Bless this Mouse Read Free

curtail—for what she called "incessant reproduction," they always fought back and increased their population once again.
    Hildegarde was not wrong to try to limit the numbers. Too many church mice was a very dangerous situation.
    Many humans came and went at Saint Bartholemew's: Father Murphy, of course; Miss Vickery, the church secretary; the Altar Guild ladies; Trevor Fisoli, the organist/choirmaster, and his award-winning men-and-boys choir; Alcoholics Anonymous members, who met on Thursday evenings; the sexton; the scoutmaster and his scouts; the visiting bishop; and countless others. Occasionally someone glanced down, saw a mouse, and said something such as "Yikes" or even "Eek." (Or, if it was an Altar Guild lady, particularly Ruth Ellen van Riper, "Oh my GAWD!")
    But that would be the end of it. Perhaps the person would say, "There's a mouse in the church." But by then the visible mouse had scampered away and become invisible. People shrugged, chuckled, and forgot.
    Ironically, they all thought they were seeing the
same mouse.
    It was Hildegarde, actually, who realized that they were making that mistake. She attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on a Thursday night in late September, hidden, of course—in fact, quite concealed behind a potted plant in the corner of the room. She liked AA meetings because they served cookies and always had a lot of leftovers.
    Waiting for them to adjourn so that she could collect their leavings, Hildegarde drowsed a bit (their meetings were very boring, she thought). Then, suddenly, she heard the word "mouse." So she sat upright and listened.
    Later she called a meeting of the church mice (just before dawn on Saturday, a time when the building was certain to be empty of humans). They streamed, more than two hundred of them, into Father Murphy's private office. They liked holding their meetings there because of the many bookshelves. Carefully they arranged themselves in rows, each mouse seated in front of the spine of a leatherbound book. Sometimes one of them, overwhelmed by temptation, nibbled at the leather, though there was an unwritten rule against that.
    (But never Bibles. The church mice never nibbled Bibles. It would have been unthinkable.)
    Hildegarde stood on Father Murphy's desk, next to his calendar (on which she noted
BLESSING OF

    ANIMALS
written in red ink and coming up very, very soon) and watched as the population arranged itself.
    "Harvey!" she called to a young mouse who was frequently inattentive. "Stop that right now! Don't make a mess of that!"
    Harvey twitched his tail and made a face. He was perched on the coffee table in front of Father Murphy's couch, and he'd been poking with interest at an arrangement of playing cards that was laid out there in an unfinished game of solitaire. Sometimes, in the late afternoon, Father Murphy amused himself that way.
    Roderick, on the desk near her, saw a way to impress Hidegarde with his intelligence. He whispered, "The red three could go on the black four."
    Hildegarde gave him an exasperated look. Then she tapped for silence, using a pencil against the telephone. "The reason I've assembled you," Hildegarde began when they were all comfortably arranged and quiet, "is because Thursday evening I dropped in on an AA meeting—"
    "Oooohh!" squealed a young female named Desirée. "Cookie crumbs, cookie crumbs, cookie crumbs!"
    Hildegarde glared at her until she contained herself.
    "—and I overheard someone, a woman, say that she had seen a mouse in the ladies' room."
    She looked around the office. "This would have been Thursday, about seven p.m.," she reminded them.

    "Anyone?" she asked, meaningfully.
    No one stirred for a moment. Then, finally, obviously embarrassed, a middle-aged female named Norma raised her paw. "That would have been me. Sorry. I went through the ladies' room because it was a shortcut. I hate making my way around the wiring in that wall."
    "Yes, the wiring there is awful. One of us is