One-Eyed Cat (16 page)

“Reverend Wallis, what brings you and darling Neddy here?”

“Why, Mrs. Scallop! How well you're looking!” exclaimed Papa. “We hoped to see Mr. Scully—if he's up to it and if you think it would be salutary.”

She nodded and looked wise. “Salutary,” she repeated. “Yes, indeed. He'll be glad to see you. He won't be able to say so. We're doing our best with him, Reverend, but there's been very little improvement.”

She led them up a long staircase and down a narrow corridor past several closed doors until they came to Mr. Scully's room. His door was open. A pot of dead geraniums stood on the sill of the one window. Mrs. Scallop made clucking sounds as she walked to the other side of the bed, where the old man lay motionless on his side. “He loved his little pot of flowers,” Mrs. Scallop said in a loud voice. “But I warned him geraniums don't do well in winter.” She smiled widely and bent over the bed. “Guess who's here!”

Papa took Ned's hand firmly in his and walked around the foot of the bed to join Mrs. Scallop, and Ned felt his stomach sink the way it did when he turned over a rock and saw the sudden stirring of insects and worms.

Mr. Scully's hair was like fluff. There was a sparse stubble of beard on his cheeks and chin. His lower lip looked frozen. But his eyes were bright with recognition and intelligence, and in that pale face which seemed made of ashes, they burned like coals. Ned leaned over him and whispered, “Hello, Mr. Scully. I'm glad to see you.”

“Speak up, Neddy,” commanded Mrs. Scallop.

“We hope our neighbor will come home soon,” the Reverend Wallis said in a somewhat preaching voice. Ned found it extremely crowded there between the geranium and the narrow bed on which Mr. Scully lay. Just as he was thinking that, Papa and Mrs. Scallop moved out into the corridor and began speaking animatedly to each other.

Ned looked down at the old man, who moved one shoulder very slightly. Talking to someone who couldn't talk back to him was the strangest thing that had ever happened to Ned. He told Mr. Scully about his visits to the Makepeace mansion, and a little about school and what he was reading and learning. He didn't mention that he'd met Doris or that Mr. Scully's flivver had vanished or that the outhouse had been taken down. All at once, he ran out of words. Mr. Scully blinked. Ned thought he smiled very slightly, but he wasn't sure. Then, very slowly, the old man brought his hand out from under the white coverlet and made a brief, stroking gesture with it, as though he were patting an animal. Ned glanced up at Papa and Mrs. Scallop. They had moved further from the door. He leaned over the old man until his mouth was close to his ear. “I think I saw him,” he whispered. “I'm pretty sure it was him at the edge of the woods, and he'd caught something to eat.”

When he stood back, Mr. Scully's eyes were gleaming up at him.

While they were driving home, Ned asked his father if he could visit Mr. Scully again. Papa said he'd take him next Saturday when he was planning to do some research in the public library. “I'm sure it will do him good to see you, Ned,” Papa said. “His daughter left rather abruptly for the West—I expect she had things she had to attend to—and now he's quite alone.” He paused and seemed to hesitate. Then he said, “I feel that you ought to know he is not likely to get better.”

“Do you mean that he's going to die?” Ned asked.

Papa's lips moved as though he were searching for a word.

“I know that,” Ned said quickly. His father put his arm around his shoulders and hugged him.

Ned went to see Mama. He told her about visiting Mr. Scully. “Does Mrs. Scallop own the nursing home?” he asked.

“So that's how she looked!” exclaimed his mother, and she started to laugh. He wasn't paying much attention to her—he was thinking of what he'd left out of the visit, his telling Mr. Scully about seeing the cat, or a cat.

“It's as I had imagined,” Mama said. “She's happy now that she has her own kingdom.”

Ned wasn't accustomed to feeling bored and restless when he was with Mama. But he was now, and he didn't want to talk about Mrs. Scallop and her kingdom anymore.

Papa had already started to prepare Sunday supper, and Ned went down to the kitchen. He usually enjoyed watching his father cook meals. Papa sprang from table to sink to stove like a deer. He seemed to Ned a different man from the one who had stood in Mr. Scully's room at the nursing home and spoken so stiffly to him. He picked up a potato in a fast, delicate way, like a raccoon picking up its food. He was telling Ned about an article he was preparing about the history of the church, of all the ministers who had preceded him there, some of whom were buried in the little graveyard near the parsonage. After a while, he got too busy to talk and Ned, to his surprise, found himself going up the back staircase, then up the attic stairs.

It was still daylight, and he didn't have to pull the long string connected with the light bulb in the ceiling. He picked his way across the magazines and books and boxes and went to stand in the doorway of the unfinished room.

From where he stood, he could see the dust on the case that held the gun. He could hardly believe he had ever touched the case, that he'd taken out the gun and carried it down the stairs, past Mrs. Scallop sleeping in her bed, all the way to the hall and out the front door and down the overgrown road to the old stable.

He remembered how snugly the stock of the gun had fit against his shoulder. After a minute or two, he went to the small window and looked out. The sky was gray and luminous like the gray pearl stickpin Papa kept in a velvet box on his dresser top and which had belonged to Ned's grandfather. There was a breath of color among the tree branches, yellowish and rosy. Soon, Ned knew, lilies of the valley would push through the earth below the kitchen window and send out their perfume in blossoms that were like small bells. Soon it would be Easter vacation, though there was still snow on the ground.

There would be an Easter egg hunt on the lawn near the parsonage for the Sunday school children. On Easter Sunday, his mother would be carried down to the Packard, driven to church and carried to the pew where she and Ned would listen to Papa's Easter sermon. He would be sitting there next to her, pretending as he always did when she was brought to church, that she could stand up and walk like everyone else.

Papa spent three more Saturday afternoons at the library in Waterville, and on those days, he dropped Ned off at the nursing home so he could visit Mr. Scully. Mr. Scully, Ned realized, was the only person he really wanted to see.

He got used to the froggy, sour smell of the wax but he didn't get used to Mrs. Scallop in her uniform with her new tightly bound hair.

Although she smiled all the time, she still had her old ways. On his first visit alone, she asked Ned, “Now, what interesting thing have you to tell me?”

“They're almost finished building the new garage near school,” he offered.

Still smiling, Mrs. Scallop said, “Are you being insulting, Neddy dear?”

He worried suddenly that she might not let him up the stairs to see Mr. Scully. He tried to think of something that would interest her. She took hold of his arm and held it tightly. “Go along! You can find your own way. Mrs. Scallop understands boys, young or old!”

As he went up the stairs, he thought of something he was sure would have interested her—how he had crept by her room one night months ago, carrying a Daisy rifle. It made him smile to himself to think of telling her, but in an unpleasant, grim way. He was pretty sure that it had not been Mrs. Scallop looking out the window when he came home that night. He had begun to doubt that there had been anyone watching him.

A tall woman in a nurse's uniform was standing next to Mr. Scully's bed, holding his wrist in her hand. She looked at Ned and smiled and said, “You must be Mr. Scully's friend.”

Ned nodded. “I'm nurse Clay,” she said. She lowered Mr. Scully's wrist gently and pulled the cover up over his shoulder. “He'll be pleased to see you,” she said as she left the room.

How still Mr. Scully was! Did something inside him run about—trying to find a way out? What did he think about?

Ned recalled the joke he had played years ago on a night when Papa had come to hear him say his prayer:
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep
… Ned had put a pillow beneath his blanket and then he had crawled beneath his bed.

Papa had spoken to the pillow for a long time and Ned choked up with laughter. Papa had laughed, too, when Ned grabbed hold of one of his ankles and emerged from beneath the bed. It must have happened before Mama got sick; Papa had laughed so much in those days. He had imitated Cosmo, Mama's horse, and galloped through the long living room. And he had made jokes that were almost as funny as Mama's jokes. Those were the days when he did everything as quickly as he made supper, and those were the days, too, when his voice nearly always sounded real.

Ned walked around to the other side of the bed and said softly, “Hello, Mr. Scully.” He waited for a minute until he recalled that the old man couldn't answer with a greeting of his own. He stared up at Ned, his eyes bright and alive as they'd been last time. But he looked faintly changed—as though he'd sunk further into the bed somehow.

“Someone has cleaned up your yard,” Ned told him. “I stop by there every day after school.”

Mr. Scully blinked.

“I was pretty sure the cat was dead,” Ned said, lowering his voice.

Mr. Scully moved his head, which made the pillow whisper. His mouth opened slightly.

“He never came back to the shed. But now I'm pretty sure that cat I saw was him. Maybe he had a mouse in his mouth. Maybe he's learned to hunt even with one eye.”

The old man was looking over his shoulder. Ned felt hollow. He turned to see what Mr. Scully was staring at. There was only the plant on the windowsill, brown and dusty, the earth dry around it.

“Do you want me to take the plant away?” Ned asked.

Mr. Scully moaned and blinked his eyes.

“It might make Mrs. Scallop get into a temper,” he said. Mr. Scully squeezed his eyes the way people do when they smile. “Maybe she won't get mad at you,” Ned said, hoping Mr. Scully was trying to smile, “because you can't talk back.”

The hollow feeling which had gone away came back. Ned began to speak about school and what he was studying and how hard arithmetic was, and his voice sounded to himself exactly the way it did when he was answering questions Miss Brewster or other grown-ups asked him. He surprised himself by breaking off in the middle of all the school talk and describing instead the stone house at the corner of the dirt road, and the long veranda of the Makepeace mansion, and how he felt there by himself, looking out over the whole countryside. He felt better, filled up with interest. But there came a moment when he grew tired of his own solitary voice, when the little room seemed to hold silence and nothing else. He told Mr. Scully goodbye and promised to come back and see him again, and he took the plant with him out into the hall, not sure what he would do with it. Nurse Clay emerged suddenly from another room and he held it out to her wordlessly. “I've been meaning to take that away,” she said. “I'll try and find a living plant for Mr. Scully.”

He went downstairs and out the front doors of the nursing home without running into Mrs. Scallop. That was lucky, he thought, still hearing the echoes of his own voice the way he'd heard them as he spoke in Mr. Scully's room. When he found Papa in the library, he asked him, “Do you ever feel peculiar when you're preaching and you suddenly hear yourself and there's no one answering you?”

Papa looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. “Sometimes,” he said. “Most of the time, I feel all the people in the congregation are talking with me, inside their hearts, perhaps.”

Ned could see it was different for Papa than it was for him when he spoke to Mr. Scully, although now that he thought of it, he might have sounded a bit preachy when he was speaking to the old man about school and all that.

Mr. Scully was weaker, it seemed to Ned, the next Saturday he saw him. He didn't blink once, just stared at Ned, his eyes half-closed. Nurse Clay told him to speak very softly and that his visit must be brief. He hardly said anything during the few minutes he stood beside Mr. Scully's bed. He felt an impulse to touch him, his shoulder, his white cheek, but he was afraid that it would startle the old man, or that his skin would feel as fragile and dusty as a moth's wing.

Mrs. Scallop caught him just as he was going out the doors. She held his arm and shook her head sorrowfully.

“We won't have Mr. Scully with us much longer, I fear,” she said. She drew him quickly into her arms, and as he pulled away from her, she announced to the ceiling that the Lord worked in mysterious ways. He didn't see how those words—which he'd heard many times before in church—were applicable to Mr. Scully, but they certainly were to Mrs. Scallop.

When he arrived the following Saturday, Nurse Clay and Mrs. Scallop were talking in the hall. The old lady with the ear trumpet like a stag's antler was creeping slowly down the steps. Nurse Clay told him he couldn't visit for more than five minutes today. And Mrs. Scallop, her nostrils flaring, said, “Do exactly as Nurse Clay says. No shilly-shallying this time.”

Ned's anger at Mrs. Scallop's unfairness blotted out what Nurse Clay had said, but he recalled her words when he was standing next to Mr. Scully's bed. The shade was drawn, the old man's eyes were shut. By listening hard, Ned caught a faint sound of slow breathing, each breath like a sigh.

“Mr. Scully?” he whispered.

Mr. Scully's eyes fluttered open. He looked blind, then very slowly his eyes focused on Ned.

“I know you're not feeling well, so I won't stay long,” Ned said. He felt dizzy; Mr. Scully seemed to be looking straight into the center of him.