One-Eyed Cat (17 page)

“Oh, Mr. Scully …” Ned said, wishing desperately that he was somewhere else, that he hadn't come. Something was hurrying him, urging him toward he didn't know what. He heard his own loud breathing. The old man lay still, imprisoned in his mysterious affliction. Was he the very same man who had stood next to Ned at the kitchen sink and leaned forward so eagerly to watch the cat playing with a leaf?

“Oh, Mr. Scully—” Ned said again. “It was me that shot the cat.”

He wanted to cram his words back inside himself. From far off, he heard and recognized the sound of tables being set for a meal, the clink of flatware and dishes, the rattle of trays. An elderly man in a bathrobe went slowly past Mr. Scully's door, his head thrust forward, stiffly held, as though he were watching out for dangers that might lie in his path. Inside the room, there was no sound now. Ned couldn't hear Mr. Scully's breathing. He felt utterly alone. He saw, in his mind's eye, the tail of the animal which had moved so quickly along the foundation of the stable, its shadow larger and looser than it, like water flowing, and the shadows of weeds cast by moonlight against the stones, all magnified in this instant as though his memory had become a microscope directed toward that moment when he'd held the Daisy, and its power seemed to be growing and becoming ever sharper, ever clearer. He felt his finger tighten as though he were pulling back on a trigger. He gasped and looked down.

Mr. Scully had moved his head and Ned could see a little of his other cheek, quilted with wrinkles. He was looking straight at Ned. His mouth moved. Then his hand began a hesitant, inching journey toward Ned's hand, which rested on the coverlet.

Nurse Clay appeared in the doorway. “I think that's all for today, Ned,” she said softly.

Ned didn't move. He couldn't, watching that hand labor toward his.

“Ned?” the nurse called.

He felt the touch of Mr. Scully's finger, then gradually his whole hand covering Ned's own. There was the faintest pressure, so faint, Ned wasn't sure how he knew there'd been any at all.

Mr. Scully's head fell back against the pillow, his eyes closed, the hand which had pressed Ned's fluttered and lay still upon the cover. Ned went out of the room, passing Nurse Clay on her way in. He heard a groan and glanced back. Nurse Clay was leaning over the slight body on the bed, hiding it from view.

Ned walked to the library. He raised the hand Mr. Scully had touched and looked at it as though it could talk. Finally, he had spoken to another person about shooting the cat. Mr. Scully had been unable to speak. Yet he had pressed that hand. He wouldn't have done that if he had thought Ned was truly bad. But he must have had a thought about Ned. Still, he'd tried to comfort him. He had understood that Ned was suffering. What
would
he have said? He hadn't ever had to lie to Mr. Scully the way he had at home—except by leaving out a few things he knew about that cat. Mr. Scully was going to die; he was leaving Ned perched on the top rung of a ladder built out of lies; the ladder was leaning against nothing.

In the library, Papa looked up at Ned from the oak table on which several books lay open.

“Ned? Are you feeling ill?” he asked with concern.

Ned saw two lines on either side of Papa's mouth; he didn't think he'd noticed how deep they were before. Someone shook out a newspaper at another table. If he went to the window near the librarian's desk, he would be able to look down at the street that ran alongside the river. He had always loved going to that street full of the smells of river water and oil. Once, when he and Papa had been walking along there, maybe to buy new shoes, or go to the barbershop, and he'd been holding Papa's hand and watching his own feet move along the sidewalk, he'd let go for a moment or so, then he had reached up and taken hold of the hand again. But when he'd looked up to say something to Papa, it was another man's hand he'd been holding onto. The stranger was smiling and Ned had looked back along the street and seen Papa standing near the barbershop and laughing. Everyone who had seen what Ned had done had laughed, and finally he had, too, and he loved the street for that as well as for its watery, oily smells, because he felt safe there, a place where he could take anyone's hand, and where everyone seemed to know him.

Papa asked, “Is Mr. Scully worse?”

Ned nodded. He felt his eyes fill. Papa took a large white handkerchief from his breast pocket and held it out to him. Ned wiped his tears away, and Papa got up and put his arm around Ned's shoulders, then gathered his books to return them to the librarian. They paused on the library steps. The March wind brought them the smell of the river, which, today, smelled more of Easter lilies than it did of oil. The sky was pale where it showed through the ragged clouds. Ned recollected suddenly the gypsies they had seen last October, the harsh, strong colors of their clothes. He wished he could see them right now, their dark, vivid faces so indifferent to everything around them as though it were all a dream they drove their caravans through.

When they were seated in the Packard, Papa said, “I think it was not wise of me to let you visit Mr. Scully. I knew he'd been failing. Try to remember, Ned, that he is a very old man, that he's had a long, long life.”

The car was rumbling and Ned wished they'd drive away.

“I'm proud of you, Ned,” Papa said. “I'm proud of your concern for David Scully.”

Ned sank deep into the plush of the seat.

“You will discover yourself as you get older that people don't behave as they should. Doris has not been the best of daughters. She did her duty only in a grudging way. Your visits to him have been very important. I know they lightened his heart.”

Ned was suddenly so angry he wanted to howl—“It's because of the cat I went to see him!”

Yet that wasn't true! It was just a piece of the truth.

A church deacon had given him a toy safe years ago. He'd lost the safe and its key but he remembered, out of a number of secret things he put there, one of the tiny glasses which held communion wine and which he'd slipped into his pocket one Sunday when no one was watching, and which he liked to drink water from, a chipped stone he'd found which he was sure was an Indian arrowhead, and a note he'd written when he first learned how to print which said: “What is a holy ghost?”

Mr. Scully had now become his safe, holding a larger secret than he'd ever had before.

More than the secret of the cat had drawn him to the nursing home. It was Mr. Scully himself. He'd known
him,
his habits, the things he knew how to do, the way he made his bread, the way he could get a fire started so quickly in the stove, the stories he told, the smile he gave Ned when he poured rum into his own tea, his memories of his long life.

He glanced at Papa. “I once stole a communion glass,” he said.

Papa said, “Oh, yes. When you were little. I remember I saw you drinking water from it one night in the bathroom.”

“Why didn't you say anything?”

Papa grinned suddenly. “Well—if you'd done it again, I might have.”

Evelyn opened the front door to them. Behind her stood Mrs. Kimball wearing her brown silk Sunday dress with its small lace collar. Ned had once seen her remove the collar as though it had been a necklace and place it between two pieces of tissue paper and put it away in a drawer of the dresser which stood in her kitchen.

“What is it?” Papa asked at once.

“Mrs. Wallis has been in awful pain,” Mrs. Kimball replied. “I've made her as comfortable as I could, Reverend.”

Ned could feel Evelyn watching him closely.

Papa was running upstairs.

“Ned, I've left a pot of soup for your supper on the stove. When Evie came by, I sent her back home to get a loaf of fresh bread for you.”

“Your Ma was crying without making any noise,” Evelyn said to him, her eyes wide.

“Evie!” exclaimed Mrs. Kimball. “Can't you see how worried Ned is? Let him go to her!”

Ned ran up the stairs and across the landing where the stained-glass window spilled its colors, grape and lemon and raspberry, upon the oak floor. He halted beside the pier glass which was as dark as a well at this time of day. Papa was carrying Mama from her wheelchair to her bed. She was pressed against him, her arms and legs drawn close as though she were knotted. Ned watched, breathless, as Papa lowered her onto the bed, glanced blankly into the hall and shut the door.

He went out of the house and ran down to the furthest edge of the field closest to the monastery. He sat on a stone that had come loose from the old dividing wall. Around him, the bony leafless branches of the sumac rattled in the wind. Once he heard a bell ring distantly.

At last lights went on in the living room. From where he was sitting and waiting, the house looked like a distant ship. He felt he could go home now. Mama must be better, or else asleep, if Papa was downstairs. From all the times before when Mama had gotten so sick, Ned knew Papa wouldn't leave her until she was all right.

When Ned walked into the hall, Papa, his face strained and exhausted, was staring at a letter on the table next to the coat stand. “I haven't opened the mail,” he said to Ned in a distracted voice. Ned stared at him mutely. Papa suddenly smiled and seemed to see Ned all at once as though he'd waked up out of a doze.

“She is better, Neddy. It's the dampness this time of year. It's so hard on her, and this old house … it can be so chilly. She's awake. You can visit her. I believe Mrs. Kimball mentioned soup …” Papa walked rather dreamily in the direction of the kitchen.

“Papa,” Ned called. “You forgot to take off your coat!” His father looked down at himself. “You're right. I've had it on all this time.”

Ned didn't wait to see Papa hang up his coat but went straight up to his mother's room. She was leaning back against several pillows.

“Ned,” she said gently, “don't look so scared. I'm much better. You know how it's always been with this sickness. But there's hopeful news, I think. Papa has been reading about a new treatment. He's already spoken to Dr. Nevins about it. It has something to do with gold salts, injecting them, and they can reduce the inflammation. That's what hurts, you see.”

“Does it hurt now?”

“It's not bad,” she said. He knew that meant the pain hadn't gone away.

Papa came to the door holding a letter. “Now look where Hilary has got to,” he said. “The Territory of Hawaii!” He put the letter down on the bed and said he had to get back to the kitchen and heat up Mrs. Kimball's soup for everyone's supper.

“You can open the letter, Ned,” Mama told him.

He drew three sheets of paper from the envelope. On one was a drawing below a note addressed to him. He held out the other pages to Mama. She didn't reach for them but kept her hands beneath the blanket. “I can't hold anything yet,” she said.

The drawing was of a ship. Ned had never seen one like it. The note read:

Dear Ned,

Here is a Chinese junk, and look how high the deck is! It's very much like a 16th century merchantman. The sails of most junks are brilliant red. It's beautiful, like a glorious insect, and I'm going to sail the China seas on one like this. Wish you were with me!

Ned held up the drawing so Mama could see it. “I'd love to see that sailing up the river,” she said. “It would rouse up the ghost of Henry Hudson.” She smiled at him. It was a calm smile yet it had a kind of tightness in it, an effort, so Ned knew he'd better go. He picked up Uncle Hilary's letter and said he'd take it down to Papa, and she thanked him and said she might sleep a little now.

After Papa had read the letter, he told Ned that Uncle Hilary was going to visit a leper colony at Molokai where a priest, Father Damien, had gone to live to minister to the lepers. Afterwards, Uncle Hilary was going to Hong Kong to find a junk he could sail on.

Ned and Papa ate Mrs. Kimball's soup, which was not very tasty but quite filling. For once, Ned wasn't so interested in Uncle Hilary's whereabouts and doings. He had homework to do for Monday but what he was thinking about mostly was sickness, his mother's and Mr. Scully's. He didn't want a colony of lepers on his mind, too.

“What is your sermon about tomorrow, Papa?” Ned asked, trying to think of a way he might be able to get out of going to church.

“The text is from Paul's letter to the Philippians: ‘Do all things without grumbling or questioning that you may be blameless and innocent—'” Ned's father suddenly broke off and reached across the table and took Ned's hand in his. “As you do them, my Ned,” he said. “Dear Ned.”

He nearly told Papa then—he felt about to burst with all that he'd hidden. He could feel everything pressing against his closed mouth as he stared up at the camel in its glass desert on the Tiffany shade. But he said nothing, and pretty soon Papa got up and began to clear away the dishes. Ned could hear him in the kitchen, fixing a tray for Mama. He was whistling the way he sometimes did after an especially hard day.

Dr. Nevins came on Wednesday of the following week and began Mama's treatment, which was called chrysotherapy. The only thing she minded about it, she told Ned later, was that she couldn't sit near the bay windows for a while because any exposure to light after you'd been given gold salts could turn your skin blue. And the salts made your mouth itch.

“But never mind all that!” she said. “Look!”

She had put her hands flat down on her tray and straightened her fingers. “I feel like silk, Neddy. I might even be able to walk into church on Easter Sunday. Think of the effect on the choir! They might be shocked into perfect harmony!”

It astonished him to see her so happy. He hadn't ever thought of her as really unhappy except, of course, when she was in severe pain, but she had sometimes seemed to him like a person watching a parade from a distance, making comments, some serious, some joking, about the marchers. As he looked at her face now, her eyes so wide and her mouth smiling, it was as if she'd flung herself right into the middle of the parade and wasn't a watcher anymore. It frightened him a little.