Duck

It's been a terrifying year for me. You and I have looked at each other and tried to focus on the past twenty years and how we could be so strange to each other. How can two people commit the same crimes over and over, harmful patterns repeating, repeating...?

What are the lessons learned from heartache and tears? What is the return on investment?

There have been two women working on us, counselors, applying their wisdom and their persistence. Like attorneys for the psyche and the soul. Stubborn things, these intimate parts. Unyielding things, they chafe and they burn, raw and tender.

I prayed to God often for relief.

One particularly stressful day while working around the apartments, I found a white duck abandoned underneath a tarp. She was just hours from death, so I put her in a box and took her home. She was too weak to stand, and could only squeak. I washed the filth off of her and looked her over. Her feet and bill were too large for her body, and that meant she'd never had good nutrition, distorted growth through wasted muscle and sparse feathering.

I crated her until she was strong enough to stand and quack. Her appetite grew from sipping a little water and just a few bites of food to robust and enthusiastic eater, and she began to gain weight. I asked you to make-shift a pen for her, and you did that for me.

Duck was grateful. She greeted me with loud quacking when I came to feed her twice a day, she wagged her tail feathers and flapped her wings. Two, then three weeks passed. Plumage was appearing a bit fuller each day, I thought, and then I noticed the eye infection. I treated it with antibiotic ointment, and it seemed to be getting a little better.

One day I took her to the pond and set her down into the water. She sank almost to her neck. Her feet could not paddle straight, and she struggled to the bank. I pulled her out and set her on the lawn, and she began drying herself with her beak as ducks do. And feathers fell like rain from her body.

I examined the feathers. They were pin-feathers, and those are the new growth that should emerge filled with blood as they grow out. As they progress from quill to feather, the blood will recede and be replaced with air... that is how a bird gets the lightness to float or to fly.

These pin feathers contained no blood. They were dead. This is a set back, I thought to myself, and I finished drying duck with a towel, returning her to her pen.

The next morning when I went to feed her I noticed blood coming from her injured eye. This is worse than a set back, I realized, and she cannot survive this. What to do? First thing, I'll give her a good meal.

Remembering that you raised meat rabbits as a kid, I called you from my cell phone and asked if you could euthanize the duck. She cannot survive her current state, I explained, it is so very sad for me. I am in the car on my way to work, and I would be very grateful if you could help me with this. Can you? It's just a duck, right?

I came home at six o'clock like I usually do, and I saw that the pen was gone, not a single feather remaining where it sat. Not a trace of duck.

I found you in the kitchen and your eyes were red from crying. You were waiting for me.

Not just a duck? I said to you. No, not just a duck, you said back to me.

Thank you, I said, both of us with now with tearful eyes.

And you took my hand and we sat at the table together.

Shame

Shelly and I were in the kitchen making peanut butter cookies for the church dinner. The oldest of my five children, I'll admit I love her the most. The other children are boys, and they are like most boys. They want to be outside playing in the hayloft, running through the woods, climbing hills... I don't know what they do out there but they're certainly not interested in women's work.

She is a sweet and happy girl. Twelve years old already. My perfect daughter, and her childhood is everything my own was not. I remember thinking this as she dropped the dough, one spoonful at a time onto the cookie sheets, criss-crossing the tops with a fork... just the way you mark peanut butter cookies. She was very meticulous. She had her back to me but I noticed she kept drawing her sleeve up to her face. I wondered, is she coming down with a cold?

I stood beside her and turned to look at her face, and I saw tears running silently down cheeks.

"What is this, Shelly? Why are you crying?" I gave her the handkerchief out of my apron pocket. She took it and lowered her head.

"I am ashamed, Mother," she said, the fork and the spoon on the counter beside the mixing bowl, both hands now to her face, hiding her eyes with the handkerchief.

And my heart felt like it had become rock, rising into my throat. So many times as a child I'd felt shame, and now I felt fear and a sort of panic, but I smiled at her and said, "Oh, Shelly, now it can't be all that bad." My voice cracked a bit, but I was thinking I know my children have a good life. I've made sure of that.

"Tell me, sweetie, what could you have possibly done to make you feel ashamed? You are such a good girl."

"No, I'm not, Mother," she said, looking at me now, "That's not what Father says."

Joseph. How could he say anything like that to his daughter? She must have misunderstood.

I've known Joseph most of my life. He's eight years older than me, but when we married he was 34 and I was 26. He knew about the pregnancy when I was 19 years old, just like the whole town knew before I could leave there and take up residence at the hospital campus in a city far away. That was where I worked as a student nurse to earn my board, and where I gave up the baby I couldn't possibly keep.

I returned to Acme three years later with a Graduate Nurse certificate. I soon found a job in a Bellingham hospital and got an apartment there. I was a pretty young woman. No one in Bellingham had any idea of what I had lived through, but I still felt very shy around my age group. I didn't socialize much, and the thought of dating did not enter my mind. What would I tell a man about myself? What could he understand and how would he judge me?

Several years later, I went home to Acme for a family wedding. Enough time had passed that I thought I could enter the church with my head up, and there were people there who loved me afterall. My sister and my two brothers were certainly beloved by me and I'd missed them so much. I helped with the reception dinner, making a potato salad and setting up the hall. And that's where I saw Joseph watching me. I smiled at him.

He asked if he could sit with me at the dinner. I was a bit shocked, but pleased, and said yes. He was so kind to me, and seemed so proud to be with me. He said my eyes were a beautiful blue, and that he'd always admired them.

And he was a constant companion from that day on. He drove the hour to Bellingham every weekend and slept on my sofa. He was ardent, affectionate, and I encouraged him. I can't say I was totally proper, but we were away from Acme, and here I was an independent woman, and not conventional by the day's standards. Joseph asked me to marry him within just a few weeks of dating and I had to say yes. This was better than I'd hoped for. Now I could come home with new respect and rejoin my family. My father, that horrible man, had died while I was living in Bellingham and so there were no obstacles.

We bought a farmhouse with ten acres. Enough land for a few cows and a place for chickens. Joseph took care of all that and I kept the house. The children arrived, the school years began, and we made lifelong friends with neighboring families, strong ties to the church. Joseph and I hosted the youth group in our home. We were busy and happy.

Then came that day when my twelve year old daughter was saying she done something bad. And everything changed. I asked Shelly again, why would your father say you were a bad girl?

And as she spoke, I could barely hear her voice.

I was remembering when I was twelve years old myself. The sound of my father's boots hitting each step as he came up the stairs to read to us from the Bible like he did every night before we went to sleep. First in the room I shared with my sister, then in the room my two brothers shared. And I remembered his hands under my nightgown, and the horror knowing that my sister could see, but he did not touch her the way he touched me. And I remember the cold air in the room and then I remember... nothing.

My daughter stopped speaking and looked at my blank face. We just stood there looking at each other for I don't know how long. Shelly hugged me and went upstairs to her room.

When Joseph came home from work, I told him to move Shelly's bedroom furniture into the room above ours. I said this is not open for discussion, just go do it. And if I ever hear your footsteps above my head at night I will kill you.

He did not say a word. He did what I told him to do.

The boys will be alright.