A Rain of Frogs 

Lucy and the Mouse

from the novel Midwife in the Tire Swing, a work in progress

Cat is a presence in the Hobart house. Not a presence to be spoken of in everyday goings-on, she festers just under the surface, behind the pale faded cabbage roses of the front hall wallpaper. Overstated roses—great showy heads in full flower, big as dinnerplates—cowered yellowly beneath a sickly overlay of tobacco resin that coated everything. These were cigar and cigarette exhalations; the Hobart men were not pipe smokers. And behind the poisonous wallpaper the spirit of Catherine Armstrong Hobart settled in to wait.

“Jesse Ventura,” said Lucian Hobart, known as Lucy. A cat that walked at his feet looked up questioningly. “A wrestler,” said Lucy. “He was governor of some state once. Minnesota—Wisconsin, I think. Could be South Dakota.” Lucy paused his walker at the edge of the state road—just enough off the asphalt, on the pea-sized gravel of the shoulder—so that if he was hit by a passing car, he could sue and win.

“Wha’d they say about South Dakota? You know that, Molly?”

The cat rubbed affectionately against one large, red wheel. “Hell with the fires gone out. That’s what they said—some general in the Indian wars.” He stumbled and caught himself. One of his wheels was stuck in a gully wash. “Nice. Shit.”

Lucy Hobart was 92 years old and expected to be feeble. His walker was an appalling construction but he had come to love it. It had four ball-bearing bright red eight-inch wheels that swung on universal pivots; big enough to get him out of anything but this one particular sinkhole it would seem. The student engineers at Willipaq Valley Vocational Technical Institute had designed it. They had a CAD-CAM program installed on their office computer with an add-on for devices to assist the halt and lame. This particular program was made available by the Department of Agriculture in the hope future county extension officers would encourage farmers to get more creative while planning construction. The old-time outbuildings rotted from the ground up.

“God damn it, Molly—that’s the way things are supposed to rot,” said Lucy to the cat. “From the ground up. Look at me. When the banks foreclose, they like the steel-frame buildings.” These could be disassembled and carted off on flat-bed semis to a fresh location after the inevitable auction.

“The value of Pi. Twenty-two sevenths. That’s how they taught it.” This was a game he played. Lucy Hobart practiced life by remembering ephemera. With the arrival of his much younger wife’s senile dementia, he was uncomfortable with his absentmindedness.

“Jesse Ventura. Just another name. I do recall a picture of him in his wrestling getup. With a nice blond with her boobs out.” The cat was a Burmese shorthair as far as anyone could tell. She stalked small things in tall grass, ate dry kibble and was a vegetarian by choice. Sixteen mousetraps hung by strings from the handlebars of Lucy’s walker.

“He was a Navy SEAL.”

The cat burraowed.

“You and my wife. They call you the same thing. Cat, that’s her name.” Molly, the Burmese shorthair, studiously ignored him. “Short for Catherine.” No response.

“Fucking machine.” Lucy gave a yank and the walker came free. He bitched about it, but admired its oversized tires and doggedly used the walker in sight of the house to quiet his wife who, in her infrequent visits in reality, was a caring person and solicitous of her husband’s well-being.

Young Lucy Hobart, age ten, held a dead mouse up to the light—warily, by the tail. The mouse's eyes were still bright and beady and only beginning to glaze over. Lucy raised the corpse slowly, at arm's length, until they were eye-to-eye. The mouse swung, a tiny dead pendulum, as the first blast went off. The mouse's eyes held a look of determined surprise, as if at the explosion. If the summons of death had not interrupted it, it would have got away with the peanut butter bait. It had struggled briefly, dragging the trap behind it as best it could with a broken neck, leaving a brownish-red smear of blood and bait on a hayloft joist. Death happens for a reason, Lucy had heard that in Rev. Havermeyer's homilies. He was the reason today. That he was a murderer did not mean that he and his victim could not at least exercise some civility after the fact. “Hiya, little fella,” said Lucy. There was another explosion from down by the road. The barn shook.

The ridge on which the Hobart house perched had over the decades been visited by successive detonations. This was late in 1928—there was money aplenty for public works—and the State of Maine, from its marbled hallways and walnut-paneled chambers in far Augusta, had decided it was time again to widen the state roads. The roads and the bridges of the State of Maine, like the Federal mails, always went through. This was an article of faith. A much needed faith.

A hayloft in high August, its air immediately unbreathable with hay dust. Blinded by the dust squall, Lucy lost his balance. He clung and swayed with his arms wrapped around a crossbeam thirty feet above the floor. Lucy Hobart dangled, feet flailing. The mouse was gone. What remained of his catch was a line of string wrapped around his wrist. At the end of the string hung an empty mousetrap. He struggled for breath in the oppressive air.

Lucy Hobart regained his perch on the hayloft beam. He ran down to where the horse-drawn road graders stood idle and hoped for further explosions. There were many. The next day he set out more traps.

The ridge on which the Hobart house perched was blasted by successive dynamite charges. This was late in 1928, there was money aplenty for public works and the State of Maine, from its marbled hallways and walnut paneled chambers in far Augusta, had decided it was time to widen the state roads. The roads and the bridges of the State of Maine, like the Federal mails, always went through. This was an article of faith. A much needed faith. The Sunday Sermon Board out front of the Willipaq (3rd) Baptist proclaimed: “Reason is the Enemy of Faith.” Pastor Brooks Havermeyer used the same outline for all of his homilies so there was never any need to change the lettering on the sign. There was faith aplenty in the railroads—transit as the harbinger of Progress. And in roads as in railroads, Progress was manifest in fattened wallets for the journeymen and burgesses of the hamlets along the right-of-way.

Carved from the shattered, sifted basaltic heart of Maine, the state road was called the “Airline,” not for the biplanes and barnstormers that might follow its twistings along the upland corridor of muskeg bogs and hollows fifty miles from the coast, but for its supposed healthier atmosphere, mountain air free from the questionable miasmas of the coast. “Sea air’ll kill you,” they said, and so it did. The lowlands were home to gurgling lungs and early death—any check through the Army medical records for World War I would reveal that fully two-thirds of Willipaq's strapping Maine farm boys failed their induction physicals because of bad lungs.

Eighty-two years later Lucy recalled the explosions, the lost mouse. Boom, that was how explosions were supposed to be written down. Young Lucy was an avid reader and knew this.

“Boom. Got that?” The cat had sprawled onto her hindquarters. She looked up from worrying an imaginary insect perpetrator.

But this had been more of a Thump, felt through the soles of his feet rather than heard, and impossible to write down. It was the percussive bass note of two empty freight cars hitting the deadhead down at the end of the line. The yard hands on the Wytopitlock and Danforth called this procedure “humping,” and seemed to derive much pleasure in telling this to him. “You’ll be humping someday, boy, can't start too early.” Lucy had believed they recognized a fellow railroader in him; there was career potential in Lucian Hobart, aged ten.

Eighty-two years later Lucy would visit the rusting remains of an old car. It was under a blue tarp piled with baled hay and weighted with stones. The Chevy 6 roadster was the only memorial to Elliot, Elliot who had died falling off a ladder. “Painting the eaves. Huh. A heart attack and he drops forty feet like a bag of hammers.” Not a manly way to die, not the movie way, spread fingers over a sudden bullet hole. Fade to black. The Chevy 6 rumbleseat roadster was where Elliot had been conceived. “We were courting, that’s what they called it then. Courting. We did it in the rumbleseat twisted up like a couple of circus contortionists. We had bruises for weeks.”

Catherine Armstrong Hobart dozed in her chair; Hollywood Squares blared unattended on the television. Lucy shuffled over to mute the set and bent to kiss his wife on the forehead. “True I talk of dreams which are the children of an idle mind.” One eye opened; there was the flutter of an eyelash indicating that life yet lingered within.

“Bet you though I had died,” Cat said.

“No such luck, my old and rare. You were breathing. The TV was on. You will never die as long as the TV is on.”

In a lucid moment Cat asked for a ride in the Chevy roadster, “Top down—get some air. It's always so stuffy in here.” His wife had adjusted her lap quilt and turned from her always-on television.

“Yard rot,” he had said. Cat was time-traveling along an event horizon of young lust and tangled limbs plump with the suppleness of youth. Cat wanted a repeat performance, an encore of impregnation.

“The car will have yard rot. Oil’s got 3000 on it, or did when I put it out behind the barn. But that's fifty years gone, Cat. It's varnish by now.”

“You can fix it, Lucy. You are so clever. All the books you read.”

“I'll study up,” he said. “Elliot, he is dead. Still dead,” Lucy told her. Cat seemed satisfied and went back to her TV.

It took him over an hour, but Lucy got the hay bales cleared away from two sides of the car and arranged into a row—to the south, dragged out of the shadow of the barn to dry in the sun. In his own private mourning for his dead son, he changed the hay piled on the Chevy each year in the fall. This hay could dry out and be put back, too early yet for fresh. He lifted a corner of the tarp. “Jesus Christ.” Death billowed forth—the stench of rotted flesh, overripe with damp, dark, and forgetfulness. Something had died in there and it wasn't Elliot. Lucy got himself away into the barn where he had hunted mice and rats as a boy. He slid the hanging doors shut behind him and was thrown to the floor by a blast of pain.

“Interesting,” said Lucy Hobart. He felt around in his pants pockets for the bottle of nitro pills as he checked his vital signs. Pain from one knee—deep throbbing bone pain, heart galloping in his ears. Nothing new. He breathed in, then out, monitoring his body. His questing fingers discovered the tiny vial of tinier pills. He broke the seal with a large jagged thumbnail; he had never taken nitroglycerine.

“At an advanced age, like yours,” the doctor said while writing the prescription, “Angina goes with the turf. Believe me. Carry them; you'll thank me.” Lucy folded the prescription then folded it again and slid it between two brass rivets into a coverall pocket. The doc caught him at the door. “You will need a knee replacement. I've called the orthopedist; here's his card. You feel pain. There is a reason for pain. Pain is God's megaphone.” He patted the faded pocket where Lucy had put his prescription. “Take one. Ten minutes pass and you still have pain, take another one. Ten minutes after that and you are still having episodes of pain, take a nitro plus an aspirin—full strength, none of those baby aspirins—and get yourself to the hospital, you’re in trouble.”

“Knee replacement. That's surgery.”

“Well, yes.” Doc Harmon looked at him like he had just hobbled down the ramp of an alien spaceship.

Lucy opened the vial and poured the pills out onto his palm where he considered them. He rotated his hand and allowed the pills to dribble away to the dirt floor. He stopped his doctor's breathing exercise—two in, one out—the bouquet of whatever it was that had chosen to die in the Chevy 6 had penetrated the barn. Sucking in a lungful of fresh air, he returned to the stinking Chevy 6. He toppled a fieldstone cairn that anchored one corner of the tarpaulin and rolled the stones aside. The smell had by now lessened somewhat. Maybe he was getting used to it.

Lucy flipped the tarp. In the car, wedged behind the steering wheel, was the carcass of a deer. That a deer should choose a mothballed Chevy 6 as its final resting place seemed so natural, so right in a grander scheme of things, that it did not occur to Lucy to question it.

“Hiya, deer,” he said. The odor of decomposition had by now mixed with the laundry-fresh smells of ice melt and fallow fields bursting with new life and the coming of spring. Lucy circled the car and filled his lungs. The rotting corpse’s smell was not unpleasant. On the far side of the Chevy 6 where the baled hay was still piled undisturbed from last year, some bales were broken, scattered. The deer had tunneled in, attracted by some redolence of sex, seeped into the upholstery. Or escaping an attack by coyotes, maybe. Lucy checked the seat covers. Yep, they had been nibbled at. He looked the corpse in its face. A four-point buck, its eyes gone and its flesh hanging loosely where last fall's maggots had bred and fled. Lucy breathed in, deeply, of a distant and unthreatening death mixed with salt air from the clam flats a mile away. The deer's antlers had gotten caught in the steering wheel.