Eleven (21 page)

But she knew that the birdhouse was empty. The bluetit family had flown away weeks ago, and it had been a narrow squeak for the baby bluetits as the Masons’ cat next door had been interested; the cat could reach the hole from the toolshed roof with a paw, and Charles had made the hole a trifle too big for bluetits. But Edith and Charles had staved Jonathan off until the birds were well away. Afterward, days later, Charles had taken the birdhouse down—it hung like a picture on a wire from a nail—and shaken it to make sure no debris was inside. Bluetits might nest a second time, he said. But they hadn’t as yet—Edith was sure because she had kept watching.

And squirrels never nested in birdhouses. Or did they? At any rate, there were no squirrels around. Rats? They would never choose a birdhouse for a home. How could they get in, anyway, without flying?

While these thoughts went through Edith’s mind, she stared at the intense brown face, and the piercing black eyes stared back at her.

“I’ll simply go and see what it is,” Edith thought, and stepped onto the path that led to the toolshed. But she went only three paces and stopped. She didn’t want to touch the birdhouse and get bitten—maybe by a dirty rodent’s tooth. She’d tell Charles tonight. But now that she was closer, the thing was still there, clearer than ever. It wasn’t an optical illusion.

Her husband Charles Beaufort, a computing engineer, worked at a plant eight miles from where they lived. He frowned slightly and smiled when Edith told him what she had seen. “Really?” he said.

“I
may
be wrong. I wish you’d shake the thing again and see if there’s anything in it,” Edith said, smiling herself now, though her tone was earnest.

“All right, I will,” Charles said quickly, then began to talk of something else. They were then in the middle of dinner.

Edith had to remind him when they were putting the dishes into the dish-washing machine. She wanted him to look before it became dark. So Charles went out, and Edith stood on the doorstep, watching. Charles tapped on the birdhouse, listened with one ear cocked. He took the birdhouse down from the nail, shook it, then slowly tipped it so the hole was on the bottom. He shook it again.

“Absolutely nothing,” he called to Edith, “Not even a piece of straw.” He smiled broadly at his wife and hung the birdhouse back on the nail. “I wonder what you could’ve seen? You hadn’t had a couple of Scotches, had you?”

“
No
. I described it to you.” Edith felt suddenly blank, deprived of something. “It had a head a little larger than a squirrel’s, beady black eyes, and a sort of serious mouth.”

“Serious mouth!” Charles put his head back and laughed as he came back into the house.

“A tense mouth. It had a grim look,” Edith said positively.

But she said nothing else about it. They sat in the living-room, Charles looking over the newspaper, then opening his folder of reports from the office. Edith had a catalogue and was trying to choose a tile pattern for the kitchen wall. Blue and white, or pink and white and blue? She was not in a mood to decide, and Charles was never a help, always saying agreeably, “Whatever you like is all right with me.”

Edith was thirty-four. She and Charles had been married seven years. In the second year of their marriage Edith had lost the child she was carrying. She had lost it rather deliberately, being in a panic about giving birth. That was to say, her fall down the stairs had been rather on purpose, if she were willing to admit it, but the miscarriage had been put down as the result of an accident. She had never tried to have another child, and she and Charles had never even discussed it.

She considered herself and Charles a happy couple. Charles was doing well with Pan-Com Instruments, and they had more money and more freedom than several of their neighbors who were tied down with two or more children. They both liked entertaining, Edith in their house especially, and Charles on their boat, a thirty-foot motor launch which slept four. They plied the local river and inland canals on most weekends when the weather was good. Edith could cook almost as well afloat as on shore, and Charles obliged with drinks, fishing equipment, and the record player. He would also dance a hornpipe on request.

During the weekend that followed—not a boating weekend because Charles had extra work—Edith glanced several times at the empty birdhouse, reassured now because she
knew
there was nothing in it. When the sunlight shone on it she saw nothing but a paler brown in the round hole, the back of the birdhouse; and when in shadow the hole looked black.

On Monday afternoon, as she was changing the bedsheets in time for the laundryman who came at three, she saw something slip from under a blanket that she picked up from the floor. Something ran across the floor and out the door—something brown and larger
than a squirrel. Edith gasped and dropped the blanket. She tiptoed to the bedroom door, looked into the hall and on the stairs, the first five steps of which she could see.

What kind of animal made no noise at all, even on bare wooden stairs? Or had she really seen anything? But she was sure she had. She’d even had a glimpse of the small black eyes. It was the same animal she had seen looking out of the birdhouse.

The only thing to do was to find it, she told herself. She thought at once of the hammer as a weapon in case of need, but the hammer was downstairs. She took a heavy book instead and went cautiously down the stairs, alert and looking everywhere as her vision widened at the foot of the stairs.

There was nothing in sight in the living-room. But it could be under the sofa or the armchair. She went into the kitchen and got the hammer from a drawer. Then she returned to the living-room and shoved the armchair quickly some three feet. Nothing. She found she was afraid to bend down to look under the sofa, whose cover came almost to the floor, but she pushed it a few inches and listened. Nothing.

It
might
have been a trick of her eyes, she supposed. Something like a spot floating before the eyes, after bending over the bed. She decided not to say anything to Charles about it. Yet in a way, what she had seen in the bedroom had been more definite than what she had seen in the birdhouse.

A baby yuma, she thought an hour later as she was sprinkling flour on a joint in the kitchen. A yuma. Now, where had that come from? Did such an animal exist? Had she seen a photograph of one in a magazine, or read the word somewhere?

Edith made herself finish all she intended to do in the kitchen, then went to the big dictionary and looked up the word yuma. It was not in the dictionary. A trick of her mind, she thought. Just as the animal was probably a trick of her eyes. But it was strange how they went together, as if the name were absolutely correct for the animal.

Two days later, as she and Charles were carrying their coffee cups into the kitchen, Edith saw it dart from under the refrigerator—or from behind the refrigerator—diagonally across the kitchen threshold and into the dining-room. She almost dropped her cup and saucer, but caught them, and they chattered in her hands.

“What’s the matter?” Charles asked.

“I saw it again!” Edith said. “The animal.”

“What?”

“I didn’t tell you,” she began with a suddenly dry throat, as if she were making a painful confession. “I think I saw that thing—the thing that was in the birdhouse—upstairs in the bedroom on Monday. And I think I saw it again. Just now.”

“Edith, my darling, there wasn’t anything in the birdhouse.”

“Not when you looked. But this animal moves quickly. It almost flies.”

Charles’s face grew more concerned. He looked where she was looking, at the kitchen threshold. “You saw it just now? I’ll go look,” he said, and walked into the dining-room.

He gazed around on the floor, glanced at his wife, then rather casually bent and looked under the table, among the chair legs. “Really, Edith—”

“Look in the living-room,” Edith said.

Charles did, for perhaps fifteen seconds, then he came back, smiling a little. “Sorry to say this, old girl, but I think you’re seeing things. Unless, of course, it was a mouse. We might have mice. I hope not.”

“Oh, it’s much bigger. And it’s brown. Mice are grey.”

“Yep,” Charles said vaguely. “Well, don’t worry, dear, it’s not going to attack you. It’s running.” He added in a voice quite devoid of conviction, “If necessary, we’ll get an exterminator.”

“Yes,” she said at once.

“How big is it?”

She held her hands apart at a distance of about sixteen inches. “This big.”

“Sounds like it might be a ferret,” he said.

“It’s even quicker. And it has black eyes. Just now it stopped just for an instant and looked straight at me. Honestly, Charles.” Her voice had begun to shake. She pointed to the spot by the refrigerator. “Just there it stopped for a split second and—”

“Edith, get a grip on yourself.” He pressed her arm.

“It looks so evil. I can’t tell you.”

Charles was silent, looking at her.

“Is there any animal called a yuma?” she asked.

“A yuma? I’ve never heard of it. Why?”

“Because the name came to me today out of nowhere. I thought—because I’d thought of it and I’d never seen an animal like this that maybe I’d seen it somewhere.”

“Y-u-m-a?”

Edith nodded.

Charles, smiling again because it was turning into a funny game, went to the dictionary as Edith had done and looked for the word.
He closed the dictionary and went to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
on the bottom shelves of the book case. After a minute’s search he said to Edith, “Not in the dictionary and not in the
Britannica
either. I think it’s a word you made up.” And he laughed. “Or maybe it’s a word in
Alice in Wonderland
.”

It’s a real word, Edith thought, but she didn’t have the courage to say so. Charles would deny it.

Edith felt done in and went to bed around ten with her book. But she was still reading when Charles came in just before eleven. At that moment both of them saw it: it flashed from the foot of the bed across the carpet, in plain view of Edith and Charles, went under the chest of drawers and, Edith thought, out the door. Charles must have thought so, too, as he turned quickly to look into the hall.

“You saw it!” Edith said.

Charles’s face was stiff. He turned the light on in the hall, looked, then went down the stairs.

He was gone perhaps three minutes and Edith heard him pushing furniture about. Then he came back.

“Yes, I saw it.” His face looked suddenly pale and tired.

But Edith sighed and almost smiled, glad that he finally believed her. “You see what I mean now. I wasn’t seeing things.”

“No,” Charles agreed.

Edith was sitting up in bed. “The awful thing is, it looks uncatchable.”

Charles began to unbutton his shirt. “Uncatchable. What a word. Nothing’s uncatchable. Maybe it’s a ferret. Or a squirrel.”

“Couldn’t you tell? It went right by you.”

“Well!” He laughed. “It
was
pretty fast. You’ve seen it two or three times and you can’t tell what it is.”

“Did it have a tail? I can’t tell if it had or if that’s the whole body—that length.”

Charles kept silent. He reached for his dressing gown, slowly put it on. “I think it’s smaller than it looks. It is fast, so it seems elongated. Might be a squirrel.”

“The eyes are in the front of its head. Squirrels’ eyes are sort of at the side.”

Charles stooped at the foot of the bed and looked under it. He ran his hand over the tucked foot of the bed, underneath. Then he stood up. “Look, if we see it again—if we saw it—”

“What do you mean
if
? You did see it—you said so.”

“I
think
so.” Charles laughed. “How do I know my eyes or my mind isn’t playing a trick on me? Your description was so eloquent.” He sounded almost angry with her.

“Well—
if
?”

“If we see it again, we’ll borrow a cat. A cat’ll find it.”

“Not the Masons’ cat. I’d hate to ask them.”

They had had to throw pebbles at the Masons’ cat to keep it away when the bluetits were starting to fly. The Masons hadn’t liked that. They were still on good terms with the Masons, but neither Edith nor Charles would have dreamed of asking to borrow Jonathan.

“We could call in an exterminator,” Edith said.

“Ha! And what’ll we ask him to look for?”

“What we saw,” Edith said, annoyed because it was Charles who had suggested an exterminator just a couple of hours before. She was
interested in the conversation, vitally interested, yet it depressed her. She felt it was vague and hopeless, and she wanted to lose herself in sleep.

“Let’s try a cat,” Charles said. “You know, Farrow has a cat. He got it from the people next door to him. You know, Farrow the accountant who lives on Shanley Road? He took the cat over when the people next door moved. But his wife doesn’t like cats, he says. This one—”

“I’m not mad about cats either,” Edith said. “We don’t want to acquire a cat.”

“No. All right. But I’m sure we could borrow this one, and the reason I thought of it is that Farrow says the cat’s a marvelous hunter. It’s a female nine years old, he says.”

Charles came home with the cat the next evening, thirty minutes later than usual, because he had gone home with Farrow to fetch it. He and Edith closed the doors and the windows, then let the cat out of its basket in the living-room. The cat was white with grey brindle markings and a black tail. She stood stiffly, looking all around her with a glum and somewhat disapproving air.

“Ther-re, Puss-Puss,” Charles said, stooping but not touching her. “You’re only going to be here a day or two. Have we got some milk, Edith? Or better yet, cream.”

They made a bed for the cat out of a carton, put an old towel in it, then placed it in a corner of the living-room, but the cat preferred the end of the sofa. She had explored the house perfunctorily and had shown no interest in the cupboards or closets, though Edith and Charles had hoped she would. Edith said she thought the cat was too old to be of much use in catching anything.