The Old Meadow

by George Selden

  “J.J.—stop!” shouted Chester Cricket.

  J.J. didn’t even hear. He swooped—then regained altitude—then swooped again, to torment the mockingbird. “You—you stranger! You wimp! You come to my Old Meadow, where I’ve been unhappy all my life, and you start your charm over everyone—”

  “Y’all want me to go away?” asked Ashley. He didn’t want to get beaten up, but more important, he knew from the pain in J.J.’s anger that a life was at stake—the blue jay’s, not his. He’d just launch off and fly back home. But J.J. could not escape from himself. “’Cause I will! I’ll fly—”

  “Oh, don’t!” barked Dubber.

  But neither bird heard. J.J. was beating Ashley now with all the force of his two wings. And he didn’t make a squawk while he did it. He was too much afraid of sounding absurd. Yet mercilessly he took out his spite on his enemy.

  “There’s still a little light in Mr. Budd’s cabin—”

  “Yes, Chester. It’s his candle—almost always lit. He can’t go to sleep in the total dark.”

  “Go wake him, Dubber! Now!”

  Dubber Dog rushed up to the cabin and began to scratch. That didn’t make enough noise. He pounded his head on the door. But that hurt. So Dubber howled: his first howl in years, except for the phony howls he made when Mr. Budd tried to whop him.

  This desperate howl worked.

  Mr. Budd heaved out of his sleep and mumbled, “What? What’s that. I am grateful for the corn, Luke!” Then he was awake. “What’s goin’ on?” He heard the birds screaming on his roof. “What is goin’ on?” Like a wounded bear, because of the arthritis, Mr. Budd hauled himself off the mattress and limped outside.

  What he saw on the tilted roof of his cabin made Mr. Budd forget his own pain. He’d slanted the roof to let the rain run off. But now, on the roof of the home that he’d built for himself and his dogs and his friends from the meadow, a battle of birds was taking place. The iron weather vane seemed loving in comparison.

  Life flexed his rigid old bones. “You stop that, darn blue jay!” He picked up a rock, but then just held it, uselessly, in his hand. In this dim light he might have hit the mockingbird. “Please don’t, blue jay! Don’t hit him no more!”

  J.J. was now pounding methodically—his right wing on Ashley’s back. He’d always picked on little birds—the sparrows—out of his own misery, or else just a nasty streak, but Ashley was quite big. He could have put up a fight. But mockingbirds aren’t fighters, and Ashley especially was not. To fight seemed not to be musical.

  “Do something, Dubber!” shouted Mr. Budd, in despair.

  “Bow-wow-wow!” hollered Dubber. It wasn’t even dog talk. Neither Chester nor Simon nor Walter could understand a word. It was just plain furious barking.

  Above, when a chance occurred—J.J. had to catch his breath, because hitting a person who doesn’t resist is very tiring—Ashley tried to fly away. J.J. gulped air and took one more swipe with his wing. He hit the mockingbird on the head and stunned him momentarily. He fell to the roof of Mr. Budd’s cabin—and the fall did stun him badly. Unconscious, he started to slide. The slant that Abner had built for rain now poured down a mockingbird.

  “Oh, mercy!” On the ground, Mr. Budd was running back and forth. His arthritis was all forgotten. “That bird’ll break his neck!”

  The moonlight was dim. But enough shone off the tar-paper roof so that Abner could follow the limp shape as it slithered down. He positioned himself—held out cupped hands—and thanked the Lord when a soft feathered weight fell into them. It was so still, though.

  “Oh, don’t be dead!” pleaded Abner Budd. “Please don’t.”

  Holding Ashley as gently as a man ever held a bird, he rushed into his cabin. Dubber followed. The door swung shut.

  By the brook, in the silvered night, the three friends were silent.

  On the iron weathervane J.J. spread his wings—more beautiful than he deserved—and flew off, to his beech.

  “I hate you, J.J.!” shouted Chester Cricket, after him. It was the first time in this cricket’s life that he’d ever used the word “hate.”

  “Come on, now,” wheezed Simon. “We’ve got to go home now. There’s times in the life of an animal—birds, too—when it’s best to be cared for by human beings. At least the ones who care for us.”

  FIVE

  A Debate

  “I am definitely gonna bite that mutt!”

  “Where?” asked Donald Dragonfly, who took an interest in everything.

  He’d been out on his morning flight—his “constitutional,” he called it—and he had decided to visit Chester. Chester Cricket was his best friend. All the field folk knew that Donald was “tetched”—too much light on those glorious wings of his—but Donald Dragonfly didn’t care. Life was full of light and colors, and Chester loved Donald for reflecting them all.

  It was good he’d flown up this morning. Walt and Chester were frantic, and Simon was as perturbed as an old turtle can get. It had been two days since the fight between J.J. and Ashley. On Simon’s advice, the three friends had stayed away from the cabin. Too much prying might make Abner nervous, he said—especially with the worries he had these days; let the Town Council spy on an old man, but not field folk. But when Donald appeared, like a rainbow whirring through the morning sunlight, everybody agreed that he at least could fly upstream and ask Dubber what in the world was happening. The dragonfly had just flown back.

  “Simmer down now, Walt,” said Chester. “Donald said that Dubber promised to come down in a while and give us a firsthand report.”

  “Well, where is he?”

  “It’s that new bird, isn’t it, Chister?” asked Donald. “The whole meadow knows about him.”

  “I know—and the whole meadow’s going crazy. I had Beatrice Pheasant and both chipmunks here yesterday, demanding to know what’s going on. We’re all behaving like a lot of giddy bugs in a tizzy.”

  “I’m a bug,” said Donald. “And so are you, Chister.” He pondered a moment. “Do you think I’d like a tizzy? I could try to be in one—”

  With Donald—one had to be careful. “I think you are fine just as you are,” said the cricket. “Why don’t you spread out your wings now, for a while? That’s always relaxing.”

  The tetched dragonfly elevated his four wings gracefully. A palette of colors fell on Simon’s Pool.

  “At last!” Walter Water Snake was stretching every inch of himself above the bank. “When we didn’t want to see him, he showed up like a bellyache, but now that we’re starved for news—! Oh, Dubber, you delightful dog!”

  “Are you sick, Walter?” Dubber padded, his potbelly swinging under him, to the edge of the pool. “You never thought I was delightful before.”

  “Enough of the chitchat!” squeaked Chester. “How’s Ashley?”

  “Oh, he’s fine.” Dubber settled his hind legs under him, and scratched his right ear. He’d had a flea there for a week, but hadn’t been able to shake him out.

  “I like it when someone’s fine,” murmured Donald.

  “The details! The details! See these fangs—?”

  “Oh, pull ’em back in!” shouted Chester. “And try to hush up while we find out the really important things.” He hopped to the bank and sat beside Dubber.

  It was near noon on a day that made the whole world—not only Donald Dragonfly—glow like a multicolored jewel, an opal perhaps, whose colors flash suddenly into light.

  “The mockingbird is all right—?”

  “Injured, but yes. He wasn’t hurt bad. After Mr. Budd caught him, we both thought he had a broken wing. But it wasn’t. Just sprained. A sprained wing is all it was, where Ashley hit the roof so hard.”

  “When can we see him?” asked Chester.

  “That’s what I came to ask you. Can y’all come upstream right now? Abner’s nappin’. He feels safe enough about Ashley now to take his noon snooze.”

  “I all can’t,” said Donald. “I take my noon snooze on my twig, a
nd I all can’t change.”

  “Oh, boy!” said Chester. “‘I all’—‘y’all’—this meadow may never recover from one harmless mockingbird.”

  “And Ashley wants to talk to you, Chester. He says we have real problems here.”

  That peeved Chester a little: that he’d have to hear that piece of news from a stranger. But it also made him want to laugh. “We don’t need a golden-throated singer to fly out of the South to tell us this.” Chester suspected that everyone’s problems were obvious—especially the ones they tried to hide.

  “Anyway, Ashley says come now! Mr. Budd’s enough certain that the bird’s on the mend so he’s willin’ to take his afternoon nap. So this is a good time for us to talk. The good Lord willin’ —an’ the creek don’t rise.”

  “Oh, boy!” said Chester. “One mockingbird.”

  “Let’s go!” said Walter.

  “You tell me about it later,” said Simon. “I think I’ll just stay here. I find that some news is more exciting when you hear about it afterwards than when it takes place right before your eyes.” Also, the sun felt like a kind hand whose fingers were strumming, but very gently, all over his shell. “Make certain you tell me everything now.” He yawned, as he fell asleep.

  “And tell me, too—if I should remember to ask,” said Donald Dragonfly. He flew home, to his twig overhanging the brook. He could always remember that flight.

  * * *

  Ashley was perched on Luke’s stool in front of the cabin, enjoying the sun in his own way, like Simon in his. “Hah, y’all!” he caroled to everyone.

  “Mr. Budd still asleep?” whispered Dubber in a baritone rumble that could wake up a rock.

  “Asleep an’ snorin’. We was up all last night again. He kept askin’ me if I could sleep—I kept twitterin’ yes—then he’d ask me again ten minutes later—an’ we went on like that till dawn.”

  “You look all right,” Chester Cricket worried. “And I promise I’ll only ask this once: are you?”

  “This wing here”—Ashley tried to straighten his right wing out, and barely could—“it’s mighty sore. That J.J. packs a wallop—”

  “He better not come within striking distance!”

  “Now, Walt, cool off. Topple back there into the creek. In many ways I had it comin’—an’ in other ways, I’m glad it happened. I was showin’ off. An’ it’s all right to show off, but only in front of the folks who want you to show. Like Hank an’ Eller. They want me to do my darndest, hidden up in the leaves of mah oak. But here—I wasn’t just showin’ off, I was showin’ J.J. up.” Ashley shook his head and warbled a tune of confusion. “I’ve learned a lot in these few days.”

  His here-and-there melody straightened out. “There’s a lot I’ve learned. One thing: your human bein’s up here aren’t an itty-bit like our people. Our people back home, I mean. Why, no one back in West Virginia would heave a man out of his cabin.”

  “You know the fix we’re in,” said Chester.

  “I think I do. But since that first day, when you explained—betwixt Dubber here an’ the ramblin’s of Mr. Budd, when he nodded off despite himself—an’ sometimes when he just had to talk, an’ I was there, bein’ tended to in his hands—I got the whole picture. It’s pretty ugly.” He sang his uncertain song again. “Especially since those guys with the ties have been comin’ around again.”

  Ashley whistled a question. “Y’all short of land up here?”

  “It isn’t that,” Chester said. “I mean—yes, we are. In this part of Connecticut. But the Old Meadow is something special.”

  “I was raised to believe all the earth was special,” said Ashley Mockingbird. “You better had try to tell me more.”

  Chester flicked his antennae. It helped to fix his thoughts. He told Ashley how the Old Meadow had been made a special place. And he tried to explain the Truce, too: “When the meadow got saved from development—from parking lots and gas stations—we animals got together and resolved that since we were saved we wouldn’t attack one another, and not eat each other, unless dangerously provoked.”

  “And J.J. broke the Truce!” hissed Walter. “He hit you without your hurting him first.”

  “I ’preciate your kind words,” said Ashley, “but maybe I hurt him in ways you don’t know.”

  “No excuse! I’ve got the right to bite him now!”

  “You leave that blue jay to me,” said the mockingbird sternly.

  “Then you are still going to stay?” muttered Dubber. “Despite J.J.”

  “Well, I reckon I’ll have to. For a while at least. Can’t leave Mr. Budd to his pitiful self, under threat of foreclosure—not after the way the good man’s taken care of me. In the middle of his own trouble, too. An’ J.J.”—Ashley looked at the weather vane—“we’ve got somethin’ between us that has to be settled.”

  A silence took over. And stayed. And stayed. Clouds had covered the meadow. The sky now shone like a cloudy pearl. A layer of dull light hovered over the world. But a mild brightness shone through. This strange misty silence was only interrupted by snores.

  “So what’re we going to do?” said Chester.

  Walter lashed his tail, distractedly, every which way. It’s what snakes do when they’re all confused. Walter fortunately missed his own head by an inch. When a snake hits himself with himself, that’s a sign of real confusion. And also it can become a bad habit.

  “How’d y’all decide on this Truce?”

  “We got together—all of us—and had a debate—and decided on what we’d do.”

  “Then that’s what you’ve got to do now,” Ashley jumped from the stool to the stones in front of Mr. Budd’s first step. A patch of sunlight lingered there. “Get together. Decide. Did you vote on the Truce?”

  “Yes, we did,” said Chester.

  “Then now y’all have to vote on how y’all will help Mr. Budd. Or let him sink.”

  “The trouble is,” said Walter Water Snake, “not all the field folk will want to help. We’ve got some proud ones here who think Mr. Budd is just a human leftover.”

  “Ashley”—Dubber Dog crept forward on his legs, flat down on the earth, the way a dog does when he wants a favor—“will you talk to everyone? You can persuade. You can sing—!”

  “Oh, I’ll sing an’ I’ll talk”—Ashley tested his wing—“an’ I’ll fly, too. The good Lord willin’ an’ the creek don’t rise.”

  * * *

  The debate about Mr. Budd turned out to be the loudest, longest, and angriest gathering of animals ever held in the Old Meadow. That time when everyone decided to establish the Truce was an afternoon’s nap in comparison. The Truce debate had been held beside Simon’s Pool. And Henry Chipmunk got so excited he fell in the brook. No one wanted that to happen again—and least of all Henry, who only got fished out because Mr. Budd was walking around and heard this squeaky spluttering.

  Mr. Budd’s debate was held in Pasture Land, which was dry: an expanse of turf where the cows, in old times which no one remembered, had been put to browse. Also, there were tuffets around. It bordered on Beatrice Pheasant’s home, Tuffet Towers, and anyone who wanted to talk could mount a tuffet and make himself heard.

  And many did make themselves loudly heard during the Mr. Budd debate. The subject, of course, was Abner. That had been announced by animal, bird, and insect, too, for two days. The time—ripe morning. Eleven o’clock as human beings measured time. The big gold feeling, as field folk measured it. In an hour the sun would be right at the summit of heaven. There’d be no shadows at all. That was a scary, shivery moment—no shadows!—for all things that lived. Everybody asked himself: Am I here?

  Chester opened the proceedings, from the top of a modest tuffet: “The question, Field Folk, is—do we try to help Mr. Budd?”

  Beatrice Pheasant, as usual, was the first to speak. She mounted a tuffet, took a quick look around at her beautiful feathers, and said, “I, for one, am rather glad that the matter of Mr. Budd—”

  “Hooray for him
!” shouted Henry Chipmunk. “I’d be drowned without him.”

  “Well, he chased me right into the brook!” said Bill Squirrel. “I was only looking for acorns, too, underneath his porch—”

  “He never chased me!” interrupted Robert Rabbit. “Just as long as I stay in my half of the carrot-and-lettuce patch, he’s as nice as grass. He even likes to watch me munch out, through that slippery window of his.”

  “He tried to drown me,” remembered Paul Mole. “Poured water down my front door.”

  “You were ruining the little lawn the old man has made,” said Robert. “If you’d struck a bargain, to live under only half—like me in his garden—he’d probably—”

  “Oh, he’s not nice!” fussed Beatrice. “He’s old, and sometimes—he doesn’t wash!”

  “The brook’s cold sometimes!” said Dubber. “I’d like to see you—”

  Donald Dragonfly tried to get in a buzz, but no one paid any attention. Donald wasn’t insulted: he’d already forgotten what he wanted to say.

  “Please! Please!” chirped Chester. “We’ll never get anywhere, if everyone talks at once.”

  Somewhere in his antennae, however, Chester Cricket knew that a lot of the fun of a great debate was in interrupting. He felt a twitch to shout himself. But he held himself steady and did his duty, as chair-cricket of this meeting.

  “I’d like to hear from Ashley Mockingbird,” said Chester, very businesslike. “Y’all—I mean, everybody knows that Ashley is our guest here this summer, and he’s gotten to be Mr. Budd’s best friend.”

  “His best?” Dubber lifted his long ears up and blinked his soulful brown eyes.

  “One of his best,” Chester’s voice retreated. “I think Ashley might enlighten us as to—”

  “I think I might enlighten you, too! Aw! Haw!”

  J. J. Jay, on his skillful wings, rode down through the air and alighted gracefully beside Chester on the Speaker’s Tuffet. He’d been sulking, brooding, in his beech for these two days—part from anger, and part humiliation, and part—who knows what? Nerves, not remorse.