure are lucky to live here. She doesn’t know it, but that boy in Iraq just lost some friends one Humvee ahead of him. I say, Yes, baby, we sure are.

  A week now with the pigs, and so far so good. I’m still eager to get the chickens, but for now the pigs are a terrific diversion. It’s fun to take the slop buckets down and watch as they devour every single table scrap and leftover and rind and trimming and old potato we cannot use. The rubber pan I bought is proving to be pretty much useless, as they wade right into their food and upend it in short order. At least it’s durable. They root and worry everything in sight. It took them just two days to work loose the legs supporting the water barrel to the point where it was teetering. I had to string electric wire around it to create a boundary and keep them from knocking the whole works flat.

  I’m in over my head, but if I pay attention, they give me hints. On one particularly hot day I eased down to watch them and found both pigs at the spigot. They were lain draped across the ground, raising their snoots just far enough to nudge the steel nipple and release the water. Each in turn would take a mouthful, then let it dribble slowly to the ground. Pretty soon they had moistened a good patch of dirt. They rooted around at it, stirring it with their noses. Then they dribbled more water and stirred it again. The cycle continued for quite a while until they had dug a muddy bowl-shaped hole. Soon the hole was so deep they were able to get beneath the new electric strand and were again threatening to undermine the posts supporting the barrel. I made a note to reposition the spigot over the concrete bunk next year so they can’t excavate.

  Not a bad idea, but not the main point. When I told Anneliese what they were doing, she clarified the obvious. “They need a wallow,” she said. Of course. Pigs can’t perspire and they need a wading pool to keep cool. I went back and hosed down one corner of the pen. I am careful not to spray the pigs themselves. I have read that the shock of cold water can give them a heart attack. Soon, however, they are scampering in and out of the hose stream, reveling in the cool and snouting around in the drenched dirt. They show no ill effects, and before long I throw caution to the wind and train the water directly on the pigs. Wilbur grunts and just stands there, but Cocklebur actively seeks the stream and often blocks it from Wilbur as she lets it play over her nose and into her mouth. When I finally close the hose their undocked tails spin a happy whirligig as they nuzzle and roll in the fresh mud.

  During one of my fits of activity, I built a shelter to provide them protection from the sun and rain. I began with a fine vision of what the shelter would look like. I even planned to roof it with some used shingles I found down in the shed. Nothing says redneck like a blue tarp roof, and I swore I wouldn’t go that way. As usual, I overdreamed and underbudgeted, and wound up banging together a bunch of castoff two-by-fours, several chunks of warped particleboard, and—due to hit the road for a stretch with no time for shingling—finished it off with a nice blue tarp. Sigh. On the bright side, it will be easily spotted by the assessor and should depress our property values accordingly.

  The pigs have so far disdained the shelter, and as a result their ears are badly sunburned. Not my fault, I think, but perhaps a better farmer would slather them in SPF 40.

  A while back our neighbor Ed drove up the hill with his tractor and rear-mount tiller and churned up a patch beside the pigpen. I planted several rows of sweet corn, some zucchini, and broadcast a pailful of soybeans Amy and I shucked on the porch steps. The plan is to feed the pigs zucchini and sweet corn and then eventually turn them loose on the soybeans and everything remaining. In the process we’re hoping they’ll chew up the ground and give us a nice garden plot for next year. Piggy as rototiller.

  Ed came up because when I tried to till the sod our little tiller hopped and bounced and barely scuffed the dirt. Ed’s machine did the job in a trice, and he wouldn’t take a thing in payment. I am grateful for the help, but even more grateful for the spirit in which it was offered. It sounded like he was hitting some rocks down there and I cringed to think what he might be doing to his equipment.

  Taking a break from the desk one afternoon, I put Jane in the backpack and take Amy down to check the pig patch. Everything has come on nicely, but because I scatter-sowed the soybeans, I can’t weed them properly, and they are succumbing to quack. We are wading through the mess when five feet ahead of me I spy a female pheasant and a scattering of pheasant chicks. They are huddled at the edge of an open spot where the previous owner of the farm had a burn pile. The entire family is utterly frozen and pressed flat into the sand and ash. Perhaps the black ash is warm in the sun. What caught my eye was the mother’s own eye blinking. When I lean in just the slightest bit for a closer look, the mother flinches, ducks her head, and nearly bolts, but in the end she holds. “Look!” I stage-whisper at Amy, then, “Don’t move, don’t move!” A look of alarm crosses Amy’s face immediately, and I whisper, “It’s OK, it’s not a skunk or a bear, look, baby pheasants!” Even from five feet it takes Amy several hard looks to spot them, but when she does, her face lights up. We study them silently. How fragile this all is, the mother with her fuzzballs and coyotes, fox, mink, and fishers all about. “I want to hold one,” Amy whispers. I explain why we must leave the birds be, and she is satisfied to leave.

  We are still mincing softly away when the pigs break into a fit of oinking and goofball galumphing. I recall how Mister Big Shot was haranguing us the day we worked on the pen, and I wonder if perhaps he was being territorial because this brood was about. Perhaps the old boy was more than strut and cackle…

  I get back over to help Mills work on the coop again. There are the usual mishaps. I painstakingly craft two tiny chicken doors. They are hinged on the bottom and designed to drop open, forming miniature ramps. I even cut and nail a series of little cleats the full length of each ramp so the chickens won’t slip and fall. Problem is, I get things backward in my head and build them too wide. An oxymoronic bout of fine-tuning ensues. Mills giggles, which helps take the pressure off, and I don’t throw a single tool. In the meantime, Mill
s is constructing walls. He’s working steady, the automatic nailer firing with a hiss and thwack as the nails are driven home. I am due for another long stretch of road time and won’t be back for a while. I know Mills enjoys projects like this and will probably continue in my absence. Somewhere in my subconscious or shallower, I’m banking on it, in fact. I should be a better person.

  The baby continues her bedtime protestations and has been right up to the edge of colicky. One night when Anneliese is in the garden and I am bouncing on the ball and nothing is working, I try humming the standard Brahms lullaby. The kid rages on unabated. Drowns me out. So on a whim, I begin singing the lullaby really, really loud. “LA-LA-LAAAAAH, LA-LA-LAAAAH, go to SLEEEEEEEP NOW MY BABY!” and by jiminy it works. Shocked her into stopping, I suppose. I feel like Papa Axl Rose.

  You can’t holler lullabies in the deep of night, however. When she wakes crying I bounce her on the ball in the dark, or walk the floor, but mostly it comes down to Anneliese nursing and rocking her. Lately when I sense that some well-meaning mother is about to give Anneliese advice on how to get the baby to sleep, I jump on the conversation like I’m smothering a grenade. Whatever it is, we’ve tried it, and it hasn’t worked. And the teething hasn’t even begun.

  Here I am set to leave again, my wife so tired, and so much undone. Again I look at the unmown lawn, and for the thirty-seventh time I tell Anneliese I plan to fence the yard and get some sheep. Let them eat the lawn and sell them in the fall. Save on gas and mowing time. Anneliese has not uttered a word of complaint about my absences, but now she looks at me.

  “About the sheep,” she says.

  “Yes?”

  “No sheep.”

  Later that evening she shares her line of thinking. “I have this vision of you in Des Moines, talking about writing and raising sheep—meanwhile, I’m running through the brush with a howling six-month-old under one arm and dragging a bawling seven-year-old behind me with the other arm while we try to get the sheep back inside a hole in the cobbled-up fence.”

  This is very hard on my pride, and pretty much on the money.

  Sheep. Maybe next year.

  And yet there are beautiful days. On a lovely Saturday morning when my mother-in-law and all three sisters-in-law are visiting and request some grown-up girl time, I put our two recumbent tricycles in the back of the pickup truck and drive to a local bike trail (if you question the environmental propriety of trucking one’s bicycles around, I encourage you to attempt a series of 10 percent grade hills on a tandem recumbent with a weeping seven-yearold as stoker and get back to me). Amy is pouty upon departure, wishing as any little girl does to be one of the big girls, but by the time we hit the bottom of the first hill she is happily shooting the breeze. This is becoming an established pattern. After a short drive to the trailhead, we unload the trikes, hook them in tandem, and set out. Behind me she narrates nonstop. “Can you tell I’m helping?” she sings out when we hit a slight grade, and indeed I can. The poor kid, as tall as she is, is nowhere near sized for this bike and is basically lying flat so she can reach the pedals. We roll along the river into downtown Eau Claire, then cut across the old railroad bridge and down to Phoenix Park, where today a local arts festival is in full swing. As we draw near we can hear live music. Amy stops pedaling and sits up in her seat. “It’s the Cheese Puff Song!”

  The “Cheese Puff Song” has been in heavy rotation around our house for some time now. The artist, Magic Mama, is a local resident. I hustle to get the bike parked, and Amy makes it to the music tent in time for a chorus. For the rest of the show she sits glowing in the front row, singing along to the songs she knows—including “Go Barefoot” and “Take It Outside”—and happily participating when Magic Mama hands out used potato chip bags and encourages the children to crackle the bags in time.

  Next we go to the craft tent and make a puppet. While Amy swabs glue and cuts out eyeballs, I take two thin strips of construction paper and show her how to make dangly accordion arms like I learned back when I was eating paste. When the puppet is finished, we wander through the farmer’s market and stop at the local foods booth, where our friend Aaron lets us sample farm-direct apriums. Amy spots a bevy of belly dancers and says she wants to watch. Who am I to argue? Amy likes the belly dancers very much, and points out her favorite costumes. In order to serve honesty I must skirt the edge of propriety and report the demonstration expanded my appreciation of the female form in both an artistic and a more basic sense, and it didn’t hurt that the scent of patchouli was prevalent throughout. Even as a guy with pickup truck sensibilities, I have always gone a little weak in the liver for patchouli. After the belly dancing we find the body art tent. Amy gets a henna tattoo on her foot and I get a henna wedding ring. Can’t lose it. Later we wander back over to the music tent, where the musician Bruce O’Brien is accompanying himself on banjo while singing another one of Amy’s favorite songs, the chorus to which goes “Peace and joy and harmony, and love is in the middle.” She is sitting beside me on a hay bale, and when she leans her head to my shoulder during the chorus I hope he’ll reprise it again and again. After the concert Amy asks if she can talk to Mr. O’Brien, and when she looks up at him without guile and says, “I really liked your music,” I get teary at her earnestness. We circulate a while longer, Amy gets a ride on a goofy bicycle that is doubling as art, she plays a while with the children of some friends, but there are clouds moving in now, so we have to go. On the ride back Amy pedals just as eagerly as she did on the way in, and when we are tooling right along she says, “I thought this day wasn’t going to be fun, but it was!”

  I have been saving the best surprise for last. Anneliese and I have split an order of chicks with our friends Billy and Margie. The chicks have arrived, and I am taking Amy to meet them. (We have a week-long family trip planned soon and won’t take our chicks until after we return.) When we arrive, Billy and Margie lead us into the garage, where the chicks are being kept in a wading pool lined with wood chips. They are a sprightly, multicolored bunch, warm under the heat-lamp light. Amy peers over the edge at them, and immediately her eyebrows knit, not in a frown but in that universal feminine look of care. “Oohhh,” she says. “Can I hold one?” There was a time Billy doubled as a bartender and bouncer in the type of taverns you enter through a small dark door. He rode a thunderous motorcycle and had the size to back down any man. Today he remains an imposing figure, but his spirit is gentle and he engraves tombstones for a living. A man who has gone from bare-knuckle to Bashō, he seems the perfect fellow to carve the dates of your birth and death, so wide is the breadth of his understanding. Now he reaches into the blue swimming pool, carefully closing a chick within the cavern of his roughened hands, and passes it gently to Amy, his blackened nails and shredded calluses (he is recovering from the peak of the carving season, when he catches up with a winter’s worth of graves in time for Memorial Day) of another creature in contrast to Amy’s soft white palms and slender fingers open wide to receive the bird. Carefully she closes her hands until the chick is cupped within, then draws it to her face and inclines her cheek to its fuzzy head.

  CHAPTER 7

  My daughter is weeping in the timothy. She is a sad sight with a sparse handful of stems dangling from one hand, grass clippers dangling from the other, head tipped back as she beseeches the sky. From my perspective—framed by the window over the kitchen sink—what we have here is a scene composed by Andrew Wyeth and retouched by Edvard Munch.

  The girl is weeping in part because I am a cheapskate.

  Among the trove of supplies and accessories provided by Aunt Barbara when we took possession of the guinea pig back in January was a neatly sealed plastic bag of prime timothy hay. Every day when Amy replenished his tiny hay rack, the creature tore into it eagerly, sometimes whistling with delight at the first sound of crinkling plastic. When the original bag was nearly depleted, I stopped by a local pet food store for another. Wanting to maintain the standards of quality established by Aunt Barbara,
I searched the racks until I found the exact same brand of timothy and grabbed a 12-ounce packet. I’ve cut and stacked a lot of timothy in my day, and while carrying the bag to the checkout I was admiring the quality of the product—a weedless sheaf of fat-leaved stalks all dried to a uniform pale green. Really top-shelf stuff. Then the woman at the register swiped it across the bar code reader. When the price popped up, I suddenly understood what was making that guinea pig whistle. I made a very similar noise, although it quickly tapered off to a wheeze.

  Numerals are not my thing, but sometimes one must quantify astonishment: Beginning with a generous interpretation of current Midwestern market prices as provided by the county extension agent’s Web site, the finest prime grade hay will run you somewhere in the neighborhood of $175 bucks a ton. That twelve-ounce packet of guinea pig hay rang up at $6.98. Rounding down, that’s 58 cents an ounce. Tappety-tap, there are 32,000 ounces in a ton. Times point-five-eight, equals: the stuff I was carrying across the parking lot to the van costs $18,560 per ton. Next time I rent an armored hay wagon, I remember thinking as I scanned the lot for grass bandits. I briefly considered selling the guinea pig and all his toys, renting a safe deposit box with the proceeds, and stuffing it with hay that I would then roll over into an individual retirement account. Instead I crawled into the van, locked the doors, took my cell phone in trembling hands, and called my father. Having recently heard him apologetically report that he was selling organic horse hay for upward of $120 per ton, I wanted to tell him these horse people are pikers, and guinea pig hay is where it’s at. Sell everything, I told him when he answered, and get yourself a miniature baler. Before I drove home I secreted the timothy beneath the spare tire and conspicuously placed my open wallet on the dashboard so that should I encounter highwaymen they would go for the wallet first.