by Helen Doss
The slimy creatures had left silver trails winding all over the kitchen. We tracked them down, under the tabletop, shapelessly inching down the table legs, heading for stove, sink, and dining-room door. Rita grinned, forgot her tears, and gathered her pets back into the can. For two days I moved warily in the kitchen, never knowing what I might step on, or discover in my sugar bowl.
Our two floppy-eared cocker spaniels were almost as destructive to our garden as Rita’s snails. They solemnly watched me plant a row of potato pieces, then dug them up and ate them. Dogs are not popularly supposed to be fond of vegetables, but ours were. Patsy, the humble little freckled blonde, would not have had the sense to snitch if big red Rufus had not shown her how. Rufus figured that if people could eat out of a garden, he could. He had always considered himself to be a people, anyway.
“See that Woo-fus?” Timmy pointed out one day. “That bad doggy eat up all our dinner.”
There was Rufus, trotting delicately through the garden, stopping now to nimbly bite off a tender, green cucumber, next to detach the juiciest red tomato from the vine, and finishing with nibbles from the berry bushes. Patsy followed ten paces behind like a Chinese wife, following his example.
Since these uninvited guests in our garden were really part of the family, we didn’t resent them. Not the way we did the parasitic rats which lived off the sweat of our hoe. When the unwelcome vermin moved into our house, we resented them even more. They migrated to us from the barn next door, a quaint, tumble-down structure on the opposite side of us from the Lodge Hall. When the barn was torn down in the interests of sanitation, the rats came over and took up housekeeping in our walls. We didn’t realize we had new boarders sharing our roof at first. Walnuts began to disappear from a box on the back porch, but we didn’t guess.
“You children might get sick,” I said, “if you eat too many walnuts.”
“We’re not eating extra,” Donny said. “Just the handful you give us every day, that’s all.”
We harvested a bushel of small tomatoes, which I stored on the back porch until I could can them as juice. These, too, quickly disappeared.
“You children are liable to get tummy-aches,” I warned.
“Not eat many,” Timmy said, his round face solemn. He counted on his fingers. “Only one, four, two.”
This obvious understatement I attributed to an inability to count. But next a sack of wallpaper paste diminished, fast. The children looked blank. “Not us,” they said patiently.
The next morning I went to the back porch to wash the dirty clothes, which I soaked overnight in the laundry tubs. A suspicious gray lump floated in the water. Carl fished it out by the tail.
“We have rats,” he said. “I’ll go buy some poison.”
The next afternoon, Timmy burst from the bathroom, his pixie eyes almost round. “There’s a skirrel in there!”
“Couldn’t be a squirrel,” Donny said. “Squirrels live in trees.”
“Sure, really, honest,” Timmy said breathlessly. “A real live squirrel. He chew a hole inna wall and poke his head out the hole, and he wiggle his whiskers at me.”
Carl found a fresh hole in the wall beside the bathroom window. “That was no squirrel, Timmy,” he said. “That was a rat.” He went for a tin lid, to nail over the hole.
Donny was busy examining the hole, and Timmy tried to peek in, too. “What’s a rat, Donny, what’s a rat?”
“A rat?” Donny threw out his hands, searching for words. “Well, it’s sort of like a mouse, only more.”
Carl nailed on the lid, then put poison out under the house. It didn’t seem to diminish the rat population, though, as the walls grew noisier and noisier every night. One pair of rats had an apartment about two feet left of the place where our stovepipe entered the dining-room wall. Nightly scuffles, with angry low squeaks and high piping squeals, indicated that the relationship was not too happy. Periodically one threw the other downstairs, with a bumpetty, bumpetty, bump all the way down between the studding, ending in a dull thud behind the baseboard.
The last straw came the morning I went to get Alex up from his basket in the corner of the living room. There was not only a new hole in the living-room wall, but fresh tracks around the baby’s basket and across his blue blanket. I snatched up Alex and called for Carl.
“Put out some more poison,” I cried. “This is too much!”
“This time I’m getting professional help,” Carl said, reaching for the phone. “It was bad enough having them invade the garden. When they take over the house—!”
The exterminator arrived and did his job. That night, and every night afterward, it was quiet in the walls of the old parsonage. No more tails lashed on the thin wallboard. We heard no more squealing and patter of rodent feet, and we didn’t even miss the quarrelsome couple which had lived two feet left of the stovepipe.
When I tried to be a farmer, I fared much worse with the chickens than with the garden. My poultry fiasco began when somebody gave us a fat red hen which Carl didn’t have the heart to kill. We kept it for a pet and it laid an egg or two, then seemed to lose interest. The trap was sprung when I was passing through the Sears, Roebuck store in Santa Rosa, and was drawn into the farm department by the irresistible peeping of a new batch of baby chicks.
Wouldn’t the children be thrilled with these, I thought.
A salesman appeared at my elbow, beaming. “Can I sell you some of this fine, healthy stock?”
“How would I raise them?” I laughed. “I haven’t any incubator, or whatever it takes. And no extra money to buy one.
He pursed his lips. He was trying to be very helpful. “Perhaps you could borrow a good broody hen from a friend?”
“I already have a hen, but I don’t know if she’s broody,” I said. “She looks like she’s brooding about something.”
He demonstrated. “Does she sit on the nest a lot, and go around cluck-cluck-cluck-CLUU-UUCK, like this?”
I looked at him, surprised that he would know. “That’s exactly what she goes around saying.”
The salesman beamed. “A good broody hen could raise at least eighteen for you, and no trouble with temperatures or thermostats. You’ll have some fine pullets for egg-layers, and good eating from your fryers. Would you like eighteen?”
“All right,” I said dubiously, showing my lack of sales resistance. “But what if the hen doesn’t cooperate?”
“She’ll take them,” he assured me, counting eighteen yellow balls into a box with holes. “The trick is to put them under her at night, when she’s asleep. In the morning she thinks she hatched them.”
At home, I opened the box on the dining-room floor and my family clustered around, hollering for turns to hold a chirping ball of fluff. The children were enchanted, delighted, overjoyed.
The old hen was not.
In the chilly night, Donny carried the flashlight, I lugged the cheeping box, and we tiptoed out to her hangout in a corner of the tool shed. Slip the chicks under her while she was asleep? That was a joke. She was wide awake, waiting for us, her battle weapons sharpened, tall and straight on her nest, with her wattles whisking from side to side as she glared from one eye and then the other. Grabbing two chicks, I lifted her wing and shoved them under. One chick escaped, and both that chick and I got viciously pecked in a manner meant to draw blood.
“She’s mean,” Donny said. “I think we ought to cook her. With dumplings and gravy.”
We huddled in the dark, hoping she would go to sleep, but we grew sleepy before she did. Every time I tried to outmaneuver her with a fast shove of another chick under her wing, she outmaneuvered me.
“I’m freezing,” Donny complained. “Let’s go to bed.”
I gave up and left the one chick under the old battle-ax, hoping that he might bring out her mother-instinct by morning. We took the other seventeen rejected orphans back to the house, and I left their box overnight on the gas range. Would the pilot light be warm enough to keep them from dying?
&
nbsp; In the morning we awoke to a chirping like a houseful of canaries. All seventeen in the box were popping with life, but the other chick was not so lucky. He had been brutally pecked, kicked out of the nest, and left to freeze.
“You’re right,” I told Donny. “She deserves to go into the pot for dinner, Sunday.”
I rounded up enough scraps of fencing and wire and boards to build a back-yard sunning pen for my orphans. It was chick-tight, but not child-tight. Timmy trotted in for a visit and forgot to shut the gate on the way out. The baby chicks, in all their trusting innocence, fluttered out to see the world. The children dashed to the rescue, helping me round them up. The two flap-eared cockers helped too, but only a few puffs of yellow down remained of the six they retrieved.
Every night the remaining eleven had to be rounded up and put into their box over the pilot light on the stove. Curiously enough, they thrived. The children were delighted to see the white feathers sprouting on wings and tails.
Then came the day it rained.
“Hey, Mama,” Timmy shouted. “All our chickies, they turning into baby ducks. They swimming!”
“Goodness gracious,” I exclaimed. “They’ll drown, they’ll die of pneumonia!”
We put on raincoats and rescued our crop of future egg-layers from the puddle in their outdoor pen. In the house we took towels and dried their tiny feet and draggled feathers. I put them in their night box and stowed it up on the shelf over our old-fashioned, uninsulated hot-water heater, which was going and would keep them warm. An hour later I noticed that the door to the heater closet had been shut, in spite of my solemn warnings to everyone to see that it stayed open. I threw open the door, pulled down the box, and yanked off the lid. Steam rose from the overheated inside; half the chicks lay on the straw, horribly still, and the rest drooped on their legs, panting.
“Give them water,” Donny said anxiously. “They look thirsty.”
We dipped their beaks into a cup of cool water, then had to tip their heads back so the water would run down their throats. We fluffed their feathers and blew cool air in their faces, kept dribbling their beaks through more water and holding them up when they were too weak to stand. Eight of the eleven pulled through. The next day Rufus dug under their pen and brought the number down to four.
“You won’t get any eggs from this batch,” Carl said. ‘Tour four survivors are all roosters.”
“I’ve got a rooster egg,” Timmy said. He pulled a large, smooth stone from his pocket.
“Roosters don’t lay eggs, son,” Carl said.
“If a Easter bunny can lay eggs,” Timmy challenged, “a rooster could lay eggs, if he wanted to, I betcha.”
“That nuisance of a Rufus,” I muttered, glaring down at the red cocker, who had the impudence to stand in front of us wagging his stubby tail for approval. “If he only could have left those chicks alone, I might have had some laying hens out of all my work and worry.”
“Rufus does have his faults,” Carl admitted, “but he loves the kids. You know, he’s a pretty good dog, down underneath.”
Our son bent over on his sturdy legs and inspected the underside of Rufus. “I think he looks better on the top,” Timmy said.
Our little illusion that we were farmers in the dell might have been maintained, if it weren’t for the Lodge Hall being in our dell, too. This brought city sophistication, noise, glamor, and secondhand parties into our otherwise quiet existence.
At night, the children could watch the festivities going on in the lighted Lodge Hall across the narrow side yard. Unfortunately, these fascinating doings began after the children’s bedtime. Whenever things quieted down so I could coax them to leave their windows and go back to bed, the music would flare out again in a turn, te-tum, te-tum, te-tum that crashed down the scales with the irresistible appeal of a Pied Piper’s flute. The children would leap out of bed and dance like elves and fairies in a moonlit ring, scattering only when my feet were heard on the stairs.
“That’s what they’re doing, marching all around,” Donny explained. “Only they don’t have fun, like us. They don’t laugh.”
The secondhand entertainment would have been bearable, if it had not been for the secondhand refreshments that went with it. Soon after we moved to the parsonage, I heard the children playing tea party outside on the morning after one of the Lodge Hall doings.
“I got a piece of bun,” came Laura’s voice, distinctly.
“There’s a wienie inside my bun,” Teddy boasted.
“Who wants mustard?” Donny asked. “I got half a bottle.”
“Look at all the beans on my plate,” Susie piped up.
“I’ll trade you a bite of this brown cake for a bite of your pink cake,” Rita was wheedling.
The aura of reality was too great for mere make-believe. I hurried outside. Behind the Lodge Hall, on the edge by the parsonage yard, I found an oil drum overflowing with boxes and paper plates from last night’s refreshments. The children were sitting in a circle under a tree nearby, delicately cleaning the remains from the party plates. I had a long, quiet talk with them about germs, sanitation, and nice manners; then we collected and burned the rubbish.
When parties were especially noisy, I usually remembered to grab a match and beat the children outside in the morning. The quieter parties became my downfall. The next morning I would hear through the kitchen window the high, childish voices.
“Good jello, hmmmm?”
“Mine’s soupy, but I got a cherry floating.”
“I like this cake with the little white worms on top.”
“That’s coconut. I’ll swap for some of this.”
Clutching my head, I would dash out with a match. They couldn’t really be hungry, as this usually happened after a breakfast that would fell a lumberjack. The challenge of a picnic, plus the irresistible lure of a grab-bag, drew like a magnet. It was the kind of fun they never forgot. Even last week, several years after we moved from Forestville, I overheard them reminiscing.
“Remember at our Forestville house?” Teddy asked. “Where they had that big barrel, and every once in a while it was full of perfeckly good food people just threw away?”
“We took our plates around behind the church and hid in the bushes,” Rita said, “so Mama wouldn’t burn them up.”
“Once Daddy looked out the church window and saw us,” Timmy giggled, “and spanked all our bottoms.”
“Yeah,” Laura drooled. “Once I had cherry pie with mustard.”
“Mama kept saying there was germs in that food,” Susie said. “But I never saw any.”
“Yeah,” Donny said dreamily. “Those were the days.”
CHAPTER 10
Growing Pains
OUR Forestville house was uncomfortably overcrowded. We were too many fish for the fish bowl when we moved there; with Timmy and baby Alex added to the family, there wasn’t room to flip around. So Donny had the perfect solution.
“What we need around here,” he began, “is a boy—”
“We have a boy,” Carl interrupted. “As a matter of fact, at my last count we had four boys, to say nothing of three girls.”
“I’m not talking about girls,” Donny protested. “What we need is a boy—”
“The RIGHT SIZE OF ME!” Teddy, Laura, Susan, and Rita shouted, as they stood on the stairs in their pajamas.
“No,” Donny said, tears misting his blue eyes. “You all got each other the size of, but it’s me who needs somebody the size of.”
“Alex hasn’t got nobody,” Teddy said.
“Alex is too young to care.” Donny turned his head and his voice choked. “But me, I’m lonesome, and I care.”
“You’ve found a lot of friends in the second grade,” Carl pointed out. “And I’ll bet none of the boys you know has a brother just his exact size.”
“One boy is twins, and he’s the happiest boys I know,” Donny said. “Besides, nobody my size lives close enough to play with.”
I kissed all the children an
d started them up the stairs. “Bedtime, now. We can talk about this another night.”
“We got room,” Donny said. “I could squeeze over and let him have half my bed.”
“You go off to sleep,” I said, “and forget it for now. Mother and Daddy will talk about it later.”
When the children were all tucked in, Carl said, “What’s there to talk about? It’s out of the question, and you know it.”
“Getting another boy? When you first told me about Alex, I thought another baby was out of the question. See how wrong I was?” I grinned and chucked him under the chin. “Now maybe you could be wrong.”
“Sure,” Carl hollered. “Just ask anybody, and they’d tell you I was a piker with only seven children. Get eight children, and then I can do a good job in the church—make more calls—preach better sermons—get more adult discussion groups going—”
“Now that you bring it up,” I agreed, “it might help a little that way, too. Donny’s at loose ends, always keeping the household in an uproar with his mischief. If he had a boy his size, like when we had Taro—”
Carl went through the motions of tearing his hair, which wasn’t long enough to tear. “Oh, fine,” he raved. “I’m already swamped with responsibilities, so you know how to lighten the load. Just take on another responsibility. That makes sense.”
“People need more than just sense,” I said indignantly. “They need hearts, loving hearts. And it isn’t just our welfare I’m thinking about, or Donny’s. Somewhere there’s a lonely kid whom nobody wants. I’ve got a feeling he’s somewhere, just waiting for our letter to come, saying we want him.”
Carl pulled me down on the couch beside him. “I like your enthusiasm, Helen, and your big, unsensible, loving heart. But you’ll have to face facts.”
“When I die,” I said clenching my fists, “I want to feel that the world is even a slightly better place, because I lived in it. Is that conceited?”
“Not particularly. That’s the way I feel, the way most people feel.”
“Well, why should I even bother to clutter up the earth, unless I intend to do everything I can, within my ability? I don’t mean just to do a few things that I can do without any sacrifice or trouble to myself, but everything—”