Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [94]
I woke Steven, as wives wake husbands everywhere, to ask: “What’s that sound?”
I knew he wouldn’t be annoyed, because this was no tedious burglary suspect—it was wildlife. He sat up, attentive. His research interest is bioacoustics: birdsong and other animal communication. He can identify any bird native to the eastern United States by ear, and can nail most insects, mammals, and amphibians at least to category. (Like most mortals, I cannot. I can mistake mammal calls for birds, and certain insects for power tools.) He offered a professional opinion on this pre-dawn croak: “Idunno.”
As we listened, it became clear that two of them were having some kind of contest: “Cro-oa-oak!”
(A pause, for formulation of the response.)
“Cri-iggle-ick!”
Steven figured it out way ahead of me. These were our boys of summer. Yikes.
More rooster voices joined the choir as dawn crept over the ridge. Eventually one emerged as something of a leader, to which the others responded together in the call-and-response style of an old-time religious revival.
“Rrrr-arrr-orrrk!”
“Crii-iggle-ick!” “Cro-aok!” “Crr-rdle-rrr!”
We had on our hands what sounded like a newly opened Berlitz School for Rooster, with a teacher hired on a tight budget.
The girls heard us from downstairs, and came up to the sleeping porch to see what was so funny. Soon we were all flopped across the bed laughing after every chorus. Welcome to our funny farm. Did I say we were hoping for a Pavarotti? We had a gang of tone-deaf idol wannabes. For how many weeks would this harrowing audition go on before we could narrow the field of applicants? One outstanding contestant punctuated the end of his croak, every time, with a sort of burp: “Crr-rr-arrrr…bluup!”
This guy had a future in the culinary arts. Mine.
Our turkeys were looking gorgeous after their awkward adolescent molt into adult plumage. Bourbon Reds are as handsome as it gets on the turkey runway, with chestnut-red bodies, white wings, and white-tipped tailfeathers. The boys weren’t crowing, of course, but this would be their only failing in the department of testosterone. We’d seen that show before. Prior to our move to Virginia I’d raised a few Bourbon Reds as a trial run, to see how we liked the breed before attempting to found a breeding flock. I’d gotten five poults and worried from day one about how I would ever reconcile their darling fuzzy heads with the season of Thanksgiving. But that summer, with the dawning of adolescent hormones, the cuteness problem had resolved itself, and how: four of my five birds turned out to be male. They forgot all about me, their former mom, and embarked on a months-long poultry frat party. Picture the classic turkey display, in which the male turkey spreads his colorful tail feathers in an impressive fan. Now picture that times four, continuing nonstop, month after month. The lone female spent the summer probably wishing she’d been born with the type of eyes that can roll. These guys meant to impress her or die trying. They shimmied their wing feathers with a sound like rustling taffeta, stretched their necks high in the air, and belted out a croaky gobble. Over and over and over. Our nearest neighbor down the road had called to ask, tentatively, “Um, I don’t mean to be nosy, but is your rooster sick?”
Many of us were relieved that year at harvest time, when our first turkey experiment reached its conclusion. By autumn the boys had begun to terrify Lily, who was six that year, by rushing at her gobbling when she entered the poultry yard to feed her chickens. In the beginning she’d lobbied to name the turkeys, which I nixed, but I relented later when I saw what she had in mind. She christened them Mr. Thanksgiving, Mr. Dinner, Mr. Sausage, and—in a wild first-grade culinary stretch—Sushi.
So we knew what we were in for now, as our new flock came of age. By midsummer all our April-born poultry were well settled in. Our poultry house is a century-old,