The River Bank

by Kij Johnson

  “It’s just that—well, he’s a Fox, and—and . . .” She trailed off and sniffed again. That sounded better; the Toad nodded enthusiastically and lifted his thumbs to her. She ventured a break in her voice. “Please, sir—please! Is there nothing you can do?”

  “Well, it’s like this,” he said slowly, and his voice sounded troubled. “Our Boss is—well, as you noticed, clever girl that you are—a Fox. And Foxes . . . Well, you’re right, Foxes isn’t like other folks, and ’e wouldn’t take kindly to anything ’appening to you, and that’s a fact.”

  “Could you not turn your back for a few moments, even?” she said, striving for a hopeless tone. “I know it’s too much to ask for; I’m just—” She broke off on another sob. The Toad tried to slap her silently upon the back, but she pushed him away.

  “What’s this?” said the Stoat, quite loud: he had re-entered the barn unbeknownst to them. “’Aving a chat with the prisoners? Maybe they want feather pillows for their ’eads? Maybe they want barth water? A grand idea, I don’t think.”

  And that, as they say, was the end of that.

  “Now what?” said the Rabbit.

  It was the middle of the afternoon. The barn was cool and shady, but when the prisoners pressed their eyes to the chinks in the outside wall, they could see the sun blazing brilliantly outside, spangling on the pollen that hung everywhere in the air. There had been a low-voiced altercation between the Head Weasel and the Stoat, but neither the Toad nor the Rabbit could hear any of it. After that, the Head Weasel did not approach the tack room. The Stoat did not leave the barn again, but stretched himself out against the main door with his cap over his eyes, and they might have thought he was asleep, except that when a fly landed upon his vest, he flicked it away with one leisurely paw.

  For an hour, the Toad had lain beside the door, thrashing about and groaning, and the Rabbit had cried out, “O, he is sick! Please, bring a doctor—water—anything!” It was a pity, thought the Rabbit, that they had not tried this first, for their captors did not seem at all convinced, the Stoat only laughing while the Head Weasel, who had evidently resolved his doubts regarding the Rabbit’s future well-being to his satisfaction, said from his place across the barn, “Give over, lassie, do! It won’t serve you as you’d like, and you’ll just make your throat dry to no end.”

  For a second hour, the Toad had taken a position beside the door and cut wheedle after wheedle. He tried bribes and he tried threats; he tried appeals to reason and to sentiment and to principle; he tried whining and blustering and begging and commanding; but none of it had the effect he had hoped for, the Head Weasel saying little and the Stoat saying only, whenever the Toad paused for breath or effect, “Go on, go on! It’s as good a play, it is,” and, “I think you’re up to Act Three, Scene Two, chum,” and, “When’s the young lady get a line?”

  After that, everyone fell silent, and there the situation rested for a while. The sun crept across the sky, but clouds began to heap beneath it. The light in the barn began to change value, to something cooler, dimmer. And then tap. Tap. Tap, tap. Tap-tap-tap-tap—and it was raining, a steady soft grey noise that laid a hush over everything. The wooden walls seemed to exhale cool air, as though it were seeping through from the outside.

  The rain continued, steady, soft, grey, pattering on the slate roof like squirrels’ feet. The Stoat and the Head Weasel went back to playing cribbage. The Toad sat forlorn in the middle of the floor, sighing heavily at intervals. The Rabbit examined their prison closely one more time: wooden walls, tack trunks, stools, saddle stands, pails, blankets. She climbed onto the feed box and was able to better examine the single shelf’s contents, all the bits and bobs every tack room seems to accumulate: neatsfoot oil and saddle soap, broken stirrup irons, old horseshoes, empty liniment bottles that still smelled sharply of creosote, hoof-picks, a chipped mug lined with a mysterious black residue, a kerosene lantern without a wick, ancient racing calendars, a small yellow paper-covered book entitled Did She Ever!, a U-shaped blade for cutting straps and reins and such. None of it would be very useful, but she brought down the strap-cutting blade and the horseshoes. She climbed onto one of the saddle stands to see if she could reach the gear hung from the walls, but there didn’t seem to be a way to pull any of it down, certainly not without making a horrible lot of noise.

  She returned to the back wall of the tack room. The barn was an old one, and the siding boards had shrunk over the decades so that there were cracks between them, an inch or two wide in places. Air breathed through the chinks, and when she pressed her eye to one of them, she saw a robin, hopping in the little grassy yard behind the barn, pulling for worms, and the beechwood just behind, the pale trunks and shivering leaves lost with distance in the silvering rain. For a moment, she saw a shape deep in the trees, indistinct but tall, slim-legged as it paced deliberately forward, rain sparking off the crown made by its antlers. “O!” murmured the Rabbit.

  “What?” said the Toad’s voice behind her, sounding surly.

  “A stag!” she said. “O, it is the most beautiful thing.” She wished Beryl were there with her; Beryl was the one for fancy words.

  “Stags! What good are stags?” wept the Toad, and flung himself backward. He had been having a trying few days, and his interest in Nature’s glories, never great (Nature, in his considered opinion, was rather undersupplied with umbrella’d café tables and sycophantic waiters to bring one a little something to take the heat off), had sagged to a level so slight as to be nonexistent.

  The Rabbit sighed to herself and ran her fingers along the wall. At the wall’s base, the planks’ ends were blunt, eaten away by moisture. but there was not enough of a gap for even a slender Rabbit to slip through, let alone a portly Toad, who would in any case very likely have to be goaded. The feed box had been built against a side wall, leaving a narrow space beside the back wall, and this had gradually been stacked with detritus, but she could see more of the silver daylight behind the pile of oddments. Was there a gap? As silently as she could, the Rabbit heaved aside a broken-backed saddle that smelled of mildew, then a shredded horse blanket. Beneath that were the broken pieces of a manger, much too heavy for her. “Toad?” she said softly. “Would you be so kind as to assist me?”

  “Why?” said the Toad: quite rudely, I am sorry to say, and at his normal volume.

  She hissed, “Shh! Don’t let them hear! The light— I think there’s a hole down here! Help me move some of this away.”

  “Why bother?” said the Toad, again at a normal volume, and then catching on at last: “Ah!” much more softly.

  “Pipe down, you,” called the Stoat warningly from the main floor of the barn.

  Together they managed to remove the manger’s pieces, one by one, and the forgiving rain concealed many of the small noises they made, the soft panting, the sotto voce crabbing (this was the Toad), and the whispered instructions. Only once was all nearly lost, when the Toad suddenly howled and dropped his end of a plank, which hit the floor with a tremendous clatter. “A ih-eh,” he explained around his paw as he sucked upon it, which the Rabbit took to mean a sliver, for she had been getting them as well, and they really were most uncomfortable.

  Scraping of chairs on the main floor; quick footsteps; the door unlocked—the Rabbit, with great presence of mind, had just time enough to toss a ruined horse blanket into the corner to conceal the silver daylight before the Stoat and Head Weasel were standing in the open doorway.

  Glancing around, the Stoat gave a mean-spirited laugh and said, “Redecorating, are we?” He entered the room, poking about. “What do you think, Weasel? ’Is ’Ighness might like a divan with crocerdile legs? Ooh, ’ow about a con-serv-atory? Or a piano-forte, an’ we can ’ave concerts, like, an’ the young lady can play the ’arp!”

  But the Head Weasel only shook his head disapprovingly “Stoaty, it ain’t civil to go a-teasing ’em, is it? They’re ’elpless prisoners, an’ you shouldn’t go making things still ’arder for them.” And to the
Rabbit, apologetically, “Never you pay him mind, miss; ’e’s low, that’s what ’e is.”

  “Low, is it?” The Stoat hunched one shoulder and said sullenly, “I was just ’aving a bit of fun. Well, all right then. Knock yerself out, but”—and he rounded upon them fiercely—“don’t think it’ll get you out, you two. These walls are solid as solid, they are.” He tapped the back wall, which gave a thunk calculated to support his statement.

  “Indeed, we’re very sorry for bothering you!” said the Rabbit faintly. She found the Stoat’s near presence a trifle overpowering. The Toad said nothing at all, for he had fallen to the ground with a little plashing noise, in a dead faint.

  The tack-room door slammed behind them, and the lock clicked again. “An’ keep it down!” the Stoat shouted through the door.

  They were more circumspect after that, but (once the Rabbit had roused the Toad, patting his hands and waving the little bottle of sal volatile from her reticule beneath his nose) in the end they were able to clear everything away from the corner, aided by the even hiss of the rain, which had settled into a steady rhythm and seemed ready to make a night of it.

  There was a gap between the floor and the wall, where the bottom of the plank was decayed: too small for anyone larger than a mouse, but the rotten wood came away in spongy bits when the Rabbit pulled at it. Picking at it with her paws and using the strap-cutter she had retrieved from the shelf, she was able to remove still more, until she blunted the tool on the undecayed wood that could not be cut. Lying full-length upon the floor, she carefully stuck her head through the hole, avoiding the ragged edges. Rain dripped from the eaves onto her ears as she looked about. The grassy yard beside the barn was empty of anything but grass and cowpats (even the robin was gone); but beyond it— O happiness! There was the beechwood: separated grey trunks sheathed in silver-green leaves, with any number of clumping shrubs between them. If they could get there without being noted, they would be concealed, and the endless sound of the shivering beech leaves and the fresh rain might—might—protect them from pursuit, long enough for them to get well out of reach, and then, to the Hills at last!

  As for the hole, it was small but she thought she might just be able to get out of it, if she did not mind scraping off the buttons on her bodice or getting her skirt even dirtier, though already she could not contemplate her gown—once her nicest Town-going outfit—without sorrow. Both would be a pity, but she had already lost one of her buttons and sacrifices would be necessary if they were to escape.

  “So perhaps after dark,” she whispered to the Toad with some satisfaction as she knelt back from the hole and brushed the bits of wood and straw from her skirt. The Toad had been assigned to watch the tack-room door, thus ensuring that the Stoat and Head Weasel did not enter unexpectedly and find the Rabbit at her work, a task which had not taxed him inordinately, for they seemed to have fallen asleep with their backs against the barn’s exterior door. She continued, “The Fox said they were all to return tonight, and there will be a lot of noise, I’m sure, and they’ll all be drinking that horrid stuff again, I shouldn’t wonder—”

  “A primitive beverage, but with a certain louche charm,” said the Toad judiciously. He leaned forward to peek into the corner she had just vacated.

  “—but we must take care to learn whether they set guards outside the barn. It will be a dark night with all this rain, so I am sure we may avoid them, and—”

  The Toad interrupted her, pointing. “That is the hole, Rabbit?”

  The Rabbit nodded happily.

  “That—nick? That peephole?”

  The Rabbit nodded, a bit less happily.

  “Rabbit,” he said plaintively, “how am I to get through that crevice?”

  She looked down at the hole and across at the Toad. “Well, it will be tight,” she allowed finally.

  “It will be impossible,” the Toad whispered sadly, and looked down at the impressive expanse of his own waistcoat, stained and torn now. He had a fine figure (for a Toad), distinguished even, as one might say: a little heavyset, yes; round, certainly; in places the critically minded might call it nearly spherical. An admirable figure, a noble figure; but, alas! There was simply too much of it for the hole in the wall. A Rabbit, slim and in the first flush of winsome youth, might squirm her way to freedom through such a chink; a Toad in the full-bodied bloom of the prosperous midafternoon of Life could not.

  She took his point immediately, and sat down on the tack truck, a little deflated. “How unfortunate. We shall have to think of something else, then.”

  But—the—Toad! What came next from him might have been anything: vocal rage against the bitter realities of a life that did not supply larger holes when needed; abject remorse for his laxness with regard to the strict regimen of diet and exercise an eminent London practitioner had ordered some months earlier; gusty weeping; loud lamentations; speechless despair; or some combination of these—for the Toad could shuttle between emotional states, even oppositional ones, as quickly as a leaf can flutter. But no. This time at least, the Toad looked inside and found a better, deeper Toad. He looked down at the hole and said, with a quiet dignity, “Rabbit, you must go.”

  The Rabbit gaped at him. She was an accommodating creature and generally took those around her at whatever value they set for themselves, but this—this selflessness, this nobility—was something quite out of the common way for the Toad. “Escape without you, you mean?”

  “Yes,” said the Toad somberly, like Napoleon at Elba. “Go without me. I shall stay until these villains have received their ransom; and if I am not ransomed—well, I hope I know how a gentleman should face adversity.”

  The Rabbit took one of his paws in hers. “Toad, are you quite well? You don’t sound at all like yourself.”

  He pulled his paw free with a gesture filled with gentle self-abnegation. “And, dear Rabbit—my dear, dear Rabbit—if they punish me for your escape, I shall suffer with a smile upon my face, knowing that you at least are free.”

  The Toad had fixed his eyes upon a point in the middle distance, presenting his left profile, which the Rabbit eyed, concerned, before patting his paw briskly and saying, “Well, I shan’t go without you, Toad, so this is just talk. We’ll find another way, that’s all.”

  He turned his face to her, astonished. “Won’t—go!”

  She sat back and looked around. “So . . . if there is no way out the back wall, perhaps we might go through the ceiling, after all?”

  But the Toad only repeated, “Won’t—go!”

  “Could we fashion a rope ladder from all the reins and straps? If only I had not dulled the strap-cutter! If we—”

  “Won’t go?” said the Toad, in an altogether different voice. “Spurn my sacrifice? Of course you’ll go!”

  The subsequent brangle was low-pitched and undertaken in tones that were anything but lofty. Having claimed a moral high ground for himself, the Toad was reluctant to abandon it for any cause whatsoever; but it had to be admitted that the longer he fought with the Rabbit about her refusal to leave him behind, the less he liked the notion of what would happen if she did go. And, now that he thought about it (though he admitted he had not always attended in school as he ought to have), had not Napoleon died on Elba? Or was it Elba? Toad was vague on the details, but in any case, wherever he had breathed his last, he imagined it was not in the ripe fullness of a happy old age, surrounded by admiring friends and followers.

  In the end, he ceded his ground with a certain private (he hoped) relief, and an agreement was made: they would face their situation together for now, but if there seemed to be no other possibility, she would slip out and get help in the Hills—though she wasn’t sure what exactly her siblings and their neighbors, the Hedgehogs and the Hares and such, could do against desperate criminals. While she longed to be able to enlist Beryl—to say nothing of the bold Badger, the clever Water Rat, and the staunch Mole—she could never get all the way to the River Bank and back soon enough, not even if she s
tarted this very minute.

  As night fell, the Weasels and Stoats (and the Barn Rat) returned in twos and threes, greeting the Stoat and Head Weasel, who had guarded the prisoners, with half-stifled cheers and laughter, as though they had been refreshing themselves from square dark bottles all day. There was much slapping of backs and “’Allo, chums!”-ing, and a great scraping of stool legs and shifting of hay bales upon the barn’s main floor, but at last everyone had everything to their liking. The Rabbit had taken advantage of the noise to pick quietly at one of the boards between the tack room and the main floor until she had created a widened crack to press her eye against. She peeped out.

  The ruffians had gathered into an irregular circle, loose enough that everyone had a bit of something to prop his back against, but close enough for convenience, for they commenced to pass around a bottle, this one dark green in hue and oval in cross-section. Conversation was general, everyone talking at once and across the circle in the lowest way, which made it hard to pick out any individual speech, but they all seemed cheerful to jollification. Many of them seemed to be planning how they would spend their share of the ransom money.

  The list was varied, unified only in that no one quite knew what sums larger than ten pounds might realistically purchase. Some wanted to buy a pub (“I’ll call it The Toad’s Despair,” said a Weasel, to a great round of coarse laughter), and others wanted to emigrate to America; if a Stoat spoke enthusiastically of opening a tuck-shop, a Weasel talked longingly of Race Week at Epsom Downs. The Barn Rat discussed the merits of launching his daughter on the ton—she was a lovely, elegant lass, if ’e said so ’imself, the very spit of her mother; and that dainty, that she ate ’er chicken with a knife and fork, just like gentry an’ all. Gold rings set with cabochon rubies for their paws; platinum watch fobs with watches to which they might be attached; bespoke clothing; visits to the seaside; even motor-cars—and indeed, two Weasels nearly came to blows over the comparative merits of the Gottleib Dasher and the Coventry Guerdon.