Dirty Chick
Authors: Antonia Murphy
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Copyright © 2015 by Antonia Murphy
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Murphy, Antonia, 1975â
Dirty chick : adventures of an unlikely farmer / Antonia Murphy.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-698-18631-6
1. Farm lifeâCaliforniaâAnecdotes. 2. Women farmersâCaliforniaâAnecdotes. 3. Murphy, Antonia, 1975â I. Title.
S521.5.C2M87 2015
636.09794âdc23 2014025087
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Version_1
For Peter,
my love.
Chapter One: It Started with a Chicken
Chapter Four: Teddy Bear Camels
Chapter Six: Stripper Calves with Satan Tongues
Chapter Seven: Back from Love Mountain
Chapter Nine: The First One Is Free
Chapter Eleven: Spinning and Spitting
Chapter Thirteen: The Grab-and-Yank
Chapter Fifteen: Catch the Big One
Chapter Sixteen: The Binglee-Doo
So many people helped make, shape, and publish
Dirty Chick.
Great big thanks and fierce hugs go out to:
My beautiful blonde shark agent, Elizabeth Evans, and the team at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency,
My exacting editors in New York and Melbourne, Brooke Carey and Alaina Gougoulis,
Michael Heyward at Text, who “fell about laughing” at my revolting lamb jokes,
Torre DeRoche and Jillian Lauren, fellow writers who helped me find an agent in the first place,
My mother and father, Anne Stein and Alexis Tellis, who read to me always,
Peter, “the perfect man for me,” who laughed at early drafts and watched the kids so I could write,
Rebecca, who helped so much with our family and other animals, and
The people of Purua who have made us feel so welcome in their community.
T
his is a work of nonfiction. Some names, nationalities, and medical details have been changed to protect people's privacy, the timeline has been compressed to make for a snappier read, and conversations are paraphrased from memory. As I fleshed out the character of Skin, I blended him with memories of two other men: his close friend and his neighbor.
And I'm sorry to say, all the disgusting animal stories actually happened.
A
s I watched my goat eat her placenta, I was mostly impressed. I did experience some other feelings, such as horror and revulsion, and also a hint of nausea. But Pearl had always been a strict vegan, so her sudden craving for raw meat showed a real taste for adventure. Some vegetarians who broaden their menu choices might spring for an egg or a soup made with chicken stock. But my goat, Pearl, went straight for the autocannibalism. Which was disgusting. And also worth some respect.
The placenta draped gracefully from her hindquarters, a translucent pink train enclosing a network of blue veins. There was a dark red, ropy thing inside, heavy with blood and the color of liver. It was this that Pearl tucked into first, craning her neck to nibble and swallow, a bloody moustache staining the white fur around her mouth. Then one of her new babies bleated, and she whipped her head around in midmunch, flinging the placenta across the grass like a parade banner. She licked the amber membrane from her newborn baby's fleece, and when a trickle of meconium appeared between its legs, she licked that up, too.
I regarded my goat, whose face was smeared with a war paint of baby butt tar and blood. Round the back end, things were worse: it looked like an abattoir was coming out of her ass.
Why am I here?
I found myself wondering.
How did my life come to this?
The answer was clear. It had started with a chicken.
IT STARTED WITH A CHICKEN
I
t wasn't even my chicken, actually, but my father's, which I was charged with caring for during the three weeks he went on holiday in France with his wife, Gail. This particular chore came with free use of his Spanish-style hacienda with a swimming pool just north of San Francisco, so I was more than happy to oblige. Besides the handful of chickens, there was an elderly cat, an idiot bulldog, and a duck. Nothing I thought I couldn't handle.
Plus, I didn't have much else to do at the time. Browsing through life in my late twenties, I was managing a small children's theater and halfheartedly attending art school. My meager paychecks added up to a spare existence based largely on peanut butter and toast, so a three-week house-sitting gig in a fancy neighborhood sounded like just the thing. I packed my bags eagerly, anticipating lazy afternoons poolside.
“Quackers is bereaved,” my stepmother announced as she tucked
a good navy cardigan into her suitcase for Paris. “He's very lonely. He hasn't been the same since Cheese died.”
Cheese, apparently, was the female duck. “He's lonely?” I asked. “How do you know?”
She cringed. “Well, he sometimes has sex with the chickens. But it's fine, really. He's perfectly harmless. Just a lonely widower.” She smiled sentimentally. “Would you help me get this suitcase downstairs?”
And that's how I met Quackers, the interspecies duck rapist. Every time I went down to the chicken run, there he was, humping away at a chicken. I couldn't make out the specifics of what was going on, but he'd be up on some poor hen, furiously flapping his wings, and she would look really perturbed. They'd scoot around like this for a minute or twoâunless I happened to separate them, which wasn't so easy to do.
“Hey! You . . . duck! Stop it! Stop
doing
that!” Quackers ignored me. I decided it would be useless to appeal to his better nature and instead went for the garden hose. “How do you like
that,
Quackers?” I'd holler, placing my thumb over the aperture to get a high-pressure spray. This usually worked, and both duck and chicken would slink away, feathers soaked and ruffled, looking ashamed.
The garden hose method was effective over the weekend, when I could lounge by the swimming pool and keep an eye on things. But come Monday, I had to go to work, and I scowled at Quackers on my way out the door. “Don't try any funny business, Mister,” I warned him. “I'm watching you.”
This was a blatant lie, and Quackers must have known it, because when I got back that night the hacienda was eerily silent. “They must have put themselves to bed,” I reasoned, taking the flashlight
off the shelf by the door and heading down to the chicken run. “I'm sure they're all fine.”
They were not. Or at least, one wasn't. A single sweep of the flashlight told me all I needed to know. Feeder, watering can, chicken roost. Three little hens, all in a row. Also a small glass chandelier, because that's how they do farming in Marin County. And one little hen, huddled up on a shelf, crouched in a way that instantly communicated something was wrong. I passed the flashlight beam over her backside, and that's when I saw the blood. I ran for the telephone.
“What do I
do
?”
I said in a panic, after calling my then-boyfriend Peter at his job. “It's bloody. It's bleeding. I think Quackers raped it to death!”
“It's a chicken,” Peter reasoned. “Cut its head off.”
“I can't
do
that!” I squealed. “These chickens aren't regular chickens! They're
pets
!”
And it was true: My dad and his wife had an unnatural attachment to their hens. Besides outfitting their coop in faux
Louis XVI décor, Dad and Gail sometimes let them wander around inside the house, where they crapped on the carpets and hassled the bulldog. One time, a framed painting fell down, breaking a chicken's leg. They didn't euthanize it. They took it to the vet and had its leg put in a sling.
Peter's voice was even and calm. “Then you don't have a choice. You'll have to find a vet who's open and take her in.”
And I guess you could say that's when my farming career began. I never much cared for animals, unless delicious slices of them were seared in clarified butter and presented to me with a sauce. But now here I was, following my soon-to-be-husband's advice: wrapping the gory chicken in a towel and speeding away to the
all-night veterinary clinic. Fumbling at the knobs on my dashboard, I found a Mozart minuet on the public radio station and turned it up, hoping the music would calm her.
Once we got to the clinic, the chicken went downhill fast. “I don't recommend keeping different species in the same enclosure,” the vet announced, after I'd been anxiously waiting in his front office for half an hour. “Especially ducks. Ducks are nothing but trouble.”
I jumped to my feet. “Where is she? Can I see her?”
Instead of a chicken, the doctor handed me a sheet of paper. It was an invoice with a single item. “Chicken euthanasia,” it read. “Cloacal trauma. $345.00.”
“Waitâ
what
?”
I asked, trying hard to be civil. “What's a cloaca? And why does it cost three hundred and forty-five dollars to kill one?”
The vet smiled benignly, murmuring something about after-hours care. And then he told me what a cloaca is.
Unlike human females, who have so many holes we might as well be pasta strainers, the chicken has one perfect, pristine opening, which handles everything. It's her intestinal, urinary, and reproductive aperture. To put it simply, the cloaca is the chicken supervagina.
I have no idea how they control them. At any moment, this same hole could produce urine, a turd, or a baby chicken eggâa fact that, I imagine, must fill their lives with surprise.
I think it was the knowledge of this elegant organ, much more than the sense of guilt I felt at not being there to protect her, that made me mourn the chicken. The cloaca is so beautifully efficient, such a miracle of avian engineering, that it seemed doubly tragic to think it had been defiled by a sadistic duck.
I got over it, though. My father and stepmother returned from their trip and they tried not to blame me for the death. I went back to my own home, which at that time was a sailboat moored in Richmond, a sketchy part of the Bay Area just east of Marin County.
Slowly, I began to put the horrible incident behind me. But one day, I got to wondering about that duck and why his romantic advances had resulted in tragedy. So I Googled “duck penis,” and instantly regretted it.
The duck, I learned, has the longest penis of all vertebrates. When extended, his penis can reach the same size as his full body height, a terrifying ratio when you put it in human terms. The mental image this produced was unspeakable: a sort of Boschian tableau featuring a Satanic duck with a six-foot cock.
Later that week, Gail gave a memorial service for her ill-fated hen. It seems the chicken's name had been Chantal and she'd been as cherished as a miracle baby after a lifetime of infertility. In a troubling blend of fetish and sentiment, Gail had kept the cracked remains of Chantal's first egg over the years, lovingly wrapped in tissue paper. These she placed in a spice jar and buried alongside the bird.
Not surprisingly, my father and stepmother didn't invite me to the wake. This may have been because I was responsible for Chantal's death, or perhaps because my father and Gail had an inkling that I might start giggling at a eulogy for poultry. Whatever the reason, the proceedings went on without me.
To be polite, I did ask about the service, and it seems things didn't go exactly as planned. Gail was vague on the details, but generally, in a case of murder and sexual assault, the assailant is not permitted to free-range at the funeral, pecking at lawn chairs and
searching for bugs in the grass. Quackers, however, had roamed the lawn, fixing everyone with a cold, hard stare.
Gail had selected a Shakespearean sonnet to read at the graveside, but no sooner had she begun than Quackers strode lustily forward, causing my father to rear back in alarm. This was a wise move, and he didn't even know the specifics of duck anatomy. A duck penis isn't just huge; it's spiny and shaped like a corkscrew. Clearly, species was no obstacle to this duck's unnatural urges. Who would he fix on next? My father? The bulldog? Chantal's recumbent corpse? The service came to an awkward conclusion, and Quackers was admonished for creeping people out.
Soon after, the bulldog died under mysterious circumstances, and while Gail was convinced he'd snacked on a box of snail poison, I had my doubts. Quackers still roamed the property, terrifying cats and small children, while everyone was careful to keep him away from the hens. He died a year or two later, and though a decade has passed since that terrible night, I still can't feed ducks at the park. “Rapists,” I mutter, whenever I see kids tossing bread in the duck pond. “Why feed your
treats
to the
rapists
?”
This has won me some unkind looks from parents and nannies, but they should read up on their anatine anatomy. If they knew what they were feeding, they wouldn't let their kids get so close.
I'd like to say this episode put me off rural living altogether, and for a while, it did. I certainly had no intention of hobby farming, even in the charming way my father and stepmother approached it. But our lives take unexpected turns. Somehow, within a few years, I was managing my own homestead in New Zealand, complete with chickens, goats, and even a few cows grazing in the pasture. The one animal I would not permit on my property was a duck. The very thought of one gave me the creeps.
If it seems strange that an artsy San Francisco dilettante should find herself living in a small rural backwater in northern New Zealand, then let me assure you, I'm as surprised as you are. For the most part, our peers back home lead conventionally successful lives: in their early forties, they run businesses, work as lawyers and scientists, have mortgages, and go to restaurants and parties. Meanwhile, Peter and I spend our time chasing cows down the road and executing chickens.
After much thought, I ascribe our unconventional life choices to three main things:
1. The ocean
2. George W. Bush
3. Hobbits
Allow me to explain. For as long as I could remember, sailing for me was a joy. While I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, someone in my family always had a sailboat, and we went out on the bay every few weeks for a dinner picnic, to see the fireworks, or just to spend a day in the sun. San Francisco is known for its brisk ocean breezes, and sometimes howling gusts come shooting down the city hills along the major boulevards. We'd get slammed by a sudden wind, our boat would heel way over and surge ahead, and I'd panic, fumbling for a lifeline.
But my brother Brian was always calm. “Don't worry about it, partner,” he'd soothe, patting my stiff yellow lifejacket as he adjusted the tiller. “This boat will not sink.” Then he'd explain the physics of sails, how the boat will heel only so much until the
sails dump wind, and how she naturally comes back upright, keeping everyone safe on deck. “Always,” he said. “She always comes back up.”
I loved the wind on my face, the salt on my skin, the pleasant, sunburned drowsiness after a day on the water. Even turkey sandwiches with sour dill pickles tasted better in my brother's cockpit. Most of all, I loved heading out under the Golden Gate Bridge, even if it was just for a day sail. I knew that past that horizon was ocean, then Hawaii, then worlds and continents I'd never seen. It was an endless blue wilderness that I had the power to explore, as long as I kept a strong vessel beneath my feet. And I wanted to get there.
For Peter, the ocean was a sanctuary. Although he's a bright and imaginative man, Peter never did well in the classroom. Now he thinks he probably had an undiagnosed learning disability, but when he was growing up and failing in school, he just felt stupid. On a sailboat, things were different. He had a natural affinity for three-dimensional space, easily understanding which points of sail would chart the most efficient course. He sailed with his father in Long Island Sound, Chesapeake Bay, and down in the Caribbean. And when he was a teenager and his parents separated in an acrimonious divorce, the ocean was the only place he felt calm.
So when we met a decade ago in the laundry room of the Richmond Marina, we were both pursuing the same passion. Peter had quit his job in New York as a network engineer a few months earlier. Instead of marrying his girlfriend and buying a house, he'd poured his down payment into a California boat that would sail him around the world. And I'd just bought
Sereia
, a thirty-six-foot 1970s ketch that I had no idea how to handle alone.
Peter told me his boat was named
Swallow
. “That's so sweet,” I replied. “What a cute little bird.” Peter's smart-ass friends back in New York had thought a boat named Swallow was racy and hilarious. More than one wanted to know when he'd be getting a dinghy named
Spit
,
so I think the fact that I didn't tease him was a relief. We went on a date, we went to bed, and then Peter moved in. Within a year, he sold
Swallow
, and we were planning to sail
Sereia
across the Pacific.
This was 2003 and 2004, the height of the Bush years, and Peter and I were unnerved by the wartime zeal in our country. Most of our fellow liberals were threatening to emigrate to Canada or New Zealand, but as it turns out, we were the crazy ones who did.
It wasn't all high-minded politics that chased us out of the States. The truth was I couldn't afford to live in San Francisco anymore. The city where I grew up, full of artists and poets and revolutionaries, was now home to millionaires. Managing a small children's theater, I had no idea how I'd ever afford to have a family: the cost of health insurance alone for a family of four was more than I earned in a month.