Lisa is under the impression that we are responsible for protecting our children from whatever my father is getting them into, but I tend to follow my mother’s lead in regard to this. “How will they learn if we continually rescue them?” I ask. “By the time we were their age we’d have learned to duck and cover until the noises die down. Besides, I’m pretty sure those are happy screams, so it’s probably all good. Or possibly the next few hours will be very tragic.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” Lisa says, frowning at a picture of herself as a one-year-old surrounded by empty beer bottles. “The day before you got here, Daddy came in and asked my kids whether they wanted to see his ‘new pets,’ and when they said yes he dumped a sack of live ducklings on the living room floor for the kids to chase down. Mom was pissed. And Daddy never thought to count them first, so who knows whether we even got them all.”
The weird thing about this picture is that my parents don’t drink. I can only assume that Lisa had some sort of problem.
“Who carries ducks in a sack?” I asked myself, but I had only one answer. The screams had died down and I heard giggling and running and possible quacking. “Shit,” I said, with resignation. I wasn’t worried about the kids (who ranged from age two to nine, and who usually watched out for one another), but I was concerned for the ducklings. I stared at Lisa and rolled my eyes in defeat. “Fine. I’ll get the broom. You man the front door so I can shoo them out without letting goats in.”
The scene was chaotic but familiar. The ducklings quacked and ran everywhere, hiding under the recliner and attempting to tunnel under the decorative but nonfunctional piano. When cornered by the children, they’d be picked up and would immediately poop, sending the kids screaming with peals of laughter as they dropped the ducklings and started the cycle all over again.
“HENRY. What did you do?” my mom yelled, as my dad laughed at the mayhem he’d created, the twinkle in his eyes still bright after all these years.
“What?” he asked teasingly. “I put down paper first.”
It was true. There was a small, empty square of newspaper in the middle of the living room.
“And you thought the ducks would understand to stay on paper?” she asked sarcastically, as she pried a terrified-looking duckling from a toddler’s sticky fist.
“Well, I guess not,” my dad admitted, but he was gleeful to see the kids laughing, and we all knew this would continue to happen. My mom shooed him outside, since he was only making things worse with his cries of “WHOEVER CATCHES THE SPOTTED ONE WINS A SILVER DOLLAR.”
The scene had taken on a dangerous carnival quality, and I was grateful that Victor had stayed home in Houston to work, since he would never let me hear the end of this. Eventually we captured the last flustered duckling and placed them in a bucket in the quiet, dark bedroom, so they could calm down (and so that Daddy wouldn’t just throw them back in the house again as soon as they were returned outside), and Lisa and I settled back down on our old bed again and picked up the albums as if nothing had happened. It’s a little disconcerting when shit like this becomes old hat, but this is the way things are, and you have to learn to roll with the punches, even if the punches are coming from the clawed feet of angry ducklings who don’t understand that you’re helping.
Whenever we came to visit my parents, Hailey would play with the moonshine still. She’d ride Jasper, the miniature donkey, in the backyard. She and her cousins would play on the old tractors and the ancient stagecoaches littering the acreage behind the house. They laughed and played and explored my father’s taxidermy shop, and wore cow skulls as masks. They looked for buried treasure with antiqued maps my dad “found,” and would dig up wooden boxes filled with coins and costume jewelry and arrowheads that Daddy had buried for them. They’d roam around the property, chasing goats and having fun, and Lisa and I had to admit that their joy made up for the occasional stray duckling that would walk into your bedroom in the middle of the night.