One-Eyed Cat (5 page)

He heard his father's footsteps going up to the attic. Then that's where he was taking the gun. His father wouldn't hide it. The painful thing was that, though Ned didn't always trust his father, his father trusted him, and that seemed to him unfair, although he couldn't explain why it was so.

The one thing in the world that would make him feel better right now was to have that gun in his hands once more, to feel the weight of it, to examine every inch of it closely. If he could do that only once, he would turn his mind from it as his father had told him to do.

There was no door to Ned's study, just a heavy old velvet curtain on rungs. Papa pushed it aside and stuck his head in.

“Good night, dear Ned,” he said.

“Good night, Papa.”

“Don't stay up too late.”

Gradually the night sounds of the old house faded away until all that was left was the creaking and sighing of the boards and joists, the old timbers. By the light of the orange moon that seemed twice as big as usual, he could see clearly the boughs of the maple tree. In a wind, even a slight breeze, they would click up against the window of his study. Papa was always saying he ought to prune the tree, but Ned loved the sound the branches made.

He had always been so glad when Uncle Hilary visited. But not this time. He rolled off the horsehair sofa and onto a long patch of light on the floor. A coin fell out of his trouser pocket. It was the nickel that hadn't been collected from him in church that morning. The morning felt a week away. He shot the nickel into a corner of the room the way he would have shot an aggie. He didn't bother to look for it.

The harvest moon had filled the whole house with pools and streams and narrow ribbons of light. As Ned wandered from window to window, holding his shoes in his hand so he wouldn't make any noise, he lost track of time; the house seemed to float above the long meadows that ran down toward the Hudson and the north field edged by the grove of pines in whose branches Ned had often sat in the summer, reading a book. From the living room bay windows, he thought he could just make out the chalk-white ghostly Makepeace mansion beyond the far line of maples to the south.

Leaning against the oak library table, he could see the dark narrow buildings of the asylum across the Hudson. Papa had taken him there once when he'd had to visit a parishioner who'd set fires all over the village of Tyler.

Ned remembered playing with a wooden horse beneath a great elm tree while his father was in the red brick ward with its porches screened heavily with black wire, and how he'd looked up once and thought he'd seen a round pale face gazing down at him like a small moon.

Though it was still warm from the day's heat, Ned shivered as though feeling winter's chill. He went through the central hall to the kitchen. At the back stairs, he stood for a long time listening.

His scalp tingled. He began to climb, holding his breath as he went past Mrs. Scallop's room. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her lying in her bed, a small mound like a risen cake in the oven, and he heard a faint fluttering of the air that was nearly a snore.

He went up the attic stairs on all fours, moving cautiously through the heaps of magazines. The orange had drained out of the moon; the light was pale now, weaker, but enough to show the hills of books and boxes and trunks and cases and crates and baskets.

The gun was not among them but in an unfinished room in the corner of the attic. Ned found it almost at once, as though it had a voice which had called to him.

He could hear his heart thudding as he squatted and rested his hands on the case. After a while, he made his way to the head of the attic stairs and listened.

He went back to the little room, opened the case and took out the Daisy rifle. He gripped it in his hands and stood up and went to the stairs and made his way all the way down to the kitchen without making one sound. He balanced the gun against the wall and went back upstairs to get his shoes.

When he was outdoors and well away from the porch, he sat down on the ground and put on his shoes. He knew now that he would have to try the gun just once. Then he would be able to do what his father had told him to do—take his mind away from it.

He glanced back at the house. Its shadow, enormous, black, nearly shapeless, lay on the ground. All around him were the smaller shadows of trees.

He began to follow the driveway as it curved out of sight of the house toward the small stable where Papa kept the Packard in bad weather. The tracks were almost completely overgrown with weeds and brush by the time the driveway reached the stable. It was really an old barn, much older than the house. Rough-hewn stones formed its foundation; ivy had straggled over much of its half-collapsed roof. Mama had told him that Cosmo, her black gelding, had been stabled there, and that at night she used to listen for his soft neigh and the thump of a hoof hitting the stable floor.

The night sky had changed; thin clouds drifted across the face of the moon. A slight breeze sprang up for a brief moment and rustled the tall grass that grew at the base of the stable. Grass grew inside, too. It wouldn't be so long, Papa had said, before the stable would simply fall into the ground and become part of it—another thing he should take care of that he simply hadn't the time or money to do.

Ned's hearing had sharpened. He could hear the sleepy night sounds of birds, the rustle of field mice or voles, or perhaps a raccoon, as they moved about in the dry grass of the fields.

He lifted the gun to his shoulder just as he remembered lifting it at the shooting range Papa had taken him to when they went to the fair. He sighted along its barrel, pointing it first at the pines, then turning very slowly in a wide circle which followed the eastern range of the mountains, the river, the western bulge of Storm King Mountain; he aimed it high above the maple trees which partly hid the Makepeace mansion, brought it to the slope behind which stood his own house, all the way back until he had turned completely around and was facing the side of the stable.

As he blinked and opened his right eye wide, he saw a dark shadow against the stones which the moon's light had turned the color of ashes. For a split second, it looked alive. Before he could think, his finger had pressed the trigger.

There was a quick
whoosh,
the sound a bobwhite makes when it bursts out of underbrush, then silence. He was sure there hadn't been any loud report that would have waked anyone in the house, yet he had heard something, a kind of thin disturbance in the air. He walked over to the barn. There was no shadow now. There was nothing. He might have only dreamed that he had fired the rifle.

He felt tired, dull, as he trudged along the drive toward the house. It seemed a long time before he would be able to crawl under his sheet and go to sleep. He felt the gun hanging loosely at his side. He'd lost all interest in it.

As he came in sight of the house, nearly lost in the darkness now, for clouds filled the sky, he glanced up at the attic where he would have to carry the gun and replace it in its case.

He stood absolutely motionless. He was sure there was a face there, pressed against the glass, looking down at him the way the person had looked down at him through the heavy black wire screen of the asylum years before.

III

The Old Man

“Happy birthday, Ned,” his mother said. She was dressed and in her wheelchair. He could see from the door that she was holding something in her hands. “Come here to me,” she said.

Some mornings he walked to school and some mornings Papa drove him in the Packard. What was unvarying was that his mother's door was closed when he tiptoed past it, his school books under his arm, and went downstairs to his breakfast. He could not remember her ever having been up this early to wish him
Happy Birthday
. It meant that Papa had risen very early to do her hair and help her dress and carry her to the chair. He dropped his books on the bed as he went to her. He felt shy; he wasn't accustomed to seeing her at the start of his day.

Her hands opened. On her palms lay a gold pocket watch nearly as flat as a wafer, its chain wound round her fingers like a golden grass snake.

“This watch was my father's,” she said. “Now it's yours.” She lifted it up to him. He took it and held it to his ear. It ticked softly. “You can keep it by your bedside for now. When you go away to college, you can carry it in your pocket. You'll always know what time it is.”

He looked at her hands as he did every day. Her thumb joints were more swollen than they had been yesterday. “Thank you, Mama,” he said.

“I think you were too little when you saw your grandfather to remember him. I know how glad he would have been to know that you have his watch. His initials are on the back, do you see? He was given it when he retired from the newspaper in Norfolk.”

The watch felt warm in his hand as though it were alive.

“Uncle Hilary left an
écu
for you. Papa has it. It's a gold coin from France, very old. I think this is a golden birthday.” She smiled. He thought she looked uncertain. He sensed she wanted to say something more and was searching for words. He felt a sudden impatience and wished he was gone, out of the house and on his way. It was something he didn't often feel when he was with her. But he had waked up that way, uneasy and in a hurry.

“He was sorry about the gun,” she said slowly, looking down at her hands. “He realized he should have spoken to your father first—before giving it to you.”

Ned felt his face turn red. She was looking at him now. He didn't meet her eyes. “I don't like guns either,” she said softly. “I'm afraid of them.” Standing there silently, unable to speak, he felt he was lying to her. “Oh, Ned!” she exclaimed, “I'm sorry, too!”

“I have to go,” he mumbled, and backed away out of the room and ran downstairs.

His class sang “Happy Birthday” to him. Some of the boys snickered and some of the girls giggled. Miss Jefferson had brought cookies she had made and a basket of Jonathan apples. In honor of Ned, she read a chapter from
The Call of the Wild
by Jack London. It was stuffy in the classroom, as hot as though it were still August. The other children looked at him, then at each other, and grinned from time to time, the way they always did when it was someone's birthday, as if it were a thing a person had done, accomplished. It isn't anything at all, he said to himself, just a day that comes along.

In the evening, Mrs. Scallop brought the cake she had made for him up to Mama's room. Papa carried a big pitcher of fresh lemonade and Ned's presents. Miss Brewster had sent him
Treasure Island,
and the Ladies' Aid Society of the church had sent an anthology of poems by Rudyard Kipling. Papa gave him a new winter coat, a book called
Robin Hood and His Merry Men
and an atlas so he could learn where the countries were which his stamps came from.

“You must blow out all the candles or a strange fate will befall you,” warned Mrs. Scallop.

His mother laughed loudly. “Oh, Mrs. Scallop!” she exclaimed. “A strange fate befalls us all!”

Ned blew them out. Everyone clapped and he cut pieces of the cake and handed them around. Mrs. Scallop presented him with the most hideous rug, Ned thought, of all the rugs he'd seen her make. It would look nice beside his bed, she said, cozy to walk on when the weather changed. Ned was glad when he could be alone in his room. He found a pile of animal stories he had cut out of the newspapers over the years and kept in an old shoe box. He felt slightly embarrassed at his age to be still reading Thornton Burgess, but it was comforting to gaze for a long time at an illustration of the plump rabbit standing in front of a tree or in a vegetable patch. His birthday was nearly over. The house grew silent except for the leaking of the toilet flush which his father was never able to repair permanently.

Suddenly he tore up the handful of stories and dropped the pieces into his wastebasket. The gold watch ticked on his dresser, his new books piled up beside it. It had really been a very hard day. He knew it was all because of the gun, his worry over what he had done. In just a few days, that worry had come to be part of whatever he was thinking about. Had he really seen a face that night looking down at him from a window in the house? If he had, it must have been Mrs. Scallop's face. But if it had been she—and if she had noticed the gun—why hadn't she said anything? Perhaps he had been carrying the gun in such a way she couldn't have seen it. Had the rifle made a much louder noise than he had thought and waked her up?

As though it had slid into the room, the wall of the stable appeared before him; he saw a flicker of movement, or moonlight wavering, or breeze-bent wild grass, something that drew the gun to it and made his finger press the trigger. He shook his head and it disappeared. He wished Uncle Hilary hadn't come.

Papa had said—take your mind away from it. It had gotten
into
his mind. He could tell Papa what he had done. After all, Papa wouldn't strap him the way he'd heard Billy Gaskell's father strapped him for the slightest thing. No, Papa would only look grave, disappointed. But he'd forgive him.

Ned put his head under the pillow. At some point, he fell asleep.

For four more Sundays the heat held. The flowers arranged around the pulpit wilted in an hour. Old Mr. Deems, dazed by the heat, snored so loudly the sound of it cut like a buzz saw through the hymns. And on the way home from church, the wind that blew through the windows of the Packard felt as though it had come straight from an oven.

When Ned ate his early Sunday supper on the porch, the sky flared like fire, and the monastery bells, ringing for vespers, seemed to be working their way through hot tar.

He went up to visit his mother. A palmetto fan lay on her tray and she was drooped over it. He fanned her for a few minutes. She smiled her gratitude. “A person can imagine anything except weather,” she murmured.