That summer an army of crickets started
a war with my father. They picked a fight the minute they invaded our cellar.
Dad didn’t care for bugs much more than Mamma, but he could tolerate a few
spiders and assorted creepy crawlers living in the basement. Every farm house
had them. A part of rustic living, and something you needed to put up with if
you wanted the simple life.
He told Mamma: Now that were living
out here, you can’t be jerking your head and swallowing your gum over what’s
plain natural, Ellen. But she was a city girl through and through and had no
ears when it came to defending vermin. She said a cricket was just a noisy
cockroach, just a dumb horny bug that wouldn’t shut up. She said in the city
there were blocks of buildings overrun with cockroaches with no way for people
to get rid of them. No sir, no way could she sleep with all that chirping going
on; then to prove her point she wouldn’t go to bed. She drank coffee and smoked
my father’s cigarettes and she paced between the couch and the TV. Next morning
she threatened to pack up and leave, so Dad drove to the hardware store and
hurried back. He squirted poison from a jug with a spray nozzle. He sprayed the
basement and all around the foundation of the house. When he was finished he
told us that was the end of it.
But what he should have said
was: This is the beginning, the beginning of our war, the beginning of our
destruction. I often think back to that summer and try to imagine him delivering
a speech with words like that, because for the next fourteen days mamma kept
finding dead crickets in the clean laundry. Shed shake out a towel or a sheet
and a dead black cricket would roll across the linoleum. Sometimes the cat would
corner one, and swat it around like he was playing hockey, then carry it away in
his mouth. Dad said swallowing a few dead crickets wouldn’t hurt as long as the
cat didn’t eat too many. Each time Mamma complained he told her it was only
natural that we’d be finding a couple of dead ones for a while.
Soon live crickets started showing up in the kitchen and bathroom. Mamma
freaked because she thought they were the dead crickets come back to haunt, but
Dad said these was definitely a new batch, probably coming up on the pipes. He
fetched his jug of poison and sprayed beneath the sink and behind the toilet and
all along the baseboard until the whole house smelled of poison, and then he
sprayed the cellar again, and then he went outside and sprayed all around the
foundation leaving a foot-wide moat of poison.
For a couple of
weeks we went back to finding dead crickets in the laundry. Dad told us to keep
a sharp look out, He suggested that we’d all be better off to hide as many as we
could from mamma. I fed a few dozen to the cat who I didn’t like because he
scratched and bit for no reason. I hoped the poison might kill him so we could
get a puppy. A couple of weeks later, when both live and dead crickets kept
turning up, he emptied the cellar of junk. Then he burned a lot of bundled
newspapers and magazines which he said the crickets had turned ’into
nests.
He stood over that fire with a rake in one hand and a
garden hose in the other. He wouldn’t leave it even when Mamma sent me out to
fetch him for supper. He wouldn’t leave the fire, and she wouldn’t put supper on
the table. Both my brothers were crying. Finally she went out and got him
herself. And while we ate, the wind lifted some embers onto the wood pile. The
only gasoline was in the lawn mowers fuel tank but that was enough to create an
explosion big enough to reach the house. Once the roof caught, there wasn’t much
anyone could do. |
