Bless this Mouse (7 page)

Father Murphy made the call first thing Monday morning. Hildegarde was watching from behind the radiator. She had taken the shortcut through the wall to his office and emerged beside the radiator pipe. It was a route that was too dangerous in winter, when the pipes were hot. But now, at the end of September, the furnace had not yet been turned on.

She saw him turn the pages of the telephone book and then run his finger down the page until he found the number. Amazingly, it was near the
front
of the book, not the back, where they had found the
X
pages.

Hildegarde was puzzled by that. She hoped he would leave the book open so that later, when he had left the room, she could check. Perhaps all by herself she could eat that page, in case there was a next time. But for now, it was too late. Father Murphy picked up the receiver and dialed. At the same time, he called to the church secretary, who was in the small room nearby.

"I'm making arrangements to have the rodent problem taken care of, Sylvia," he told her.

Hildegarde shuddered. To be lumped like that into the category of
rodent!
Awful! That category included
rats,
a terrible enemy of mice! She knew that technically church mice were rodents. But to have it said so blatantly! Well.
Well!

She waited, listening to his conversation, then watched while he hung up the phone, rose from his desk, sneaked a couple of gumdrops from their hiding place into his mouth, and left the room. "He'll be here Wednesday," she heard him tell the secretary.

Quickly she scampered over to his desk and examined the opened telephone book. Too late for this time. The church mice would have to deal with Wednesday and what it would bring. But next time—if there was ever a next time—they'd be better prepared.

The page was in the
Es.
And there it was: a little boxed ad, with silhouettes of mice displayed (not very well drawn, she observed; the ears were too small, and the noses overly pointed, giving the silhouettes an evil appearance). And she could see immediately the mistake they had made. The person Father Murphy had called was actually the EXTERMINATOR.

So it was
EX,
not X. Well! Live and learn!

And Hildegarde had an
EX
of her own now to plan, she realized—a special kind of
EX
she had learned about from listening to readings from the Bible. She had saved this word for the moment it was needed, a moment she had hoped would never come.

She grabbed a gumdrop—a green one, her favorite flavor; no sense wasting the opportunity!—and scurried back across the room and down into the radiator pipe opening. When she reached the undercroft, she went first to her secret place. Everyone knew about her napping place in the sacristy, and most of the mice knew, too, that she slept in her night nest under the organ pedal. But no one knew of this secret place, behind the breaker panel, where she hoarded small treasures. Carefully she stowed the green gumdrop there, rearranging the pile of gold threads—she had unraveled them, one by one, from Father Murphy's vestments; she was
so
attracted to gold—and a red satin ribbon that had come loose from a prayer book.

Then she hurried away, because she had work to do. There was so little time, and so many mice! But they had trained for this. She would start by announcing the biblical word and having it passed on. Oddly, it seemed to go well with that other word:
exterminator.

Hildegarde took a deep breath. Then, loudly, she made the announcement: "EXODUS!"

Dutifully, because they had been taught the procedure, the mice passed the word along, calling to one another, so that the message made its way throughout the interior of the church walls.

"Exodus! Pass it on!" Vivian squeaked to her adolescent children, and shooed them off to be messengers.

"Exodus! Pass it on!" Jeremiah called through a furnace duct. In seven different locations, other mice heard it and repeated it so that the news went from mouse to mouse to mouse until each one, all but the smallest ones, knew, and knew what it meant. They all prepared to flee. They were going Outdoors.

***

Monday night was spent organizing, collecting food, hiding evidence of their existence, and instructing the little ones, who were caught up in the excitement but didn't know why.

"What's
exodus?
" the small mouse named Harvey kept asking. He was an annoying little fellow with a very whiny voice. "What's
exodus?
What's
exodus?
" When his mother, busy with other things, didn't reply, he scampered about and bothered everyone else. Finally someone told him to go find Ignatious.

"Ask Ignatious," they said. "He'll explain."

Ignatious was very old, but new to Saint Bartholemew's. He had lived for a long time at the university library, and had become a church mouse quite by accident when he had foolishly crawled into the pocket of an overcoat that was draped across a chair during a lecture. He had fallen asleep there. Next thing he knew, the overcoat, and its owner, Father Murphy, transported him to Saint Bartholemew's and he had been there now for several months.

It wasn't much different from the library, actually. Pocket crumbs to eat still, and he had made himself a nice nest from some shredded hymnal pages. He wasn't fond of crowds and tended not to attend meetings (on the night Hildegarde had gathered the mouse congregation in Father Murphy's office, he had stayed behind, eaten some small tobacco flecks that he'd been saving, and gone to sleep), but he understood what was happening now and was preparing, like the others, to leave.

Harvey, the little whiny mouse, sought him out and pulled at his tail to get his attention. There were few things Ignatious hated more than having his tail yanked. He turned irritably and said, "What?"

"They told me to ask you what
exodus
means." Harvey folded his paws politely and looked up with big eyes.

"
Departure,
" Ignatious replied. "It's Greek." Actually, he could forgive a tail yank if someone was genuinely seeking knowledge. And he remembered Greek fondly, from the university library. He had nibbled quite a bit of Greek. "An ancient language."

"Greek?" Harvey giggled, and said it several times. "Greek? Greek?" It was so close to
squeak
that it amused him. Ignatious gave him a meaningful dark look and he subsided.

"It means 'the departure of large numbers.'"

"Of mice?"

"In this case, mice."

"Why?"

Ignatious sighed. He knew that once a young one started with
why
there would be many
whys
to follow. "Because we're in danger. We have to escape."

"To where?"

"Outdoors."

Harvey squealed nervously. "
Outdoors?
"

Ignatious held up one paw in a STOP gesture because he could see that Harvey was about to ask
why
again. Ignatious liked imparting knowledge, but he found a litany of
whys
annoying.

"Go," he said. "Stay with your mother and siblings. If you run off by yourself, you might never find your way back here. I myself made a foolish mistake once in leaving the university library, and..." He stopped himself. Too long a story. Not of interest to young ones.