No Nest for the Wicket(63)

“They don’t have to be here,” I said aloud. “I suppose Chief Burke told them not to leave town, or something of the sort, but I’m sure he didn’t mean that they had to stay here camped in our backyard. Not that they’re not welcome to camp here if they want to,” I added, for the benefit of any lurking Shiffleys. “But they don’t have to be, so I don’t see why we need to entertain them or anything like that.”

“I wasn’t talking about entertaining them,” Dad said. “But even though they can’t work on the house until the chief okays it, we must have plenty of things we could have them do.”

And pay them for doing, of course.

“Such as?” I asked.

“Well … for example, what about the pond? We could ask them to find a way to make it hold water. I know you don’t want to have to go up and fill it every day the way I’ve been doing and—Oh my God! Duck!”

I admit, I started slightly when he shouted that, and I was pleased to see that Tony and Graham hit the ground and scrambled under the picnic table as efficiently as if they’d drilled for weeks. Unnecessary, but if they planned to keep playing eXtreme croquet—or, for that matter, hang around my family for the rest of the day—it was nice to see they’d paid attention and picked up a few useful survival skills.

“At ease,” I said to them. “What about Duck, Dad?”

“Where are my shoes?” he said. He scurried around, looking for them in a variety of improbable places. “I need to get up to the pond right away. With all the excitement yesterday, I forgot to fill it. The water was low yesterday morning; it’ll be nothing but mud by now. Poor Duck.”

“She’ll be fine,” I said, handing him the shoes, which had been hidden in plain sight on one of the picnic benches. “Ducks do like swimming, but it’s hardly a life-or-death issue if they can’t. She can cope.”

“It’ll make her crankier, though,” Rob said. “She’s already pretty hard to live with.”

“Hard to live with,” Tony said. “Try vicious.”

“That’s only temporary,” Dad said, looking up from his effort to untangle a knot in one of his shoelaces. “Because she’s gone broody.”

“Ah,” Graham said, but Tony looked puzzled.

“It just means she’s laying eggs,” I explained. “Duck lays eggs all the time, so in her case, it means she’s sitting on the eggs, instead of just laying them and leaving them around everywhere for people to step on.

“And she gets cranky and takes it out on anyone who comes near her nest,” Rob added.

“Can you blame her?” Rose Noire said. “She’s only expressing her maternal instinct and protecting her eggs from harm.”

“I guess you’ll have baby ducks pretty soon, then,” Graham said.

“Not unless Duck has found a drake while none of us was looking,” Rob said.

“So what do you do with the eggs, then?” Tony asked.

“Eat them, I should think,” Graham said.

“I’m a vegetarian,” Rose Noire announced. “I don’t eat any eggs.”

“No one in the family has the heart to eat Duck’s eggs,” I said. “We usually put them in the refrigerator and argue for a while about whether someone should cook them or not. Eventually, when we’re pretty sure they’ve gone bad, someone finally gets up the nerve to throw them out.”

“Would anyone get upset if someone did eat one of the eggs?” Graham asked.

“Why—would you like one?”

“No, but I think that’s part of what the Shiffleys are scrambling out there on the grill.”

“They’re scrambling Duck’s eggs?” Dad asked, looking up. “Oh dear.”

“Calm down,” I said. “We’ve said for years that someone should.”

“Yes, but those weren’t very fresh,” Dad said. “I’m not sure they’re safe to eat.”

“The Shiffleys have noses, Dad. If they don’t use them, it’s not our fault. It’s not as if we set out to poison them.”

“‘Poison them’?” Graham echoed. “What would happen if you ate them?”

“That would depend on the poison,” Dad said. “For example, salmonella—”

“Don’t coach him, Dad. You remember what happened when you gave that talk about the bubonic plague at the last family reunion  . Besides, we need to see about the pond.”

I hustled Dad out of the barn before his enthusiastic and graphic descriptions of salmonella poisoning could affect the obviously impressionable minds of the two Morris Mallet Men. The minute he got outside, he dashed off at top speed toward the pond. I followed, but I didn’t catch up with him until we were nearly at the pond, where the slope of the land grew steeper and slowed him down even more than me.