Granny’s Surprise

By Dusty Richards

They looked like Three Musketeers; dust streaked faces and carrying great swords made from some of grandpa’s tomato stakes.  Erwin, Alvin and freckle-faced Roy back from storming a castle up in the grape vineyard, and sitting astride their imaginary nervous stallions that circled impatiently under them.

“Wash up your hands and faces, me lords.  We are having breast of peanut butter-jelly sandwiches,” she said to her soldiers. 

“We saw that sneaking ground hog up there, Grandma,” Roy said.  “We’d speared him, but he out run our horses to his den.”

“Fast bugger, huh?  Lord Ground Hog lives another day.”  Amused, she knew they’d never catch him.

“Not for long,” Erwin said as the chief of the corp.  “We lay great plans for his demise.”          

“Porter Heinz told me they ate them things,” Alvin said, squeezing the bar of Lava soap out of his lathered fist and shooting it over into the gray enamel washbasin.

“Well, you will have to catch him first for us to consider such a fine feast.”  She dismissed the idea and herded her grandsons in the house for lunch.  The three cousins were spending the week on the farm.

“They chased Lord Ground Hog in his den, Grandpa.”

“Oh, he’s sure fast for being so fat.”

Soon they joined him at the dinner table.  From their learning to use an outhouse to gathering eggs, life on the farm obviously intrigued the three.  She couldn’t imagine three boys, age nine to eleven, growing up in the city.  This visit Grandpa had read them most of the Three Musketeers book.  With only a few days left he read more each evening after supper.

It was a cloudy Friday afternoon. She expected rain and told the boys not to get too far away. Grandpa’d gone to town to get some supplies and she was taking the oatmeal-raisin cookies out of the oven when the entire house rattled from the nearby bolt of lightning and thunder that crashed overhead.

Where were those boys?  Perhaps in the tractor shed or hay mow.  She went out on the screen porch and rang the dinner bell so they would come in.  Water sheeted off the roof and the air had turned cold.       

She heard some shouting and three boys wet as rats came streaking around the hen house. Alvin, the oldest held something up by the tail.  It was large and all he could do to hold it up as they raced toward her in the downpour.

“Grandma!  Grandma!  We’re having Lord Groundhog for supper.”

Ugh. Her heart stopped.