The Mouse and His Child
“Good evening,” he said as Ralphie came toward him with the mouse and his child. The frog’s golden eyes took on red glints from the fires as he fixed upon father and son a look of profound and penetrating observation. “WHAT FORTUNE AWAITS YOU?” he boomed. “FROG LIFTS THE VEIL THAT HIDES THE FUTURE. CREDIT GIVEN ON FAVORABLE READINGS.”
“Listen,” said Ralphie, “you sold me a charm last summer.”
“Ah,” said Frog, “I remember. It was the herb called High John the Conqueror, for success in love.”
“Well, it don’t work,” said Ralphie. “I rubbed it all over me like you said, and it give me such a smell that the girl I was after run off with another rat.”
“Which proves she was the wrong girl for you,” said Frog. “That is one of the charm’s wondrous properties — it shows which love is true and which is false. Come, let me tell your fortune. No charge.”
Ralphie held out a paw, and Frog looked into it. “Ah!” he said. His eyes flashed red and gold as he stared from the rat’s paw into his face.
“What do you see?” said Ralphie.
“A journey,” said Frog, having noted the bag carried by the mouse and his child, “a long journey.”
“You’re wrong there,” said Ralphie. “It’s a short one.”
“One never knows about journeys,” said Frog. “It may seem long.”
“What else?” said Ralphie, and he smacked his lips as he thought of the treacle brittle.
“There’ll be good eating,” said Frog. “I see that very definitely.”
“Tell our fortune,” said the mouse child.
“Windups don’t have no fortune to tell,” said Ralphie.
“Not so,” said Frog. “The future is impartial, and Fortune smiles on whom she will.” He bent close to the child. “Tell me,” he said, “what do you want from the future?”
“I want to find the elephant,” said the child. “I want her to be my mama, and I want the seal to be my sister, and I want us all to live in the beautiful house.”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed the father. This was the first he had heard of the elephant and the seal and the dollhouse since they had left the store five years ago.
“Let us see what time will bring,” said Frog. “As your palm is not accessible for me to read, I shall use an ancient form of divination that was taught me by an oriental mantis.” Ralphie, well content to put off his errand at the bank, watched with interest as the frog unslung the matchbox from his back and took out a handful of sunflower seeds. Then he removed from his neck the coin that hung there, and tossing it and the seeds together, watched them fall to the snow. “Now,” he said, as he wound up the father, “you must walk through the design.”
Three times, directed on different angles by the fortune-teller, father and son walked through the seeds and changed their random pattern in the snow. Then, squatting heavy and still, Frog examined the disposition of coin and seeds, staring concentratedly at their new arrangement, while above him the floating red smoke of the trash fires intermittently obscured the stars. Ralphie leaned close, watching intently, and the mouse and his child, unwound, waited.
The frog, as far as he himself knew, had never accurately predicted the future in his entire life. He told fortunes for profit, just as he sold charms and cures, surveyed territories, and performed weddings. The weddings at least were legal, since he was a legitimate justice of the peace; the surveys were more or less exact; the cures occasionally healed; the charms worked as hard as their wearers; and in the matter of fortunes he had learned long ago to say whatever best suited the occasion and the customer. The mouse child wanted a family and a house, and Frog desired to please him; therefore he went through the motions of the oriental divination, preparing the while to see in the future a mama, a sister, and a beautiful house.
So the frog intended, but as he looked at the coin and the seeds he found himself unable to speak the words he had planned. He had practiced the seed and coin oracle many times, but never before had he experienced anything like what was happening to him now. All else beyond the pattern in the snow departed from his vision; his ears hummed, and other sounds all vanished, leaving him alone with the voice of his mind and the dark seeds dancing in the stillness of their mystic changes.
“You have broken the circle,” he said, “and a straight line of great force emerges. Follow it.”
“Where?” asked the father.
Frog traced a line from seed to seed, and made an up-and-down gesture. “Depths and heights,” he said, “but the bottom is strangely close to the top.” He paused. “The road is long,” he said, “and very hard.”
“But where does the road take us?” asked the child.
Frog stared harder at the seeds, his golden eyes unfathomable. His yellow throat swelled, gleaming in the opening of his ragged glove. He seemed to grow large and remote in the starlight, and his voice was distant when he spoke: “Low in the dark of summer, high in the winter light; a painful spring, a shattering fall, a scattering regathered. The enemy you flee at the beginning awaits you at the end.” The words stopped, and the voice went quivering into silence. The child began to cry.
“That isn’t much to look forward to, is it?” said the father. “Can’t you tell us more than that?”
“No,” said Frog. “Nor can I even read the meaning of the words I spoke.” Now that the words had gone from him he seemed smaller, nervous and uneasy. There was silence for a moment. The rat, the frog, and the mouse and his child, lit by a sudden flaring of the flames below, stood out sharply against the darkness, motionless on the tin-can slope.
“Let’s go,” said Ralphie, shivering as if he felt the chill of winter for the first time. “Let’s get to where we’re going.” He wound up the father, and they started on their way out of the dump to the dark fields beyond it. Behind them on the narrow path the frog picked up the coin and the seeds, and watched them out of sight.
* * *
IN THE BEER-CAN AVENUE the battered windups of the forage squad stood and lay in silence where they had stopped, while their master paced among them thinking treacle-brittle thoughts. The sky had clouded over again, and Manny Rat felt better with the stars out of sight. He looked toward the fires beyond the rubbish mountains, and sniffed the smoke complacently. Then, humming a little tune, he passed through the ranks of his silent slaves and went off to look for the windup Ralphie had told him about.
He found her near the wreckage of a bridge table, close to the highway. The purple headcloth was gone, her gray plush was black with rot, one eye and one ear were missing; but still the elephant maintained an air of monumental dignity.
How she had suffered! She who had thought herself a lady of property, secure in her high place — she had been sold like any common toy, while the gentlemen and ladies in the dollhouse never so much as looked up from their teacups. The house itself, her house, as she had always believed, had been cut off abruptly from her sight as the tissue paper closed about her head, and thus her world departed, and reality was thrust upon her.
She had been taken to a house much grander than the one on the counter, and there she had endured what toys endure. She had been smeared with jam and worried by the dog, she had been sat upon, and she had been dropped. She had been made to pull wagons, had been shot at by toy cannons, and had been left out in the rain until her works had rusted fast and she was thrown away. Still she endured, and deep within her tin there blazed a spirit that would not be quenched. Though the heavens should fall, she knew that justice one day would be done. That day, and that day only, was what she lived for: to pace again with swinging trunk beside the windows of the mansion that was hers; to know again the stately mode of life that was her due. In the meantime, here was a rat to be encountered, and he should be confronted firmly, as she had met all adversity thus far.
“Good evening, madam,” said Manny Rat. “Do we find ourselves quite worn out and thrown away? Do we lie here, lonely in the wintry waste, and rot? The pity of it!”
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The elephant said nothing.
“Be of good cheer,” said Manny Rat. “Rejoice! Help is at hand!”
Still the elephant preserved her silence.
“Surely you can speak,” said Manny Rat. “You have heard the striking of the town hall clock, and the hour is long past midnight.”
“We have not been introduced,” murmured the elephant almost inaudibly, as if she hoped to create the illusion that the words had not actually come from her.
“Ah, but we shall be!” said Manny Rat. “We shall become, moreover, close friends and intimate associates.” He tried the elephant’s key, but could not turn it. The spring was tightly wound and thick with rust. “What better introduction could there be,” he said, “than to take you apart and repair you so you can work for me?” He produced a rusty beer-can opener from within his robe and undid the tin clasps that held the elephant together.
“Nothing more to say, madam?” he asked as he pried apart the two halves of her tin body. “Not so much as a how-do-you-do?”
But the elephant was silent. She had fainted.
* * *
THE SKY WAS BEGINNING TO PALE, and the air was sharp with morning as Ralphie and the mouse and his child came through the woods along a path to the Meadow Mutual Hoard and Trust Company, an earthen bank beside a stream. There were many tracks in the snow, and following these, they went through the entrance between the roots of a great sycamore tree.
The interior of the bank was chill and dim and hushed; the acorn-cup tallow lamps did little more than cast their own shadows and catch the glint of frost and mica on the earth walls. In the half-light a drowsy chipmunk teller looked up from the sunflower seeds he was counting as the rat walked in with the mouse and his child. The father pushed the son up to the rock behind which the chipmunk sat, then stood treading the ground until his spring unwound. The chipmunk looked at the paper bag they carried, then at Ralphie, and he felt for the alarm twig with his foot.
“Um yes,” he said. “May I help you?”
Ralphie squinted cautiously into the shadows around him, saw no guards, and at once forgot everything Manny Rat had told him. “All right,” he said, snarling and showing his teeth, “this is a stickup. Take me to the vault.”
“Um yes, sir!” said the chipmunk, stepping hard on the alarm twig as he spoke. The twig passed through a hole in the dirt wall behind him, and its other end vibrated against the snout of the badger guard who was dozing behind the stone that was the door of the vault. The badger woke up and smiled.
“This way, please,” said the chipmunk. Ralphie wound up the mouse father, and they went through a short tunnel to where the stone blocked the opening of the vault. “Here is the vault,” said the chipmunk.
“Well, open it up,” said Ralphie.
“Um certainly,” said the chipmunk. He moved the stone and stepped out of the way as Ralphie rushed into the waiting jaws of the badger, who ate him up.
“Them city fellows ain’t much at robbing banks,” chuckled the badger when he had finished, “but they’re good eating. Young fellows nowadays, they don’t know how to pull a job. All they know is hurry, hurry, hurry.” He picked his teeth with a sliver of bone. “What about them other two?” he asked the chipmunk.
The chipmunk looked back through the tunnel and out past the entrance of the bank. The mouse and his child, spun about by the violence of Ralphie’s rush into the vault, had stumbled out of the Meadow Mutual Hoard and Trust Company into the blue dawn, leaving their paper bag behind them. The chipmunk watched them walk down the path until they bumped into a rock and fell over. He shook his head. “Whatever they are, they’re harmless,” he said. “Let them go.”
The mouse and his child lay in the snow where they had fallen, rattling with tinny, squeaking laughter. “Skreep, skreep, skreep!” laughed the father. “The frog was right — Ralphie did go on a long journey.”
“Skreek, skreek!” laughed the child. “There was good eating too, for the badger! Skreek!”
“Seven o’clock!” called the clock on the steeple of the church across the meadow as it struck the hour.
“Listen!” said the father as he heard it. “It’s time for silence. Skreep!” And he began laughing all over again.
“If it’s time for silence, how is it that we’re still talking, Papa?” giggled the child.
“You’ve already broken one of the clockwork rules by crying on the job,” said the father, “so we might as well break the other one too, and have done with it.”
“But I’ve often tried to speak after dawn,” said the child, “and I never could till now. I wonder how it happened?”
“Perhaps your laughter freed you from the ancient clockwork laws,” said a deep voice, and the bullfrog fortune-teller hopped out from behind a tree. In the daylight he seemed smaller than he had at night, and much of his mystery was gone. He was not a young frog; the glove he wore was shabby. In the cold light of morning he could be clearly seen for what he was: an old, eccentric traveler, neither respectable nor reliable, hung with odd parcels, tricked out with a swinging coin, and plying his trade where chance might take him. He set the mouse and his child on their feet and considered them thoughtfully. “I have never heard a toy laugh before,” he said.
“Did you see what happened?” said the father, and he told the frog about the attempted bank robbery.
“A rash youth, Ralphie,” said Frog. “He had no patience, poor boy! For once I read the future truly, and it came with fearful swiftness. But are you not curious about my presence here?”
“Why are you here?” asked the child.
“Because I followed you,” said Frog. “Something draws me to you, and in the seeds I saw your fate and mine bound inextricably together. I said nothing at the time — I was afraid. There were dark and fearful things in that design, and unknown perils that can only be revealed by time.” He shook his head, and the coin swung like a pendulum from the string around his neck.
“Are you still afraid?” asked the father.
“Utterly,” said Frog. “Do you choose to go ahead?”
“There is no going back,” said the father. “We cannot dance in circles anymore. Will you be our friend, and travel with us?”
“Be my uncle,” said the child. “Be my Uncle Frog.”
“Ah!” said Frog. “I had better make no promises; I am at best an infirm vessel. Do not expect too much. I will be your friend and uncle for as long as our destined roads may lie together; more than that I cannot say.” He gestured toward the snowy meadow that sparkled in the sunlight beyond the trees ahead, and pointed back along the shadowy pathway they had taken to the bank. “Which shall it be?” he said. “Toward the town, or out into the open country?”
“Maybe we could look for the elephant and the seal and the dollhouse that used to be in the store with us,” said the child. “Couldn’t we, Papa?”
“What in the world for?” said the father.
“So we can have a family and be cozy,” answered the child.
“To begin with,” said the father, “I cannot imagine myself being cozy with that elephant. But, putting that aside for the moment, the whole idea of such a quest is impossible. Despite what she said, she and the dollhouse were very likely for sale just as we and the seal were, and by now they might be anywhere at all. It would be hopeless to attempt to find any of them.”
“She sang me a lullaby,” said the child.
“Really,” said the father, “this is absurd.”
“I want the elephant to be my mama and I want the seal to be my sister and I want to live in the beautiful house,” the child insisted.
“What is all this talk of elephants and seals?” asked Frog.
“It’s nonsense,” said the father, “and yet it’s not the child’s fault. Our motor is in me. He fills the empty space inside himself with foolish dreams that cannot possibly come true.”
“Not so very foolish, perhaps,” said Frog. “This seal, was she made of tin, and b
lack and shiny? Did she have a small platform on her nose that revolved while a sparrow performed acrobatic tricks on it?”
“No,” said the father. “She had a red-and-yellow ball on her nose.”
“She could have lost the ball,” said the child. “Maybe she does have a platform on her nose now. Where is the seal you saw?” he asked Frog.
“I don’t know where she is now,” said Frog. “But two years ago she was with a traveling theatrical troupe that comes to the pine woods every year.”
“If Uncle Frog could take us there, maybe we could find the seal,” said the mouse child to his father, “and then we could all look for the elephant together.”
“Finding the elephant would be as pointless as looking for her,” said the father. “But since I cannot convince you of that, we might just as well travel to the pine woods as anywhere else. At any rate we shall see something of the world.”
“Very well,” said Frog. “On to the pine woods.”
“EXTRA!” screamed a raucous voice above them as a blue jay flashed by in the sunlight. “RAT SLAIN IN BANK HOLDUP ATTEMPT. WINDUPS FLEE WITH GETAWAY FROG. LATE SCORES: WOODMICE LEAD MEADOW TEAM IN ACORN BOWLING. VOLES IDLE.”
“So it begins,” said Frog. “For good or ill, you have come out into the world, and the world has taken notice.”
“A long, hard road,” said the father to Frog. “That was what you saw ahead for us, was it not?”
“All roads, whether long or short, are hard,” said Frog. “Come, you have begun your journey, and all else necessarily follows from that act. Be of good cheer. The sun is bright. The sky is blue. The world lies before you.”
The father saw the brightness of the meadow through the dark trees. Two crows, sharp against the sky, sailed over it on broad, black wings, and he thought of how many steps it would take him to traverse the same distance. His spring tightened as the frog wound him; his motor buzzed, and he pushed his son ahead.