I broke through the bushes, catching sight of Linda seconds after the ducks had noticed her. She had hoped to get below them on the hill and turn them toward the open gate, but wife and waterfowl intersected at the edge of the woods just beyond our property. Linda made a leap for Phoebe, barely missing her. I chased the ducks through the trees, unable to catch up until Phoebe changed direction and headed due south for the water.
Born of virile late-spring rains, the pond was no less than fifty feet wide and seductive in its sheltered calm. Its length stretched an unknowable distance east through tracts of trees that guarded a boundary of leg-enveloping muck. If the ducks reached the water, we would have no chance whatsoever of retrieving them. Fortunately, the truants paused long enough to contemplate the majesty of the pond for me to stumble down the slope and cut them off. Wildly waving my arms, I sent them zigzagging back toward Linda. This time a flying tackle successfully nabbed Peggy.
“Put her back in the pen,” Linda panted, thrusting the football-size duck into my hands. “I’ll get Phoebe.” I saw great wisdom in this. My fear of self-injury put me in an altogether different class than my self-sacrificing spouse. Plus, my long hours sitting in chairs were poor preparation for tearing willy-nilly through the scrub, and I was quickly running out of steam.
At the open gate I met Daphne, poised to start her own wilderness excursion. She ambled back to the duck house a few steps ahead of me. I dumped a complaining Peggy in the straw, latched the pen door, and walked toward the gate, expecting Linda with Phoebe. Instead, I heard a call whose plaintiveness rivaled the horn of a distant freight train.
“Phoebe! Phoebe!”
I joined my wife in the woods. She had come within an arm’s length of the escapee when a log had intervened. The nearly flightless duck had sailed over the obstruction, which halted Linda with a blow to her shin.
For the next half hour, we combed the woods, swale, and swamp, snapping our heads toward a suggestive ripple of sunlight in the weeds, an empty Jay’s potato chip bag trapped by deadfall, a white Styrofoam cup, the scrabbling of a squirrel, a red-bellied woodpecker spiraling up a tree, a headless doll, and the flutter of chickadees unhappy with our intrusion. We wandered as far as an unfordable stream splicing the Grand River to our pond. Changing direction, we trudged back a half mile until the pond petered out at the neighbor’s raised dirt driveway. Flip-flopping, we fanned eastward again. We shouted pointlessly for Phoebe, singing out the name of a duck who had never responded to anything but food, the wading pool, and the company of other ducks. “She’s always wanted a husband,” Linda announced, as we broke through to the busy road in front of our property and the billboard promising MCDONALD’S—2 SMILES AHEAD. We turned toward the house. “She wants to have babies,” Linda amplified.
“Maybe she’ll come home when she’s hungry.”
I never even considered what poor luncheon hosts we had been until I followed Linda into the kitchen to find Shirley sitting at the table. Several thicknesses of paper towel covered her index finger. A blush of blood stained the surface. “Stanley bit me,” she said. “I was just trying to make friends with him.”
Waving off our apologies, Shirley politely resumed her meal with us, stayed for coffee, joked about her injury as she tarried on our porch, and never visited us again. We saw nothing further of Phoebe, whose clipped wing prevented her from flying away. Linda swore she glimpsed a black and white duck on the pond two mornings in a row, but the sightings were too distant and fleeting to confirm. Since only mallards and wood ducks included us on their travel itineraries, the visitor might indeed have been Phoebe. Unless she was very lucky, our earthbound duck had little chance of surviving among the raccoons, owls, and foxes that lived in the woods, nor could she easily feed herself. But we liked to imagine she had waddled down to the river and floated with the current toward Lake Michigan, joining welcoming flocks of ducks along the way.
Our sadness at losing Phoebe hit me especially hard. It obliged me to reinforce our backyard fence to prevent continued escapes. That meant spending several hours on my knees fastening a two-foot-high length of chicken wire along the bottom of the fence for its full length. An unskilled male or female could have finished the job in a single afternoon, but my unique approach spanned days. Unrolling a bail of fencing the proper length a few yards ahead of my progress and balancing the bail just right consumed a distressing amount of time. If I didn’t unroll the bail far enough, it loved snapping back at me like a spring, or toppling over and jerking the wire from my hands. If I unrolled too much chicken wire, it tangled itself in the wild black raspberries and other revenge-hungry bushes that poked branches at me through the fence. I twisted finger-piercing stubs of bailing wire to the fencing every nine inches or so, staggering them from the top to the bottom of the chicken wire. Not until I was two-thirds finished with the project and my hands were misshapen into bleeding claws did I conceive of wearing work gloves and using pliers to twist the wire.
“Peggy and Daphne are lonely,” Linda informed me the Saturday afternoon I had finished the fencing upgrade. I had planned on spending the rest of the day unbending my back, but a car trip loomed instead. “They miss Phoebe. They need a little friend.”
We found Rupert Murdoch busily preparing for the first of countless county fairs that spanned the summer around our portion of the state. He waved when he saw us, but his grin wasn’t as sustained as on our last visit. “My wife says she’s tired of me spending so much time with my animals,” he lamented. “She’s making me cut back on how many I show this year.”
“How many are you taking to the fair?” I asked.
“Way less than normal,” he told us sheepishly. “Not more than two hundred chickens and ducks, all tolled.”
As Rupert gave Linda an updated tour of his duck pens, and Linda agonized over choosing a new duck, I wrestled with the fact that a septuagenarian with a limp easily outclassed me in terms of strength, energy, and ambition. Judging from his glacial movements, I figured it would take him an entire day to cage two hundred birds and load them on his truck. But at least he would get the whole job done. If working slowly was the key to accomplishing more, I wanted no part of that system. I gauged a successful day not by how many tasks I had finished, but by how much leisure time remained following a minimal show of effort.
“They call that one a Blue Swede,” he explained to Linda, when she had picked out a bluish-gray duck with a black hood and white trim. Extending his long-handled net into the small enclosure reserved for Swedes, he chased a half dozen or so birds back and forth until he had cornered the designated duck. Linda told him she wanted the fatter one near the feed trough instead, and he began the culling all over again. The process reminded me of goldfish-buying, when my wife would point out a particular individual in a tank of perhaps a hundred essentially identical carp, and the clerk would risk inserting his upper body in the water in pursuit of exactly the right fish.
As Rupert regrouped, I cast my mental net upon what I later learned was an Indian Runner Duck, an improbably tall and thin bird that resembled a wine bottle with wings. Bustling about its pen with a nervous pitch and stiff vertical posture, one of these, in fact, was nearly my identical twin. I fantasized herding myself around our yard and wondered if, like the salamander in Julio Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl,” I might identify so closely with the bird that we would exchange psyches. Before I could explain the possibilities to Linda, she had nixed the runner duck on appearance issues.
“Every time I looked at him, I would just feel sorry for him.”
“But you married me anyway.”
“What are you talking about?”
Rupert lifted up the Blue Swede for Linda’s approval. “Now she’s what you term a show duck,” he warned us, as he popped the bird in the requisite cardboard box. “They come a little more expensive than your White Pekins or Rouens.” The fee was exactly what we had paid for the black and white Cayuga, an affordable ten dollars, though the nuisance
value of a duck was infinitely greater, of course.
Linda named our putative Scandinavian Martha, “because she looks like a Martha,” she said. The Swede got along fine with Daphne and Peggy right out of the box—once the usual formalities of pinning down the newcomer and showing her who was boss were dispensed with. Her temperament pleased us. She was less wild than Phoebe, more accustomed to people, and also every bit as noisy, which spared me the trauma of having to adjust to a quiet environment.
Though Martha was Daphne’s equal in terms of size, neither of the two matched Peggy in the feistiness department. The fearless little duck took charge of the flock without so much as submitting to a popular vote. Whenever we let them out of their pen, Peggy invariably took the lead. When it was time to shoo them back inside, she brought up the rear, herding them a few steps in front of me. She was first at the feed trough, eating unmolested while the others indulged their queen. She was first in the pool, too, clouding the freshly changed water by rinsing a small beak that held an impressive cache of backyard mud. While she generously allowed the others to swim alongside her, she might launch a peck at a wing or feathered back as a reminder of her authority. But Peggy didn’t merely boss her subjects. She seemed bent on protecting them. If I trespassed into the pen to check their food or change their water, she would insert herself between her flock and me. Then, as I was closing the door behind me, she would dart forward, quacking a hoarse stream of duck invectives as if to prove to Martha and Daphne that she had chased me out. “You’re lucky I’m letting you leave in one piece,” she seemed to boast.
We were crazy about Peggy, as were most people who laid eyes on her. “How’s that little white duck with the bright orange feet?” my sister, Joan, would ask me when we ran into one another at my mom and dad’s house. “I’ve got to see Peggy,” Linda’s friend Deanne would insist when she came by for a visit.
“One of these days, I’m going to pick you up,” I’d warn Peggy, though I never assaulted her pride by carrying out the threat.
“Let’s get a baby call duck and raise it to like being held,” Linda suggested.
Rupert Murdoch told us such things were possible. “The more you fool with them, the tamer they get,” he counseled Linda on the phone. But he didn’t have any call duck ducklings. Or bush baby babies, presumably. Applying herself to the quest with her usual intensity, Linda located a matched pair of them at a business called Dorflinger’s, a few miles north of Rupert’s farm, between Rockford and Cedar Springs.
“Dorflinger’s?” I demanded. “That’s a nursery. Not a poultry nursery. It’s a greenhouse, isn’t it?”
“I stopped in to look at their perennials and got to telling Mrs. Dorflinger we were trying to find a baby call duck, and she said they had a couple in the back.”
“Wait, wait. Why would you tell Mrs. Dorflinger we wanted a call duck?”
She regarded me with amazement bordering on pity. “I always talk to people in stores, and that’s what we talked about.” And it was true. Linda measured the success of any commercial transaction less by whether she received fair goods at a fair price than by the length of time the store personnel spent chatting with her. She discussed the stickier aspects of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians with Eddie, the clerk at the Lowell Blimpie sandwich shop. She knew intimate medical details about most of the cashiers at the Food City supermarket and shared a stack of our Quebec vacation photos with Salvador of Salvador’s Pizza. Not long ago, I had been praising a fast-food joint whose gooey cinnamon rolls particularly appealed to me. “I won’t even go in there,” Linda huffed. “They’re not friendly at all. I was telling this one girl about how my windshield wiper fell off when I was driving. It was a very funny story that anyone else would have enjoyed hearing, but she just gave me a mean look like she couldn’t be bothered and asked me if I wanted to order anything.”
As it turned out, in addition to its advertised business selling flowers and shrubs, Dorflinger’s conducted a speakeasy-style side trade in ducks, chickens, and pygmy goats, but only if you were in-the-know enough to ask to see the pens behind the store.
“Come out to the car, sweetie. I’ve got the two call duck babies in the backseat.”
“You bought two of them?”
“Of course, I bought them both. You wouldn’t want them to get lonely, would you? And this way, there’s one for each of us to fool with.”
DECIDING THE DUCKLINGS would benefit from maximum contact with us, we installed them on our enclosed front porch in Bertha-Simon-Binky’s old rabbit cage. This arrangement didn’t please the fuzzy yellow fussbudgets. Despite a mere six days’ experience in the world and ignorance about the essentials of life, they had already formed an unyielding dislike of people in general and duckling-fancying people in particular. Every time a human shadow fell upon them, the pair exploded in a flurry of feathers and peeps, scattering food and water in all directions in a miniature yet intensified version of our initial experience with Daphne.
“They just need to get used to being held,” Linda suggested.
“That’s what you said about Binky,” I reminded her.
Linda was sure that the duck hostility would melt once our loving intentions toward them became clear. We gave it our best shot. Twice a day, we cradled them in our hands and petted them, crooning, “Oh, what nice little ducks you are.” Squirming and squeaking when we first plucked them up, the ducklings would gradually ratchet their attitudes down to those of simmering displeasure. They tolerated our stroking their heads and necks, mainly because they were still too young to have mastered biting us. By the end of the first week, we fooled ourselves into thinking that we were making progress. But each time we approached them in their cage, they acted as if they had never seen such travesties of creation before, throwing themselves into their food and water dishes with compact fury. By the end of the first week, the mixture of duck droppings and spoiled food splattered on the walls and floor made our porch an olfactorally memorable spot.
One furnace and plumbing technician, Greg, paid us a service call the afternoon our well pump stopped working. Our well apparatus was the bulky old-fashioned type; below our bathroom window crouched an apparent doghouse containing a well pump that could have come from the boiler room of the RMS Lusitania. To access the machinery, Greg had to unbolt one wall of the pump house, poke his legs inside, and drop down four feet to an earthen-floor well pit. After the customary fifteen-minute minimum-billing wait, I sidled outdoors and stuck my head through the opening to ask if he had located the problem.
“Some critter has made himself at home inside your well,” he told me, with barely suppressed amusement. He stuck a shovel in the pile of dirt he had already excavated. “He buried your pump and it overheated.” Here and there a flanged mesmer valve or grommeted phlogiston regulator emerged from the heaped earth like a Chichen Itzan artifact, but the body of the antique pump remained hidden.
“An animal,” I groaned. With so many domestic creatures causing us grief, it didn’t seem fair that we should suffer from the whims of wild animals, too.
“Probably a woodchuck. He dug so far underground, I can’t even find the entrance to his hole.”
“Have you run into this kind of thing before?” I inquired, hoping that woodchuck vandalism was commonplace in our area.
“Let’s just say, I’ll put this in my memoirs.”
By the time Greg had emerged from digging out our pump and replacing the burned-out points in the motor, his clothes were stained with soil and sweat. It was all part of a day’s work in a profession that plunged him into the dankest recesses of his customers’ domestic lives. He climbed into dusty attics that had never seen the light of an alternating-current lamp, thrust himself under kitchen sinks whose cupboard enclosures bred undiscovered species of mildew, probed sewage-pipe entrances, and squeezed his frame through crawl spaces where filth frolicked unfettered. Our house was no exception. The previous winter, he had scooped buckets of soot from our chimney and pulled a
fried bat from the oil furnace burner. He suffered these jobs without complaint. But as he stood on our front porch drinking a glass of ice water while I wrote him a check, he sniffed the air, aimed his nose at the agitated ducklings, and winced, “Are they always this smelly?”
That’s when Linda and I abandoned our roles as surrogate hen and drake and surrendered the ducklings to their peers. While Linda was still disinfecting the porch, we heard Martha’s clamorous quacking and the beat of wings against the plastic swimming pool. Instead of adopting the ducklings, the three adults pursued them without pause. Peggy led the attack against her own kind with vigor. By the time I reached them, their yellow down feathers were damp and flecked with mud, but they preferred a beating to the safety of my arms. We put the pair inside the bunny cage, but the adults still managed to get to them. Peggy poked her beak through the wire from the front while Martha harassed them from the back. Before we could intervene, they had bloodied the smaller duckling’s wing. Grabbing a length of chicken wire fence, I made a double-thickness ring around the babies. That finally ended the assaults.
“You’d think we had some endangered species out here,” I complained to Linda. “We’ve got the ducklings inside a cage, inside a fence, inside a pen, inside a fenced-in yard. The last passenger pigeon in America was never this well protected.”
As the call ducks grew, we put aside the bunny pen while enlarging and reinforcing the ring of fencing. Whenever we let the adults out of the pen, we put the ring out in the yard around them, thereby allowing the youngsters to peck at the grass unmolested. The attacks had taken their toll, however. The female developed a condition known as slipped wing, in which the tips of both wings jutted outward rather than hugging her body, caused by a combination of stress and poor nutrition. Mrs. Dorflinger had told Linda to feed the babies the same food as the adults, but we learned too late from the folks at the Lowell feed mill that ducklings need a special vitamin-and-mineral supplement. At least the visual clue allowed us to tell the female, Wing Ding, apart from her brother, Blabby.
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