When I was a kid my parents bought a barn. Actually, they bought a farm, complete with 180 acres of land, a saggy Edwardian-era farmhouse, multiple very saggy outbuildings, and two staunch barns that had been built together (one in the early-mid 1800s,…
My mother standing in what would become the living room of the Barn.
When I was a kid my parents bought a barn. Actually, they bought a farm, complete with 180 acres of land, a saggy Edwardian-era farmhouse, multiple very saggy outbuildings, and two staunch barns that had been built together (one in the early-mid 1800s, the other about 60 years later). My parents didn't care about the outbuildings: they--my father, mostly, but my mother as well--wanted a place they could turn into a kind of funky, interesting House Beautiful. The project took more than twenty years (the first ten years the Barn was a weekend hobby... we lived in New York City and commuted). Over those years it went from a place with uncertain floors, no plumbing or electricity, and the remnants of animal occupancy, to something more stylish and interesting. But it never quite got over its essential barn-ness.
Case in point: we had bats. Many of the rooms (including mine) did not have actual walls for some years--just two-by-four studding. And when your ceilings are 45 feet high and not insulated, bats think this is a cozy place to hang, and they do. Even by the time we gained interior walls (once we'd moved up to Massachusetts full time, when I was 13) we still had indoor livestock, because it is almost impossible to seal off a barn the way you do a standard house. One often heard the pitter-patter of little feet--squirrels, and the occasional mouse--in the walls, and on one memorable occasion a snake moved into a pile of decorative gourds in the front hallway. And because the walls of the living room and hallway (40 feet high!) did not have interior walls and insulation until about 15 years into the project, it was a great place for bats..
After we moved to the Barn full time, my father spent three or four days a week in New York, working. The rest of us dealt with living in a house five miles from town, where our next door neighbors were just inside the range of shouting-distance. My mother, always anxious by nature, was generally poised for country-related disasters to occur when Dad was out of town.
I should add that my mother was constitutionally unable to shop for more than one-day's food at a time*, which meant that pretty much every day after school we (my brother, my mother and I) drove into town to pick up groceries. The routine was: the school bus would drop Clem (my brother) and me at the end of the street, we would walk the not-quite-a-mile home, dodging the neighbors' very territorial dogs, and immediately be swept up into that day's grocery run.
So one afternoon, just as we were about to head for town, Mom spied a bat fluttering around near the ceiling in the hallway. There was a good 30 feet between the bat and the rest of us, but someone had told Mom that any bat that flies during the day is rabid, and she went into full alert mode. Full alert mode, in this case, meant a determination to kill the bat. Which was 30 feet above our heads. Mom thought fast and improvisationally: we had several cans of wasp spray with a 20-foot range, meant to coat the outside of wasp nests from a safe distance. Barking orders at us with the force of terror, Mom had my brother and me race upstairs to the landing outside her bedroom (which was open to the hallway) and spray this toxic gunk in the bat's direction. It must have had some effect, because the bad began to fly in increasingly wobbly circles, and finally fluttered woozily down from the safety of the ceiling into the kitchen (which was a huge room, open to the hallway) to land, panting, on the screen of one of the kitchen windows.
A note about the windows in the Barn: after the purchase of the property holes had been cut in the exterior of the structure, and dual-pane windows installed in the holes. They were all custom-made, sized to fit the design my parents were working toward and must have cost a bomb, a remnant of a time when my parents were flush. Each of those windows had a matching screen, removable outside of fly season..
The kitchen at the Barn
So the bat, tiny little sides heaving, clung to the screen. My mother, still determined to kill the bat before it murdered us all, instructed my brother to get the CO2 pistol we kept for target shooting outside. Now, my brother and I had been instructed, on pain of extreme paternal wrath, never ever EVER to shoot the CO2 gun inside. Period. We pointed this out to my mother, but she was unmoved. "Get the CO2 gun," she insisted. "I'll handle your father." (At this point I should have realized we were in trouble.)
My brother got the gun, got about two feet from the bat, and put a BB pellet through the bat, the two panes of glass, the screen, and--I think--nicked some bark from a tree outside. At which point two things happened:
1. The bat expired. 2. My mother freaked out.
Mom had not actually understood the mechanics of a CO2 gun. "I didn't know it shot pellets! I thought you were going to gas the bat to death!"
Honest to God.
Mom was pretty much useless after that. She sat at the kitchen table shaking her head. I sent my brother to get a butterfly net and use it to nudge the bat off the screen and take it outside. I got to call my father. Dad was of the old school, telephone call-wise: he disliked talking on the phone, particularly in those days when mid-day long-distance rates were extortionate. Still, the story wasn't going to get any better for waiting, so I called number in New York and explained what had happened.
Dad laughed for three minutes despite the mid-day long-distance rates.
My mother had a drink. Clem carried the bat out to the rickety woodshed and pitched it (with its alleged rabies) as far in as he could get it. Eventually everything went back, more or less, to normal. But it did take seven years for my parents to replace the window. Every time my mother passed it I could see
_______ *I think she cherished the notion that it was somehow superior to buy food fresh every day, but this didn't leave much wiggle room for those days when you just couldn't make it out, or there was a national holiday. This all happened when Massachusetts was under the influence of the "Blue Laws," when shops were fined for staying open on Sundays, so exceptions had to be made, grudgingly once a week. But the bat adventure happened on a school day in the middle of the week.
No comments:
Post a Comment