To See His Face by S. Michael Wilcox

Author:S. Michael Wilcox [Wilcox, S. Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 1984-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

12

"Those Who Are With Us"

I had only six weeks to go when the final incident occurred. I was working on my science fair project, a wooden maze that helped me compare the intelligence of a mouse, a rat, and a hamster. Every day I clocked them as they tried to learn the twists, doors, and turns it took to get to the food at the end. I won the school competition and was given the opportunity of going to the all-school event. The hoods heard about it and tried to spoil it.

As I was taking my project home they caught up with me three blocks from school. In the hazing that followed, they took the mouse out of its cage and played catch with him. Somebody missed, and he fell to the sidewalk. When I finally got him home he wasn’t moving very much. If he died, the project was ruined.

I pleaded with my mother to let me keep him in the house for a few nights. I told her he was sick. I promised her he wouldn’t get loose. “I’ll lock him in the bathroom inside a box.”

I convinced her, and she let me bring the mouse into the bathroom, to my grandmother’s loud disapproval. I couldn’t bring the cage in, so I made a nest for the mouse in a small wooden crate. He was still quiet.

I went to sleep praying the mouse would be better. When I lifted the box lid in the morning, I found a little hole in the corner, and the mouse was gone. I searched the bathroom with no luck.

I didn’t know how I was going to tell my mother. She came into my room when I was on my knees looking under the bookcase and guessed what had happened. If it had been anything but a mouse, life would have been easier. Mother couldn’t stand mice, and my grandmother had an instant fit.

“Seth! You’re not going to school today. I’m going to take the day off and take your grandparents to the mountains. When I come back this evening, I want that mouse in its cage in the garage!”

She stormed out of the room with Grandma huffing behind her. Grandpa shrugged and followed them into the kitchen. Before she left she said, “When you look for that mouse, remember the last place you think he’d be is the first place you want to look.”

I spent the whole day going from room to room without any success. I found an old slipper I’d lost three years before, a baseball, Mother’s good ballpoint pen, and some old Christmas decorations, but no mouse.

For days everybody tiptoed around, but no one saw anything. Mother’s anger soon turned to worry when she realized that without the mouse, there would be no all-school competition. We both feared the mouse had crawled into a corner and died.

Each day that I looked in vain for the mouse my hate increased. I still brought the nickels, but they could tell my attitude had changed and pushed harder to get me to fight.

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