Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  The slatted wood floors inside the Park Hills Drug Store squeaked and groaned like a patient in a sickbed as I threaded my way through narrow aisles stocked with unfamiliar palliatives and elixirs. Ahead of me in line at the pharmacy counter stood an elderly woman so frail of frame, I wondered how she had ever darted through the traffic out front until I realized from the slow pace at which Park Hills conducted its business that she had undoubtedly been waiting for her prescription since Reagan’s first inaugural. When my turn finally came and I informed the pudgy pharmacist, “I’m here to pick up a prescription for Tarte,” he couldn’t have been more excited to meet me.

  “You’re here for the goose?” he asked, blinking his large eyes.

  “Yes, prescription for Tarte, please,” I repeated.

  “Matty,” he called to the sixty-something woman rattling glass vials behind him. “It’s the man with the goose.”

  “How’s the goose doing?” Matty brightly asked me.

  “We put her medication in a liquid medium as your veterinarian requested,” the pharmacist explained, as he removed a small plastic bottle from a refrigerator next to the cash register. “I tried to choose a flavor that I thought your goose would like. This one is liver. We had a fish-flavor base, but I didn’t know if geese cared for fish.”

  “Not as much as they love liver,” I assured him. “Anyway, she won’t have much of an opportunity to taste it. I pretty much squirt it straight into her crop with a syringe.”

  “You use a syringe?” he asked in wonderment, widening his eyes so far, he seemed positively owlish. Who cooks for you, I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t want any trouble. “I guess you couldn’t use a spoon.” He chuckled as he popped the medicine into a bag with a handful of pro bono syringes.

  “I hope your goose gets better,” Matty told me. “We’ve done cats before, but never somebody’s goose.”

  “That would explain the liver and fish flavorings,” I replied, as I edged away.

  Linda set up living quarters for Liza on our enclosed porch that would have been the envy of any housebound goose. Filling a wading pool with straw, she topped it with one of several bed sheets that she changed and washed throughout the day. After dark, she tossed a lightweight blanket over Liza’s back and would have offered her a pillow if she could have wrested mine away from me. A space heater took the chill off the May nighttime temperatures.

  Within easy reach of Liza’s pool were bowls containing water, scratch feed, and mud, though she preferred us to hold the bowls whenever she ate. She required dirt for the strictly utilitarian purpose of grinding and predigesting the raw corn kernels in her gizzard, but she attacked it with the vigor of a gourmand devouring a sinfully rich dessert. Half submerged in mud, her beak snapped open and shut almost too rapidly for the eye the follow, and in her eating frenzy she would all but knock the dish out of my hand. To supplement her bowl foods, I gathered dandelion leaves from the yard.

  “Look at these beauties,” I’d brag to Linda. “I found them near the mailbox, mixed in with some annoying grass.”

  Liza relished dandelion leaves even more than mud, tootling her appreciation with alto-saxophone slurs while yanking an entire handful from my fingers at a time. “Liza, you made me drop them all,” I’d complain, and she would honk gleefully between mouthfuls.

  Despite her good spirits, Liza remained too weak to walk or even rise to her feet on her own. If the sun was shining, and we didn’t want her to have to spend all day on the shaded porch, we would carry her down to the duck pen and set her in an area on the girls’ side that I had fenced off. Sequestering her discouraged the others from their genetically-imprinted urge to pick on the weak, and it also kept them from getting close enough to catch her aspergillosis. Once or twice I carried Liza out to the front lawn and placed her in the middle of a virile cluster of dandelions, hoping that she would help herself. But even after twenty days on her antifungal medication, she remained gravely ill.

  “Sweetie.” I looked up from the newspaper on a cool June evening as Linda came into the living room from the porch. She spoke softly, breaking bad news gently. “I don’t think Liza’s going to make it through the night. She’s having a lot of trouble breathing.”

  I took a cushion onto the porch and sat on the floor next to our goose. She rallied briefly when she realized that I was there, even favoring me with a conversational honk, but a few seconds later she lowered her head to her chest and squeezed her eyes shut. I tried tempting her to eat with a fresh bowl of mud and a handful of tender dandelion leaves, but she wouldn’t take any food. Her entire body strained each time she took a breath, and her wheezing was unusually loud. “I’m sorry, hon,” I told her, petting her neck. Linda came out to spread a blanket over her and adjust the space heater. Finally both of us told her good night and went back into the house.

  “She sure has been a nice goose,” Linda told me sadly, as we settled into bed. “I sure have enjoyed our time with her. I like it when we’re watching TV and she honks because she wants us to go out and fuss over her.”

  “I just hope she isn’t suffering too much,” I said.

  In the swamp below the backyard, the last of the spring peepers were singing. Only five or six were still left in the shrinking seasonal pond, and each time a car rumbled past our house, they immediately fell silent only to resume their chirping several seconds later. Ever since moving to the country, I had loved the song of the frogs, and despite my aversion to fresh air, I’d occasionally crack the window open on chilly spring nights to bring their voices closer. But as I lay in bed worrying that Liza was dying, I wondered how I’d feel about the frogs the next time I heard them. Bertha had died at the height of katydid-calling frenzy, and hardly an August night went by when their zip-zip song didn’t evoke a memory.

  I awoke the next morning with my stomach knotted by dread. Crawling carefully out of bed so as not to disturb Linda, I eased shut the bedroom door and unlocked the door to the porch. I was still twisting the knob and hadn’t even taken my first step outside when Liza was already honking hello. She peppered the air with excited bleats and attacked her scratch feed with gusto when I held the bowl. It took two trips to the front lawn to gather enough dandelion leaves to satisfy her hunger. I was so thrilled that her vitality had returned, I generously waved at a passing motorist who was rude enough to beep his horn at your average everyday pajamaclad man squatting in the grass plucking weeds.

  We experienced a few more shaky nights with Liza, when she barely had sufficient strength to breathe, but by the end of the fifth week, she would occasionally succeed in struggling to her feet after soaking up the sun on our front lawn. She even managed a wobbly step or two to great vocal encouragement from her caregivers. One morning during week six, Linda called me from the bedroom to witness Liza standing proudly at the threshold to the porch all the way across the room from her wading-pool bed. That same afternoon, as the ducks and Hailey fanned out across the backyard while we changed their water, Liza rose from her spot in the warm grass, walked to the front gate, and honked at us to let her join the others.

  “Should we let her go?” Linda asked me. “I can’t see what it would hurt.”

  “Let her through!”

  Few sights would seem to hold less drama than a goose waddling through a garden gate, but to us the occurrence was every bit as monumental as if the Sphinx had climbed down from the Giza plateau and moved into our barn with the turkeys. Walking slowly, Liza honked nonchalantly to Hailey and joined her grazing under the redbud tree. Toucanlady had been correct. The short trip from our front porch to the backyard had turned out to be a long, hard road indeed. Our goose had been so sick for so many weeks, I had never expected her to get better, and I felt overjoyed at her recovery. Liza’s return to health apparently affected her emotionally, too, since she immediately underwent an unusual form of amnesia.

  A year and some months earlier, our geese had come to us from their previous owner habituated to human company and not yet in
the throes of hormonal changes that would later cement their interests exclusively to members of their small waterfowl society. Gone were the days when I could plop down on the lawn and find a goose in my lap without a favorite food item to tempt her there. After Liza had fallen sick enough that she had lost her ability to walk, however, she placed her care in our hands with unstinting confidence, not merely tolerating but welcoming physical contact with us. The touch of a hand reassured her, and she no more feared our approach when we walked over to her pool to feed her than would the family dog. But once a healthy Liza strolled back into the pen with her sister, Hailey, and her duck accomplices, all memory of the niceties of human contact fled. The very next day when I let the girls out for a romp around the yard, I headed toward Liza to give her a pat and wish her well. She honked and skittered away as if to say, “What on earth are you doing? What kind of a goose do you take me for?”

  “That’s good,” Linda answered. “She’s really back to normal.” And she was right.

  From time to time after Liza’s recovery, I would hear the barred owl hooting from our woods. On more than one occasion, it sounded like the owl was calling from the walnut tree on the edge of our backyard, where I had caught it in my flashlight beam on that fateful spring night. “Who cooks for you?” the barred owl inquired. “Who cooks for you all?”

  I was tempted to hoot back with my boyish trombone imitation. After all, a summons from such a magnificent and powerful bird was an honor that deserved a reply. But remembering my manners, I restrained myself and muttered to the window instead, “Forget it, owl. What kind of a superstitious fool do you take me for?”

  CHAPTER 12

  Comings and Goings

  Avoiding pet stores wasn’t enough to keep our animal population from expanding. Neither was snipping the phone line to block requests that we take in yet another winged or long-eared orphan. Occasionally a new animal would literally drop from the sky.

  One summer afternoon, Stanley Sue sounded the shrill alarm-call whistle that usually indicated she had spotted a hawk from the dining room window. I peered into the yard and up through the skylight, but didn’t see anything more threatening than a nuthatch, until a tan-and-white pigeon plopped down from our hackberry tree onto the flat roof of the milk house. While pigeons are as common as in-laws in most neighborhoods, they never visited us in the country. A few shy mourning doves pecked the ground under our bird feeders in frigid seasons when natural food was scarce, but we were definitely far removed from pigeon thoroughfares. In an attempt to satiate every bird within a two-mile radius of our house, we usually supplemented the food in our bird feeders by dumping vast quantities of seed on the ground and on the milk-house roof. Ground-feeding birds such as blue jays, along with finch flocks, attacked the scattered seed with gusto, but with nothing resembling the desperate greed exhibited by the tan-and-white pigeon. Once the bird had eaten its fill, it stayed put even as I grimaced at it though different windows and from different angles, attempting to assess if anything was wrong.

  “I think it might be someone’s pet,” Linda concluded. “Maybe it’s a racing pigeon that got knocked off course by a hawk.”

  I pooh-poohed the idea even as I considered the possibility that it might be true. Wherever the pigeon had come from, it didn’t demonstrate overt fear of humans—or at least not of me, failing to budge from the roof even after I had unfolded the stepladder next to the shed, clomped quavering to the top, and sat upon the eaves not three feet away from the presumed stray. Reaching out to tweak its beak proved a step too far. The bird flew to the metal strut on the second story of our house that buttressed the chimney of our basement wood furnace. Once I returned to ground level, the pigeon’s love affair with the milk-house roof resumed.

  “I think that bird might be someone’s pet,” I explained to Linda patiently.

  “She looks like a Tillie,” Linda surmised.

  Deciding that the pigeon sought our help, I sent her flapping back to the chimney support by lugging our trusty Humane Live Animal Trap to the top of the milk house and loading it with a virgin pile of scratch feed sweetened with a pinch of the parakeet seed that Howard loved. I watched with Stanley Sue through the dining room window as Tillie dropped down to the roof, paced in front of the open door of the trap bobbing her head with each step, and after a moment of indecision, hopped inside. I worried that she didn’t weigh enough to trip the trigger, but a few seconds later she fluttered her wings in panic as the door snapped shut behind her.

  Tillie showed more annoyance than unease as Linda transferred her from the raccoon trap to a cage on the front porch. Less than a month earlier, Liza had abandoned her straw-filled pool to rejoin the backyard ducks, and it seemed natural to once again have a living creature outside the living room to keep the mice and spiders company. Uncertain what sorts of exotic microscopic creatures might be clinging to an apparent bird in distress, I took her to see Dr. Fuller after a few days.

  “She does have lice,” he told me, as he began examining her.

  “She’s a Birmingham Roller Pigeon,” I blurted out in her defense.

  “Son of a gun,” he chuckled politely. My dubious identification was based on three minutes spent with a guide to doves and pigeons at a local remaindered-book outlet. I had wanted to buy the half-priced reference book, but was easily dissuaded by an expansive “Disease and Injury” appendix brimming with color photographs of bizarre growths, pustules, and swollen internal organs.

  “She certainly doesn’t look like any wild pigeon I’ve ever seen,” I insisted.

  “I don’t know,” he answered gently. “I’ve seen lots of color variation, including all-white birds. But they usually don’t last long in a flock. They stick out like a sore thumb to predators.”

  Except for the bloom of lice scheming beneath her feathers, Tillie received a clean bill of health from our vet. Back home on the porch, I was shaking a can of bird insecticide from the pet store until my arm hurt when Linda came out to determine what the moaning was all about.

  “Too much exercise,” I complained.

  “What are you going to do with that?” she asked.

  “Delouse Tillie.”

  “Put her somewhere else while you spray her cage.”

  “You’re supposed to spray the bird. That’s the whole point.”

  “But that’s insecticide.”

  “See the label? See the picture of the happy bird on the label? ‘Safe for birds.’ You have to spray the bird to kill the lice. Dr. Fuller recommended this brand.”

  “It’s still insecticide,” Linda pointed out. “It will make her sick.”

  “‘Safe for birds,’” I repeated. “I’ll spray the cage. But I have to spray her, too.”

  “Don’t spray her with insecticide. You’ll make her sick.”

  “You’re supposed to spray the bird.”

  We went around and around like that until both of us were giddy. Releasing the bird from the cage to flutter around on the porch, I took the cage outside and liberally doused it with the spray. Linda watched, then went back to her business in the house. I chased down the bird, put the bird back inside the cage, and lightly sprayed the bird with insecticide. More of the insecticide dribbled onto my fingers than ended up on either cage or caged bird. I licked my fingers with no ill effects other than a sudden hankering for an arachnid canapé.

  The longer we kept Tillie, the stronger she became. She also grew less satisfied with captivity and increasingly intolerant of her captors. For a few days we tried putting her in the dining room with the other birds, thinking that once she had gotten a taste of the pampered life, she would reclaim her identity as a pet bird. The only joy she eked out of perching on a cage top near the ceiling was launching pecks at Howard whenever he landed near her. In the larger free-flight area of the porch, she spent the majority of her time fluttering from window to window in search of a way outdoors. Gradually, we came around to realizing that Tillie was undoubtedly a wild bird after all. Dinner
at my sister Joan’s house clinched it when Linda and I studied the sky-darkening flock of pigeons that had descended on her lawn around her bird feeder. Sprinkled amid the standard-issue blue-grey city pigeon uniforms were pigeons clad in brown, white, and green color mixes.

  THREE WEEKS HAD elapsed between Tillie’s capture and the afternoon I took her cage outside and opened the door. “You can leave if you want to,” I told her, hinting that it would be ungrateful to actually fly away. With an energetic chugging of her wings, she rose as high as the second story chimney strut and stayed there. Throughout the remainder of the summer, she stayed close to the yard. She might disappear for hours at a time, but by evening we would always find her roosting on the chimney support as close to the house as possible, for protection against hawks. Sometimes when Linda and I were taking care of the ducks and we left a hose running on the lawn between pens, Tillie would swoop down, grab a drink, then return to the safety of the milk-house roof or our hackberry tree.

  A few days after Tillie’s release, Linda ran into Tam and Steve at the Food City supermarket. The couple shared a house even smaller than ours with eight orphaned cats and owned a patch of land overrun at various times with wild turkeys (we had watched a flock from Tam and Steve’s living room window), deer, Canada geese, and raccoons. An industrious muskrat usually busied itself in the pond on the other side of their gravel driveway, while a fat possum they dubbed Electrolux had taken possession of a back corner of their garage.

  “A friend of ours has a really nice rabbit in need of a good home,” Tam told Linda. “She’s getting married and moving away, and she can’t bring the rabbit with her.”