The Ballad of Tubs Marshfield Read online

  “Tubs,” said Virgil, shaking his head. “This lemming ain’t magic.”

  “Of course I’m magic,” said Roy. “What are the chances I’d fall directly into the house of the frog I was wishing to see?”

  “He has a point,” said Beau.

  “A point on his pencil, maybe,” said Virgil.

  “He does not have a point,” said Lila. “But maybe he can help us.”

  She looked at Roy. “As you were flying from your home to the swamp, did you see machines or pipes pumping smoke into the air?”

  “I did!” said Roy. “Because we flew over the factory. It smelled terrible. I thought it might be run by giant crows—you know how crows love things that smell bad? I thought they might be manufacturing ships so they could—”

  “Mmm,” said Lila, interrupting him. “Did you happen to see if there were people in the factory?”

  “I imagine there are all kinds of people in the factory,” said Roy. “Wearing hard hats and bringing lunch pails to work and understanding the mysteries of the giant crows that hired them.”

  “Now listen,” said Beau, “it might not be a factory at all.” He sneezed and adjusted the ice pack on his head. “Maybe it’s a painting of a factory that you thought was real.”

  “Maybe Lila runs the factory,” said Billy.

  Then everyone was talking at once.

  “Maybe it will get hit by lightning.”

  “Maybe we can build a dam in front of the pipe.”

  “Maybe Pythia can put a spell on it.”

  “Maybe it will get hit by a train.”

  “Maybe we’re all having a bad dream and we’ll wake up.”

  “Maybe we can reverse the pipe and the goo will pour all over the factory.”

  “Maybe there will be a forest fire—but for factories.”

  “Maybe people will see us—and then they’ll shut it off.”

  “Maybe the crows can help us.”

  “No one lives forever.”

  “Maybe it’s just time to go.”

  19

  The animals talked until it was nearly evening—and no one could agree on a plan to turn off the pipe. When everyone had gone, Lila and Tubs sat at the kitchen table. The portrait of Elodie gazed out over them with a loving smile.

  Outside, they could hear the first notes of “Kiss Me, I’m the Fattest” rising into the evening air. Neither Tubs nor Lila felt like singing along. Roy sat in the living room with his pencil tucked behind his ear, trying to teach himself to play the jaw harp. A bottle of willow-sap soda sat on the table and Tubs poured three cups—one extra in case Roy decided to join them.

  The swamp was misty and hazy in the afternoon. It was so peaceful, Tubs understood why some believed there was nothing wrong with the water.

  “First we have to figure out a time when no people are at the factory,” said Lila. “We have to find a way to shut off that pipe.”

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” Roy called from the living room, “if we could write a song that would levitate the factory and put it on the moon?”

  “How long is he going to come up with these ideas?” said Lila.

  “I don’t think he ever stops,” said Tubs. “But the song idea isn’t all bad.”

  “Oh, Tubs . . . ,” said Lila.

  “Not to levitate the factory,” he said. “But we need to start singing something different. Listen to them out there: still singing about tadpoles, and the greenest trees, and the coolest mud, and how far we can puff out our throats. But nothing is the same anymore. I think that’s why folks like Billy and Beau are so confused.”

  “A new song isn’t going to make that pipe go away,” Lila said.

  Tubs sipped his soda and caught a fresh fly that was buzzing by.

  “But it can’t hurt,” she said. “It’s better than trying to get everyone to agree on what to do.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter if everyone agrees,” said Tubs. “As long as they are trying to shut off the pipe.” Tubs thought of how everyone played different instruments in a band, and everyone had a different voice. He thought of the salamanders singing in harmony, how it made a bigger sound. “Maybe it’s better for everyone to think differently.”

  “Maybe,” said Lila. “But we need to work together.”

  “I know a bunch of bog lemmings who like to do whatever anyone in front of them is doing,” said Roy.

  “Where are they?” asked Lila.

  “In a bog,” he said. “Sometimes in the woods.”

  “Hmm,” said Lila.

  “Maybe we can scare the factory away,” Roy said. “That duck is sure scared of you, Lila. Maybe you can scare the factory.”

  “The factory is a building,” said Lila. “We need to scare the people who put it there.”

  “Billy’s scared because he thinks she ate a duck,” said Tubs.

  “Well, the factory won’t be scared of that,” said Roy, “but there’s got to be something.”

  “What scares people?” Tubs asked.

  “Lions,” said Roy. “Fires, hurricanes, bears, tornadoes, alligators, loud noises, diseases, other humans, earthquakes, lightning strikes, sharks, snakes, ghosts, and magic spells. The only one we have is magic spells.”

  “We don’t have magic spells,” said Lila.

  “We do have an alligator,” said Tubs. “And loud noises.”

  “And magic spells,” said Roy.

  Lila thought for a moment. “We have this illness,” she said. “That should scare them—maybe if they thought they could get sick, too, they would help us.”

  “We could ask them to leave,” Roy said. “We’d say, Could you please leave? We are covered in bumps. You’re pouring glop on our houses and our ducks are nervous. And then maybe they would say yes, we’re turning off the pipe, and they would take us on vacation to the top of a mountain and we would get to look out over the whole world.”

  Tubs could feel an idea forming like a song, waiting to come to him. “Kiss Me, I’m the Fattest” had got him thinking. Frogs were creatures of habit, who did the same things every day. And he thought fixing something didn’t happen all at once, you had to work on it every day. Even to live in your house, you had to do the same things every day, like wash the dishes, sweep the dock. Virgil went fishing every day, and Lila saw patients every day. Most songs didn’t come out perfect all at once, you had to play them every day before they were right.

  “What do people do every day?” Tubs said.

  “Eat,” said Roy. “Brush your teeth, jump off a cliff.”

  “You can’t jump off a cliff every day,” said Tubs.

  Roy grinned. “You can if you have a parachute,” he said.

  20

  Lila, Tubs, and Roy weren’t the only creatures who kept talking after the meeting was adjourned. All over, the swamp animals and insects began to meet.

  The crawfish gathered in their pebbled homes in the shallows; the birds roosted together at the top of an ancient cypress tree; a group of water rats moored their boats together by the lily forest and sat in conversation. The dragonflies and fireflies gathered by a lamp on Billy’s porch. What they talked about, on that lonely evening, one could only guess.

  Lila headed back to the hospital, and Tubs had retired to his piano, where he sat plunking on the keys—and occasionally standing on his head to help him think.

  Roy, too excited to sit still, packed his purple bedsheet and headed west to the little wood at the edge of a dark bog.

  Outside in the swamp, Tubs could still hear “Kiss Me, I’m the Fattest,” and he played the piano to the same tune.

  “Please let the right song come to me,” Tubs said to the piano.

  Then he called out, “I am here, idea. If you need a voice, I’m yours.”

  He thought of Elodie, and he thought of morning light breaking through the branches of the mangroves. He thought of swimming through the green water and seeing fish, watching the plants wave and dance as he drifted past.

&nbs
p; Soon he began to sing. He didn’t change the tune at all, he kept it.

  Tubs ran out to the dock and sang the new words as loud as he could. This is our story now, he thought. This is our new love song.

  “If someone doesn’t hear you—even when you sing

  You’ve got to let them know—you’re a creature, not a thing

  If someone doesn’t see you—even when you’re there

  That someone won’t protect you

  That someone doesn’t care

  If a stinging stinky poison pours around your house

  Through a pipe or through a smokestack, you’ve got to shout and shout

  ’Cause it’s gonna make you sick—if you’re a bobcat or a gnat

  Or a person or a swallow or a crawfish or a rat or a hundred-legged centipede

  Talking to a cat

  That pipe doesn’t care if you’re a person or a grouse

  It isn’t there to help us, it’s there to push us out

  So kiss me, I’m the fastest,

  I can swim out to the pipe, I can stand before the factory in the misty daylight

  We can smash that thing to pieces, we can make it go away

  Kiss me, I’m the fastest frog to wreck that pipe today

  A creature is a creature is a creature

  In the dirt and the water and the air

  A creature is a creature is a creature

  We’re alive, we’re everywhere

  So kiss me, I’m the fastest, I can leap into the air

  We can stop the pipe from spouting

  We can make it go away

  Kiss me by the broken pipe tomorrow and today”

  When he finished, he sang the song again. This time he heard others singing with him. He sang it a third time for good measure. The fourth time he sang it, even more voices joined. The fifth time Tubs stood in the darkness and just listened. From every bank and stone, from every dock and boat, from every place in the mud, frogs were singing the new song with the old melody.

  21

  The frogs sang late into the night, and Tubs lay in bed listening.

  Just as he was beginning to drift off into dreams, he remembered the salamanders, and the smart, friendly-looking weasel, and the countryside flying by. One day, Tubs thought, I’ll get to New Orleans just like Elodie. One day when everyone is well again.

  In the morning, Tubs got in the red-and-white boat and pushed off from the dock. He headed past the copse of young willows that had formed a canopy over a nearby embankment. Mist rose in the early light and the boat drifted along quietly. Soon Tubs could see the round door to Virgil’s house, and the garden of climbing swamp moss that surrounded it. Virgil’s rowboat was moored by a tall rock that jutted out of the water.

  Through the mist, Tubs could see the old water rat busy at work on the muddy embankment with a group of his friends. As he got closer, he saw they weren’t getting ready to fish. They were carrying great lengths of nautical rope, which they were loading onto Virgil’s boat.

  “Good morning!” called Tubs.

  The water rats looked up and nodded.

  “Mornin’, Tubs! We was just talkin’ about you. Frogs over this way got a new song in their heads,” said Virgil.

  “Yup,” said Virgil’s friend. “I heard frogs at the far side of the swamp started singing that new song, too.”

  “You wouldn’t know nothing about that, now would you, Tubs?” Virgil winked.

  “I didn’t think you listened to our songs,” Tubs said.

  “Kinda hard to avoid,” said Virgil’s friend.

  “This might-could be the first one you ever wrote that made a lick of sense,” said Virgil.

  “Where you headed, Tubs?” asked the first water rat.

  “I’m bringing Lila her breakfast,” he said, holding up a bundled handkerchief. But the truth was, he had planned to drop off Lila’s breakfast and go back to the factory. “Where are you headed?”

  “Aw, we’re off to that pipe,” said Virgil. “You know, kiss me, I’m the fastest and all that. But I don’t think you’ll find Lila at the hospital. She passed by here some time ago, carrying her briefcase.”

  Tubs rowed along the shore, thinking maybe he would see Lila and take her where she was headed in the boat, or at least give her breakfast.

  The air was getting warmer and the misty fog was lifting. The red-and-white boat drifted through some high cattails where dragonflies were gathering. More dragonflies than Tubs had ever seen in his life. They must have come from far away.

  “A creature is a creature is a creature!” they buzzed to Tubs as he rowed by.

  “We’re alive,” said Tubs. “We’re everywhere!”

  22

  Tubs kept an eye out for Lila as he rowed, but she was nowhere to be seen. Near the pebbled shore he saw a group of crawfish pushing a large stone—nearly fifty times their size. They had wedged narrow branches beneath it and were rolling it along. A blue heron and a long-legged egret walked beside them in the water, giving the stone a tremendous kick whenever it got stuck.

  “Good morning,” called Tubs.

  Several of the crawfish waved to him; the rest kept their heads down, working hard.

  The egret looked up at him and smiled with her eyes. “A creature is a creature,” she said by way of greeting.

  “In the dirt and the water and the air!” said Tubs, rowing on. The last time he had seen a crawfish and an egret together, one was eating the other.

  The creatures of the swamp looked happier this morning, thought Tubs. The time for talking about what to do was over. Now everyone was just doing it—though he wasn’t quite sure what they were doing. I wonder if Lila is at the factory, Tubs thought, because she really is the fastest.

  The boat coasted along near the shallow water, and soon he was passing a little wood of ash and oak trees whose trunks grew tall and straight. Their branches reached up to the heavens and sunlight filtered through the green canopy, making patterns on the water.

  On the ground between the trees stood dozens of small bog lemmings. They looked nearly identical, except for the different-colored bedsheets they wore as capes. In front of them stood Roy, holding a hammer and hopping from foot to foot. The lemmings hopped from foot to foot, too, waving their hands in the air.

  “Hello!” called Tubs.

  The lemmings all turned at once to see him, and they smiled.

  “Tubs!” shouted Roy. “These are my friends! This is Tubs,” he said to the lemmings.

  There was a small chorus of “Hi, Tubs!” and “Oh, wow, that’s Tubs!” and “He’s so green!”

  “We spent the whole night making parachutes,” Roy said. “And now we’re practicing our magic dance. After meeting your friends, I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if some of the birds could give us a lift over to the factory? Then we could jump from their backs and glide right down and see if the people needed any help turning off the pipe. Or at least we could find where they turn it on and off.”

  The lemmings all nodded at once.

  “And then we would turn it off and I would cast a magic spell with this hammer that would make it very hard to turn back on again.”

  Tubs laughed. I’ll have to write a song about Roy, too, he thought.

  “We already did a magic spell to call the birds,” said Roy. “We stomped our feet and rubbed the tops of our heads and flapped our arms and tied bedsheets around our necks, then we saw Billy paddling near the bog! Our spell made him appear!”

  The lemmings laughed in delight. “He just appeared out of nowhere!” “No explaining it.” “There he was.”

  “Did you do a spell to make me appear?” Tubs asked.

  “No, no, no,” said Roy. “Seeing you is just a nice surprise, like seeing a cloud of butterflies when you’re on your way to your sister’s house to eat cake with blue buttercream icing, or finding a rock shaped like a chicken’s head. But listen. Once we made Billy appear, we danced a hypnotic dance! And asked him if he and his friends wou
ld like to give us a lift. It was magic!”

  “I’m not sure that’s how it works, Roy,” said Tubs.

  The lemmings looked at Tubs. “Roy’s magic!” they shouted.

  “I really am magic, Tubs.”

  23

  Tubs said goodbye to the bog lemmings. He steered the boat farther out into clear water to avoid a large bloom of algae, then unwrapped the bandanna and ate some of Lila’s breakfast.

  Fortified by the snack, he began rowing faster, taking the most direct route north. As the sun rose high, he could hear the sounds of busy creatures, and little snippets of “Kiss Me, I’m the Fastest” still being sung. The swamp echoed with animals greeting one another with the words “a creature is a creature.”

  Pythia was right about one thing, Tubs thought. Everyone was singing his song.

  Before him a small forest of dead trees rose out of the swamp, and just as he was deciding whether to row around it or through it, he heard a familiar voice.

  “Tubs, where you been?” Beau called.

  Tubs looked around and saw no one.

  “Up here, frog!” shouted Beau. Tubs looked to the treetops but there was no one.

  Suddenly out of the hazy sky Tubs saw Billy, feet forward and wings back, patches of his feathers missing, about to make a water landing. And holding tight to Billy’s back, wearing his special cowboy boots, his eyes open wide, was Beau the frog.

  Billy paddled up to the boat and Beau jumped in and stood in front of Tubs, waving his arms and talking fast. The boat rocked from side to side and Tubs steadied it with his oars to keep them from tipping over.

  “Tubs, you were right,” shouted Beau. “That ain’t no painting of a factory!”

  “It’s an honest to dog factory!” shouted Billy.

  “And that stuff spilling out all over our home, that stuff ain’t good for no one,” said Beau. “We seen it for ourselves!”

  “We seen a little newt all covered in that goo. He was coughing and spitting!” said Billy.

  “We took him out and washed him up and helped him get on his way. But Tubs, Tubs!” said Beau. “We gotta get rid of that thing. I mean, a creature is a creature is a creature, am I right?”