Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  Once the door was hung, in a mistaken attempt to ingratiate myself, I complimented him on how well it fit. “That’s fantastic,” I simpered. “You can hardly see a sliver of daylight between the door and the frame when the door is closed.”

  “Cut it out, Bob,” he growled, with only a trace of a smile.

  Though Dell and I stood on opposite sides of the personality fence, he got along famously with Linda, apparently recognizing a fellow generous-hearted soul who was forced to put up with me. He complimented her on the morning glories climbing the side of our house in the brisk fall weather. He talked effusively about his family, joked about retiring to a warmer climate, and told stories about his missionary days in South America. Even after his tools were neatly put away and his son waited silently in the truck, Dell stood chatting with Linda in front of our open basement door, never once answering a question with a quip like, “Where does this kind of wood come from? I don’t know, Bob. I think it comes from a tree.”

  Some of Linda’s success with Dell came from a natural-born ability to talk that she had honed to a fine sheen through unflagging exercise. She would talk to anyone anywhere, as I learned early in our relationship. On a trip through Michigan’s “thumb region,” we visited the Lake Huron town of Grindstone City, which in the early 1900s had been a bustling millstone-manufacturing center. A friend of mine had enticed me there with a surreal photograph of a beach littered with massive defective grindstones dumped at the last minute while being loaded on a ship. “The whole town is like that,” he had insisted. “You’ll see grindstones everywhere,” but we saw none at all. Nonplussed, Linda marched to the door of the first house she saw. Five minutes later we were sitting on a porch swing poring over a Grindstone City scrapbook with an elderly woman as loquacious as my wife.

  But that was merely a warm-up. Years later on a bird-watching jaunt to Ontario’s Point Pelee National Park, we overnighted in the tomato-producing town of Leamington. Deciding to take a walk after dinner, we trundled down a one-block street in back of our motel. The outing was uneventful until Linda noticed a woman tending a garden. A full half hour later, we broke free of her backyard pond and ceramic frog collection only to encounter another woman with a hose and a patch of flowers. Two doors down and twenty minutes later, a young couple en route to their house from their station wagon was waylaid by my wife. Finally, with most of the block still stretching before us, I told Linda, “I’m sure several families have called the police by now to tell them about the suspicious characters casing their neighborhood.” Though our Canadian vacation had included visits to spectacular waterfalls, charming zoos, a historic basilica, and a whale-watching cruise, Linda would refer to the Leamington walk as “almost the best part of the trip.”

  Three days after starting the job, Dell closed his toolbox for the last time, and I shamed myself by studying Daphne’s new home. I had originally based Binky’s pen around the leftover structure of a rectangular play area and sandbox. To transform the cozy rabbit pen into a raccoon-proof villa for Daphne, Dell had merely planted a few posts in the ground to extend the walls toward our back fence, covered the sides and top with wire, and added a wooden door. Even with my nonexistent construction skills, I should have been able to do the same. Little did I realize that our duck population was destined to outgrow the pen.

  Once we transferred her from the gloomy interior of the barn to the fresh air and hazy sunshine of her pen, Daphne was a changed duck. She showed her appreciation by consuming great quantities of the scratch feed she had previously ignored. But the swimming pool went untouched. Neophytes to waterfowl, we didn’t know that Muscovies shared neither water pool nor gene pool with American domestic ducks that trace their roots to the common mallard. Unlike the Mallard derivatives, whose lives revolve around the pond, the tropical-born, marsh-dwelling Muscovies have comparatively underdeveloped oil glands and aren’t very waterproof. Consequently, they are poorly adapted to swimming. Because we were ignorant of these facts, Daphne’s failure to take advantage of the local pool facilities struck Linda as a wrong that demanded righting, a failure of nurturing whose blame we had inherited.

  “She needs a little friend to show her how to swim,” Linda told me.

  “You showed her pretty well a couple of days ago.”

  “Ducks are very social. They aren’t happy by themselves.”

  “Then,” I heard myself tell my wife as if through another person’s ears, “we’d better get her another duck.” In truth, I couldn’t think of a single reason not to. Having already bought the proposition that one duck was no trouble at all to keep, no trouble times two still equaled zero bother. How could it be otherwise? The ducks would live outdoors rather than gnaw at our woodwork, eat when stirred by hunger rather than dominate our meals, and wander our yard unsupervised rather than require complicated, coordinated periods of freedom.

  With ruthless efficiency, Linda located a source for a companion duck in the person of a farmer a few miles north with the remarkable name of Rupert Murdoch. On the evidence, I decided that he probably wasn’t the infamous media mogul. Though his house was in no worse shape than ours and of similar vintage, the matchstick barn barely hung together, and the denuded yard of hard-packed mud boasted indescribable clutter. Duck pens claimed the area, but these were nothing like the roomy, open-air living quarters that delighted Daphne. The two dozen or so wooden-sided, side-by-side, four-by-six-foot pens each contained a flock of ducks or a gaggle of geese of heretofore undreamed of breeds. “That’s a black and white Cayuga,” the elderly Rupert Murdoch drawled, elongating the word “Cayuga” into poetry at odds with the squalor. “That one’s a Blue Swede,” though it appeared neither blue nor Swedish.

  If the varieties of waterfowl were bewildering, the range of chickens wandering free-range or cooped up in the disconcertingly backward-leaning barn truly boggled the mind. We witnessed chickens whose feathers curled up like chrysanthemum petals, chickens with pom-poms on their feet, chickens with bald heads and necks, mouse-size chickens, mastiff-size chickens, and chickens whose complex color patterns turned them into optical illusions with beaks. A flock of what he termed “fancy pigeons” with feathered britches in place of naked legs scattered as he took us to the back of the barn to show us an inch-long, vitamin capsule–shaped white object. “Do you know what some fellows call these?” he asked us.

  “I wouldn’t know what to call it,” I admitted.

  “Some fellows call them rooster eggs. But they’ve never seen a rooster lay one.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s an egg. But roosters don’t lay any kinds of eggs,” he explained with a wise grin.

  After viewing various turkeys, pheasants, guinea fowl, grouse, and goats, and after stooping to pet a couple of barn cats and an old dog in a bandana, we followed Rupert Murdoch back to the duck ghetto. While Linda decided which duck to take home, I mentally recounted the plot of every episode of Hogan’s Heroes I could remember and was almost through the series run of The Prisoner when she finally picked out a female black and white Cayuga. “She’s a show duck,” the farmer warned us. “Costs a little more than your White Pekins or Khaki Campbells.”

  “She would have to,” I agreed, unsure what either of those animals were but bracing for a bite to the wallet. The cheapest parrot, after all, wore a two-hundred-dollar price tag, cockatiels flew as high as one hundred dollars, and hand-raised parakeets at Jonah’s Ark commanded eighty dollars.

  “Have to charge you ten dollars,” he insisted.

  Using a long-handled net from a catfish farm, Rupert Murdoch dipped into the Cayuga pen, cornered the female, and with a twist of an arm, scooped her up. “You don’t want her flying nowhere,” he stated. When we nodded our agreement, he deftly plucked five primary flight feathers from her right wing. The duck never even flinched. “That will keep her on the ground.” As I helped him put the Cayuga in a cardboard box and tape it—this seemed to be the preferred method of transporting birds of every ilk—Lind
a shouted to me, “Sweetheart, come quick and see a little white bathtub duck.”

  “That’s what you call a call duck,” Rupert told us.

  “Another of your show ducks?” I asked.

  He nodded. “It’s all the bigger they get.” I felt the pressure of Linda’s eyes. I shrugged. I nodded. The farmer netted a fourteen-inch-tall pure white duck with an orange beak and orange feet, and popped her in another box. If I knew how to whistle, I might have. No anxiety gnawed at me. We had a spacious pen capable of easily absorbing all three birds. We had a large fenced-in yard. We had a big bag of scratch feed. I had finally adjusted to my Zoloft dosage. Calmer and less crabby than I had been for years, I had nary a care in the world. Everything seemed, well … everything seemed just ducky.

  CHAPTER 6

  A Wild Duck Chase

  Aren’t your ducks supposed to be in the yard?” Shirley piped up, as Linda slid falafel patties onto our plates.

  “They’re probably behind the spirea bush sticking their beaks in decayed leaves,” I said, attempting to infuse even these odd words with a sense of welcoming.

  A bowl bisected by an oversize spoon crashed into a crock of mashed potatoes. “This is a cucumber dressing,” Linda explained.

  “Should we avert our eyes?”

  Shirley stopped squinting out the windows and slid back into her chair. Her light skin and short curled hair were almost exactly the same shade of beige, and I kept losing track of her eyebrows as she talked. “You wouldn’t believe the people that come into my flower shop and have no idea how much work goes into flowers,” she was telling Linda.

  “They must think they grow on trees,” I quipped.

  “They expect to get them for free.”

  “For free?” Linda shouted. “They want them for free?”

  She didn’t really own a flower shop. It was actually a flower refrigerator, and the refrigerator didn’t even belong to her. The owner of a produce store in Hubbs had subcontracted Shirley to keep a cooler in his store stocked with cut flowers in an attempt to win some customers. The business wasn’t doing well, but no new business did well in our area. If a restaurant or store managed to hang on for a couple of years through sheer force of will, the locals might begin trickling in. Our own front-porch pottery shop, designated by a sign in the front yard as Pink Pig Pottery, attracted about six visitors a month, and most of these balked at the eight-dollar price tag on our hand-thrown, one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-duplicated coffee mugs and off-center bowls.

  “Those are some of your flowers in a vase Bob made.”

  Sharing centerpiece duties with a heaped dish of rice, a vaguely bottle-shaped vessel surprisingly thick and heavy for its size supported a graceful trio of lavender Peruvian lilies. Linda had bought the flowers from Shirley partly as a means of getting acquainted. She was drawn to Shirley’s enthusiasm for gardening along with her professed love of “talking about the Lord.” Excited that she had finally made her first Lowell friend, Linda had asked the flower-refrigerator lady over for lunch. But Shirley, we learned, wasn’t a local at all. She commuted forty-five miles from a village near Lansing, where her husband worked in a butter factory. And rather than being a source of joy, as Linda’s Christian zeal was, Shirley’s religious faith was bitter solace for a spouse whom she suspected was cheating on her, a daughter who belonged to a New Age cult, a trailer that suffered from mice in the walls, and people who didn’t appreciate the value of her flowers.

  “One of these days, I’m going into their yards and start helping myself to their roses, and if they say anything, I’ll just go, ‘Well, you told me in the store they’re not really worth anything.’”

  “Oh, my gosh,” exclaimed Linda. “You really wouldn’t do that, would you? You really wouldn’t pick someone else’s flowers.”

  Shirley swiveled to face the parrot’s cage. “Stanley wouldn’t act like that,” she declared in a little girl voice. “Stanley’s too nice a boy to pick on me.”

  “Careful,” I admonished, as her fingers strayed perilously close to the bars of Stanley Sue’s cage. “She’s not what you’d call a people bird. She will definitely bite you if she gets the chance.” I emphasized Stanley Sue’s correct gender along with the warning.

  “Not a nice boy like Stanley. He wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  “She would.”

  Shirley began expounding on her family problems, and my mind naturally migrated to my own misfortunes.

  A bad winter even by Michigan measure had tossed cold water on our assumptions that keeping ducks would be a cinch. Daily chores kicked off each morning with our bundling up from head to toe, trudging across an arctic landscape, and struggling to get inside the duck pen. Since the frozen outdoor spigot on the back of the house was unusable, we were forced to drag a long hose down the hill from the leaky laundry sink inside the basement. By midwinter, the backyard snowpack had compacted to a treacherous glaze, and we took to strapping metal cleats designed for ice fisherman onto our boots. Snow and slush from the previous day delighted in hardening overnight and blocking the pen’s wooden door. Tired of chipping at the ground with a shovel, I twice raised the bottom of the door by hacking off the planks, but I still had to shovel, sweep, and chip to free it most days. Once inside the pen, changing the water in the plastic wading pool involved first breaking up the half-inch-thick surface ice and sloshing out the chunks with a push broom. Liberating the largest icebergs meant plunging our hands in the pool and wresting them out, ending up with soaked arms and with bodies chilled to the nubbins.

  I hated the exertion. The frigid temperatures depleted my tiny energy reserves, but they didn’t daunt the ducks, who merrily took to the pool even when the television weatherman gloated that the thermometer had bottomed out below zero. In the throes of a howling blizzard, as Linda and I stood shivering, wrapped in blankets as the furnace labored to keep up, we would peer outside through the blowing snow to find all three ducks trolling in the water. Taking to a pool in icicle weather baffled me until I realized that the coldest water was still tens of degrees warmer than the ground and air temperatures. The swimming pool was a kind of low-grade sauna. Even the hydrophobic Daphne splashed around with enthusiasm. But because of her underpowered oil gland, her belly feathers accumulated ice crystals that could grow to Christmas tree ornament size by night. “Do you know where the blow-dryer went?” Linda would ask me. “I have to defrost Daphne again.”

  Spring came as a great relief, but not immediately. Throughout winter, we had scattered straw on the pen floor to insulate the ducks from the ground. When the straw-and-ice sandwich melted, the accumulated droppings and spilled food grew redolent in the sun. I had never regarded straw in any quantity as a material of consequence. Even a bale the size of a file cabinet was easy to lug one-handed across the yard. But an armload of this soggy, compressed, waste-laden mulch was staggeringly cumbersome for the weak of frame such as myself. Transforming the smelly pen-floor burden from a biohazard to potential compost necessitated my wading deep into the pit of rural life by wielding an actual pitchfork. Added to this was the indignity of donning rubber work gloves and hitching myself to the back end of a wheelbarrow that I had always sniffily regarded as a useless curio. I carted countless loads from the pen to the back fence, holding my breath as I pitched the fetid debris into our field. Afterward, I lay panting as Linda effortlessly brought the ducks a brand-new layer of light and airy fresh straw bedding.

  Simple drudgery followed, as the season matured. Although I avoided duck duties weekday mornings by dint of a freelance job away from home, when I returned in the afternoon, I couldn’t escape Phoebe’s continual clamor to be let out of the pen. Muscovy Daphne emitted little noise. Tiny white call duck Peggy quacked an agreeable whispery purr. But black and white Cayuga Phoebe unleashed an atmosphere-cleaving series of complaints. Like Ollie, she was unrelenting. We began to give the trio the run of the yard as soon as either Linda or I pulled into the driveway. We would leave them out for hours, ra
rely glancing in their direction, reasoning that farmers like Rupert Murdoch gave their ducks, geese, chickens, goats, and pigs free run from morning to dusk. And we had the advantage of having a fence around our yard that would keep our ducks from straying.

  “AREN’T THOSE YOUR ducks just beyond the fence?” Shirley asked, once Linda had finished a lengthy grace that blessed our food, each of our animals, and the majority of our living relatives by name.

  I was out the side door on Linda’s heels before my napkin could hit the linoleum. At the bottom of the hill, Daphne paced back and forth on the correct side of our fence only because she was too fat to wriggle through and join the two escapees. Peggy and Phoebe flickered in and out of sight amid a tangle of wild black raspberry bushes. As I flopped over the fence, Linda galloped across the grass and yanked open a crude metal gate on the far side of the yard. “Try to herd them this way, I’ll shoo them back in,” she hollered. At the top of the cement steps one stride outside the kitchen, Shirley towered with her arms crossed high on her chest. She was chewing and held a fork in her fist.

  Shielding my face, I plunged through stubborn foliage that mustered the full strength of its xylem and phloem to resist my passage. Flashes of white and black feathers ahead of me indicated that the ducks were racing forward alongside the fence. I took this as a hopeful indication that they were searching for a passage back inside the yard, preferring their plastic pool to the seasonal pond that glittered in a greening vista between our backyard and the river. Urging the ducks eastward as plant life stung my skin, I fought to keep my feet in view to avoid a tumble down the boulder-strewn slope. Unhampered by height, the ducks moved nimbly through narrow openings at ground level below a maddening thicket of whips and razor wire masquerading as branches.