Fowl Weather

by Bob Tarte

  Most years, I’d joke, “It’s my turn to have a ‘Bob Christmas.’ “

  “What would that consist of?” Linda would ask, playing along.

  I’d answer, “Not one thing,” with a wistful sigh.

  But holiday cheer was serious business to my wife, and any holiday applied. I rarely escaped the Fourth of July without slapping mosquitoes off my neck while fireworks popped overhead, and even the amorphous Labor Day necessitated a stroll through some park simply to distinguish the occasion from plain vanilla calendar dates. If worry prevented me from being dragged into Christmas festivities with my usual glumness, the least I could do was try to avoid completely ruining the season for her. And she wouldn’t let me cancel the celebration anyway. Due to the precariousness of Stanley Sue’s condition, we hired Jamie to sit with Stanley Sue and the tricky thermostat while we spent the afternoon of December 24 making merry with Linda’s son Ben; his wife, Ann; their kids; and Linda’s mom. I watched my watch and barely paid attention to anything else.

  Christmas Day at Joan and Jack’s proved even bumpier, despite a meat-optional breakfast buffet and the cheery disorder supplied by five cats, two ferrets, a wolf-dog, and a sparrow. Holidays had lacked their center since the death of my father, who had apparently played neutron to the uncharged lesser particles of our family. This year my mother had slipped out of orbit, too. She had forgotten the whole concept of opening presents.

  “Just tear the wrapping,” Joan urged her. But even after I ran a finger under the pieces of tape to pop them and unfurled the paper to the first fold, she hesitated. Then she placed the present on the floor beside her chair and examined the wrapping-paper shell instead.

  “Whose house is this?” she asked Joan as we nibbled on Bett’s molasses cookies.

  “It’s my house.”

  She waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, go on!” She had come to think of Joan and me as college-age kids still living at home.

  “How’s your bird?” Bett’s husband, Dave, asked.

  “I’m guardedly optimistic,” I managed to answer.

  Just as I was mentally patting myself on the back for putting on a vaguely cheery face, Joan gave Linda a sculpted necklace of an African grey parrot. With its bright red tail, it resembled Dusty but inevitably reminded me of my maroon-tailed Stanley Sue. I ducked into the bathroom and stared at the soap dish for a while.

  “We need to get going,” I told Linda mere seconds after we had opened the last present.

  “Thanks for coming to see me,” Mom said.

  “You’re in my house,” Joan reminded her.

  When I got back home, Stanley Sue dipped her head, grabbed a beakful of the shredded paper that lined the bottom of the aquarium, and gave it a short toss. “Are you throwing confetti?” I asked her. But her pleasure at seeing me was short-lived, as I proceeded to tube-feed her. Happy holiday.

  I DECIDED TO GET Stanley Sue out of the fish tank. If she had to die, she would at least die inside her cage and not in a glass house designed for guppies. I shoved aside the stacks of newspapers that had so far escaped the recycling bin, then nestled two extra dining room chairs together to create a hole in the clutter for her cage. The relocation boosted her morale. She took two helpings of dinner veggies from my spoon, crawled up to her hanging rubber ring at bedtime, and reached out to jangle her bell in protest when I snapped off the light.

  Barely had I settled into the shallow indentation of an optimistic groove when Linda received a phone call saying that her mother had been rushed to the hospital with, of all things, pneumonia. I didn’t burn my brain cells metaphorically linking her respiratory sickness with the bird’s, except to note the evil correspondence as I drove Linda to Battle Creek. Then I headed seventy-five miles back home to begin caring for thirty-some animals on my own.

  I slept poorly, worrying about Linda, her mom, and Stanley Sue, and cursed the alarm clock when it hollered in my ear. Getting the duck and goose chores finished before leaving for work meant straggling out of bed under black-of-night conditions to clear snow, chip ice, fill wading pools, replenish drinking water, top off food, bump into things, and make sure that high-strung ganders Matthew and Angel didn’t bolt out the doors. Back inside the house I uncovered the birds, fed our three cats—Whiskers and Baby had long since rejoined Nancy Ann—overcooked instant oatmeal on the stove, let the rabbits hop around the dining room as I bolted down my gruel, clipped rectangles of toast to the parakeet and dove cages, coddled a squawking Ollie, filled seed cups and water bowls, and, taking a deep breath, tube-fed Stanley Sue before slip-sliding to my workplace.

  Back from work shortly after noon, I trudged out to the waterfowl pens, tugging open the doors to allow the ducks and geese a chance to turn up their nostrils at a snow-covered yard. I refilled their pools and water dishes and did the same in the barn enclosures. Indoors I let Howard, the parakeets, and the canary out of their cages. The blustering dove chased the smaller birds, who easily outmaneuvered him. I checked the rabbits’ food and water, then retreated to the back room for an attempt at a nap disguised as quality time with Stanley Sue while I waited to hear from Linda.

  I opened her door and let her clamber to the top of her cage. She watched me as I snaked my legs beneath Linda’s desk, threw a pillow onto the floor, and did my best to achieve some comfort in the little room. Troubled by the lack of news from Battle Creek, I fell short of my normal afternoon descent into merciful oblivion. After a few minutes of supine anxiety, I sat up and faced six weeks’ worth of unpaid bills. As I assuaged our power company, telephone carrier, and trash service, Stanley Sue navigated her bars to pluck a grape from the tea cart. “That’s an awfully good girl,” I said. She chewed it, adding the skin to the peanut shells littering a strip of chain-store advertisements at the foot of her cage. “Keep it up, and we might be able to skip the you-know-what-feeding tonight,” I promised. I had just belatedly paid the fall leaf-raking bill when my hand leaped to the ringing phone.

  Linda described a long night at the hospital sitting with her mom, who had drifted in and out of consciousness. “The nurse down the hall took me aside and said, ‘I thought you should know, your mother is dying.’ Then, about an hour later, Dr. Lee finally showed up, and he said that he didn’t expect her to last until morning. He said, ‘She’s old. That’s what happens,’ as if he couldn’t be bothered taking any trouble with her.”

  That matched up with what we had heard about Dr. Lee’s bedside manner from her mom. I couldn’t bring myself to ask straight out if she had died. “Is she?” I stammered. “Is she still with us?”

  “She’s about the same as last night,” said Linda, taking no notice of my clumsiness. “She isn’t in good shape. She had a heart attack while they were giving her albuterol to help her breathing.”

  “Oh, no.” I glanced at Stanley Sue, who had keyed in on the concern in my voice. I carried the cordless phone into the living room, where the bird wouldn’t hear me. “How bad was the heart attack?”

  “They described it as ‘minor.’ They’re mainly worried about the pneumonia right now.”

  After Linda hung up, I was grateful that I had endless animal chores ahead of me to dull what passed for mental activity. These were tasks that the two of us usually split, if you defined “split” as ninety percent Linda, five percent Bob, and five percent that Bob didn’t get to as promised. But excuses cut no ice with demanding pets, beginning with barn ducks and hens that expected their table scraps, greens, and chunks of bread before I scraped dinner together for the parrots and me. Once we had all squawked and eaten, I put Ollie to bed, wiped the dining and kitchen linoleum, vacuumed, let Dusty out of the cage, and retreated to the living room with the rabbits lest he bite my toes. After roaming the floor and calling out, “Hello,” he refused to go back, forcing me to tease him into attacking and clinging to a towel. The trick was getting parrot and towel through the door of his cage before he managed to climb up to my hand. Then I covered the birds, checked food and water dishes
, read from an old Perry Mason mystery, and at just about nine-thirty gave the rabbits their nightly oatmeal treat before covering them, too.

  The following night, I wrapped up the chores earlier and made it to bed before nine. Each successive night, my bed moved closer to the dinner table, until soon I was hitting the hay and trying not to dream about it by eight-thirty. Still, I realized that I had the easy part of the deal. Linda stayed at the hospital all day, making sure that whenever her mom awoke, she was on hand to ply her with water, urge her to eat, and maintain the kind of positive spin that I barely even knew existed.

  A week after I had driven Linda to Battle Creek, I met her at the hospital. Her mom wore an oxygen mask, spoke nearly inaudibly, and seemed frighteningly frail. I could hardly believe that she had been worse than this, but Linda assured me that she was on the mend. I wished I could have made the same claim about Stanley Sue. Her breathing hadn’t improved, and we’d finally reached a point where her best chance was an X-ray that could provide a diagnosis. It was the least intrusive of the tests she might need.

  I dropped her off at Dr. Fuller’s office that Friday and spent an anxious morning at my workplace fretting over the possible results. Shortly before I wrapped up my work, my phone rang. As a high-voltage shot of dread washed over a feeble undercurrent of hope sparked by the turnaround of Linda’s mom, I heard Dr. Fuller tell me, “I’m afraid I have bad news. Stanley Sue passed away during the X-ray procedure.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Muskegon Wastewater

  The thump in the middle of the night woke me up. It sounded as if something had crashed into the top of the house. I had just fallen asleep, after hours spent kneading my pillow, bending and unbending my legs, and flopping my head into different positions while I fretted over Stanley Sue. Several weeks after her death, I still couldn’t get out from under the grief. Toxins bubbled through my brain, while my body was encased in enough layers of lethargy to fill a municipal waste-disposal site.

  As I lay listening in the upstairs bedroom, where I snoozed when plagued by restlessness so as not to disturb Linda, I tried to explain away the thump as a raccoon plopping onto the roof from an overhanging branch or a brick detaching itself from our chimney, until a rustling in the corner of the room overpowered the hammering of my heart. An intruder seemed to be nosing aside a plastic bag containing secondhand mystery novels at the foot of the bed. I figured it must be a cat in search of a mouse, but when I flung myself off the mattress and flipped on the light, I found Penny asleep at the top of the stairs, while Moobie sprawled her huge self across the living room rug. I discovered Agnes lurking in the basement as I beamed the flashlight into the corner to make sure that none of Linda’s rickety storage shelves had toppled beneath the weight of orphaned appliances, stacks of old magazines, and cartons of knickknacks.

  Linda, of course, continued sleeping soundly. She hadn’t heard the wall-jarring thud, just as she had snoozed through the bloodcurdling primate howls a few winters ago. She also hadn’t suffered the ghost-cat visitations, a phone call from the space people, a fairy intrusion from the garden, Ouija board Star Trek episode predictions, psychic messages from Kenn Kaufman, or Bobo’s possibly malevolent clowning, though she had shared the brunt of Eileen’s meddling.

  Back in bed on the second floor, I tried reading a Calvin and Hobbes “best of” comic-strip compilation to calm myself, but mainly stared off the page at the carpet. Instead of blaming paranormal forces for the unexplained noises, I clasped and unclasped my hands in a hot-cold pang of worry, wondering if I wasn’t truly losing my mind.

  My mental train had jumped the rails the night after Stanley Sue had died of what Dr. Fuller suggested might have been cancer, based on the evidence of her fatal X-ray. I insisted on sleeping on the living room couch to be near the room where she had spent her final weeks. Part of me immediately stepped back with arms folded and warned, Uh-uh. Nope. Don’t even think of doing that. But my larger, spongier self decided that taking an emotional nosedive down an elevator shaft was a fine idea. Three nights later, Linda urged me to return to our bed, citing the psychic misery my davenport bivouac was causing me, not to mention the strain it put on her back.

  “I can’t keep bending over and consoling you,” she said.

  “I’m trying to cry myself to death,” I explained.

  “If you keep acting like this, you’re going to have to see a doctor.”

  Little did I realize that the prolonged spate of depression was threatening my health. It didn’t help matters when I realized that Stanley Sue had died five years to the day of my father’s death, and almost to the hour. As the days wore on, a cold developed into a particularly virulent case of bronchitis. I sat with a heating pad strapped to my chest and my faithful box of tissues at my feet. Bacteria and despair were bad enough, but soon I developed heart palpitations that put me in fear of sharing a heavenly perch with Stanley Sue.

  A student nurse instantly picked up on my collapsed state of mind as I huddled in an eggshell-colored office awaiting the family doctor. In the presence of her supervisor, she gently asked if perhaps somebody in the family had died.

  “A pet,” I blurted out and began to sob.

  Once the nurses had left the room and shut the door behind them, I heard the supervisor tell the younger woman, “That served you right.”

  An EKG indicated normal heart activity, a chest X-ray revealed that my bronchitis hadn’t turned into pneumonia, and my doctor diagnosed anxiety as the reason for my occasional arrhythmia. He put me back on the Zoloft that I had weaned myself from a few years earlier. The medication took the burr off the edge of the rim of the lip of my psychological sinkhole, but it didn’t touch the obsessive concerns that Stanley Sue’s death had illuminated inside my head in high-wattage, life-interfering glory.

  The fact that I was more upset at the passing of a bird than I had been at the passing of my father popped the lid off a cauldron of burbling guilt. But while my dad’s death hadn’t been my fault, I had been responsible for Stanley Sue’s welfare. I had failed her. I had missed the early signs of illness, and she had died under my care.

  Memories of her final days poisoned me. I couldn’t think of her without endlessly replaying mental loops of her crash-landing in Dr. Hedley’s office, her confinement in the aquarium, and, worst of all, my having to force-feed her. This was particularly painful, because I had always felt a kind of telepathic link with her. Our bond had grown especially tight in her last days, when it had seemed as if she was as concerned about me as I was about her. She’d made brave attempts to eat fruits and vegetables she didn’t want simply to please me. I’d even speculated that she understood the seriousness of her sickness. Realizing that I couldn’t bear to see her die, she’d chosen a moment to let go on a rare occasion when she’d found herself away from home. This wasn’t easy to accept or even to think about.

  Funeral rituals had helped mitigate the pain of my father’s death. I’d had little time to dwell in misery while participating in the planning of the visitation, service, burial, and reception. This distraction had comforted me, as had the support of family and friends. But no such mechanism existed to ease the blow of an animal’s death. Despite the best intentions of people close to me, I missed the catharsis and onset of healing that a public ceremony provided. With no socially acceptable channel into which to ladle my grief, I felt lonely and foolish for allowing myself to become devastated by the loss of a bird.

  Often the thoughts that kept me up at night weren’t even quasi-rational. In the full light of day, or what passed as such during a Michigan winter, I couldn’t figure out why so fragile and misguided a concern had robbed me of my sleep. So as I pulled the covers up, bracing myself for another puzzling thud on the roof of the house, I tormented myself with the weirdest dollop of self-pity to stream down the mental pike to date.

  I’m nothing now, the voice said. I’m just some idiot without his parrot.

  MY FIRST VISIT to the Alzheimer’s Unit at Test
ament Terrace didn’t exactly wash away my grief. I stepped off the third-floor elevator and into a David Lynch movie, as stabbing piano music pulled me toward the residents’ lounge. A lavender-haired woman with faraway eyes at odds with the determined thrust of her jaw tore through a heated performance of “White Christmas,” followed by a nerve-jangling “Jingle Bells.”

  “She’s a little out of sync with the season,” I told Bett as we stood on the perimeter of an arc of elderly folks who sat blinking at the piano.

  “Jennifer told me she plays Christmas songs all year.”

  I nodded at the Testament Terrace nurse, who had perked up at the mention of her name.

  Joan lowered and shook her head, sharing my glumness at consigning our mom to the company of people who were as in the dark about the when and what of Yule as she had been. But she couldn’t remain on the assisted-living floor due to her nocturnal wanderings, packing for nonexistent trips, and escalating forgetfulness.

  As we toted her belongings from the old apartment to slightly less fashionable new quarters just out of earshot of the piano bar, a staff member from the assisted-living section took me aside and told me how much she would miss my mom.

  “I wish you could have met her ten years ago,” I said.

  “She’s very sweet just the way she is,” she replied. “I’ll be serving her a meal, and she’ll lean over and ask, ‘Now, is there anything I can do for you, dear?’”

  I could list many adjectives to describe the mom who had raised me: even-tempered, tough-minded, hardworking; critical but caring. “Sweet” better described my dad, however, and I wondered if my mom’s disease hadn’t allowed a submerged quality to shine through.