Chester Cricket's New Home (4 page)

“How-dee-do!” chortled Walter.

“Oh—I'm fine,” replied Chester, and thought to himself that Walter Water Snake didn't seem much like his old acquaintance Frank at all. He wasn't big, and he wasn't fat—rather trim and sleek, in fact. And he was sort of—Chester searched for a word, and “goofy” was all that came to mind. “That is,” he went on, “if you think anybody is fine who just had his house sat out of existence.”

“I heard all about it!
Whump! Sqwush!
”

“Who told you?” Chester asked.

“Guiss!”

“Oh.”

“That dragonfly was all over the Meadow while you and Simon the Swift were toddling home. Didn't say much, though. ‘Chister's stump got squished!' was all. Then he lit out like greased lightning to bring the bulletin to a family of frogs. Good gossip it is, too! I have to admit. The bulrushes all alive with it!”

“Mmm!” muttered Chester, who was having mixed feelings about this snake. (Mixed feelings are those that you can't quite sort out. Some feel good, others don't.) For one thing, he thought it was rather impertinent to refer to the oldest Meadow dweller as “Simon the Swift,” especially since even the mosquitoes knew that the venerable turtle was the slowest soul in the world. For another, “good gossip,” he thought, was hardly a sympathetic description of his own catastrophe.

“Hey! How did you like my song last night?” Walt's head bobbed up and down in the water, like a cork expecting a compliment. “‘A cricket lived in a rickety stump—'”

“Oh, very nice.” Chester fudged a bit.

“Say, in New York they never called you ‘crickety,' did they?”

“No. Mama Bellini said ‘cricketer' sometimes.”

“Too bad,” said Walter. “I could have composed, ‘A crickety lives in a rickety'—et cetera. Crickety-rickety. Nifty rhyme! Get it?” His head ducked down—then out it popped. “Get it?”

“I get it,” said Chester without too much enthusiasm.

“You and I could make sweet music, Chirpy Chester! I like to do words, and you make up the tunes. How about that?”

“I'll have to think,” said Chester Cricket, but he didn't plan to think too long.

“You think then. Think!” Walter disappeared.

“Is he
always
like this?” said Chester to Simon.

“Most always.” The turtle laughed. He didn't seem to mind Walter Water Snake at all. “He's zany, isn't he?”

“I don't think I know what that means,” said Chester.

“You stick around Walt long enough,” said Simon, “you'll learn.”

“I can't even tell if he's looking at me. His eyes go—”

“Did you think?” A familiar head flashed up so close that it almost toppled Chester over.

A turtle's chuckle is wonderful. Simon got one in his voice, and coughed to keep the laughter down. “Walt, Chester was saying while you were away, he can hardly tell which way you're looking—”

“Snake eyes!” Walter reared out of the water—at least his upper half. “I got the snake eyes, Chester—you bet! The authentic item—that's me! Have a look—” He stared at the cricket in a highly unsettling manner.

“Oo! Oh!” Chester blinked. “I wish you wouldn't do that, Walter. It's very disturbing. And dangerous for the eyes, as well.”

“And not all snakes have the true and magic snake eyes.” Walter flipped some water with his tail. “Now, there's a good friend of mine—a copperhead named Charleton—and, Cricket, Charleton C. has eyes like a little lamb—the darlin'! But he lacks snake eyes. Lives up the brook a piece, he does—and happy as a dandelion.”

Walter whacked the surface of the pool—just for fun. “You want to hear how I knew I had snake eyes, Chester C.?”

“Not really,” said Chester. “For a cricket it is somewhat worrying—”

“I was out in the Meadow one afternoon, just sopping up sun for the fun of it, and this hoity-toity girl come along, with her boyfriend. They shouldn't have been in our lovely, enchanted Old Meadow at all! They should have been in a roller disco! His name was Billy! Billy Sweetie, she called him.”

“What was
her
name?” said Chester. Despite his worries—stiff neck, no home—the cricket was starting to like this story. Walter Water Snake, he decided, was quite a raconteur. (That word means someone who tells stories well. Once in New York the cricket had heard his friend Harry Cat describe an old acquaintance of his—an owl who lived in the church of Saint Mark's in the Bowery—as a marvelous raconteur.)

“Her name was Toots,” said Walter. “Or Tootsie. Billy called her both. She had shoes with high heels! Can you beat that, Crickety Chester—huh? Spiky heels!—to go strolling in the Meadow. Some people! And the clothes she was wearing! Yellow and purple slacks, and a blouse that started out to be green and ended up pink. It looked like ten different kinds of parrots had landed all over her.
And
—ooo, this made me mad!—a belt which suspiciously seemed to me as if it was made of snakeskin!”

“Oh boy,” sighed Chester. He glanced at Simon, to share his sympathy, but found that the turtle was snickering.

“Come to think of it now, Miss Ditsy may have been somewhat nutty on the subject of snakes.” Walt undulated his back in the water. He had a long back to undulate, too. “She had sequins all over that tacky colored blouse of hers. And sequins are just about as close as a human being can get to scales. Anyway”—he flipped himself out like a piece of rope—“I thought I would teach Tootsie Ditsy a lesson.”

“Hee! hee!” Simon Turtle was wheezing in anticipation.

“I reared straight up! And although I'm no cobra, Chester ol' pal, I can rear pretty well—”

“So I see!”

“—and I gave her the old snake eyes!” Walt's head swung high, and then low, over Chester. Then he lounged back in the water comfortably, like someone in a rocking chair. “Well, let me tell you that that girl screamed—she said,
‘Eek!'
”

“I heard it all the way here!” said Simon enthusiastically.

“
‘Eek!'
she screamed. ‘Oh, Billy,
eek!
There's a snake!' And, Chester, the two of them took off like a couple of broken dolls! The last I saw, they were falling all over a bunch of tuffets, scrambling toward the road. So
that
is how I know I've got the genuine snake eyes!” He finished his narrative happily, and poised before Chester. “Terrific—huh?”

“Oh, very good,” Chester had to admit.

“Some might say cockeyed,” Simon puffed through his chuckles.

But Chester, inside himself, sighed. And decided—“Good friends are wherever you're lucky enough to find them.”

FOUR

John Robin and Friends

The morning had made up its mind by now: it was going to be hot. These last days of August sometimes were the sultriest ones of all. The summer seemed to have saved its strength, and then—perhaps warned by a single bright, cool day like September—in one week it burned up all its stored heat. A good time for insects, this time of year was. Chester Cricket and all his friends and relatives—cicadas, locusts, katydids—made music in the fields.

With his special liquid melody—all birds have their own, like signatures—John Robin coasted down through the air and alighted next to Chester. “Hi!”

“Hi, John.”

“Nice day!”

“Yes, very.”

Walter Water Snake raised two eyes suspiciously above the surface of Simon's Pool.

To show how nice and share his pleasure, John sang his song a few more times. But, unlike every other day, his wordless tune brought no joy this morning to Chester Cricket. It hurt him, somehow. Ordinarily, hearing John pour forth his robin's throaty happiness—even show off a little, if he felt extra well—was one of Chester's greatest pleasures. Not now. It reminded him of all that had happened yesterday: that he had no place he could stand and say, “This is mine, my home, this is where I live.”

“Hey, Chester—” John hopped from one foot to the other: a very good sign (among robins, that is)—“I've got good news! Your house—”

“My
stump
—?” hoped Chester, for a moment.

“Oh no. That's gone. Worse even today than last night. What's left of it's all falling down of its own accord.”

No hope. “Oh.”

“Better even!” the robin boasted. “We cleaned out an old squirrel's nest! My Dorothy and I, and whatever kids we could still collect—Jeanette and Joe volunteered—we spent half the night, oh, airing, and dusting, and shaking leaves out—”

“I am
not
going to live in one of Bill Squirrel's nests,” said Chester firmly.

“Not Bill. You know Bill lives up there in the elm tree.” With a flick of his wing John gestured toward a hill that rose above Simon's Pool. It was crowned by a soaring, splendid elm. Bill Squirrel had made his nest there for years. In fact, as John and Chester, and Simon and Walt, looked up, they saw a flash of gray in the leaves—which would have been a whisk of Bill, or else a patch of morning sky. “This is down at my willow,” John went on. “Last summer, or maybe two summers ago—it could have been three—there was this squirrel, whose name was Lou—or was it Luke?—anyway, he built his nest in my willow tree.”

“So this nifty nest is going on four years old?” asked Walt. He sank his head down so that only his eyes were staring gloomily over the water. His expression seemed even more skeptical because of one eye that headed toward the north.

“I think it's only two,” said John Robin reassuringly. “Well—this Lou, or Luke, only stayed one year. He said he was restless, and never would take more than one summer in any particular meadow. Footloose is how he described himself.”

“A bum, in fact,” commented Walt. “At best a hobo.”

“Oh, I wouldn't say that. He just had the itch to travel, that's all. So he put up this thing in my willow tree—”

“Har-har! he-he! and ho-ho!”

John Robin looked blank. Somebody unkind would have said he looked dumb—or at least dumbfounded. “Walt—what are you laughing at?”

“Nothing, Friendly Feathers—nothing. Come on—tell us more about Footloose Lou and his flimsy folly, soon to be known as Chester's Rest, or Cricket's Crack-up, as the case may be.”

John looked at Chester; his eyes were glazed, as if an acorn had dropped on his head.

“Don't mind him, John,” the cricket advised. “What else should I know? About this construction.”

“Well, I'll admit,” John Robin nodded, agreeing with himself, “it isn't exactly like one of Bill's nests. When Bill makes a nest, he makes it to last. But honestly, Chester, I think you'll like it. Dorothy and I were up half the night, patching with twigs all the holes that you might fall through. And the view is really beautiful! It isn't as high as me, of course, but you see the whole Meadow, and the brook down below, with your mashed-up old stump.”

“The heart swells at the thought,” said Walt. “A shack in the sky, overlooking a former home now squashed into ruins.”

“Please come!” John urged. “I'll be a good neighbor. Honest I will.”

“I'm sure you will, John.” Chester shifted from one set of legs to the other. “It's just that—it's just—”

“Just what?” The robin seemed puzzled, and maybe a bit hurt.

Chester sighed. “I guess I have to move somewhere—”

“Come on!” John bobbed up and down beside him. He was all eagerness, if Chester was not. “Let's go right away! I'm dying to show you everything. And the folks are waiting.”

“What folks?”

“Just
come on,
Chester! You'll see. You want me to carry your bell? I will—”

“I think I'll leave it here,” said Chester. “Temporarily.”

“Okay then. Grab on. I'll fly us over.”

“I can fly,” the cricket announced, “when I want to. Don't rush me. Anyway, I'd rather hop.”

“We'll hop,” said John obligingly.

“Hippety-hop to the willow top! Crickety-crack! There and back!” Walter Water Snake sang gaily, and blew bubbles in the pool.

“You're in a good mood today,” said John.

“Always! Always!” Walter declared. “My one and only lovable failing.”

“I'm beginning to know what ‘zany' means,” said Chester to Simon.

“Thought you might,” the turtle replied.

“My only regret”—Walt loomed from the water, but didn't seem all that sad to Chester—“is that Cricket and I won't make music together. However”—he vanished—
whssh!
—and then reappeared—“someday we may.”

“Come on!” John Robin urged again.

With one jump Chester cleared the pool and landed neatly on the bank. “Bye, Simon. Bye, Walter.”