Young Fredle - Louise Yates [67]
“I know,” Fredle said, first remembering how glad he’d been to see Bardo and then almost wishing he could see Neldo and her brother again. “But not always, not all bad.”
Axle continued. “Something was bound to happen, sooner or later. We were heading for trouble. I was sorry to hear you got pushed out.”
Fredle waited for her to ask him about what had happened to him, how he had managed, where he had gone and what he had seen, but she didn’t have a single question. Instead, she told him, “It’s getting pretty crowded behind the pantry.”
“In the cellar—”
“A lot of the mouselets will have to be pushed out, unless we all want to go hungry. It’s not easy, these days,” Axle said. Then she did have a question. “Where are you going?”
Fredle had turned around to leave. He looked back to explain, “I want to …” But he was too sad to say more.
He went to wait by the pantry door with Grandfather. Grandfather didn’t even greet him, he just said, “Really and truly? Up in the air? Moons?”
Fredle was glad to be able to say to him, “Really and truly.”
“I wish I wasn’t old,” Grandfather said.
“You’d like the lattice wall, too,” Fredle said, wishing the same thing. “You can see through it, to outside and the green of the grass, and—”
“I don’t know,” Grandfather answered quietly, but he didn’t tell Fredle if what he didn’t know had to do with grass and the lattice wall or with something else. “I just don’t know.”
As they made the trip back up to their nest, Fredle asked Kidle, “Is something wrong with Grandfather?”
“He’s worried about how we’ll manage. I think he expects, any day, that he’ll be the one pushed out.”
“I shouldn’t have come back.”
“That’s not it,” Kidle assured him. “We’re all glad and I’m really glad. It’s only, what Father says, it’s hard times.”
“What can we do to make them better?” Fredle asked.
“When times are hard, all a mouse can do is hunker down. That’s the way mice are.”
Not me, Fredle wanted to tell him, but first he wanted to talk to Axle again. That is, he wanted to try to talk to Axle. He wanted to give her another chance.
So before he went to sleep, he crept back along the board to her family’s nest. “Axle?” he whispered. “Axle!” and eventually he saw her head rise over the rim. “Come down,” he said.
“I can’t. You know that, Fredle.”
“I wanted to tell you,” he whispered. “I met raccoons.”
“Raccoons?”
“A band of them, they were going to eat me—after they showed me the lake and fed me some fish. But I escaped.”
“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?” Axle asked. “We’re too old for stories now, Fredle,” she told him. “I’ve grown up and you should have, too.”
“And there were stars,” said Fredle, desperately.
Axle didn’t ask him what any of those things might be, stars, or fish, or lake, and she didn’t ask him what raccoons looked like and smelled like, or talked about. “Go to sleep, Fredle,” she advised him. “That’s what I’m going to do. That’s all a mouse can do when he has to go to bed hungry.”
Fredle didn’t move. “In the cellar—” he tried again, but she was gone.
Fredle didn’t want to return to his nest. He wasn’t tired. But where could he go? Here, inside, within the walls, there was no place to go, and even if you got somewhere, it would be just like the place you left. Everything was the same, here, inside, he thought. Everything didn’t change and mice didn’t change and the way things were was the way things had to be. He had certainly heard the rules often enough.
Thinking that made Fredle tired, but not in the way that made him simply want to sleep. He was tired in a way that made him not want to do anything except go back to the nest and wait for sleep to come and find him. He turned slowly around.
Why couldn’t mice change? he wondered tiredly. And then he was awake and paying full attention to his own question because he knew that he had changed. He had changed, and not just once but many times. This