Dirty Chick (10 page)

The next morning, I looked out the window after finishing my coffee. And there was Kowhai, barking and prancing over a very limp goat carcass. “Kowhai!” I shrieked. “
Baaaaa
!
”

Kowhai looked up, as surprised as I was that Pearl had fallen. The game was supposed to go like this: Kowhai tried to bite Pearl's legs, and Pearl reared up until Kowhai ran away. But this time, Pearl hadn't fought back. She'd just collapsed.

I rushed to Pearl's side, quickly noting that she was still alive. She struggled to her feet, so she had no broken bones, and I couldn't find any blood. But then I had to look for the goat abortions.

Our farming books had warned that stress and traumatic experiences could cause spontaneous abortion in a pregnant doe, and they urged me to keep our goat safe and comfortable during gestation.
Does that include the gang rape?
I wondered. Because now that we'd done it, the process of getting a goat pregnant in the first place seemed about as traumatic as things could get. After that, a couple of dog bites would feel like a holiday.

Still, I worried about the possibility of miscarriage. For the rest of the day, I followed Pearl around, cringing every time she raised her tail. On a goat, all the sex gear is arranged close together in the hind quarters, so when I saw her tense up, I'd brace myself, waiting for baby bucklings to shoot out like paint balls. But instead, it would just be pee or a few dozen goat berries, and soon I stopped fretting, convinced her baby was okay.

Pearl, however, was another matter. Her lack of fighting spirit concerned me. I wasn't about to lose another animal. So that afternoon, I rang up the veterinary office.

“You'll have to bring in a stool sample,” the receptionist chimed. “We can't tell what it is without a sample. And not a little teaspoon, either. We'll be wanting a nice big soupspoon full of goat berries!”

“Okay.” I nodded grimly. “You got it.”

It wasn't hard to collect the poop, since Pearl was basically a grass-to-poop conversion machine, but it was tough making time in my schedule to get to the veterinary office. This meant that for the next several days, I had a mustard jar full of goat turds in the bottom of my handbag.

The poop in my purse didn't really bother me as much as the logistics of the thing. As a busy mother of two small children, I often found myself rooting blindly in the depths of that bag. A mustard jar full of goat berries could feel very much like the smooth surface of a water bottle, for example, and when I offered it to my thirsty daughter on the way to the vet's to drop it off, her eyes grew wide with joy. “Mama,”
she asked incredulously, “is that
candy
?”

“No,” I snapped, shoving the jar back in my bag. “It's
poop
and it's
poison
and also very
spicy.
So don't eat it.”

“But it
looks
like candy,” she protested.

I didn't answer. Mutely, I floored it to the vet's office.

Once we opened the tinkling door to the waiting room and addressed ourselves to the cheerful receptionist, everything began to feel a bit more normal. “I have, er, something for you,” I told the lady behind the counter, pulling out my mustard jar. The receptionist glanced at the label:

I'd labored over that label. I mean, really stressed about it. The extra
a
in “faecal,” for example, just looked pretentious. But here we were living in New Zealand, the land of hobbits, faeces, and diarrhoea, so I was trying to spell like a local. Then why had I specified the species? This was a veterinary office. Did I really need to tell them it was a jarful of goat shit? Was there the slightest chance that, like my daughter, they would mistake it for a selection of tiny truffles? Hand rolled, perhaps, and packaged in a pretty Dijon mustard jar? Finally, why had I written down the symptoms? The lab didn't care. They were just a bunch of underpaid technicians who spent all day hunting goat poop for worm eggs.

No, I think I wanted to make something clear: that I am not a person who fills jars with goat turds for fun. That this was not a crude practical joke, but rather a serious attempt to cure my goat, who was clearly ill. It was probably a parasite infection, unless she'd eaten a poisonous plant. Or maybe our dog had injured her, unless she was just depressed because we'd left her on a hillside to get gang-banged for six weeks.

So when I spoke to the vet, I tried to play it cool. “My goat is, uh, thin,” I began, racking my brain for technical phrases.

“Male or female?” the vet wanted to know.

“She's a . . . ewe.”
No, shit, that's a sheep.
“I mean a girl. I mean a doe.”

The veterinarian jotted this down on her index card. “Do you know her weight, by any chance?”

Now there was a stumper. Because how do you weigh a goat? Was I supposed to coax her onto a bathroom scale? Do I pick her up and weigh her myself? This animal had hooves, and teeth like a pearly white chainsaw. If she didn't kick me in the gut, she would probably eat my face.

I took a shot in the dark. “Um . . . a hundred pounds?”

“It's most probably worms,” the vet informed me. “
Haemonchus contortus.
We call it the barber pole worm. We'll have to get right on top of it, so we'll give you a prescription today. They suck the goat's blood, you see.”

I swallowed. “They do?”

“And they reproduce rather quickly. Up to ten thousand eggs a day. So the worms can suck a lot of blood in a very short time.”

The fact that vampire worms were reproducing by the tens of thousands in the belly of my goat should not have come as a surprise. By now I'd learned that country life is not a pastoral painting. Sure, at various times during the year you might see fluffy white lambs prancing in the tall grass, but those moments are rare. Real country life, it turns out, involves blood, shit, and worms. Also goat abortions.

The other thing it involves is dead chickens. I found that out when I got home from the vet's office only to learn that Kowhai had chomped on a chicken.

Through all our recent animal traumas—the brain-eating alpacas, the scouring calves, the worm-ridden goat—we'd kept our flock of six chickens, along with the notorious Jabberwocky. They all appeared
healthy enough. There weren't any more leg mites, no one was showing signs of leprosy or cloacal trauma, and they were laying a regular supply of eggs. Their biggest problem was the rooster and his insatiable sex drive.

That is, until Miranda left the door of the chicken coop open. At first I didn't know anything about it. I dosed Pearl with the worm medicine, and I was just taking my coat off when Miranda came running. “Mama!” she hollered, naked apart from purple underwear and her shiny black gumboots. “Kowhai did bite a chicken!”

Oh God, here we go
, I thought, running after her.
My daughter's first taste of mortality
. After all, we'd executed chickens and roasted a sheep on the property, but she'd never actually witnessed the carnage. Would she be traumatized? Have nightmares? “Is it Jabberwocky?” I asked hopefully.

“No, it's just a chicken,” she said, leading me to a large flax bush by the henhouse, where Kowhai was happily chewing on a pile of feathers.

“
Kowhai!
” I shouted in my Wrath of a Vengeful God voice. “
Baaaaaa!
”

Kowhai dropped the chicken, her eyes mourning the wasted snack.

My medical diagnostic skills were not what they could have been. “Chicken?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

Miranda poked the bird with a paint-stained finger. “I think it's dead, Mama. I think it's dead.”

I had to agree. The chicken was looking decidedly not
okay, lying limp on the ground, her eyes all white.

But she wasn't dead, just in shock. Those white things must have been chicken eyelids, because in a minute or two her eyes opened wide and she stumbled wearily to her feet.

“It's not dead, Mama!” Miranda crowed. “I think the chicken's not dead!”

“God, I hope not,” I agreed, picturing the Chicken from Beyond the Grave. “Because that would be weird.”

That night, over dinner, I had a new discovery to announce. “Her wing is broken,” I reported. “There's no blood, but the left wing is hanging down, and I think it hurts.”

Peter looked at me blandly. “Should we stick it in the freezer?”

“Uncle Peter!” Rebecca stopped chewing her veggie burger to fix him with an indignant stare.

“
No
.”
I shook my head, vehemently. “We have to bind her wings. I read it in my chicken book. We bind her wings with gauze, then just keep her away from the rest of the flock.”

“How do we do that?” Peter asked, cutting into his chicken. The one on his plate was sautéed in a nice, creamy white wine sauce.

“We'll keep her in a cage. On the deck.”

“Or else what?”

“Or the other chickens will torture her. You know, like the pecking order.”

Peter waggled a forkful of chicken at me. “Tell me again. Why don't I just cut its head off and stick it in the freezer?” Perceiving that I was on the side of the chicken, Rebecca kept her arms crossed and listened intently.

“Just because she's
injured
?
You want to
decapitate
her? Because she's not
perfect
?”

“Because she's food.”

“
I'm
not perfect. My thighs have cellulite. Are you gonna cut my head off, too?”

Peter reached over and patted my knee. “Don't be silly, honey. You don't have
that
much cellulite.” Surprisingly, this didn't make me feel better.

Peter wanted nothing to do with the chicken physiotherapy
project. So Rebecca and I dug up some gauze from our first aid kit, then she held the bird firmly on her lap while I bound her wings. We made a little house for her in a large dog cage on the deck, which quickly became known as the Chicken Hospital. She looked depressed in there, but she ate and drank, and she didn't seem to be dying. Every few days, we'd check her dressing, and I'll be damned if her wings didn't start looking a lot more even.

Pearl was getting better, too. Once we gave her the worm medicine, she started gaining weight and defending her territory against Kowhai. After a while, people started admiring her. Autumn and Patrice came around for a visit, and she stroked Pearl's ears while he examined her udders.

A handsome man with a strong Gallic nose and bright blue eyes, Patrice had spent years abusing himself as a chef in top French restaurants before burning out and moving to New Zealand. Now he worked as a teacher's aide, helping Silas through the routines of a school day: hanging up his bag, sitting at a desk, and beginning to write with a pen. At first I thought Patrice was naturally quiet, but then I realized he struggled with English, so sometimes he gave up on talking and kept his thoughts to himself. This time, however, he couldn't hold back.

“You are so lucky,” he told me enviously. “Your goat has great tits.” I wasn't sure what he meant by this until I realized it was the French accent that was confusing. What he intended to say was “teats,” and his interest in Pearl extended just to chèvre and fresh milk.

The funny thing is, he was right. Pearl
did
have great tits. The more I learned about dairy goats, the more I learned about teat position, and how you want them angled the right way to make milking easier. And once we killed off the vampire worms and once
the troubling memories of Love Mountain were behind us, I began to feel real affection for Pearl. I watched her belly growing each day, murmuring sweet nothings to her and scratching her between the ears. As for Rebecca, she made gourmet goat salads for Pearl, pinching off the tenderest shoots of bok choi and chard, then sprinkling the dish with nasturtium petals.

As far as we could calculate, Pearl would be due sometime in November, a mere two months before the end of our rental. We had to find a safe place for her baby, but week after week, nothing was for sale but multimillion-dollar farms—and the illegal Slovak house, with no heat or phone service. Despite her gourmet goat salads, it was starting to look as if Pearl might be raising her kid in a car.

TURKEY TIME

T
hen, at the end of June, another opportunity appeared. It was Monday afternoon and Amanda was over for a visit with her kids. We poured drinks, and Amanda pushed Amelia on the giant tree swing that hung from the ancient totara on the property. She could push Amelia with only one hand because she was balancing a glass of quince wine in the other.

“I've been thinking,” she mused. “What about Michiko's house?”

“The burned one?” I frowned. “I was sort of thinking something with a roof.”

“You'd be helping her out. There's no way she can live there. Then you could build a new house, maybe start building one now, while you're here.”

“So you've been in touch with her? Since the fire?”

Amanda shook her head. “No. I don't know where she's staying, but I think you could make contact through her lawyer.”

I hadn't thought of building a new home. And I didn't want to
swoop in on Michiko's tragedy like some tacky American jackal. But if buying the land might help her out, then that was something else.

Amanda scribbled out directions to the house on the back of a grocery receipt, and I stuck it to the refrigerator with a magnet. For the rest of the week, Peter and I talked about this new possibility. We pored over house building websites, considering that we might get much better value if we bought cheap land and built a new home on it. Plus, Michiko's property was right up the road from the school. The location was perfect.

On Saturday, we decided to drive there. “I don't know if I want the kids wandering around a burned-out ruin,” I said, glancing at Silas, who was pensively tasting the corner of a used Kleenex.

“That's okay,” Rebecca piped up. “I have some fabric dyeing I want to work on. I'll take care of them.”

“But I
want
to come!” Miranda howled, her eyes brimming with tears.

“Miranda,” Rebecca beckoned mysteriously. “We're going to make a
magic potion
this morning, and I need your help.”

Miranda considered this option. “Magic?” she asked doubtfully.

“Yes! With onions!”

Mollified, Miranda agreed to stay.

“That girl is incredible with the kids,” I commented, once Peter and I were pulling out onto the road. “How does she do it?”

“Becca's just talented,” Peter said, shrugging. “And then there's Will. She's always been protective of him.” Will was Rebecca's little brother. Five years younger, he had been born with a developmental delay. No one was sure exactly what was wrong, but he'd always been different, and from the start, Rebecca knew how to love someone who was vulnerable.

Michiko's property was situated on a loose gravel road, deep in
the Purua countryside. We began to see bright yellow signs nailed to the trunks of overgrown trees. “Dogs Kill Kiwi,” they adjured, and I swallowed hard. There's a hundred-thousand-dollar fine if your dog kills a kiwi bird in New Zealand. Living out here with Kowhai could get expensive.

Peter took notice. “We're right next to the reserve.” He looked around, casting a sharp eye toward the bushes at the side of the road. “I bet you really can see wild kiwi out here.”

After three or four minutes, we reached the crest of the hill. Peter glanced at the address on the small slip of paper. “This is it,” he said. “You'll have to open the gate.”

I climbed out of the car and stopped, taking in the view. The land was perched on the edge of a hillside, looking out on a deep gorge full of native New Zealand bush. Manuka, kanuka, and giant ponga ferns were woven together in a rich prehistoric foliage. Shafts of sunlight shone down from pink clouds, bathing the valley in golden light.

I opened the heavy steel gate and followed our station wagon down the driveway. Here were the ruins of Michiko's house. Sturdy brick walls were now piles of debris, the site a foot deep in ground glass and twisted metal. A single apple tree stood on the pavement, its branches singed.

We picked our way through the rubble, careful not to cut ourselves. Personal items were scattered through the wreck: a splintered skateboard, a little green flip-flop. A few pages of sheet music floated through the ashes. There was a Chopin prelude and “The Girl from Ipanema.” I could imagine Michiko playing that one for her kids. But it felt too intimate standing in the ruined lounge, as though we were trespassing in Michiko's home. After a quick look around, we made our way back outside.

“The concrete pad might be still good,” Peter commented, kicking it thoughtfully with his boot. “If we could clear the bricks out and keep the foundation, we'd save a ton of money.”

The property was positioned on a level building site carved from the hillside. On three sides, the land dropped away, quickly surrendering to thick brush and wild foliage. We started picking a path down the slope, dodging thorny bushes studded with bright yellow flowers.

Peter pinched off a yellow blossom and crushed it between his thumb and forefinger, sniffing the petals. “This is gorse, I think. Scottish gorse. Smell the coconut? This stuff's a nightmare to get rid of.”

“Well, we'd have to do something about it.” A thorny branch tugged at my coat sleeve, and I yanked it back before the fabric could tear. “It's growing everywhere.”

At the base of the gorge we found a shaggy macrocarpa tree hanging low over a cool, dark stream. Silty with rainfall, the water flowed thick like melted chocolate.

“Be a good place to read in the summer,” I pointed out.

Peter reached down and wet his hands in the stream. “I could make a little bench here, maybe put in a fountain.”

I smiled at the thought and looked up. “Who's that?”

A shadowy figure stood at the top of the hill. I couldn't make him out at this distance, but he was working the latch on the gate. He unlocked the barrier, swung the gate wide, and came onto the property.

“That's not the husband, is it?”

Peter glanced up sharply, shading his eyes with his hand. “Come on.” He took my hand protectively and started leading me back up the hill.

Whoever he was, the man had spotted us. He'd left the gate open and was now sauntering down the driveway, calm as can be. He looked casual, like he owned the place.

“Do you know what Duncan looks like?”

I shook my head.

“Me, neither.” Peter's face tightened. “Let's see what he wants.”

We scrambled up the hill, my boots losing purchase on the crumbling soil. Peter grabbed my arm as I started to slip. The man was staring in our direction. The sun shone behind him, casting his face in shadow. He wore a long dark coat and what looked like ragged jeans.

Twenty feet away, he called out. “Howzit guys? All good?”

“Oh, God.” I let out my breath. “It's Skin.”

We came up the last rise of the hill. Skin stepped back, a mirthful smile on his craggy face. He turned to Peter. “Ya gonna buy this place, then? House needs a bit of work.”

“I don't know. What do you think?”

Skin's eyes shone. “Good land. Got lots of pretty flowers on it.”

“You mean the gorse?” Peter grinned. “This stuff is the hedge from hell, isn't it?”

“Nah, she'll be right. Just put a whole heap of goats on it. They'll get rid of it for ya.” Skin stood there, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, surveying the view.

I followed his gaze, out over the valley full of lush, green bush. Most of it was the hedge from hell. But it would still be dark out there at night, an ocean of trees surrounding us. Not a boat maybe, but still a new horizon.

“Yeah,” I said. “Goats. I could see goats on this land.” And secretly, I thought,
I don't care if it's not perfect. I could see us here, too
.

We drove back home then, and when we walked in the door, we
found all our windows fogged up with steam. A cauldron of onion skins bubbled on the stove, and Rebecca was happily curled up on the couch sewing pistachio shells into a nightgown.

“There's a reason for this, right?” I asked. “Besides the onset of schizophrenia?”

“Becca's dyeing!” Miranda informed me. “And the 'stachios are the zist!”

A few extra shells tumbled to the ground. Silas placed these into his mouth, licking the salt from each one and then handing them back to Rebecca.

“
Resist,
” Rebecca corrected Miranda. “It's a technique my fibers teacher taught me. We stitch the nuts into the fabric. Then, when we dye it, we get this really cool pattern. I want to try it with avocados, too. And lichen.”

Dyeing was an element of fiber art that I hadn't considered when we first asked Rebecca to join us. I knew she was into weaving and knitting, but natural dyes could be harder to live with. Our countertop was cluttered with empty ice cream boxes where we sorted our kitchen scraps, the first three labeled “Compost,” “Chickens,” and “Goat.” Now we had a fourth vessel, this one titled “Becca Box.” The Becca Box contained decaying food items that might serve as experimental dye ingredients: moldering chunks of red cabbage and chard, puckered avocado skins, and piles of furry gray lichen. The whole assortment was starting to stink, and I was running out of counter space.

“So I was thinking,” Rebecca inquired. “What are we doing for Thanksgiving?”

Peter and I exchanged a look. Apart from a very sandy turkey we'd roasted on a Costa Rican beach a few years ago, we'd mostly let the holiday slide. Turkey could be hard to find outside
North America. Since it was so often dry and overcooked, the people we'd met on our travels tended to consider it a second-class meat.

“Hadn't really thought about it,” Peter admitted, pulling a cold bottle of water from the fridge. “Seeing as how it's June.”

“But that's the thing.” Becca put down her nut-nighty project and looked up. “We slaughtered them when they were six months old back at Putney. So if we get some young turkeys now, we could serve our own birds for Thanksgiving.”

“Like baby turkey chicks?” I wondered if they cut off their noses.

Rebecca shook her head. “Not the babies. I don't want to sound mean, but baby turkeys are as dumb as they come. At Putney, they were always drowning themselves in their water dispenser. When they weren't lighting themselves on fire.”

I blinked. “Why were they lighting themselves on fire?”

“It wasn't on purpose. They were just so effing
dumb
,
so they'd wander into the heat lamp and set their fluff on fire.”

“Like Michael Jackson,” Peter commented.

“Yeah.” Becca smiled. “Kind of. No, I was thinking we could get some young ones and, you know, raise them up.”

“I thought you were a vegetarian?” I queried.

“Mostly.” Rebecca picked up a pistachio shell and resumed stitching. “But I'll taste an animal if it had a happy life. You know, like happy meat.”

“Happy meat,” Peter repeated.

“Yeah.”

To prepare for our happy young turkeys, Becca and I determined to clean out a small pen that was already built beside the storage sheds. About forty feet square, it contained a hovel that would
provide shelter from the weather, and the wooden enclosure seemed sturdy enough. The problem was that it contained a rainforest.

Katya and Derek hadn't used this pen for some time, and in the intervening months, it had become choked with weeds. These were not small clusters of dandelions. The pen was bursting with formidable plants, many of them over six feet tall, green and shaggy with long, pointy leaves and clusters of dark berries.

Pulling on our gumboots, we got to work. As tall as they were, the weeds came up easily, and we lugged armloads of them to the wheelbarrow, taking turns carting them to the palm tree for Pearl to snack on. Though the day was cool, it wasn't long before we were both dripping with sweat. Rebecca had her iPod connected to some speakers, and we kept up our energy by blasting Reggaeton and New York hip-hop at obnoxious levels. Which is why we didn't hear Amanda drive up until she was standing right in front of me.

“I said, ‘
What are you lot up to?
'” she shouted.

I dropped my weeds and hit the Power button on the speakers. “Sorry.” I reached up to adjust the cat's ears, which were sliding off my head. “We're making room for the turkeys. We'll feed all this to Pearl, then put down some wood shavings for the birds.”

Amanda reached into the pen, plucking a berry and inspecting it closely. “Do you know what this is?” she asked.

“A fucking nightmare? We've been at it for hours. You wouldn't believe the size of some of these plants.”

Amanda's eyebrows furrowed. “I think it's inkweed. You'd better not give it to the bloody goat. You'll kill her.”

“Sugar, Honey, Ice, and Tea!” Rebecca raced out to the palm tree, where we quickly kicked the pile of death weeds away from our pregnant goat.

I let loose a frustrated sigh. “Great. Now we'll have to move all this out to the upper paddock and burn it. More work.”

Rebecca drew in her breath sharply and put her hand to her mouth. Her lips started working strangely.

“What's wrong, Rebecca?” Amanda looked concerned.

“I . . . I think I just swallowed a fly.”

“Ha!” I crooned. “Vegetarian no longer!”

Rebecca looked aggrieved.

“That's all right,” I soothed. “I'm sure it was a happy fly.”

That week, I purchased three young turkeys online. Collecting the birds, from a playful English couple who ran a bed-and-breakfast and raised turkeys for fun, was mostly uneventful. It wasn't until we got them home that the shenanigans began.

To begin with, they were surprisingly unattractive. They had dun-colored plumage that bore no resemblance to the splendid feathers I'd imagined; pale, pimply skin on their heads; and wattles that dangled like an old man's balls.