Tenants of the House

by JOSEPHINE JOHNSON

1

LIKE the night, an old house has a thousand eyes. Small shapes and forms have inhabited it from generation to generation. When one comes, as we did last year, to live in such a house, one must expect small unwinking eyes in the darkness; the cracks in the floor, the knotholes in the wood, the ancient beams of the cellar, have a life of their own. There is the loud tick of the wood beetle, the soundless scurry of the centipede like a furry shadow, and the sudden appearance of black ant borings around the kitchen sink.

But there were also certain tenants that no one fold us about at all.

The enormous house was beautiful and its cost was reasonable, much more reasonable than that of a house of normal size — a rare and capricious combination. In addition there were three acres around it, and at the back door a tall and crumbling brick structure, big as another house, which had been used as the servants’ quarters long ago. We bought all this and moved in at Christmas time. Not until April were we aware that we were no longer alone, and that, added to all the registered members of the family and the migratory assorted insect life, up from their southern wintering spa had come the tenants of over a hundred years, the enormous summer colony of the Fiedermäuse, the chauves-souris — in the colder Knglish, bats.

The extent of this home-coming was not apparent to us all at once. We began to be aware of bats drifting out from under the eaves at twilight, swooping to and fro under the southern porch, and then scattering high over the cornfields, weaving long swinging patterns until they were lost, invisible in the night.

“The bat is an insect eater,”I said. “Bats help keep the balance of nature, and therefore are very good things to have around.”The balnnce-ofnature had a comforting sound, but one evening when standing in peace, admiring the magnificent silhouette of our great brick mansion against the sky, we became aware that the cometlike streak of bat after bat from the narrow eaves had been going on for a long, long time.

“You sit on this side of the house and count,”my husband said. “I’ll take the other side.”His voice had a curious, strained sound.

For a little while I sat in silence and counted. Fifty bats went by. Fifty more. I got tired of counting and just watched the streakings and swoopings, undiminished in number or timing, go on and on.

After a while Grant came back with a look that seemed clearly dark and thoughtful, even in the dim twilight gloom. “And how many did you count?“ he asked. His voice was that of one w ho graciously withholds his news, knowing its nature can never be topped or spoiled.

I said I’d only counted a hundred but that they’d kept coming on and on.

“I counted one thousand three hundred and seventy-three!" he said. “Good God! Why do you suppose nobody ever told us?”

Bats were still flowing out from under the eaves.

As June warmed into July a mousy smell like musky mignonette became a palpable presence. It filled the upper rooms thick as a furry fog and started to creep softly and smotheringly down the stair. And then the bats themselves, a few of the finally estimated four thousand, began coming inside the house. Their small restless shapes would appear suddenly, swooping across a lighted room. From the cracks around sills, from supposedly sealed fireplaces, and from God knows where, they crept forth, and a long, curiously unforgettable summer had begun.

In the wonderful, illustrated Natural History by S. G. Goodrich, which I referred to in this trying time, published in 1859 and full of amazing lore and truly horrendous etchings of the Bat Megaderm and the Bat Rhinolophus Nobilis (size of life), there appear these memorable sentences: “In a rude age, the imagination needs little encouragement to convert objects so really curious and strange as these we have been describing, into hideous monsters, endowed with supernatural powers. It is the province of education and enlightened reason to reduce these horrid creations of fancy to the comparatively simple and innocent dimensions of truth.”

Now my husband, educated and enlightened though he be, may be described as a brave man who abhors bats. With the exception of his four years in the army, his bravery and his abhorrence herein reached all the climax of their conflicting powers beyond which man neither can nor is expected to go. As twilight of each evening drew on, he would fetch the kitchen broom, place it close at hand, and with his back against the wall relax nervously and begin to read. By the front door we kept an empty wastebasket and a flat cookie tin. We did not often have long to wait. A soundless shadow would speed across the light, easting its signature athwart the page; Grant would leap up with the broom and the evening was begun.

The radar mechanism of the bat is such that he avoids all obstacles in front with unerring accuracy. On the wing he is not likely to touch anything he does not wish to devour. (This is hard to believe, of course, and it is next to impossible to convince the white-faced guest that the low slicing dive which fans his cheek and lifts his hair is a deliberate miss, and not a deliberate attack that failed.) After some trial and error and considerable sweat, Grant learned to outwit the radar warning by swinging at the bat from behind, fouling its control mechanisms, as he put it, and speeding it into the nearest wall, where it bumped, folded, and fell to the floor. Then the wastebasket would be inverted over it, the cookie tin slipped under the wastebasket, and the whole borne hastily out the front door. One evening I released the lid too soon; the bat turned around and scuttled back into the house on its elbows, and had to be swept out again.

Several times I was awakened at night by the sense of a presence in the room, and once, stumbling to find the light, I stepped on a soft-furred thing that squirmed under my bare foot. Other furred things with wings swept back and forth across the room an inch or two above Grant’s innocent sleeping face. He is a sound sleeper and did not wake while I furiously beat the air with his shirt and finally drove them into the darkness of the upper hull and quietly shut the door. In the morning I found them snuggled between the curtain folds and upside down on the shades.

It is almost impossible to convey the largeness, the oldness, the vulnerability of an ancient house, the smallness, the craftiness, the dexterity of a bat. Convinced that they were coming inside through the window sills of an upper room (during the day we could hear them talking to each other inside the hollow wood), we hired a carpenter who came unhappily, removed the window frame and sill, announced it had been impossible for bats to get in from the outside and replaced the boards, sealed it all up — and the bats continued to enter.

2

REPORTS of our unusual number of what Mr. Goodrich describes as “one of the most remarkable groups in the whole circle of animated nature” began to circulate in Cincinnati, and two naturalist friends expressed what seemed to us a somewhat unnatural eagerness to go up under the roof, look around for themselves, and study the Vespertilionidae in situ. Bearing a tremendous amount of camera equipment, a stout cotton bag, and dressed nonchalantly in shorts and T shirts, Karl and Woody arrived one humid Saturday morning and disappeared cheerfully up the small trap door in the ceiling. They ranged about in the hot fragrant darkness for some time. For quite a long time in fact, and sometimes they were very quiet. Another fragment from Mr. Goodrich’s book began to haunt me with its gentle incisiveness. “In India,” he wrote, “the megaderms may be heard on quiet evenings crunching the heads and bones of frogs.” But eventually the men returned with about sixty bats in the bag and the heartening report that the old manse probably contained the largest concentration of bats in the world outside of Dante’s Inferno and the Carlsbad Caverns. We sat awhile meditatively on the front porch, drank iced coffee, and watched the bag undulate and nearly walk off by itself.

As a naturalist Karl took only a calm, detached view of the situation. Woody, who had worked for exterminating companies, remarked that no company would guarantee a bat job, but that they might try — for a price. The thought of actually exterminating four thousand bats, not just driving them away, was truly appalling to me.

On the other hand, if we merely drove them out, there was always the great brick servants’ quarters for their refuge, open to sun and wind, impossible to seal, too expensive to demolish, and but a few paces from the back door, where the gentlest breeze could bring the musky presence right back into the house again. Karl and Woody were sympathetic about our unusual problem; told us to be of good cheer, that the bats would leave with the first frost sometime in October; and after a while swung the bag in the car and went home to stuff bats and develop some excellent pictures of the attic.

A few weeks passed. Friends who used to drop in began quietly staying away. Then one sweltering summer day, impelled by a curious mixture of duty and what is sometimes referred to as the death wish, Grant determined to carry this fragmentary battle to the very stronghold under the roof itself, drive out the bats once and for all, and sell the guano to connoisseurs in the garden clubs. His plan was simple and based on close, if not loving, observation of the creatures’ nocturnal habits. At ten in the evening, long after the working hours of the bats had started, he would go up with a bright light. This would drive away any of the more home-loving type who might have expected to spend the evening in.

12 P.M. Go up and light two sulphur candles.

4.30 to 5 A.M. Bats return, smell sulphur, and go — elsewhere.

4 P.M. Grant to go up into dark attic (now to be free of sulphur fumes and all bats), plug up holes with aid of light shining in from outside, and problem is solved.

The plan began on schedule at ten o’clock. Grant dressed himself carefully in his old army clothes, tucked the pants legs into combat bools, put on a pair of beekeeper’s gloves that came up over his shirt sleeves, and then carefully placed over his head a paper bag in which he had cut two eyeholes sealed with clear cellophane. He then buttoned on another shirt (to keep the mammals from coming up under the bag), took a last look at the known and loved, and climbed the ladder up to the trap door, beyond which lay, Mr. Goodrich had assured us, only “the simple and innocent dimensions of truth.”The opening of the trap door let down a staggeringly warm wave of truth, but Grant silently struggled through and stood up with his light.

It was at this point that that plan began to disintegrate. In the first place, more bats like to stay in at night than you would imagine — if you care to think about bats staying in at night. Disturbed by the glare and sound, dozens of furry bodies let go of the beams and started swirling insanely around and around in the narrow space. Some opened theirmouths and snarled and the pinkness showed up quite clearly, outlined by their little pointed teeth. The bat has a peculiar cry which can only be described as a chitter or at times a horrendous smacking kiss. Chittering and kissing, the bats swirled about with no apparent intention of being driven forth to feed in the cool starlight outside.

Nevertheless, Grant decided to go ahead, step up the procedure by lighting the sulphur candles now, and drive them all out at once. This he did, placing them in pans of water to keep the whole house from burning up, and descended the ladder, a seriously disturbed man, if not positively paranoiac. The most shattering experiences of life do not all occur at the age of four but may well crop up in a 101° attic surrounded by antagonistic bats as one approaches the age of forty. It is, I think, of vast importance to know that there are men today who can emerge from an experience of this nature with only a slight tic and a tendency to shudder at a loud and aggressive kissing sound. Also those who can, go back up again.

In the gray dawn I went out expecting to find the outside of the house a mass of fluttering wings and frustrated Fledermäuse. But there was not a bat in sight. At 4 P.M. (we at least kept to our pari of the plan) we discovered that the sulphur had neither driven them away entirely nor kept them entirely from returning. It had in fact suffocated a certain selected number.

The smell of dead bats, live bats, and sulphur descended heavily throughout the house. Two days later, for the last time, a grim, tight-lipped man dressed in his airtight suit ascended the ladder bearing a bucket, twenty pounds of naphtha flakes to further discourage and repel the bats, and a bottle of pine oil deodorant to drown the smell. Fighting his way among swirling and snarling little shapes, he collected all the bodies he could find, spread out the naphtha flakes — mainly by throwing balls of them at the bats — splashed pine oil over the rafters, and lowered the bucket of dead ones down through the door. (I buried them in the potato patch and was amazed at how light is even a whole bucketful of bats.) Then Grant came down, sealed up the trap door, and removed the ladder to the tool house. Something in his kindly open nature had hardened and his eyes had the withdrawn and distant look of those who have known some experience not communicable to mortal men.

The summing up of that summer’s efforts was an unpleasant old house, redolent with naphtha, pine oil, sulphur, live bats and dead bats. Bats were distributed about uncomfortably behind shutters: bats in the hollow pillars of the porch; and most of the bats up under the roof where they had always been.

This was in August. We sat down in exhaustion and waited for the first sharp breath of frost to send them south.

3

THE whole winter passed, in which we spoke sporadically of “doing something" about them. We thought of having a carpenter come who would go up and stop up every hole inside and out, a task of microscopic research and patience. But we did not know what the spring would then bring forth. Perhaps a house completely decorated with fur-lined shutters, or a brick bat-roost at the back door, or — knowing the nature of the bat, a nightmare thought occurred to me. They would find one hole — one infinilesmal hole up under the eaves, and all four thousand would enter in the spring, and every night all four thousand would fine up in a long, sinuous queue from beam to beam and, chittering and shoving, make their exit from that one hole, and in the gray dawn similarly return.

Thus April was upon us and the mass immigration took place again and nothing had been done to keep them out — and nothing could have been — and all that was left was the chance of a professional mass extermination. It is difficult to explain, wholly apart from the costliness of such a thing, the moral scruples involved. Four thousand bats is a lot of life, and for a long time I could not bring myself to sanction such a sweeping and drastic destruction. They were just too many to be killed. For two months I temporized, delayed, hoped that this year would be different, better; but by June things were obviously the same — and worse. The walls might as well have been completely porous as far as bats were concerned. We came to dread the gathering darkness, and not a single evening passed without at least two and sometimes four swooping shadows moving from room to room. Sometimes they held off until eleven, giving us false hopes of a peaceful night, but always and invariably before the stroke of midnight they were there.

We could not stand it any longer and we hardened our hearts and opened our bank account. We called an exterminating company and had them make an estimate, but this was only the beginning.

The exterminator estimator said that the old end plates should be torn from the roof and replaced with new snug end plates — replaced after the brickwork had been pointed up to seal the place. We called a carpenter, an enormous fellow, who came, looked, and said that there was no sense mending the end plates until the gutters were repaired; so he called a tinsmith. The tinsmith said that he could not repair the gutters until the carpenter had torn off the molding. At this point, the carpenter revealed that he had grown too fat for ladder work and called in a subcarpenter who climbed up on the roof and reported that the molding was the gutter and the gutter was a solid, handcarved beam made from a single cedar and forty-five feet long without a break other than the rotten spot objected to by the tinsmith. The larger carpenter— who turned out to be more in the nature of a broker or procurer — said to chop it down anyway. And on a hot June morning the sub-andsmnller carpenter actually began to saw and chop and the last and final ousting of the tenants began.

The great rotting gutter came down in sections, the carpenter reported there was a hell of a lot of bats up there, but they did not come out by daylight, and the tinsmith returned, put in a new gutter, and the carpenter sealed up all the holes that he could find.

I took the children and in a somewhat cowardly fashion fled the state, and my husband went to stay with friends. The fire chief was informed, a large warning poison sign was posted on the door (reported later by a neighbor child as “that skiliton on your house”), and the exterminators set the cyanide gas cans up inside the attic. For a week the house was uninhabitable. Thousands of bats were killed and had to be shoveled out by hand and lowered down the trap door in buckets. A few hundred escaped and went behind the shutters, from which the exterminator drove them with a mouse powder and these died outside.

Well, it was done, and successfully, and gradually the incomparable smell of dead bats faded from the hot summer air. Friends looked upon us again with something besides horror; our relatives, convinced we had been the center of a potential plague, communicated kindly with us again: those humorists who had delighted in saying the Cannons really have bats in their belfry were desolate; and we now sleep peacefully at night without the soundless intrusion of little swooping wings.

But I am not wholly happy about it all, for bats on such a grand scale as ours seemed an extraordinary phenomenon, a hundred years accumulation of life, and an act of God not to be tampered with too much. Will not nature take her revenge in some unknown and probably terrifying form? Sometimes at midnight I listen for the sound of monstrous insect, wings, of mosquitoes hungry and humming in the dark, armed with the knowledge of their enemies’ mass death, and come at last into their own. And beyond the sinister hum I hear the laughter of little bat ghosts, sneering in the night.