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By Root 371 0

When we arrive, Billy and Margie lead us into the garage, where the chicks are being kept in a wading pool lined with wood chips. They are a sprightly, multicolored bunch, warm under the heat-lamp light. Amy peers over the edge at them, and immediately her eyebrows knit, not in a frown but in that universal feminine look of care. “Oohhh,” she says. “Can I hold one?” There was a time Billy doubled as a bartender and bouncer in the type of taverns you enter through a small dark door. He rode a thunderous motorcycle and had the size to back down any man. Today he remains an imposing figure, but his spirit is gentle and he engraves tombstones for a living. A man who has gone from bare-knuckle to Bashō, he seems the perfect fellow to carve the dates of your birth and death, so wide is the breadth of his understanding. Now he reaches into the blue swimming pool, carefully closing a chick within the cavern of his roughened hands, and passes it gently to Amy, his blackened nails and shredded calluses (he is recovering from the peak of the carving season, when he catches up with a winter’s worth of graves in time for Memorial Day) of another creature in contrast to Amy’s soft white palms and slender fingers open wide to receive the bird. Carefully she closes her hands until the chick is cupped within, then draws it to her face and inclines her cheek to its fuzzy head.

CHAPTER 7

My daughter is weeping in the timothy. She is a sad sight with a sparse handful of stems dangling from one hand, grass clippers dangling from the other, head tipped back as she beseeches the sky. From my perspective—framed by the window over the kitchen sink—what we have here is a scene composed by Andrew Wyeth and retouched by Edvard Munch.

The girl is weeping in part because I am a cheapskate.

Among the trove of supplies and accessories provided by Aunt Barbara when we took possession of the guinea pig back in January was a neatly sealed plastic bag of prime timothy hay. Every day when Amy replenished his tiny hay rack, the creature tore into it eagerly, sometimes whistling with delight at the first sound of crinkling plastic. When the original bag was nearly depleted, I stopped by a local pet food store for another. Wanting to maintain the standards of quality established by Aunt Barbara, I searched the racks until I found the exact same brand of timothy and grabbed a 12-ounce packet. I’ve cut and stacked a lot of timothy in my day, and while carrying the bag to the checkout I was admiring the quality of the product—a weedless sheaf of fat-leaved stalks all dried to a uniform pale green. Really top-shelf stuff. Then the woman at the register swiped it across the bar code reader. When the price popped up, I suddenly understood what was making that guinea pig whistle. I made a very similar noise, although it quickly tapered off to a wheeze.

Numerals are not my thing, but sometimes one must quantify astonishment: Beginning with a generous interpretation of current Midwestern market prices as provided by the county extension agent’s Web site, the finest prime grade hay will run you somewhere in the neighborhood of $175 bucks a ton. That twelve-ounce packet of guinea pig hay rang up at $6.98. Rounding down, that’s 58 cents an ounce. Tappety-tap, there are 32,000 ounces in a ton. Times point-five-eight, equals: the stuff I was carrying across the parking lot to the van costs $18,560 per ton. Next time I rent an armored hay wagon, I remember thinking as I scanned the lot for grass bandits. I briefly considered selling the guinea pig and all his toys, renting a safe deposit box with the proceeds, and stuffing it with hay that I would then roll over into an individual retirement account. Instead I crawled into the van, locked the doors, took my cell phone in trembling hands, and called my father. Having recently heard him apologetically report that he was selling organic horse hay for upward of $120 per ton, I wanted to tell him these horse people are pikers, and guinea pig hay is where it’s at. Sell everything, I told him when he answered, and get yourself