Rascal Read online

  His virtual invisibility was due to the fact that he was lying on a large jaguar-skin rug which Uncle Justus had sent us from Pará, Brazil. The mounted head had realistic glass eyes which Rascal often fondled and sometimes tried to dislodge. The little raccoon blended perfectly into the handsomely marked pelt of the once-ferocious jungle cat.

  When Rascal began to rise from that skin, like the disembodied spirit of the Amazonian jaguar, it startled Theo nearly out of her wits.

  “What in the world is that?”

  “That’s Rascal, my good little raccoon.”

  “You mean it lives in the house?”

  “Only part of the time.”

  “Does it bite?”

  “Not unless you slap him or scold him.”

  “Now get that thing right out of here, Sterling.”

  “Well, all right,” I agreed reluctantly, knowing that Rascal could let himself back in any time he pleased.

  Rascal spent the rest of the day sleeping in the oak tree, but that night when the moon arose, he backed down his tree, padded to the screen door, opened it with ease, and went confidently to our bedroom and crawled in with Theo. My father and I who were sleeping upstairs were awakened by a blood-curdling yell. We rushed downstairs in our pajamas to find Theo standing on a chair, treed by a complacent little raccoon who sat on the floor below blinking up at this crazy human being who was screeching like a fire siren.

  “He always sleeps in this bed,” I explained. “He’s harmless and perfectly clean.”

  “You take that horrid little animal out of the house this minute,” Theo ordered, “and hook the screen door so it can’t possibly get back in.”

  “Well, OK,” I said, “but you’re sleeping in Rascal’s bed. And he has just as many rights around here as you have.”

  “Don’t be impertinent,” Theo said, reassuming her dignity.

  A later episode of this visit is worth recalling. Recently married, Theo treasured her engagement ring, a square-cut diamond of perhaps one carat, mounted in white gold. She had misplaced this ring on several occasions. Once we dug up eighty-five feet of sewer, only to find that she had transferred the ring to another purse.

  True to form, she again lost her ring. She thought she had left it on the wide rim of the lavatory when she went to bed, and that either it had fallen into the drain or had been stolen. No one in Brailsford Junction ever locked his door. Not within memory had there been a robbery.

  We ransacked the house, hunted through the grass and the flower beds, and then made plans for again digging up the sewer. Then a farfetched possibility struck me like a bolt from the blue. Just before dawn on that fateful morning I had heard Rascal and Poe having a terrible fight on the back porch. Before I could shake the sleep from my eyes, the cawing and screaming subsided and I had drowsed off again.

  Feeling as keen as a Scotland Yard detective, I began to weave a theory. On this fourth night of Theo’s visit I had not hooked the screen door. Rascal apparently had slipped into the house, reached the downstairs bedroom, and wisely chosen not to create another scene. He had decided, however, to have a drink of fresh water from the lavatory, had climbed to the window sill and then to the basin, and found it empty. But joy of joys, there on the rim of the lavatory was the prettiest object he had ever seen in his life, a big diamond ring gleaming with blue-white radiance in the pre-dawn light.

  If my theory were sound, Rascal had picked up the ring and taken it to the back porch where Poe-the-Crow had spotted the treasure. This would explain the crow-raccoon fight which had awakened me.

  Quite probably the black thief had won again—at least in the matter of flying away with the loot.

  I had to ask permission of the kindly Reverend Hooton before starting my dusty climb to the seventy-five-foot belfry. The shaft was dark and filled with cobwebs and some of the cleats were loose, making me fear I might fall. But having enlisted in this venture, there could be no turning back. At long last I reached the airy little room at the top, with its widely spaced shutters, furnishing a view of the town and the creek winding toward the river. I stood for a few moments viewing the world below me. Then I touched the big deep-toned bell which had tolled forty-seven times for my mother and would one day toll ninety-nine times for my father.

  Remembering my mission, I began to search the dusty belfry. Behind a pile of discarded hymnals which some dedicated idiot had lugged to this unlikely storage place I found the ragged circle of twigs and leaves and black feathers which Poe-the-Crow called home. As some people keep their money in their mattress, Poe had made his bed even more uncomfortable with a pile of shining junk which overran the nest and spilled across the floor. Here were glassies and steelies and one real agate marble, all of which he had stolen during our marble games. Here was my football whistle, snatched while he hovered just over the line of scrimmage shouting, “What fun! What fun!” Here were scraps of sheet copper, a second key to our Oldsmobile, and, wonder of wonders, Theo’s diamond ring.

  Poe dropped in at about this time, and he didn’t say, “What fun!” He wouldn’t let me pet him, and he cawed and swore at me as though I were the thief and he the honest householder.

  I put several of these stolen articles into my pocket, my best marbles, the second key to our car, my football whistle, and Theo’s ring, of course. But I left many of the shining trinkets, knowing that Poe couldn’t tell sheet copper from a diamond ring. The crow’s raucous criticism followed me all the way down that shaft and out into the sunlight.

  Theo was so pleased at my recovery of her ring that she did not insist on the removal of my canoe from the living room. And she postponed the decision concerning a full-time housekeeper. She merely fed us delightful meals, and, with Jennie’s help, left the house shining clean, with fresh curtains at the windows. Then with a good-by kiss and a wave of her hand she was off again—gallant and beautiful, brave and temperamental—and now no more.

  III: July

  RASCAL had one virtue, rare in human beings, the capacity for gratitude. Feed him a favorite food, say a kind word, and he was your friend.

  This simple approach to the heart of a raccoon produced some odd friendships in our neighborhood. Rascal’s circle included Joe Hanks, the dim-witted janitor of the Methodist Church, who was convinced that the German Lutherans were planning to poison the water supply of Brailsford Junction.

  “Stands to reason, don’t it?” Joe said. “They got the water tower right up there on German Hill behind the Lutheran Church. All they got to do is drop a couple of little poison pills down the air vent and next morning we’ll all wake up dead.”

  Joe was otherwise harmless. He pumped the pipe organ when sober, and let me pump it when he started getting drunk. His secret for winning Rascal’s affection came in his lunchbox. He always gave my raccoon half of one of his jelly sandwiches. Rascal thought Joe was one of the nicest people he had ever met.

  Another friend was Bumblebee Jim Vandevander, the bald, three-hundred-pound son of our equally large washerwoman. Jim arrived every Monday morning pulling a little coaster wagon behind him to pick up our washing and brought it back on Friday, clean, fresh-smelling, and beautifully ironed. On each arrival he gave Rascal a peppermint candy. What more could one ask of a friend?

  Rascal couldn’t, of course, read the calendar or the clock, but he knew almost to the minute when Bumblebee Jim was arriving and always became eager and talkative, anticipating his piece of candy. I finally concluded that raccoons, who do most of their hunting at night, have an extremely acute sense of hearing. Apparently Rascal was aware of the first faint rattle of the coaster wagon far off down the street.

  From all the sounds of summer—the whirr of distant lawn mowers, the singing of the cicadas, the clip-clop of horses’ hoofs, and the orchestration of the birds, Rascal could distinguish and identify, long before I could, the distant approach of the coaster wagon.

  Not all of Rascal’s motives were ulterior. He loved music for its own sake and had definite preferenc
es among the records I played for him on the wind-up Victrola. Wagnerian sopranos hurt his ears. But he would sit, dreamy-eyed, listening to his favorite popular song: “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-winding.” In that ballad nightingales are mentioned.

  I asked my father one morning if we have nightingales in America, or any other bird that sings at night.

  “Not nightingales,” he said, “but we do have whippoorwills, of course.”

  “I’ve never heard a whippoorwill.”

  “Can that be possible? Why, when I was a boy . . .”

  And he was off on a pilgrimage into the past when Wisconsin was still half wilderness, when panthers sometimes looked in through the windows, and the whippoorwills called all night long.

  Thure Ludwig Theodor Kumlien (1819–88) always came into these reminiscences somewhere. He was a great pioneer naturalist, for whom the Kumlien gull, aster, and anemone were named. A contemporary of Thoreau and Audubon and Agassiz, he had been trained at Upsala in Sweden, and had come to southern Wisconsin in the 1840’s, buying eighty acres adjoining the North homestead.

  “Kumlien could start the whippoorwills any night by playing his flute,” my father said. “Far across the fields we heard them, the old man with his flute, his son playing the violin, and hundreds of whippoorwills calling—that’s music to remember.”

  It made me sad that I could not have known Kumlien, and walked the woods with him, learning every bird and flower and insect. I had been born too late, it seemed, even to hear a whippoorwill.

  My father looked at me for a moment as though he were really seeing me.

  “Let’s take the day off,” he said. “There must be a pair of whippoorwills somewhere around here.”

  Those were rare and gala days when my father took me rambling. While I slapped together a few cheese sandwiches, and packed half a dozen bottles of cold root beer and pop in the lunch basket, my father drove downtown to hang a sign on the office door:

  Gone For The Day

  He came back with the windshield down, the top back, and his white curls blowing in the wind. He was wearing a pair of motor goggles and looked very handsome and dashing, I thought. I put on my goggles too. Rascal, of course, wore his permanently. He perched between us on the back of the seat, gazing rapturously ahead.

  We had sold the old Model T, and now were driving a huge seven-passenger Oldsmobile which my father had accepted in one of his numerous real estate swaps. It was rather large for the two of us, but we needed that big back seat for the occasions when we took Wowser with us. The Saint Bernard would never lie down in the car. He lumbered from one side to the other, peering forward with worried face and furrowed brow, occasionally woofing a deep-throated warning. But Wowser couldn’t go today. He would frighten too many birds. The three of us were leaving him behind.

  We were a happy trio as my father pulled down the gas lever and roared from low into second, and from second into high. We took the Newville road which led toward Lake Koshkonong, one of the largest lakes in Wisconsin, which is formed by a widening in Rock River, and deepened by the dam at Indian Ford. In former years it had been covered in the shallows by hundreds of acres of wild rice which had attracted thousands of waterfowl and migrating bands of Indians. There were still many flocks of wild ducks and geese each spring and fall, and big pickerel and wall-eyed pike for which we sometimes trolled from a rowboat.

  We swung upstream from Newville toward Taylor’s point where an old resort hotel called the Lake House then stood. There were few cottages on Koshkonong in those days, merely groves and meadows, and miles of sand beaches. Several creeks entered shallow bays where great blue herons waded stealthily, striking as swiftly as a water snake to seize and swallow small fish and frogs.

  We took the Lake House road, and followed a grassy lane to the limestone cliff jutting into the lake, a promontory crowned with white clover and shaded by magnificent old trees. My father set the emergency brake, and I chocked the wheels with large stones to be sure that the Oldsmobile would not bounce from that seventy-five-foot precipice into the lake.

  Then all three of us went running out to the very tip of the point as though we were a little mad with happiness—as indeed we were. This was our very own lake, filling our life to the brim. We had each been born almost within the sound of its waves. Here we had spent our separate boyhoods. Here we fished and swam and canoed and searched for arrowheads.

  The view from the point was superb. We could see the outlet of the lake into Rock River, downstream to our right, and ten miles away to our left the inlet in the blue haze.

  My father’s memories and mine differed, of course, for he had known these shores when they were heavily forested and he had visited the Indian wigwams on Crab Apple point, Thibault’s point, and Charlie’s bluff. At the age of twelve he had fallen slightly in love with a pretty Indian girl, so light-skinned and delicate of feature that my father was sure she was more than half French. The Indians had moved on, like the waterfowl they hunted, and with them went the girl, whom he never saw again.

  Most prominent of all the points was a dark, lush projection which was the delta made by Koshkonong Creek—perhaps the wildest bit of woods and water in the entire region.

  I had been careless in supervising Rascal, and I looked just in time to see him disappearing down a crooked ravine that angled through the limestone toward the lake. It was a moist and pleasant cleft in the rock with wild columbine blooming from every crevice, and it led by a devious and dangerous route to a little cave named for the Indian chief, Black Hawk. Rascal was only exploring, but I feared the small raccoon might take a dangerous tumble at the edge of the precipice.

  “I’m going after him,” I shouted to my father.

  “Well, be careful, son,” he said.

  He was a casual parent who never tried to stop me from risking any hazard, even when I swam through the floodgates at Indian Ford. He knew I could climb like a squirrel and swim like an otter. So he had no worries about me now.

  The little ravine, nicked into the cliff, was steep and slippery. But the chase was swift, for there, well ahead of me, was that ringed tail, disappearing around one turn after another.

  “Come back here, Rascal,” I shouted sternly. But the raccoon paid no attention. I pulled a sugar lump from my pocket, usually a successful recourse. But Rascal was having none of it. He did not hesitate a moment until he reached the sheer cliff with a twenty-foot drop to the cave’s entrance, toward which he peered down eagerly.

  I trilled in our mutual language and he responded. But over he went, scrambling backward down that wall of rock. I reached the edge a moment too late to stop him; and I could only hold my breath until he arrived safely at the cave.

  There was nothing for it now but to inch my own way down that last twenty feet, catching a toe hold or finger hold wherever possible between the strata of limestone. In a few minutes, however, I too was safely at the entrance, which offered crawl space to the inner room.

  It wasn’t a large cave. But, by tradition, it had furnished Black Hawk a hiding place while he was being pursued by Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and other young soldiers during the Black Hawk War. The episode was probably a myth, but the boys of that area who scrambled down to the small cavern believed every word of the story, and shuddered to think that the ghost of Black Hawk might be lurking there in the gloom.

  The sandy floor of this cool hideaway was large enough for a small campfire and two or three campers. And there was a convenient ledge four feet above the floor, which furnished sleeping space for an uncomfortable night wrapped in blankets.

  When my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I saw Rascal. He was prowling along the shelf of rock trying to reach the tiny, gleaming stalactites which hung from the low roof of the cave. He was reaching up with his eager little hands when I caught him.

  I had no desire to punish him. I merely held him close. And Rascal told me in every way he could that I was completely forgiven for having cornered and captured hi
m.

  My father greeted us as we came safely up the cliff. He had been certain that I would rescue the raccoon, and then would survive the climb. Living much in the past, and never in the worrisome future, his outlook was so tranquil that he drifted pleasantly from 1862 to 1962—seven months short of a full century—with very little sense of personal or international tragedy. Curiously enough, this lifelong detachment accompanied an excellent university education, a vast store of disorganized knowledge, and a certain amount of charm.

  “Whippoorwills,” he explained, “are seldom seen in the daylight. They crouch on fence rails or the limbs of trees. If they flutter up for a moment they resemble giant Cecropia moths. We won’t find them until after dusk, and that gives us many hours.”

  With the whole day ahead of us, we took our swimming trunks and the lunch basket and started down the long sloping path to the beach. My father was the acknowledged expert on the Indian trails of southern Wisconsin.

  “This was a Fox-Winnebago-Sac trail,” my father said. “It was used by Black Hawk and his warriors and by their pursuers. These large burial mounds were probably made by much earlier tribes.”

  Along these trails were to be found bird-points, hunting arrows, skinning knives, and scrapers, mostly of flint. In my father’s fine collection there were also black and gleaming obsidian spear points, some of them eight inches long, red calumets transported from Minnesota, and copper ornaments from the Lake Superior region.

  As we progressed downward toward the beach, Rascal trundled along obediently, panting in the manner of dogs and raccoons when they are hot. The sight of glistening water ahead, cool and inviting, increased his gait to a gallop.

  I paused to examine his tracks which made a design like beadwork on an Indian quiver. The handprints and footprints resembled those of a very small human baby. Where Rascal had been walking, the imprint of the retreating left hand was paired with that of the advancing right foot, and vice versa. But where he had broken into a gallop, all four tracks tended to bunch.