Tiger by the Tail (2 page)

“Come on, Sarah, don’t be such a baby!” Nick screamed at me. “Where did the snake go?”

Just then a flash of lightning filled the sky and the light forced its way in through the grimy windows, filling the stable with a micro-second of eerie brightness.

My heart stopped. I was staring — eyeball to eyeball — with a tiger, separated by air and a couple of rusty old bars. I looked down. On my shoulder rested an enormous brown paw.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” I jumped forward onto my hands and knees and scrambled on all fours, still screaming as I motored across the floor.
Thud
. I bashed into something and came to a stop. Head down, I stayed on my hands and knees, straining to catch my breath, my chest heaving up and down, up and down. In the darkness my eyes started to focus. They widened in surprise and then terror as I realized what I was seeing: two feet. I allowed my eyes to follow up from the feet and legs, leaning
back to find myself looking up at a man, an old man, standing above me, holding a rifle.

“You’re in more trouble than you can even imagine,” he growled as he stared down at me.

“Didn’t you think that I’d catch you sooner or later if you kept coming back?” the old man questioned, glaring down at me with hard, angry eyes.

I looked up wordlessly. His face was lined with wrinkles and a few days’ worth of grey whiskers. His hair was also grey and longish and messy.

“Get up!” he ordered and prodded me with the barrel of the gun. I rose to my feet. I was shocked to realize that I was taller than he was.

“What were you doing to my animals?”

“We weren’t doing anything. We were just trying to get out of the rain.”

“We? How many others are there?”

“Just … just my … my brother.”

“COME HERE, BROTHER!” he yelled out. “Or you may become an only child.”

No answer came out of the gloom. The man took a few steps backwards, his eyes still trained on me. He reached over his head and I heard a “click.” There was a soft humming sound, followed immediately by the glow of fluorescent light. Within seconds the entire floor was bathed in light. The first thing that caught my eye was my brother, backed off in a corner, looking suitably
scared.

“Come on, boy!” the old man ordered, and Nicholas started to slowly wade through the pile of straw. “And hurry up or I’ll let my tiger come on over to get you.”

Nick cast an anxious eye toward the tiger and then picked up his pace, hurrying over to stand beside me.

“I’ve got to figure out what to do with you two. Maybe I should just call your parents, or the police. Or maybe I should do something else.” There was an ominous tone in his voice.

“Like what?” Nick asked. There was a catch in his voice like he was close to tears.

“I don’t rightly know, but I guess there’s just no telling what ‘crazy old McCurdy’ might do, hey?”

I swallowed hard. I looked over at my brother. He looked like he was about to start crying.

“Isn’t that what all the kids in town call me, ‘crazy old McCurdy’?”

“I don’t know,” I answered quite truthfully. “We just moved here two weeks ago.”

“Why do you kids come up here, anyway? You trying to hurt my animals?”

“No, sir,” I answered. “We were trying to get out of the rain. Honestly.”

“We all would have been better off if you stayed in town.”

“We didn’t come from town,” Nick answered.

“Where’d you come from then?” the old man asked.

“We live on a farm just over there,” I answered, pointing in the general direction of home.

“A farm? You live around here?”

“Yes, we just moved here, with our mother.”

“Where is this farm?” he asked, even more forcefully.

“It’s just north from here, the first farm,” Nick answered.

“The Gibbons’s place?”

“Yes,” I answered.

He shook his head sadly. “That didn’t take long. Poor woman’s hardly in the ground before somebody takes over her land.”

“We didn’t take it over,” I protested. “We inherited it.”

“Inherited?”

“Yes, Mrs. Gibbons is — I mean was — our grandmother, our mother’s mother.”

“You’re the grandchildren of Emily Gibbons?”

“Yes,” both my brother and I answered in unison.

“My name is Sarah Fraser and this is my brother, Nicholas.”

The old man stared past us at the tiger. “I want to make sure my ‘boy’ is okay.” He brushed between me and Nick and walked to the tiger’s pen. He was slightly bent over and he limped as he moved. He leaned his gun against the pen and crouched down. When he reached his hand between the bars, the tiger moved closer and pushed up against him. I watched in wide-eyed
amazement.

“PURMFFFF,” the tiger said loudly.

“What was that?” Nick asked apprehensively.

The old man turned around to face us. “That’s called ‘puffing’ and it’s a greeting. Old Buddha was just saying hello.”

“Ah, hello,” I answered back.

“I know what to do with you two now. Come on, both of you, up to the house.” He stood up, picked up his gun and came toward us.

“I don’t think we can do that,” I answered. “We’re not supposed to go into the house of a stranger.”

“You’d better come along,” he said as he brushed past us, this time in the other direction.

“But …” I started to object.

“Sarah, are you crazy? He has a gun, remember?” Nick whispered to me.

“Yeah, I do have a gun. Here,” he said, turning around and offering the weapon to my brother. “Carry this.”

“No!” I said, stepping in between and pushing the gun back into his hands. “Mom wouldn’t want him to be holding a gun.”

“Why not?” the old man asked.

“Because he could get hurt, or hurt somebody else.”

“The only way that could happen is if he dropped it and it landed on his foot. It’s not even loaded. And even if it was loaded, all it would do is put somebody to
sleep.”

“Sleep?” Nick asked.

“Yep. It’s a tranquilizer gun.”

“What would you want with a gun like that?” Nick questioned.

“They’re for putting large animals to sleep so they can be trapped or treated or examined,” I answered.

“Does she always answer everybody’s questions?” the old man asked my brother.

“Yeah, but you get used to it after a while.”

“And is she usually right?”

“Almost always,” my brother confirmed. “What would happen if you shot a man with one of these?”

The old man turned to me. “You want to answer that one or should I?”

“I don’t know the answer.”

“Good!” The old man chortled, and Nick laughed as well. “If you shot a man he’d go down just like any other animal. Depending on how big he was, and how big a dose was in the gun, he’d just go to sleep. Course he’d wake up with a headache that’d make him think his head was going to split right in two,” he chuckled. “Believe me!”

“You’ve shot somebody with one before?” Nick asked.

“Yeah … me.”

“You shot yourself!” Nick exclaimed.

“Yep, and the worst part was that I had nobody else
to blame. I was carrying the rifle, tripped, and it went off. The needle went right through my shoe and into my foot. Slept for the better part of two days.” He chuckled even louder. “Enough storytelling, come on up to the house and let me have a look at that knee.”

“Knee, what knee?” I asked.

He pointed at my leg. I looked down. My left pant leg was ripped and blood was dripping out of the tear.

“Come on, we’ll fix you up,” he said, and then turned and started walking away. I trailed after him reluctantly.

We left the barn and took the gravel path. It had stopped raining and a few rays of sunlight had burst through the clouds. There was a small trickle of water rolling down the hill beside the barn.

“Close the door after you,” he yelled over his shoulder without looking back.

I turned around to Nick, who was just leaving the barn, and passed the order along. I quickly moved alongside the old man, trying to keep up. He glanced over at me but didn’t change his expression.

“Did you know our grandmother?” I asked.

“First met her when I was about seven years old,” he answered softly.

“We didn’t know her very well. She didn’t like travelling that much, especially the last couple of years when she wasn’t feeling very well. We only saw her on special holidays and things like that.”

He nodded his head, but didn’t say anything.

“Do you know my mother?”

“Nope. Knew that Emmy had children, but I never met any of them.”

“I thought you’d know my mother for sure. She was raised in the farmhouse where we’re living.”

“My brother would have known her, but I wasn’t around. I just got back myself about six months ago.”

“Our Nana died about four months ago,” Nick said from behind.

“Yep,” he answered.

“Is it just you and your brother living here?” I asked.

“Nope. Just me. My brother died about a year ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“That’s okay. None of it seems too real anyhow. It had been almost forty years since I’d seen him.”

“Wow!” Nick exclaimed. “How come?”

“Nicholas! It’s not polite to ask!”

“That’s okay. The only thing my brother and I had in common was our parents. Both of my parents died over forty years ago. My brother stayed and ran the farm and there wasn’t really any reason for me to come back home.”

As we got closer to the house I realized it wasn’t in much better shape than the barn. Mr. McCurdy grabbed the old screen door and pulled it open.

“Coming in?” he asked.

“I … I guess so,” I answered.

He let go of the door and it jumped back noisily into the frame.

“Come on,” I said to Nick.

“I didn’t think you wanted us to go into a stranger’s house.”

“He knew Nana. Besides, who’s scared now?” I asked. I opened the door and went into the house, with Nick following closely on my heels. I was immediately hit by a wave of foul air.

“What died in here?” Nick asked.

“SHHHH,” I scolded.

We walked down a dimly lit passage tracking a trail of mud along the length of the hall to the kitchen. There was a table, littered with newspapers, dirty dishes and assorted other things, surrounded by four old chairs. A large black wooden stove sat in the far corner. My eyes were still scanning the room when Mr. McCurdy came back into the kitchen through a doorway at the far side.

“Sit down,” he ordered.

I moved over to one of the chairs and pulled it out from the table. It was covered with a thick pile of old, yellowed newspapers. I pulled out a second chair and sat down. He walked over, carrying a little white box, and bent down beside me.

“Let’s see if we can fix that cut.”

“I guess you hadn’t seen Nana for a long time if you
were away so long,” I hinted.

“A long time. Meant to drop in and see her, but I just kept putting it off and putting it off and then … I read about it in the papers … the funeral.”

“OOOCHH!” I screamed, clutching my leg.

“Sorry. I didn’t know it would sting so badly.” He paused. “I almost went to the funeral, but then I thought … I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to change the way I remembered her,” he said wistfully.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You’re too young to understand. You see, when you haven’t seen somebody for a long time you keep a picture of them in your mind. You may grow old, but that picture doesn’t age.”

“And you have a picture of our Nana in your mind?” I asked.

“I sure do. I remember a picnic, just at the end of the school year. It was a beautiful day, sunny, not a cloud in the sky. Warm, maybe even hot. Everybody was spreading out their blankets and setting out their lunches. There was a baseball game going on, off in one corner. Almost everybody was there, but not your Nana. Then suddenly she arrived. She didn’t so much walk as glide, almost like a dancer, and every head turned to watch her pass by. She wore a long blue dress with red flowers on it. She wore a big straw hat too, tied with a ribbon, a pink ribbon, and …”

“You remember what she was wearing?” I asked.

“You have to remember she wasn’t just any girl. She was the most beautiful girl in the whole school.”

“Nana?”

“For you she’ll always be Nana. For me she’ll be a beautiful young girl strolling through the meadow, smiling and laughing.”

“The laughing and smiling part sounds like her,” I said.

“It’s wonderful that didn’t change. When I close my eyes I can still picture her in that meadow, still so young.”

Mr. McCurdy’s eyes were closed. His face looked peaceful. Then he opened his eyes again and I looked away, embarrassed that our gazes had met.

“How long ago was that? How old was she?” Nick asked.

“That was so long ago it’ll seem like forever to you two, but to me it was just the blink of an eye. Sixty years ago. She was fourteen, or maybe even fifteen. No, she had to be fourteen, because we were born the same year, and I ran away to join the circus the summer I was fourteen.”

“You ran away to join the circus!” my brother said excitedly.

Mr. McCurdy took a large pad of gauze and taped it in place over my knee. “Maybe ‘ran away’ wasn’t quite
right. At that age you could pretty well do what you wanted back then and I wanted to be with the circus. I wanted to lead an exciting life: travelling, seeing the world, big crowds, new people, always on the move.”

“It sounds exciting!” Nick blurted out. “Were you like an acrobat, or a juggler, or did you get shot out of a cannon, or —”

“Animals.”

“Animals?”

“Yep, animals. I took care of the animals.”

“That must have been pretty exciting too,” I said encouragingly.

“If you consider shovelling elephant crap or cleaning out tiger cages exciting, then it sure enough was. But, I did a lot more than that after the first few years.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I also trained them and kept them warm and safe, used to treat them when they were sick. Hardly a vet around who knows what to do when an elephant has problems, but I do. I was there to help when they gave birth and to take over raising them if anything happened to the mother. Many a time I’ve had to have a little tiger, born too early, snuggled up with me for nights on end feeding it out of an eye dropper.”

“Wow!” I gasped. I loved animals, but we’d never been able to have anything except fish because of all my father’s allergies.

“Mama, God rest her soul, told me that if I joined the circus that I’d never settle down, that I’d never be able to get married or raise a family. She was right. Mothers are almost always right. But you know, when you spend as much time as I did with those animals, they get to be like your family and when you raise them from little balls of wet fur, they feel like they’re yours.”

“What sort of animals?” I asked.

“You already met one kind, up close,” he said, laughing a bit before the laugh turned into a coughing fit.

“Too close,” I said. “But worse than the tiger was that snake.”

“You met my snake, did you? You don’t have to worry about him. That snake isn’t big enough to harm anybody.”

“Not big enough?” I said incredulously. “It looked pretty big to me.”

“It is pretty big. It’s almost three metres long, but that’s not big enough to harm anyone except a wee child.”