Dirty Chick (17 page)

“No, we finally killed our boring turkeys. Then we plucked out the feathers and opened them up, and it turned out they were full of rocks.”

Nick blinked. “They eat rocks? I knew they weren't that bright, but . . .”

“No, it's on purpose. They hold the rocks in their gizzards, and it helps them to grind up their food. They don't even have teeth, but the rocks are like teeth on the inside.”

Amanda put down her fork. “That's life on the farm, really,” she said. “Never know what you'll find down there. Pigs running off, rooster killing . . .”

“Rooster killing?” Peter interjected. “We could use some of that.”

“Nick had to kill our rooster.” Amanda nodded proudly at her husband. “They all get mean at some stage, then they attack the kids. Or they gang-rape their mother.”

“Excuse me?”
I looked up from my plate. “You didn't mention that when you gave us Goldie.”

“You didn't ask.” Amanda smiled wickedly. “Anyway, you were so keen for a rooster I thought I'd let you find out for yourself.”

She had a point. I had asked for the rooster.

Amanda sipped her wine. “When I was a girl, Mum thought it would be good for us kids to get a chicken with a clutch of eggs, so we could see the baby chicks being born. And it was nice. They all hatched out of their little eggs, and they were really cute.”

“So what happened?” Peter asked.

“They all turned out to be roosters. Every last one of them. Then they grew up and gang-raped the mum.”

“Oh my
God.
”

“What's a gang rape?” Miranda wanted to know. “Is that a grown-up word?”

I shushed her, and Amanda giggled. “I know. It's shocking, really. We were having a teddy bear birthday party, if you can believe it, and all my little friends were over, with our teddy bears and cake, and the dog got out. And she deposited this—er, this
well-loved
chicken in the middle of the picnic. Dead.”

There was a silence as we took this in. Then I burst out laughing.

Peter shot me a reproachful look. “How can you
laugh
?”
he asked. “It's chicken matricide and sexual assault!”

“It's just . . .” I took my napkin and dabbed my eyes, helpless with giggles. “It's so fucking hard to be a parent. And no matter how bad it gets, it's always so much
worse
for the animals.”

“I don't know,” Nick objected. “Our animals have it pretty good. You should see how they keep pigs in Malaysia.”

“Oh, I'm sure you're right,” I said. “But we're so stressed out about Silas's seizures, and I have to say, no one's getting raped by a duck. Or getting his nose hacked off with a laser beam. Or getting infested with thousands of vampire worms.”

Sophie, Lucy, and Amelia were all staring at me, their dark eyes round with horror.

“Okay!” Amanda got up from the table. “That's enough nightmares for now. Anyone for a pud?” She dished out bowls of warm chocolate pudding, passed a pitcher of cream, and sat down to eat. “Every parent goes through some version of this. We've had our share of surgeries. The allergies, the infections. It's always awful.”

“But they said if it's more than five minutes, we have to call an ambulance,” I protested. “We have this emergency medicine, and—”

“If Amelia eats a peanut,
we
have to call an ambulance,” Amanda interrupted. She gave me a hard look. “One nut.”

“Have to eat the rocks with the maize,” Nick observed. “Get some of those inside teeth growing.”

The doctors told us to expect more seizures, and for the next few days we watched Silas closely. He couldn't be left alone now, especially not in the bath. The neurologist was still adjusting his meds, and every few days, the seizures came and took him away. He'd be standing in the middle of the living room, turning the spinning wheel, and I'd hear the familiar chant:

“Bus . . . ah . . . mmmm.” Then I'd glance his way, only to see an ecstatic smile take over his face, his eyes rolling back in his head. I'd lunge across the room as he crumpled to the ground, and sometimes I'd catch him before he fell.

The fits came in waves, a series of maritime squalls, small storm fronts that blew in without warning or cause. When Peter and I were sailing, we traveled through some tricky weather. Motoring across the Gulf of Panama during storm season, I'd look on the radar screen and see them: multiple clusters of black dots, patches of high wind and rain so dense they'd show up as solid masses.
There were too many to dodge, so we let them blow over us, shake our rigging, and pitch us sideways. They'd disperse in a minute or two, leaving us in the eerie silence of the Doldrums.

Peter and I loved that part of sailing. We couldn't insulate ourselves from the weather, the way people did in their large, heated homes in the city. On our boat, we felt connected to the rhythms and whims of the planet. When we knew a storm was coming we shortened sail and battened the hatches, sat back and enjoyed the lightning, confident in the strength of our vessel.

But sailboats are built to weather storms. Each time one hit, we emerged from the squall unharmed. That's not how it was with Silas. He'd be seizure-free for a few days, even a week. Then the storms would hit and knock him back down. When he came to, he'd be confused, and his words would disappear. “Bus,” he'd say, “bus-ah-bus,” and all I could do was hold him.

Eventually it seemed silly to keep him home all day. I couldn't stop the seizures just by cuddling him and reading him storybooks. We gave his teachers specific instructions about what to do if Silas went down, sent him back to school, and hoped for the best.

So on Pearl's big day, Rebecca and I were home alone. We'd packed off Silas and Miranda to school, and Peter had left for work. I was pottering around the farm, ostensibly feeding animals but really looking for reasons not to write. I checked Pearl's vagina, and that's when I saw it.
There were wood shavings stuck to her butt.
This might not seem like an extraordinary discovery, but it meant there was something sticky back there. I looked closer.

“Hot damn.” I breathed. A thin stream of mucus hung between her legs. “Rebecca!” I called. “Come and see this!”

She ran over, and squeaked when she saw the mucus. The two of us clapped and stroked Pearl on the neck, saying inane and
encouraging things such as “Good job, Pearlie Whirlie!” And she even let us touch her. It was possible she'd realized she might need us soon.

A couple of hours later, I was hanging laundry out to dry when I heard the demon death knell. “GWAAAAAK!” came a noise unlike any sound my animals make. “What was that?” I called, rushing to the front of the house.

Rebecca was right ahead of me. “Pearl!” she gasped, and then she got to Pearl's side. “She—uh—ah, there's a baby coming out!”

Pearl was lying on her side beneath the palm tree. And a goat head was coming out of her ass.

Not her ass, exactly, because that wouldn't make sense. But as I may have mentioned, it's all kind of a mystery down there, and there was definitely a goat head coming out of a hole in her hindquarters. Pearl was amazingly cool for someone who was shitting a live goat out her vagina, as though she'd done this every day since the beginning of time.

I took my cue from her. “Good job, Pearlie!” I coaxed. “Just one more push!” To Rebecca, I hissed, “What do we do now?”

“Hopefully, nothing,” Rebecca whispered. “Unless there's a problem, it's best not to touch her.”

Pearl's body tensed again, but this time she didn't cry out. And there, on the ground, was a wet and goopy goat baby.

Rebecca squealed. I squealed. There was a lot of squealing that day. To be honest, I felt a little teary-eyed and sentimental. I'd never actually attended a birth where I wasn't personally pushing out a melon, and it was easier to appreciate the Miracle of Life when I wasn't convinced I was dying. And it really did seem like a miracle. I watched in amazement as the baby unfurled its long legs and shakily got to its feet. It fell right away but didn't give up. It leaned
its weight forward and tried again, and all the while Pearl was licking and cleaning it, swallowing the amber membrane as she worked. This little kid was a patchwork of black and brown spots, with a snowy white head and a black backside. It breathed right away, and once it managed to stand, it started sniffing at Pearl's armpit for food.

“Not there, honey.” I nudged it. “In back.” The kid was so eager to start living that I decided its name was Moxie.

“Is it a girl or a boy?” I asked Rebecca. “Can you tell?” The gender of this baby was critical. If it was a girl, we'd keep her for milk and cheese. If it was a boy, we'd be eating goat curry.

“I can't see yet; she has to pee.” The little goat bent slightly at the hindquarters, urinating daintily into the grass. “It's a girl!” Rebecca crowed. “She pees just like Pearl, see? I think it's a girl!”

The pink goop dripping out of Pearl's backside was fascinating. I was filming it with my iPad, crouched at her hindquarters, and that's when I got the money shot. All at once, she blew a water balloon out her vagina. About the size of a grapefruit, it was full of amber fluid. She walked around like that unconcerned, a big yellow bubble hanging out her butt, and then I saw it: another snout, another hoof.

“There's another baby!” I hollered, as though I'd made this one myself.

The second kid came out in one push, surging to the ground in a flood of fluid. It was covered with membrane, its nose a bit more blocked than Moxie's. It spluttered a little, and Pearl cleared its face. This one, also a female, was pure white, with a black stripe down the spine just like her mother. Her name, of course, was Stripe.

The rest of the day was pure magic. Rebecca and I sat with Pearl and her babies, tweeting pictures of the birth and stroking the kids.
We made sure they could nurse, and once we figured out what the iodine was for, Rebecca held them up as I disinfected their little umbilical cords. We gave Pearl some hay, then rolled oats and raisins, then water that I'd sweetened with molasses. She ate all her treats, then she ate her placenta, then she ate the meconium right off her babies' butts, and then we thought we might be done with the magic.

“Thank you for the babies, Pearl,” I murmured, scratching my goat behind the ears. “What a good job you did. Thank you for being so healthy.”

She looked up at me then, her strange rectangle eyes full of light and intelligence. “And
thank you
,” I continued, “for not making me insert my hand.”

THE GRAB-AND-YANK

M
y colleague Premal says we should fry it up. It's a delicacy in Sri Lanka,” Peter announced when he got home from work. He was standing with me under the palm tree, watching Pearl nurse her babies. Moxie and Stripe were disturbingly good at it: their technique involved jumping up and smashing their mother in the udder to make her let down, a trick that looked painful and a little bit mean.

“Colostrum?! We can't eat the
colostrum
,”
Rebecca protested. “It's not even real milk. It's like a vitamin soup. It's got all the antibodies the babies need to survive.”

“Whatever.” Peter shrugged, then headed inside to change. “But Premal says it's the best stuff there is. He says you'll never put anything more delicious in your mouth.”

Seriously?
I sat there for a while longer, watching the babies prance around Pearl.
The best stuff there is?
How could we let this chance slide? When would I get another opportunity to taste pudding made from goat colostrum squeezed fresh from the teat?

“Mama?” Miranda came up behind me carrying a plastic baseball bat. “Do you want to come see this dead thing that I don't know what it is?”

“Of course I do, Magnolia,” I said, rising to my feet.

The dead thing turned out to be a desiccated songbird, and we buried it in the compost before heading back inside. But despite my best intentions, I couldn't stop thinking about goat colostrum. That night I got on Google and learned that eating this stuff is all the rage. Just about everywhere people raise dairy animals, there's a tradition of tasting the mother's first milk. In Iceland, there's a pudding called
broddur
, and the French make a savory custard called
béton.
The English call animal colostrum beestings, and with that discovery, I made up my mind. There was no way I was passing on a fresh beestings pudding.

But first, I had to learn how to milk. Autumn had already loaned us her milking stand, a sturdy wooden contraption that looked somewhat like medieval stocks. There was a platform for Pearl to stand on, and a shelf where we put her food. Once she'd jumped on the platform and bent to eat her breakfast, we locked in her head with a sliding plank. She was trapped, but this didn't seem to bother her. As long as she had something to munch on, Pearl was happy to be fondled.

This was a subject Rebecca felt confident to teach. She'd milked her way through high school and had taught countless students how to do it, usually in a freezing barn before dawn.

“Sit there,” she instructed, pointing at the seat that jutted out from the milking stand. “And grab a teat in one hand.”

I did as I was told. Pearl jerked a little when I grabbed her boob, but she didn't run away. Possibly this was because her head was locked in place.

Rebecca bent close. “Now, gently but firmly, ease the pressure down to the end of the teat.”

I did. No milk.

“Too gentle. Try using a little more pressure.”

I squeezed the teat hard, and Pearl squawked in alarm, kicking her hind leg at my face.

“
Not that hard.
See?” Rebecca took over and showed me how it was done. Contrary to what I'd thought, milking an animal isn't just a grab-and-yank. You increase the pressure as you move downward, coaxing the milk to the tip of the teat.

I think I must have exhausted Rebecca, because after our lesson, she retired to her sleep-out.

“It's a lot like giving a hand job,” I reported to Peter, once my lesson was finished. “You go easy at first and see what you get.”

“I never liked hand jobs,” Peter observed.

I winced, remembering the grab-and-yank I'd performed on poor Pearl. “You never know,” I said brightly. “Maybe milking will improve my technique.”

“So is it hard?” he asked. “The milking?”

“Not once you get the hang of it,” I bragged. “At first it takes a little while. You kind of have to stimulate her, to get her going.”

Peter put down his coffee. “What do you mean, you punch her in the tit?”

“Kind of,” I turned the stove on, readying my pudding ingredients. “Not ‘punch her in the tit' so much as massage it. You should see how those babies go at her. They're relentless.”

As if on cue, Miranda walked into the room. Still groggy from sleep, she stood there in her pink rabbit nightgown. “Mama?” she asked.

I was stirring my colostrum.

“
Mama
,”
she repeated.

I put some butter in the pan and watched it melt.

“MAMA!” she shrieked, as if someone were breaking her leg.

“
What?
”
I whirled around.

“Can I have a cuddle?”

“Can't you see I'm making pudding?” I snapped, sloshing the colostrum in the pan, where it instantly started curdling.

“Bus,” Silas announced, entering the kitchen with an empty jar of mayonnaise.

“Has he been in the recycling again?” Peter got to his feet. “Silas, that's
garbage.
Come on, let's throw it away.”

Ignoring his father, Silas bent to the floor and started spinning the empty jar.

“No one is giving me a cuddle!” Miranda raged. “Not even one person!”

I looked skeptically at the colostrum, which had congealed in the pan like pale scrambled eggs. “Breakfast time!” I sang out. “I have something special for you today!”

The children eyeballed their bowls of goat beestings warily, and Peter got up from the table. “I'm off to check the cows,” he said, and I turned back to the project at hand.

The second time I heated Pearl's colostrum, it was much more successful. This time, I heated it gently, over a double boiler. And I'll be damned if it didn't set up, turning thick and silky like a rich, eggy custard. I put a spoonful to my mouth, and I had to admit it was delicious. I could imagine it sweetened with saffron and cardamom, an exotic treat from the Orient.

But I never had time to bust out the cardamom, because Peter started hollering from outside.

“Antonia? Why is there blood all over the deck?”

I turned off the stove and rushed outside, only to find a pattern of blood drops speckling the deck, from the front door to the barbecue, then down the two front steps.

“Miranda?” I called. “Are you bleeding?”

“Mama, this custard is weird,” she replied. “I hate it.”

I ran inside to inspect Silas, but he was intact, too. “Do you have an ouchie?” I asked, knowing he wouldn't be able to answer. Still, I lifted his Bob Marley T-shirt and felt around for any injuries. “Bus,” Silas replied. “Bus-ah-bus-ah-bus.”

“
Miranda,
”
I insisted. “Eat your pudding. It's full of antibodies so you don't get sick.”

“But I'm
not
sick,” she whined.

“Still,” I told her. “It'll protect you from hoof rot. And black leg. And mange.”

Miranda rolled her eyes and pushed past me, her colostrum pudding untouched. “I'm gonna go see my baby goats,” she announced, and since I was busy solving the mystery of the blood spots, I didn't argue.

My next thought was that Kowhai had killed a chicken and dragged its hapless body over our porch before hiding in the bushes to devour it, so I stood at the door and yelled. “
Kowhai!
Come
.
Here
.
Now!
”

Peter was down on his hands and knees, wiping bloodstains off the deck, when Kowhai came trotting up. “You look guilty,” I said when I saw her. “Who did you kill?”

“Oh, Jesus.” Peter cringed.

“What?”

He leaned back on his knees and pointed. “The dog has her period.”

I turned Kowhai around and examined her. Sure enough, little
droplets of blood were clustered around her backside. We knew this would happen, since we'd planned to let her have a litter. Still, it was a little early in the day for dog period.

Peter got to his feet. “Now I'll have to build a bitch box.” He sighed. “Where the hell am I gonna put one of those?”

That hurt my feelings. “Seriously? I know I don't give the best hand jobs, but—”

“Not for
you
.”
Peter snorted. “For the
dog.
Now she's in heat, we'll get male dogs sniffing around from all over, and they're all gonna want to mate with her. We have to lock her up so she can't get out.”

“And it's called a bitch box?” I asked doubtfully. “That seems unkind.”

“
Mama!
” Miranda called from the palm tree where she was hanging out with the goats. “Pearl is all bloody!”

“
Christ
.”
I rolled my eyes. “Does this ever
end
?”
It occurred to me that there was a reason Rebecca preferred her nail bed to hanging out with the rest of us.

Pearl's backside was crusted with dried black blood, so I got out a rag and a bucket of warm water. I wasn't worried about a little bleeding after the birth, but it was unpleasant to look at. Also, it occurred to me that flies might lay eggs back there, and I didn't want to deal with the maggots.

I locked Pearl into her milking stand and, as gently as possible, pressed a warm rag to her hindquarters, softening the bloody chunks and then picking them out of her fur. Mostly this didn't bother me, but when I flicked a bloody period chunk and Kowhai caught it in her mouth I must have groaned out loud.

“Oh,
God
.”
I moaned. “I could be in law school right now. Why didn't I go to law school?”

Miranda put her hand on her little hip and frowned. “Mama, you're just freaking out. What
next
?”

“I don't know,” I admitted, wiping my bloody hands on my nightgown. “Certainly not law school. That ship has sailed.”

I sat down on the milking stand, which Moxie and Stripe took as an invitation to play. Instantly, they were both on my lap, their hooves on my shoulders. Stripe started sucking my hair.

“No, Stripe, cut it out!” I sputtered, batting her away with the back of my hand. “My hair is
not
a breast!”

Bored with not being the center of attention, Miranda ran back inside. I returned my focus to Pearl's large, speckled teats. If I leaned my body in close to hers, resting my head against her side, Stripe and Moxie didn't have room to wiggle in between us. I pressed up against her, and Pearl sighed. Munching her nuts, she seemed to relax.

And that's when Miranda came running. “Mama!” she called. “We had a little problem with Silas! He had a seizure!”

I dropped the milk jar and ran, meeting Peter as he struggled out of the bathroom with Silas in his arms. Silas's body was stiff and gray, a thin child's corpse dripping water.

“Is he okay?” I asked, my voice too loud.

Peter laid our son on the living room carpet. “Can you get a towel?”

I ran for a towel, and we dried him off, holding Silas on his side as he shuddered and shook.

“Check the time,” Peter barked.

“Eight forty-six.” Silas was jiggling uncontrollably. The color was gone from his face. A thin stream of dribble ran down the side of his mouth.

Miranda stood behind me clutching That Baby to her chest. “Mama?” she asked. “Is Silas going to die?”

“No,” I snapped.

“Miranda, be quiet,” Peter ordered. “We need to concentrate.” Something in his voice meant business, and for the first time in her young life, Miranda said nothing at all. She backed onto the couch and sat, burying her face in her doll.

“Time?” Peter asked.

“Eight forty-eight.” Silas was jerking now, punching out his arms and legs, controlled by an invisible defibrillator.

“Forty-nine,” I told Peter. “Do I go for the Midazolam?”

“Not yet.” Then: “How long's it been?”

“Four minutes.” I glanced over at the kitchen cupboard, where the emergency meds were kept.

“He's coming out of it.” Silas's body was relaxing, but his eyes were still closed. Peter bent down to put his face at eye level with his son's. “Silas? You there?”

Silas did not respond. “Is he out of it?” I wasn't so sure.

Peter lifted Silas's eyelid. The boy blinked. With a yawn, he snuggled into his father.

“Bus,” he murmured. I'd never been so glad to hear anything in my life.

“I was sitting right there,” Peter explained. “He got some of that pudding down his front, so I was giving him a bath. I was just watching him splash in the tub. Then his eyes rolled up, and he slid right in.”

“Did he go under?”

“Almost. I grabbed him just before. That would have been it,” he said softly. “If I hadn't been there. He would have been gone.”

I called the pediatrician; I wrote to the neurologist. “Why is this happening? When can we do an EEG? An MRI? Why is my son still having seizures when he's taking medication? What can you do to help?”

The answers were always depressingly vague. “In these kinds of cases, we manage the symptoms,” the doctors told me. “The most important thing is to get his seizures under control.” But they weren't under control. Every few days, Sophia would send Silas home from school because he'd collapsed at the squash court, on the playground, in the bus. Patrice was usually the one who caught him, and I could tell it was taking a toll. He'd retired from cooking to avoid heavy stress, and now he was catching an epileptic five-year-old for a living.

“Man, it is fucking scary,” he told me one day when I'd arrived to pick up my son.

I nodded. “Tell me about it, Patrice.” As usual after a fit, Silas was deeply asleep, so I scooped him up like I did when he was a baby and carried him to the car.

“Why aren't these doctors doing anything?” I raged at Peter. “It's like they don't even care, like they've written him off as some retarded kid who's just going to have these fits. Like it's normal.”