Wild Turkeys

A couple relocates to Cape Cod, where wind-scoured beaches and the quiet strangeness of roosting wild turkeys herald a new, quieter life. As seasons turn, grief recedes, leaving space for possibility.

Words and images: Hannah Clarkin

We move to Cape Cod in December, the Pleiades tipped at the edge of the horizon, sunsets clear as glass, sliding down over Buzzards Bay. Into North Falmouth, the second town over the Bourne Bridge. Onto a suburban street, houses planted in a wide circle: ranches, capes, vinyl-sided colonials, with narrow woods between them. Two miles from the sea.

I expect long dusk walks at Chapaquoit Beach, other people’s dogs tearing up and down the sand. I expect wind thrashing the moss-furred oak trees around our new house. I expect raccoons, coyotes, and all manner of birds. My husband says he is going to learn the names of those birds. But I do not expect the turkeys.

We hear them on our first morning in the new house, breaking their descent from the trees on the roof of the sunporch outside our bedroom window. We lay in bed, light slanting across the east-facing room, and giggle when they actually gobble.

Our new house is a 1979 cape with a central stair, two bedrooms downstairs, two upstairs. A fireplace. An overgrown yard planted with holly, hydrangea, rhododendron, and English ivy coming up the hill to take over back the lawn. More than we could ever get in Boston. Ordinary for here.

“This is the neighborhood with the best elementary school,” our realtor tells us. I try to ignore the comment.

We are just a couple, in our early thirties, moving to Cape Cod. My husband is an ocean scientist, and this is a good place for both of us to work. It’s where my grandparents live. I’ve dreamed of being here since I was a girl.

Still, it’s hard not to think about the spare room across the hall from the master bedroom. The one with a slanted ceiling and warm pine beadboard, with floral wallpaper I like.

The turkeys return each dusk, pecking the lawn in front of our house. Mostly females, dark and hunched, feathers shining, faces chalky. They take a running start in the street and launch themselves onto our roof. They clatter up to the ridge and fly into the oaks behind our house. We watch them settle into the trees for the night.

After Christmas friends from Boston start to visit. Some bring good coffee, others beer they brewed themselves, all of them bring babies.

I buy whole milk in a glass bottle at the market down the street. My husband takes out the only toy we own, a wooden puzzle. We borrow a portable crib from my grandparents and set it under the slanted roof of the spare room.

After the baby is in bed, we adults sit beside the fire drinking wine and it feels almost as if we’re inhabiting the not-distant past, when we all lived in the same place, when none of us had children.

In deep winter the wind blows down all the oak leaves and I am up in the night. Out the bathroom window I see stars and black shapes, like trash bags caught in the branches. I count a dozen of them. I see one shift and ruffle its feathers. The others rock with a gentle wind.

I say guardian angel out loud. I think of ghosts silently. Then of thestrals, fictional winged horses visible only to those who have seen death. We have seen death, my beloved and I. If an ultrasound screen counts as seeing. If miscarriage counts for death. It is the most natural of human events. It feels entirely unnatural that it could happen to us again and again.

I sleep, watched over, as dark birds abide in the trees behind our house.

On a Friday in spring we stand on the back lawn and watch turkeys fly over us into the trees. It’s getting warmer out. We’ve been on the sunporch all afternoon. We have pizza in the oven inside. Guests on their way to eat it.

My husband has his guitar and we are looking up into the branches, laughing each time a turkey barely makes it to a perch. He is singing Rancid’s Journey to the end of the East Bay.

“All these bands and all these people,
All these friends and we were equals,
But what you gonna do when everybody goes on without you?”

The turkeys shift at the sound of the guitar. They teeter in unsteady positions at the sound of his voice. Then they begin to fly to other trees further back in the woods.

Sometimes it feels as if leaving Boston erased some of the last two years. Like we can skip parts of the narrative. None of our new friends have children, yet. We are just a couple, in our thirties, buying our first house. We have one cat, one car, three bicycles. We might get a dog.

On the weekend we rake between the overgrown firs in our front yard. I pull leaves out of the creeping phlox and look at the ivy, assessing the difficulty of rooting it out. My husband begins a trail into the brambles behind our house, clearing his way with shears as he goes. After disappearing for a while, he stops and calls to me. I go down into the valley.

Hidden by a fallen tree bough is a domed structure made of vines and leaves—a turkey nest.

I think of the coyotes we’ve heard in the night. Of all the neighbor’s chickens eaten by racoons. I think of the birds of prey that sometimes perch in our trees. It must be unlucky, nesting here on the ground, with only branches for protection.

The nest is full of dried leaves. A holly bough has started to grow over the top of it. It looks empty, old, unused.

Still, we go quietly back up the hill. We look up nesting season on our phones. We abandon trail-making for the time being. We let that part of the wood lie quiet and undisturbed, just in case.