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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
1. Dubber
2. Mr. Budd
3. Ashley
4. J. J. Jay
5. A Debate
6. Fights!
7. Jailbreak—Number One
8. A Singing Lesson
9. Jailbreak—Number Two
10. A Meeting
11. The Old Meadow
12. Avon Mountain
Also by George Selden with Pictures by Garth Williams
Copyright
ONE
Dubber
“Here he comes again!”
Walter Water Snake craned his head up as far as he could above the surface of Simon Turtle’s Pool. He could see just over the rim of the bank of luscious mud that surrounded, on three sides, the neat inlet where he and Simon lived. The fourth side opened out to the brook which in its rush kept fast fresh water circling their blue-green home.
“I’m gonna bite that mutt!”
“No, you’re not,” said Chester Cricket wearily. He’d heard all this before. Chester, too, lived in Simon’s Pool—or rather above it, in a hole in a log that had been chewed out by Simon and Walt. The cricket’s first home, a comfortable stump, had been squashed by two overweight ladies who sat on it. “You know you don’t bite.”
“I can try!” Walter fumed. “After all—I am a snake! And I have to keep up appearances.”
“Walt—will you behave?” demanded Chester. “And not even pretend to bite Dubber?”
“Oh—tchoor!” When Walter Water Snake was feeling frisky, which was most of the time, or feeling mischievous, which was most of the rest, he said “tchoor” for “sure.” The joke of life delighted Walter: how things and words could pop up so spontaneously, just the way he himself liked to pop up his head from the tranquil surface of Simon’s Pool.
“Besides,” wheezed Simon Turtle, “anybody who bites that dog runs the risk of mange.” The old turtle had been spread out on his bank, drowsing and dreaming of how nice the world would be if it was all made of water and mud—with some sunshine thrown in, of course.
And indeed it was a lovely morning, a sunstruck morning, and the clear air seemed to ring like a bell. A wind like a steady invisible hand with a brush was combing the rich green grass of the meadow all one way. But through the beautiful summer day tramped a sad fat dog. His coat was knotted, there were burrs in it, two ragged bedraggled ears hung down, and his eyes were red and watery, as if he’d been up all night worrying—which he had.
“Hi, Dubber!” called Walter cheerily. “Hi, Rub-a-Dub-Dubber! You dapper and delightful dog!”
“’lo, Walt,” the dog grunted. “’lo, Simon, ’lo Chester.” He flopped down on the bank.
Simon Turtle and Chester Cricket each called as cheery a “Hi!” as they could.
“How are you?” Walt clapped the pool with his tail. “You live-wire fireball hot-ticket you!”
“I’m none of those things,” said Dubber Dog. “I wouldn’t set fires—honestly, Chester,” he added apologetically.
“Don’t worry, Dubber—I’m sure you won’t,” answered Chester Cricket. In his voice there was sympathy and an insect’s tenderness, something tiny but real and very precious. It was always in his chirp, too. “How’s Mr. Budd?”
“We’re not so good.” Dubber Dog was a mongrel, and there must have been some spaniel in him—as well as a breed with a tendency to put on weight. The spaniel came out in his ears. “As a matter of fact, we’re getting worried and worrieder.”
“Dubber—your ears!” said Walt. “They’re hanging over into the mud.”
“Who cares?” sighed the dog. “Mr. Budd won’t notice. That’s how worried he is. He doesn’t bother to wash me now.”
Walter Water Snake sank, and slowly sank farther, until just his eyes showed above the pool. He stared hard, in both annoyance and pity, at the dog sprawled above him on the bank.
“Were those men there again?” asked Chester.
“Yes,” groaned the dog. “Four this time!”
“Well, they may not have been from the Hedley Town Council—”
“They were, though. They used all those words—‘unsightly’ and ‘undignified’ and—what was that new word—‘deplorable’! I don’t even know what that means, but it sounds very awful to me.”
“It is,” said Chester.
“One even said, ‘This wretched little cabin lowers the tone of the whole Old Meadow. It definitely takes away from the charm.’”
“What a jerk!” sputtered Walt.
“Yes, and Mr. Budd threatened to bop him with our broom. But since it broke in half last week, I don’t think that would have done much good.”
“Did Mr. Budd whop you?” asked Walter very seriously.
“Of course he did. When they’d gone. Who else has he got to whop? Besides, he doesn’t really mean it. Most times.”
“That’s no excuse—!”
“Oh, Walter, shush!” said Chester Cricket.
Walter tried to growl his disapproval, but his rrrr came out ssss, since he was a snake. He vanished below and cooled his temper in the soothing depths of Simon’s Pool. Then just his two eyes appeared again.
“Walt, you don’t understand,” Dubber Dog explained. “Mr. Budd is afraid. Beneath those bushy white eyebrows of his and behind his beard—he’s scared to death.” Dubber’s worry, the formless gloom of a blobby dog, was left hovering in the summer air. His friends couldn’t see it, but all of them felt it. These days it followed him everywhere.
Chester tried to stir up the sticky silence. “Well, but no one said anything like ‘eviction.’ Or that the Town Council would vote to tear down his cabin.”
“Not yet.” Dubber’s voice, like his chin, slumped over the bank, down into the mud.
“Well, have hope! Have hope!” squeaked the cricket. “Right. Walt—?”
“Tchoor! Have hope.” Walter Water Snake’s hope was so weak, however, that he slumped back and sank.
“If they did throw him out, and pull down his cabin,” said Dubber, “and put him in an old-folks home—it would kill him. I know it. He’d die. But not before he tore that old-folks home apart.”
“That’s what I’d do,” said Simon Turtle.
“And as for me”—Dubber sighed, as only a potbellied mongrel can sigh; the depths of it came from the springer in him—“I’d just become a dog of the streets. They’d never take me back in Puptown.”
“I knew it,” muttered Walter, whose eyes were flashing on the surface again. “Puptown. Also known as Puppyville.”
“Shhh!” Chester Cricket creaked under his breath. His glance at Walter was charged with meaning. It meant: Keep quiet—Dubber’s very unhappy—and finally, Remembering sometimes lessens the pain.
“Puptown.” Dubber’s eyes gazed into the past, an invisible space just before a dog’s eyes. Then he chuckled, a rumbly kind of a sound that came out of his big old hanging belly. Chester Cricket didn’t have any belly at all, but he always wanted to chuckle, too, when he heard Dubber heave up a laugh like that.
“Ah, Puppyville,” said Walt, sighing. He leaned back on a wave like a rocking chair and prepared to hear Dubber’s past. He’d heard it so often that after the first bit of repetition it almost seemed like a lullaby.
Simon, too, eased himself in the mud of drowsiness, and Chester shifted four legs to get more comfort from the noonday sun.
“I guess Daddy was a cocker or a springer,” Dubber Dog began. His history relaxed him, too, since it was past and didn’t hurt him too much now. “Mommy may have been a basset hound. But nobody knows. That’s what Agnes thought. When I woke up the very first time, there was Agnes Fluger. And she was hovering over me. I’ll never forget her.” Dubber scratched one ear, very fast, with his right hind leg, the way a dog does, as if his memory, along with a flea, was in his ear and he might get it hopping with a good brisk scratch. “Nor will I forget her friend Marvin Detzinger, either.”
“Nor will we,” murmured Walt, as he rocked on the waves.
“Ag and Marv had this business which they called Puptown. They’d go all over Hedley and collect us little leftover dogs and bring us home to sell to folks.” Dubber rumbled his deep bass, bubbly chuckle that had to be called a belly laugh.
“That house was a sight! Pups tumbling everywhere.” Dubber loved this part of the memory. “And the television! I often heard her say while watching soap operas, when someone had just killed someone else, ‘That lady just needs a little dog.’ And the ice cream—which she shared with us dogs, also while watching television! That’s when Puptown became Puppyville.”
“What was her favorite flavor?” asked Simon Turtle. He’d lived a very, very long time and had only had ice cream once. That was when a little boy named George had dropped his Popsicle in the brook.
“Chocolate-caramel, as I remember, with hot-fudge sauce. It drove her wild.”
“I don’t wonder,” said Walt. “Myself, I’d never risk it.”
Dubber fondly scratched.
And suddenly Walter shouted, “Ugh!”—and ducked beneath the surface. He came up spluttering with rage. “Dubber Dog—I wish you would not scratch your right or left ear beside this pool! I honestly do not want to be remembered as the first snake in history to come down with fleas!”
With a casual woof, Dubber brushed off Walt’s fear, if not the flea that had landed on him. “I was covered with ice cream a lot, in those days. Because Aggie decided that I was her favorite.”
“Sundae?” said Walter.
“No—dog. She shared all her goodies with me. Even cranberry sherbet, when that came out. And when people came who’d try to adopt me—in those days I really was quite—quite—”
“—the cutie!”
“I was nice, Walter Water Snake! But Aggie would say, ‘Oh, no—that one’s not for sale.’ And then she’d feed me up on more mocha-raspberry-pineapple splits!”
“What a fate! Well—”
“So by the end of half a year I was unadopted and getting fat. But one day Marv came back from Big World of Cars, the garage where he worked in the day, and he took one look at me—I was sprawled on Aggie’s living-room rug, lapping up praline ice cream from a pan and engrossed in a TV serial where somebody’s mother eloped to Hawaii—and Marvin said, ‘We’ve got to get rid of that dog. The older he gets, and the fatter he gets, the less likely he is to find someone to love him.”
“Oh, that’s so true,” sighed Walter sadly. “Applies to snakes and people, too.”
“Anyway,” Dubber Dog went on, “Marvin said that otherwise—if I stayed fat and nobody got to like me—I’d have to go to the corner of Squigg Street and Lebel Avenue. And you know what’s there! Even I knew what was there—at the age of six months.” Dubber paused, to let the terror and awe sink in.
“The dog pound!” chorused Simon Turtle, Walter Water Snake, and Chester Cricket together.
Their doom-laden voices were just what Dubber needed to hear. “Yes! And right at that moment Mr. Budd came in and found me with my nose full of ice cream. Of course you field folk had known him before—”
“Lord!—for how many years,” wheezed Simon Turtle.
“—but that was the first I’d seen of him. It was just after Jimdandy, his dog who ate boiled beets, had died, and he saw me with my jaws dripping ice cream, and he said, ‘That’s him! He needs me.’ So that was it. I got adopted. But also, I secretly think inside—Mr. Budd is afraid of the pound himself. It was after a little talk with Marvin that he grabbed me up and rushed me away. To his cabin.”
“He’s kind of fat himself,” said Simon. “Though Lord knows how he gets that way—just eating those scrawny vegetables.”
“Our vegetables are good!” woofed Dubber Dog indignantly. “They’re not scrawny!”
“How did you get used to vegetables?” wondered Chester Cricket. “After all that sweet ice cream? Must have been a big comedown.”
“It took some doing,” admitted the dog. “But you know Mr. Budd: with a carrot in one hand and a beet in the other—he won’t take no for an answer. Besides, I needed the vegetables anyway—to reduce after all that goo.” He heaved himself into a new position. “Not that it did so much good.”
“Tchoor—we know Mr. Budd,” muttered Walt. “He whops you. Does that help to reduce you, too?”
“It doesn’t mean he hates me,” hoped Dubber. “In fact—that last day—he demanded of Aggie and Marv that they take a dollar bill. They had wanted to give me away—but Mr. Budd said, ‘Nope, nope—he’s my dog now. He deserves to be bought.’ They compromised on a quarter.”
In a stillness, the wind brushed Dubber’s hair. For those who had no hair—like Simon, Walt, Chester—the wind felt like a smooth hand on their backs.
“So, Chester,” said Dubber, “that’s why I was wondering”—his voice drooped to a plea—“I was wondering if as Chester Cricket you might solve the problem—I mean, take away all the worry—about words like ‘eviction,’ and ‘unsightly.’ I mean—as applied to Mr. Budd’s cabin.”
“Me!” squeaked Chester. He’d known all along that the sadness of Dubber Dog would end up right on his wings. “Why me? I’m just a little cricket. Who sometimes has friends who help. Why me?” Chester’s voice got swallowed inside his throat. “This is a big problem—”
“Sometimes,” said Simon, “it takes a little, ingenious person to find his way through the holes of an enormous problem.”
Iron worry imprisoned everyone.
“Did he whop you—hard?” Walt had to ask.
“Not really,” said Dubber apologetically. He often had to defend his master before his friends.
“Oh—Mr. Budd,” Walt moaned with sadness and anger and sorrow. He let himself sink.
“Oh—Mr. Budd,” Simon, Chester—the whole Old Meadow—sighed back in echo.
TWO
Mr. Budd
Oh, Mr. Budd … Mr. Budd was the problem.
As the animals lingered beside the brook, they chatted together about the old man. Their talk drifted into the deep Old Meadow, a place that was fairly overgrown with the vines and the grass and the secretive flowers of Abner Budd’s life.
* * *
“Scrawny vegetables! As if we’d ever raise such things!”
* * *
Of all the field folk, Simon Turtle understood the problem of Abner Budd best, although the two, man and turtle, had had, for over sixty years, just a nodding acquaintance. Long before Dubber or Chester or Walt had been born—and in fact just after he himself had come out of the egg—Simon Turtle had known about Abner Budd. And the man’s life had grown to be entwined with the fate of the whole Old Meadow. He was the single and—as he liked to say—the ‘onliest’ human being to live there. That is, to live in the meadow since the farms failed, were sold, or the barns burned down. He was just something there, in his cabin, upstream, like the old gnarled tree that grew beside his vegetable patch. That tree dropped its leaves in the brook, and for years they’d sailed past Simon’s Pool on their way to a river and then the great sea. But since Mr. Budd had gotten to be a problem—and no one knew how: he just was, one day—those leaves seemed to Simon like anxious notes. They’d been written by weather on an old willow tree and mailed by a brook, and each one was received by a worried old turtle. His fear had been very slow to grow, like his legs heaving up the bank or his head as he craned around, b
ut it got there, fear did, just where it was headed—deep into his heart. Turtles get where they’re going.
* * *
“The lettuce is especially lovely this year.”
“Oh, Dubber—drat! By my shell—we’ve got something much more important than vegetables to think about!”
* * *
The Old Meadow had a great, deep past. Simon’s forebears were the only field folk who remembered its whole long history. Farmer Hedley had been the first to live there, and love that land that the brook ran through, and cultivate it, and make it a farm. He’d made peace with the proud Indians who lived thereabouts in Connecticut, and in exchange for services, like medicine when they were sick, they’d sold him the Old Meadow. In fact, that tribe—the Sistikontik—had liked him so much that they’d helped him pile the boulders and stones of his new property into a splendid natural wall. It still could be seen, if a field person or a human being had the eyes for such things. Beneath the ivy and shrubs and the clinging wildflowers that the years had encouraged, there the stone wall stayed. One eager crimson morning-glory vine had rioted over half a mile. But those stones were well laid. Though tumbled in places, they seemed to remember the hands that had put them where they belonged. And they were as faithful to the farmers who worked as a turbulent nature—wind, rain, snow—would allow.
Farmer Hedley sold out to a man named Santell, and Andrew Santell left the farm to his son-in-law, rich Phillippe LeBel, a French Canadian who’d come down from Quebec. Phillippe’s son, Edmund, came back every Saturday night quite tipsy from the local tavern, the Cow Lick, so the farm and the meadow went again to a son-in-law, Paul Squigg. Edmund, by the bye, went to California to search for gold—and never discovered as much as a nugget. The Squiggs had the land for two generations, doing middling well, but the last Squigg, Simon, bred a new kind of corn and made a fortune. He sold—and this was a gloomy sign—to someone who didn’t live where he farmed. His tenant farmer—named Pett—did all he could, but it wasn’t enough. Edward Stroke, who’d bought from the Squiggs, just wanted land. He was greedy, and felt he was rich just if he owned earth, brook, trees—even tuffets. And Edward Stroke the Second, his son, was even more careless of land. He’d found that even owning it and doing nothing was profitable. You just had to wait till there wasn’t enough land to go around—and then you sold out, and were rich. So for two generations, father and son, the earth, raw soil, didn’t do a thing, except play. Weeds grew—and trees—the bushes went wild—hidden flowers flourished, which no one saw. The stone wall was covered by layers of years. The Old Meadow stood still—in the heart of the state of Connecticut—uninhabited, wild, so everyone thought.