Mean Margaret Read online

  “You know, Phoebe,” he said. “I was thinking you might come and live here.”

  “Here!”

  They were sitting in his inherited chairs. Fred got out of his and knelt in front of her. “As my wife. Could you conceive of doing me such an honor?”

  Phoebe wasn’t caught completely off guard. Things had seemed to be heading in this direction. And though she did worry about the kids, about how well Babette would make out raising them on her own, she knew it was time for her to start a life and family of her own. She and Fred seemed perfectly suited to each other, and this old-fashioned proposal touched her deeply. Nothing could have been more flattering than having a woodchuck with such neat and formal habits kneel on the floor this way.

  “Yes, I could conceive of it,” she said, looking into his eyes. “In fact, I think the honor would be mine.”

  Hearing this, Fred felt just the way the world had looked that morning: fresh and new. He stood up and dusted himself off. Phoebe stood as well and, smiling her bright smile, opened her arms. But hugging mussed your fur terribly, so Fred opted for sitting down on the sofa and patting the place beside him.

  After a confused moment, Phoebe sat, too.

  “You’ve made me a very happy woodchuck, Phoebe.”

  So saying, Fred put an arm around her, just as the fat, ugly human being he’d seen from the tree had put an arm around his fat, ugly wife. And in a moment Phoebe leaned her head on his shoulder, just as the fat woman had leaned hers on her husband’s shoulder.

  Closing his eyes, Fred saw a rainbow.

  Nine

  Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, the fat, ugly human beings, lived in a town about a mile from Fred’s burrow. They had nine children. The five oldest were fairly well behaved, but the last four were terrors—especially the youngest. When Mrs. Hubble got home from her job at the post office and saw the jam stains on the walls and her husband dozing in front of the TV, she would sigh and think, “If only we’d stopped at five.”

  Life had been sunnier back then. In those days, Mr. Hubble had been a carpenter and Mrs. Hubble had stayed home. But their appetites had gotten the better of them. For breakfast they had syrupy pancakes and bacon. For lunch, ham sandwiches plastered with mayonnaise, corn chips, and chocolate shakes. For dinner, pot roast with potatoes and gravy. For dessert, cupcakes or sundaes, and later, in front of the TV, popcorn slathered in melted butter. The sad day came when Mr. Hubble, the biggest eater of the bunch, could no longer climb ladders without breaking the rungs. He lost his job.

  When their car was repossessed, Mrs. Hubble took her job sorting mail. Mr. Hubble stayed home and guzzled beer, only budging to go to the supermarket or his cousin’s pig farm, where they got cut-rate hams. By this time there were eight children, and while they all had names, beer drinking made Mr. Hubble so fuzzy-headed he simply numbered them. He called the two youngest boys Six and Eight and the youngest girl Seven. Six, Seven, and Eight were very undisciplined. They never said “Please” and never passed the rolls and butter.

  In the old days Mrs. Hubble had been merely chunky. Raising children was strenuous work. But all she did at the post office was sit, and though her waist size couldn’t quite match Mr. Hubble’s, she expanded considerably. One day she stepped on the scale she used to weigh large packages and was appalled to see she’d put on fifteen pounds. She cut out bacon and cupcakes, but a few weeks later she found she’d put on five more pounds. Her heart sank. There was only one possible explanation: she must be pregnant again.

  Their ninth child was a little girl, and her name was Sally, but Mr. Hubble just called her Nine. By the time she was two years old, Nine put Six, Seven, and Eight to shame in the bad-table-manners department. Leaning out of her high chair, she snatched things right off her brothers’ and sisters’ plates. If they tried to take the food back, she howled—a howl so piercing they all had to cover their ears. As soon as they did, she would grab more. She ate so much that she usually tottered over if she tried to walk, so she preferred to crawl. As for talking, she could babble a few phrases, but she rarely did. Howling was more effective.

  Nine made her brothers’ and sisters’ lives so miserable that one day Six and Seven and Eight, who had to share a room with her, called a secret meeting in their tree hut in the backyard.

  “We’ve got to do something about the monster,” said Six.

  “Rat poison?” Eight suggested.

  “We’d have to buy it,” Six said. “They’d trace it to us.”

  “There’s the axe,” Seven said.

  “Too messy,” said Six.

  But they finally hatched a plan.

  One night early in June, after their mother dragged herself up to bed and their beery father dozed off in front of the TV, Six snuck down to the kitchen for a banana, peeled it, and met Seven and Eight back upstairs. The three of them tiptoed over to Nine’s crib, shoved the whole banana into her mouth, and carted her out of the house.

  They headed straight out of town and passed the last house before Nine managed to swallow the last of the banana and let out a “Whaaaa!” Down a country road they went, past a greenhouse glimmering in the moonlight. Before reaching the pig farm, they cut across a meadow, through some trees, and dumped their cargo in a ditch. Six, Seven, and Eight then skedaddled home.

  Poor Nine was in shock. It was the first time she’d ever been dumped in a ditch in the dark. How could her brothers and sister do this to her? She howled at the top of her lungs, but for once her howling had no effect.

  After a while she clambered out of the ditch and crawled along in her nightdress, shrieking every time a pebble or a pine needle jabbed one of her chubby knees. But eventually she looked up and saw the street lamp outside her bedroom window. In the bedroom was her crib, with its nice soft mattress, and her teddy bear. Best of all, two peanut-butter cookies she’d snatched were hidden under the pillow. She crawled faster, almost tasting the cookies. But the street lamp—it was actually the moon—never seemed to get closer. And since she wasn’t used to all this fresh air and exercise, she finally collapsed at the foot of a tree and fell fast asleep.

  Lousy Luck

  The tree she collapsed under was the birch tree near Fred’s burrow—or, rather, Fred and Phoebe’s burrow, since they’d now been together several weeks. By woodchuck standards that made them an old married couple. Now two woodchucks woke up every morning at nine. Fred preferred twin beds—sleeping together mussed your fur—but he and Phoebe would wake up at the same instant, rub the sleep out of their eyes, look at each other, and smile. After a nice, civilized breakfast, they cleaned house. They spent most afternoons foraging for food, and later they fixed dinner together. In the evenings they reminisced about the day by the light of the glowworms till they started to yawn, then they padded off to bed.

  One morning a dreadful wailing woke them two hours early.

  “What a racket!” Phoebe exclaimed, sitting up in bed. “Do you suppose it’s that brown bear we saw last week?”

  “Sounds more like a moose,” Fred said. “I believe it’s their mating season.”

  They went to the entrance mound and stood there blinking till their eyes adjusted to the rays of the just-risen sun. The wailing went on, but there wasn’t a moose in sight.

  “You’d think they’d be too big to hide,” Phoebe said. “Especially with those silly antlers.”

  “Let’s go back to bed.”

  But in fact the noise was too shrill to sleep through, and when Phoebe headed for the birch tree—it seemed to be coming from thereabouts—Fred followed. Much as he hated getting morning dew on his fur, he hated the idea of her facing a moose alone even more.

  It wasn’t a moose. It was a plump human child. Fred instantly backed away from the deafening thing. Not because it looked dangerous but because it was so repulsive. The creature’s nightdress was filthy and covered with burrs, and its face and hands and feet were smeared with mud.

  “Are you all right, child?” Phoebe said, going right up to it. �
��Where are your parents?”

  Nine just wailed louder. What was this nasty, hairy-faced beast peering at her?

  “We should be getting back, Phoebe,” Fred shouted over the din.

  “But, Fred! We can’t leave the poor thing out here.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s just a baby.”

  “She’s awfully big for a baby.”

  “But she’s lost.”

  “She seems to have found her way here. No doubt she can find her way back where she came from.”

  Phoebe tugged him aside. “You mustn’t talk like that in front of her,” she whispered.

  “Why not? She can’t understand us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Even if she could, she couldn’t hear us over her own caterwauling. Besides, what on earth could we do for her?”

  “Take her home.”

  “We don’t know where she lives.”

  “To the burrow, I mean.”

  “Our burrow? You can’t be serious, Phoebe.”

  “She’s helpless.”

  “She certainly doesn’t sound it. Besides, if we move her, the parents won’t be able to find her.”

  After making this convincing point, Fred strode rather smugly back to the burrow. It was early for breakfast, but since the wailing ruled out going back to bed, he arranged portions of clover on the table. However, Phoebe didn’t join him. And he was so used to having all his meals with her now, so used to discussing the freshness of the food and their plans for the day, that he found he couldn’t eat alone.

  He went back to the entrance mound. To his horror, she was shoving the bawling child his way.

  “Let her be, sweetheart! Come have breakfast!”

  But Phoebe either couldn’t or wouldn’t hear him.

  “Of all the lousy luck,” Fred said, talking to himself for the first time in weeks.

  Since becoming a couple, he and Phoebe had had only one argument. After returning from a visit to her sister and the kids, Phoebe had brought up the alarming idea of starting a family of their own, and when he’d made the obvious objection—that children turned life topsy-turvy—she’d replied without a shred of logic that topsy-turvy wasn’t necessarily so terrible. Of course not even she could argue his point that she was very young and they hadn’t even been together a season yet. But now this wretched human child had landed smack on their doorstep!

  All by herself Phoebe managed to push the thing right up to the entrance mound.

  “What in the world are you doing?” he said, astonished by her strength.

  “If that bear comes back,” Phoebe said, “he’ll rip the poor thing to shreds.”

  “Well, she’s certainly not coming in my burrow.”

  Phoebe gave Fred a long look. Much as she loved him, she longed for someone to hug and cuddle—things Fred never did.

  “Then I’ll just have to take her to Babette’s,” she said.

  Fred watched, speechless, as Phoebe pushed the creature off in the direction of the stream. He hated it when she went to the big stump. Sometimes she stayed away for hours and he missed her terribly.

  “When will you be back?”

  “Hard to say,” Phoebe called over her shoulder.

  “You’ll never get that thing across the fir tree!”

  But again she either couldn’t or wouldn’t hear him. Her strength really was mind-boggling. In five minutes she and the bawling creature were nearly out of sight.

  The Houseguest

  Though the child was bawling away and covered with dirt, Phoebe found the feel of her very satisfying. Even so, she dreaded arriving at Babette’s. Since she’d moved out, the burrow under the stump had grown more chaotic than ever, and the last thing it needed was added confusion. But while she was still on this side of the stream, Phoebe’s progress was suddenly stopped.

  She poked her head around the child to see whether they’d come up against a rock or a tree—and saw that they’d come up against Fred.

  “Let’s take the thing home,” he said over the bawling.

  If Phoebe hadn’t known how he hated having his fur mussed, she would have thrown her arms around him. As it was, she smiled her warmest smile and said, “Thanks, sweetheart.”

  Working shoulder to shoulder, the woodchucks got the child back to the burrow in short order. They squeezed her in the entrance mound—Phoebe pulling, Fred pushing—and down into the living room.

  “This is our home,” Phoebe said brightly.

  Nine looked around and wailed louder than ever. Now the hairy beasts had dragged her into a hole in the ground! But screaming at the top of her lungs took a lot of energy and she soon conked out on the floor.

  The woodchucks slipped into the kitchen so they could talk without disturbing her. They both spoke at once.

  “We should get her some food,” said Phoebe.

  “We should get her cleaned up,” said Fred.

  Since Fred had just given in to her, Phoebe gave in to him this time. He went for moss; she filled the bowl from the stream. Back in the burrow they gently pulled off the child’s dirty nightdress and delicately sponged her with damp moss, careful not to wake her. Then Phoebe washed the nightdress in the stream while Fred went out to collect food. He brought back two bundles of fresh clover, some tasty-looking greens, an assortment of insects, and three nice, juicy snails.

  When the child woke up, late that afternoon, she looked around the burrow in horror and disgust. Why was she lying naked in this hole? Where were her crib and peanut-butter cookies? Two bristly, beady-eyed faces were peering at her—the beasts who’d dragged her underground.

  “Don’t worry, you’re safe with us,” Phoebe said. “Do you have a name?”

  Nine just blubbered.

  “I guess she’s too young to know,” Phoebe said.

  “Or too dumb.”

  “Don’t say that!” Phoebe said. “What shall we call her?”

  “Why call her anything?” said Fred, who trusted their guest’s stay would be brief.

  “Everyone has to have a name. What do you think of Margaret?”

  “Why Margaret?”

  “It was my mother’s name,” said Phoebe, who’d always intended to name her first child that.

  Fred shrugged.

  “We got you some nice clover, Margaret,” Phoebe said, holding out a bunch.

  The child knocked it away and blubbered louder. Phoebe handed her a clump of greens. The child turned her nose up at that, too. Where were her mashed potatoes and gravy? Where was her hot fudge sundae? Before she knew it, the horrid creatures were holding out bugs and snails!

  “Maybe she’s more thirsty than hungry,” Phoebe said. “Would you get some fresh water, dear?”

  Fred wasn’t sorry to escape Margaret’s shrieks and the mess she’d made of the living room: greens and clover and snails scattered everywhere.

  Ten minutes later he returned from the stream with the refilled bowl. The child took a sip of the water and spat it out in his face.

  “Yuck!”

  “Oh, dear,” said Phoebe, drying Fred off.

  “Clearly she doesn’t want our help,” Fred said coldly. “I think the sooner she’s out of here the—”

  “Hush!” Phoebe said. “She’ll understand you.”

  And in fact Margaret was catching on to the animals’ way of speaking. One of the good things about being very young is that your brain’s so uncluttered it’s easy for new things to fit in.

  “Hungry!” Margaret cried, attempting animal talk.

  “I really think she wants something to eat,” Phoebe said. “We’ll just have to figure out what she likes.”

  By this time there wasn’t much daylight left. Fred and Phoebe scurried around in the twilight, gathering up every kind of grass and weed available. But when they offered these delicacies to their houseguest, she threw them on the floor or spat them back in their faces. Normally, at this hour of the day, she would have been perched in her high chair, stuffin
g her face with pot roast and buttered bread and grabbing assorted goodies off her brothers’ and sisters’ plates. But here she was, stuck in a hole with a pair of stubbly beasts who kept trying to force-feed her things that weren’t even food.

  On top of that, they seemed to expect her to sleep in a bed half the size of her crib. While the smaller beast lay down on the other bed, the bigger one went out to the living room and put out the light. Instead of blubbering, Nine lay silently in the darkness, waiting for her kidnappers to doze off. Having snoozed all day, she wasn’t the least bit sleepy.

  After quite a long time she groped her way out of the bedroom. A leaf was draped over the jar of funny lit-up worms, but a bit of the weird greenish glow leaked through, and as she crawled past the sofa, where the bigger beast was lying, she caught the glimmer of two open eyes. To her surprise, he didn’t try to block her escape.

  The nightdress they’d stolen from her was hanging in the breezy entranceway. It was still a little damp, but she did her best to put it on. Outside, a white tree stood out against a black sky. She started toward it, led on by visions of peanut-butter cookies, but after crawling a few feet she heard a growl and turned to see her teddy bear—except twenty times bigger, with knifelike teeth that glinted menacingly in the moonlight.

  Milk and Honey

  A second after the scream, Phoebe stumbled out of the bedroom, rubbing her eyes. “What on earth was that?”

  Fred sat up on the sofa with a sinking heart. He’d hoped he’d heard and seen the last of the child when it crawled past him.