This memory was still vivid in our minds as my father pushed us all outside into the cold darkness to show us whatever horrifying booty he’d managed to capture, shoot, or run over. My sister and I hung back nervously as my mother braced herself with a deep breath and leaned forward uneasily to stare into the eyes of a dozen grim live birds, who looked as if they’d been driven through hell. A few squawked indignantly, but most huddled numbly in the corner, no doubt shell-shocked from the windblown journey, coupled with being forced to share the pickup bed with several animal carcasses my father had probably picked up for taxidermy work. To the birds, I assume it must’ve been very much like accepting a ride from a stranger, only to get in the back of the van to find several murdered hikers who were being made into lamp shades.
My father explained that the birds were well-behaved Wisconsin jumbo quail, and my mother countered that the birds were, in fact, rowdy turkeys. He explained that he’d gotten them in trade for the rusty crossbow he’d brought home a few months ago, and technically the birds seemed the lesser of the two evils, so she shook her head and went back to cleaning. My mother was a woman who knew how to pick her battles, and she probably realized that the quails-that-were-actually-turkeys would be less dangerous to all of us.
Those birds loved my father with a white-hot passion. They followed him around, reverently, in what I can only imagine was some sort of Patty Hearst Stockholm syndrome, no doubt strengthened by the sight of him carrying dead animals into the house every few days. My father was the only person they seemed to tolerate. As the months wore on, the turkeys grew bigger and louder and more obnoxious, and would roost on low tree branches, screaming at my mother every time she left the house. My father insisted that the quails were just eccentric, and that we were misinterpreting the loud, angry gobbling, which he maintained was simply the birds singing with joy. He implied that our response to the quail was probably just an indication of our own guilty consciences, and my mother implied that he probably needed to be stabbed repeatedly with a fork in the thigh, but she said it more with her eyes than with her mouth, and my father seldom paid enough attention to either.
As the birds grew larger and meaner, I thanked God that we had no neighbors near enough to witness the turkey’s behavior. I was already plagued with insecurity and shyness, and the embarrassing angry turkey attacks were doing nothing for my already low self-confidence. My sister and I tried to ignore the whole situation, which was difficult, because my father insisted on naming the turkeys and treating them like pets. Pets who would angrily run at you in a full-out attack, nipping at your tiny ankles as you ran in circles around the yard, screaming for someone to open the door to the house and let you in.
Lisa tried to convince my father that the birds (led by an unpredictable turkey named Jenkins, for some reason) wanted to eat us, but my father assured us that “quail don’t even have teeth, so even if they did manage to kill you, they certainly wouldn’t be able to eat you.” I suppose he thought that was comforting.
“Do turkeys have teeth?” my sister asked him archly.
My father tried to lecture her on respecting your elders, but he got distracted trying to calm down Jenkins, who had lodged himself on the mailman’s hood and was violently attacking at the windshield wiper, while gobbling accusingly at the baffled postman.
We lived on a rural route, so our mailman was fairly used to being besieged by stray dogs, but he’d been utterly unprepared for an angry turkey attack and indignantly yelled, “You need to lock those damn turkeys up if you can’t control them.”