“I have a surprise I’m bringing home :)”
Charis sent me this text a couple weeks ago. She was working an afternoon shift milking cows at the dairy farm, and, knowing well what she typically brought home—a few choice words for stubborn and kicking bovine—I was a little apprehensive.
“Uh oh, I’m nervous.”
Three hours later, we gathered around a kiddie pool filled with cedar chips, water, a raggedy t-shirt for a bed, and some makeshift feeding bowls. In our hands was a timid, runty duckling. Liam was beside himself with glee running around our three-season porch, and Oliver kept a fascinated if wary eye on the feathered stranger. A first family pet, unconventional as it may be.
“What should we name him, Liam?” asked Charis.
“Koonk.” A fine name, indeed. Simple and zany and oh-so-Liam.
Charis had found the newly christened Koonk shuttered away in the corner of the milking parlor with no sign of how he got there. No quacks from a nearby mama, no siblings peeping in from the outside world, no pond on site to call home. Just a weak, trembling duckling. Our best guess was that one of the barn cats had caught him somehow, separating him from all else, abandoning him for later use. So Charis scooped Koonk up in gloved and gentle hands to tend to him in whatever ways we could.
Koonk was with us for a short thirty hours. We knew from the start that Koonk faced a trying upstream paddle. Ruffled and matted feathers, glossy eyes, a lackluster appetite, and no poultry companion: he bore the telltale signs of an unkind life. And he had only us for some small version of comfort. For thirty hours, the four of us welcomed Koonk into our circle. Charis and I took turns holding him while we stroked his head until he drifted off to sleep. We nudged him toward his untouched food dish as Liam cheered on and Oliver waved clumsily. We provided him a heat lamp at night, and the boys checked in on him often by peering through the porch windows. Liam made sure we let him say goodnight to Koonk before hurrying off to bed. We did what we could and what we thought was best for our little duck. We consulted a family friend and vet for advice. And we watched as he kept slipping away.
Around 8:00 on a Sunday night, Charis came back from one of our routine checks and said Koonk had died. Since the boys were already asleep, the two of us stepped out onto the porch and viewed the duckling bobbing in the water, having fallen, lifeless, from his mound of fabric and cedar chips. I placed him in an empty coffee tin and buried him beneath the pines out front, fighting back mosquitoes and misty eyes.
When I sat back down on the couch next to Charis, we were both pushing down lumps in our throats, struck by how pronounced our attachments to the bundle of ebbed life had become in such a short time. I’ll admit that later that night I straight-up ugly cried. Like Claire Danes in Homeland. Yeah. I’m still surprised at this reaction, which probably explains why I knew I had to write about Koonk this month. It’s a way of sharing a life with you, a life that went largely ignored, brief and unimportant.
But it was important, silly and trivial as that may seem. Koonk was important to us as his misinformed, well-meaning, adoptive family. He was important to Charis, who couldn’t shake the feeling that she could have or should have done more for him. He was important to Liam, who, even though we spared him the details and the harshness (those will surely come soon enough), still woke up a few days later in the middle of the night crying out that he misses his duck.
Far worthier and more pressing people and events deserve our cares and tears. This is fully realized and undisputed. Koonk was just a reminder of how even the smallest things can elicit strong affections and responses. It all started with a hungry bully of a cat and a rescue mission from trampling cow hooves. He was a lesson that whatever offerings of comfort we can give are no wasted efforts, a charge to do so more readily, more deliberately, and more often.
Jacob Schepers (Calvin ’12) is the author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises (2014), a winner of the 2013 Outriders Poetry Project competition. His poetry has appeared in Verse, The Common, PANK, The Destroyer, and others. He lives in South Bend, IN, with his wife, Charis, and two sons, Liam and Oliver. He is both an MFA student and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame.
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He was a lesson that whatever offerings of comfort we can give are no wasted efforts, a charge to do so more readily, more deliberately, and more often.
Really well put. Thanks for this.
I live in my neighborhood’s animal rescue house, and I understand this heartbreak completely. Thanks for this beautiful post.
Thanks, Sabrina, though I’m sure that your experience in the animal rescue house is far more heartbreaking. I give you many props and wish you so much strength.