Chester Cricket's New Home (7 page)

“And that reminds me, Turtle-urtle!” Walt knifed through the water, next to him. “There's something I want to discuss with you.”

SIX

Home Life—and Too Much, in Fact

And that afternoon, to the frisky delight of everyone who got caught in it, there
was
a brief shower—a downpour that lasted just long enough to rinse the day, what was left of it, and hang it out in the sunset to dry. Walter Water Snake and Simon Turtle barely noticed the rain. They were watery people and both of them enjoyed basking in either sunshine or shower. But not today. There was too much to talk about—plans to be laid—decisions taken. By twilight, they had made up their minds. Yet the stars found them still awake—too excited to sleep.

At sunup, after a fitful rest that lasted no more than a couple of hours, they both were awake and hard at work. Simon was busy, huffing and puffing, over and under and around his log, and Walt was dashing back and forth in the water, half out of sheer enthusiasm, but partly to clear debris away.

They both were so preoccupied that only by chance did Walt happen to look up and see on the bank—“Why, can this be? No, surely not. He went off yesterday to a cozy cottage, a lovely lair, a beautiful burrow. Oh no! But yes! It really is! It's—”

“Hi, Walter,” said Chester, who was just too tired to be amused or angry or peeved, or anything else at Walter's way of speaking.

Walt raced like a cutter across the pool. “What are
you
doing here?”

The cricket shrugged—but only one shoulder, things seemed so hopeless. “I don't have any place else to go.” He glanced around—at the log, the pool. “What are you two doing? What's all this stuff?”

“Why—why”—Walter Water Snake seemed at a loss for words, which was very unlike him—“we're making boats!”

“Boats?”

“Aren't we, Simon?” Walter demanded. “Making boats—”

“Oh, boats! To be sure!” the turtle agreed. “Comes over us every August, it does—this urge to build boats.”

“Look at this.” Walter nosed a piece of bark toward the bank. The pool's surface was littered with chips of wood and bark. “This elegant sliver of bark is a boat.” He gentled it around and around, then out the channel that led to the brook, where the current took it. “And there she goes! Away down our own bucolic stream—but soon to be joined, after travels through numerous little towns, to the ever-flowing, majestic Connecticut River—and then—O grandeur!—with a whoosh and a rush and sploosh, the glory of Long Island Sound! Just think of it, Cricket! The poetry of it—the beauty! It makes the heart swell.”

“It makes the head ache, the way you describe it,” said Chester.

But Walter, whose mind was flying high, would not be stopped. “And along with toy boats when the fit is upon us, we make—we make”—he glanced around, discovered a chunk of floating wood, which didn't look all that big to Chester, and slithered up on top of it—“we make
boat
boats!” And promptly capsized, which wasn't a serious accident, for a water snake.

“Very impressive,” said Chester, when Walter came up, spluttering joyfully.

“Just watch! Just watch!” The snake tried again, and this time he managed to stay afloat. By using the end of his tail like an oar, he even was able to paddle himself in leisurely circles around the pool. “Just look! Am I grace? I am athletic grace! I am poetry in motion!”

“You're crazy,” said Simon.

“Now you, Crunchy Cricket!” Walter beached his homemade canoe below Chester. “Jump on!”

“Oh, Walt,” Chester groaned. “I don't feel like a boat ride.”

“See these fangs?” The water snake reared up, made his head level with Chester, and showed the cricket two really astonishing, long, curved teeth.

“Very scary,” said Chester.

“You hop on my pleasure craft before I sink 'em into you!”

“Oh, all right.” Chester did as he was told. And found that the boat was much more suitable for a cricket than for an overactive water snake. “You wouldn't really bite me, Walter, would you?”

“No, never. Never!” Walt shook his head. “But I have to pull rank sometimes to remind myself that I'm terrifying. At least that's what some dopey humans think. There”—he sank to his nose and rocked Chester gently on the rhythmical billows that flowed back and forth across Simon's Pool—“isn't that comfy, now?”

Chester stretched himself out. In fact, it felt so delectable, he stretched each leg out separately. “Quite nice,” he admitted. “Delightful, I must say. Very restful.”

“You look as if you need a rest.” Walt peered at Chester, examining him—very doctorish. His beady eyes, if only they behaved themselves, were highly scientific.

“I didn't sleep a wink,” yawned Chester.

“More birds?”

“No birds.”

“Then elephants? Zebras? Kangaroos?” Walter searched for unusual animals, and found the strangest ones of all. “
Chipmunks,
perhaps?”

“I didn't dare fall asleep,” confessed Chester. “Emmy and Hen said I snored.”

“Poor
cricket!
” Walter exclaimed. He found a position that suited him and just settled back to relax. Walter could do that with water—just turn it into furniture that fitted him any way he wished. “Let's hear it all. Just start from Stump One.”

“Stump One is squashed,” said Chester. “I'll start from when we left yesterday. Well—” The deep breath he drew now—the breath to tell all—was a little bit sadder than the one he had drawn just the day before. “We scurried on home, with the two of them urging me please to keep up—it was going to rain. So then we got there. And oh, Walter—oh, Simon—you just ought to see their lawn!”

“But what about Uncle?” Simon asked.

“Oh, Uncle—I forgot,” said the cricket. “He's a grand old rosebush—he really is. Very casual, very easygoing. Just lets himself climb and spread as he wants, every which way. Very informal he is. And believe you me!—Uncle Rosebush is absolutely the last informal soul that I saw yesterday! 'Cause behind good old Uncle—”

“I see it coming!” caroled Walter. “Behind good old Uncle, the chip and the munk have their lawn.”

“Do they
ever!
” said Chester. “And are they ever proud of it! I have to admit, though, it's beautiful—that is, if you like grass so well tended it has to be treated like fragile green glass. You know that golf course, Walter? South of the Meadow?”

“I know it,” said Walter. “But I don't golf much. Play a lot of tennis, but—”

“
Anyway
—the chipmunks' lawn would make the neatest green on that golf course look like a patch of untended prairie. They bite it once a week.”

“The chipmunks bite their lawn?” This bit of information astonished even Walt Water Snake. He keeled over backwards and disappeared. And stayed under for quite a long time.

“Walter?” Chester tapped the water. “Walt Water Snake?”

“You called?” The snake popped up again and rested his head on the chunk of wood—now Chester's boat—where the cricket was floating. “Do you mean to tell me, Cracklin' Cricket, that Emmy and Hen chew on their lawn?”

“It's the only way they can keep it trimmed just so. And ‘just so,' they told me, is how they like it. Not too long, not too short—”

—“just so.” Walter saw it all. “Oh boy! oh boy! Oh me! oh my!”

“I was invited to join them next Thursday, biting the lawn. That's when they do it: every Thursday at ten o'clock. The weather permitting, I suppose.”

“The sweetness of it! The tenderness!” Walter saw even more. “Just think—like two little brown sheepies, munching away. Next Christmas, somebody should give them a doll's-house lawnmower.”

“I wanted to see this fabulous turf up close,” said Chester, “but as I was bending down, they both squeaked at me, ‘Please don't—' ‘—step on the grass!' And honestly, Walter, my feet aren't really all that big. I wouldn't have left a dent in their lawn. But to hear the way they were hollering, anybody'd suspect that I was a June bug wearing wooden shoes. I hopped quick back on the path, I can tell you.”

“They have a path?” Walter asked.

“A beautiful path! Made out of twenty-six perfect white stones, curving up to their front door. I know there are twenty-six, too, because they told me so—twice. It took them six months to find just the right stones, in the brook. They have to match exactly, you see.

“Imagine! Twenty-six perfect white stones,” echoed Walter. “It sounds just like a fairy tale! I'm surprised they didn't use bread crumbs.”

“The birds would have eaten the bread crumbs,” said Chester. “And besides”—he cleared his throat—“you can't polish bread crumbs.”

“They
don't!
” Walter exclaimed.

“Every Wednesday. Weather permitting. At three in the afternoon. They said so. With nice dry little ferns that they save especially for polishing.”

“Could you get me an invitation?”

“To polish the path? You
want
one—?”

“Har har.” Walt rocked Chester's boat so vigorously that the cricket almost fell off.

“Oh, Walter—you get me so mad sometimes,” said Chester—and almost meant it, too—as he tried to keep from falling in.

Like many snakes, Walter Water Snake could do with his wiggling what most animals—and a few human beings, the gifted ones—can do with their hands: he could express the most subtle and wide-ranging emotions. The hypnotic swaying, just now, of his whole upper half above the water suggested admiration and awe—and perhaps a little twitch of doubt. “If the yard and the path were so perfect”—he sighed and looked toward heaven—“the mind boggles to think what the house must be like!”

“It's beautiful!”

Walter loomed over Chester eagerly. “Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!”

“Everything”—the cricket paused—“is in place.”

The looming became more impatient. “Well?
Well?
”

“Well, that's it. Everything is just so. I felt—that is, even before they told me not to—that I really shouldn't touch anything.”

“They told you to keep your feet off their house?”

“Not in so many words,” Chester tried to explain. “But I guess I'm just a touchy person. You know, Walter, these front feet of mine”—he wiggled two feet to demonstrate—“they're almost as agile as hands. And I do like to handle things, too.”

“I don't have hands
or
feet!” said Walter. “And I get by.”

“Well, of course,” agreed Chester. “But if you do have a hand or a foot—”

“—or a fang—”

“—or a fang—you might as well use it, is my philosophy. Well, not the fang, exactly.”

“On special occasions, I use my fangs!” boasted Walter. “Like building boats.” He winked at Simon. (Or would have, if he'd had an eyelid.)

“Anyway, I like to touch things!” Chester said. “I like to pick things up and hold them close and look at them. You get the feel of the world that way. But when I picked up the rose blossom—”

“
What
blossom?”

“It's one of Uncle's most beautiful blossoms. They saved it from last spring. In the middle of the living room—they call it the living room, although Henry sleeps there, the room just inside the door—in there they've got this big table. It's made of a section of branch, gnawed smooth on each side. And, Walter, I mean
smooth!
What those chipmunks can do with their teeth is amazing.”

“Little dental homemakers, they are,” Walt observed.

“Yes, and right smack in the center—the centerpiece—of this very carefully gnawed maple table is Uncle's loveliest, biggest blossom. In a tasteful arrangement of four green leaves.”