Inconvenient Ostriches

Page 2

Fences and Neighbors

I believe that children are born with hearts as big as the fallow acres my father tilled and cleared in the midwestern heat while breathing in what often seemed more like bath water than dusty air. Sweat rolled and backs sprained to plant food that would serve to help us grow, but not as a family, only taller in the end. Among many glaring deficits, we were devoid of any commonalities, incompatible as it were, each one of us without a single tether to one another. Wait, that’s not entirely true. Although my oldest brother and I were adopted as infants after a decade of “trying” and my mother finally becoming just that, her body finally relaxed with bliss only to bear a natural daughter. To say merely that they were close would be a disservice, but not the worst thing I’ve said about either of them. Without connection there is little meaning, and without meaning there is little purpose leaving the lot of us to languish on a cellular level as we sat in the wood paneled den in front of an unnecessarily large piece of glowing furniture night after night entirely and unwittingly alone. Few resuscitation attempts were made in the decades to come, but despite our separate paths each child somehow managed to lead a life of discovery. Perhaps the only bar put forth that mattered is that none entered a life of crime.

Despite my thick, leathery layer of self-sustained obstinance, one of the many rites of passage for the middle child, one or two dew droplets of wisdom seeped into the cracks of my biology despite the trail of smoldering bridges in my wake. The tough exterior encouraged by my father and equally discouraged by my mother, neither of whom I obeyed, was a critical feature honed and developed over years so that when called upon to be tested, I would most surely pass. Who would have guessed the test would be hiding ostriches. Well, parts of them.

Commonly the very big, very tough parts that cannot be gnawed through by farm dogs, particularly the sly and cunning Bubble, an abandoned rough collie who hobbled up to my door nearly dead one day. We knew our long-time neighbor at the top of the hill, an old pig farmer, had passed but that had been over a year ago and we didn’t’ know he had a collie. After his death, and on my occasional morning jog, I would see her at the house next door to the pig farmer, a nice ranch style painted fir green and set back 50 yards from the gravel road. Perhaps she'd just visited there during her wanderings after his death, scraping by on scraps and goodwill for that time before finally staggering to my door. She would greet me to say a brief Hello, a sweet and soft-spoken hound that somehow kept herself clean despite living among farmers. I thought she lived at the fir green house, but she adamantly told me that day that she absolutely did not. I named her Bubble because she seemed a bit on the dim side at first, but once she was fed and watered for a week or so, she got back to being her brilliant and optimistic self despite a bit of arthritis giving away her true age. We didn’t know the green-house neighbors or in fact most of our neighbors except a handful by name only. Upon finalization of the purchase of our property, in 1967 my father wasted no time systematically alienating, threatening and making enemies of everyone within a 1-mile radius ensuring he, nor any of us, would be bothered with the annoyances of friendship.

Our considerably less brilliant neighbors – it is after all the rural south, ignorance abound – discovered the breeding and selling of ostriches was quite lucrative. And, this is true but only for those with the capacity for complex thought, experience and understanding are successful. Charging forward as ignorance so often does, they attempted to build a fence for such foul fowl and a proper fence is actually two fences. You can begin by building one fence, except that this fence must be open at the bottom all the way around the fence and high enough for a person to drop and roll out. This is for safety; when the bird or birds has a real or perceived slight, they will attack you by whipping their necks back and then whipping them forward again aiming usually for your head. Although rare, this can prove fatal. I have no accurate statistics on hand to support specific numbers, so let’s say the blow would smart considerably and should be avoided. The second fence surrounds the first and is standard in nature and goes all the way to the ground containing the birds entirely. However, when I rolled up the driveway returning from my institution of higher learning to find feathers, and internal organs of unknown origin scattered about the property, I didn’t know they were ostriches, but I did know I could not identify the remains, and this was vexing.

The Killings

Then another smaller dog went missing, one that I was keeping over the summer while the original owner was off doing some ambiguous military duty I can’t now recall. This was not just noticeable but concerning as I had taught the dog to play dead and roll over only two days prior and also taken her to the vet to the tune of $88, a small fortune for a full-time student working 2 part-time jobs. In the woods, all pets have both autonomy and agency. It is not uncommon to see them once per day or even less depending on the temperament of the dominant breed within the dog – farm dogs are rarely one breed and if they happen to be, expect them be stolen in short order and sold at a flea market so the seller/thief can buy their child a Christmas present that year. Or meth, but certainly one of the two. I waited a day or two with still no dog and decided to walk over to the neighbors and simply ask.

We were not friends, nor did we know one another. Each household both divided by a gravel road, a barrier of tall, thick trees on either side and, of course, the impenetrable air of disdain. In the country, there is always a minimum of one person outside tending to one thing or another, car repair, a garden, or an animal. In a place where there is little convenience, this is one. I easily found a man I’d never seen, likely in his early 30’s, milling about. I introduced myself and explained my dilemma asking if he’d seen the dog, all short white hair, about 18 pounds named Winnie (short for Winter, not creative but also not my dog.) He said he had not seen her, but I could tell he was lying. He was evasive and vague; country people are neither. Seeing the fence and birds as we walked and talked, I learned the source of the feathers and body parts I’d accumulated, none of which I mentioned to him. I asked all I could about the ostrich business trying to seem genuinely fascinated but surreptitiously trying to learn how this related to the disappearance of Winnie. Once I saw how the fence was built, and I emphasize fence in the singular, I concluded exactly what happened to Winnie. Simple people built a simple fence 18 inches off the ground but neglected to build the second fence to completely contain the birds. The birds could not get out, but dogs could get in. And, if you’ve never had ostrich both Winnie, Bubble and I could tell you how very delicious they are . . . or were. Well, I could, Winnie is dead, shot for hunting Ostrich. Not long after my meeting with the spurious simpleton, another family member whom I know slightly better as we were childhood mates, and unaware of the first reported “story”, let it slip that Winnie was caught hunting the birds and had to be stopped to protect their financial investment.

But this story is not about Winnie. It’s about Bubble. Bubble the bright and noble collie who survived for over a year on her own was the culprit of the feathers, the discarded bloody sacks of fascia and sinew that were simply not chewable and likely undigestible. And the legs. My god, the legs. The legs of ostriches are covered in skin that is most like elephant skin. It’s grey and wrinkled, fibrous and tough and no match for the teeth of a 12-year-old herding dog. The legs were roughly 60 inches long on average, and although they didn’t look heavy, imagine picking up a 5-foot bar of steel with a foot on the end, that has a 6-inch diameter at the smallest point. It may only weigh 20 pounds, but that weight is awkwardly distributed at one end, and oh by the way it is an ostrich leg! Imagine then, to keep your dog alive you must hide this and subsequent severed legs.

Every day that I returned from school, I quickly and covertly collected legs and random body parts from both inside and outside of the bird, and discarded them in a heavily wooded, overgrown area of our farm where they are likely still there today. On any given sunny summer afternoon in the late 90’s, you might find a girl, 5’4, 118 lbs. dressed in men’s salvation army clothes (men’s clothes are cheaper at The Salvation), covered in pottery clay from hair to Redwings dragging ostrich legs by hand across the property and flinging them into the thickets and brambles all in pursuit of saving a dog that came to her for food and water when all else had failed. Bubble was special, as are most dogs I suppose.

I am writing this down no to complain about unsophisticated neighbors or dead ostriches. I am only reminding myself and anyone who reads this (after someone involuntarily drags me off to be disposed), that preventable burdens, ones that drain you at a time when you have little extra physical or mental capability to give is when you are creating the colorful and textured person you were meant to be. Especially when it is inconvenient.