Why Peacocks? Read online

  On Christmas morning, Emmett was elated, as expected. He was mildly disappointed in the embargo on handling Cosmo, but in the short term the illusion was perfect. With the lights and the driftwood and the shavings, it looked like there must be a snake in there. If Emmett contorted himself to get his eyes even with the floor of the tank and cupped his hands like blinkers on a horse, he could see a dark lump that might have been Cosmo’s snout. In the meantime, not having a snake—a real, living ball python—to watch gave him time to study the rest of the habitat. He focused briefly on the thermometer, which I’d prudently reattached at the very bottom of the tank.

  “Why does that have the pet store logo on it?”

  All the panicky adrenaline had kept Louise and me up; in the dark of our bedroom, we had worked through answers for the various worst-case scenarios, beginning, of course, with why the snake was dead (unpressurized high-altitude travel, obviously). Explaining away a logo was the least complicated. “C’mon, pup,” I said. “Santa doesn’t make snakes. They’re living creatures—he has to get them from the same place everyone else gets them. He probably picks up the thermometer and stuff while he’s there.”

  “Santa goes to the pet store?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” I said. “He sends an elf.”

  Emmett looked skeptical. He squatted next to the tank, his face level with Cosmo’s cave, and blinkered his eyes again. “I think he moved,” he whispered. “Yeah, he definitely moved.” Louise and I left him like that, staring at a shadow, while we went to make Christmas breakfast.

  * * *

  Cosmo was not dead. He mercifully emerged early in the evening, throwing that same fingerling shadow up the wall, nosing along the edge of the tank the same way he’d done the day I’d bought him. The next morning, I carried everything up to Emmett’s bedroom and put it on a shelf where he could see it from his bed. Emmett dutifully changed the water and checked the temperature and humidity. For weeks, Cosmo’s entire behavioral repertoire consisted of hiding in his cave, lazing under a lamp, soaking in his water dish, or crawling from one to the other, a routine occasionally punctuated by unenthusiastically squirming around Emmett’s wrist every three or four days.

  The only other thing snakes are supposed to do is eat, which Cosmo refused to do. Knowing nothing of snake anatomy, I suspected that Louise and I had damaged his esophagus, or whatever equivalent it is that snakes have.

  We kept a bag of tiny newborn mice in the freezer next to the Popsicles and the peas, and every five days Emmett thawed one under hot water and left it in the tank. Cosmo ignored it. Emmett moved Cosmo and the dead mouse to a dark box, and Cosmo ignored it there, too. Emmett sliced one open and wiggled it in Cosmo’s face so he could pick up the scent of the entrails. Nothing. For two months.

  And then he died.

  I found him late on a Saturday morning when Louise and Calvin were out of town at a hockey tournament. Depositing some clean laundry in Emmett’s room, I noticed that Cosmo was stretched out in the shavings instead of under his lamp, as was his habit. I gave him a little nudge. He did not move.

  I called down from the top of the stairs. “Pup? I think Cosmo is, um… sick.”

  He pounded up the stairs. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I’m not sure. You should probably come and look.”

  He looked for a very long minute. “He’s just sleeping,” he said. He looked closer. He looked from a different angle.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “But I don’t think so.”

  “Can we take him to the doctor?”

  I was already Googling. There was a reptile vet thirty minutes away, and it closed in forty. “Yeah, if we hurry, we can get him there.”

  We dumped some LEGOs out of a plastic box, stabbed air holes in the top, tossed in a handful of shavings. Emmett reached for the snake. “I’ll get Cosmo,” I said. If he was dead, I could fake it, hold him so he wouldn’t dangle, plainly limp and lifeless.

  He was limp and lifeless.

  I laid Cosmo in the box and started to put the lid on. “Wait.” Emmett was holding the cave and the water dish. “He’ll need these if he has to stay.”

  “Good point, pup.”

  Emmett rode in the back, holding Cosmo’s box. For the entire drive, he was completely silent. I could see him in the mirror, staring at the box. He was pale.

  We got out of the car in front of the vet’s office. Emmett stopped before we got to the door. “Do you think he’ll be okay?” He was looking at Cosmo, not me.

  Cosmo was already dead. This was all a pantomime.

  “I don’t know, pup.”

  My cheeks flushed with shame. Emmett was for the first time facing the death of something he loved, and I froze. Death is one of the few things I should have been equipped to explain, too. I understand death. I’m good at death. Except in the clutch, when I lied to my son about his dead pet.

  * * *

  I write about death for a living. More specifically, I write about events, crimes and disasters and such, in which people have recently become dead. Magazine stories, mostly, long narratives about awful things that, over three decades and six continents, have involved many hundreds of dead people. I have no idea how many because I’ve never had the inclination to trudge back through the years and count them all. But in Emmett’s lifetime, from his birth until the spring of third grade, the cumulative body count was four hundred and ninety-eight.

  In fairness, almost half of those people were on a Malaysian airliner that disappeared in 2014. Most of the others were shot, which probably is the most common way people in my stories have died over the years, starting long ago with a newborn killed by his (clinically, legally, and temporarily) psychotic mother. A few were stabbed and some were blown up. At least twenty-five burned to death, possibly more depending on how finely one parses the cause of death, and the rest drowned or suffocated or were battered in one manner or another. One had a heart attack that almost certainly wasn’t the result of poisoning, but opinions differ. One was sawed cleanly in two at the waist.

  Sometimes there are forensic reports and legal briefs to help explain how those people became dead. But the actual mechanics usually aren’t worth dwelling upon. Death is a plot point, and killing people on the page is not technically difficult, anyway. Death is an abbreviated narrative, the arc precise and clear, the trajectory wholly kinetic. Writing death well requires only restraint. There is no need to layer drama onto what is inherently dramatic, and no one deserves to have his or her last moment corrupted by clichés, especially nonsensical ones—bullets, for instance, are never pumped into anyone, though if they were, far fewer people would be killed by them.

  The more interesting stories are who the dead were or what happened after they died or why they became dead in the first place or, usually, some combination of those things. Telling those stories, then, requires listening to the people who knew the dead or survived the catastrophe or treated the wounded or solved the crime or buried the bodies, and as many of those as are willing to talk. It’s not an especially difficult job, that part. Anyone with empathy and patience could do the listening. Traumatized people want to talk to an interested stranger more often than you would probably suspect. They remember the most curious details, too, like how a skull looks when a bullet explodes out the back. They cry a lot, and you try to make yourself small in those moments, not to crowd their grief. As a rule, it is indecent to interrupt.

  The harder part is absorbing all of those memories and all of that sadness and rage and distilling it into sentences coherent enough for a stranger to understand. That part takes more practice.

  None of that, the listening and absorbing and processing, is remotely the same as grieving. But immersion and repetition are rigorous teachers. Strange, really, that I hadn’t learned any wise and comforting words to ease the death of a snake.

  * * *

  The vet was about my age, graying hair and glasses, with a softness to his manner, the sort who will make a terr
ific grandfather someday. He introduced himself, asked Emmett his name, then nodded somberly.

  “Emmett, I’m really sorry, but I’m afraid your snake died.”

  Emmett did not visibly react, except for the first glistening of tears that he managed to keep from falling out of his eyes.

  “What was his name?”

  “Cosmo.”

  “And how long have you had him?”

  “Since Christmas.” His voice cracked.

  The vet gave a slow nod. “I see,” he said. “And where did you get him?”

  “Santa,” I interrupted, possibly with a hint of desperation. There were only so many life lessons Emmett needed confirmed in one day.

  “But I think he got him at a pet store,” Emmett said. “All the stuff in his tank came from the pet store. And my dad said Santa can’t make a snake.”

  “Well, yes, that’s true. But I think Santa might have gotten you a sick snake. He hadn’t eaten in a long time, is that right?”

  “He never ate.”

  “Yeah, that means he was probably sick.”

  The room was quiet. “Maybe,” Emmett said, “Santa shouldn’t get animals from the pet store.”

  The vet vigorously agreed. I looked at my shoes.

  We buried Cosmo on the east side of the silver maple, where the ground was soft and loose from all the seasons we’d tried, and failed, to grow asparagus and artichokes. Emmett made a tombstone from a broken slate that had fallen from the roof and planted it next to the grave. He kept the tank in his room so that he could look at it, and the view wasn’t much different than the one he’d had on Christmas morning. If he wanted, and sometimes he did, he could pretend he still had a snake hiding in that little ceramic cave.

  And then Louise got him the chickens.

  She was buying tomato plants on the first Sunday in April at Barnes Supply Company, a shop west of downtown that an army colonel named Lee “Shorty” Barnes opened after fighting Nazis in World War II. It sold agricultural supplies until the spreading city absorbed the local farms, and then it sold mostly lawn and garden staples until Home Depot and Lowe’s sponged away that business. So the George family, which bought it when Shorty retired in 1991, recalibrated it into pet supplies, food and toys and bedding and such, but retained the agricultural roots. Shelves of herbs and vegetable plants are wheeled onto the sidewalk out front each spring, and there are bins of seeds mounted to a wall inside. Bags of soil and amendments, compost and manure and whatnot, are stacked out back, and they stock the tools to sow, cultivate, and harvest a large garden. They sell feed for chickens and, in the spring, actual chicks. They’re kept under lamps in the shed where the poultry waterers and feeders are shelved, with each breed, the Orpingtons and Easter eggers and Australorps, sorted into separate containers.

  Louise brought home two barred Plymouth rocks, peeping charcoal puffs splotched with yellow. “The lady at Barnes said these are the best chickens to have as pets,” she told Emmett. “I know they can’t ever replace Cosmo, but they’re pretty cool, right?”

  Emmett, eyes big as walnuts, scooped up a chick. “I’m going to call this one Comet,” he said, “and the other one Snowball.” Calvin did not argue for naming rights, a solid big-brother move.

  “Why Comet and Snowball?” I asked. “Neither one looks like a comet or a snowball.”

  “Comet does,” he said. “A comet is a big dirty snowball in space”—ah, yes, he’d binged Cosmos twice on Netflix, which also explained the original Cosmo—“and the chicks look like dirty snowballs. But I can’t call the other one Dirty Snowball.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  As luck would have it, chicks require almost the exact same environment as a ball python—a tank, shavings, and a heat lamp. They are, however, much more interactive than snakes. Every couple of days, we would cover the bathroom floor with newspaper, shut the door to keep the cat out, and let the chicks bounce around for a while. Chicken Time, we called it. They also grow very fast. Within a couple of weeks, Comet and Snowball were the size of squabs, their down replaced with feathers striped black and white, and ready to be moved to a small mail-order coop next to the barn.

  I wasn’t expecting much from them once they were outdoors. Though I’ve always been fond of animals, I held the same agnosticism toward chickens as I did snakes. So far as I knew, they were among the lesser avian species, flying only in short, panicked bursts and incapable of asking for crackers or repeating dirty words. They adapted easily to living brief, miserable lives on factory farms, which is not at all their fault but nonetheless a subjugation that is difficult to imagine, say, an eagle or a hawk tolerating. Once they stopped being cute, I assumed Comet and Snowball would be skittish accessories to the yard, like squirrels. They would lay eggs and eat ticks and fertilize the garden, all worthwhile contributions but nothing over which affectionate bonds typically are formed.

  And yet they were such charming creatures. I was usually the first one up, so I’d release Comet and Snowball in the morning, which to a chicken is a time of great joy. Their heads would pop up in the window of their hutch when they heard me crunch across the gravel, and they would hop down with tremendous enthusiasm. Pure gratitude, chickens. They never stopped chattering, their jabbering clucks eventually softening into satisfied tuts. “How are the single ladies this fine morning?” I’d ask as I tossed feed on the ground. Oh, they had a lot to say. On weekends, they followed Louise and me to the porch, eating ants and spiders while we drank our coffee and read the news. One of them, and usually both, would flap up on the arm of a chair and, from there, into a lap or onto a shoulder. If they weren’t with us and we couldn’t see them, we just needed to call. “C’mon, chicken friends,” one of us would yell, and they would come running in tandem, always together and perfectly synchronized.

  By early July, the ladies were outgrowing their small coop. I decided to build something next to the barn, on the side where the roof extends like a giant carport over a wide patch of dirt where we keep the firewood and the lawn mower and, at the far end, a substantial pile of scraps and trash I kept promising to get hauled away.

  I stared at the wall, puzzling out a new enclosure. Chief snorfled in the paddock. The chickens liked to wander near his hooves, and I used to worry he’d step on them, but he never did. It was midafternoon and very hot.

  My phone chirped. It was a text to both me and Louise from our friend Tanja.

  ANY CHANCE U GUYS WANT A PEACOCK? NO KIDDING!

  I blinked once or twice.

  I had never considered whether I wanted a peacock. When did that become an option? Where does one even get a peacock?

  And why would Tanja think we’d want a peacock? Oh, right, because we have chickens and a barn, and it kind of looks like we live on a farm even though we don’t and… Wait, Tanja’s an attorney. How does she have a peacock to unload?

  No, we didn’t want a peacock. What would we do with a peacock? Where would we put a peacock? I’m trying to find space for chickens, and they’re like, what, a tenth the size of a peacock?

  My phone chirped again. Louise: I WILL SPEAK FOR THE GROUP: YES, PLEASE.

  Chapter Two

  The peacocks lived on a real farm the next county over, where Tanja stabled her daughter’s horse, and about twenty miles from our faux farm. We turned off a blacktop two-lane onto a long driveway that curved around a pasture, through a cluster of outbuildings, and past a pen containing a fully ripe hog before ending in front of a pale two-story house surrounded by shade trees.

  A peacock stood on the roof, his back to us. His train hung over the gutter like a ristra, catching speckles of midday sunlight sneaking through the trees. From our angle, the feathers were of no particular color, only sparks of green and gold, copper and turquoise, burgundy and blue-black, all of them flashing and fading and flashing again with the slightest movement, the whisper of a breeze, the bird shifting his weight.

  It was the most magnificent creature I had ever seen.

&nbs
p; Calvin and Emmett went running after more peacocks by the tree line, at least ten of them, maybe a dozen, one alabaster white, like a statue in the grass. The place smelled of pine sap and manure, and dust seemed to powder almost everything, the buildings, the chickens in the coop by the hog, the air.

  Except the peacocks. They remained glittering, almost shiny.

  Louise was staring at the bird on the roof. “What do you think?” I asked softly, almost reverentially. “Pretty spectacular, yeah?”

  She didn’t answer right away, just studied the peacock a little longer.

  “It’s bigger than I thought,” she said.

  * * *

  Tanja had texted us only the day before, but the question of whether we wanted a peacock was presented as a matter of some urgency. Why wasn’t made clear, but we were encouraged to get to the farm as quickly as possible, whereupon the proprietor, Danielle, would explain.

  She appeared from out of the dust, a generation younger than I’d expected, with a sporty flush on her cheeks and blond hair pulled back loosely. She had an unfussy confidence that immediately struck me as required in a horsewoman, though I knew little about horses; Chief was the only one I’d spent a significant time around, and he seemed more like a very large dog than a horse. Danielle had dirt on her hands and mud on her boots and an understated swagger in her walk. She looked like she could wrangle a large animal and like she would use a word such as wrangle.

  Peacocks, I would learn later, had been on Danielle’s farm since 1977, shortly after her grandfather bought the place from the estate of a dead tobacco farmer. He paid cash for it, which Edwin Johnston was able to do because he’d made himself wealthy in the artificial-eye business. He was a pioneer, and perhaps the only practitioner ever, of traveling ocularistry. Ocularists make prosthetic eyes, which used to be glass but, since about World War II, have been custom-molded and hand-painted acrylic shells fitted over a base surgically implanted in the eye socket. It’s a niche business that tends to run in families, since the only way to become an ocularist is to apprentice under one, of whom there are extraordinarily few. Edwin married into the trade and learned it from his father-in-law, a third-generation artisan who spoke not a lick of English but had roots in Lauscha, a German glassblowing town and the traditional home of the modern artificial eye.