Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature

by James A. Michener

  ‘Private Debbish, have you always had that extra bounce in your step?’

  ‘I have, sir.’

  ‘And you can’t control it?’

  ‘I can’t, sir.’

  ‘So you’re always just a bit out of step? Is that right?’

  ‘No, sir. I’m in step. It’s just that my head pops up higher.’

  To my surprise, Cobb laughed: ‘You’re right, son. We have a name for that. Extra levitation, and it’s not a crime. We’re up here to fight the Chinese Communists, not impress visiting Congressmen with our dress parade.’ Turning to the sergeant, he said in an almost brotherly fashion: ‘Sergeant, this man is telling the truth. He does have that turkey trot and there’s nothing you or he can do about it. Excuse him from drill, but see that he gets some constructive assignment to take its place.’ With that he saluted crisply both the sergeant and Private Debbish.

  Back at headquarters I told Cobb: ‘Masterly. You do know how to keep troops moving forward,’ but he said: ‘What else could I do? We get a bouncer about one in twenty thousand, and no way’s been devised to slow them down.’

  There it should have ended, with Debbish neatly out of sight and the detachment burnishing its reputation with each weekly report. But that night I received a rocket from my boss in New York while Colonel Cobb was getting an URGENT from his boss in the Pentagon. Mine said ominously:

  Private Max Debbish Cobb’s detachment son of famed atheist Martha Mears Debbish. She screaming son must not wear patch For God and Santa Barbara in violation First Amendment. Fullest coverage, quotes from soldiers.

  When I ran to Cobb’s quarters, I found that his orders were even more ominous:

  Private Max Debbish your detachment son of notorious atheist Martha Mears Debbish. She has goaded Senators and Representatives to protest your unit patch as violation of First Amendment. Who authorized patch? Are non-Christians excused from wearing it? Submit fullest report, explanations.

  As soon as I saw that red-flag wording ‘non-Christians’ I realized that it was my job to interrogate as many Jewish soldiers as possible. I think they realized that I was on Cobb’s side and not trying to cause him trouble, for five of them gave me great quotes: ‘If it was anyone but Colonel Cobb, I wouldn’t want to wear a Catholic saint, but he’s done wonders with our patch, so it’s O.K. by me.’ And: ‘I ain’t big on saints, but if she’s fightin’ on my side I say fine, because we need all the help we can get.’ One fellow from Boston who proved what he said, told me: ‘I wear Saint Barbara outside to please the colonel, the Star of David inside to please me,’ and he showed me that under the official patch he had scrawled in black ink a six-pointed star.

  I was about to pursue some other potentially interesting Jewish quotes when I received surprising information from New York. Since Private Debbish was proved to be not Jewish, the boss suggested I play down that angle and focus on ordinary Protestants. Debbish’s famous—or infamous if you wish—mother was a standard Georgia Baptist married to a Maxim Debbish, a Californian reared in some Central European branch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

  The upshot of the affair was that Colonel Cobb was ordered by the Supreme Court to remove the offending patches from his men’s uniforms; he was rebuked by his superiors for having earned the army a spate of unfavorable publicity; he became the subject of editorials across the nation; and he was quietly retired from army life. Of course, when he left his artillery unit, to be replaced by a strictly ho-hum fellow from New Hampshire, to whom I took an intense dislike, as did his soldiers, the unit promptly relapsed into its old habits, for it had suffered two grievous wounds: the zeal of Colonel Cobb, who had held it together, was missing; and the comfort of Santa Barbara was gone. So was Private Debbish, back once more in Los Angeles with his crusading mother.

  Now, years later and under rather strange circumstances, the colonel and I were about to renew our acquaintanceship. In the Louisiana city of Shreveport, on the Red River, not far from Jefferson, the son of a wealthy businessman had been kidnapped by three hoodlums with no brains, no plan and no possible chance of having their ransom demands fulfilled. In a crude handwritten note smeared with fingerprints, they asked for one million dollars, and should have been arrested within hours, for they were instantly identified. But suddenly they developed catlike cleverness and for two weeks eluded capture, even though their photographs were broadcast, showing three world-class punks who looked exactly like what they were. Their case became a sensation, and when they were captured in a swamp that fed into the Red River I was sent down to write their histories.

  When I had my notes in order, I remembered that my old friend Colonel Cobb resided not many miles to the west, and when I telephoned Jefferson I heard the same crisp, manly voice that I had known in that Korean winter: ‘Shenstone, it’s not as cold as when I last saw you. Come right on over. Julia’s always said she wanted to meet you.’

  Thus, through the accident of a botched-up kidnapping—the father’s total worth was not over two hundred thousand dollars—I was able to meet once again a man I had respected and in whom I had an abiding interest. I had seen him only once since Korea and had tried then to apologize for my role in getting him elbowed out of military service. The occasion had been a public forum on defense at which he was a panelist and I was delighted to find him as self-confident and aggressive as ever. His posture was still so slim and erect that he resembled a white birch, a comparison that was augmented by his gleaming white hair. When it came time for him to speak he did not equivocate. When he finished, no one had to ask: ‘Now, what was it he advocated?’ His voice was as firm in Washington as it had been in the snow-swept battlefields of Korea: ‘I say that if the Communists in Russia make one more threatening move, we use every power in our command to foment revolution along their entire border. Agitate the Baltic states. Help the Ukraine to rebel. They’re vulnerable in Armenia, Uzbekistan, Siberia. And keep them pinned down in Afghanistan. Our guns do not have to fire shot one. Help them to destroy themselves.’

  When a more conciliatory panelist asked: ‘But wouldn’t that run the risk of Soviet retaliation in areas over which we have no control?’ he snapped: ‘That danger exists right now, has existed for the past forty years. But one thing’s in our favor. Russia grows weaker every year, not stronger. Do not fear goblins.’ He persuaded no one, but that was back in 1973.

  When I reached Jefferson, a sleepy warmhearted little town in that corner of Texas which preserved the look and customs of the Old South, I could have been in Georgia or South Carolina, for there was the quiet air of a village to which local planters would be bringing their wagons of cotton for baling, and I expected to see Colonel Cobb riding on a white horse. When I stopped to ask a man lounging outside a drugstore where I might find Santa Barbara plantation, he said: ‘Turn right at the corner, one mile down that road, the place on the left, painted white, porch with six columns like in the movies.’ When I thanked him he added: ‘But if you want to see the colonel himself, he’s over there in the hardware store.’

  I parked my car, crossed the street and entered Gravel’s Hardware, a store that seemed to carry one of everything, and there at a counter talking energetically to a clerk was my old battlefield companion, same weight as before, same thrust-out lower jaw and same close-cropped military cut to his white hair.

  ‘Colonel! It’s Shenstone. How well you look!’

  Turning his head away from the clerk without moving his body, he cried: ‘Damn, Shenstone, it’s good to see you,’ and with that he indicated by a gesture of his right hand that I was welcome to be there but that I must excuse him because he was engaged in important business.

  ‘You say this one is bound to work?’ he asked the clerk.

  ‘Guaranteed. Mrs. Wilcox told us that when everything else failed, Dover Fool Proof did the trick. No more trouble with the enemy raiding her birdseed.’

  ‘Does she get a lot of birds there on the riverbank?’

  ‘Like the big cage in a zoo.�
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  As if he were making a decision to attack at dawn, he said crisply: ‘I’ll take it, but I have no confidence whatever it’ll work.’ Slapping two ten-dollar bills on the counter, he reached for a rather long cardboard box decorated with a forest scene. Only then did he turn his body to greet me: ‘Shenstone, we’ve not met since Washington, but I do read your things now and then in the magazines. What brings you here?’

  ‘That ugly kidnapping in Shreveport. I’m trying to unravel twisted minds.’

  ‘I’m honored that you found the time to come my way. I remember you as one of the few writers and newsmen who had any sense.’ And then, always a military man, he rapped out an order. ‘Jump into your car and follow,’ and I replied like a second lieutenant: ‘Roger, wilco.’

  He led me along a tree-lined country road to a high spot overlooking the arm of the waterway connecting with the Red River. It was the site of a rural mansion built sometime prior to the Civil War; its entry gate bore a plaque stating that this was Lammermoor, famous as the seat of the Cobb family, which had emigrated there from South Carolina to play a major role in the fight of Texas on the side of the Confederacy. I had thought my Cobb lived at a plantation called Santa Barbara, and I paid attention when he ignored the big house and continued to a smaller one-story ranch-style house built apparently sometime after World War II. It was easy to identify it as Cobb’s residence because its gateway bore the neatly lettered sign: SANTA BARBARA, COLONEL BEDFORD COBB.

  Stopping his pickup by the porch, he called loudly: ‘Julia! I think we’ve got the little bugger this time!’ His wife, a small, pretty woman in white who looked as if she could have been created by Margaret Mitchell, came to the door, saw the large package he was bringing into the house and said: ‘I hope so. This is the fourth surefire system you’ve tried.’ Then she saw me leaving my car and cried: ‘This must be Mr. Shenstone, the man who got you fired. I’m amazed he’d have anything to do with you.’ When she chuckled, came forward and greeted me warmly, I knew I was going to have a pleasant break in my work.

  I still did not have any idea as to what Cobb had purchased at the hardware store, but as I stood by a picture window my attention was attracted by a garden that seemed dedicated to birds. Spacious in dimension, it was edged by shrubs that bore berries on which the birds could feed and contained two Grecian pillars five feet high, topped by large cement basins filled with water for the birds to drink or use for their baths. But what attracted my attention, because it stood so near to the big window, was a solitary telephone pole at least fifteen feet tall. It had a stout wooden crossbar from whose end nearest the house was suspended an intricate bird feeder filled with sunflower seeds and other morsels. Someone had spent effort and money building that feeder.

  As I was wondering whether any birds were about, a lovely female cardinal, not a garish red but all gold and brown, flew to the feeder to feast on the sunflower seeds so generously scattered there. I was admiring the muted beauty of the bird and thinking: She’s like a nineteenth-century dowager in a story by Edith Wharton, when right at my elbow Julia emitted a piercing scream. Cobb hurried over and asked: ‘What’s happened, darling?’ and without explanation she pointed to an inert object on the lawn near the shrubs. Although I could not ascertain what it was, I did see that it was black, and apparently dead. ‘He’s done it again, the little bastard,’ she cried, leaving us and running out to lift the dead body and carry it reverently to the small table near the house. When she carefully placed it there, as if it were a human corpse, I saw that it was a squirrel, but of a type I did not know; its coat was a silky black and not the rather grubby gray of the squirrels I had grown up with in New Mexico.

  When Julia returned to us she was weeping: ‘We had two families of these beautiful black squirrels, and that little bastard has killed them all.’ As she said this she pointed toward the pole from which the bird feeder hung, and there, on a contraption that had been guaranteed by a dealer in Vermont to prevent squirrels from getting at the expensive seed intended for birds, sat an ugly-looking squirrel gorging on seeds and spitting the husks onto the ground below. His coat was gray and the grin on his face as he picked out only the best seeds was positively evil. He was the murderer, he was the thief, and that was my introduction to Genghis Khan.

  ‘I gave him the name,’ Cobb explained, ‘because he’s a barbarian, some wretched spirit invading our home from the steppes of central Asia.’

  Julia broke in tearfully: ‘We did our best to protect our black squirrels, lovely little creatures, but he could not abide them. Killed them all to protect what he thought were his rights. And Bedford has done his best to keep the rascal away from our bird feeder. One clever device after another, all failures.’ She slumped into a chair by the window and watched disconsolately as Genghis munched away, pausing now and then to sneer at us as if to say: ‘Up yours, you clowns!’ Then, as the maid prepared the table at which we would be sitting for lunch, Julia wailed: ‘The wretched part is, with him monopolizing the feeder, the birds we love so much refuse to come near us.’

  ‘She’s right, Shenstone,’ Cobb said. ‘With great patience, and assisted by those two baths and this feeder right by our window, Julia’s attracted an entertaining collection of birds, all types, all colors. They feed so close they seem to be part of this room. You’d see what I mean if that little monster weren’t hogging the feeder. With him around, the birds are afraid to visit, and Julia does miss them.’

  ‘So does Bedford,’ she said between sniffles, ‘but he doesn’t like to admit it. Because if he likes the birds so much, why can’t he stop that damned squirrel from limiting our enjoyment of our own home?’

  As she said this I was not looking at her birds but at Genghis Khan, who was ripping the husks off a large seed that I could not identify, and practically smacking his lips over the morsels inside.

  ‘What is that he seems to favor?’ I asked, and Julia wailed: ‘My sunflower seeds, damn him. They cost four dollars and ninety-five cents for a smallish bag. The beautiful birds love them. Fly in from miles around, only to be scared away by that greedy monster.’ As she spoke a pair of male cardinals ventured in, their red coats gleaming like the uniforms of Hessian soldiers two hundred years ago. Settling close to our window, they had barely started on their share of the seeds when they were driven away by Genghis.

  ‘If I had a gun I’d shoot that pirate!’ Julia cried, but the colonel reprimanded her: ‘Darling! Never say that. He’s our enemy, granted, but an honorable one. We’ll defeat him, but we’ll do it fair and square. No guns, please!’

  As I listened to their plans to defeat the squirrel I concluded that they opposed him for several reasons: he drove away the good birds; he killed the black squirrels; he was a greedy beggar. But most offensive of all, he monopolized the sunflower seeds. They were expensive because they attracted what the blurb on their bag called ‘the better type of bird,’ by which was meant wrens, cardinals, bluebirds, flickers and grosbeaks. One ravenous gray squirrel could banish them all.

  As I stared at the little glutton he stared back, and then he sneered at me, waved his bushy tail in my face and, descending from the foolproof anti-squirrel feeder, ran into the woods, probably looking for more black squirrels to fight.

  ‘That’s the last time he stares into our window when we’re eating,’ Cobb said.

  After lunch he and I went into the garden with a ladder. Propping it against the telephone pole and asking me to steady it, he climbed to the top, dismantled the expensive Vermont feeder and threw it disgustedly to the ground. ‘It was never worth a damn,’ he growled. ‘He figured it out in fifteen minutes. Pass me the new one,’ and from its careful packaging I extracted a device so intricate that both Cobb and I had to study the instructions intently. When we finally got it assembled, we had a masterpiece so involved and protected by trip-trigger devices that no squirrel was going to be able to climb a nearby tree, leap over to the pole and descend to the feeder. No way could Genghis Khan continu
e gorging on the sunflower seeds put in this feeder. From now on, those delicacies would be reserved for Julia’s cardinals and bluebirds.

  It took us two hours to assemble and attach the contraption to the crossbar and plug the electric cord into the outlets in the garden wall, but when we had it finished even I could see that no animal, no matter how clever, could get into that feeder unless it had wings. Normal transit was ooo-oom-possible, as the soldiers in Korea used to say.

  There were five barriers a squirrel would have to conquer if he wanted to feed at the Cobb restaurant for robins. It would be easy for him to climb into the nearby trees and leap from some limb onto the pole, but this would place him high above the feeder, and when he started to descend, he would meet eighteen inches of highly polished steel encircling the pole and providing no kind of foothold. Suppose he did manage by some trick to work his way below the slippery steel. Two feet farther down he would encounter another fifteen-inch metal strip, this time carrying a charge of electricity strong enough to knock a squirrel right off the pole. If, by some miracle, he got past this, he would come upon a metal cone, tight about the pole at the top, well flared at the bottom, off which the beast would have to slide. If he used some magic to avoid it, he would have to work his way along the crossbar, which was protected by a large reverse cone which he could enter but not leave. And finally, the long, slim wooden feeder itself was suspended from the crossbar by two wires of a special metal that had great tensile strength but were so thin that nothing could negotiate them but a hummingbird, if it kept its wings beating furiously.