One-Eyed Cat (10 page)

The real cold had not started. What would happen in December when the ground might be covered in deep snow? The cat would starve.

Ned had always loved Uncle Hilary's visits. They had been surprising, like mornings when he waked up and the ground was covered with snow which had fallen all night while he slept. He didn't want to think about Uncle Hilary now—or to imagine fields of snow.

If he could keep the cat alive, it wouldn't matter so much that he had disobeyed Papa, sneaked into the attic and taken out the gun. But if the cat disappeared, so that Ned wouldn't know if it was dead or alive, then his taking the gun would matter more than anything in the world.

“We'll miss you at Christmas, Neddy,” Mama said. “But when I think of the fun you will have, I don't mind the thought of missing you.”

Ned went and stood in front of the windows so he wouldn't have to answer. He didn't know what to say to his mother, any more than he had known what to say to his father about Uncle Hilary's invitation. Having to think so carefully before he spoke to his parents was terrible. It reminded him a bit of the time last spring he had neglected to memorize a poem, and when the teacher had called him up to the front of the classroom, he had had to stand there, saying nothing, feeling himself turn bright red, the children beginning to giggle, the teacher waiting, surprised, and then so disappointed in him.

“Maybe Uncle Hilary will have to go back to France,” he burst out suddenly, turning toward his mother. “Before Christmas, I mean,” he added, not looking at her.

“Oh—you needn't worry about that,” she said. “I'm sure he won't have to go anywhere but where he wishes to go.”

Ned felt miserable. He remembered a fairy tale Mama had read him about two children who had gotten bits of glass in their eyes, and how the glass had changed their vision of everything. He could sense that she was waiting for him to say something.

“I have to do ten long-division problems,” he said, and walked quickly out of Mama's room. Another lie! And this one with the added flourish of a number!

That night, he thought he wouldn't get to sleep because of all the worrying he was doing about Christmas and Uncle Hilary.

He listened to the sighing of the wind outside his windows and looked out at the sky swept clean of clouds, so that he could see the glitter of the stars. He wondered if he was going to stay awake all night long. He began to recite to himself the names of presidents of the United States. Papa had taught them to him before he had started going to school. If
that
didn't put him to sleep, he made up his mind to get up, go downstairs and read all the newspapers on the library table. But he fell sound asleep just after he'd whispered, “Rutherford Birchard Hayes: 1877–1881.”

When he woke up, the first thing he thought of was the cat. He dressed hurriedly, shivering. It was a cold morning, and he wished he could get back into the warm bed, into the nest of his own warmth, and hide his head beneath the pillow and sleep all day.

“Count your blessings,” Mrs. Scallop ordered him in her loftiest voice as he sat eating his oatmeal. “You have been fortunate this morning. I didn't do to you what you did to me—leaving a dead bug on a cookie. What if I'd put it in your oatmeal?”

He dropped his spoon and ran out of the kitchen, hearing Mrs. Scallop announce to the kitchen table that he was a minister's son, and weren't they always the worst?

Papa was calling out goodbye to him, but Ned didn't answer. He grabbed his coat and books and fled from the house.

When he reached the end of the driveway, he paused and looked up at Mr. Scully's windows. The shades were drawn. No smoke came from the chimney. He imagined how chill the air was inside; he imagined the small old man lying beneath the thin blankets Ned had often made up his bed with. He went around to the back of the house. Nothing was stirring. Two crows flew past, black streaks against the pale morning sky. There was no sign of the cat.

He walked on down the road toward school wishing he'd meet up with Janet. Perhaps he would be able to speak to her about a strange thing that was happening to him. He had begun to fear animals, even those which he knew lived in other parts of the world.

Last week, as the children were passing the evergreen woods on their way home from school, a red-furred dog had rushed out from among the trees and made straight for Ned, barking and shaking its head from side to side like a pony. He'd fallen right down in the dirt and hidden his face until Billy, hollering and laughing, grabbed his hands and made him see that the dog was lying down next to him, licking the sleeve of his coat.

He had been looking through all the old
National Geographies,
too. He didn't go all the way into the attic but sat on the top step and reached out for the magazines, shuddering at pictures of anacondas and cheetahs, even of small creatures like flying squirrels and tarsiers. He'd asked Papa if there were poisonous snakes in the old stone wall that ran along the east side of the Wallis property where the sumac grew.

“Up in the mountains,” Papa had said distractedly. “I don't believe they come down this low. Oh, perhaps the occasional copperhead.”

Occasional copperhead! Ned had been horrified.

He saw ahead of him Janet skipping down her path to the dirt road, and he called out, “Wait up! Wait for me!” and she paused without turning around.

“Listen,” he said when he'd reached her, “what do you think about Bear Mountain? Do you think there are bears there?”

“They put roads all the way to the top,” Janet said. “When people arrive, animals go.”

“All right, they go. But
where
do they go?”

“I never thought about that,” Janet said.

“Are you afraid of bears?” he asked her with effort.

“Well, I might be if one was standing on my foot. But I'm not scared of a bear that's maybe a hundred miles away.”

Ned had been about to tell her that he was scared of the very idea of bears, but now he shut his mouth. He decided he'd better keep certain things to himself.

Mr. Scully was standing next to the pump looking out the kitchen window. The gray cat was close by the shed, eating from its bowl.

“He's getting a little plump,” Mr. Scully noted. “I guess he's fond of the food I give him.”

“Where do the wild cats go when it freezes at night?” Ned asked.

“I expect they have all kinds of spots for sleeping, a hole in a tree trunk, or an old chicken coop, or a hollow in the woods. Creatures like that get pretty clever about taking care of themselves. They have to do it every minute, I suppose, and that makes them alert and tough,” Mr. Scully said.

“I wonder where he was born,” Ned said.

“It might have been to a wild mother. Though he doesn't seem quite as timid as cats born in the wild. No—I think maybe he was a kitten of someone's pet, and he ran away or got lost, or else they put him out to fend for himself. People do that, you know.” The old man suddenly leaned forward. “Ned! Look at that! He's playing!”

The cat was leaping in the air, chasing a leaf as it spun down from a maple tree.

“He's feeling better,” said Mr. Scully.

Ned stretched over the counter and pressed his face against the window. As he watched the gray cat circle and leap and pounce, he felt light and hopeful; he felt free of an oppressive weight. Then he saw the emptiness of the cat's left eye which the lid half revealed. He saw the way the cat still shook its head from time to time as though something had crawled inside its ear.

Mr. Scully had gone to sit at the table. “He sleeps on that old quilt all the time,” he said. The cat was sitting down near its bowl now, cleaning its thin little tail. Ned sat down with Mr. Scully. “I was going to throw the quilt out,” the old man said, “but I'll leave it. The cat likes it so much. He probably feels it's his home. Another thing that happens when you get old—you wake up so early in the morning like you were going backwards through the night—and when I'm standing at the window, pumping water for my tea, I can hardly tell whether he's there or not … gray cat, gray quilt and gray autumn morning. It all seems one grayish haze. Then he lifts up his head and cocks it and stares at the window … looking to see if I'm up. He's getting to know my habits. Animals learn you, Ned, just as much as you learn them.

“Well, then he stretches front and back, and looks around and yawns and that's the first bit of color I see, that little pink spot of the inside of his mouth. He jumps down from the icebox and arches his back and runs about for a minute, disappears for maybe five or ten minutes. Pretty soon, when I'm drinking my tea, he turns up, ready for his breakfast. So I put something in his bowl and get my sweater off the hook and go out the back door and put the bowl down where he's used to it now, by the shed. He's less timid and lets me get a closer look, a little more every day or so.

“I close the door and come back to the window. He looks up at it, spots me with his good eye, then goes to the bowl and eats his breakfast. I do like to watch him clean himself. He licks a paw and runs it right over that empty socket. It don't seem to hurt him. After he's washed about every bit of himself, he struts off to do the day's business.”

Mr. Scully's voice was so lively that Ned was surprised. He hadn't thought the old man was interested in much except the past, and whether or not he was going to get a letter from Doris.

“It's funny how alone an animal can be,” Mr. Scully said in a musing tone, “and still be all right.”

In the afternoon they sorted through boxes of buttons which had belonged to Mr. Scully's mother. “Just think how old these are,” he remarked, some of the animation with which he'd spoken about the cat still in his voice, like the afterglow of a sunset. “How strange it is that the hands which formed them are long gone from the earth. How pretty they are! Look, this one is pearl—here's a bone button—this one is silver. It's a shame to throw them away, so much human thought went into them. What I'll do is take them to the Kimballs. With all those children, Mrs. Kimball can make good use of them. They don't have nearly enough buttons, I'm sure.”

He poked Ned's arm and let out a cackle of laughter. “Now they'll have more buttons than clothes,” he said. “Of course, Mr. Kimball is an independent sort of fellow, never wanted to work for anyone, so they struggle along. She used to be a practical nurse, I think. Imagine having so many children …”

“Evelyn is pretty nice,” Ned said.

“I can't tell them apart,” Mr. Scully said, looking cranky. “My wife never much cared for them. She was very particular.”

“What does it mean—if you're particular?” Ned asked.

“It means you don't like much,” Mr. Scully said gruffly.

It was time to go, Ned thought. The newspaper was folded on a chair, the floor swept, the wood piled up near the stove, handy for Mr. Scully. The two of them had emptied out a big box today. There weren't many boxes left to go through. But there would always be more to do. There always was when you lived in an old house, Mr. Scully had told Ned.

“I'll be going,” he said.

“Thank you, Ned,” Mr. Scully said, looking at him with a kindly expression. He wasn't smiling, but there was a certain softness around his eyes as he gazed at him.

“When the snow comes, where will the cat go?” Ned asked him.

“Maybe you can shove that icebox a little further into the shed,” replied Mr. Scully. “That'll keep the wind and snow off of him. Makes a kind of winter nest.” He looked out the window. “If I'm still here …” he muttered.

“Where are you going?” asked Ned. His voice trembled a little.

“I'm not
planning
on going anywhere,” said Mr. Scully sharply. “But it isn't up to me anymore. See this?” He held out his thin, bony hand. “Now watch …” He very slowly tried to ball up the hand into a fist, but he couldn't. “I don't know how much longer I can manage, Ned,” he said.

His words alarmed Ned but there was nothing he could think of to say to them. He muttered that he'd go out and push the icebox further under the roof of the shed. Mr. Scully nodded absently at him.

Later, as he walked home up the hill, Ned thought of Mr. Scully's hand which wouldn't clench and of his mother's hands, so often twisted and balled up. He stooped and picked up handfuls of stones and flung them into the meadows on either side of the driveway, hoping Papa wasn't looking out of a window and seeing what he was doing. It was bad enough, thinking about hands that weren't strong and straight like his, but added to that was the worry about his report card in his back pocket. It said Ned hadn't been paying attention in class. His grades were lukewarm, not failing. Papa would be serious; he'd speak in that cemetery voice and remind Ned that school was his job and he must try to do it well.

The late afternoon was cold and hard like slate. It would be cold in church on Sunday. The Sunday school classes would be held close to the door of the furnace room. After their Bible stories, the little children would cut turkeys out of orange paper with blunt scissors and nibble on the corn candies left over from Halloween. Holidays had an orange tinge to them except for Christmas which was red and green.

It was one of the busiest times of the year for the Reverend Wallis. There would be a special Thanksgiving service, arrangements to be made for the delivering of food baskets to needy people in the valley—some of them never came to church but were given baskets anyway—and, at the end of November, a pageant would be presented showing scenes of historical events since the founding of the church. Ned was to play the part of a carpenter's assistant in a scene in which the first meeting house was razed to make way for the present church. After that would come Christmas time when the church, lit up every evening, was like a village, with people coming and going, committees meeting, presents for the children being wrapped in bright paper, choir practice, and the whole church filled with the forest smell of the great evergreen tree that would stand in the corner below the gallery.