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Dispatch 12: The Infamous Bat Story
I grew up in an old farmhouse in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania. The house had been built in the 1720s and when it was built it was only a couple of rooms, dirt-floored and with walls that would stop cannon. Being that it was only 1720 and Chester Heights, Pennsylvania didn't qualify as frontier even then, I don't exactly know whose cannon they were planning on stopping. Maybe they just built 'em thick in those days.
Pretty much every generation from then on added something to the house. By the time it got to my parents, who weren't from Chester Heights, Pennsylvania, it had sixteen rooms including a music room, three stories, a basement, a Greek Revival veranda with five Doric pillars, a sun-porch, two barns, a stable, a tool-shed (on top of the stable) and a root cellar. It still retained a certain architectural integrity, but then the Northeastern American style of house has always been fairly forgiving in that regard. My parents would later do their bit, enlarging the kitchen, and adding on three more bathrooms, two upstairs and one downstairs.
I tell you all this because you have to understand that my childhood home was old, a little odd, and full of cracks and creaks and groans. And you should know that because my parents hadn't added on the three extra bathrooms yet, if any of us wanted to pee, we had to go up to the first floor, all the way down the hallway to the front of the house, up a step, and past a closet where, I swear to God, Dracula lived, waiting to get me. He was in league with the thing under the bed that would grab my ankles if I didn't hold my breath and leap the last few feet onto my sheets. They were both in league with the thing that lived behind the coats in the back staircase that would jump on me from behind if I was a bit tardy in getting up the stairs. I usually went up on all fours, because it was faster.
My dad was away a lot on business, because he worked for duPont, the company in Delaware that everyone worked for back then, unless they worked for ICI or Hercules instead. Dad had this amazing job helping to set up joint ventures for duPont, and he was always going off to places like Leningrad or Shanghai or Sao Paolo or Curtea de Arges, Romania, places where other American kids' daddies just didn't really go in the 1970s.
Mom and I coped pretty well on our own, but there were some things, like vermin, that she wasn't so good on and, well, I think we've already established that I had a vivid and excitable imagination. One day while my dad's away, this bat gets into the house. It flies around for a bit, scared, and we run around for a bit, scared, and then the bat disappears. We don't think it flew out of the house. Mom calls the exterminator and says, what do we do? The man gives us some advice, telling us it would be pretty hard to find the bat as it can squeeze into the tiniest crack, but if we do find it that we should go after it with a tennis racquet, because the strings don't show up on the bat's sonar. He tells us a few other things too, like that the bat has probably found a nice place to roost which it won't move from, and to be careful because bats fight savagely when cornered.
Mom and I arm ourselves with two ancient, dented aluminium tennis racquets and patrol the house. The bat is nowhere to be found. A day passes. Still no bat. Then my mom goes up the stairs, down the hall, up the step, past Dracula's closet, and into the bathroom, because she has to pee. And then she screams. I come as fast as I can (the stairs on all fours) to see what's the matter. Mom is pale and pointing at the toilet. I can't see anything, so I look a bit closer. There's something like a little black stick on the side of the seat. I lean in even closer. Mom puts a warning hand on my shoulder. There was something like a little wrinkled bag of black leather hanging under the toilet seat.
It was the bat. It had been hanging upside down in the main toilet in the house for the past 36 hours. Mom and I looked at each other. What could we do? There was no way we could fit a tennis racket into the toilet to knock the bat out. And Mom still had to pee. Mom orders me to get a sheet, an old sheet, from Dracula's closet. (But she doesn't call it Dracula's closet, because I hadn't told her about Dracula yet. I didn't want to alarm her.) I grit my teeth and snatch a sheet from the closet and come running back with it. Mom has gotten some rope. On her command I slammed the toilet lid down and Mom threw the sheet over it, wrapping it firmly in place with the rope.
Then we flushed. We flushed that toilet for damn near an hour straight. We left it for a while and came back after dinner and flushed it some more. We carefully unwrap the sheet from around the toilet and peek into the bowl, dented aluminium tennis racquets at the ready in case the bat decides to get even. But the bat had succumbed to the tidal wave of flushing and had gone on to Bat Heaven.
My dad gets back that night and can't figure out for the life of him why the women of the house keep shifting uncomfortably and crossing and re-crossing our legs when we sat down. You see, Mom had a vivid and excitable imagination too, and all she and I could think about for the next week was how the nice exterminator man had told us that "bats fight savagely when cornered".[Late 1970s, Chester Heights, Pennsylvania]