One-Eyed Cat (12 page)

Billy went on home and Ned slid most of the way down to the state road to Mr. Scully's mailbox. There was no newspaper today; he guessed the snow must have stopped the delivery boy. But there was a handwritten note that said the new garage down the state road would be finished pretty soon. Mr. Scully's Ford flivver was practically buried by the snow. Ned guessed Papa would pick up Mr. Scully's groceries for him, just as he'd done in the past when the weather was bad and Mr. Scully was afraid the flivver would get stuck in a ditch somewhere.

His chin was freezing; he held his mitten over it, thinking how good a cup of hot tea would taste as he clambered up toward the house. He pulled himself over a patch of ice by grabbing onto the shingles of the outhouse. He looked over at the icebox just under the shed roof. The cat was lying on the quilt just as he had last seen it in the morning. He groaned out loud. He glanced toward the house. Mr. Scully was staring out the kitchen window at the cat.

Ned ran, stumbling and slipping, to the back door. Mr. Scully took a hundred years to open it.

“Is he dead? Is the cat dead?” cried Ned.

“Come in. Come inside, quick! Don't let the cold in.”

Ned leaned against the kitchen table. The snow melted off his galoshes and made a little pool on the floor. He kept his eyes on Mr. Scully's face.

“Take your wet things off, Ned,” the old man said quietly. “No, at least, he isn't dead yet. Right after you went home yesterday, I saw him scrabble up there on his quilt. He settled down and seemed all right. But when I set out his supper for him, he didn't pay attention like he usually does. It began to snow and I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to chance grabbing and putting him way inside the shed. Those wild ones can hurt you. And I thought maybe it would scare him if I tried that—he's such a timid fellow. I kept an eye on him and the snow got deeper and he didn't move. I went to bed finally. I told you how bad I sleep, Ned. Old people don't sleep the way young people do, they wake up so easy. Maybe it was the snow stopping that got me up. I came downstairs with my candle and set it down here on the table. I thought to have a cup of tea. Take off your coat, Ned. Put it over the chair there by the stove. One of the few nice things about age is you can give in to yourself in little ways. I wouldn't have dreamed of drinking a cup of tea in the middle of the night when I was young. Who ever heard of such a thing?”

Ned couldn't shake his head or smile or say a word.

“Calm down,” Mr. Scully said. “The cat's sick. That's what I'm explaining to you. Anyhow, I looked out in the yard. I could just make him out, you know, because the sky was all cleared out of snow. So I put on my coat and my boots and went out to the icebox and stood right next to him. At first I thought he was dead, that he'd climbed up there to die. After a while, though, I heard him breathing, just a little whisper of air being taken in and let out. In fact, I even rested my hand on his neck and he let out a sound—poor devil, it wasn't purring—like a piece of glass scratching a stone. I guess his throat's hurt, too. I put his bowl of food right on the quilt beside him. He lifted his head a touch and looked at it out of his eye. But he didn't want it. His head sank down again so I brought the bowl back in. It would have frozen. Since then I've taken him food several times. He don't bother to even look now.”

“Is he dying because of what happened to his eye?” Ned asked in a choked voice.

“I don't think that. People put out rat poison in their barns to kill the vermin. He might have eaten some. Anything can happen. Is that a letter in your hand?”

Ned handed him the notice about the new garage. “Pooh!” exclaimed the old man, crumpling it and putting it into the stove. Ned put his coat back on and walked out of the kitchen. Mr. Scully didn't say a word to stop him.

During the time he'd been inside the feeling of the day had changed. It now held the silence of midnight, a kind of silence Ned had listened to when he'd awakened with a sore throat, or a pain in his stomach from eating too much dessert.

He walked to the icebox, stamping heavily on the snow as he went. The cat didn't move. Ned drew closer. He gripped the icebox and peered up at the cat. He stretched one hand over its back. The closer he lowered his hand to it, the more he felt it was alive, even if it was barely alive. There was a breath of difference; he seemed to feel it in his fingers.

“You could tell, couldn't you?” asked Mr. Scully when Ned returned to the kitchen. “It's funny but you can always tell.”

“He'll freeze to death,” Ned said.

“You can't know that for sure. If the temperature doesn't drop too much further, he might make it. I'd let him come in here, but he won't do it. I've held the door open for him. He runs away.”

It was brave of Mr. Scully, Ned thought, to have offered the cat the shelter of the house.

“Well, yes,” the old man said, as though Ned had actually remarked on his bravery. “I did try—thinking about the hard weather coming up and him being in poor shape for hunting. But he seemed to be getting so strong. Ever since we watched him playing, I believed he might have a real chance. Here's your tea. Let's sit by the stove. Then I'd appreciate it if you'd fetch down one last box from the attic. I know it's there because it's not in the parlor. Once we've gone through it, the whole place will be in order. In as much order as I can manage.”

Ned drank his tea. It warmed him and comforted him; for a little while he stopped thinking about the gray mound on the quilt. He went up a little ladder to the hole that let him into the attic and found the last object it held. It wasn't a box but a leather satchel, one strap holding it together, the leather nearly rotted away. There was nothing left in the dark space but cobwebs and old planks with rusty nails poking through them.

He brought the satchel to the kitchen table, and Mr. Scully unbuckled the strap carefully.

“Look at that …” he said wonderingly. The satchel was filled with a child's clothing. A blackened spoon with a curved handle fell on the table. The old man rubbed it with his finger and the tarnish came off. “Silver,” he said softly. “What Doris ate her cereal with …” There were high-buttoned shoes that had once been white and were now the color of curds. Mr. Scully held up a sprigged cotton dress with a crocheted collar that crumbled in his hand. “She wore that to a birthday party when we lived in Poughkeepsie. My, my … think of her, way out in the golden west.” He stared at Ned for a minute, then shook his head as though saying
no
to something. “I must throw this all away. There's no use for it now.”

Ned washed their cups and piled up a few sticks of wood near the stove. He put on his coat. Mr. Scully said, “Ned, wait …” Ned paused at the door. Mr. Scully stared at him. Then he said, “While you were up in the attic, I looked at the cat. I'm pretty sure he lifted up his head.”

As Ned walked home the dark set in. He was cold and tired, and fear for the cat's life tugged at him. Then he saw the lights shining through the windows of his home; he thought of the voices of his parents, and the echo of their voices that seemed to fill the rooms and halls of the house even when they were silent, Papa working in his study and Mama reading in her wheelchair.

He glanced through the bay windows of the living room and saw the pussywillow wallpaper his grandmother had chosen, the top of the bronze lion's back, the parchment shade of the lamp his father read the newspaper by. The room was empty. For a brief moment, he felt years had passed since he'd left for school that morning. He ran quickly to the front and up the porch steps, opened the door with a wrench and ran into the hall.

His father's coat hung from the coat stand, its hem falling on the handles of two umbrellas no one ever used. On the table where his father often left his old leather briefcase—and sometimes a box of chocolates he bought in Waterville—he saw an envelope addressed to him. It was the first letter Uncle Hilary had ever mailed directly to him. He opened it and read it:

Dear Ned,

On our way south, we may stop off to visit an island I've recently learned about where there are small wild ponies which live in a forest. Presumably, a ferryboat delivers mail and supplies to the island, so we'll just grab a ride on it. Be sure to pack books. I'll telephone from New York City as soon as I've made all our arrangements. I am only sorry you don't have a year's vacation instead of ten days. But, of course, a person only has a year's vacation before the age of five
.

Ned realized with a start that Christmas was only a few weeks away. He was standing there with his coat still on, wondering what could save him from this vacation trip which he now dreaded nearly as much as if it were to be spent alone with Mrs. Scallop, when she appeared, her finger to her lips, walking toward him. Since he rarely said more than hello to her, he couldn't imagine why she was warning him to be silent.

“You must be very quiet,” she said in a loud whisper. “Your mother is very ill.”

Ned tore off his coat, flung it at the coat stand and started for the stairs.

As he put his foot on the first step, he heard a trembling sigh that was nearly a word float down from above. He stopped, frightened. He turned hesitantly to Mrs. Scallop. She was nodding as though satisfied.

Then he took the stairs two at a time, going up fast because he didn't want to go up at all. He heard a second sigh, somewhat fainter. He reached the top of the stairs and saw his father bending over his mother's bed. His father looked up, saw him, and glanced down at the bed, then walked quickly out of the room to Ned.

“She's been suffering,” Papa said in a low voice. “The pain has diminished, but she's quite weak. You'd best not go in right now, Neddy. You go and have your supper. I'll sit with her until she falls asleep.”

Ned ate at the kitchen table, watched over closely by Mrs. Scallop, whose lips moved faintly each time he picked up a pea with his fork. She had made chocolate pudding, which was nearly his favorite dessert. He took no pleasure in it, his mind either on his mother or the cat. Mrs. Scallop noticed he wasn't eating and said, “Mrs. Scallop is known for her chocolate pudding, yet Neddy is so ungrateful for such a great treat that he simply fiddles with that wonderful pudding on his spoon!”

“What do you care whether I eat or not?” he suddenly cried out at her.

He had never spoken back to any grown-up before, and he was astonished at himself. Mrs. Scallop stared at him, her thin lower lip pushed out like a child pouting. “How could you raise your voice to me?” she asked in a tiny voice, as though her throat had shrunk to the size of a pin. To Ned's dismay, a large tear appeared on the lower lid of her right eye. One tear, he observed to himself, despite his embarrassment—how can a person cry one tear from one eye?

He got up so hurriedly, he knocked the chair down. Picking it up, he muttered an apology. She hadn't moved. The tear traveled slowly down her large cheek. He had to go right upstairs to do his homework, he said, and he wasn't hungry tonight but he thanked her for the pudding. He was gripping the back of the chair so hard he heard the wood creak.

“Well, I
do
care what you eat,” Mrs. Scallop said in a child's voice.

“Oh, I know you do,” Ned said, and realized he had sounded just like Papa. Clumsily, half-bowing, he managed to get out of the kitchen.

At the top of the stairs, he saw a small lamp had been lit in his mother's room and placed near the windows. His father was asleep in the chair by the bed. Ned leaned around the doorway and saw Mama, her face white against the pillow, her eyes wide open. She turned her head slightly and stared up at him. She put a finger to her lips, as Mrs. Scallop had done, and pointed to Papa. She smiled faintly at him, and Ned tried to smile back.

He went to his own room. What a day it had been! The best part of it had been fighting, then making up, with Billy. He was almost happy when he shut the door and turned on the light and saw his books on their shelf, his yellow-painted dresser. He went and sat in the small woven chair Uncle Hilary had brought him from the Philippine Islands years ago. He could barely fit in it. For a long time, he sat in the chair and watched the lights twinkle across the river, glad to be away from the pain and craziness of grown-ups.

Later, when he crawled under his blanket, he found he couldn't sleep. He thought for a moment of taking one of his late-night walks through the house, but he suddenly recalled the rather strange emptiness of the livingroom when he'd looked through the windows after coming home from Mr. Scully's. It wasn't only that no one had been in the room. It was as though the whole house had been empty.

The cold didn't abate for several days, and Ned and Mr. Scully spent a good deal of time at the kitchen window watching the cat. It continued to raise its head now and then, and each time it did so, Ned and the old man would exclaim and one or the other would remark that it was still alive. They took turns taking out bowls of food. Once, Ned pushed the bowl right up to the cat's face and it made a sound. “It's like a rusty key turning in a lock,” he reported to Mr. Scully.

“It wants to be let alone,” Mr. Scully said resolutely. “And that's what we must do now, Ned, leave it alone.”

“Couldn't we take him to a doctor?”

“I don't believe a doctor could get near him. Weak as he is, when I touched his head this afternoon before you got here, he hissed at me and opened his jaws. Let me tell you, Ned, he's a wild cat. We must wait and be patient and see. Anyhow, I haven't the money to pay an animal doctor.”

The next day, Mr. Scully and Ned both concluded the cat was dead. There had been a brief snow flurry in the afternoon, and the animal was covered with a layer of snow. Mr. Scully had been unable to detect any breathing.

“Come away from the window, Ned. You'll wear a hole in the glass. If the cat's dead, I'll dispose of it tomorrow. I'm worried about a few things I want to talk to you about.”