• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 364 0

to quack. We are wading through the mess when five feet ahead of me I spy a female pheasant and a scattering of pheasant chicks. They are huddled at the edge of an open spot where the previous owner of the farm had a burn pile. The entire family is utterly frozen and pressed flat into the sand and ash. Perhaps the black ash is warm in the sun. What caught my eye was the mother’s own eye blinking. When I lean in just the slightest bit for a closer look, the mother flinches, ducks her head, and nearly bolts, but in the end she holds. “Look!” I stage-whisper at Amy, then, “Don’t move, don’t move!” A look of alarm crosses Amy’s face immediately, and I whisper, “It’s OK, it’s not a skunk or a bear, look, baby pheasants!” Even from five feet it takes Amy several hard looks to spot them, but when she does, her face lights up. We study them silently. How fragile this all is, the mother with her fuzzballs and coyotes, fox, mink, and fishers all about. “I want to hold one,” Amy whispers. I explain why we must leave the birds be, and she is satisfied to leave.

We are still mincing softly away when the pigs break into a fit of oinking and goofball galumphing. I recall how Mister Big Shot was haranguing us the day we worked on the pen, and I wonder if perhaps he was being territorial because this brood was about. Perhaps the old boy was more than strut and cackle…

I get back over to help Mills work on the coop again. There are the usual mishaps. I painstakingly craft two tiny chicken doors. They are hinged on the bottom and designed to drop open, forming miniature ramps. I even cut and nail a series of little cleats the full length of each ramp so the chickens won’t slip and fall. Problem is, I get things backward in my head and build them too wide. An oxymoronic bout of fine-tuning ensues. Mills giggles, which helps take the pressure off, and I don’t throw a single tool. In the meantime, Mills is constructing walls. He’s working steady, the automatic nailer firing with a hiss and thwack as the nails are driven home. I am due for another long stretch of road time and won’t be back for a while. I know Mills enjoys projects like this and will probably continue in my absence. Somewhere in my subconscious or shallower, I’m banking on it, in fact. I should be a better person.

The baby continues her bedtime protestations and has been right up to the edge of colicky. One night when Anneliese is in the garden and I am bouncing on the ball and nothing is working, I try humming the standard Brahms lullaby. The kid rages on unabated. Drowns me out. So on a whim, I begin singing the lullaby really, really loud. “LA-LA-LAAAAAH, LA-LA-LAAAAH, go to SLEEEEEEEP NOW MY BABY!” and by jiminy it works. Shocked her into stopping, I suppose. I feel like Papa Axl Rose.

You can’t holler lullabies in the deep of night, however. When she wakes crying I bounce her on the ball in the dark, or walk the floor, but mostly it comes down to Anneliese nursing and rocking her. Lately when I sense that some well-meaning mother is about to give Anneliese advice on how to get the baby to sleep, I jump on the conversation like I’m smothering a grenade. Whatever it is, we’ve tried it, and it hasn’t worked. And the teething hasn’t even begun.

Here I am set to leave again, my wife so tired, and so much undone. Again I look at the unmown lawn, and for the thirty-seventh time I tell Anneliese I plan to fence the yard and get some sheep. Let them eat the lawn and sell them in the fall. Save on gas and mowing time. Anneliese has not uttered a word of complaint about my absences, but now she looks at me.

“About the sheep,” she says.

“Yes?”

“No sheep.”

Later that evening she shares her line of thinking. “I have this vision of you in Des Moines, talking about writing and raising sheep—meanwhile, I’m running through the brush with a howling six-month-old under one arm and dragging a bawling seven-year-old behind me with the other arm while we try to get the sheep back inside a hole in the cobbled-up fence.”

This is very hard on my pride, and pretty much on the money.