Funny Short Story – By One September Night
Photo credit: hotblack from morguefile.com
Indian summer, what a wonderful time! The sun in the sky is still rather warm and only a few birds have gone South yet; grass, is still green and there are a thousand other nice things to remind us about the summer but …. this is no longer the summer, it is the Indian summer. I love this time of the year a lot, the air becomes crystal clear, the sky is awesome blue, clouds are snow-white, hackneyed but a true phrase, if there wasn’t a season like Indian summer, this world would be a much duller place. I wonder, is this season specially made for something extraordinary to happen?
There is nothing more captivating in a serene September day than digging potatoes with other country folks, when the sun shines and there is not a cloud in the sky. So I thought to myself before doing this for the first time in my life. Well, half-hour, OK, an hour, so far so good, but four hours in a row, what the heck, pardon my French!
To crown this shovel and basket torture, our potato field lies exactly opposite grandpa’s beehives and the bees , apparently, consider this place to be their sovereign territory or the buzzing lot simply got scared of so many of us crowding by their beehives, who knows? Anyway, one brave bee, undoubtedly irritated by my personal presence in her backyard furiously stung my right cheek. In an instant the cheek got swollen, and I got a perfect shiner under the eye.
No, no way could it be a peaceful harvesting of potatoes; this was war, folks, between the nature and us! At the end of the day we got nine bags of potatoes, not a bad reserve for the winter time. We bag packed only large tubers, whereas small ones were added to a separate basket in order to give this dainty later to a neighborly suckling-pig, whose name, in accordance with an age-old Russian tradition was Bor’ka (a pet name for Boris). So, potatoes.
Digging them up is only a half of the whole fun. They must be transported (well, brought with our aching hands) from the field into the basement to store them there until the winter when they should be boiled, fried and stewed by us. Twenty meters from the field to the house, three meters across the hall in the house and down to the open hatchet. It was 5 p.m. when the job had been done, everyone sighed with a relief and I, in the great expectation of the coming supper, decided to pick some apples. Just imagine: dead silence, in the air a floating mixture of heady apple aroma, old grass and sun-warmed soil. Being a city guy I couldn’t help admiring the natural beauty of the country life. Slowly, savoring every minute of it, I picked two baskets full of ripe juicy apples and shuffled into the house with them.
Here we sat at the brown oak table with a tasty rural supper served before us – fried potatoes, fresh-salted cucumbers and salted mushrooms, chicken baked in the Russian oven. All of this was eaten in an instant, over a quiet gossip about the neighbors. Time to sleep.
“Ah, look, now and then a rat gnaws something under the floor at night but it doesn’t come out of its shelter under the floor, no worries” grandpa said to us right before we were about to turn in. OK, we understood where we were, it was definitely unpleasant, but we should survive somehow, rural realties. I suddenly felt like Tom Sawyer, ask me why? I don’t know.
It was ten o’clock when half-asleep I heard a soft monotonous sound of scratching in a corner of the room, as if someone was sawing plywood with a fret saw. It lasted for about an hour and a half, as it seemed to me, then something began to rustle loudly, my sleep was immediately gone and I leaped off the bed to turn on the light. All was clear, even the rustle had ceased but, in an instant, it began again. My 7-year old son woke up as well.
After consulting with each other, Tom Sawyer came to my mind again, listening attentively to the sounds of the night, we decided to return to bed. Light turned off. In about ten minutes we heard it again and I jumped off my bed, turned on the light – not a creature in the room… except for us. It occurred to me, why didn’t I just switch on the table lamp and place it on the floor, next to bed, there was a weak hope the rat should finish its night trills it had guts to perform in the darkness.
No chance of it! The light was on but the monotonous gnawing continued softly, looked like I got used to it, I started to nod, my eyelids grew heavy, in a second I would finally fall asleep, but something quick and dark darted to the window-sill from under the table, which was standing in the far corner of the room! My sleep evaporated, I jumped as a scalded parrot and began to bawl:
“Chooo!” the dumbfounded rat rapidly retreated to its shelter under the table, filled with carton boxes and other rubbish, covering its burrow in the floor. It was 3 a.m. when I decided to stay awake until the morning. All my family were up too: my son surprised and excited by my behavior, continually got up and down from his horizontal position, my wife, who slept on a separate bed that night was agitated, but much less than myself, since she percepts all these gray rodents without my sharp fastidiousness.
“You folks go to sleep, I will guard the place. If I yell, don’t panic, everything is under control.”
There was silence; the rat ceased making any sound, slowly advancing its muzzle so that I could see its nose. Under the circumstances, any human brain works like a fine-tuned machine; mine was no exception when a bright idea struck me and made to rush into a neighboring room to fetch Vasya, one of our old tomcats. Vasya, winking his eyes from the light of the lamp, jumped onto our bed, coughed a couple of times and immediately fell asleep with his pink tongue pulled out. We all laughed at him. Rat rustled, Vasya didn’t even turn his head.
“Is he deaf?” I asked. “Or are you just another hypocrite who cares not for its master?” I said loudly into the tomcat’s ear.
In the silence of the rural night my words echoed. I guess. Wife and son laughed seeing my stormy disturbance, with no reaction from the tomcat, which phlegmatically opened his eyes and looked into the emptiness of the wooden wall. He was old enough not to notice such a nuisance like me. Eventually, he jumped down on the floor, went to the door and mewed to let him out.
“Get out of here, you good-for-nothing old bag” with these words I opened the door before him. Another five minutes of thinking over why-and-what-to-do-now were interrupted by our grandpa’s words: “So, hard to fall asleep, ah?”
“Give me a poison pill” I wanted to say feeling like a governor of the rat precipitated fortress.
Then my eight-year old son said suddenly: “Let’s shoot the goddamned thing” pointing at the old air-rifle on the wall.
“All right” grandpa agreed calmly as if it was just another request for a cup of tea from his grandson. We loaded the rifle, I took the lamp in my right hand to light the scene and we started our hunt. The rat appeared in a minute, grandpa pulled the trigger, we all heard the hissing shot but missed it and the rat managed to retreat back into her shelter. In a dead silence we recharged what it looked like our ultimate lifesaver then.
“Meeeeewwwww” a tomcat’s voice behind the closed door sounded as a thunder in a sunny day.
“Wow, did you hear that? It must be Vasya, his conscience woke up, he can’t help but come back to the battlefield” I was mumbling to myself opening the door. But this time it was another tomcat, Vasya as well, but the grey one. After entering, he threw himself to the table, under which the rat was hiding then stood still with both ears up. The rat, apparently, sensing the presence of a younger and more dangerous tomcat, panicked and rushed circuit between the stove and the wall, tomcat made a sharp movement towards the only passage, saw the rat and thrust powerful claws into the rat’s body.
The rat gave an outrageous loud cry which sounded devilishly to us after this long and sleepless night. Bad luck for you, grey rodent, and the tomcat will never let you go. Vasya looked at us with his old hunter’s sharp look as if asking: “Will you be daring to ask for a half of it or maybe you’d rather leave me alone to finish the mess?”
I opened the door and he graciously disappeared in the darkness of the kitchen with the rat’s tail hanging weakly like a banner of a defeated army.
Calmness at last. This fight between the good and the evil somewhat completely devastated us emotionally; I couldn’t fall asleep lying with my eyes open until five o’clock when the first rooster sang his tribute to a new morning.
Later, the grandpa showed us that little what remained from the night intruder – Vasya was a real pro in his business.
Here you are with the free Russian rough and tough safari on a weekend. Ha-ha-ha, talk to me about lion hunting in Africa after that!
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