Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [109]
I wept then, my wife beside me.
In the morning we pull the chicken tractor out, fill the feeders, slop the hogs. I move the tractor a little too quickly and Little Miss Shake-N-Bake gets rolled out the back, squeezed between the cross-member and the ground, and then swept along by the rubber skirt for a few feet. I figure I have ruined her for good, but when Amy runs to pick her up the bird evades her for the first three passes, a bona fide sign of life.
Even without me running her over, the bird’s tremors have gotten worse. Amy picks her up several times a day, smoothing the feathers along her back and cooing in her little chicken ears. Little Miss Shake-N-Bake is a determined bird. Naturally she is always on the outside fighting her way in when it comes to dinnertime, and you can’t help but root for her, lowering her head to slam into the wall of tail feathers before her and then bouncing back like the skinny kid hitting a blocking sled at football practice. She ricochets, shakes her head like a woozy prizefighter, and charges forward again. Her single-mindedness serves her well, if she’s going to survive as the runt; when we throw table scraps into the tractor, the other birds tussle with each other and dart from scrap to scrap, seemingly more intent on coveting than eating. Meanwhile, Little Miss Shake-N-Bake gets herself a chunk of cucumber and just sticks with it. It takes her a while to get her beak dialed in, she shoots wide a lot, but she is indefatigable, and even though she bats about .250, the cucumber slowly disappears.
Up north on the home farm the phone will be ringing steady. Cars and trucks will be coming in the yard. Our place feels quiet and removed. There is the urge to just drop everything and head to my folks’, but one thing we have learned is how friends and neighbors come in and fill these early days. I spoke to Mom earlier, told her to call if there is anything we can do, and I know she will, but in the meantime, there is life to be taken care of. Amy has swimming lessons, and after that, piano lessons. We go. We do. What else? In the chicken tractor Little Miss Shake-N-Bake has cornered another piece of cucumber, and when the other birds come after her she dives beak-first beneath the corner shelf that supports the waterer. Only her tail sticks out as resolutely she digs in.
On visitation day, I drive to Fall Creek to buy pig feed, and then I drive into Eau Claire to buy dress shoes for Jed, as he has none of his own. He called yesterday and asked if he might borrow mine, and I said yes, but then I got to looking at them. I bought them some years back in a fit of stylishness and they are square-toed verging on floppy—imagine a cross between a clown shoe and a pilgrim shoe. I won’t put him through that. Instead I buy him the plainest sort of black shoe I could find. Then I go back home and feed the pigs.
Then we pack up the family and drive north.
It is a long, long day. We stand together just beside the casket and the line goes right out the door for hours. They arrive steadily—relatives, neighbors, distant cousins flown in, fire department members in uniform, church people I haven’t seen since some Sunday meeting years ago, and many faces I just plain don’t recognize. There are a lot of old farmers who can’t bear to look in the casket, and you see these sunburned old dogs approach my brother and break down weeping as they take his hand or wrap him in their bearish arms, and maybe they are wearing big belt buckles or unmodish jeans or have their sparse hair Brylcreemed in the style of a ’60s trucker, but it strikes me again how much we miss if we rely wholly on poets to parse the tender center of the human heart. At times like this I am grateful I was not raised to be sleek. Behind us pictures of Jakey project on the wall, dissolving one into another, and beside the casket are all his green tractors from Debbie and Roger, his John Deere blanket, and the wooden biplane his Uncle John made for him by hand, because if it was possible Jakey loved anything more than a green tractor,