One-Eyed Cat (11 page)

The church ladies used to provide a good deal of Thanksgiving dinner for the Wallis family. Ned had liked driving home from Tyler with their food hampers on the back seat of the Packard, carrying them into the kitchen and opening them up. It was a little like opening Christmas presents. Papa had cooked the turkey. When it was all done and carved, Papa would carry Mama downstairs and place her in her wheelchair, which had been drawn up to the round oak table beneath the Tiffany-glass shade.

This year, Ned imagined, Mrs. Scallop would be rushing about the kitchen, glowing like a hot coal, making huge cakes and pies, mashing potatoes, basting the turkey, telling anyone who passed through what a wonderful cook she was.

Do bullies know they're bullies? Ned wondered. Do people know when they're boasting? He walked up the porch steps and, through the window, saw his father sitting at his desk. He was only half glad Papa was home.

“Here's my report card,” he said when he went into the study.

Papa smiled and took it from his outstretched hand and looked at it for what seemed a night and a day.

“Ned, I don't believe you've been working very hard,” he said at last in a solemn voice. “Marks aren't so important. The fine thing is to do your best. Neddy, this isn't your best. Is it?”

Ned shook his head. His father uncapped his fountain pen to sign the report card. In two minutes, this would be over. In a week, he would have forgotten it. In ten years—

“Ned?” his father inquired, looking up at him. “Have you something to say?” When Ned didn't answer, his father sighed. “I don't see quite how I can send my boy away for a splendid holiday with his uncle if he is indifferent to his work,” he said, looking down at his desk.

Hope stirred in Ned's heart. But he could hardly tell Papa that. “I'll try to do better next month,” he said, wondering if he could get his grades down so low that Papa wouldn't let him go to Charleston with Uncle Hilary. Papa was smiling now. “That's the spirit,” he said.

Ned was disgusted with himself. Bullies might not know they were bullies, but a liar must know when he had lied. Ned did.

As it turned out, Mrs. Scallop didn't cook the Thanksgiving turkey for the Wallis family. She asked for the day off and went to Cornwall, down near the Hudson, to spend the holiday with a cousin of her dead husband's who lived there. Mr. Scully had his turkey with the Kimball family, and Ned and his father fixed their Thanksgiving dinner together. The church ladies provided three pies: mince, pumpkin and sweet potato. When the table was spread, it looked to Ned as if there was enough food on it to feed all the Kimballs for a week.

Mama wore her silk dress that was the color of lilac blossoms. On one of her fingers was an amethyst ring, her favorite stone she had told Ned. She was able to wear the ring because her finger joints were hardly swollen today. When Papa said grace, he added special thanks for Mama being at the table with them. When Papa looked up from his prayer, he gazed across the table at Mama for a long time. His face looked young the way it had years ago when he used to play with Ned before bedtime, playing hide-and-seek with him and laughing even harder than Ned had when Ned found him.

Except for the dark trunks of trees, there was hardly any color outdoors, but at the table there was a feast of light: the bright food, the blue and white dishes which were used only on holidays, the reflected glow from the lamp shade around which the wild animals paraded.

The three of us, Ned thought, and for no reason at all, he suddenly saw the cat in his mind's eye, not smooth and motionless and perfect like the animals on the Tiffany shade, but scruffy and dirty and wounded.

His mother was saying that she was specially thankful today that Mrs. Scallop had gone to haunt another household, and Papa laughed but reminded her—as he always did—that Mrs. Scallop had her virtues. Mama said they really ought to think about moving into the parsonage. Ned saw her father make a face.

“It would make life easier, Jim,” Mama said. “And if you dislike the parsonage so much, we could think about a house in Waterville. Just imagine! No more Mrs. Scallop, no more leaking roof, driveway upkeep, tree pruning, paying the farmer to mow the fields. And we'd be closer to the church by several miles, and you wouldn't be driven to distraction by your worries about me.”

Papa was staring down at his coffee, stirring it slowly and thoroughly. Ned knew that Papa liked coffee more than he liked most food. He drank cups of it while he prepared his sermons. He looked up at Mama.

“We love the place so,” he said quietly. “What would you do without your view? What would Ned do without the maple branch he swings on, and the meadows he can run through and the trees he can climb?”

“I think of all the burdens it would lift from you—moving away,” Mama said.

“The lilac bush,” murmured Papa. “I'd miss that. When I imagine my father sailing up the Hudson and seeing this hill … when I imagine strangers sitting in this room …”

“It would be hard,” Mama said. “But we must try to think. Ned, what would you say to our moving?”

“You've spent your whole life here,” Papa said to him.

“I know it,” Ned said. “What would happen to Mr. Scully? Who would bring his mail to him? Or chop the wood?”

He was thinking to himself: who will take care of the cat?

“We wouldn't move for a long time,” his mother said quickly. “It is only that we must begin to think seriously about it. Once Papa finds work for Mrs. Scallop—”

“—Ned,” interrupted Papa. “Why are you making that heap of turkey bones and skin next to your plate?”

Ned started. He felt a blush spreading all over his face and neck.

“It's leftovers,” he said, stammering slightly. “It's—” He stopped speaking. For, perhaps, the time it took for his heart to beat twice, he nearly told them everything. Their faces looked so gentle in the lemony light. They were looking at him so fondly.

“It's for Evelyn Kimball's dog, Sport, that they keep on a chain. I thought—the dog looks skinny and the Kimballs don't have much, so it gets only a few scraps. I thought I'd give it a treat—”

He closed his mouth. They smiled at him. He knew his father might even praise him for his charity. His father often spoke about charity as though it was a person he loved.

He felt his stomach sink the way it did when he had to go to the dentist to have a cavity filled.

It would take him three minutes to fetch the gun down from the attic. It was with the gun that his trouble had started. Yet the gun hardly seemed to matter now. It was as if he'd moved away, not to the parsonage next to the church, or to Waterville, but a thousand miles away from home. What did matter was that he had a strange new life his parents knew nothing about and one that he must continue to keep hidden from them. Each lie he told them made the secret bigger, and that meant even more lies. He didn't know how to stop.

He got up from the table hurriedly and gathered up some dishes to take to the kitchen, miserable and ashamed as he glanced at their faces and saw written there their pride in him.

V

The Strength of Life

Ned loved snow, the whisper when he walked through it, a sound like candles being blown out, the coming indoors out of it into the warmth, and standing on the register in the big hall through which the dusty, metal-smelling heat blew up, and the going back out again, shivering, cold, stooping and scooping up a handful to make a snowball, packing it hard with wet mittens, hefting it, tossing it as far as he could, and the runners of his sled whispering across it as he sleighed down the slopes which were smooth and glittering and hard, like great jewels.

On the first of December, there was a heavy snowfall. When Ned looked out of his window the next morning, the river glowed like a snake made out of light as it wound among the snow-covered mountains.

He ate breakfast hastily, too preoccupied to read the story on the cereal box. Mrs. Scallop was broody this morning and left him alone, her glance passing over him as it passed over the kitchen chairs.

On the porch, he paused to take deep breaths of air which tasted, he imagined, like water from the center of the ocean, then he waded into the snow, passing the Packard, its windows white and hidden, the crabapple tree with its weighted branches, down the long hill trying to guess if he was anywhere near the buried driveway. By the time he reached Mr. Scully's house, his galoshes were topped with snow and his feet were wet. Mr. Scully's shades were drawn; the house had a pinched look as though it felt the cold.

Ned went around to the back until he could see the shed. There were boot tracks in the snow leading to it and returning to the back door. He guessed the old man had taken in the cat's bowl; it was nowhere to be seen. You couldn't leave anything out in this weather, it would freeze. Mr. Scully had told him that finding water in the winter was a big problem for animals. Licking the snow or ice could make them sick.

Ned stared hard at the shed. Perhaps the cat was inside, squeezed in behind logs in a tight space where its own breath would keep it warm. He was going to be late to school if he didn't get a move on, but he kept looking hard all over the yard as though he could make the cat appear out of snow and gray sky. Twice, his glance passed over the icebox. The third time, he saw that the motionless mound on top of it was not only the quilt but the cat, joined into one shape by a dusting of snow.

Ned held his breath for a moment, then put his own feet in Mr. Scully's tracks and went toward the shed. The tracks had frozen and they crunched under Ned's weight, but the cat didn't raise its head. Ned halted a few feet away from it—but of course, he realized, it wouldn't hear him because of its deaf ear. He could have gone closer to it than he'd ever been but he had a sudden vision of the cat exploding into fear when it finally did hear him.

When he got back to the front of the house, he saw fresh footsteps on the road. He could tell it was the road because of the deep ditches which fell away to either side. He guessed they were Billy's tracks. It was odd to think that Billy, huffing and puffing, had gone past Mr. Scully's place, thinking his own thoughts, while he, Ned, only a few yards away, had been searching for the cat. He found Evelyn's tracks, too, and later on, Janet's, the smallest of all. He felt ghostly as if he'd been left alone on a white, silent globe.

Somewhere in the evergreen woods, snow must have slid off a bough, for he heard the loud plop, then the fainter sound of the bough springing up, relieved of the weight. He thought about the cat, visualizing how it had looked on the quilt. How still it had been! Why hadn't he gone right up to it, looked at it close, touched its fur? Why had it been so motionless—still as death, still as a dead vole he'd seen last summer in the grass near the well? He came to the snow-covered blacktop road upon which a few cars had left their ridged tire tracks. He had a strong impulse to turn back, to play hooky for the first time in his life. Mr. Scully, with his poor eyesight, might not spot the cat on top of the icebox, might not, then, set food out for it. Fretting and shivering, his feet numb, Ned went on to school.

He tried very hard to concentrate on his lessons, to watch Miss Jefferson's plump, even handwriting on the blackboard as she wrote out the lines from a poem by Thomas Gray that the class was to memorize that week, but try as he might, the image of the unmoving animal on the ragged old quilt persisted. Last week, on a rainy afternoon, the cat had looked at Ned, had cocked its head as though to see him better. Its one eye, narrowed, had reminded him of a grain of wheat.

“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea …”

Ned read the lines several times before copying them down in his copybook. The words made no sense to him. It was this that had made his hours in school so hard ever since he and Mr. Scully had seen the cat last autumn, this drawing away of his attention from everything that was going on around him. He was either relieved because the cat was where he could see it or fearful because he didn't know where it was.

In the afternoon, on the way home, Ned got into a fight with Billy.

Janet stumbled over a hidden root as she turned up her path. She fell forward, dropping her books. Ned picked them up, brushed off the snow and handed them to her as she got to her feet.

“Goody-goody!” shouted Billy. “Mama's goody boy!”

Ned felt a fierce single impulse. His arm swung out like a chain of lead, and he knocked Billy into the snow with a triumphant howl of joy. Janet's mouth fell open in astonishment.

It was the deep frozen end of late afternoon, and the snow had hardened. He and Billy rolled about on it, grabbing at each other's ears and faces.

“Stop that!” Evelyn shouted.

“Oh, you boys! How I hate boys!” cried Janet.

Ned and Billy got to their feet. Billy's knitted hat was still on. Ned found himself hating it for its silliness—it stood up so high on top of Billy's great round head. All at once, Billy stuck out his tongue. Ned burst into laughter, and in a moment Billy was laughing, too. Evelyn gave them a disgusted look and trudged on ahead, but Janet paused, looking puzzled, and asked Billy if he
liked
to be knocked down. He only grinned at her.

For the first time in a while, Ned felt like himself, or what he thought of as himself. He and Billy walked along companionably all the way to Mr. Scully's house, talking about hockey, and how the pond near school must be frozen solid by now, and maybe the bigger boys would let them skate around the edges of the game this year. Ned remembered how the boys had skated, holding their hockey sticks diagonally across themselves, how their racing skates flashed against the cracked, milky ice, how they'd shouted at Billy and him to stay out of their way, how they'd looked like warriors.