Coop

by Michael Perry

  We had been sitting Fritz the Dog again, but that is over now because he killed four of the laying hens. It took him a matter of minutes. When I walked to my office the chickens were beneath the big pine tree and Fritz was lying beside the sidewalk, and when I came back a few moments later there were feathers in the yard and Fritz was hiding behind the pump house. The White Rock was dead beside the light pole. Nothing was left of the Partridge Rock save a few brown speckled feathers. The third chicken had for all intents and purposed evaporated. But worst of all, there beside a pinecone in the grass was a segment of wing that I recognized immediately as a remnant of Little Miss Shake-N-Bake.

  When Fritz tore up the cold frame, I flat lost it. When he killed the chickens, I felt something colder. I immediately flashed to the day I got off the school bus and found Dad stringing up dead sheep on the corncrib. Several of the sheep were horribly wounded, the flesh gnawed from their back legs, gaping chunks torn from their hams. Snags of wool hung loose from their bellies. I remember the bright red meat exposed, and the darker red of the blood in the wool, and I remember my father’s grim face. “Dogs,” he said. His deer rifle was leaning against the corncrib. First he shot the dogs; then he shot the sheep, one by one. A few were already dead, but some of the most grievously wounded were still alive and had been trying to escape the dogs by pulling themselves along on their front legs. One sheep was dead without a mark on her. “Shock, I think,” said Dad. He was hanging them to be skinned, butchering them being the only salvageable option.

  Nothing was so despised in the country as a dog that killed livestock. A coyote might kill your sheep one or two at a time, but when dogs get started, they don’t stop. For Dad this was more than cruelty, it was destruction of property, putting his livelihood at risk. The dogs belonged to the neighbors just up the road. They were newcomers to the neighborhood. Dad went up there to tell them what had happened, and what he had done. He was straightforward but gentle about it. When we first moved to the farm we had a dog named Sam, and Sam had run over to the Andy Dunn place and killed Andy’s sheep. Dad has been on the other end of the conversation.

  When I recall the look on Dad’s face that day, I realize he was facing a serious economic blow. That is hardly the case with our chickens, but man. We liked those silly birds. And Little Miss Shake-N-Bake…Amy was sad but composed. The killing happened at dusk, so in the morning I took her out and we tried to reconstruct the scene. “He killed my two favorite chickens,” said Amy, picking through feathers. I wasn’t sure which of the other chickens she meant, but I knew better than to interrupt. “I miss Little Miss Shake-N-Bake the most.” She ran in the house, but then returned. “I put two of her feathers in my memory box!”

  Jane continues her attempts to convey herself, knitting her brow and squealing meaningfully when we get face-to-face. We are still on a stretch of enforced insomnia as she continues teething. One night I find myself driving to Eau Claire in the middle of the night to buy a tube of Anbesol. By the time I’m back she has fallen asleep. As with any baby problem, we’re getting lots of free advice. Some of it we try—for instance, letting her chew on frozen rags. Some we don’t try, like the pioneer method of rubbing brandy on the baby’s gums—although I’m currently rethinking that one: After a speaking engagement during which I mentioned the teething and the fact that my wife was at home holding down the fort with a bawling baby, a man approached and introduced himself as a pediatrician. “Here’s what you do: soak a rag in brandy and rub it on the baby’s gums…” and I thought, Yeah, yeah, but then he said, “…and then give the rest of the bottle to Mom!”

  Less than a week after the dog attack, we’ve lost another chicken. One of the Barred Rocks. I was working in the office and saw the birds down around the pigpen. I happened to look up just as the Barred Rock went in the brush behind the trash-burning barrel, and she simply never returned. When the other hens wandered back up to the yard without her, I went to check for feathers but found nothing. A fox? A fisher? A wrong turn? I guess I’ll never know, but we have established a 50 percent loss rate. I really need to get that coop done. Mills was working on it the other day without my help. He tried to build a wall but shot himself through the finger with the nail gun. He took a picture of the punctured digit and the puddle of blood and e-mailed it to me. I felt bad for a split second, then mailed him back to check how the rest of the coop was coming along.

  Our friend Karen has come over to make sauerkraut. She and Anneliese and Amy are on the deck, working in the sun. Jane is in her baby bouncer. The poor kid, we go about fifty-fifty with disposable diapers to cloth, and today she’s wearing a cloth pair that makes her butt look like a cabbage. It doesn’t help that she’s wearing them beneath a pair of brightly colored stretch pants. I call this her going-to-bingo look, although perhaps I should not. Lately she has developed a drooly gape-mouthed grin immediately recognizable in my baby pictures from the same stage. But her blue eyes, pale as winter sky—those are all Mom.

  Anneliese is using a slaw board that was handed down to my mom from her uncle’s mother and has been in our family for over a hundred years. The board is pretty much just that—a long board with wooden rails on either side and three deadly blades mounted at an angle between the rails. You slide the cabbage head up and down the board, and the blades slice it into strips. After a century of use the wood is smooth and dark. It got dry last winter and a corner of the wood cracked. When I came in from writing late last night, I found it on the table with a note from Anneliese asking if I could fix the crack. I spread wood glue over both surfaces, and then clamped the halves together using a conglomeration of miniature bungee cords and plastic clips. It looked hack, but in the morning the board held solid and the crack was nearly invisible. When Anneliese thanked me for fixing it, her smile was a fine reward, and for the umpteenth time this year I took note of the fact that I need to review my set list.

  Almost immediately Karen cuts off the tip of her finger. I have just received a new jump kit from the local fire department, so it’s a great opportunity to familiarize myself with the contents of the bag and review basic bandaging technique. We get the bleeding stopped and I do a serviceable job of dressing the wound. I do not use clamps or bungee cords. Karen is determined to continue, and as I pass back and forth through the house for the remainder of the day the pile of cabbage heads in a cardboard box transforms into a pile of pale green silage in a crock, and by the end of the day the kitchen counter is lined with glass jars set to percolate and produce the perfect side dish to those pigs of ours.

  I am not a deadbeat husband—lately I work probably too much. But among other things this year is highlighting the difference between earning and providing. I should be helping with that sauerkraut.

  The next day Anneliese and Karen can sweet corn and tomatoes.

  When Mills and I began working on the coop, the corn was short. Now it is turning in the field, and my chickens are still homeless. Oh, but take heart, fowl, because today on a sunny morning Mills and I met at his place, deconstructed the coop wall by wall, loaded it piece by piece on an equipment trailer, and hauled it home to Fall Creek. We are assembling it now as we giggle in the sun. Before we flop the floor over on its skids, we insulate it from below with strips of Styrofoam salvaged during yet another one of Mills’s dump runs. I like to think that come January my chickens will have warm feet. Then we begin remounting the walls. We get the first one tacked up fine, but then there is a breakdown in communication (“Slide ’er a tad to the le—RIGHT!! RIGHT!!”) and the eight-foot-tall front wall does a full-on topple, missing me by the skin of my bald head. It’s made mostly of oak, and hits the driveway with a tremendous thump, blowing dust across my toes. “LOOOOORD MISTER FORD!” hollers Mills, his hammer dangling from one hand and his eyes and mouth three perfect circles. There is the iconic silent film in which Harold Lloyd stands fast as the front wall of a house collapses over him, and he survives only because he manages to stand right in line with the window. Same deal h
ere, except I didn’t hang around to thread the window.

  Apart from a few busted boards, the damage is minimal, and we assemble the rest of the walls without incident. Mills roughs out roof boards while I install the windows and tune the doorjamb. The windows were salvaged from my beloved New Auburn house, and it warms my heart to see them put to use. And they bring the structure alive—when I stepped back for the standard moment of appreciation, there was something about the light on the panes that took it from a bunch of boards to a coop. When we knock off there’s still much to do—tarpaper the roof, install the insulation, mount the roof vent, put facing on the interior walls—but before we quit we cut scrap plywood and nail it over the roof.

  Meaning, tonight our chickens snooze in a coop. Sure, it’s still sitting in the driveway blocking the garage door, and it’s not really finished, but as dusk falls I lure the layers near by shaking a pail of feed, then I sprinkle a trail of it up the cleated gangplank of the door, and sure enough—after much clucking and nervous head-dipping—the Barred Rock pecks her way up the plank and into the coop, where she stands blinking at the new digs. I have to cheat a little with a couple of the other birds, give them a boost, but in short order they’re all in place. I rig a divider between the two little doors and then haul the meat chickens over two by two, stuffing them in the second door. When everyone is in place I distribute feed and water, and then before I go into the house, where the kitchen light is now a yellow square in the dark I stand awhile and just listen to the sound of them shuffling and settling.

  The mornings are cool now, and knots of color are appearing against the green slope of the valley. I called the farm today and no one answered, and then I realized Mom and Dad were at “convention,” an annual assembly of the Friends at a farm an hour due west of here. For four days they will gather on gray wooden benches inside a large white barn to pray, sing hymns, and give testimony. Even this far removed I can feel the peace of it, the cars motoring in slowly while the mist is still clearing the hills, everyone parking neatly in the mown hayfield and making their way to the barn, Bible cases in hand. There will be some lingering and visiting in the yard up until ten minutes prior to service, at which point all but a few stragglers or parents with crying babies will be in the barn and on a bench, sitting in quiet meditation. Prepare your hearts unto the Lord, the Bible says, and so it is.

  We always opened with a hymn, and it was a great joy to sing at convention, to hear all those voices raised. Even given our constrained ways and hymns titled “We Thank Thee, Lord for Weary Days,” the sound of a few hundred open throats does grow you some wings. I remember most of all the older women, the ones with mysterious steamship bosoms and black stockings, and how purely their voices soared. I can’t read music per se, but I retained enough from Mrs. North’s piano lessons to tell when we were going up and when we were going down. John and I learned to harmonize simply by sitting beside each other and trying to hit notes that seemed to blend. Sometimes they were by the book, sometimes not. But by the time our voices changed brother John and I could manage a serviceable descant as the ladies headed for the rafters.

  Anyone who had professed was free to participate in prayer and testimony during the first portion of the service. The bulk of the meeting consisted of sermons from the workers, who rotated through in fifteen-or thirty-minute increments. There was one two-hour service in the morning, another in the afternoon, and a shorter, more gospel-oriented service in the evenings. Mom was realistic about having six or eight kids ride a wooden bench for four days straight; each year we each got a brand-new miniature tablet notebook with a fresh pencil, and during the afternoon meeting she would dole out a few pieces of hard candy to each of us and then—late in the afternoon, and we always anticipated it—a single piece of Trident original flavor sugarless gum. I still buy it just for the memory. When Mom had to leave with one of the babies or to give a tube feeding, Dad’s meaningfully raised brow was usually enough to quell any percolating misbehavior. I recall entertaining myself by drawing cartoon heads and watching doomed flies land on the flystrips dangling from the rafters, where they’d buzz in futility until their wings became trapped against the oily ribbon. Some of the boys used to catch flies. Then they’d pluck a long hair from their poor sister’s head and tie it around the fly so it could get airborne but not get away. You’d see these flies circling in tethered orbit and some kid evilly grinning. We never got that one past Dad’s raised eyebrows.

  Between services we ate in a giant tent. It was dark green and probably army surplus. We stood in line, and when the dinner bell rang and the flap was opened we filed slowly inside to the homey aroma of beef stew and piping hot dumplings. We sat at long tables and sang grace, and then the food was served—great marbled plastic bowls of boiled potatoes, plates of sliced peppers and tomatoes, trays of bread and cookies. The whole operation from cook to bottle washer was run by volunteering Friends—children pitched in too, often carrying the pitchers of coffee, tea, and water from table to table, and gathering the dirty dishes as people finished. On cold days the tent was the best place to be, full and warm with the heat generated by all the cooking and the clouds of steam rolling around Mr. Ramsdell in his rubber gloves and apron beside the homemade scalder. The forks made a silver clatter when he dumped them from the basket, the sound of their steely tumble ringing above the muffling green of the trodden grass.

  When I grew older, the time between meetings became charged with the nervous hope of love. We were sometimes admonished by the workers to remember that convention was about worship, not dating. But when you belong to a group as rare as this in which marrying outside the faith is fundamentally forbidden and you suddenly find yourself with free time and girls who believe, you make romantic hay. Or try. I rarely got past furtive glances. The standard procedure was to wangle your way into conversation with a likely candidate and then invite her on a walk. The convention grounds were perfectly suited for this, with trails that wound all through the hills and fields, and on a sunny day between meetings they were filled with teenage boys and girls walking in couples and clusters. I envied the boys out there strolling, because I was too shy to pull off anything that straightforward. In line with church precepts, the girls who walked the paths wore long dresses—mid-calf at the least—that ranged in style from evening wear to Little House on the Prairie. Their long, thick hair was wound and folded carefully into buns and swoops held in place with invisible pins and beautiful clasps, and the general absence of makeup lent their faces a frank clarity. To this day the look draws my eye in a way no swimsuit model can manage. I became hooked on the idea of purity, and that hair tumbling down. My poor wife has learned that if she dons an old jeans skirt and twists her hair up to grub around in the garden, I tend to lurk around the kohlrabi and attempt to make small talk.

  Of all the children in our family, none have continued in the Truth. Looking out across the sunny country now, over the coloring hills and to the west, I think of Mom and Dad gathered right at this minute, and I wonder if this is heavy in their hearts. Once when it was early in my “losing out,” I came to convention with long spiked hair and dressed like a cross between a U2 roadie and Don Johnson’s personal shopper. I was sitting by Mom in the dining tent when she quietly wondered what the Friends must think. “I don’t care what these people think!” I snapped, and she turned her head quickly but I had seen the immediate flash of tears and I was sick with my cruelty. I am still ashamed. But I am better with it now, because although I don’t believe, I have never lost the memory of how comforting it was to gather for four days in quiet circumstance with fellow believers. I am happy that they are there, and I hope it is peaceful. Soon enough they will have to come back out among us. Because of the cows, we always had to leave before the evening meal and service. How jarring it was to depart the quiet farm with its fellowship and murmur and shortly be passing by taverns and gas stations and short-haired women in pants.

  Today my friend Buffalo came by to inspect the ro
of of our old granary to see if it would support a rack of solar panels. Actually, Buffalo has informed me they are photovoltaic panels, and that if we get some we will be part of the “PV community.” Buffalo installs alternative energy systems for a living, and he and his wife Lori were the first set of friends Anneliese and I met and became close with as a couple. Although I am happy to say we each get on well with the friends the other brought to the marriage, it is also nice to have “shared” friends, and it doesn’t hurt that they have two daughters roughly Amy’s age. Anneliese invited them over today under the pretense of dinner, but in addition to spec’ing the granary, I’ve bamboozled Buffalo into helping me finish off the coop. While I cut and staple insulation between the studs, Buffalo tarpapers the roof and cuts a hole for the roof vent. After he helps me install a row of plywood facing around the base to keep the chickens from eating the insulation, I bring the tractor around and we make the big move.

  The tractor moves across the yard with the coop in tow. In a rare moment of foresight, we removed the windows so they wouldn’t bust in transit, and Buffalo is riding crouched in the window waving at the kids like an underweight troll, his head of curls and big black beard flopping in the wind. For my part, I keep ’er steady with the tractor, one arm raised and pointing to the distance as if I am Hannibal headed for the Alps. The three little girls dance and wave from the deck.

  We pull the coop into a patch of weeds beside a chokecherry tree, the windows facing south to catch the winter sun and allow the hens a view of the valley as they squeeze out their eggs. When we head to the house for supper I notice the coop is sitting at a pretty good angle, but it looks solid there on the horizon, just like I imagined all those months ago when I was poring over schematics drafted in 1933.