Mr. Bridge_ A Novel - Evan S. Connell [19]
21 Locusts
Gradually the low sky of winter began to lift. Beneath the shrubbery and in dark, cold corners the snow hardened into ice, but everywhere else it was melting. Icicles grew from the eaves, dripping and shining during the day while great pleats of snow skidded from the roof and thundered softly into the drifts.
Then one afternoon a breeze floated through the rose trellis, birds sailed overhead, and it was April. Harriet left the kitchen door open. The laundress strung clothesline in the back yard. Ruth and Carolyn oiled their roller skates and Douglas quit wearing the helmet he had worn nearly every day since October. Mrs. Bridge placed her fur coat in storage. Mr. Bridge, with no regret, carried the big flat-bladed snow shovel to the basement, where he hung it on a nail in the wall behind the furnace. He inspected the window screens. He rolled the lawn mower back and forth and sharpened the blades, and he sharpened the clipping shears.
And then it was summer.
Nothing spoke so persistently of summer as the ceaseless rasping song of the locusts—not the whirring lawn mowers or the morning twitter of sparrows in the birdbath or the shouts of boys playing baseball, the monotonous buzz of houseflies, little girls skipping rope on the sidewalk, not even the ephemeral moths bumping with mild anxiety against a screen. No noise welled from the green heart of summer like the buzzing of the locusts. Each afternoon they began when the hottest part of the day was over, and they did not stop until late at night, unless there was rain.
One evening on the porch he was reading the Star. His wife was sewing buttons on a shirt. Carolyn was reading a book. Douglas sprawled on the floor drawing pictures in a tablet with a box of crayons. Ruth lay on the swing doing nothing. In the dark trees the locusts sang.
Carolyn looked up. “Mother,” she said, “where do they go when summer is over?”
“The locusts? I’m not sure, dear. Ask your father.”
Mr. Bridge lowered his newspaper. “They live only a few weeks, Carolyn.”
“How do they make that noise?”
“Oh, goodness, I used to know,” her mother said. “Let me think. We were taught in school.”
He waited for her to remember, but she could not, so he said, “They are not rubbing their wings together, as most people think. They produce the noise by the vibration of a membrane situated near the abdomen. And as I recall, Carolyn, it’s only the male who ‘sings’—if you care to call it singing. I’m afraid this just about exhausts my knowledge of them. It’s been quite a while since your mother and I were in school.”
But she had noticed that they began in unison, not one after another. She asked how they knew when it was time to begin. He answered that this was a mystery.
“It’s so beautiful,” Ruth said. “It’s like they had an orchestra with a conductor. I could lie here and listen forever.”
Mrs. Bridge said, “They always let us know evening is on the way.”
“It sure is funny you never see them,” Carolyn said. “I looked, only I couldn’t find any.”
A few minutes later Mrs. Bridge remarked, “Don’t you wonder how many there might be in that old elm? Suppose we guess.”
Mr. Bridge discovered that he could not read any more, though he continued holding the paper. He listened to his daughters and his wife and he observed his son, but he no longer understood what was being said; as he listened to their voices and to the seasonal music of the insects the problems which had troubled him during the day did not seem important, and he reflected that he had practically everything he ever wanted.
22 You Don’t Love Me
It happened one warm Sunday afternoon while he was on his hands and knees in the yard with a can of poison. She came out of the house to watch, at least he assumed she had come out to watch his progress in the unending battle against the