The Ballad of Tubs Marshfield

by Cara Hoffman

  The salamanders all nodded. “Sure did,” said the fattest salamander. “Exact same thing, ’cept it wasn’t an alligator, it was a shooting star. And nobody was getting sick; she left because the new factory made too much noise.”

  “Ruby sure hates noise,” said the shortest salamander.

  Tubs said, “What’s a . . .” but the rest of his words were interrupted by a deafening whistle and steady chug of the train and then the screech of brakes. The train pulled into the station: a racing magnificent machine. And there was a great bustle of people and animals disembarking and running to get in line.

  The star-nosed mole and the salamanders lined up where they wouldn’t be trampled by human feet—ready to board the train. Tubs joined them.

  People made quite a racket shouting goodbyes, trundling their suitcases along, handed their tickets to the conductors. Some of the train cars were made for people, and some were just open cars with no seats that carried crates and boxes. Tubs watched as the mole and the salamanders scurried along the side of the rail and then jumped up, grabbing a metal bar at the base of the wide-open train car. They swung themselves upside down and into the train. Tubs followed, taking a running leap, and managed to jump all the way from the ground into the boxcar.

  “You’re a natural, Santa Frog!” said the skinniest salamander.

  Surrounding the boxes and crates were a number of animals heading to the city. Some, like Tubs, carried their belongings in a handkerchief tied to a stick. Others sat on large steamer trunks.

  I wonder where they are going and why they are leaving their homes, Tubs thought.

  Some of the animals were frogs who nodded politely at Tubs, but there were also rabbits, a family of shrews, and a friendly-looking weasel with round glasses and tousled hair who leaned against the wall, reading a book. The weasel looked up at Tubs and smiled.

  “You might want to hold on to something,” he said.

  The train began to roll ahead, first slowly past the station, then faster and faster. Tubs felt the wind on his skin. The countryside was rushing by—and he could see fields and buildings racing past, gone in the blink of an eye. He could now see the swamp from a distance. It was shocking to see that it was bigger than he thought, and even more beautiful and green.

  The mole busied himself reading a newspaper. The salamanders started up a new verse to their song about Tubs. The shrew children played a game with chalk, drawing on the floor of the boxcar, and the weasel seemed lost in a daydream. None of them were very concerned with the world outside.

  But Tubs stared, transfixed by the view, and the swamp sang to him, calling him back. What am I doing? Tubs thought. This is no time to leave the swamp. Abandoning my sick friends, listening to a creature that would just as soon eat me.

  There was no other place where people sang the same songs for thousands of years, or had parties that lasted for ages. There was no other place where he stood beside the greats—it was there—in his own green home. “I’m in the swamp and the swamp is in me,” he whispered.

  “Hey, Santa Frog,” called one of the salamanders. “You’re getting too close to the door.”

  Tubs looked back at the animals in the boxcar and smiled. “Oh, I’m all right,” he said.

  And then, just as if he were hopping off his own dock on a hot summer day, Tubs jumped right out the door of the boxcar. He heard the other creatures shouting his name, but it was too late. The wind caught him, and he was flung by the force of the moving train far out over a field and into the open air.

  15

  The ditch was wet and full of reeds and Tubs woke groggy, with a large lump on his head. The train was long gone, taking his bindle stick and his new friends with it. He had only the clothes on his back and his harmonica, which had miraculously landed beside him in the ditch.

  Tubs lay still and looked up at the sky. The air was cooler than before and the clear blue was giving way to thunderheads, gray and roiling across the heavens.

  Well, he thought, here’s one bit of luck at least. He tucked his harmonica in his pocket as the rain began to fall, pattering on the grasses and leaves around him, soaking his dry skin and giving him strength.

  Rain has a way of making decisions for frogs. The water played a silent melody that he could hear with his whole body—and it was calling to him, like the swamp. He stood and surveyed his surroundings. He couldn’t see the swamp or station house or even the railroad tracks, but it didn’t matter. He climbed out of the ditch. Before him, winding away into the distance, was a narrow, muddy trail.

  The song of the salamanders was still ringing in his head, and he hummed it and let his senses guide him. He didn’t take the trail at all but went as fast as he could through a field of grasses until the earth started getting cooler and even wetter beneath his feet. He entered a thick hedge and came out on a muddy embankment; it was the last solid land. There before him lay the swamp—in all its green and reedy glory.

  There is magic in the world, Tubs thought. But it doesn’t come from rubbing the nose of a lemming or taking advice from an alligator.

  Before him a forest of cattails rose out of the edge of the swamp and he headed quickly to it. He could see the glinting water and clusters of wizened trees. The thought of swimming was a comfort.

  He hopped south along the bank. This will take me to the spot where Lila dropped me off, he thought, and from there it’s a straight shot across to home.

  Thunder shook the world, and he walked for a time in the shallows. As he walked, his feet grew itchy, and even though it was raining, his eyes grew itchy, too. Just before the place where he and Lila had docked, he reached a large mound of kudzu. Tubs decided to jump over it and hopped high above the green climbing plant. But not high enough. His legs became tangled in the vines, pulling him down onto something hard that made a very loud clang.

  Kudzu does not clang, said Tubs to himself. He stomped his foot into the mound of kudzu and it clanged some more. He slid off the side and cleared away the weeds so he could get a better look.

  Beneath the kudzu was a metal pipe. Tubs walked along beside it, deep into the tall forest of cattails, until the land grew marshy and softer. The farther he walked, the more his eyes began to sting and itch.

  Soon he heard the sound of rushing water. He followed it down the embankment, where he saw at last the end of the pipe. From its mouth rushed a dark, glittering, foul-smelling liquid. He could see a great pool of the stuff pouring into the swamp, spreading out into the water, turning it murky like the bottom of Pythia’s teacup.

  “Who could have put this here?” Tubs said to the rain. Why would anyone pour something so terrible into the water? he thought. What kind of animal would do this? Don’t they know someone lives here?

  The sky turned darker and thunder echoed out along the land. Tubs picked up a stick and began hacking the kudzu away from the pipe. Then he turned and walked along the edge of it in the opposite direction, following to see where it began. He walked through weeds and tall grass, his legs sunk deep into the mud.

  The rain was a deluge now and the water rose up to his waist. At times he had to cling to the pipe to keep from falling. He pressed on against the current, listening to the rain pattering against the metal and the leaves and the water with a beautiful syncopation, each playing a different note, and he wondered why there were no frogs singing in this part of the land.

  He was lost in these thoughts, his head down, when he walked straight into a wall. Tubs looked up. The pipe disappeared directly into this wall, which was at least one hundred times his height. Tubs hopped upon the pipe. Some weeds and vines spread up along the wall, and he pushed his way into them and began climbing. The vines were slick with rain, but the rain itself had given him strength and soon he had reached the top. With a great leap, Tubs flung himself from the climbing vines, until he could grasp the top edge of the wall. Then he pulled himself up so he could stand.

  16

  The sight before him stole his breath—a vas
t sea of concrete, steel towers, and metal pipes spread out into the landscape and rose up into the sky. These pipes released clouds of thick, awful-smelling smoke. Tubs’s heart beat fast in his chest and his skin itched and burned though it was wet from the cool rain.

  A hissing, thumping sound came from the awful towers. Tubs remembered the salamanders talking about their friend Ruby, who moved because a factory was too loud. This must be it, he thought. This must be a factory. He stood frozen in horror. Nothing moved or grew or sang or spoke on the other side of that wall. We can’t live with this, Tubs thought. Because it’s trying to kill us.

  Tubs turned and took one great leap back down. He landed in soft mud.

  The rain was letting up and the sun was breaking through the clouds. He ran as fast as he could back along the pipe until he reached the swamp. But there’s no way to swim, he thought. Being so close to that pipe was too dangerous. He looked frantically in the reeds and along the bank for anything he could use as a boat. Finding nothing, Tubs headed south at the water’s edge, trying to distance himself from the dark liquid pouring into the swamp.

  He ran along in the marshy mud, stumbling and righting himself. When he reached a grove of willows leaning out over the water, he had an idea. Tubs jumped up and grabbed a low-hanging branch. Then he ran away from the swamp, pulling the branch tight. When it was almost too hard to keep holding, he turned and leaped into the air. The branch swung out over the water, catapulting Tubs far past the mouth of the pipe.

  He landed in the swamp with a splash and began to swim as fast as he could.

  By dusk he had reached a garden of lily pads not far from the roots of the mangroves. He pulled himself up onto one and lay there to catch his breath. The lilies were blossoming their white flowers and the smell of his home surrounded him. Now that he was deep in the swamp, he could hear birds warbling to one another, settling down for the evening, and then, faintly, the song of the frogs coming from every distant bank. They were singing that two-hundred-sixty-five-million-year-old song. A song Tubs knew in his bones. From his place on the lily pad, he joined in.

  “Kiss me, I’m the fattest,” he sang quietly. “I sing so you will know. Our tadpoles are the fattest, too, our swamp will grow and grow.”

  And then he stopped.

  It’s not true anymore, Tubs thought. We’re still singing it, but it’s not true. There are no tadpoles and the swamp is vanishing. Every night we sing this lie. All of us.

  His skin itched and his eyes burned and the lump on his head throbbed. He stared up into the darkening sky, with no song in his heart.

  And then he heard a sound that was music to his tired ears. The steady splash of oars breaking through the water.

  Tubs sat up and saw Virgil. His hair looked patchy, but he was stout and strong as always. His pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth as he guided his boat into the garden of lily pads.

  “Tubs,” he said. “You’re covered with lumps.”

  “I jumped from the train,” said Tubs, and he began to cry.

  Virgil took Tubs’s hand and helped him into the boat, then quickly headed south, taking his friend to the frog hospital at the base of the giant cypress tree.

  Lila saw the boat approaching from the window of her office and ran to meet it as it docked in the tree roots.

  “What happened?” she shouted.

  Tubs jumped from the boat. “I found it!” he said. “I know what the algae and the reeds have been eating. I know why the fish are disappearing. I know why there are no more tadpoles. I know what’s in the water, Lila, I know!”

  17

  The next day, after Tubs had been bandaged and Lila had administered more arnica, the entire swamp gathered at Tubs’s house.

  Tubs looked for Gloria amid the crowd. He listened for her melodic warbling voice. There were turtles, frogs, crawfish, birds, bugs, and water rats, even Beau and Billy came, but their friend was nowhere to be seen.

  “It’s all right,” Lila said, watching his troubled face. “Gloria is still with us, just too sick to leave her tree.”

  The creatures crowded into the living room and sat beneath the open roof, a clear blue sky shining overhead. Tubs told them about the factory and the pipe, and the dark murk that was pouring into the swamp and spreading.

  “Friends,” he said, “we need ideas. There won’t be a song or a prophecy that can cure us.” Suddenly he was thinking of Roy and all his ideas, and wishing he could invent something that would help.

  “We need to find a new place to live,” said an egret.

  “Now hang on a minute,” said Beau, “how do we even know the stuff coming from the pipe is bad? Maybe it’s something that will help make everyone better.”

  “Beau,” Virgil began to say, then he just shook his head and shifted his pipe to the other corner of his mouth.

  “How do we know Tubs and Lila aren’t making all this up?” said Billy. “They’re the only ones who left the swamp and now they’ve got this crazy story. They’re trying to scare us and make us leave, too.”

  “How do you know?” said Lila. “You don’t need to believe us—just look around. Every single one of us knows someone who is sick. Or who is in the hospital.”

  Many of the creatures cast their eyes down, not wanting to look at all, but it was clear, especially in the light of day.

  “Billy, you’re missing half your feathers,” said Lila. “I had to bandage the sores on your legs this morning. Almost all of us have a rash—” She held out her arm, which was covered with bright red bumps. Tubs, who had been swimming a long way through the swamp, looked more like a spotted toad than green frog. Other creatures had coughs and patchy fur and red, tired-looking eyes. “Beau, you are covered in arnica balm. Do you really think we can keep living here this way?”

  “Where would we go?” asked a turtle. “If this thing is so big, how do we escape it?”

  “We can start heading farther south,” said the egret. “Take one of the streams.”

  “But what about the algae?” asked a dragonfly. “And the lily fields? And the cattails and the mangroves? And the willows? We’re just going to leave them here to suffer?”

  A hush fell upon the animals.

  “I don’t want to leave my home,” said Billy.

  “None of us want to leave,” said a turtle. “But we’ve got to be practical. If the water is poisoned, what choice do we have?”

  “We’ve been around for two hundred and sixty-five million years,” said the yellow tree frog. “I think that factory should leave.”

  At this a cheer rose up, animals clapping and yelling.

  “Yes!” said Lila. “We all want the factory to leave, but how?”

  Tubs knew the poison factory beyond the wall was impossible to move. Worst of all, it had made it so the things they loved—like swimming and eating—were now killing them. The yellow tree frog was right: If they escaped, it would just keep hurting someone else. Tubs wasn’t sad anymore. He was angry.

  “There’s no choice,” he shouted. “We’re animals, we’re living things. This machine hasn’t just made us sick, it’s made us sick at heart. And we’ve got to make it stop—even if we put our bodies upon the gears and the levers or in front of the pipe. If we don’t do something now, we won’t be around to do something later.”

  Another cheer rose up.

  Then Virgil said, “Tubs, I ain’t putting my body on no gears or in front of no pipe—and I don’t want you to neither. I think we best find a way to do it without no one getting hurt. Consider how the machine works or the laws of physics and suchlike.”

  Suddenly there was a commotion from the birds roosting above.

  “Watch out,” they cried.

  “What is that?”

  Everyone looked up and saw something black hurtling down from the sky, headed right for the open roof. As it got closer, they could see it was covered with fur.

  Then a purple cloud appeared to bloom out of its back and it began to float slowly down. />
  It landed with a delicate thunk on top of the piano. And then it looked out at the creatures of the swamp with dark shining eyes.

  18

  “Roy!” Tubs laughed in surprise. “How . . . How did you . . . ?”

  “Turns out,” said Roy, “it works the three hundredth and sixth time you wish to be somewhere else. I’ve been wishing to see you since you left my house.”

  “This is fantastic!” said Tubs.

  “You’re all fantastic!” said Roy. “I’ve never seen so many frogs in one little house before! Are you all waiting for a visit from a prince who is going to take you to a castle and feed you beignets? That would be so wonderful. And then he would say, come with me and live in a lagoon, the water is so clear you can see down one thousand feet. And you would all go there and sing to a mermaid who lived in an underwater cave.”

  “You know this vole?” Lila asked Tubs.

  “This is Roy!” Tubs said. “He’s not a vole.”

  “I’m a southern bog lemming!” said Roy.

  “And you really are magic!” said Tubs. “This is amazing! We could use some magic right now. How did you do it?”

  “Well,” said Roy. “I was standing on my balcony, saying I wish I was with Tubs and rubbing my nose and counting to eight, and then doing it again.”

  The creatures of the swamp leaned in close to listen and Roy went on. “I think I fell asleep at one point—but when I woke up, I kept doing it—only this time I thought very hard about where you might be and I rubbed my nose and waved my bedsheet in the air and hopped up and down. And then suddenly, out of the clear sky, there came a terrible screeching noise and then a giant bird snatched me up in its talons and flew high over the swamp! I poked it in the belly with my pencil, and it dropped me and here I am!”

  The frogs and the turtles and the crawfish all looked at one another.