The way you make bricks is by baking them like brownies in an oven, or pouring the mixture into thousands of small molds and drying the shapes in the sun if you don’t expect it to rain terribly much where you live. If it does rain and you haven’t baked your bricks, you may end up with drooping walls. The bricks that are used to build a brick oven must get so totally baked into brickness that they almost can’t bear it another minute, since they heat up, on one side, that is, every time they bake the bricks inside, hundreds of times over, like a drip of black cheese in the microwave.
Brick is a good word for bricks because it has the sound of the sharp, crunchy edge in it, pulling across. They were looking into Force and Friction in Nory’s science class at the Junior School, and finding out that a brick creates a ton of friction. Ricki Ticki Tavi, the mongoose who saved the little boy, got his name from the rick-ticking sounds he made. Near the end, when Ricki Ticki disappears down the hole with Nagaina, the Queen Cobra, with ‘his little white teeth clenched into her tail’—animals often had surprisingly white teeth — you’re supposed to think that he might be dead. Usually with a story there is a moment at which you’re supposed to think some person or animal has died or some other really sad failure has happened — and if you don’t know that that’s how stories are supposed to work you can become quite upset and have to run out of the room to escape the squeezing feeling in your chest, like at the end of Lady and the Tramp, when the movie tries its hardest to make you think the old dog who couldn’t smell very well anymore had gotten run over by a carriage-wheel and died.
But the time of worrying that Rikki Tikki is dead didn’t last quite long enough, in Nory’s opinion. It could have lasted a little longer, and since they’re supposed to be having a terrible battle down in the hole you need some sign that something’s going on down there, like little faint struggling sounds, or every so often a whiffle of dirt flying out of the hole.
The other small problem with the story — not that there are any real problems with the story, it’s a good story by a man who lived in Africa for many years, not an African American man but just a man who lived there, or somewhere like Africa — but it’s sad to think of such a likable mongoose eating holes in the baby cobra eggs. The baby cobras hadn’t killed anything or frightened anyone. They would when they hatched out, because that’s what cobra snakes are designed to do naturally. But a story should not have a small, tiny, curled-up barely alive animal be killed unless it has done a terrible thing, which it can’t have done because it hasn’t even uncurled itself from the egg. And the story isn’t about what cobras do naturally, anyway, since it has the cobras speaking. In real life they don’t speak, at least in English. A cobra couldn’t call itself ‘Nag’ or ‘Nagaina’ because the cobra’s tongue is so thin it couldn’t make an N sound. A cobra would probably just call itself ‘Lah,’ if anything.
The swans on the river made a pretty frightening sound when Nory fed them. They came up out of the water and started walking toward her, shrugging up their wings, and no matter how many pieces of bread she threw their way, they kept coming towards her, because they wanted the bigger piece of bread in her hand. When Nory said, ‘Hold your horses, back up, back up!’ they opened their beaks and made a nasty sound, like a hissing cat. Their necks were like cobra necks, somewhat. Nory’s father was alarmed and didn’t want to feed them anymore and was shooing them away with his briefcase, but it wasn’t fair, Nory thought, that just because a bird was somewhat alarming he should not be fed, whereas the ducks, which weren’t alarming, should be fed. There was a group of ducks that were so cute, a mother and about fifteen babies, each with a dear fluff of brown on its head. They crossed the street, just like in Make Way for Ducklings, which was the first book Nory ever read. Nory gave them some crackers. A girl at the Junior School, Kira, who was turning out to be a nice friend, said that her parents didn’t let her feed the birds any bread, because it wasn’t what they would normally eat if they were wild. Nory told her that she fed the birds sesame crackers, at least sometimes, and sesames are seeds and birds eat seeds. But both the ducks and the swans ate grass. There was a lot of grass-eating, which wasn’t very natural either, because there didn’t used to be so much grass in the world.
There was a lot of attention paid to grass in England. Cows used to keep it short, long ago, but now they used lawn mowers, of course. Sometimes they mowed it very short in a crisscross, so that it looked like a plaid cloth. One large field below the cathedral near Nory’s school was totally bare earth, because they were putting in new grass. One day when she was walking home with her mother they saw five men walking in a row on this field. Each man had a big white plastic thing attached around his waist, like a drum in a marching band in a parade, and they reached into their drums and got handfuls of grass seed and threw it out over the brown field. Nory’s mother thought it was a beautiful sight, and it was. There were some interesting holes in one of the fields they used for sports at Junior School, but nobody seemed to know what was inside them. Not cobras and mongooses, but you never know. You don’t want to reach your hand down in there. Even if you poke a stick in, sharp teeth could suddenly grab the stick, which would be startling. In some fields, people might have been buried there long ago. For instance near the South Door of the Cathedral it was now all grass, but in the map of the way the Cathedral was during Prior Rowland’s lifetime it said ‘Monks Graves.’ Did they move the monks, or just forget about them?
12. Ladybugs, Butterflies, and a Hurt Thumb
Nory used to not like the idea of burying people terribly much. Now she had come to gripes with it as a fact of life. When she was four she dictated a letter that her father typed out for her:
To Whom it May Concern:
Eleanor Winslow does not want to be buried under the ground.
Sincerely,
Eleanor Winslow.
She scribbled a fake signature, since at the time she had not known how to write, and she put a stamp on the piece of paper and scribbled on the stamp and it looked official. When her hermit crab lost all its claws one by one, very forlornly, and died only a few weeks after they got her, Nory buried her with a grave marker that said:
TO HERMIONE
Soon Gone
She wanted a dog or a rabbit or a kitten, anything warmblooded, except possibly a cow, but her parents said that they couldn’t have one for various reasons.
The field at the school that Nory used for hockey had no holes at all, whatsoever, because it was made of Astroturf. There was lots of sand sprinkled in the Astroturf. Nobody knew why. If you were an animal, digging a hole, and you dug and dug and then dug up to the surface intending to make a South Door for your hole, and you came up under the Astroturf, you would be pretty unhappy about having done all that work for nothing. Maybe there were dead monks under there. Once Nory found a ladybug in the Astroturf and carried it to the edge, and set it on a leaf. That was on a fairly embarrassing day, the second time they played hockey, when Nory’s skirt fell off twice. Luckily hockey was all girls. And another girl had the same problem, too. While Nory was carrying the ladybug off the field, she was worried that it would fly off. If it flew off, it might just land in more Astroturf, where it couldn’t live.