Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [16]
On a cold night getting colder, we are off to fetch the guinea pig. Amy knows we are going to visit Aunt Barbara and Uncle John, but we haven’t told her why. She has inklings, however, and by the time we turn the final corner she has gone all wiggly. When we climb out of the van, she is in full pogo mode. In the house, Barbara brings forth the guinea, and Amy pulls it to her chest. “Oh!” she says, inclining her cheek to his. The guinea pig nestles in. He has the coloring of a Guernsey cow, fawn and white.
Now Barbara is loading John and me down with an astounding array of accoutrements—a ventilated travel box, Carrot Crunchies, a bag of timothy hay, liquid vitamin C, claw clippers, an exercise sphere, assorted rattle toys, two dishes, a gravity-drip waterer, a cardboard crawl tube, and a fully stocked cage sufficient to house a brace of wombats. John and I lug everything out to the van. As we pull out of the driveway, Amy is in her booster seat, clutching the guinea pig to her heart. I look back to see her face beneath the dome light, and with wide eyes she says, “I am trem-buh-ling with joy!”
I turn back to face the road, so as not to dampen her happiness with my watering eyes.
By the time we’re back at home in Fall Creek, it is bitterly below zero. I stoke the stove while Anneliese slices cheese, butters bread, makes a salad, and fries herself a burger. She is hungry all the time now. The three of us sit on the floor before the stove and turn the guinea pig loose. He roams, and we giggle at the sight of his bouncy behind, transported by two woefully undersize legs. Popular mythology holds that if the laws of aerodynamics are applied, bumblebees are calculably incapable of flight; watching his improbable giddyup, it strikes me that guinea pigs are the bumblebees of the rodent set. He toddles along like a wobbly fur-lined sausage, his butt all waddle and humpety-bump. He stays shy of Amy and me but makes regular loops back to Anneliese, putting his forepaws on her legs and begging food. At one point he tips her water glass and sticks his fat head inside, the scalloped surface giving him four red eyes. Amy beams through her missing front teeth. She is wearing her favorite purple footie PJs, and her neck and forehead still bear the fading red marks of the chicken pox.
Even with the fire going, the house feels chilly to me. I’ve been a little brittle lately. I think it’s the move, the sick kid, the baby pending. For years I slid through life with no more on the line than my own hide. Now I have these other lives, and I’m feeling a little onerous, which is three syllables for whiny. I can’t imagine how it was for my parents with everything on their plates. I look at the little girl so happy here, my wife with the baby in her belly, I feel the killing cold outside, and my head tumbles with the usual Big Questions, ranging from “Hello, God?” to “What character improvements are available via the adoption of a pet guinea pig?”
Amy wants the pig near this first night, so we allow her to unroll her sleeping bag beside the cage. Up in the bedroom then, I reach for Anneliese and hold my palm flat over the half-globe of the womb. No hiccups tonight. Palpating gently, I try to remember what I learned from the midwife. The constellation of baby. Even though it’s dark, I close my eyes, straining to visualize what my fingertips feel. The head there, maybe? A shoulder here? I keep returning to one particularly prominent protuberance. It juts out, and I can’t place it. I kiss Anneliese on the brow and roll over to sleep.
It seems we are bound to deliver a unicorn.
CHAPTER 2
I am building a glorious chicken coop in my mind. Each day I tweak the design based on an image I printed off the World Wide Web, or a weeded-up tumbledown model I spotted behind a barn while driving, or a photograph I found while paging through a 1928 issue of Crows