***
The renovation went on apace. Ben, Tom, Ginna, Gareth, Sue, Cal and Mr. Jeffs bombarded me with questions for which I usually didn't have answers. The cats and Beanbag wanted to be fed so often I felt like I was running a fast food restaurant. The humans kept throwing dirty laundry in the general direction of the washer. That was confusing; except for Ben's and mine, I didn't know who belonged to what.
Every morning I gathered up clothes on and around the washer and stuffed them in pillow cases to take to the laundromat. I could never remember which jeans had to be hung to dry and which were allowed to go in the dryer, and my patience was stretched to the limit by whoever persisted in leaving socks in a smelly rolled-up ball.
After two days, I quit trying to sort the clothes I'd folded at the laundromat. I stacked the piles on the kitchen counter and told everyone to come and collect their own. The third day Mr. Jeffs, who'd been crawling around under the house inspecting pipes, looked in the laundry room and complained that he couldn't find his shirt. He came into the kitchen, saw the neatly folded item on the counter and said, "Why did you wash that?"
One more question I didn't have an answer for.
George eased up on disciplining Clyde and Jeremy and went back to hunting. One morning he brought in a small green frog and released it under the dining room table, which was temporarily in Ben's den. He walked off, black tail high and waving, to do whatever private things emperors do when they celebrate a triumph.
I had no wish to step on a frog, dead or alive, so I crawled under the table on my hands and knees and tried to capture it. The frog sat still until I was within two feet of it, then leapt six feet sideways. I recoiled, banging my head on the table. With much swearing, I managed to herd the creature across the hall, through the kitchen and out the open French doors. It disappeared into the grass in the back yard, and George, who had been watching my inept attempts to capture prey, began stalking it.
"Your Royal Highness, stop! There is lunch to be made and drywall dust to be vacuumed. I don't have time to chase your little playmates out of the house."
Fortunately for me — and the frog — George spied Ben on a ladder, nailing new cedar siding over the old. The Royal Hunter went nimbly up the ladder and perched at Ben's feet, yelling at him to move so he could get a closer look at the Houseboy's handiwork. A few seconds later, Clyde and Jeremy were up there, too.
"Holly, get these cats down. I'm afraid they'll fall and hurt themselves."
The cats were all of three feet off the ground. Ben knew perfectly well they wouldn't get hurt jumping off the ladder, but his fatherly instincts had been working overtime ever since George made him Houseboy. I coaxed the cats down with tuna and life returned to its normal chaos.
Later, preparing for cocktail hour at the pool, I heard a squeal from that direction. When I went out, everyone, including the cats and Beanbag, was peering into the pool. Circling in it was a small green frog, looking worried.
"I suppose that's George's frog," I said. "Take the animals in the house and I'll get the frog out."
Three indignant cats and one reluctant dog were chivvied out of sight. The frog didn't even wait for me to grab the pool rake. He leapt out and dove into the bushes. I called the others and relaxed with my martini, hoping the frog had moved next door or across the road.
"Any progress on naming the farm?" Gareth asked.
"Cat Heaven?" Ginna said. "Holly's spoiling them rotten."
"How about Cock Crow?" Tom had changed his mind about the farm being peaceful after Mr. Mighty greeted the dawn at length three mornings in a row.
Ben looked up from his daily expense notebook. "I've got a better one.'Destitution Dell.'"
IX - The Black Plague
"Let's go away for a week," I said. "I feel as if I'd done a year's work in the last four months. Besides, I really need a break from this place."
Ben gave me a worried look. "I suppose we could. You have been working hard."
Our relatives had gone home at the end of July, leaving the lower floor of the house looking brand new, but it had taken days to arrange the furniture, put up curtains and organize the kitchen, not to mention the time I spent gloating over my new stove and fridge. It had taken George almost as long to stop searching the house for invaders and exult over having his kingdom and staff to himself again.
"What'll we do about poor little George?" the Houseboy asked. "He'll be lonely with both of us gone. Maybe you should go away by yourself so I can stay with him. Then I'll take my turn later."
"Ben, we can't put our lives on hold for George. I suspect that having his own territory is as important to him as we are. He'll just have to cope with someone else caring for him."
We phoned Cal Peterson. He said he'd be happy to look after George, the garden and the chickens for a few days. "It'll be payback time in September," he said, "when I do the rounds of the fall fairs."
After three glorious days in Victoria, visiting friends, I quit grumbling about the way livestock and gardens tie one down. Lazing at Long Beach on the west coast of Vancouver Island was even more relaxing and, when Ben suggested we come back two days early, I was disappointed but not unhappy. I'd missed George much more than I thought I would.
We arrived after midnight and went straight to bed, accompanied by George, who alternately ignored and scolded us for leaving him all alone. When he decided we'd had enough punishment, he curled himself around the top of my head and purred. The house, which had been locked up most of the time, was so hot we yanked the blankets off the bed and slept naked.
So much for the joys of home and hearth. I woke covered with itchy flea bites and deduced, as I tried unsuccessfully to scratch all of them at once, that the cats and Beanbag had brought fleas into the house on their fur. While we were gone, eggs had hatched, releasing hundreds of fleas with nothing to nibble on but George. Starved of food for a week, the fleas had been desperate enough to do Superman leaps onto the bed to get at me. Ben had only a few bites and I was unreasonably annoyed to learn they didn't bother him at all.
"I hate fleas even more than mosquitoes," I said to Ben, as I went on scratching. "You know my skin reacts violently to insect bites. Aside from wearing a wet suit, I don't know what to do about it. At least I can wear knee-high rubber boots to mow the lawn."
"The neighbors will think that's pretty funny."
"I don't care what they think. And I'm calling Pied Piper right this minute."
"Before you make coffee?" Ben asked plaintively. Then, more seriously, "Are you sure we need Pied Piper? I didn't budget for flea extermination."
"You wouldn't be worrying about the budget if you had to experience the agony of itchy bites all over your body or the horror of seeing little black terrorists leaping at you from the carpet."
"Why do they bite you and not me?"
"My blood smells so good that they look on me as a delicious dessert after they've chewed on George. Mother fleas tell their babies, 'Go get her; she's yummy!'"
"Can't you put something on your skin to stop them?"
"I've tried all the remedies and none of them work."
"There must be something. Go surf the Web; see what you can find out. I really don't want Pied Piper if we can find a cheaper way of dealing with the problem."
The Internet provided some interesting but useless information. I didn't need to know that a flea can jump a hundred and fifty times its body length, which is like a human jumping the length of three football fields, and do it thirty thousand times without stopping for breath. And I really didn't want to know that they can also consume up to fifteen times their body weight in blood every day.
In the vet's office, I read pamphlets on fleas and flea sprays and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. They all said, 'treat the pet's bedding as thoroughly as the floor.'
"Those tracts must be written by people who own dogs or horses," I said to Jerry. "Cats not only sleep 18 hours a day, they sleep everywhere." The flea treatment would have to be
applied to the floor, all the furniture and shelving, the computer, Ben's newspapers and me.
Jerry suggested I spray or powder George. I was doubtful about George's reaction but I said I'd try.
George hated the chemical smells and the indignity of being treated. Rubbing flea powder on him required at least eight hands. Spraying didn't work because he'd immediately sit down and lick the wretched stuff off. Then be sick to his stomach on the living room carpet.
I followed the rules in the pamphlets and vacuumed everything in sight. I laundered everything that could be laundered. I used flea spray on the furniture and carpets but there was no way to prevent fleas coming into the house on cat fur or human shoes. The fleas bit George and me – and leapt, satiated, to the floor – but eventually they died. After laying their eggs, of course. I wanted to spray the whole farm, but logic dictated that if I wanted to get rid of the flea problem completely I'd have to spray the entire world, and Ben would say he hadn't budgeted for it.
Using a flea comb helped a little because George's fur was short and he adored attention, but he wouldn't allow me to use the comb on his tummy or inside his legs.
The fleas compounded the problem by refusing to cooperate. When I used the comb, I tried to catch and squeeze them to death between thumb and forefinger, but they moved too fast and seemed encased in steel. I tried slicing them in two with my thumbnail against the flea comb. This only worked when they didn't see me coming. Finally I discovered that a few cat hairs in the comb got the fleas so tangled up they couldn't move freely. It was a great pleasure dunking the comb into a pan of water and watching the brutes drown.
The basic problem, though, was persuading the King to sit still for flea-combing. Worse, fleas leapt off the comb onto me instead of back onto him. While I was frantically trying to find the fleas and get them off, George would wander away and I'd have to start all over again.
Fear of being bitten was worse, in some ways, than the bites. George and I were frightened every time we saw a small dark speck. The King, thinking he'd seen a flea in the carpet, would look for it while trying to keep all four feet off the floor at once. Unable to do this, he'd traverse the room via the furniture, peering nervously at the carpet as he leapt from item to item. When he ran out of furniture, his quick flight across the rug looked like some new high-stepping dance. This did nothing for his usual air of regal hauteur but for once in his life he was more concerned about his skin than his dignity. I knew exactly how he felt.
Twitching is contagious and soon I was leaping sideways and tempted to walk on top of the furniture myself. Cigarette smoke, according to legend, will deter insects but being a walking smudge pot didn't help at all. My only relief was to retire to a bathtub full of hot water where I could hide in safety for a while and wonder if a doctor would agree to replace my blood with some that was flea-repellent. If he could get funding for research, I was more than willing to offer myself as a guinea pig.
Ben, meanwhile, was having his own problems; while we'd been away, the deer had been munching peas and beans and corn in the garden.
"I've decided not to put up a roadside stand until the root vegetables are ready," he said. "The deer haven't left enough of the other stuff to make it worthwhile." He shook his head. "They do far more damage than I expected. I'd hoped to maybe break even this year but it isn't going to happen."
"I can freeze or can what we do get," I said, "and give some to Cal."
"It just doesn't work, having someone else look after the place," he said. "A farm needs someone around all the time and Cal has his own work to do. But it will be different when I get the puppy trained. I'll pick him up as soon as Pied Piper gets rid of the black plague." Ben had called the exterminators himself, his sympathy for George and me having overcome his budget concerns.
"You'd better get him and George each a flea collar."
"Maybe I should buy one for you." He was grinning.
"Don't be ridiculous. You can't have put that in the budget."
He stopped grinning and checked his list. "I'm going to buy bird feeders, too."
"I thought you were against feeding animals that don't pay their way."
"There won't be much for them to eat during the winter," Ben said. "I wouldn't want them to starve when a little grain will keep them going."
"Next thing you'll be feeding the deer."
"Never!" He peered at me over his glasses. "Birds aren't totally useless, you know. They eat fleas."