Coop

by Michael Perry

  The darkness was unimaginable. But he emerged, and married Leanne. She came to the marriage with Sienna, a beautiful three-year-old girl. It was good to see the new little family at popcorn Sunday nights, with Jed smiling again. In time, a baby came—Jake. Jakey, we called him, or sometimes Jaker. Jed will tell you that first year wasn’t easy. That he second-guessed the whole idea of babies. But by that second year Jake was toddling, and he became Jed’s constant companion and mimic. When he picked up even the lightest object he grunted comically, like Daddy did. When he took a swig off his bottle, he followed it with a breathy, overacted “Aaahhhh!” just the way Daddy taught him. In my favorite photo of the boy, he is in the back of Jed’s truck, surrounded by chain saws, hard hats, a plastic tub of bar oil, scattered wrenches, and Jed’s firefighting gear. His diaper is low-slung and dirt-scuffed, and his little hands are grease-lined as any mechanic’s. He is hatching a grin like he has come to know the whole wide world, and in the shadowed background Jed is standing with the driver’s door open, looking back at his boy, holding him steady in his gaze. I shot the photo on one of those cheapo disposable cameras. Somewhere along the line the camera wound up under the seat of my car, and it was a year or so before I found it again, covered in lint and fluorescent orange Cheetos crumbs. We shot up the rest of the roll and sent it in, and when the pictures came back, there was Jakey, only by that time Jakey was gone.

  Jakey died, and there is no poetry in it. When Jed’s wife died, I asked his permission before writing about it. This time I can’t even bring myself to broach the subject. The night is scalded on our souls, and I am not going to tell much. Everyone tried so hard, beginning with Jed, who pulled Jakey from the farm pond just moments after the boy disappeared. There was still a heartbeat, and Jed and Leanne worked together to revive him. They are both members of the local fire department, and later they would say their training just kicked in. Soon they heard sirens, help coming the way it always has in rural settings—from friends and neighbors suddenly turned rescuers. Then the ambulance came, and then the chopper, and when it lifted away with Jakey inside, the fire chief put Jed and Leanne in his truck and drove them the forty-five miles to the hospital. I was waiting outside the emergency room when they arrived, and what I will remember forever is Leanne running to be with her little boy and the solid feel of my brother’s muscles even as he sagged in my arms.

  Everyone worked so hard, and we were in the little room with Jake for a long, long time. We knew there was little chance, and at the end there was none. In the hallway I saw firefighters, paramedics, nurses, the emergency room physician—everyone in tears. Mom and Dad had been traveling toward the middle of the state when they got the call, so we all gathered in the open air of the parking lot until they arrived, and Jed and Leanne got in the back of their car and everyone went home.

  While I was driving to the hospital, Anneliese had called our neighbor Ginny to come and sit with Amy and Jane. Both of our vehicles were running on empty, so coming home from the hospital we stopped for gas. While the pump ran I was standing beside the car feeling the absolute weariness grief brings, and when I looked up across the fuel island to Anneliese, our eyes met and I saw the very same weariness in her. There was something in that moment—on the concrete under the false light, the anonymous cars coming and going all around but our eyes wordlessly speaking—that reminded me why I love her and how. In her weariness I saw compassion.

  When we got back home the children were asleep and Ginny was at the kitchen table. We told her Jake was gone, thanked her, and she left quietly. Her husband Ed, the man who tilled our pig patch, had recently been diagnosed with cancer. She knows grief of her own.

  Upstairs, we looked in on Amy, wrapped in her sheets. And then I went to the crib and bent down, listening close in the dark until I heard the silken thread of breath, in and out, in and out.

  I wept then, my wife beside me.

  In the morning we pull the chicken tractor out, fill the feeders, slop the hogs. I move the tractor a little too quickly and Little Miss Shake-N-Bake gets rolled out the back, squeezed between the cross-member and the ground, and then swept along by the rubber skirt for a few feet. I figure I have ruined her for good, but when Amy runs to pick her up the bird evades her for the first three passes, a bona fide sign of life.

  Even without me running her over, the bird’s tremors have gotten worse. Amy picks her up several times a day, smoothing the feathers along her back and cooing in her little chicken ears. Little Miss Shake-N-Bake is a determined bird. Naturally she is always on the outside fighting her way in when it comes to dinnertime, and you can’t help but root for her, lowering her head to slam into the wall of tail feathers before her and then bouncing back like the skinny kid hitting a blocking sled at football practice. She ricochets, shakes her head like a woozy prizefighter, and charges forward again. Her single-mindedness serves her well, if she’s going to survive as the runt; when we throw table scraps into the tractor, the other birds tussle with each other and dart from scrap to scrap, seemingly more intent on coveting than eating. Meanwhile, Little Miss Shake-N-Bake gets herself a chunk of cucumber and just sticks with it. It takes her a while to get her beak dialed in, she shoots wide a lot, but she is indefatigable, and even though she bats about .250, the cucumber slowly disappears.

  Up north on the home farm the phone will be ringing steady. Cars and trucks will be coming in the yard. Our place feels quiet and removed. There is the urge to just drop everything and head to my folks’, but one thing we have learned is how friends and neighbors come in and fill these early days. I spoke to Mom earlier, told her to call if there is anything we can do, and I know she will, but in the meantime, there is life to be taken care of. Amy has swimming lessons, and after that, piano lessons. We go. We do. What else? In the chicken tractor Little Miss Shake-N-Bake has cornered another piece of cucumber, and when the other birds come after her she dives beak-first beneath the corner shelf that supports the waterer. Only her tail sticks out as resolutely she digs in.

  On visitation day, I drive to Fall Creek to buy pig feed, and then I drive into Eau Claire to buy dress shoes for Jed, as he has none of his own. He called yesterday and asked if he might borrow mine, and I said yes, but then I got to looking at them. I bought them some years back in a fit of stylishness and they are square-toed verging on floppy—imagine a cross between a clown shoe and a pilgrim shoe. I won’t put him through that. Instead I buy him the plainest sort of black shoe I could find. Then I go back home and feed the pigs.

  Then we pack up the family and drive north.

  It is a long, long day. We stand together just beside the casket and the line goes right out the door for hours. They arrive steadily—relatives, neighbors, distant cousins flown in, fire department members in uniform, church people I haven’t seen since some Sunday meeting years ago, and many faces I just plain don’t recognize. There are a lot of old farmers who can’t bear to look in the casket, and you see these sunburned old dogs approach my brother and break down weeping as they take his hand or wrap him in their bearish arms, and maybe they are wearing big belt buckles or unmodish jeans or have their sparse hair Brylcreemed in the style of a ’60s trucker, but it strikes me again how much we miss if we rely wholly on poets to parse the tender center of the human heart. At times like this I am grateful I was not raised to be sleek. Behind us pictures of Jakey project on the wall, dissolving one into another, and beside the casket are all his green tractors from Debbie and Roger, his John Deere blanket, and the wooden biplane his Uncle John made for him by hand, because if it was possible Jakey loved anything more than a green tractor, it was airplanes. “Oh!” he’d say at the first sound of an engine overhead. “Whassat?” And then he’d stand stock-still, watching until the engine faded and the plane was gone. He came by that innately, because he certainly wasn’t pointed to it by the ground-bound farmers who raised him. At one point John slips away, and I see him kneeling before the toys, carefully tipping the tractors over backward, one
by one, until every single one is sitting nose in the air. Leanne remains at the casket, stroking Jakey’s hair and greeting the mourners one by one. How thin and pale she looks, and yet she will not sit or turn away. A tall man leaves the line, approaching her with tears in his eyes, and I recognize him as her fire instructor. Just over two years ago he marveled when Leanne completed her firefighter’s certification test in full turnout gear, Jake riding in her belly.

  We stand there, brothers and sisters by blood and otherwise—Suzanne has come, and Don and Migena, and Kathleen. Donna and her husband Grant have come to care for Jane, allowing Anneliese to be by my side. I reach for her hand much of the day. And of course there are young ones everywhere, clambering in the pews, running in and out, hollering happily as they play tag beneath the churchyard swings.

  That night Jed and I are on his lawn, talking quiet in a pair of canvas chairs, leaned way back to watch the sky all thick with stars. Now and then a big jet passes above us, so far up as to be silent. When Jed worked late in the shop across the yard, Jake would hang out with him, dragging big wrenches across the concrete, riding his plastic tractor in circles, and just generally getting grubby. He’d stay happy at it so long Jed says time would get away and when they walked to the house it was dark and Jake would want to stop and say good night to the stars. He’d pick out those blinking lights, Jed said as we watched another silent airliner slide across the sky. You can imagine the two of them then, faces to the heavens, the little boy with his finger extended, tracing a light seven miles high.

  “I was wondering if you could rewrite this,” Jed says, digging a folded and refolded piece of paper from his jeans. “Kinda smooth it up.” It’s the eulogy. “I want to try to read it,” he says. “Prob’ly won’t make it, but I wanna try.” I pocket it, tell him I will do.

  We talk past midnight. Jakey was a little roughneck, and not at all retiring. But whenever they looked at the stars, Jed says, the boy spoke in a whisper. He’d point to the moon, Jed said, look up at me, and whisper, cookie.

  It is a short walk down the road to my father’s farm in the dark, and beneath the stars I think of Jed and Jake hushed there in the yard, and I wonder, what does a child sense, that he would address the universe in a whisper?

  I let myself in quietly, but my parents are both in their recliners downstairs, Dad dozing fitfully and Mom reading her Bible. I power up Dad’s computer and unfold the eulogy. It is written in ballpoint, in a scraggly but readable hand, and the more I read, the more I realize there is little for me to do. I retype it anyway, stopping to bawl between lines, but in the end I alter maybe four words.

  There is humor—the story about Roger teaching Jake that one end of the cigarette is hot!, and how Jake made chain-saw noises when he cut his food. The line about Jake and Jed spending their time either working, goofing off, or goofing off working. I recognize my brothers in that. There is more, but it is not mine to share. When I reach the part where he tells about Jakey whispering to the stars I bawl again, and knowing Jed will never make it through, print an extra copy for the minister. And finally I climb the stairs to bed, to one of my childhood bedrooms, and stare straight up in the dark. I am remembering that before Jane was born, I was talking to a friend about how it was when he went from one child to two. “Love expands,” he said, “to fit the need.” I am wondering if grief can do the same.

  Jed reads the eulogy straight through. When he nears the part about the stars, tears are streaming down my face because I know what is coming, but he takes it absolutely and resolutely home. Then there is the terrible closing of the casket, and we leave the church. At the cemetery little Sidrock says loudly, Jakey drowned and now they are burying him, and you can feel the collective instinctive move to say shush! but then the ebb on the heels of it as we know it is a time when the truth should be left as it is. When the service is complete and we prepare to leave, John steps to the casket and draws flowers from the bouquet, handing them to the children as they file by. I carry the vision of his fingers, thick and grease-lined, passing the slender stems one by one to the tender hands reaching up, toward the sun beating in the sky.

  Our meat chickens have arrived. They came in the mail, peeping in their perforated box. In order to hit the price break, we’re splitting a batch with our neighbor Terry. With the coop still not done, I have built a small crate that I have placed in the garage atop an old piece of linoleum to keep the concrete clean. With the pump house already occupied by the layers, the garage is the only space available that we can seal up tight and varmint-proof. I rig a heat lamp, and first thing the next morning I discover the drawback to my plan: the things smell awful. I leave the door open during the day, but by day two the smell has already penetrated the cement blocks. Out of kindness Anneliese has not inquired, but I have told friends she has every right to ask: Which came first, the chicken or the coop?

  We’ve begun to free-range the layers, dispensing with the tractor and just turning them loose. They love the new freedom. They run and swoop. They flutter and hop. They get all chesty and pushy and face each other down in pecking matches, neck feathers flared into a fright wig muff. They scratch and chase flies and dandelion fluff. They did this in the chicken tractor too, but within a few hours everything was tramped down. I’d pull the tractor ahead ten feet and they’d be happy again, but soon everything would be flattened and I’d have to skid the whole works again. Now they have the wide world at their disposal, and they can’t wait to tear it up. Two of the hens discover an anthill and scratch at it with great exaggerated motions like they’re going for a major peelout. When they unearth a scatter of white eggs from the hill, their beaks jackhammer the earth like zigzag sewing machines. When I fed them apples in the tractor I had to slice the apples up to get them started, and even then they’d peck at them just off and on. Now when they range under the apple tree they drive their beaks deep into the wormholes and peck fresh white craters into the apple meal. Poor little Shake-N-Bake lags behind, wobbling as she does and having to sometimes come to a full stop before gathering herself and plunging forward again, but eventually she winds up under the apple tree, and just as I’ve seen her do with a cucumber before, once she picks an apple she stays with it, hanging in there even after the other chickens have charged off after grasshoppers. She’s smaller than the rest, no doubt due to the fact that it’s harder for her to eat.

  When she does chase off after the other chickens she’ll get four or five good strides in and then go into a tumbling veer, like someone reached out and pushed her from the side. The thing that really gets you when it’s a fun group sprint across the yard is how fully she believes that she can run with the crowd; she never gets hangdog or stops, she just collects herself and goes bounding off as if this time she’ll be the smoothest bird in Eau Claire County. And it isn’t always veering. Occasionally one of her legs will straighten explosively and she’ll shoot a foot and a half into the air. It really is something to see. Sometimes when she’s doing her dangedest to hang with the pack her earnest ping-ponging schizophrenic hopscotch is so over the top I find myself laughing out loud. I mean no disrespect, but honestly it’s like watching a fast-forward version of the classic Tim Conway bit where he plays a dentist who shoots one leg full of Novocain.

  In perhaps the saddest funny moment so far, I am throwing bread on the lawn when poor Little Miss Shake-N-Bake gets overexcited, rears back to take a hefty stab at a crumb, misses, and jabs her bill in the dirt. She literally has to back up and tug it free. As penance for laughing right out loud I give her an entire slice of cinnamon raisin bread—I figure she can aim at the raisins with the rest of the slice as backstop.

  When we left the church after Jake’s funeral we carried a big box of cards, and they’ve been coming in the mail daily ever since, so on a Sunday we all gather at the farm to write thank-yous. Barbara with her tax accountant sense of organization is in charge, and she has us ranged around the kitchen table in stations to handle everything from slitting the envelopes t
o noting the contents to writing and stamping the notes in return. As each card makes its way through the system, we read it, often checking the return address to place the person. There are a lot of Oh!s as we recognize old familiar signatures, while other times it takes a group effort to match the name on the return address with a person. For all we would give if this day could be taken away, the net effect of all these envelopes circling is that the afternoon slides into a sustained conversation in consideration of all that is good in this world, and when the last stamp is affixed, Mom pulls out the pan and starts popping corn.

  Three days later I am back at Jed’s, ripping out fence line. A while back when he heard I was scavenging steel posts, Jed told me he was going to be reconfiguring the field north of his house, and I could have the posts if I’d help pull them. When he called last night to see if I could help today, we both knew it wasn’t about the posts. I’ve got to be in Madison—four hours south of here—by evening for purposes of researching yet another writing assignment, but I knew I had to do this first. We’re working in the deep grass at the border of the field. The hot weather has been holding pretty much unabated—90 degrees again today, with humidity to match. The sweat is running off the bill of my cap and my shirt is soaked through and streaked with rust from the posts, which have been in the ground for decades. We’re working smart for once. Jed is in his skid steer, and I have a chain. I sling the chain around the post, give it a couple of wraps, and then hold tension on one end while hooking the other over the skid steer bucket. You can crank and yank on posts like this all day long and get nothing for your trouble but a sprung back, but the skid steer plucks them from the earth as easy as a straw from a malt. We move quickly from post to post, all along the edge of the forty. As soon as they clear the earth, I unwrap the chain and chunk them in the bucket. We’re working right out by the road, and at one point two of our longtime neighbors—Big Ed (who used to work at the feed mill) and Gerald—pull over on the shoulder and we visit. Big Ed asks me about my pigs, and I tell him about our stash of bakery bread. “Oh, that’s the best thing to feed pigs,” he says. “Bread and withit.”