Summer Echoes

Every Sunday Mrs. Parker admonished the three of us to be as quiet as church mice.   After one meeting Jerry had a great idea.  We made some box traps to catch field mice.  By the end of the week we had captured ten furry little critters.  We kept them fed and watered and waited for Sunday.

We came early to help Reverend Brightly distribute the hymnals before the service.  It wasn’t difficult to hide the box of field mice behind the screen that kept the organ from the view of the congregation.  We had covered the top of the box with cheesecloth and smeared some bacon drippings on it.  Carefully we placed the box on its side, knowing that it wouldn’t take the mice long to gnaw through the cheesecloth.  When they escaped there was only once place they could go -- straight into the choir loft.

The organist played the prelude, reverently welcoming the congregation.  Reverend Brightly began the service by announcing the opening hymn, to be sung by the choir and congregation.  Tis the Call of the Trump of God  began with an introduction that sounded like a fanfare of trumpets.  The organ burst forth with the clarion call.  The mice made their escape from their pasteboard and cheesecloth prison.

About three bars into the chorus, Maud Overstreet, who sang alto, turned and bent slightly toward the floor.  A look of terror flooded her face.  She heaved her two hundred pound person, feet first onto the rickety folding chair behind her.  Her voice rose three octaves.   She shrieked, “Rats, rats!”  The spindly chair could not withstand the abuse and collapsed sending Maud backward into Thebert Paquette.

“T” as he like to be called, belched out a very unmusical sound as Maud came down on his skinny midsection.  The mice ran helter-skelter.  One ran up the voluminous pant leg of Maecenius Pyllos, our basso-profundo, who jumped about shaking his leg.   He broke forth with a string of profanities that had never before been heard in the house of worship, nor since.

The choir director fainted dead away.  The organist fanned her with a piece of sheet music.  Half the congregation seemed to be dumbstruck.  The rest roared at the spectacle in the choir loft.  I fell against the bench, doubled over with laughter.  Jerry and Waldo were hooting and pointing at the show going on in front of us.

“Shut up, shut up!” shouted Mrs. Parker.  “It isn’t funny.”   But it was.   “Out, out,” she cried.  Flailing her handbag, she shepherded us to the back of the chapel and out the door.  Ma marched right behind her.

Ma twisted my ear, whirling me toward her.  I had never seen her lost for words.  Her mouth was working but not a sound came forth.  Finally she croaked, “Go home!” pointing southward.