Roscoe

We’d had a nice chat through a warm Louisiana evening.  Now I was ready to buy.  “Do you think I might see the potion?” I asked.

“I suppose we had to come to that,” she said, and she began to rise from her chair.  Her withered old arm strained on the rest to lift her tired, heavy body from the seat, and as I got to my feet, I gently reached out to help her up.  “My, you are a gentleman,” she said.  “Your mama raised you right.”  She began to shuffle her way slowly towards a bookshelf.  “I can always tell when someone was brought up right.  It just shows.  Ain’t that right, Roscoe?”

“Uh… Roscoe?”

“Mm hmm.  Roscoe,” she said, briefly lifting her cane and indicating the little caged hamster on the shelf.  As she approached, the hamster hopped into his wheel, and began running in it.  I watched in amazement as one whole segment of the bookshelf began to turn on a hinge, opening to a whole secret room, unsuspected by me until that moment.

“That’s remarkable,” I said.  “Did he open that by running in the wheel?”

“He surely did… didn’t you, Roscoe?”

“That’s a magnificent job of training.”

“Oh… weren’t much in the way of training involved,” she said.  “See, Roscoe here, well… he wa’n’t always a little hamster.”

“…No?”

“Oh, nooo.  Big strappin’ man, he was, once.  Refused to open a door for me.  Was pretty mean and nasty about it, too, let me tell you.  I mean the words that came out of his mouth, oh!  I knew right away he had not been brought up right.  So… I thought I would give him the opportunity to open the door for me.  To make amends like.  And ever since then, he’s been polite and mannerly as you could want… a hamster in a house full of cats.”  She let out a few long, low chuckles.

“Tell me… does he still think?  Can he still understand?”

She leaned in close, with a broad smile.  “Now, what do you think, hmm?”

I glanced at the hamster, who was indeed paying very close attention to us.  What did I think…?

“After you,” I said, bowing to the lady.

“Such a gentleman,” she patted my cheek.