“Read me Owl,” the little boy said.
“Benjy, I just finished reading you Owl,” his father tried to reason with him.
Benjy was four, and not easy to convince. He began pressing his lips together, threatening to cry. It was a bit of emotional blackmail he had learned how to perform before he was two. In the past year he had developed the Benjy Pout, as Carl called it, into a fine art. Carl could never bear to see his little boy curl his lip that way. He hated to see him cry.
Carl’s own father had been very firm with him and had smacked him if he didn’t hop into bed on time; his father had even smacked him for forgetting to say his prayers. Carl had grown up not particularly liking his father and not at all convinced that a strong arm directed against one’s small, trembling backside builds character. He worked all day in an advertising office, where he made a great deal of money but did not like the people he worked with or the work he had to do. He had signed up with Belgore, Bristow and Ryan right out of college because he had thought the copywriting position would give him enough money to write his novel. The novel had been rejected by thirteen publishers, and Carl had accepted this as a sign pointing to his resignation from novel-writing.
Meanwhile Mr. Ryan, the only partner still active, had called him into the big office for a drink, the crowning B.B.&R. accolade, and told him he had “the making of one helluva copywriter.” That was fifteen years ago, and now Carl was only a year or so away from tacking his last name to the end of the formidable chain.
To be honest with himself, Carl hated Belgore, Bristow and Ryan, individually and collectively. He hated his suburban house—a disturbingly expensive split-level—even with its full acre of gardens and lawns. It was almost an estate. It was almost in the country. That’s what he used to tell his clients when they asked where he lived—way out, beyond Scarsdale, almost in the country.
“Read me Owl, Da-da,” his son was saying, blinking his eyes as if to cry.
Of the many books Benjy had, Owl was his favorite. His mother wanted him to be a reader. Already she had dreams of his becoming the writer Carl had wanted to be. She bought him a new picture book almost every day. Benjy would like the one about taffy clouds one week and about the peppermint tiger another week, but all summer long, to their amazement—yes, and pride—he had been faithful to Owl. It was about a baby owl, round as a dumpling, not at all a solemn owl but one with a big, happy, infectious smile on its face. Peg liked to dabble in children’s books. She drew quite well, and often thought she could make a better book than the one she was buying. But she had to admit that Owl was a stroke of child-book genius. “He’s so completely owl; everything about him is owl,” she would say to Carl.
The surprising thing was that Benjy agreed. He became owl-minded and finally was owl-obsessed. His mother bought him rubber owls and pictures of owls and plates and glasses with an owl motif. The first sounds Benjy made every morning were “Hoo-hoo-hoo …” With variations he could keep this up contentedly until his parents awakened. And at night he would hoo-hoo-hoo himself to sleep. Carl and Peg would tiptoe up to his bedroom and look at each other with soft smiles as this slumber music died away. It had become an evening ritual.
So now when Benjy begged once again to hear the Owl book that already had been read to him three times that evening, Carl said, “Benjy, wait till you see the great big surprise Mommy and Daddy have for you. We’re going to leave this house and move out to a better house, a real farmhouse. We’re going to have pigs and chickens and there’s a great big old barn. And, Benjy, the main reason I’m buying the place is—guess who lives in the barn.”
“Owl?” Benjy said.
“Owl,” Carl said. “Not just a little book owl, but an honest-to-goodness friendly barn owl for you to talk to. You can say, ‘Good night, Owl,’ and he’ll answer back, ‘Hoo-hoo, Benjy, hoo-hoo-hoo’—which is friendly owl talk for ‘Nighty-night, see you in the morning.’ So off to sleep you go now.…” Carl tucked the little boy in and kissed him on the forehead.
“Maybe sometime the friendly owl can come in my bed and sleep with me,” Benjy said.
“Maybe, if you’re very nice and gentle with him,” his father said.
“I’ll make a nice nest for him in my pillow,” Benjy said, and he began to hoo-hoo-hoo himself to sleep.
The idea of moving from the lower Westchester suburbs to the remote wilds of upper Westchester had come to Carl quite suddenly one Sunday afternoon when he and Peg were visiting a college friend, a playwright who lived beyond Katonah.
“George is so mad about his new tractor I’m afraid he’s going to give up his typewriter,” the playwright’s wife had said, to make easy visiting conversation.
George had tapped tobacco into his pipe and looked thoughtful. “Well, not quite. But, Carl, they may laugh at us intellectual country boys, but when I’ve plowed a ten-acre field and I look back at that lovely turned-over earth, fresh and waiting for the seed, I feel I’ve done something—not just written another scene those bloody actors will probably louse up a few months from now, but done something with my own hands.”
The wives had tried to turn off the rather solemn pronouncement with politely mocking repartee, but Carl had become just as serious. “I know exactly what George means. Look at my life. Everything so clean, so antiseptic. Everything is done for me—aluminum foil and garbage disposals …”
“Oh, we have aluminum foil and a garbage disposal,” said the playwright’s wife. “I mean, we didn’t exactly come out here in a covered wagon.”
“Yes, I see the station wagon—it’s a beauty,” Carl said. “But I also see the tractor and the Jeep. If you were snowbound, you could live from your own corn and tomatoes, your own eggs every morning. I think that’s what living was meant to be. I don’t mean full time—I’m not a romantic.”
“Oh, but you are, hopelessly—always have been,” Peg said.
“Well, I mean … not losing our ties with our old roots … our hold, I mean—” George had been using a heavy hand on the sour-mash bourbon and Carl was feeling not exactly drunk but a little loose, a little wild, a little angry at—what? What does a successful advertising executive happy with his second wife and crazy about his four-year-old kid (his first son; the girls were with their mother) have to be angry at?
“Carl, I’ll get you a windbreaker and we’ll go for a walk,” George suggested.
Conspiratorially they stopped for another shot of the sour mash in George’s rustic bar off the big Early American living room. “I know what you’re trying to say,” George assured his long-time but not really close friend. “Modern life is a crock. You do great at it and what have you got? We’ve lost something. Even if we never find it, at least the searching is a positive act of faith. Out here in the real country you feel as if your soul has room to search and stretch.”
Benjy ran toward them, twitchy with excitement. “Da-da, look, look!” He opened his hand, moist with discovery. Nesting there was a small, uneven egg.
“That’s an egg from a young hen,” George explained. “That’s the way they lay them at first—small and uneven.”
“You see, even a chicken has to learn to make eggs.” Carl took delight in instructing his four-year-old. Suddenly a warm, undersized, uneven egg was a symbol of escape from their overcivilized world.
“Can I save it, Da-da? Can I?”
“If you put a pin in it and suck out the inside,” George answered for Carl. “Take it into the kitchen. Mrs. Enright will show you.”
Benjy hurried off, with the egg held out importantly in front of him. “Careful you don’t drop it,” his father called after him.
The kitchen door swung shut behind Benjy. A moment later they heard piercing howls of anguish. The men found Benjy disconsolate in the pantry, the crushed egg leaking through his fingers.
“That’s all right—there are lots more,” George consoled him. “You see, Benjy, eggs from these new little hens still have very soft shells.”
“There are so many things to learn on a farm, aren’t there, Benjy?” Carl kept at his educational approach, kissing his son’s damp cheek.
“Uncle George and I are going for a walk. Maybe Mommy will read you Owl.”
The two men followed a winding dirt road that led through a pasture where sleek, well-fed Holsteins were grazing. The sun was low, but would linger for another half hour. The breeze was soft and the air was a sweet mixture of clover and cow dung and fresh-cut hay.
“Mmmm, the air smells like—perfume,” Carl said.
George smiled. “You advertising fellers,” he chided him. “Got to improve on everything. To me the air smells like good country air.”
“Wish I could bottle it and take it back to the office,” Carl said, breathing in and out with exaggerated heartiness.
“You might have a new product there,” George said. “Fresh air in the new container with the easy-open, snap-off top.”
They were approaching the sprawling ruin of a barn that long ago had been painted red. Now it was faded to weathered rust. The big door was off its hinges, the windows were broken and the barnyard was fenced in by an eccentric collection of bedsprings, ramshackle boards, gnarled barbed wire—whatever the owner could patch together. In the barn doorway appeared a tall, unshaven, unkempt figure that impressed Carl as an apparition haunting the place from some previous century. It was difficult to describe just what the man was wearing as a shirt—“tatters” would probably say it best—strips of limp gray cloth that hung down like worn skins. His shapeless pants were tucked into torn high rubber boots. Under the wild beard and the grime Carl could detect a long-boned, noble head and dark, intelligent, angry eyes.
“That’s Mr. Bassey,” George told him, and called out as a greeting, “Bassey?”
The big countryman gave a grunt of recognition, an animal throating that sounded like “Hmmmmmp.”
George nodded proudly. “A real character. I’m seriously thinking of doing a play about him.” Then in his special gruff, country voice he called, “How you doing, Bassey?”
“Can’t complain,” Bassey barked at them. From a large, dirty pail he tossed the slops to his pigs.
“Bassey, this is an old friend of mine, Mr. Aarons,” George said.
“Hmmmmmpf,” Bassey said, taking a stick to swing out the very last of the slops to the pigs. “What line of work you in?”
“I’m in advertising,” Carl said.
The hulking countryman shrugged and his lips parted in a kind of malevolent grin. Then he said, “Craaw,” or something that sounded like a crow’s mirthful but humorless laugh. “Reason I ask, I write up a colyum for the weekly paper, the Hoopville Sentinel. Thought maybe I’d put you in it. Don’t have too much to write about out here.”
Carl and his playwright friend walked on. George was smoking his pipe and swinging his walking stick with what seemed to Carl ostentatious contentment. They were approaching a once beautiful but now dilapidated story-and-a-half stone house.
“Seventeen forty-seven,” Carl said in awe as he read the chimney date stone.
“That’s when the original Bassey built the place,” George said. “Captain Bassey. This character’s great-great-great-grandfather. They called him Captain Bassey because he organized a local militia in the Rebellion—that’s what this Bassey still calls the Revolutionary War. In the country’s first depression, 1786—I get my local American history straight from Bassey—when veterans like Captain Bassey were desperate for paper money to save their farms, he raised a little army of destitute farmers and tried to overthrow the governor. Sort of a local Shays’ Rebellion. In fact, Captain Bassey and Daniel Shays were friends. I’ve actually seen the letters. Bassey’s got some stuff in that cluttered farmhouse of his that belongs in a museum. A fascinating character, Bassey. Looking at him, would you ever believe that he’s a college man? He knows Latin and Greek, and that funny column of his sounds right out of a Jeffersonian Republican paper. Bassey knows more about Jefferson than What’s-his-name at Princeton. And with it all, I don’t think he ever takes his clothes off or takes a bath—”
George stopped. Bassey was right behind them. Somehow, high boots and all, he had crept up within hearing distance.
“You want to buy the Bassey house?”
Carl stared at the man. “What makes you think so?”
“I was watchin’ how you looked at the sign.”
Carl tried to fit a word to the look in Bassey’s eyes. Craven? Mendacious? Country-shrewd? In the unkempt yard in front of the house was a faded “For Sale” sign.
“Are you moving away?” Carl asked.
“Craaw,” came the harsh laughter. “Us Basseys got our own cemetery up there on the hill. Cheapest funeral I could possibly get, so I’m aimin’ to use it. Not right away, though.”
Carl wondered if he ever could get to like Bassey.
“Bassey sleeps in the old carriage house,” George said. “There are four separate houses here at Basseydale, as the old estate used to be called. But this is the earliest one.”
“Oldest house in the county,” Bassey said. “I’ve got the original deed.”
From the dark silhouette of the barn behind the house, in the dying light of sunset’s final minutes, came a hoarse hoo-wah, like a snoring man choking out a cry in a troubled dream. Hoo-wah, hoo-wah …
“What on earth is that?” Carl asked.
“Barn owls,” Bassey said. “Got a whole family of ’em in the barn.”
“Are they friendly?” Carl asked.
Bassey looked at him. “Well, sure, I guess you could call ’em that. As friendly as any of us.”
“I’ve never seen an owl,” Carl said.
“Well, they go with the place,” Bassey said. “No extra charge.”
Carl would never admit it, not even to his wife Peg, but it was the owls that persuaded him to buy the place. That’s why, when Benjy had asked him to read Owl once again, Carl put him off by letting him in on the surprise—a farmhouse of their own with their very own Owl.
They moved in before the remodeling was finished. They were having the house repointed to restore the original stone facing, and they were taking old pine planks from the barn to panel a study for Carl. Dormer windows were inserted in the slanting walls of the attic, and Peg had begun to transform it into a wonderland nursery for Benjy, painting a prettified barnyard fresco dominated by a charming owl that smiled down on Benjy protectively.
Near Benjy’s window was an old maple tree, and it was there that Benjy decided his real Owl was to sleep. Carl had taken him into the barn and told him to look up and see if he could find any owls. He thought he could see them way, way up at the top.
“See their little white faces?” Carl asked.
“I want Owl to sleep in the tree by my window,” Benjy said.
“All right, I’ll tell him,” Carl answered. “If you’re a good boy and go to bed without complaining every night, Owl will watch over you in the big tree by your window.”
It was an ideal arrangement. Just about the time Benjy started fretting that he didn’t want to go to bed, Carl would say, “It’s time to say good night to Owl.” It was magic. Nothing in any of their child-psychology books worked so swiftly and satisfyingly as Owl. Benjy would begin his delaying action in prayer: “God bless Mommy and Da-da and Grandpa and Grandma and Mr. Milkman and Mr. Postman … and Mr. Moon [“Now you’re getting silly,” Carl or Peg would reprimand him] and Owl.” Then when the jig was up, Benjy would go to the window and peer out. “Good night, Owl,” he would say into the dark.
Outside, the night was full of country sounds, the oohs and moos of barn life busily settling down for the night, which might easily have been mistaken for Owl’s end of the goodnight ritual. Satisfied, Benjy would climb into bed and fall asleep. At breakfast, before Carl caught the commuter train to the city, Benjy often described his Owl dreams. He would be locked up in a cave by a Bad Giant, and Owl would fly in when the ogre went out to catch other little boys. In Owl’s mouth was a doughnut so Benjy wouldn’t be hungry. Because Owl could see in the dark he was able to show Benjy a secret passageway in the back of the cave. By the time the Bad Giant returned, Benjy was already back safe and cozy in his bed.
“There’s nothing like the country for a little boy,” Carl boasted to the head of one of the big companies for whom he was laying out a new advertising program. They were lunching in the Oak Room of the Plaza, and subconsciously Carl was using his new country experiences to charm his client. “I mean, in the suburbs all my son could do was read about wildlife. Out at the farm he can actually live with it. You begin to get a feeling of what Thoreau was talking about …” The charm-of-the-country talk was not only a pleasing respite for the client, but it made Carl feel there was some sense to this Madison Avenue martini race.
During his first days in the country Carl was so green that he had just left the garbage cans out by the kitchen door and expected them to disappear as magically as they had in Scarsdale. But when he got home for dinner Peg described how George and his wife had laughed at their city ways when they stopped by that afternoon. “Out here we have to handle it ourselves,” George had explained. “We throw the slop to our pigs and bury the trash in a trench at the far end of the cornfield.”
The idea of buying young pigs to fatten with table scraps was a novelty that Carl found himself enjoying. But the disposal trench turned out to be more than he bargained for. The ground was much harder than he had expected it to be, and after hacking at it for half an hour he managed only a shallow wedge barely two feet deep. There, rather proud of this pioneering effort, he deposited the trash. It looked quite neat when covered over with loose earth and then tamped down with the new boots he had brought home the day before from Abercrombie & Fitch. But that evening Peg reported that Bounder, their German shepherd, had dragged discarded chicken bones back to the kitchen door and had scattered shreds of brown paper. Carl went out with a flashlight and studied the mess strewn along the edge of the woods. He had been late getting home because the client had turned down the whole new ad campaign and there had been a long crisis conference in his office. The last thing in the world he needed was to be digging a garbage trench at night. In fact, his associates in the office would never believe it if he told them how he was spending his evenings in the country.
“Craaw … need any help?”
Carl was so concentrated on his labors that he had not heard Bassey coming up behind him. Carl had placed his flashlight on the ground at the edge of his crude ditch, and Bassey, in his baggy clothes, big floppy hat, and hip boots rolled to the knee, looked like a magnified long black shadow.
“Good evening, Mr. Bassey,” Carl said, trying to put that certain country heartiness into it.
Bassey just stood at the edge of Carl’s shallow trench. “Ain’t much of a hole, is she? Guess you city fellers could use a lesson in old-fashion’ diggin’.” With a brusque gesture Bassey took the shovel from Carl’s hand and stepped down into the hole. “Dig a hole around you—it’s a lot easier on your back.”
Carl felt the blisters that were beginning to rise on his palms. “Thanks, Mr. Bassey. This is very kind of you.”
“Craaw.” Bassey dug in silence for a few minutes with awesome efficiency. Then he paused with his heavy foot poised on the spar of the shovel. “Tom Jefferson,” he barked.
“Pardon?” Carl said.
“Yessiree. He’s been to this farm. Come t’ see Cap’n Bassey when he was runnin’ for president. Tom helped get him his pardon after the Rebellion. Even loaned him a little money. After a spell Bassey got back on his feet and even got himself elected to Congress. Guess you remember that Tom only beat out Aaron Burr by one vote. So you could reckon it was Cap’n Bassey put him in the White House. Over in the historical museum you c’n see the letter Tom sent my kin. One of the first letters written by the President from his new capital in Washington.”
Carl liked American history, but never before had he felt it wrapped intimately around him like this. The way Bassey talked, it was no longer mere history, but something altogether personal that had just happened to him. He was beginning to appreciate Bassey. Here was your true early American in the flesh, Carl thought, almost a lost type—actually a throwback to the days when a man could be a thinker, a scholar, a writer and at the same time live by his own muscle, sweat and skill of hand.
It had been cold, and now a wind was building up. An enormous, shapeless cloud was blacking out the moon. “You better get back to your house,” Bassey said. “The weatherman is fixin’ to spit.”
“That’s awfully kind of you,” Carl said again.
Bassey hunched his big shoulders. “Well, we’re neighbors, ain’t we? If we don’t scratch each other’s backs, it’s a pretty sad day.”
Pleased with Bassey’s quaint phrases and neighborly service, Carl bent into the wind and walked back to his house through the gaunt November field. As he passed his huge, empty barn he heard the hoo-wah hoo-wah of the barn owls. Upstairs he found Benjy already in bed but, as usual, resisting sleep.
“I want to say good night to Owl,” the child begged.
“Now, Benjy, dear, you said good night to Owl ten minutes ago,” Peg said impatiently.
“But I want to say good night to Owl with Da-da,” Benjy insisted.
“Well, all right, but after that no nonsense,” Carl said, giving in as always. The boy was irresistible in his flannel bunny pajamas. Carl carried him to the window, and Benjy looked out as if he could really see his nocturnal friend. “Good night, Owl,” he said, and then he added something new: “I love you, Owl.”
Carl felt his eyes going wet. It had been such a perfect country evening. First Bassey’s gesture of warm, neighborly spirit, and now the simple love of a child for his wildlife friend. “It restores my faith,” Carl said to Peg in bed that night. “After a day with those elegant cutthroats who’ve got the ethics of sewer rats, little things like this restore your faith.”
Carl was late getting back to the country next evening. B.B.&R. had lost a big account, some eight million dollars’ worth, and Carl had worked very late. Peg met him at the door, nervous and upset.
“Oh, Carl, I’m glad you’re here. That terrible man has been waiting for you in the den.”
“Oh?” Carl’s mind was still on his bleak afternoon with the dissatisfied client. “What terrible man?”
“He came in through the kitchen and tracked mud all the way through the house. You can follow his tracks. He’s such an animal. It’s like having one of his filthy pigs in the house.”
“Oh, so that’s it—Bassey’s here. Now, Peg, it isn’t anything to cry about.”
“I can’t help it. That man makes me terribly upset.”
“Now, darling, don’t get yourself into a mood. Bassey is a character, but he certainly isn’t dangerous. I’m sorry about the mud he tracks in, but the way he lives American history is—”
“You know what they say about him around here? That he’s crazy. That insanity runs in his family. His mother used to keep a loaded shotgun handy because she was afraid the British were coming to burn her house down.”
Carl smiled. “Well, you never can tell. They did set fire to the White House not so long ago—1814, to be exact.”
“I don’t think it’s a bit funny. Did you ever notice his eyes? He gets an awfully peculiar look. From now on I want you to keep your quaint Mr. Bassey out of our house and back in the pigpen where he belongs.”
Carl never liked Peg when she got this way. She had a childish way of heaping personal blame on him when she was upset with things that neither of them could help.
“Benjy all right?”
“He tried to wait up for you but he finally fell asleep. He was simply darling with Owl tonight. He said his usual good night, and then he went back to the window and said, ‘Don’t forget now, if you get lonely out there, you can come in and sleep with me.’ Everytime I get to thinking that living in the country is more trouble than it’s worth, I think of Benjy and Owl and I begin to feel better about everything.”
“Mmmm-hmmmm,” Carl agreed. “Every kid needs something like that, an old spaniel to boss or an imaginary owl to talk to.”
“Imaginary? Benjy makes Owl so real I find myself talking to him too!”
As if in agreement there came the haunting, familiar call from the barn.
“I love that sound,” Peg said. “It makes Benjy feel Owl is really talking to him. I’m sure he’ll remember it all his life.”
“Bassey says barn owls are better than cats for keeping rats away.”
“Wouldn’t it be fun if we could tame one and keep it in the house, like a parrot?”
Carl smiled again. “Maybe. Meanwhile, let’s see if we can tame Mr. Bassey.” He kissed his wife on the cheek as a sign of truce and went on into the study he had paneled in golden pine lovingly removed from the barn. This time Peg had not been exaggerating. You could follow Bassey’s mud tracks, all right. The man did have a maddening contempt for civilized living. He was a fascinating old character—Carl could see him in one of George’s future plays—if only someone could house-break him.
In the study Bassey was sitting in Carl’s favorite red leather reading chair, his large, unkempt, bearded head bent toward a book in his lap.
“Got some good books here,” Bassey said. It sounded as if he were barking angrily at Carl.
Carl noticed that Bassey had selected Beard’s The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy
“This fella Beard knows his Jefferson,” Bassey said approvingly. “Mind if I borra this book?”
It was a rare book, long out of print, and Carl had a thing about lending books. “Well, I never like to …”
“Neighbors is neighbors, ain’t they?”
“You came to see me about something?”
“That’s right. My money.”
“Your money?”
“For the slop trench I dug for you. Ten dollars.”
“Ten dollars! I thought you were doing it out of the goodness—as a neighbor.”
“Craaw. We’ve got to watch you city fellers. You’ll skin us every time.”
“Just how do you figure ten dollars?”
“I put in three and a half hours last night. The rate’s two dollars an hour, after dark. If I was in a union, I’d be getting overtime.”
“Now, Mr. Bassey—”
“Then I come back this afternoon and hauled away today’s garbage and dug—”
“Did Mrs. Aarons ask you to?”
“She saw me doin’ it and she sure didn’t stop me.”
Carl felt that captains of industry were easier to deal with.
“Now if you’ll give me my money, I’ll be getting home to supper.”
Carl swallowed hard and handed him a ten-dollar bill.
“You’ve got a fine ditch there,” Bassey barked as he shambled through the living room to the kitchen. “Four foot deep and ten foot long. You don’t have to worry. From now on I’ll look after your garbage.”
“At those prices we could put in an automatic disposal system,” Carl said. But Bassey didn’t seem to hear him. He just kept on tracking mud through the kitchen to the back door. It was only when Carl stood looking after him that he realized Bassey had taken the Jefferson book with him.
At the end of the first week Carl had paid Bassey twenty-seven dollars for a few hours of hauling and digging. Carl was sure he was exaggerating about the hours he was putting in. But it was too much for Carl to take care of and still make his morning train.
“It’s getting ridiculous,” he said to Peg at dinner on Monday of the second week. “In Scarsdale we paid the garbage collector ten dollars a month. Talk about city slickers—he’s the country slicker taking us big-city hicks!”
“And in Scarsdale the garbage collector didn’t track mud through the living room,” Peg said.
“And he didn’t borrow my books.” Carl said.
“Well, you were the one who said he was so fascinating,” Peg reminded him.
“I hate him,” Carl said.
“Carl.” Peg had a finicky theory that hate created bile in the stomach and led to ulcers. This was all wrong, Carl thought. If it was ulcers he was in for, he was supposed to get them from those madmen on Madison Avenue. The country stood for Thoreau and peace and inner growth, a sense of being in harmony with the elements. That’s what he liked to tell associates at the office. But Bassey was the black bootprint of mud across the harmonious carpet. If only Bassey would change his clothes! If only Bassey would work for an equitable minimum wage like an accommodating suburban hired hand! Damn Bassey. Bassey was beginning to take up too much of his conscious time. Carl had come into possession of Bassey’s house; but Bassey—unless Carl could find some way of fighting back—was beginning to possess the possessor.
These troubled thoughts were interrupted by the cries of hoo-wah hoo-wah they had grown accustomed to hearing from the barn. Only this time the sound seemed louder, closer, as if one of the barn owls were actually perched in the two hundred-year-old maple tree that spread toward the house. When Carl went up to say good night to Benjy the little boy was excited by the closeness of the owl sound. “Owl wants to come in,” Benjy said. “I think maybe he’s getting cold outside.”
“Owl has nice warm feathers,” Carl said. “Owl is fine. He’s been sleeping in the barn all day and now he’s getting up to have his breakfast.”
“Owl has his breakfast when it gets dark and I have my breakfast when it gets light,” Benjy said.
“Right,” Carl said. “Now say good night and hop into bed.”
“Good night, Owl,” Benjy said, his face serious. And then, with his nose against the glass for a hoped-for last glimpse of his friend, he said, “I love you, Owl. Forever and ever.”
Carl picked the boy up and hugged him hard, carried him to his bed and lovingly tucked him in. “Now get under the covers, like a good little owl.”
“Owl doesn’t have covers; he has feathers,” Benjy corrected him. “Nice soft warm feathers. I want Owl to come in the house so I can pet him on his nice soft feathers.”
“All right. Someday you can do that. Off to dreamland, now.”
“I love him,” Benjy said.
Carl kissed the little boy on his warm, sweet-smelling forehead. “And he loves you. Now close your eyes. Owl says, ‘Sweet dreams, Benjy-boy.’ ”
On his way down the stairs Carl could hear Benjy contentedly hoo-hoo-hooing himself to sleep.
When Carl came home from the office next evening, the big country kitchen looked warm and inviting. A fire was blazing in the corner fireplace, and Peg was busy at the old-fashioned eight-burner stove she had carted home triumphantly after overbidding at a back-road auction. She was making her own cranberry sauce for the turkey George had given them from his flock down the hill. Benjy was playing on the floor with one of the empty glass jars Peg had sterilized for the cranberries. He had discovered that when he put his mouth to the open neck of the jar and blew, he could make a deep, echoing sound like a real owl. “Hoooooo, hooooo,” he kept repeating.
Carl made himself a highball. It had been another jagged day at the office.
“All right, Benjy, dear, that’s enough Owl for one night,” Peg pleaded as she poured the steaming cranberry juice.
“Benjy, please, give Owl a rest,” Carl seconded.
Stubbornly concentrating on his discovery, Benjy was just putting his mouth to the lip of the jar again when Bassey burst in. Peg glared at his filthy boots. The smell of him seemed too strong to be human. His small, shiny eyes in his heavy, bristled face made him look like a giant boar reared up on its hind legs. He wasn’t as erect as usual. He was weaving slightly, and Carl was sure he had been swigging homemade applejack.
“Mr. Bassey,” Peg said boldly, “we’re trying to keep this kitchen clean for the holidays.”
“Craaw,” Bassey said. “Got something for the boy.”
Carl looked at him, from his muddy boots to his unwashed, unshaven face, and wondered what he was up to.
“Y’know how he’s always talkin’ about owls. Well, I went ’n’ fetched him one.”
In an unexpected, cat-quick movement he shut the kitchen door behind him and was gone. But in an instant he was back, carrying a cage. In it was a wild, clawing something that made a hideous, hoarse, rasping sound. A rapacious hooked beak was slashing at the bars of the cage, which was being shaken violently by powerful talons. The face was a spectra white Halloween mask come savagely to life. The eyes were large and black and full of fury.
It all happened so quickly that it seemed a jumble of discontinuity, but Bassey extended the cage toward Benjy as if to present to him the captured barn owl, and in surprise, or to ward off an enemy, the boy moved his hand toward the cage. The angry bird lurched forward and—whether with his talons or his beak, Carl wasn’t sure—ripped the flesh from the tips of Benjy’s fingers. Benjy’s scream was shriller than the owl’s. Blood was spurting along his fingers. He was screaming hysterically when Peg grabbed him up and ran out of the room with him.
“See how deep it is—maybe we should call a doctor,” Carl called after them. Then he turned on Bassey. “You son of a—”
“He ain’t hurt. Just a little scratch on his finger.”
The owl was screeching and flailing to fight free of its cage.
“Take that damn thing out of here!”
“I thought he’d like to see what a real owl looks like.”
“Bassey, that was a mean, despicable thing to do. I never want you to set foot on this place again.”
“All right by me. Just pay me the twelve dollars you owe me and we’ll be even.”
“Twelve dollars! I don’t owe you a nickel.”
“Two hours a day for the last three days. Don’t worry—I keep track.”
“You can sue me for it, damn it.”
“I’ll get the constable on you, that’s what I’ll do. City people comin’ in here, hoggin’ everything …”
“Damn it, Bassey, what you did to that boy … Now get out of here.”
The barn owl was still flapping, hissing, struggling to get out of its cage.
“And take that goddamn owl with you!”
Bassey hulked out of the door with his ferocious prisoner gnashing at its bars. Through the small square window in the kitchen door Carl watched his atavistic neighbor trudge across the lawn into the field that separated this house from the squalid carriage house. Carl bolted the kitchen door and went up to the nursery. Benjy was still whimpering and staring moodily at his bandaged hand.
“That wasn’t the good owl that lives in your tree,” Carl said. “That was the bad owl who lives in the barn.”
Benjy didn’t say anything. Carl offered to piggyback him around the room, but Benjy didn’t want to. He sat on his bed, staring at his fingers.
Carl tried again. “Don’t you want to say good night to Owl—the good owl?”
The little boy was silent.
“The good owl is waiting for you to say good night to him,” Peg said weakly.
Benjy’s silence made them want to keep talking, but they couldn’t fool Benjy any more. There weren’t any friendly owls. Owls had feet to grab and claw you with, and hard, angry mouths to tear at your flesh and eat you up. Real owls had mean, fighting eyes and all they wanted to do was hurt you and kill you.
The next day Benjy did not mention Owl. He had cut him out of his vocabulary as one painfully omits the mention of an old friend who has betrayed him. Sometimes he would just sit at the window and stare out for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, something he had never done in his going-on-five-year-old life. Carl would have been relieved if he had said, “I hate that old owl,” but he never did. Owl was a closed chapter in a life that Carl darkly imagined as an accordionlike unfolding of disenchantments.
With Bassey gone, Carl went back to burying the garbage in inadequate holes he never had the time or the patience to dig. To add to his country woes, he was no longer on speaking terms with his neighbor George. George had taken Bassey’s side of the argument over the twelve dollars, and Carl accused George of becoming a professional country snob. George went back to his luxurious farmhouse in angry silence.
Sometimes Benjy would wake up crying at the sound of the barn owls, and Peg complained that their constant hooting was disturbing her sleep too. To top it off, the R. of B.B.&R.—Mr. Ryan—had retired, and Carl found himself saddled with major responsibilities for replacing lost accounts, which required after-dinner meetings in town two or three times a week. Before the end of winter he and Peg began searching through the Sunday Times real-estate section. Carl could hear Bassey saying, “Craaw!” and George muttering something over his pipe about summer soldiers. Well, to hell with them. At least if he and Peg moved closer in, there would be no physical threat from those hideous barn owls to give Benjy nightmares and jangle their peace of mind. But as he checked off, with a nagging sense of surrender, half a dozen promising locations in Scarsdale, Larchmont, Mamaroneck, picturing quiet tree-lined streets far from mud, garbage ditches and Basseys, a sound even more threatening than the scream of the owls grew louder and louder in his head: “Craaw! Craaw craaw CRAAW!”
