One-Eyed Cat

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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAULA FOX

Winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award

Winner of the
Paris Review's
Hadada Award

“The greatest writer of her generation.” —Jonathan Franzen

“One of America's most talented writers.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Consistently excellent.”
—The New York Times

“Fox has always been adept at writing apparently simple stories which on closer examination prove to explore the essential meaning of relationships … and to illuminate our understanding of the human condition.”
—School Library Journal

“Paula Fox is so good a novelist that one wants to go out in the street to hustle up a big audience for her.… Fox's brilliance has a masochistic aspect: I will do this so well, she seems to say, that you will hardly be able to read it. And so she does, and so do I.” —Peter S. Prescott,
Newsweek

“Fox is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.” —
The New Yorker

“As a writer, Fox is all sensitive, staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina … Fox's prose hurts.” —Walter Kirn,
New York
magazine

“Fox's achievement is to write with magnificent restraint and precision about the interplay of personal and historical, inner growth and outer framework, the process of learning to think about oneself and the world.” —Margaret and Michael Rustin

“Fox has little of Roth's self-consciousness, less of Bellow's self-importance, and none of Updike's self-pity. Unlike all three men, Fox does not jealously save the best lines for a favoured alter ego, and her protagonists do not have a monopoly on nuance. Instead, she distributes her formidable acumen unselfishly, so that even the most minor characters can suddenly offer crucial insight, and unsympathetic characters are often the most fascinating: brilliant, unfathomable and raging.” —Sarah Churchwell

“There are no careless moves in the fiction of Paula Fox.… [Her] work has a purity of vision, and a technique undiminished by
homage
or self-indulgence.” —Randal Churb,
The Boston Review

“Paula Fox is as good as her revived reputation suggests.” —Fiona Maazel,
BOMB

One-Eyed Cat

A Newbery Honor Book

ALA Best of the Best

ALA Notable Book

ALA Best Book for Young Adults

A Horn Book Fanfare Selection

Booklist Editors' Choice

International Reading Association Teachers' Choice

Notable Children's Book in the Language Arts

Winner of the Bank Street Children's Book Committee Award

Winner of the Christopher Award

International Board on Books for Young People Honor

Jane Addams Children's Book Award

New York Times Outstanding Children's Book of the Year

“A deep and demanding psychological novel.”
—School Library Journal

“This riveting tale is spun with an eloquent simplicity that belies the skill of its telling. Fox brings a penetrating compassion and understanding to finely textured characters, young and old.”
—Booklist
, starred review

“Tautly structured, perceptive, compelling.”
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
, starred review

“In a rare, remarkable novel for children, the pure clarity of the prose, its reticence, and its concrete sensual imagery recall the literary style of Willa Cather.”
—The Horn Book Magazine

“A beautifully unfolded story with memorable characters, a firm sense of the tides of family life, and an unexpected revelation before the apposite ending.”
—Kirkus Reviews

One-Eyed Cat

Paula Fox

For my sons

G
ABRIEL
and A
DAM

and for my brothers

J
AMES
and K
EITH

C
ONTENTS

I

Sunday

II

The Gun

III

The Old Man

IV

The Cat

V

The Strength of Life

VI

Christmas

VII

Disappearances

VIII

Cat's Moon

About the Author

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycle of years.

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN

I

Sunday

Ned Wallis was the minister's only child. The Congregational Church where the Reverend James Wallis preached stood on a low hill above a country lane a mile beyond the village of Tyler, New York. Close by the parsonage, a hundred yards or so from the church, was a small cemetery of weathered tombstones. Some had fallen over and moss and ivy covered them. When Ned first learned to walk, the cemetery was his favorite place to practice. There, his father would come to get him after the members of the congregation had gone home to their Sunday dinners. There, too, his mother often sat on a tumbled stone and watched over him while his father stood at the great church door speaking to each and every person who had attended service that day. That was long ago, before his mother had become ill.

Just past the church was a low, dark, musty-smelling barn where people had stabled their horses in the days before there were automobiles. In bad weather, it was still used by ancient Mr. Deems, who drove his rattling buckboard and skinny chestnut mare all the way from his farm in the valley to the church and into the barn. And when Ned grew older, he and a few of the children from the early Sunday school class played there, hiding and shouting and scaring each other but keeping their distance from Mr. Deems's mare, who was known to be cross tempered. On warm days the voices of the choir—especially the high tremulous voices of the oldest singers—would float into the darkness of the barn like the thin, sweet aroma of meadow flowers. The children would pause in their play and listen until old Mrs. Brewster, who held the last note of a hymn till her breath ran out and she tottered into her seat, fell silent.

The Wallis family didn't live in the parsonage, although they could have and it would not have cost them a penny. Their house was fifteen miles from Tyler. It had been built by Ned's grandfather in 1846, nearly eighty years before Ned was born. Like the church, it stood on a hill. From its windows there was a view of the Hudson River. This view was one of the reasons the Reverend Wallis did not want to move.

It was a big, ailing old house. When too many things went wrong with it—the furnace cut off when it wasn't supposed to, the cistern overflowed, the roof leaked—or when Ned's mother's illness grew worse so that Reverend Wallis could hardly bear to leave her to take care of his many pastoral duties, then he would cry out that they would have to go and live in the parsonage, such a mean, small house, so far from the heart-lifting sight of the great river. Ned knew that his father loved the house that was such a trouble to take care of, too far from his church, too costly for a country minister's salary.

When Ned followed his father into the church on Sundays, he was always startled by the vast airy openness above the aisles and rows of pews, and by the immense height of the windows which flowed with light, and by the many dark gold-colored pipes of the organ which rose behind the pulpit. No matter how often he counted them, he always ended up with a different number. He knew every part of the church, from the cellar where the huge furnace glowed in cold weather like a steam locomotive, to the basement where the Sunday school classes and meetings and study clubs were held, and on special occasions, where church suppers were spread out on long tables, all the way up the curving narrow steps to the gallery above the choir. Perhaps he was always surprised by the bigness of the church because he was used to thinking of it as another room in his house.

One Sunday in late September, a few days before his eleventh birthday, Ned was leaning back in the front pew where he usually sat. The red velvet pew cushion, so comforting in winter, was making the backs of his legs itch. The August heat had held on and the sky was pale with it. Papa's voice, as he preached his sermon, seemed to come from a great distance. Someone coughed. Someone else rustled the pages of a hymnbook. A cloud of drowsiness dropped over Ned like a cloth. He tried to keep himself awake by imagining what it would be like to live on the ocean for all of your life. That was what had happened to Philip Nolan in
The Man Without a Country
: he had been exiled to a ship. Ned had just finished the book that morning before he went downstairs to have breakfast with Papa. The thought of breakfast woke Ned up completely. It reminded him of Mrs. Scallop.

Until two months ago, Sunday breakfasts had been quiet. Ned's Papa always wore his amethyst tiepin in his black silk tie, his black trousers with the satin stripe down each side and the cutaway jacket with back panels that looked like a beetle's folded wings, and he had his Sunday look, thinking about his sermon, Ned knew. The only noise had been their spoons hitting the sides of the cereal bowls. Sometimes Ned would gaze up at the Tiffany-glass lamp shade with its various panels depicting wild animals. Ned's favorite was the camel who stood in a brown glass desert which appeared to stretch for miles when the light was turned on. But that quietness had been shattered by the coming of Mrs. Scallop, whose voice now intruded in the dining room every morning, as sharp and grinding as the woodcutter's saw when he came in the spring to thin out the pines which grew along the north side of the Wallises' property.