The Cats of Tanglewood Forest (2 page)

One afternoon Lillian and Aunt were working in the corn patch. Aunt pulled the weeds up with her
hoe while Lillian followed behind and put them in a basket. Aunt was humming some old tune, the way she always did. “Get Up John,” maybe. Or that old, sad song “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake.”

“I wouldn’t hurt the fairies,” Lillian said. “I just want a look at them is all. Where’s the harm in that?”

Aunt broke off her humming and leaned on her hoe.

“Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t,” she said. “I reckon only those little spirits could tell you the one way or t’other. I just know what my pappy told me. He said, ‘You be careful ’round the spirits. Once they take an interest in you… well, sometimes they take a liking, and sometimes they don’t. They’re like the wild cats thataway.’ ”

“I like the cats.”

Aunt nodded. “And I reckon they like you, seeing’s how you’re giving them a saucer of Annabelle’s milk every morning the way you do. I don’t mind ’em coming ’round. They keep the mice away. But you got to remember with a wild cat, you could be a-petting him calm as you please one day, and the next it’s a-scratching and a-clawing at you for no good reason you could ever put a finger on. There’s no accounting for them. No, sir.
That’s
what the
spirits are like, girl. Folks like you and me, we can’t predict what they’ll do.”

“Maybe the fairies would like me the way the cats do.”

Aunt smiled and went back to her hoeing.

“I’ve heard tell,” she said as she worked the dirt, “that they’re kin of a kind. The way a squirrel and a rat are kin, them both being rodents. Pappy said everything living in the deep woods has got a bit of magic in it, but cats have more’n most. You ask the preacher and he’ll tell you it’s because they all got a bit of the devil in ’em.”

Lillian shook dirt from the weeds and dropped them in her basket. She liked it when Aunt talked about fairies and such. Most times she only told Lillian about practical things to do with running the farm.

“Have you ever seen a spirit?” she asked Aunt.

That earned her another smile. “Live in these hills long enough and sooner or later you’ll have seen pretty much everything. Your Uncle Ulyss used to tease me something fierce, but I hold to this day that one time I saw L’il Pater crossing the bottom of the field. He was walking on his hind legs, just like a little man, with a floppy hat on his head, big black boots on his feet, and a bag hanging on a stick he had slung
over his shoulder. And following on behind him was a line of cats of every size and color.”

“What did you
do
?”

“I didn’t do anything. I just stood there with my eyes big as saucers, staring and staring until the woods swallowed ’em all up like they’d never been there.” She laughed. “Which is what Ulyss said was the case. But I’ll tell you, I didn’t see a cat around this farm for two weeks after. And when they come back, they were slinking around like they’d spent the time they were gone doing nothing but drinking moonshine and dancing, and every time they had to move, it made them ache something fierce.”

Aunt went back to humming and Lillian tried to imagine what she would have done if she’d been the one to see L’il Pater.

The next morning she did her chores, just like every morning. She fed the chickens, throwing an extra handful of grain into the grass for the sparrows and other small birds that waited for the promise of her bounty in the branches of the wild rosebushes that grew nearby. She milked Annabelle, their one cow,
and set out a saucer for the stray cats that would come out of the forest while she put the cow out to pasture and brought the milk in to Aunt. After a breakfast of biscuits and honeyed tea, she weeded the vegetable patch. If Aunt didn’t have any other chores for her, and she was done with her lessons, the rest of the day was hers to do what she wanted.

She set off on a ramble, running up the hill to leave a piece of one of her breakfast biscuits under the boughs of the Apple Tree Man.

That’s what Aunt called the oldest apple tree in their orchard gone wild. He stood near the very top of the hill, overlooking the meadow dotted with wildflowers and beehives and the other apple trees.

“Why do you call him that?” Lillian had asked the first time she’d heard his name. “Is there a real man living in the tree?”

He’d be a gnarled, twisty sort of a man, she thought, to live in that old, twisty tree. She probably daydreamed as much about him as she did fairies, especially when she was lying under his branches. Sometimes when she dozed there she imagined she could hear a distant voice telling stories that she never remembered when she woke.

“I don’t know the why or where of it,” Aunt replied. “But that’s what we’ve always called the oldest apple tree. Only we didn’t leave food out for him, like you do.” She shook her head. “You’re just feeding the raccoons and squirrels.”

Lillian didn’t think so—not at all. There was an Apple Tree Man, just like there were fairies and magic cats. He was shy, that was all. Private. But one day all the spirits of the Tanglewood Forest would know that she meant them no harm, and they would come to her and they’d all be friends.

So, with her chores done, breakfast finished, and the Apple Tree Man fed, she went down into the hollow. She wandered upstream from the stepping-stones to where the creek tumbled down a staircase of rocks, enjoying the change of temperature on her arms when she walked from sunlight into shadow and then out again. By the waterfall she balanced on the slick rocks and lichen, poking at the shiny pebbles underwater with a stick until she felt the weight of someone’s attention upon her.

Looking up, she found herself face-to-face with a
handsome, white-tailed deer. He stood on the edge of a tangle of rhododendrons, with the sprucy-pine and yellow birch rising up the hillside behind him.

Deer were almost as good as fairies, so far as Lillian was concerned.

“Hello hello, you,” she said.

When he turned and bolted, she ran in pursuit. Not to catch him, not to scare him. Just for the fun of seeing how fast they both could run.

They ran uphill and down. They ran through thickets of hickory and yellow birch, across sudden
meadows where the grass and weeds slapped against their legs, up rock-strewn slopes, dusky with moss and ferns, and back down into the hollow, where the creek ran with them. They ran and ran, the deer bounding gracefully, Lillian scrambling and leaping, but no less quick for that.

Sometimes she could almost touch him. Sometimes
all she could see of him was the flash of a white tail, but when he saw that she was falling behind, he would pretend to catch his own breath, only to bolt away again as she drew near.

They ran through familiar fields and meadows and deep into parts of the forest where Lillian had never been before. The trees were older here, and the thickets sometimes so dense that she had to wriggle under the ones that the deer bounded over so gracefully.

That was how she finally found herself lying under that grandfather beech tree in its hidden clearing, the deer gone his own way while she collapsed in a tangle of limbs in the tall grass and fell asleep.

And that was where the snake bit her.

It was an awful, dreadful snake, like in that old song Aunt sometimes sang. Lillian never even knew it was there under the tree with her until it struck.