Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  I thought of Buddy pecking gloriously at his birthday cakes in the middle of every March. I thought of him sitting on the front steps on warm summer days gazing over his kingdom. I thought of the dirt baths he took in the mulch by the bushes, the holes he dug, the look of unabashed delight he got when the kids burst out the doors to run around his yard. I thought of a moment on Mother’s Day, just a week earlier. I had dumped bags of fresh soil into Pam’s garden beds, one after the next, as Caroline and Abigail spread it out with metal rakes. Buddy had wandered into the garden, and as I eyed him warily, he simply lay down amid the discarded bags and tools, content to be part of it all.

  I swerved into our driveway, jammed to a stop, and leapt out of the car. I pushed open the gate and bolted across the yard toward Buddy’s rooster house. His front doors were open, but there was no Buddy and no Pam. Somehow, from the sound of that call, I already knew he wouldn’t be there.

  I whirled around and saw them, Pam sitting on a chair on the back porch, Buddy in her arms. I saw that he was completely still. His head rested against Pam’s chest, his eyes were closed. His clawed feet were in her hands. She stroked his feathers as tears rolled off her cheeks and onto his white wings.

  “I opened his doors,” she said softly, anguish covering every inch of her face. “He walked outside like he always does. But then he just flipped over into the grass. I swooped him up—”

  Pam paused here, collecting herself, her hands never leaving Buddy’s feathers.

  “I swooped him up, he let out a final caw, and he died.”

  Pam cried in the shade of the covered porch and held Buddy tighter. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure what to think. All these years, all those hopes, all the noise, the frustrations, the fears, and the joy, and this is how his life ends.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, my voice catching. “I’m so very sorry.”

  I sat down and Pam looked from Buddy to me, and then at Buddy again.

  “All he ever wanted, the only thing he ever asked for, was to be part of the group,” she said.

  As I watched them, it dawned on me that I had never seen, or could have possibly imagined, Buddy ever being this still. In life, he was a whir of constant movement, his head spinning and poking, his feathers rising and falling, his voice cackling then bellowing. He didn’t just live life; he seemed to define it. Of course, in the last few months, he rested more on the blankets and towels that Pam spread for him in the corner of the back porch, but when anyone opened the door to check on him, he immediately rose, seemingly embarrassed, and got back to the business of high-stepping and clucking around his territory, if not the life of the party, at the very least, the Head Party Planner.

  But seeing his body spread across Pam, I couldn’t get this single impression out of my head: Buddy looked ancient. His feet, yellowed claws, carried a prehistoric quality to them, scaly and worn. His face, though peaceful in its expression, was physically weathered. His feathers didn’t look as bright white as they had seemed even the day before. Maybe all of this, or at least part of this, was what Pam loved so much about him.

  It’s a cliché, but clichés often carry the mark of truth, that it seemed like just yesterday that Buddy was a fuzzy chick chirping at the television as he sat between Caroline and Abigail on the couch in their house. So much happened to him in these three years. He went from a chick to a chicken, from the house to the yard, from a cage to the garage, from a benign if unusual presence to a loud and occasionally ornery rooster. When we all moved in together, he got his own shed, took over our yard, and became something of a neighborhood celebrity, more popular than I ever would have thought. And through it all, from youth to death, he maintained an unwavering commitment to everything on his side of the fence. Me aside.

  Death inevitably makes people think of themselves. Maybe it’s a muted form of narcissism, but I think it’s just human nature. I thought of my own life and where it had gone over the course of Buddy’s time on this earth, not just physically, though certainly that as well—Pam, the kids, the animals, the suburbs, the sense that this was what it all means. My life had changed in ways that I never fully imagined it would.

  “I thought he’d be around forever,” Pam said, breaking my reverie, “even if I’ve been worried that he hadn’t seemed like himself.”

  I gazed at her and replied, “Buddy always lived on his own terms, and he died on his own terms. There was nothing you could have done to prevent this.”

  In the coming days and weeks, the builder would stop by and say our house looked and felt completely different without Buddy in the yard. Neighbors knocked on the door to offer condolences and to at least say the right things about how they already missed his crowing. Pam bought a big stone planter in the shape of a rooster, filled it with flowers, and put it by the front door. Truth is, in its stillness, it reminded me more of what we were missing than of what we once had. Tom, from around the corner, delivered a bouquet of white flowers with his daughter and asked, as others had, “Will you get another?”

  “Buddy just happened,” Pam replied. “It was fate. I don’t think a rooster is something you go out and get.”

  Hopefully, she didn’t see me furiously fumbling with my iPhone in my efforts to record her words.

  Pam would spend more than a little time researching what might have gone wrong, reading and talking to chicken experts at big universities. She came to learn that he was undoubtedly what’s known as a “broiler breed,” the kind of chicken whose body isn’t made to last more than a few years because he was supposed to have been eaten in his relative youth. The reality dawned on us that Buddy lived as long as he could.

  That sad Sunday, the kids’ father kindly dropped them off at the house, even though it was his weekend. They came walking through the kitchen, out the back door, and onto the porch, tears streaming down their faces as they gathered around their mother and their bird. Abigail kissed his face as she kept saying, “My Nu-Nu,” one of her dozen or so nicknames for the chicken that she brought into this world. Caroline rubbed his feet. Pam told them how it happened. I assured them that Buddy loved them very, very much.

  The three of them exchanged stories of Buddy’s exploits and feats over the years. Pam pulled out some clay, and they made impressions of his claws that would later harden in the oven. I retrieved a shovel from the garage and began digging a hole under Buddy’s favorite Japanese maple in the back of the yard, a shaded spot where he had dug many holes before.

  I wasn’t more than a few shovelfuls in when the kids came over, certain that I couldn’t be doing it perfectly enough for Buddy, and took over the job. We all took turns until the hole was deep and wide. Pam wrapped Buddy in a blanket and ever so gently nestled him down into the earth.

  “Think of your favorite Buddy memory,” she told the kids.

  I hesitantly spread a shovel of dirt on top of Buddy, then another, and another. I noticed Caroline staring into the hole as I did this, holding a sprig of flowers she had pulled from a nearby bush. I saw Abigail biting her lip. They weren’t little kids now, the little girls they had been when Buddy arrived, but little people, with emotions and dreams and styles that were every bit their own. How far they had come, I thought. How far we had all come, heartbroken in unison over the death of this unusual bird.

  As I smoothed out the ground with the back of the shovel, Abigail said, “Buddy must have known he had done his job, so it was okay to leave.”

  I knew I was feeling emotional, but it didn’t seem that truer words had ever been spoken. Buddy had helped bring us all together.

  An hour or so later, the kids were upstairs. Pam and I were in the kitchen. Caroline’s voice rang out, her squeaky voice, “Hey, Brian, come up here.”

  So I did. They had their collection of Breyer horses spread all across the room, barns and stables and riding rings and ponies with a dazzling array of complicated names, all of it an elaborate attempt to gamely push through the sadness of an otherwise brilliant day.

/>   “What?” I asked,

  “Nothing,” Abigail said with a tone of distracted annoyance. “We just want you to watch us play.”

  So I took a seat, kicked up my feet, and realized quite quickly that there was nowhere else better to be. As they played, we talked a little bit about death and a little more about life, most of it natural and none of it forced.

  Outside, it was eerily quiet, the kind of quiet that wouldn’t seem normal for many weeks, and in those weeks, I would still see white flashes outside the windows just as I used to hear Harry padding through my Boston condo in the months after he was gone.

  But inside, even amid the loss, there was the sense of something gained. Buddy, in Abigail’s words, had done his job.

  Acknowledgments

  This book, oddly enough, rose from the blood of a fellow scribe. One of my very best friends, Mitch Zuckoff, a former Globe reporter, now a decorated and bestselling author, came to dinner at my house in the suburbs one summer night with his wife, Suzanne Kreiter. They were accompanied by our longtime literary agent and friend Richard Abate.

  We had just moved in, and Buddy, the resident rooster, proved anything but a gracious host. As soon as they strolled through the front gate of our yard, Buddy was on Mitch in a flurry of feathers and claws, his sharp beak catching Mitch’s shin in that spot you never want to be hit. There was the oddest wail, an open wound, and probably more laughter than was actually polite. Richard spent the vast bulk of the dinner repeating, again and again, “You’ve got to write this story.”

  To his credit, he wouldn’t let it drop. Richard helped me form the idea in my head, pushed me to outline it on paper, and instilled in me the belief that it was a tale worthy of being told. It’s impossible to thank him enough, as well as Richard’s expert assistant at 3Arts in New York, Melissa Kahn.

  Equally impossible would be finding a better home for this story than Crown. I’ve spent a career in journalism chronicling the deeds and misdeeds, adventures and misadventures, of invariably colorful people, some well-known, others barely known at all; it has been somewhat bizarre to devote this many words and this much time to my own life, or at least this facet of it. But my editor, Lindsay Sagnette, a world-class wordsmith and, whenever needed, a singularly gifted therapist, has guided me along this unfamiliar path with extraordinary vision, empathy, and charm.

  So much of Crown is like that, including Christine Kopprasch in editorial, Ellen Folan in publicity, Julie Cepler in marketing, the incomparable Ron Koltnow in sales, and Chris Brand, the art director who spent a memorable day overseeing a photo shoot with Buddy preening from my favorite leather chair. All of them have shown remarkable enthusiasm for Buddy and his namesake book, and beyond that, they are just personable, kind people. It’s no wonder that Crown is as good as it is when you factor in the leadership of Molly Stern, whose contagious enthusiasm for this story from its inception gave me the confidence to sit at my keyboard, day after day, and let my memories and emotions pour forth.

  In Boston, the aforementioned Mitch and Suzanne were critical contributors, sounding boards and wise counselors, as always. Chris Putala, my other best friend, indulged all my absurd rooster tales with his trademark wit and towel-snapping cheer. Larry Moulter was an invaluable adviser from the very beginning and a key cheerleader as the process spun forward.

  Colleen, the younger of my two older sisters, was my first reader, as she was with my prior books, partly due to her insistence but more to do with her insight. I’ll never shed the image of looking out the window at Abigail’s birthday party and seeing Colleen racing across my backyard with Buddy in hot pursuit; I suspect he had just learned we were related. My sister Carole was just about Harry’s favorite person in life for every good reason, not the least of which was that he undoubtedly knew she is mine. She has been endlessly supportive of this project, and for that, has my further appreciation. Then there’s Yvonne McGrory, my mother. I flatter myself to think that even a few of her many gifts, most especially her lust for life, have rubbed off on me over the years, but I can certainly hope. There are not strong enough words to express my thanks.

  Of course, one of my biggest debts is to the Boston Globe, where I’ve had the privilege of making my writing career for the past quarter century. I don’t honestly think I’d trade in a single day. Special thanks to Marty Baron, the editor, who also happens to be the fairest boss and most upstanding newsman I’ve ever met. Thanks as well to my talented editor, Chris Chinlund, whose enthusiasm for a column I wrote about a young Buddy, long before I ever imagined a book, provided the tacit encouragement to go forward. And without bringing up names, because there are too many to list, my colleagues at the Globe have my deepest gratitude and respect. Truth is, they amaze me every day with their extraordinary work, which is critical to making Boston the world-class city that it truly is. We are all fortunate, myself and the entire Globe staff, to have the most engaged and enlightened readers that a newspaper reporter, writer, photographer, editor, or designer would ever dare dream.

  Lastly, and most profoundly, my thanks to Pam and the kids, Abigail and Caroline, who changed my life in ways I was never creative enough to foresee. Pam wasn’t just valuable, but invaluable, in terms of writing this book. It’s scary, the things she is able to remember, and it’s quite humbling to see her put even life’s smallest moments into a larger perspective. A few years ago, I probably couldn’t have imagined my life today. Now I can’t imagine anything but.

  About the Author

  BRIAN MCGRORY has been a writer and an editor for the Boston Globe since 1989 and received both the prestigious Scripps Howard and Sigma Delta Chi awards in 2012 for his twice-weekly metro column. He is the author of four novels and lives in Massachusetts with all creatures great and small.