Japanese beetles are fat, copper-colored, and voracious. All you had to do was grab them, yank them off the leaf, and dump them in a bucket of soapy water. They’re slow, lumbering beetles, so it’s easy to do…unless, of course, you’re seventy-three years old and not nearly as quick as you used to be.
She was having a bad day of it. The gloves made her clumsy, but she couldn’t stand the way they squirmed against bare skin. She’d grab a joined pair of beetles—they were screwing all over the roses, disgusting things—and drop it in the bucket, but that would startle the others, and a dozen would take off from the bush, and she’d try to grab one out of the air and miss every time. Sometimes she even missed the stationary ones, and there was nothing to bring you down like being outwitted by a beetle.
She missed another one and said a word that would have shocked most of the members of the Garden Club. She managed to snag the next one, but she took a rose leaf with it and grumbled.
Something landed on her shoulder.
She turned her head, reaching a hand up automatically to brush away whatever it was, and froze. A bright black eye peered back at her, as the wren shifted its weight. She could see the fine scaly flesh around its eye, and the dusty feathers at the edges of the beak. There was something very reptilian about birds up close like that.
“Um,” said Louise. “I’m….killing beetles. Um. Hello?”
The bird cocked its head and said “chuuurk!”
Did I expect it to speak English? For lack of any other ideas, Louise held up the Japanese beetle for the bird’s inspection. It was a Carolina wren—the drill sergeant? Or another one? How could you tell?
It hopped down onto her upper arm and examined the beetle carefully. Most birds didn’t eat Japanese beetles, that was part of the problem. Louise dropped it into the soapy water.
The wren hopped to the bucket, peered down into it, and then flew away. Louise exhaled.
Well, what did you think would happen?
She straightened up and set the bucket down. Her back twinged, and her left knee, which probably meant that the late spring weather was about to change.
The wren reappeared. It was carrying a kicking copper beetle in its beak. It landed on the edge of the bucket, dropped the beetle in, and looked up at her with bright eyes.
“Errr,” said Louise. “Yes. Yes!” She nodded, and then thought Nodding is stupid, it’s a bird, it won’t know what you mean. Oh god, how did you communicate with a bird? All the primate gestures were useless. Heck, all the mammal gestures were useless. All those scientists worried about how you would communicate with space aliens, and the real question turned out to be how you communicated with a bird the size of an old woman’s hand.
She reached out and grabbed another beetle and dropped it in the bucket.
The wren cocked its head again, and its throat vibrated briefly, and then it flew away again. She could hear it calling loudly in the shrubs.
A few minutes later, a female cardinal, clad in brown and orange, landed on the edge of the bucket and dropped a Japanese beetle into the water. The cardinal was followed by a pair of titmice, which were followed by a scruffy looking robin.
Louise sighed. It was going to be the Good Shepherd home for sure—but in the meantime, the roses were being spared. She went back to work, with the birds fluttering around her. She felt like a geriatric Snow White.
The bucket filled up with beetles.
After about twenty minutes, Louise straightened up, said “Excuse me,” to the birds, and went inside. She got a drink of water, then opened her pantry and stood staring into it.
There was plenty of birdseed. But the birds had helped her—were helping her—and she felt like they deserved a treat. It’s not like they could eat the beetles.
She found a half-full jar of peanut butter leftover from her turn bringing cookies to the pot-luck, and dug most of it out with a spoon, then dumped in some corn starch and some lard for good measure. Louise felt that it had been a sad day for the country when lard had been replaced by margarine, and anyway, birds didn’t need to watch their weight.
She took the bowl of nutty goop outside and spooned most of it into the tray on the birdfeeder. The birds—who had still been cheerfully picking beetles off the roses—descended on the feeder with shrill chirps of delight.
“If you can take care of the roses, I’ll bring you all the peanut butter you want,” said Louise, thinking No, doctor, of course I don’t talk to birds, that would be crazy, why do you ask?
“Chirrr!”
“Achicka-dee-dee-dee!”
“Teakettle-teakettle-teakettle!”
“Chee-ark! Chee-ark!”
On the news that night, the lighthearted story was about a jogger being trapped by a flock of feral parrots in Dallas. They’d kept him pinned down in an alley for six hours, until somebody brought in a pick-up truck load of fruit and seeds.
They interviewed a Cornell scientist, who explained about mobbing behavior in birds. “They were probably viewing him as a threat,” said the ornithologist. “Fortunately, they were able to distract the birds with food, allowing the man to escape.”
“Bleep!” said the jogger, interviewed directly afterwards. “Mobbing behavior my bleep! That was a hostage situation! Those birds weren’t letting me go until they got their bleeping ransom payment!”
They cut back to the anchors, who joked about bird brains. Louise turned the TV off. Parrots holding joggers hostage was a far cry from her polite beetle-killers. “Well,” she said to Pibb, “it’s Texas. I suppose their birds are crazy too.”
The gunshot rang out when Louise was taking a nap, which is why she ran outside in her bathrobe, white hair flying, one foot in a bedroom slipper and one, which had missed the slipper, completely bare.
At that moment, though she was less concerned about her appearance than the pathetic scatter of feathers under her birdfeeder.
“What are you doing?” she shouted.
Sonny Gothaway lowered his gun. He was leaning against the fence, and he had that “aw, shucks” look that dangerously stupid people sometimes get when they are trying to appear harmless. “Huntin’ birds, Missus C. Mom says they went after Tilly.”
“Not these birds!” Louise advanced on him. “You don’t shoot these birds, you idiot!” Oh, why had she said it was birds? She should have said a possum got Tilly. She didn’t wish harm to possums, but nobody ever accused a possum of being frighteningly intelligent.
Sonny narrowed his eyes, but Louise was too furious to pay attention to the warning signs. She marched towards him, shaking her finger. “It was a big bird that went after Tilly. Do these look like big birds to you?”
“You wanna be careful, Missus C,” drawled Sonny, looking less harmless and more belligerent.
Some distant part of her brain was fully aware of how ridiculous she must look, marching towards him with one slipper and one foot covered in grass stains, her hair standing out in all directions and her bathrobe flapping around her bony knees. She didn’t much care. If she’d been able, Louise would cheerfully have strangled him. The bird lying under the feeder had undoubtedly been more intelligent than Sonny, and it couldn’t possibly have done as much harm in its entire life as Sonny managed in a week.
“You’ve got no call to be shooting birds on my property!” snapped Louise. Maybe that’d get through to him. His mother was always talking about her land and her property and let the guv’mint just try to take it.
Sonny pointed the gun at her.
Louise stopped.
About half of her was terrified. It was a very large gun. Louise didn’t know anything about guns, couldn’t tell a BB gun from an assault rifle, but it seemed extremely large.
The other half of her, unfortunately, was still furious, and it seemed to be in charge of her mouth.
“Don’t you point that thing at me, Sonny Gothaway,” she snapped. “You shoot me and the sheriff’ll be out here in no time, goin’ all through the woods, and even if they
don’t catch you, they’ll find whatever it is you’re doing back there that you think is so all-fired secret.”
Sonny flushed. Louise had no idea what he was doing back there—in her youth, it was still moonshinin’, and sometimes growing marijuana. Lord knew what kids got up to these days—crack or meth labs or growing opium poppies. Well, probably not opium poppies. Louise could grow poppies in her yard, but the heat usually flattened ‘em come June, and Sonny just didn’t seem like the type to hand-water a poppy and make sure it got a nice drink of compost tea twice a month.
Whatever it was, apparently Sonny was real surprised that people paid attention to little things like trucks coming and going at all hours of the night. “You wanna be careful, Missus C,” he said again, but he sounded much less certain this time. “You wanna keep your mouth shut.”
“Then you want to put that gun away,” said Louise, jamming her hands on her hips and glaring at him.
He kept it pointed at her a moment longer, then spat over the fence and turned away. Louise watched him walk away until he was lost in the screening trees.
“Well,” she said, and her voice cracked, and then the adrenalin hit her and she had to sit right down in the grass where she was. Her heart thudded in her chest. Was she having a heart attack? That’d be ironic.
She put her forehead on her knees and tried to breathe.
Something landed on her shoulder. She didn’t need to look up to know that it was the wren.
“Teakettle-teakettle-teakettle!”
The voice of a Carolina wren is near-deafening at close range, particularly coming from such a small throat. Louise pressed her hand to her chest and said “It’s okay. I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s nothing.”
The bird eyed her skeptically.
“I’m fine.” She sighed. “Let’s see about your friend…”
Sonny’s victim was a female cardinal. There wasn’t much left of her. Louise wondered if it was one of the cardinals who had helped her catch beetles. She felt sick and sad and old.
The wren perched atop the feeder and looked down at her. Louise glanced around the yard and saw titmice and mockingbirds, all watching her silently.
“I’ll get the shovel,” she said.
The ground was soft. It didn’t take long. It took longer to gather up the drab red-brown feathers littering the grass, but Louise didn’t feel right leaving them scattered across the yard. She put the sad little handful in atop the body of the cardinal, then filled in the hole.
The birds watched her the entire time. She wondered if they had any idea of what she was doing. Birds didn’t bury their dead, did they? Did they realize she was trying to do what was proper for the cardinal?
They probably think I’m saving her to eat later, thought Louise gloomily. Maybe they’re wondering if they should all attack now, or maybe they don’t care about their dead and are just wondering what’s wrong with me.
They didn’t attack. Louise said the Lord’s Prayer over the grave, for lack of anything else to say, and placed a rock on it. It joined the small stone-marked graves of Pibb’s two predecessors and a mole that Louise had hit with her car four years previous and hadn’t felt right just throwing into the woods.
The birds watched the whole process in silence. When she had said the last “Amen,” a silence fell. Then a mockingbird sang—something sweet and sad and not entirely ruined by the addition of a car alarm imitation at the end.
That night, the birds began building something far back in the trees.
When the police officer showed up at Louise’s door, her first, ridiculous thought was that they were there about the murder of the cardinal.
This was followed by the thought that police never do anything nearly so useful—witness the fact that Sonny Gothaway was still a free man—and she opened the door. In recent years, Louise had stopped feeling the vague unease that even law-abiding citizens feel in the presence of uniformed police. They were all just so young. The one on her stoop barely looked old enough to shave. What was he going to do, run her into the station on the handlebars of his bicycle?
“Ma’am?” said the policeman. “I’m Officer Daltry. I’m afraid you’ve been the victim of a nasty prank.”
Louise blinked at him, and took a few steps onto the porch, looking for the rotten eggs or the soaped windows—did kids still soap windows?—or the rolls of toilet paper hanging from the trees.
“The mailman called us,” said Officer Daltry patiently.
Louise sighed. “Did someone hit the mailbox with a baseball bat? You’d think that living on a cul-de-sac, they wouldn’t, but some of these kids—”
“No, ma’am,” said Officer Daltry, flushing. Apparently his training hadn’t covered this particular scenario. “I’m afraid something’s been left in your mailbox.”
Louise raised her eyebrows. “Rotten eggs?”
“It was a dead possum, ma’am,” said Daltry hurriedly.
Louise put a hand to her mouth.
It was Sonny—of course it was Sonny—fool boy, he thought he was scaring her. Well, she was scared, right enough, but she’d been scared anyway, so he’d wasted his time and some poor beast’s life for it.
“That poor possum,” she said. “I mean, you see them on the roads all the time, but it’s different—in the mailbox, you say?”
“We’re taking care of it,” Daltry assured her, as she looked past him, down the driveway to the road.
“Oh. I suppose it’s evidence, or something?” Louise tried to imagine Daltry taking a dead possum down to the station. Perhaps they had a cooler?
“We took photos,” he said. “We, uh, didn’t think you should have to see it.”
Well, that was one nice thing about getting old. Police didn’t make you clean dead animals out of your own mailbox. If I was forty, I suppose they would simply give me a plastic bag and some bleach…
“Thank you,” she said. “Oh dear. How awful!”
“If you wouldn’t mind—I need to take a statement—” Daltry pulled a boxy plastic clipboard. “Did you hear anything, ma’am?”
“Oh no,” said Louise. She waved a hand to the distant mailbox. “I wouldn’t have, though.”
Daltry nodded. “Can you think of anyone who might have done this?”
Sonny Gothaway, she thought, but didn’t say it. She didn’t have any proof. You couldn’t get fingerprints off a dead possum, could you? And if it was her word against his, they’d probably believe her—respectable retired math teacher versus young ne’er-do-well—but when you were seventy-three, you weren’t exactly a reliable witness. What if they decided that Sonny Gothaway was harmless, and she was just a senile old biddy?
It would stir up a lot of trouble, and Sonny would be twice as bad. He might take it into her head to shoot all her birds. Sergeant Wren and the foolish doves and the courteous mockingbirds that had bowed to her. And how did you request police protection for a bunch of birds?
“I’m afraid I can’t think of anyone who would do such a thing,” said Louise to the police officer.
She went out that afternoon for groceries, and stopped by the liquor store for more rum. A rum-and-coke in the garden, she decided, was the best possible way to end a day. The Garden Club would have been shocked.
“Really, though,” she said to the wren, who was sitting on the deck railing, overseeing maneuvers, “at my time of life, what am I saving my liver for?”
“Teakettle-teakettle!” agreed the wren.
Louise slapped at a mosquito, took a sip of her rum-and-coke, slapped another mosquito, and itched at spot where one had bitten her without being noticed.
“I don’t suppose you can do much about mosquitos?” she asked the wren. “Or is that a bat thing?”
She hadn’t noticed any bats behaving in eerily intelligent fashion, but a human probably wouldn’t, would they? They could be doing madrigals and operettas in sonar, and nobody would be the wiser until some researcher pointed a microphone at them at the exact right moment.
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“And he’d probably know better than to tell anyone,” she told the wren. “They’d send him off to the Good Shepherd Home For People Who Listen To Bats.”
Two doves collided in mid-air again. The wren sighed. Louise went inside for a citronella candle and some matches.
The wren watched her strike the match with great interest. “Chirrr?” It hopped down from the deck railing onto the little patio table and eyed the candle-flame.
“Be careful,” said Louise. “I’m pretty sure feathers burn.” She wondered how to illustrate the point, found a pine needle on the deck, and held it to the flame. The wren watched the little red line of fire creep up the pine needle. “Chirrrrr.”
The scent of citronella wafted through the air. Louise leaned back in her chair and took another sip of her rum-and-coke.
“You din’t ought to have called the cops,” said Sonny Gothaway over the fence.
Louisa whirled around, feeling scared and furious and outraged at the sheer stupidity of what she had to deal with. “I didn’t call them, you stupid boy!” she yelled, stumping toward him in her slippers. “You stuck the damn possum in the mailbox, and what did you think the mailman would do when he saw it? Stick the junk mail in between its toes?”
Sonny took a step back, plainly startled. A long red flush started on his meaty neck and ran up towards his ears. He wasn’t carrying a gun, but a beer, she noted with some relief.
“For god’s sake!” Louise threw her hands in the air. “You can’t leave roadkill in somebody’s mailbox and expect the mailman not to notice! If you’re going to threaten me, stupid boy, think it through first!”
Really, crime was wasted on criminals. She would have been so much better at it than Sonny. It was a pity that she had lived such a blameless life.
Me and Miss Marple…
Jackalope Wives And Other Stories Page 6
