My Million-Dollar Donkey

by East, Ginny;

  The next morning, my other eBay peacock eggs arrived. I put the dog out and barred the door for the important egg-resting phase. Hours later, these eggs joined the others in the incubator. The peacock project was underway in earnest.

  For several days, Neva turned the eggs, but the endless routine quickly lost appeal and she turned the job over to me. “Just call me when they hatch,” she said, more interested in her Gameboy than the incubator. So much for the mother-daughter egg babysitting bonding.

  For a month I hovered over the incubator, turning the eggs four times a day. I couldn’t go to lunch or the movies. I had to plan my grocery shopping and equestrian chores carefully. Life went on, but no matter what, I had to turn the eggs.

  One day, as I reached in for yet another turn, a duck egg exploded in my hand. Yucky blackish-green goo covered the incubator and the smell of rotten egg invaded the entire downstairs. Oops.

  A few days later, another duck egg exploded. Several of the duck eggs were turning grayer each day. Were these eggs dead and just rotting? Perhaps the duck package had been x-rayed during delivery, thus killing the embryos. Then again, maybe I overheated the eggs on one bad day when the humidity dried up and the temperature spiked to 104. The eggs might not even have been fertilized from the beginning.

  As I cleaned the incubator, I had visions of all eleven eggs going off like firecrackers, making my entire house smell rancid. Some looked healthy enough, but I decided to throw out the gray ones before they took out every last healthy egg in the incubator, like little duck landmines. I tossed the questionable eggs into the woods. One egg wasn’t that gray, but was so messy due to the rotten gunk clinging to the sides that I didn’t know what else to do with the thing. Not like you can rinse an egg under water this late in the process—or at least I didn’t think so. The not-so-gray egg was weighty, and that bothered me, but still, I was pretty convinced that this egg hatching thing was going to be a complete failure anyway so I was ready to throw them all out. Thinning out the incubator seemed a prudent way to avoid the disgusting clean-up work later, if nothing else.

  I moved the six better looking duck eggs into the clean (meaning uncontaminated) incubator with my peacock eggs and continued turning, turning, turning. I felt like the Dunkin’ Donuts baker on the commercial who, looking exhausted, drags himself out of bed each day saying, “Time to make the peacocks...um, I mean donuts.”

  When I had just about enough, I reached in one morning to turn my donuts and there was a little bird staring up at me through the window. His feathers were wet and his body swayed to and fro as if gravity were too much for his weak little legs to handle. He rested his chin on his broken eggshell and closed his eyes. I called for Mark. Together, we stared through the tiny window attempting to figure out what had hatched.

  “Is that a duckling or a peacock?” I whispered.

  “It’s probably Neva’s little bantam.”

  “No way. You think he’s a duck? He’s yellow like a duck. I saw a baby peacock at the feed store once, and the chick was brown like Ameraucana chicks. Not like this.”

  “That doesn’t look much like a duck to me.”

  I couldn’t stand not knowing, so I reached in to get the shell. My copious notes written on the egg confirmed that this hatchling was one of the white peacocks, remarkably, the very egg my dog had carried around in her mouth. (I knew this because I had drawn a little frowny puppy face on the side of the shell.)

  By the time Neva came home from school, we could hear peeping from inside the other eggs. Shortly thereafter, a duckling hatched. This bird had typical webbed feet, a bigger head, and a tell-tale round beak. The difference between the two baby birds was so obvious I had to laugh. A duck looks nothing like a peacock. Duh!

  The two baby birds were still weak, so I let them stay in the warm incubator for a few hours to fluff out and get their sea legs. After dinner, we discovered another duck hatchling. Peeping was coming from eggs that were now moving on their own accord, rolling the slightest bit as the inhabitants struggled to greet the world. As my fascinated family stood by, all six of the duck eggs hatched.

  All I could think about was the eggs I tossed into the woods. Had there been little baby ducks only one day from hatching curled inside as I hurled them to their demise? I felt awful.

  The baby birds were now becoming more active, so I removed them from the incubator to a brooder cage heated by a light bulb. The young ducks behaved aggressively with the peacock, and since she was my most prized new chick, I put her in a cage of her own. She looked small and lonely in there, full of energy but anxious and uncomfortable in a cage all alone. She kept running back and forth, sticking her beak through the bars, acting frantic compared to the ducks who were all nestled together in a contented clump. I tapped on the incubator, trying to guilt the other peacock eggs into hatching, but the eggs lay there like dead rocks.

  I named the peacock Early since she was the first bird to hatch, and by the next morning, I worried she might be the only egg to hatch because all the other eggs were quiet and still. Early obviously wasn’t getting companions anytime soon, so I went to the feed store to ask for advice.

  The proprietor, Linda, recommended I buy my peacock a chicken buddy just in case the other eggs didn’t hatch at all.

  “Will a chicken and a peacock get along?” I asked.

  “If you raise the two birds together, the chicken will think she’s a peacock. No problem.”

  Every Lone Ranger deserves a Tonto, I decided, so I picked out a cute chick. The moment I put them together, they became fast friends.

  Eight days later, the remaining peacock eggs still sat lifeless in the incubator. This gave Early epic standing as a special bird. She was not just my only peacock, but tangible proof that I wasn’t a complete idiot in the incubation arena. By now, Neva and I agreed to call it a day and clear out the incubator to make room for something else.

  “I guess I’ll just throw the eggs out,” I said, thinking this had been a rather expensive experiment, considering Early had just become a $116.00 peacock chick.

  “We have to open the eggs first,” Neva said matter-of-factly.

  “Oh, honey, I can’t. What if there are birds inside that were almost ready to hatch, but died at the last minute? I don’t want to see half-formed peacocks. That would be too sad.”

  “We have to open them,” she insisted. “That’s what the book tells you to do and the only way to determine if you did something wrong.”

  “Whatever you do, just handle those eggs far away from the house,” Mark said, remembering the stench of exploding duck eggs.

  In the end, Neva was insistent, so I agreed to open the eggs far away from the house. We hiked up a hill with the still warm peacock eggs in my infamous dead thing bowl. Neva brought a small garden shovel and dug a grave for a communal bird burial, which we agreed would be appropriate in case we found dead baby peacocks inside. If all we found was rotten undeveloped eggs, a nice deep hole would cover up the smell.

  We crouched beside the hole and I picked up an egg.

  “Couldn’t we just bury the eggs whole?”

  “No way, Mom. Crack it open. Aren’t you dying to see what’s inside?” she said with curious, bright eyes.

  “Not a bit.”

  “Well, I am,” she said, leaning closer.

  I tapped the egg with the edge of the shovel. Out slipped a gooey yolk that looked like any egg you might open from the supermarket, except for the orange yolk, of course. The gooey mess didn’t even smell.

  Neva frowned and dug into the goo with a stick. “There isn’t even a vein of blood. I bet this egg wasn’t fertilized. Try another one.”

  Swallowing, I picked up a blue peacock egg and cracked this one open. Again, we found nothing but goo.

  “What a gyp,” Neva said.

  I thought so, too, but not because we were being cheated out of view
ing interesting bird embryos at different stages of development. I was thinking someone on eBay sold me the bird version of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  We opened the last three eggs. The insides were thicker, like a dab of pudding was plopped in the middle, but there was no telling if the eggs had begun to develop or the yolks were just getting so old they were hardening.

  “At least now we know we probably didn’t do anything wrong,” Neva announced, pushing dirt on top of the little scrambled egg grave. “We can try again someday.”

  After all that money and 48 days of sleep down the drain, my enthusiasm for homegrown peacocks had drastically dimmed, but I kept that opinion to myself. I thanked her for making me open the eggs, admitting that knowing is better than not knowing. She gave me a “told ya so” grin.

  As we walked back to the house, Neva paused to pick some wildflowers. Spying a cricket, she bent down to place the bug in the dead things bowl for a quick study. I could see my girl was growing up curious about the world, engaged with the core truths about life, and sensitive rather than sentimental. I had a single peacock now to add elegance to my world, but in that moment, I believed true elegance walked beside me in the form of a beautiful, inquisitive child with dirt under her fingernails, and a healthy love for nature.

  “However mean your life is, meet and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its doors as early in the spring.”

  —Henry David Thoreau

  INSTINCT

  “I can’t believe you’re living on a farm,” my mother said when she came to visit.

  “This is not a farm. We’ll be living in a million dollar cabin in the Georgia mountains. I’m just raising some animals on the side for fun.”

  “You have a garden. Chickens. A peacock. A donkey. Horses. Rabbits. This is a farm.”

  “A real farm supports itself. It makes money. A real farm has pigs. I don’t have pigs.”

  Her eyes slipped to mine. “Why not pigs?”

  “Mark drew the line at pigs. I did, however, donate to a “save the pigs” campaign.”

  “See? You’re living on a farm. Just not a successful farm,” she said. “You two retired with all that money, and you could have gone anywhere or done anything. You chose a farm.”

  “Land’s a good investment. We still plan to travel and do some lovely things with our retirement.”

  “When?”

  “When Mark is done building his house. He’s promised.”

  She lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “If anyone ever told me you’d end up here during those years you danced in New York City, I’d never have believed them.”

  “I admit moving to the country wasn’t a part of my life plan when I was young, but living here has been a great adventure.”

  “I thought you sold the studio to have a less stressful life.” She stepped over a pile of horse droppings and gave me a “do you see that?” stare.

  “Me, too,” I confessed.

  Seeing our world through my mother’s eyes made me feel foolish and very, very tired. I was the artsy girl who liked to wear long skirts, high heels and big earrings. I loved museums, Broadway shows and dance concerts. I preferred experimental theater to sporting events, and wine tastings to tailgate parties. I fit when I lived in the city. So, how was it, then, that I fit here in the middle of the country, too, with nothing but a donkey and some peacock experiments to stimulate my imagination?

  You’d think I had a split personality, and perhaps I did. For years, the city girl had the upper hand, obscuring the quiet shadow of the country girl who, unbeknownst to us all, was buried in my bosom. Now, the country girl demanded her turn at bat, scratching her way to the surface with such aggression I couldn’t help but wonder if my self-image as a dancer was only surface deep after all.

  I wanted to blame this change on menopause. I prayed for hot flashes. Nothing. I was the same person I’d always been, only now my natural curiosity and my tendency to do everything 110 percent had wandered away from dance and towards sustainable living. I was still that girl with the middle-class American upbringing, a credit card-carrying member of the consumer class with all the expectations and sense of entitlement that came with the role. The difference was, now I had a donkey.

  My husband of seventeen years was feeling the same pull towards this polar opposite world as I was, so there had to be something to our change of heart. Perhaps it was a fluke that two separate individuals were experiencing the same shifts in perspective at the exact same rate. Had one spouse not been on board, the entire experiment would have collapsed under the weight of uncertainty, for sure. But just as some couples start to look alike or begin finishing each other’s sentences after many years together, we seemed to have developed a common vision that had us both balking at what was considered “the norm” for people of our background and potential. If living on a farm had taught me one undeniable thing, I’d discovered that instinct always prevailed over training. So it was with animals. So it was with us.

  One day, as Chris, my burly cowboy-farrier friend carved away at my horse’s hooves, he asked, “What’s the donkey for?”

  “Just a pet. I’m told they make good guard animals.”

  “What’s he guarding?”

  “Nothing yet, but someday I might get some sheep. We had a goat once, but I wasn’t too keen on him. Sheep, however, might be interesting.”

  Chris’s expression made clear he considered keeping sheep about as pleasant as rolling in poison ivy. “I’m a horse man myself. Had a buffalo once. Damn near killed anyone who came near the fence. I sold him.”

  I made a mental note to scratch buffaloes off my wish list. Not that I had a buffalo on my wish list, but after the donkey, I no longer trusted my whims to remain explainable. “I think a llama would be cool. They’re exotic and otherworldly.”

  His expression made clear he considered my wanting an animal for anything other than practical use the height of self-indulgence.

  I grew defensive. “I’m a writer, after all. I learn about things by experiencing them. If I had a llama, I’d write about the experience.”

  Being a writer had become my catchall explanation for anything I wanted to do that might come across as impractical to my new country acquaintances. No one ever asked what kind of books I wrote. Literature was something the locals admittedly didn’t care much about, so whenever I professed my avocation, the words hung in the air like a fart people chose not to acknowledge.

  “Well, I know a fellow who’ll sell you a llama for cheap,” Chris said. He wrote the man’s name on the back of my bill.

  I had only been speculating for fun, but thought I might pass the name on to Mark. My birthday was coming up and a llama would be a rather cool present.

  “No way,” Mark said when I handed him the llama trader’s name with a brazen hint.

  Six weeks later I was the surprised recipient of a huge black llama wearing a red birthday bow around his neck.

  The llama was an odd, prehistoric-looking creature with a long neck, curved ears, and thick, feathery-looking fur. He had thin legs, two-toed hooves, and large soulful eyes fringed in long lashes. He moved as gracefully as a reincarnated ballerina, head held high as his feet treaded gingerly through the wildflowers in the pasture. One look at him and I wanted to burst out singing A Whole New World.

  “You can name your llama whatever you want,” Mark said.

  “What was the llama’s name before?”

  Mark had decided that he wouldn’t share that information unless I twisted his arm.

  “You don’t wa
nt to know. Trust me, you’ll be changing his name.” “Well, now you have to tell me. How bad can his old name be?” Mark paused a moment, then sheepishly said, “They called him Nigger, claiming the name fits because he is black and ornery.”

  “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

  “Tried not to.”

  Mark suggested I name the llama Dalai, just so I could say the Dalai llama lived at our house. Not very original, but I didn’t care. In that moment, I was leaning toward calling him Martin Luther King, just for principle.

  I thought Dalai was exotic and remarkably cool. I had seen llamas before, but never in my own backyard. While llamas are often aloof, this one was friendly enough, taking cookies from my hand and venturing to the feed bucket when the horses came for their meal. Most of the time, he paced the pasture from end to end, as if he were memorizing how many steps he must take to cross. After several weeks of diligent exploration, he picked out a favored spot in the pasture and plopped to the ground, rolling over and sticking his feet straight up into the air.

  “Your llama is dead,” Mark said every time he drove up and saw the animal laid out like a carcass cooking in the sun.

  “Har, har,” I’d say, but just in case I’d shout or take a few steps in the animal’s direction, needing confirmation that the dang thing was indeed alive. I didn’t know if this animal’s nutritional needs differed from the horses, or if a llama should be wormed, or have his feet trimmed, or if his wooly coat needed to be treated for fleas. Do they make a flea collar that big? I wondered, thinking I really needed to learn more if I wanted to keep this pet alive and well.

  Back to Amazon. I immediately ordered several books on llamas and joined the Llama Association of America. Apparently, country adventure had a cost beyond the original investment since each project required I stumble around trying to figure my way through the maze of new challenges.