Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  CHAPTER 10

  Let’s Talk Turkey

  Sweetheart, come out here quick! Hurry, sweetheart.” A fresh layer of snow tried to muffle Linda’s voice. But her summons still reached me upstairs from the backyard, penetrating two panes of glass, thirty feet of diagonal space, and the pleasant whoosh of heated air through the furnace duct. I was lounging in my office enjoying a cup of ginger tea and savoring the fact that Linda was taking care of the ducks on a frigid January afternoon while I read a detective novel with a warm cat pressed against my leg.

  “Sweetie, come quick, it’s Hector!”

  Bolting out of my chair, I thudded down a flight of stairs, dodged a twenty-five-pound bag of rabbit food in the living room corridor, and bounded toward the basement. Various unpleasant scenarios crowded my brain. The farmer who had sold us Hector three months earlier was right about our Muscovy’s mercurial personality. Hector could have injured one of our ducks, though so far he had reserved his aggressive attitude for people. That meant he might be chasing Linda. When gripped by a darker mood, he would not be deterred from latching on to a leg or article of clothing with his wickedly serrated beak. Or the blowhard could have clashed with our neighbor’s dog or a raccoon on snack break from hibernation. Clomping across the basement floor, I expected the worst as I threw open the back door. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

  Dressed in a nylon jacket and crowned with the inevitable stocking cap, Linda stood beaming on the back deck with a large white duck perched on her shoulder.

  “What is he doing up there? Are you okay?” I demanded, fearful that Hector might have bitten my wife silly.

  “He flew up there himself. Well, he didn’t exactly fly. I was bending down to pick up the hose, and he sort of climbed up all on his own.”

  “You must be very proud,” I muttered above the hammering of my heart. “Both of you.”

  “Take a picture of us, sweetie!”

  WE HAD AT FIRST treated Hector with such extraordinary caution, he might as well have been a fer-de-lance. Isolated in his wire loop, he was safely prevented from inflicting any evil on our geese and ducks that his Muscovy mind might devise. I was especially wary of him. When dangling an arm into his loop to give him water or a fresh bowl of feed, I moved in exaggeratedly slow motion, speaking in the same reassuring voice that Dr. Glaser had used successfully with me.

  “Now, I’m just giving you something nice to eat, Hector,” I’d quietly explain. “Here, I’m setting down the bowl, and in no way should my fingers remind you of edible pink worms. They are far too bony to enjoy, not succulent like Linda’s, if you get my drift.”

  After a couple of days of keeping Hector in solitary confinement, Linda complained, “This isn’t any better than the way he lived before. He needs room to move around.”

  “How about Idaho?”

  “Just let him out. He looks utterly harmless to me.”

  “So did Ollie, and Hector’s a lot bigger.”

  But the next time the ducks were grazing in the yard, Linda deemed it a good opportunity to test Hector’s social skills, despite my whining protests. “It’s a huge area,” she pointed out. “He shouldn’t feel territorial or hostile toward the ducks or geese.”

  “How about toward the person who picks him up?”

  With a dismissive sigh, Linda reached into Hector’s pen, pulled him out without incident, and deposited him on the grass near our geese Liza and Hailey. I took two long steps sideways that simultaneously took me closer to the geese in order to protect them in case of an attack and also closer to the basement door should I decide to run for it instead. The geese continued nibbling at the lawn as Hector waggled his tail and waddled a few steps toward them. The female ducks busied themselves patrolling the area near the spirea bush in search of fresh patches of gourmet mud. Stewart and Trevor shadowed the females at a distance, confused by their low autumnal hormone levels as to what they should do next. A tanker truck thundered past the house. A sulfur butterfly fluttered in a splash of sunlight on the border of our woods. Hector moved closer to Liza, flapped his wings, and ambled off on his own in another direction.

  Once back inside the pen, the story was different. The geese and female ducks gave the liberated Hector a wide berth, as if they were noticing him for the first time, while Stewart and Trevor quacked in whispered gratitude for the fence that separated them from the Muscovy. Hector walked to the water bucket, towing a perimeter of empty space around him. Looking bored, he gave the feed dish a perfunctory peck, toddled toward Maxine, who scurried away from him, then began preening the base of his neck with his beak. From the open basement door, I leaned toward the yard, expecting a ruckus at any moment. During dinner, deafened to the outside world by the indoor birds, we peered through the windows. A placid white shape stood by as the geese splashed in the pool. Then it was dark. There was no trouble the next day, either.

  Hector turned out to be a complex Jekyll and Hyde of a fellow who seldom socialized with the other ducks. For days at a time, his behavior was innocuous almost to the point of invisibility, as he kept silently to himself while brooding over weighty matters known only to a waterfowl who doesn’t enjoy the water. His antipathy toward the pool was responsible for the dirt-streaked feathers that gave him the air of a tough from the wrong side of the marsh. Even by Muscovy standards, the preen gland at the base of his back wasn’t up to snuff. Try as he might to groom his feathers, his beak either came up dry or globbed his tail and lower back with yellow spots. Once Linda realized how agreeable our “Ducker Jekyll” could be, she occasionally whisked him into the basement, plunked him in the laundry tub, and lathered him up with baby shampoo. “I think he likes it!” a soaked Linda would holler up the stairs to me, as Hector thrashed in the basin. She never quite got him clean—industrial solvents would have been required—but he looked substantially better after a bath and sported an agreeable Johnson & Johnson scent.

  Hector’s Mr. Hyde aspect would descend upon him without warning. One day he’d be docile and withdrawn. The next day, without so much as the portent of a full moon, he would undergo a personality cataclysm. As if seized by the spirit of a rabid lapdog, he would follow us around the yard panting with great gusto, his crimson-masked head thrown back, beak thrust open, crest raised, and glassy eyes lit with incomprehensible intent. “He just wants to be petted,” Linda explained, and against any prediction I would have made, he huffed and puffed contentedly in place as she stroked the back of his neck. If she sat down in the grass, he would actually climb upon her lap in search of affection.

  But petting him could be risky. His hissing just as often gave way to aggression, as he defended what he considered his territory. When Hector was out of the pen and out of sorts, I seldom ventured into the backyard without a pushbroom to push between my body and his jagged-edged bill, capable of inflicting frighteningly hued hematomas. If he was bent upon attack, there was no cowing him. On one occasion, each time he came at me with blood-lust on his brain, I picked him up and tossed him in the air, but he would not be discouraged. Fluttering to the ground, he resumed the attack unceasingly and tirelessly. When he was in such a state, there was no herding him back to the pen with the others. Carefully avoiding his snapping beak, I picked him up, clamped him against my chest, and plunked him down inside the pen. But he never transferred this hostility to his fellow inmates. He wandered sullenly but nonviolently among the ducks and geese, as disconnected from their social order as a tortoise at a bridge tournament.

  Though Hector’s good days and bad days were evenly doled out, we doted on his outgoing personality most of the time and found more comedy than threat in his rages. He was mysteriously selective in his judgments about people. Whenever my parents and sisters, Joan and Bette, came for a Saturday lunch, we inevitably lured them into the yard. Without hesitation, Hector would bypass my well-nipped legs in favor of launching beak strikes at my mother. She was, in fact, the first of us ever to suffer a Hector attack, and because she was so e
ngrossed describing a friend’s latest ailment, she didn’t even notice that a large duck was chewing on the hem of her dress until I pulled him away. Just as quickly as Hector categorized my mom as beak fodder, he tagged Linda’s friend Deanne a romantic interest.

  “Isn’t he sweet,” cooed Linda, as Deanne sat under our hackberry tree holding and stroking the love-struck miscreant. “I hope he decides to become Daphne’s husband. Rupert Murdoch said that Muscovies make the best mothers.”

  “What a thought. That would mean more ducklings,” I pointed out.

  “I would love it if we had some baby ducklings.”

  “Muscovy ducklings,” I added, but Linda still didn’t get my drift.

  “Growing up into big Muscovies. Like Hector,” Deanne prompted. Sensing that he was being insulted, Hector scuffled his clawed feet until Deanne set him on the ground.

  WE DID END UP with baby ducks, but Daphne wasn’t the mother. Before the first snowfall of the season arrived—and a month before Hector turned himself into my wife’s epaulet—Daphne grew listless and stopped eating. Linda brought her indoors late one afternoon to spare her from a cold and windy night, and by morning she was dead.

  “I think she was older than we knew,” Linda said. “She looked old when we first got her.” And it was true that even in death she seemed worn down rather than at rest. She had carried the heavy burden of ushering us into the world of poultry and had witnessed the passing of three friends—Phoebe, Martha, and feisty little Peggy. She was not only our first duck, she was our sole mouse-devouring duck, and her passing saddened us.

  Although our waterfowl dormitory was segregated into male and female residences, we frequently allowed the boys and girls to mingle in the yard once spring had passed and Stewart and Trevor were no longer constantly chasing the hens—and I use that word correctly. Female ducks are hens. Male ducks are drakes. And duck owners who permit unchaperoned conjugals are asking for unplanned embryos. We were accustomed to Maxine and Chloe disappearing into their doghouses and sitting on a nest of unfertilized eggs for days on end, rarely abandoning their vigil to eat, drink, or upbraid our lawn. So we didn’t take the latest round of incubation behavior seriously until the morning we were greeted with the sound of peeping from the pen. Maxine jealously guarded four brown-and-yellow gobs of fluff. Chloe had just one duckling of her own. Considering her broken leg and limited mobility, one youngster was probably all she could handle. Chloe proved that she could handle me just fine when I reached for the tiny brown baby and she flew at my face. Miraculously, she missed my nose—only to catch my wrist with two rattlesnake-quick bites.

  Linda was ecstatic about the babies. She laughed when they came out from their shelters to peck crumbled duck meal, whooped when they flapped their stubby, featherless wings, and nearly exploded when three of them tried swimming in their water bowl. But she also felt the weight of worry that any new mother undergoes. “What if Hector’s mean to them?” though he was too self-absorbed to even acknowledge their presence underfoot. “What if they get stuck in the swimming pool and drown,” she fretted, but they were too small to climb over the rim. “Do you think they’ll be safe out in the yard?” Behaving like miniature adults, they followed the other ducks around the lawn, the synchronized twitching of green sprigs betraying their presence in the tall grass.

  Even I got caught up in the excitement, phoning my friend Brian in Washington, D.C., to brag, “We’ve got baby ducks!”

  “So do we,” Brian replied. “We’ve got them in the pond behind the condo.”

  “But these are ours,” I emphasized.

  “We’re raising them.” “We’ve got all kinds of them,” Brian bragged. “You’ve got to come out here and see them.”

  By midsummer, the ducklings had grown as large as their parents. They had also sprouted adult feathers and acquired determinable genders. Chloe’s Clara was her double. Via one or both of the male Khaki Campbells, Maxine had produced the mostly brown Gwelda, who wore a mallard’s white and blue hashmarks on her wings, and the miraculous Marybelle, who accessorized a coat like her sister Gwelda’s by adding a beige ring around her neck.

  “Are you sure Howard didn’t get out into the duck pen?” I grilled Linda. “That ring looks like his work.”

  The two male ducklings had rather plain brown-and-cream bodies offset by the dark green head and roguish curlicued tail feathers of a male mallard. We shuttled them into the boys’ enclosure lest further demon-seed hybrid offspring appear, but son and nephew fought so vigorously with father and uncle that we rapidly returned the newcomers to the female sector, figuring we could postpone dealing with their housing until spring when they would receive their first full wallop of duck testosterone. The addition of five ducks to a pen already occupied by Chloe, Maxine, Hector, Liza, and Hailey might have crowded the female side of the fence if the entire group hadn’t gotten along so well. But we threatened the harmonious atmosphere when we unexpectedly took in a quartet of birds vastly more unruly than the greenheads and several magnitudes bulkier.

  THE FREDERIK MEIJER GARDENS was a botanical garden fifteen minutes from our house. Linda and I particularly enjoyed visiting the rain forest conservatory on weekends, when members of the Great Lakes Aviary Society showed off their pet parrots against an ersatz jungle backdrop. One Sunday we had been admiring a sulfur-crested cockatoo with a louder voice and far more demanding personality than Ollie’s and were gleefully reminiscing about the sad expression on the owner’s face as we started back home. No sooner had we pulled onto Bradford Street alongside the Gardens when Linda blurted, “Pull over! Pull over! Right here! Don’t you see them?” Remarkably, I hadn’t. On the side of the road, a trio of black and bronze–colored turkeys with flashes of green iridescence on their backs surrounded a fourth turkey huddled on the ground. They yipped like dogs as we rolled to a stop.

  My only experience with wild turkeys had occurred a couple of months earlier at the house of our friends Tam and Steve on the Flat River. Squatting in their living room, we had peeked through a window at turkeys so shy, they scattered at the movement of a curtain. These, on the other hand, refused to budge when Linda and I climbed out of the car. Instead, the three standing turkeys advanced on us as Linda knelt next to the downed bird. Two made warbling cooing sounds while the third pecked insistently at my shoe. If their behavior was unlikely, so was the setting, which favored neither wild nor domestic poultry. Though evidence of woods and meadows lay all around us, their habitat was broken up by a subdivision. Behind a stand of trees that at first glance appeared to be a woods, the newest homes concealed their wealth. An elderly woman across the street watched the turkeys mob us as she tended a neatly coiffured hedge. Linda trotted up the front walk, and with her usual enthusiasm, inquired whether the woman knew anything about the birds.

  “Oh, them,” the woman chuckled. “They make their rounds every day. They like to go from yard to yard and visit us. They’re crazy about people.”

  “Where did they come from?” asked Linda.

  The woman gestured vaguely toward the thicket where the turkeys were gathered. “The Oostdykes. They had a lot more of them, but these are all that’s left.”

  I had tentatively moved toward the conversation, then backed off for fear that I might end up in the backyard touring a ceramic-frog collection. After a long interval during which civilizations rose and crumbled to dust, Linda finally returned to fill me in on the story. A young couple called the Oostdykes had spotted a few wild turkey stragglers upon moving to their upscale suburban neighborhood and decided it would be great ecological fun to supplement their number. They bought thirty-six turkey chicks, hand-fed them for several weeks in their cavernous garage, and when the birds got too large to handle, unleashed them upon the world. The young toms and hens explored the area but did not successfully colonize. Within three months, the three dozen had dwindled to the four individuals here on the shoulder of the road. Contributing to their troubles in the wild, we later determined, was thei
r lineage as hybridized birds bred for dinner-platter delectability. Engineered for maximum body weight and minimum initiative, they had about as much chance of making it on their own as our pasta-eating parrot, Ollie.

  “John—that’s the husband—said that foxes got most of them. Some broke their legs falling out of trees,” Linda told me. She grimaced. “He ended up shooting them. We better see if we can get the injured one some help.”

  I often find myself wondering how my college-age self of the 1970s would regard what I have become. He might have forgiven my move out to the country. He would not have accepted my adoption of ducks and geese. And if a time traveler from the 1990s had materialized in front of College Bob to play him a video of Married Bob struggling under the weight of a thirty-pound turkey, while three more turkeys followed him up a curved driveway behind a scrim of trees, it’s safe to say that I/me/he would have joined a Tibetan monastery to prevent such a catastrophe from coming to pass.

  While I did my best to hide behind the unexpectedly placid turkey, Linda rang the Oostdyke’s bell. It resounded with an authoritative Westminster chime designed to signal that we were darkening the doorstep of people with oodles of money. The three turkeys pecked at the lawn near a Tiffany gas lamp, where remnants of scratch feed showed signs that the area served as a feeding station. They didn’t seem inclined to wander, so I set down the fourth upon a bed of exotic Sulawesi Island hardwood mulch. Extracting a sales slip from her purse, Linda wrote a note explaining that we were willing to take the turkeys, added our phone number, and wedged the folded note into the solid platinum doorframe.