How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (32 page)

Unsure of what to do but knowing if I stayed there debating my options, the mother cat might well come and blind me, I left the coal shack and lingered about the yard. In my exasperation, I lifted the lid of my drum and was about to take my

dowels out and drum a racket louder than I had ever drummed, when I saw a man I had never seen, crossing our yard towards the orchard of wild orange trees that stretched beyond our fence. A dog accompanied him, or rather, the dog ran ahead, slowed, sniffed the ground, gave a bark, chased a butterfly, and in a dozen other ways, made the world safe for the man. The man was a dashing, handsome, storybook kind of man, dressed in jodhpurs and riding boots. He had a goatee and a mustache, which made me wonder if he weren't the Devil, and a way of addressing the dog with affection and humor, which convinced me he wasn't. He had not seen me and was passing not more than ten yards away when the dog twisted about, raised his nose, and curled one paw up. The man stopped and looked up at the sky. It was then I noticed he was carrying a gun on a shoulder strap, the barrel pointed up. The dog began to bark.

"There, there," the man said, addressing the dog.

"Where are your manners?" Then he turned to me. The ends of his mustache lifted in a smile. "Good day, little miss. I hope Kashtanka did not frighten you?"

I eyed the man, his gun, the dog now poking his nose where dogs always poke their noses on a person. With a child's instinct, I knew the man was safe, for occasionally, strangers my grandfather had met on his travels came for a visit and wandered over to our property. But I was uneasy that a dog was loose and there were kittens, seven mouthfuls, nearby in the shed.

The dog sniffed my drum. "I say," the man said, "what have you got there?"

"It's a drum," I said, bringing it round from my hip to in front

of me, "but I've lost the drumsticks." And I lifted the top and tilted the drum so he could look in at the two dowels. "I've got to use those, and the sound is not the same."

"It never is," the man agreed, to his great credit. He crouched down beside his dog. His riding boots creaked.

"About drumsticks," I said. And then, because I was sure I had found my man, I hurried my questions:

"Can you play with a brand-new kitten or will the mother abandon it or blind you if she catches you and by when can you take a kitten from its mother to keep as a pet?"

"Well!" the man said, looking at me closely but with friendliness in his eyes. "About drumsticks, eh?

Well, just as your drumsticks belong inside your drum, and dowels will not do, so a kitten belongs with its mother, and no one else will do."

"But pets," I protested, glancing at Kashtanka.

The man's hand fell fondly on his dog's head. "Pets are a different matter, to be sure.

But the little creature must be old enough to survive without its mother," he concluded, rising.

Just as he was rising, Kashtanka made a dash forward. The man snatched his collar and pulled the dog back so his front paws were still treading the air.

"Drumsticks, eh?" The man laughed at something over my shoulder. I turned around and saw a large black mother cat, her teats pink and sagging, slinking into the coal shed. Kashtanka barked excitedly. The cat scurried in.

"Your manners, Kashtanka!" the man said, giving the collar a jerk. The dog heeled, whining quietly to show that his feelings were hurt. "About drumsticks," the man said, winking one eye so long I wondered if, like Pila's, his wasn't real either. "While a kitten is still a suckling, it cannot, now can it, be taken from its mother to be a pet?"

I had to agree.

"To take it away Would be ..." The man considered his words. "To take it away would be a violation of its natural right to live." The man saw I did not understand him. "It would die," he said plainly. "So you must wait," he added, petting my hair so that Kashtanka gave me a jealous look,

"you must wait until that kitten can make it on its own. Don't you agree?"

I looked over my shoulder at the coal shed.

The man went on. "I would say in a week, and that's one, two, three is Sunday, seven is Thursday, by Thursday I should think a kitten, even if born this very day, a kitten might be ready to belong to a fine young lady with a drum."

I drummed my fingers on my drum, one, three, five, seven is Thursday.

"That's a fine drum," the man observed, "and a good, sturdy strap."

Just then, a flock of birds flew overhead. The dog looked up and let out an excited yelp.

"We're off," the man announced. And off they were, before I could count to seven, down the lawn to a creaky wicker gate, through which they entered the orchard and disappeared among the trees.

One, two, ba-bam, three is Sunday. The mother cat had gone into the coal shed to feed her kittens. Ba-bam. Mine was the best dressed one. I would name her Schwarz. Seven is less than the fingers of two hands, but seven was seven more than now, and as if to confirm my addition, I heard the thunderous report of the man's gun in the distance. There was a clatter from the coal shed and, moments later, the mother cat dashed across the yard, flushed out by the noise of the gun.

While the coast was clear, I decided to re-enter the coal shed and tell Schwarz of our plan for next Thursday. I walked in, looked over the brim of the coal barrel. Schwarz was meowing in terror.

"There, there," I comforted her. But there, there would not do.

I picked her up and whispered in the sweet little seashell ears, "There, there." I brought her down to my shoulder and burped her and put her in the crook of my arm and tickled her belly and poked my fingers under her arms, and she meowed that that was fun, that I should do it again. And there, there, I did.

It was Friday and it would not be Thursday for another seven days. I had every intention of putting her back.

But then, call it coincidence, call it plot, the man's gun went off again in the distance, and I realized he was in the orange grove hunting.

Hunting! Some of the birds he was aiming at this very moment were mothers with worms for their babies.

I did not know at the time the word for saying one thing and doing another, but I did know plenty of practicing adults, and I was not going to be gypped of a well-dressed kitten by a moral imperative given to me by an exception to the rule!

Out of the shed I strode with Schwarz clapped on my shoulder. She meowed out goodbyes to her brothers and sisters as we crossed the yard. Suddenly, I stopped. Up ahead sat the fat black mother cat enjoying the warm sun on her fat black back, licking a paw as if there were cake batter on it.

She had not seen me, but I knew it was a matter of moments before Schwarz's meowing reached her. In that instant the vague memory sharpened. I saw a cat slinking forward. I saw it crouch to spring. I saw it leap and land on a woman's face. I saw its claws rip out an eye. I saw that jelly spill-and I remembered suddenly with shocking clarity Pila recounting how she had lost her eye!

Slowly, my left hand patting Schwarz to encourage a hiatus in her meowing, I worked the top off my drum with my right hand. Schwarz's mother put down one paw, lifted another, and began to lick it. I picked Schwarz up, and in one deft movement, plunked her down into the hollow of my drum, grabbing up my drumsticks in exchange, slapping the lid down, shifting the drum in front of me, and then as the mother cat jerked around and caught sight of me and then of my drum, which was meowing furiously, I brought down a loud, distracting drum-roll:

BARRA BARRA BARRA BOOM BOOM!

(meow!)

barra boom! (meow! Meow!) BOOM BOOM

BOOM (meow!)

I marched straight towards the house, lifting my knees high like a majorette. The baffled mother cat looked at me uncertainly and followed at a cautious distance, meowing. The drum meowed back.

I drummed madly. My heart was drumming. And then, as the cat gained on me, I broke into a mad run, scrambled up the back steps, slammed shut the back door that led through the laundry room to the house. A deep sink full of soaking whites told that the new washerwoman had stepped out only for a moment. Backed against the wall, I spied out the window. The mother cat prowled in front of the door.

She stopped, smelled the ground.

"Schwarz!" she meowed.

Schwarz meowed feverishly from inside the drum.

The mother glanced all about her, at the door, at the sky, but she could not find where the sound was coming from.

"Schwarz! Where are you?" she meowed.

"THUNDER, THUNDER!" The gun thundered. The mother cat bolted away.

I picked the meowing kitten out of my drum. Its little human face winced with meows. I detested the accusing sound of meow. I wanted to dunk it into the sink and make its meowing stop. Instead, I lifted the screen and threw the meowing ball out the window. I heard it land with a thud, saw it moments later, wobbling out from under the shadow of the house, meowing and stumbling forward. There was no sign of the mother cat.

I must have gone to that window about a dozen times that morning and watched the wounded kitten make a broken progress across the lawn. I was tempted to go and deposit it at the door of the coal shed, but there was no leaving the house, my mother's orders. Some crazy fellow was shooting illegally in the orange grove.

The police had been called. Sometime before lunch the shooting stopped. I looked out the window of the laundry room. The kitten was gone.

That night I woke with a start in the claws of a bad dream I could not remember. In those days we slept with mosquito nets strung from four poles at each comer of the bed. Everything in the dark assumed a spectral appearance through white netting: a ghostly bureau, a ghostly toybox, ghostly curtains.

That night, sitting at the foot of my bed, poking her face in so that the gauzy net was molded to her features like an awful death mask, was the black mother cat. I froze with terror. She glared at me with fluorescent eyes. She let out soft, moaning meows. I closed my eyes and opened them again. She sat there, wailing until dawn. Then I saw her rise, leap, and land with a thud on the floor and trot down the hall and down the stairs. The next morning in tears I told my mother of the cat that haunted my bedside all night. "Impossible," she said and to prove it, we went through the house, inspecting latches and windows. "Possible," Mami said when we found a window left opened in the laundry room. That new washerwoman, Nivea, was almost as bad as the old one, Mami complained.

Impossibly the next night-for the windows were locked and the house secure as an arsenal-the cat appeared again at my bedside. And night after night after that. Sometimes she meowed. Sometimes she just stared. Sometimes I cried out and woke the house up.

"A phase," Mami said, comworried. "A perfectly normal nightmare phase." The phase lasted. I gave the drum away to a little cousin, throwing the ghost cat into the bargain. But the cat came back, on and off, for years.

Then we moved to the United States. The cat disappeared altogether. I saw snow. I solved the riddle of an outdoors made mostly of concrete in New York. My grandmother grew so old she could not remember who she was. I went away to school.

I read books. You understand I am collapsing all time now so that it fits in what's left in the hollow of my story? I began to write, the story of Pila, the story of my grandmother. I never saw Schwarz again. The man with the goatee and Kashtanka 29dg

vanished from the face of creation. I grew up, a curious woman, a woman of story ghosts and story devils, a woman prone to bad dreams and bad insomnia. There are still times I wake up at three o'clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life, her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art.