Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [117]
I wrote the word reverence into our vows in honor of the way my father has always treated my mother. Dad taught me that reverence wasn’t fawning, nor was it always delivered in hushed tones. I saw it in the goofy way he doffed his fur-lined Boris Yeltsin hat when he opened the van door for her on Sunday mornings; the way he quietly abstained when we kids teased her for not getting our jokes; the way he never failed to leave the dinner table without thanking her. And there was the reverence between them: lest we be deceived, on many occasions—together and separately—Mom and Dad made sure we understood that their marriage had rough patches and disagreements, but that they had long ago promised to work it out quietly behind closed doors. It didn’t hurt that they sometimes made sure to let us catch them kissing. Nothing off-putting, just a hug and peck in the kitchen or in the sheep barn during lambing. In this I believe they were extending their reverence to the children—letting us know that when we went to sleep it was in a house headed by parents joined at hip and heart.
Tonight in the strip mall as we revisit the other words we promised each other that day (gratitude…devotion…trust…unity…), my eye is continually drawn back to reverence, and how the animation of the word requires more than simple respect or careful talk. I am thinking reverence requires presence and attention, and that I must bestow reverence on my wife if I wish it to fall gently on my children. Looking up from the vows between us, I see a delicate brown fleck set against the blue of Anneliese’s right eye. I discovered the fleck the first time Anneliese allowed me in close, but haven’t noticed it in some time. I need to look my wife in the eye more often.
We hold hands on the drive home, and while Anneliese goes to the house I close the chickens in the pump house. They are mostly roosted and fluffed. As she always does, Little Miss Shake-N-Bake has settled in the wood chips on the floor. The struggle to roost is a challenge beyond her at the end of day. The Speckled Sussex is exactly where I left her earlier. I refresh her saucer of water, turn out the light, close the door, and drop the hook in the eye. Then go in the house and to bed, and begin the fourth year of my marriage.
Mid-afternoon of the next day I look up from the desk in time to see the Speckled Sussex step tentatively out of the pump house. She continually cants her head to the side and shakes it like a swimmer with water in the ear. I’m sure some poultry expert could diagnose this. I just stare at her. She steps carefully, and when she pecks at the grass she is tentative, but it seems a good sign that she’s up and about.
And so it is disappointing when I open the pump house door the following morning and there she is flat on the floor, stiff as a board, dead as a nail. Well, shoot, I think. Picking the feathered corpse up by its feet, I walk down past the burn barrel and sling it deep into the ravine. Fox food. Unless the coyotes find her first, and they probably will. Ever since we began free-ranging them, I’ve been compulsive about counting the chickens whenever I see them. I adjust the tally in my head, take it down from a dozen to eleven.
On a humid overcast morning three weeks after the death of his son, I meet Jed in Chippewa Falls. My stepmother-in-law is letting me salvage her old pigpen, and Jed is bringing his trailer to haul the panels, which are too long to fit safely in my truck. The old pen is back in the brush and weeds, so everything is woven in the overgrowth. It takes a lot of ripping and tugging to get the panels loose, and the steel T-posts are even harder to free. We’re in the middle of a month-long drought