Musings For February
The newsletter dedicated to the memory of Walter R. Brooks.
By Michael Cart, Editor, “THE BEAN HOME NEWS”
Greetings from frigid Indiana, where the temperature is cold but the heart is warm (or is that my acid indigestion?). Whenever I think of winter, I immediately recall the opening chapter of Freddy the Pied Piper.“It had been a hard winter. A foot of snow had fallen on the 3rd of December and another foot on the 10th, and then the mercury crawled down to ten below and stayed there until after Christmas. Then it warmed up just enough to snow some more. And the weather kept on like that for another six weeks. It was still that way on the morning of February 14th when Freddy, the pig, crawled out of his warm bed and went to his study window and looked out and said disgustedly: “Oh, my goodness sakes!”
Oh, my goodness sakes, indeed. Poor Freddy had hoped that, it being St. Valentine’s Day, the mailman would be bringing him lots of valentines, ideally with money in them. But, as Walter tells us, “the mailman hadn’t been up the road past the Bean farm in over a week, and he certainly wouldn’t try to buck those drifts in his old Ford today, even to bring Freddy a valentine.”
To make matters worse, the pig is practically sty-bound by the deep snow. But then inspiration visits: he will ski down to the cow barn, where, he has learned, Jerry the rhinoceros from the Boomschmidt Circus is waiting to see him. What he doesn’t know is that it has rained overnight and then frozen so the snow is slick as glass. “He put on his skis” (don’t ask me why a pig has skis but, come to think of it, he has a bicycle, too) “and stepped out on the snow. And it was a good thing that the skis were pointed towards the barnyard or goodness knows where he would have ended up. For the minute the skis touched the icy crust, they started. Freddy gave a yell of surprise and pushed backwards with the ski poles to keep from falling, and then the whole farm seemed to come whizzing up towards him, and though it was a still day the wind whistled in his ears; and then before he knew what had happened the dark square of the cow barn door rushed at him and swallowed him and there was a crash and a thump and he was sitting on a hard floor with a pain in his shoulder and a lot of comets and constellations whirling around his head. And when these cleared away he couldn’t see anything.”
No, he hasn’t gone blind (though at first he thinks he has); his eyes are just shut!
It doesn’t take very long thereafter for Freddy to learn why Jerry has walked all the way to the Bean farm from Virginia. Mr. Boomschmidt, in financial trouble, has had to close his circus. Worse, Freddy’s dear friend Leo the lion has gone missing. What’s a pig to do? Why, assume his persona as Freddy the famous detective, of course. And so he does. Just how he does it, is the stuff of this very funny adventure. But before he gets very far, there’s another weather-related problem to deal with: the horrible weather has driven mice into houses all over Centerboro. They’ve even infested the bank where they’ve chewed up half the important papers in the vault not to mention a whole package of five dollar bills (cha-ching!). It doesn’t take Freddy very long to come up with a scheme to rid the houses of their vermin (my apologies, Eek, Quik, Eeny and Cousin Augustus; I should have said “mice”) and, in the bargain, make enough money to save the circus. He will rent a good, tight barn where the mice can spend the winter, charging householders $5.00 a pop to entice the mice away. “Now Freddy could have moved the mice over into the barn quietly without any fuss, but that was not his way of doing things.” Instead, he takes out a big ad in the “Centerboro Guardian” with the headline “THE PIED PIPER OF CONTERBORO will free your town of mice Monday at 2 p.m.” At the appointed hour Freddy, resplendent in a pied piper costume that Miss Peebles (see Freddy and the Popinjay) has helped him fabricate, appears at corner of Main and Elm, pulls a tin fife out of his pocket and, tootling the first seven notes of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” starts up Main Street. The mice have their instructions and so come tumbling out of the houses as Freddy passes, falling in line behind him, “dancing and squeaking.” This is a bit overwhelming for some of the more timid citizens and Old Mrs. Peppercorn is so scared she swarms up the trellis on Judge Willey’s porch and the fire department has to come to get her down.
With that mission accomplished the portly pied piper – with $1,726.00 in his pocket – along with Jerry, Leo (who has been rescued by now), and Jinx head for Virginia to bail out the circus. They say a fool and his money are soon parted; now, Freddy is no fool but he is soon parted from his money. How he contrives to get it back provides one of the funniest scenes in the Freddy series. In fact, Pied Piper boasts two of the funniest scenes in the series: the other is the rescue of Leo from the clutches of the evil pet shop owner Gwetholinda Guffin.
So do yourselves a favor: on one of these long winter evenings, curl up with a copy of Freddy the Pied Piper. You’ll thank me later.