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They went on like this, the three of them, on the shelf on the wall. Tildy of course never moved, but her visitors came and went regularly enough. In rain, when Uriel stayed away, Prospero would sometimes stay longer. Sometimes Tildy was alone, and that was sometimes hard.
The winter came, and with it the snow. Uriel, being a migratory crow, came to say goodbye. Tildy was sad to see him go, but he promised to return with a sea shell from the ocean; his cousins the gulls knew where he could find some of the best.
The winter wore on, and for poor Prospero the crumbs grew infrequent, so they sang songs to while away the long, cold nights. Addy had been fond of music, so Matilda May knew all kinds of songs, and she taught them all to Prospero. He loved songs like “This Old Man,” and “Red River Valley,” but he disliked “Three Blind Mice,” and Tildy was careful not to sing it for him twice. Tildy knew sixteen different lullabies, and Prospero taught her to sing “The Mouseling’s Lullaby,” which had been sung to him, to his father, and to his grandfather’s father. Prospero had even learned how to play it buzzing on a leaf, like Addy’s old tissue-paper and comb harmonicas.
By the time
Uriel returned in the spring, they were able to sing in harmony for him.
The performance was so inspiring that he begged them to show him how.
His caw would never be as soft and clear as the mouse’s tenor voice,
but what he lacked in sweetness he made up for in loudness. Altogether
they made a happy little band.
“Speaking of sound,” Uriel said finally, when the hellos, hugs and songs were through, “I’ve brought presents.” Uriel flew down and lumbered ungracefully back up through the air with a large, curved object. It looked rugged, and pale, and Uriel seemed remarkably proud of it.
“How did you ever carry it all the way back?” Prospero was frankly amazed.
“It’s really something,” Tildy said. “What is it?”
“It’s a sea shell,” the crow said. “And it’s actually quite small. Near my cousins, they grow them enormous. Listen: it’s the great blue sea you hear.”
They each took turns, marveling at the sound. Suddenly, Tildy felt as she had only just lost Addy, all over again. Tildy felt like a little raft on that great blue sea.
“I’m so sorry that my gift has made you sad,” the crow said kindly, and began to pick up the shell.
“No, please,” Tildy said. “Don’t take it away. I love having it.”
Uriel tilted his glossy black head, and peered into her button eyes. “Some humans, my cousins say, collect many of these – all shapes and sizes. They walk, slowly, eyes down, like the gulls, but they do not eat what they find. Perhaps they fill another kind of hunger.”
Every
spring, Uriel brought another shell back for Tildy on her shelf by the
window. It was the summer that Uriel brought her the fifth shell –
a leopard-spotted spiral beauty – that the door of the old rambling
house opened once more.
Prospero ran all the way from the garden up to Tildy on the second floor, up the window ledge and onto the shelf, and so he was still catching his breath when Tildy watched the truck pull up onto the gravel drive in front. The gravel wasn’t raked neatly, as it had been when there were humans in the house, but the noise was achingly familiar to Tildy anyhow.
“People?” she said simply.
Prospero merely nodded.
Tildy watched, hawk-like, from her window, and from the nearby oak, Uriel watched, crow-like. He knew better than to go near the house with people in it. Humans worried in the presence of crows, and often got violent if they came too near.
Tildy searched only for Addy, but she searched in vain. She thought, for a moment, that she saw Addy’s mother, but when she looked again, she saw it was not.
Prospero began to shake when he heard the footsteps. “You’d better make yourself scarce, my friend,” Tildy cautioned.
“What do you think they’ve come for?” he asked. “Do you think they’ve come to get you?”
Tildy wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She was torn between wild hope and imaginings, and the wild fear of being taken away from her friends, who by now she had known almost as long as she had known Addy herself.
The last thing she expected was what happened next.