Hobby Farming

by ALYSSA CROGAN

11

She stalks across the yard in hunter green rain boots, two sizes too big. They slap the back of her calves in a staccato rhythm. Tufts of blonde hair have escaped her messy topknot and her nose is snotty. There’s a knotted stick in her hand. As she runs, she trips in her boot and holds the stick out like it will catch her. A sob catches in the back of her throat and breaks.

At her feet, the feathers curl as they drift among the dandelions. Soft and downy, they tangle in the burdock at the edge of the woods. The trail is fading but she follows the crumbs, dodging branches and horseflies. Every so often she pauses at a clump of feathers with the red flesh still clinging to it, fresh. She lurches forward.

Over the stone wall and into the underbrush the trail is harder to find. New clues emerge: a depression here, a snapped twig there. The displaced leaves tell the story of bodies dragged from beds still warm. An abduction in broad daylight.

It’s getting harder for her to see through the salty trickle that runs from her nose to her chin. She shakes and the stick keeps catching on roots. The slapping of her boots slows and it’s like she’s moving through thick, tangled air, gasping towards a hole in the ground no bigger than a child’s face. The burrow. She peers into it and a fat, wet drop tumbles in so that her tears are mixing with the dirt, and the dirt with the feathers, and the feathers with the blood. She sees red. I do not know what she does. She can vaguely feel the stick jabbing down, down, down into a hole that turns like an elbow. An underground arm twists its fingers away from the surface. I think she yells.

When she finishes, that hole and the other two she found nearby are plugged with rocks and dirt. That same dirt is shoved far up into the bed of her nails, gritty against her skin.

She walks home, legs numb and face stinging.

It will be days until she tells her mother what she has done and is reprimanded. The fox does not come back to her coop. I imagine it watching her thin form flinging rocks and dirt as she rages against a hole in the ground. I imagine it squints slantways from beneath a choice bramble patch, the fat bird dangling loosely from its blood-matted maw, eyes smiling.

12

She’s cross-legged now on the cement painted into green tiles. The paint has turned to dust over the years so it stains the back of her Bermuda shorts with its green. She drapes a ratty pink towel across her legs and rocks, softly humming. Her voice cracks but she sings, “Well you only need the light when it’s burning low / Only miss the sun when it starts to snow / Only know you love her when you let her go.” It is the most beautiful song she knows.

Between her knobby knees the bird, named Chipmunk, sprawls belly-up. Its abdomen is swollen like a balloon; she can count every feather jabbed like needles into the pink skin, poised to pop. Hot air wheezes out of the bird’s soft yellow beak. Its eyes are half-lidded; the comb sags waxy and pink. Its talons curl limply and she strokes one lightly. Her hand comes to rest gently on the extended pillow of black-and-white barred feathers.

It was the birdseed, she thinks. The illness rained down on seeds spat out by wild birds and gobbled up by her flock. No one tells her not to bury her face in its soft belly as the bird wheezes out its last sigh. No one hears the small wet noise the eyelids make as she slides them shut.

13

She’s flanked by her family now. They spread out across the yard, bent over like umpires. Someone clucks. Someone else swings a butterfly net wildly. Her Uncle Marshall doubles over his round belly, laughing, his face red. He slaps at his jean-covered thigh in mirth. His face glows.

Uncle Marshall was the one who brought the silkies. The master hobby farmer with dozens of birds in his New Hampshire backyard. He was also the one who cracked the door of the carrier too soon. He wanted to show her which of the new birds would make tiny blue eggs, like the kind he has at his house. But the birds slipped between the wire and now, little and fast, they weave in between the bushes planted to keep the neighbors’ junkyard at bay. The silkies move with the dexterity of tiny roadrunners and their feathers look more like fur than anything. The black one races past her foot and the net comes streaming down after it, a moment too late. They’ve already returned one to the carrier and it stands on furry claws croaking out a melody. She imagines it coaching the others, “Run! Dodge! Weave!”

They chase the birds as the light slips past the barn roof. The white one lasts the longest, darting between ankles and zooming under outstretched fingers. Marshall lounges in an Adirondack chair, puffing hard, as the rest of the family sweats. The excitement of the day wears on him. Finally, all the silkies sway in the carrier, tiny puffs of wispy anger. One of them croaks the sorrowful tune of defeat. She carries them tenderly to the coop, pulling the door shut behind her. She scoops out each soft body and deposits it among the cedar shavings on the floor: Carl, Daisy, and Turkeyrilla. The other birds eye the newcomers from the roosts and cluck disapprovingly.

13 (and a half)

Uncle Marshall’s new birds brought disease, intruders too small to see. Now tiny mites cling to each bird’s crusty claws. She is tasked with hoisting each bird up and slathering its legs with Crisco, to choke out the bugs. It must feel good because the first bird sighs and ceases to struggle as soon as the white grease coats its leg.

The pecking order has been reestablished and Carl, the black silkie who can croon his own name, is the only bird accepted into the original flock. The other two huddle in the nesting boxes at night. They will freeze when winter comes. The bird called Turkeyrilla has been pecked bloody and featherless. His comb is a crusted purple mess atop his balding head. His head tilts permanently to the left. She places him in his own section of the coop, separated by chicken wire and a little door. He butts his head against the walls at night, screaming.

14

Turkeyrilla is dead. Of the newcomers, only Carl remains. He is the only rooster; the previous two succumbed to the disease Carl and his siblings brought. Their bodies are buried deep beneath the white pines. Carl is too small to mount the Rhode Island Reds. At least she doesn’t have to hear the panicked squawking of a hen pinned beneath a cock. Carl shuffles around, beating his chest and trying to convince the hens to squat in the dirt. His crows screech like metal on metal.

She doesn’t like to watch them run across the yard anymore. They’ve stopped trailing behind her as she jogs across the yard to pick blackberries or to dip her toes in the stream behind the sugar shack. In the winter, she forgets to clean the coop and a bird dies of ammonia poisoning.

15

The light is on when she pulls up in her dented Nissan. No one is ever awake when she gets home from the restaurant, the smell of onions and garlic heavy on her skin. The first thing she does, after creeping up the stairs in the dark, is hop in the scalding shower and scrub the smell from under her nails. Tonight though, both her parents are sitting on a brown couch under a pool of yellow light. The light catches and laps at the puffy redness of her mother’s under eyes. Something is very wrong.

I don’t remember what they told her. I wrote it down but I lost it and now I just have the memory of her holding her sobbing mother. How much of it did she know? How much did she find out later? They may have said, “Uncle Marshall was very sick for a very long time,” or “He was suffering.” Did they tell her that he killed himself? She wouldn’t have asked how.

Under the yellow light with her mother in her arms, she could have thought back to pill bottles, mood swings, and the way expressions on his face would snag like a nail on a sweater. She might have cried but I don’t think she did. In the weeks that came later, she might have thought that the way he did it, wandering out into the woods, was brave. She might have gone to the coop and sat in the dark, listening to the wheezing of ten sleeping birds.

22

The entire flock is gone, picked off one by one. The majority went to the mutts from down the street. They didn’t even eat the birds—just shook them so their necks snapped. Her parents’ new neighbor, the one who adopts elderly chickens with broken legs and lays them around the yard so they can lounge in sunspots, says he’ll kill those dogs if they ever came back. He is swinging a baseball bat as he limps away from her. She recognizes his anger as something she used to carry.

Some of the birds were taken by a bobcat that her brother recorded in a grainy iPhone video. Others were snatched by hawks with only a few red feathers left behind. One was plucked off by a barred owl, a silent assassin. Of the ten birds, only one survived the spring. They drove it to a friend’s house and plopped it in the new coop. It’s happy there and even started laying again. Back home, she helps her father scrape and paint the old coop. They tear out the divider and pile the plasterboard and chicken wire on the back lawn. They scrub the shit off the wall and duct-tape over the places where the chickens pecked through the siding. When the winter firewood is dumped under their red smoke tree, she helps her father fill the old coop with stacks of logs. It will be easier for him to haul the wood from the coop than from the barn, especially through the snow.

The backyard is quieter now. Besides the occasional hummingbird war, a bird never wakes her from her sleep. She tells herself that she doesn’t miss the early morning crooning or waking up on Saturdays to clean the coop. But as she tosses at night, she dreams of soft feathers and weak necks. When her alarm sounds in the morning, she jolts awake still thinking that she needs to throw open the doors of the coop so the flock could hop down, one by one, and scuttle under bushes. And when summer comes, she can still see how the birds leapt, surprisingly agile, to pluck the juicy raspberries from the vines that framed their enclosure.

You can’t will something to stay alive, she thinks, turning over in her childhood bed. Nothing about your love can protect it, make it stronger.  

25

Her childhood room stands empty now. She’s ten hours south in some high-rise apartment. When spring calls, she sets an incubator up in her classroom for her students to watch. For twenty-one days they wait, with bated breath. Blinds are drawn and eager faces glow as an LED light shines through fragile shell, illuminating the embryos within. Students’ pencils form new words like “albumen” and “chalaza” on their worksheets. The countdown is written on the board in big letters. Tomorrow is the day! Students are so excited they can’t sleep.

When three of the chicks die in the incubator, she brings their little bodies to the hazardous waste can in the nurse’s office. As she waits for class to begin, she’s anxious, twisting in her seat until a wave of third graders rush into the classroom and the torrent of questions starts. “Where are the other three? What happened? Are they dead?” She’s expecting tears but students nod grimly, like it’s a matter of fact. She warned them this may happen.

As they leave the room, she releases a sigh she didn’t know that she was holding in.

During lunch her mother calls and talks about the new flock they just moved into the coop. “Your father was annoyed at first, but the wood is fine in the barn. Plus, I think he likes the birds just as much as I do.” When she hangs up the phone, she looks down at the newly hatched chicks and discovers that the smallest chick has tumbled into its water dish. Black feathers matted, it quivers in the corner of the enclosure, peeping mournfully. She groans and reaches for the paper towels.