Fur, Feathers, and Claws

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

“‘Tucker Wade Bishop IV…that’s a boarding school name,’ Mack Kirby had teased. But Tucker hadn’t come from money. ‘I definitely wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth,’ he’d once told me. ‘In fact, sometimes when we ate, we used no silverware at all. And sometimes,’ Tucker claimed, ‘a couple of animals shared my plate.’“

Emily Bishop died in 1958, when her son, Tucker Wade, as he was called back then to avoid confusion, was only six years old. Cancer, a hideous disease, took her from him long before that, though.

“At least he’s too young to realize what’s happening.” That was what Mrs. Burke said. She was one of the neighbors from down the street, whose son Chad, the same age as Tucker, went to religion school instead of the regular kind. “He’ll hardly remember any of it,” Mrs. Burke had claimed. Yet Tucker did remember. He remembered Mrs. Burke saying it, and he remembered his mom being too weak to give him baths or to meet him at the bus stop some days. She had always been there, from the very first day of Kindergarten, with the family dog, Toby. The first time that Tucker realized something was wrong was the day that Toby had come all alone. When the two of them got home, there sat Emily, in her shoes and coat, in a kitchen chair, too weak to go any further. She got better—for a while. Then, a couple of months later, several times in one week, there was Toby by himself again. Another month went by, and it was just Tucker and Toby every day, walking up the eighth-of-a-mile dirt trail from the main road to the house. When the bus pulled up on February 8, 1958, and no one was waiting, no mom or no Toby, little Tucker Wade immediately knew the something he’d been dreading—something he wasn’t supposed to realize was imminent—had finally really happened.

Tucker Wade walked home as slowly as possible that day. Perhaps he should have rushed, but as young as he had been, he knew there’d be nothing he could do, and no one he could save. He opened the unlocked door, and there was his mother in bed in the living room, where she’d normally been for the last several weeks. Tucker had gotten used to seeing her there, to hearing her heavy breaths. He’d grown accustomed to the rattle and the wheezing that always made him sad. Not hearing those sounds was even sadder.

And there was Toby. Tucker could still see it in his mind some twenty years later: the yellow Lab curled up at his mother’s side. His mother’s. Both of theirs. Elvis sang melancholy rock in the background, a 45 on the changer, the last in a stack, “Heartbreak Hotel,” which restarted itself fifteen times—Tucker counted—before his father got home and finally shut the frigging thing off.

“Since my baby left me…” That was Tucker’s last memory of his mom and her touch, which he could never recall without that goddamned song as the soundtrack. Emily Bishop loved music. She loved her record player, and young Tucker wasn’t allowed to touch it, so he’d sat there waiting, one hand on the dog’s soft, furry belly, his mother’s hand in the other. It had still been warm when he’d taken it, but by the time Tuck Bishop got home, and gently pried it away, it no longer was.

Tucker remembered his father saying to Uncle Walter, “She wasn’t supposed to die while I was at work and the boy was at school.” He remembered Uncle Walter making a clucking sound with his tongue as a response. He remembered Mr. and Mrs. Burke shaking his hand at the funeral and then making their son do it, too. Chad didn’t want to. He cried, and Tucker remembered how Roy McKenna called Chad weird right to his face, right in the church. Tucker also remembered following his father around the house for days—everywhere—even standing outside the bathroom door when he peed, for fear that he would leave him, too. For someone who wasn’t supposed to remember anything, he sure remembered a lot.

Toby refused to eat for days after Emily Bishop’s death. He refused to leave the bedroom where she had perished, and Tuck, as Tucker III was known, paid as much attention to the dog’s grief as he did to his son’s. Instead of that making Tucker Wade jealous, it made him love his dad even more, and also nurtured an affection for animals that only grew over time.

Tuck would play his wife’s favorite singles every night, after Tucker Wade was supposed to be snug and secure in his bed. Tucker could always hear his dad crying during quiet spots in the melody. He had cried, too, as he’d listened to both the music and the sobs. Sometimes he still did, at almost age thirty, when a particular song came on the radio or he pulled a certain record. With all the memories that adult Tucker held, it was the one thing he could no longer conjure that made him most sad: not a sound or sight, but something tied to another sense: that of touch.

As time progressed, Tuck Bishop showed himself to be ill-equipped to raise a child on his own. Once he gave into his own mourning, once he gave into the “eccentricities” his wife had managed to keep in check for many years, he somehow went from socially-awkward working engineer to reclusive home inventor and “collector” in almost the blink of an eye. He had always had a huge heart, wide open to anything that breathed, but also—and some called it a mental illness—to inanimate objects that didn’t. From the time he and Emily got their own home, Tuck would stop on his way home from work and grab a bureau or a discarded lamp from the side of the road, fix it up and then drop it, at Emily’s insistence, at the Goodwill. The only thing she never complained about was more records, and Tuck brought in plenty of those, plus furniture, abandoned television sets, discarded bikes and toys, even unwanted bathroom fixtures that he felt deeply all deserved a welcoming space to call their own and a loving hand to make them whole and useful again. When inanimate things became living things, though Emily loved animals too, she tried to put a stop to it at once.

“The night I brought home Toby, your mother said, ‘No, Tuck! No!’“

Tucker didn’t really remember that scene playing out, but his father recounted the story several dozen times after Emily’s death, as he, his dad, and Toby walked hand in hand from the bus stop.

“But the mutt won her over quickly, and soon everything was peachy keen again.”

Tuck added a wink and extra hand squeeze whenever he said ‘peachy keen,’ like even back when the phrase was popular, he found it dippy enough to require one. Tucker Wade loved holding hands with his father. He missed holding hands with his mom, and even then, anxious, always thinking, as the sensory recollection of his mother’s touch faded day by day, he tried to store the feel of his father’s grip away, so he could always bring it back, when they weren’t holding hands for real.

“When I tried to bring home a cat, and her kittens, Tucker Wade—six kittens—your mother put her Montgomery Ward’s saddle shoe down. ‘Absolutely not!’ she said.”

Inky and the Ink Spots, as Tuck had referred to the black cat and her black, white, and black-and-white brood, had ended up out in the shed. “Just until I find them good homes,” he had promised his wife, but Tuck never had, and the Ink Spots, over the course of a year, in which Emily Bishop got sicker and sicker, had brought forth Ink Spots of their own.

“You are to bring home no more animals,” Emily had decreed on one of her stronger days, and so Tuck had promised that he wouldn’t. He’d held to it, too, right up until Emily died. Within eight months after that, though, by the time six-year-old Tucker became seven, several cats and another dog had joined the family.

Tuck saved things “just in case” and “just because.” He saved rubber bands and old envelopes, soup cans and cereal boxes. He saved all kinds of boxes, actually: shoe, cardboard, and cat food. He brought home old clothes that would neither fit him nor his son. In fact, most of them wouldn’t fit anyone they knew. He even carted in old books, and magazines and newspapers from years, eventually decades, gone by. And, of course, at least once a week, he brought in more records. Tuck collected “art,” “antiques,” and “artifacts” that “might be worth something someday” and some he claimed already were. He made new junk out of old junk, inventions and gadgets he found a use for, but ones it seemed doubtful anyone else ever would. More nobly, Tuck saved every single stray kitten and dog he or anyone he knew came across. Everyone was given a name alphabetically. While most people would have realized “empathy” and “compassion” had overruled common sense by the time they came around to “A” again, Tuck Bishop never did. Tuck was a hoarder. He hoarded objects and he hoarded pets. By the time Tucker reached his teens, the Bishop men had no less than seven dogs in their six-room house at any given time, and the number of cats quickly became immeasurable. Some of the felines were feral. Most were not spayed or neutered. The Bishop home reeked of urine and feces on hot days, and balls of animal fur bounced like Old West tumbleweeds over every surface. By the time Tucker was in high school, though his father was barely in his fifties, “Acorn,” “Amy,” and “Alistair”—who looked nothing alike—had all become interchangeable. And though Tucker didn’t have words for it, he also noticed “eccentric” becoming “obsessive” at times, possibly even “bewildered,” and once in a while, his usually loving dad was uncharacteristically “hostile.”

Around the time Tucker Wade had hit puberty, his father had stopped going to work. The money he spent on things, the money he bought groceries with, Tucker was just becoming aware enough to wonder where it came from. Roy McKenna’s father had a job, and so did Mr. Burke, and all the other dads on the street. One day in class, the teacher asked what everyone’s father was. She didn’t ask Tucker Wade. His father sold things, all kinds of things; that’s what he would have said, though nothing ever seemed to leave—more stuff just came in. Maybe they were rich, like Governor Rockefeller. Maybe that’s what Tucker Wade would have claimed. His father probably had tons of money squirreled away. There was always plenty of food, even if there was little space to cook it in or eat it, so young Tucker Wade decided not to worry about it.

For a while, there was plenty of affection, too. Tuck the hoarder was also a hugger, he held Tucker Wade’s hand any chance he got, and also lugged him around, piggyback, as he tended to his inventory until Tucker Wade was too heavy to be held. Even after that, Tucker never minded a quick embrace before taking off for school, one when he got home, and a longer hug before bed. His father’s gentle touch when he scraped a knee, when wiping away a tear, a pat on the shoulder when Tucker had experienced a bad day at school, and those mornings when his dad tried to tame back a herd of cowlicks on his head; there was nothing quite like the caress of a loved one, nothing like being touched skin-to-skin by someone else’s hand. As the wild body hair Tucker now had first appeared a strand or two at a time, he worried even more, as his father’s attention was often directed somewhere else, that his touch would soon be nothing but a diminished memory, too.

Despite the way they lived, with cats and puppies licking at the same cereal bowl from which Tucker Wade ate his breakfast, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, a dog as a pillow instead of an actual one, and though Tucker III and IV traversed the dwelling they called home through small, narrow paths, walls of junk piled to the ceiling on one side and actual walls on the other, reminiscent of one of the several hamster Habitrails they owned, in school, Tucker Wade was a teacher’s dream. He was smart as a whip, just like his dad. If the elder was crazy, as many townsfolk would come to eventually claim, no one ever called him dumb. Tucker Wade also had a crisp, pitch-perfect, high-tenor singing voice he’d definitely inherited from his mother, which led to a thirty-measure solo at fourth-grade graduation. He was excellent in gym class, too, and also at most sports. Intelligent, athletic, artistic and cute, Tucker—the Wade would be dropped by then—should have been popular amongst his middle school peers as well. He wasn’t, though: he was picked on and bullied.