CW ~ Reference to suicide, animal death.
***
"How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks" Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night.
The intermittent soft peeping seemed to be coming from the spare room, a strangely small yet loud sound. It heralded the arrival of a tiny and vulnerable body with enormous needs, sized to encompass all its future selves. My husband Josh had set up the incubator a month prior, filled it with goose and duck eggs, plugged it in and then promptly forgotten it.
A mother duck will rotate the eggs with her feet and bill, moving them from the heat epicentre of the nest to the colder borders and back, side to side, trying for that equality of opportunity between siblings that always fails. In the white artificiality of the incubator, a human hand must do this, as well as refill the water that stabilises the humidity in the interior. The tiny embryos need moisture so they can float between the golden orb of the yolk and the membranes of the shell, otherwise, they can adhere to the interior of the eggshell and die.
This little one had benefited from neither of these interventions and was struggling to release its body from the egg, the only egg moving. When we held my phone light to the other eggs, like a flashlight held to a hand in the dark of a blanket fort, instead of their interiors glowing rose-tinged and threaded with arteries, only unmoving darkness was illuminated. Birdlings of all sorts talk to their mother and siblings while still in the egg. But this little one had grown to the precipice of emerging in a congealed silence. None of its calls could be answered by the surrounding thickened quiet of calcium, protein and fat turned back from the possibility of life.
All mammals have one of four instincts to mother and be mothered ~ to cache, to carry, to nest and to follow. It’s an instinct connected to milk, to fat content and feeding but also to fear and predation. Cache mothers hide their babies and return to feed them every half day or so, the babies feed fat and stay quiet longer, silent to predators, mothers scent away as a decoy. Carry mothers are us, the apes, tied by breasts and arm or sling or stroller to the weakest of all babies who need, need, need in a frequency that can tear our minds. Nest mammals are heartbeat seekers, pressed by the soft bodies of siblings in between mother’s feedings every two to four hours. The following mothers are the authoritative parents, expecting their child will follow in their footsteps, an exact trail to becoming that is a belonging that stretches backwards and forwards through time.
Although a duckling follows its mother, a duck is also a bird that imprints. Imprinting is the process by which a duck (or a goose and some other birds) determines what it is from the cues of the first large moving thing it sees in the early days of its life, what is called its “sensitive period”. This duckling saw me, and I, a carry species mother who had deeply invested in attachment style parenting through four children, could not bear to cache, nest or follow parent this tiny alone thing. With a flurry of swear words directed at Josh’s lack of foresight and how this was all his fault, I became a duck mother.
I had owned other runner ducks before this single one, but in multiple so that they imprinted on each other. Twelve initial ducklings became two after ten were sold and then one was killed by our dog. We moved and I purchased another twelve ducklings, which eventually dwindled, through fox theft and forest tithes, to this ducklings' genetic parents. One morning our last male Runner Duck was lying dead on the driveway and his mate went immediately into mourning. She built a nest of grief, composed of mud and straw, rising much higher than a typical duck nest, a tower of filth. For weeks she sat in it, only leaving to take enough water and food for the barest survival.
Yet another morning, I heard the geese at the base of our front steps screaming a need I didn’t yet understand. I went outside with our youngest son Taryn and they accosted us, tugging at our pants, almost like they were trying to search our pockets. Honking is not a word that aptly describes how they stridently articulate alarm, need and desire. They had recently hatched a solitary gosling and it was not with them, which seemed to be the source of their distress. I opened the man door to their coop and there was the gosling caught between the door and lintel, grown rigid and strangely oblong like it had been caught metamorphosing into a brick of butter or bar of gold.
Not long after, the dog startled the goose couple into flight directly into the front of my car as I rounded the bend in our driveway. The lady goose’s wing was caught beneath my right tire, crushing it completely. I ran out and saw how bad it was and started to cry, and then slowly reversed, knowing the great mechanised weight of us was passing back across the splintered bone and mashed meat of her wing. She immediately ran off and I could not catch her. Some understanding must have passed along the deep current of knowing that also bonds geese to their mate for life because the gander did not try to follow her. The next morning I went looking for her and found her elegant grey body forever stilled, tucked into the long green grass.
The keening of the gander, his sound-slicked siren of passage for the gosling and the goose, perforated the grief-crazed brain of the widow duck. Along with growing thin, she had grown dirty, besmirched, grimed with her own shit and the decay that she had been nesting in. The cataclysmic call of loss seemed to shift her little heart back to a remembering of green and light. She came outside and bathed, gleamed white again, her feathered purity rendered by being reborn to it. I bought three new Toulouse geese and along with the little white widow and the gander, they became a new family.
While tragedy had unfolded outside, a little romance slumbered in a perfect egg, in a neglected artificial nest, in a seldom-used room. With the crack of its egg and the soft peep of its call, a little duckling became the orbit of our home. It called out “peep peep”, always a quick staccato of two utterances repeated in succession and we replied in kind and so it came to be named Peep Peep.
Peep Peep was alone with no mother or siblings, so Josh suggested I put it out in the coop and see if the others tended to it. I knew that they wouldn't. I could not bear it, this little beings panic at aloneness, so I slept awkwardly with its little delicate body tucked beneath my chin, in the hollow of my neck. I was grateful for its follow creature instincts, quite in contrast to my human babies, who had sucked and screamed through the night, who had torn blindly at my breasts with grasping mouths like hyenas head deep in meat. If I was still, so was the little duckling.
The soft yellow fuzz turned to awkward pin feathers and then to a sleek white. Every change of feather signalled a new milestone at which I would decide that a boundary of reasonability had been breached and it could no longer possibly be a house duck. He, for he had become a he, and a Peep, instead of a Peep Peep, came with me everywhere. He came in the car to get the kids from school, and he came camping in the woods, though his webbed feet posed difficulties over rocks and fallen trees. Inside, he sat at my feet or in watching distance of me during daylight, slumbering one-eyed on the floor at my side of the bed after nightfall. Where I was, so was Peep.
Peep understood his world by observing me and he rooted his calm in my constancy. Which, of course, was not constant, just as we humans are never constant to each other, parent to child, lover to lover. Ducks can shut down half their brain to sleep while the other half remains vigilant, so Peep’s ability to watch me with the eye not asleep was unwavering. The absurdity of his attentiveness was often a joy ~ a duck slowly and quietly passing by a door ajar, like the heavy foreshadowing of a campy detective story, the difficulty of giving a decent blow job while a duck rests his head on the bed.
I didn’t know all these details about how ducks develop until faced with the responsibility of a duck that didn’t know it was a duck. I read about imprinting and looked for answers, for constructive guidance on how to stage Peep’s departure from the house, just as with one, two, three, four baby boys I had obsessively read parenting manuals that often advised things I was incapable of, like how I could never let them cry it out. I crumbled at the article that stated “Your duck will be sad”.
Still, the pervasiveness of duck shit is a compelling instigation for betrayal so Peep began to spend long lonely nights in the coop with the white widow and the geese. He lay there apart, rejected by and rejecting the other birds as he didn’t see himself as one of them. He was frantic to see me in the morning and my time started being eaten by my overcompensating attention to him, the parenting we do in too late recognition of the harms we have inflicted on our children, a scrambling to soften and silken silver scar tissue already formed. Every morning I opened the coop door to see how irreparably this little duck had been cleft from what he truly was into a being of neither house nor coop.
I decided Peep needed to be forced to confront his duckness. I moved the little white widow and Peep together into a stall, a quarantine of attachment. For months I simply came and fed them, I did not take Peep out, did not hold him against my chest and let him snuggle into my hair as I had done every previous day of his life. We started calling the widow duck Lyra and she was charged with revealing Peep to himself, in the way that our therapists warn against but is almost always the truth of how we know each other in the container of a relationship. Leading each other, scarring each other, revealing in contrast, epiphanies grown from an aggregation of familiarity. I was determined that he would love the little widow and so heal her, and she would teach him who he was, and so absolve me.
There always comes a day in February in Ontario, amid bitter cold, when the sky heats the land into a remembering of the hope of Spring. You can hear the soft give of the snow crust to the kiss of the slumbering earth beneath it, bird song seems to resound where it did not on the colder day before and although it is not warm by summer standards, the ecstasy of being outside without layers is a wild egress of the body into weather. It would be this day that I would release the two ducks. They stretched into the sun, spreading their wings wide to warmth, quickly spotting the delicious cool of the puddled runoff. I watched them together, bobbing and talking to each other, running their necks backwards across their backs in the way that ducks cleanse themselves, watched the dreary cobwebbed grey of months run from their feathers and then I walked away, up the round of the drive towards our house.
Peep followed. He ran at full tilt, a headlong, panicked Runner Duck sprint after me. I stopped and waved my arms rapidly “ Go back, go back” but he would not, and I walked back and forth to Lyra, who was quacking in a way that seemed like she knew that this was Peep’s betrayal. I ran behind outbuildings and tried to sneak away, but he would find me and finally, I just started sobbing in the driveway. It had failed, this graft of a duck that didn’t know it was a duck onto a duck that did know, a young drake onto an older widow, a spell against aloneness.
I came into the house crying. Josh was making coffee and turned with alarm at my distress but bubbled over with laughter when I choked out at him that Peep had broken Lyra’s heart and would never leave me, that I would have to be that duck’s world for 8 - 12 years, the average lifespan of a Runner Duck, until our son Taryn was done high school, university even. That this was a terrible thing we had done, to have bent the shape of a creature's life away from its own kind and on and on until I was also laughing because it was all so absurd and so serious. It was just a duck and it was everything I knew about love and it was us, Josh and I, here, still together in this house.
Lyra and Peep eventually changed each other. Lyra became not as skittish as a normal Runner Duck. She humoured her partner's recklessness, and his desire to be near humans and dogs. She knew me to be someone to tell things to, and from time to time, just as the female goose did, she came to tell me of her idiot partners’ current predicament, a bond of wives. Peep came to know himself as Duck in the mirror that was Lyra, but there have been accidents in his awareness of the boundaries of Duckness. Between the crush of lumbering pig trotters who he thinks are his dog kin and falling down and off things ducks shouldn't be climbing, he broke one leg, the same one, three times in three different places. The fragility of life, how quickly, nauseously our flesh envelopes are riven, that fragility is Peep.
The passage of time that is the story of a Peep Peep to a Peep has been filled with anxiety, with fear for Josh’s mind and for what that means for us. The risk of loving Josh has been mirrored in the risk of loving this duck. I catch sight of Josh working through the window, the same window I am always looking out of now to check on Peep. My eyes fix on my favourite face, his leanness, his hair grown long in a way that softens him again, the known heat of his skin when he comes back in, the smell of him. Knowing that love is not enough but is sometimes what you have most of. That love is care and need but is love and not need and love and not care but also love and that this is who we are, the continual choosing of each other, the inevitability of us, moment to moment.
Later, thunder and lightning fracture the night and I wake listening to Josh’s slow breaths, the thick hide silk of his skin against my back. The shape of knowing that is peculiar to a long love. It’s a night he isn’t screaming “no”, “no” “no” in his sleep, the dark things that haunt him from childhood. He stirs with the thunder and reaches for me, pulls the blanket he's stolen across me tenderly and mumbles “I love you”. Taryn cries out from his new room, which was Peep’s room, and I hear his feet across the old wooden floorboards, a house song just like Peep’s thwack, thwack, thwack webbed feet once were and then he's at the foot of our bed. Josh, awake, crooning “It’s ok buddy, crawl in with us”, and the warmth of him, the hymness of him snuggled between us, the envelope we make, our bodies undulating away from each other to make a space for this being that is the mingling of us, who falls quickly back to sleep, safe in the known body of us. Josh murmuring and then asleep and then it’s only me awake listening to the storm. Thinking about how my edges have worn off from, well, everything, you know? I’ve been worn so smooth to the fit of us.
Outside, the geese and the goslings, listening. Lyra and Peep together, listening.
Each of us placebuilt for a world made of us and for us, our towering nest of grief and beauty.
***
After years of struggle with mental illness, Josh hung himself on September 6, 2022. The June following his death, in a cloud of overwhelm and exhaustion anticipating selling our home and losing our animals, I left the duck coop door unlatched. I woke to Lyra’s voice, ran, stole what was left of Peep back from the raccoon dragging him away. I cradled him against me as his head moved into my hair
"Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place
Where as a child I'd hide "(GnR)
just as he had always done. His blood ran warm down my back. I broke his neck.
Lyra, twice widowed, hatched a clutch of eggs on Josh’s first dead birthday, July 6. Although some did not survive, the remaining Joshlings are all white and all male. Cass and Devan, new owners of our old home, adopted all of Peep’s family.
On our way east to New Brunswick, we found a white ceramic duck statue in a second-hand shop. Although I wrapped it carefully, when we unpacked our belongings, the duck’s right leg had broken.
The same leg that Peep had broken three times.
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The Writer's Federation of New Brunswick
Juror Shelly Kawaja