One-Eyed Cat (15 page)

But his elation didn't last longer than two minutes. He thought of the hard months ahead, January and February and March. How would he be able to keep the cat alive until the warmer weather came?

School, his classes, church, were like a faint mumble in another room. His conversations with Mama had become increasingly uneasy. He could see she was bewildered. Taking the gun from the attic and shooting it—his first disobedience—had happened years before, it seemed to Ned. All the lies he had told, the subterfuge, were piled up over the gun like a mountain of hard-packed snow. He felt his secret had frozen around him. He didn't know how to melt it.

Ned watched Papa take a long fur cape from a closet and unwrap the sheet that covered it. Mama's grandmother had left it to her in her will, and Mama always wore it on Christmas Eve when Papa drove them all to the church.

Ned drew his hand over the soft fur.

“What's it made of, Papa?” he asked timidly.

“I think it's seal,” Papa answered.

He and Papa trimmed their own small Christmas tree that stood in the living room across from the library table. Ned's throat began to feel very sore.

“Neddy, you look so flushed!” said Papa. “Do you feel all right?”

“No,” Ned said miserably.

A half hour later, Ned was in bed, his teeth chattering, as Papa piled up blankets over him.

He shivered or burned all the next day. “Mrs. Kimball will come and stay with you,” Papa said. “And Mama is going to stay home, too. I know how disappointed you are, Neddy dear. But you mustn't go out as sick as you are.”

He didn't care now about missing the sight of the great Christmas tree with all its lights turned on any more than he cared about the trip with Uncle Hilary. He imagined himself throwing off the blankets and running down the hill to take food to the bowl. But he really knew he couldn't, and wouldn't, do that.

In the past he had sometimes liked being sick. His father would bring him a tray with a tall glass full of eggnog on it, or dry, slightly cold toast that had a chewiness he liked, or milk toast, warm and comforting in a soup bowl. His mother would call out to him from her room, and tell him stories after Papa had wheeled her chair close to Ned's door.

But now he was frantic.

It's such an awful cat, he suddenly thought as his father stood beside his bed, waiting for the five minutes to be up when he could remove the thermometer from Ned's mouth. It was ugly and battered; its fur was patchy; its toes stuck up and its whiskers were sparse. It would never be like one of Janet's kitties that meowed sweetly and sat on her lap and purred. It had a black hole for an eye.

The eye. His fault! His father removed the thermometer from his mouth. Ned whispered, “Die, cat, die!”

His father bent over him and asked softly, “What, Neddy?”

Ned shook his head. His father placed his long cool hand on his forehead.

VII

Disappearances

Ned's fever dropped to normal the day after Christmas. Papa said he could get up as long as he kept himself warmly dressed and didn't come downstairs where the rooms were so drafty.

For the first time that he could recall, Ned wished school vacation was over. Each day was a week long. He went from window to window and stared out at the snow-covered landscape. In other seasons of the year, something moved or fluttered or flew past, leaves, birds, insects, squirrels—the meadows waving like banners in a breeze—but now nothing moved that Ned could see except for the tiny drops of moisture from his breath upon a windowpane.

He spent a few minutes with Mama each day. She wasn't feeling well either. Upstairs was like a hospital. Papa went up and down with trays of food and emptied dishes, smelling faintly of evergreen tree. Papa had put the silver icicles, one by one, on their own Christmas tree on Christmas morning, but Ned hadn't been down to see it yet. Everything was so separate, the tree, Papa, Mama, himself. His limbs were heavy; he could even feel the dullness of his own gaze. He moped around, occasionally galvanized by the explosion of a violent sneeze. His whole room smelled of cough medicine.

Wearing his old brown wool bathrobe which he'd long outgrown—the belt loops were practically up under his arms—he halfheartedly played with his Christmas presents. He learned to tap out the distress signal on the sender of the Morse code set Papa had given him, and to adjust the eyepiece of the microscope Uncle Hilary had mailed to him from New York City. It was secondhand, Uncle Hilary had written, but it was real, and he hoped Ned would get some enjoyment from it, although it was no way near as wonderful as a trip to Charleston would have been.

The only thing that really took his mind off the slow passage of the hours was
Kidnapped
. Each day after lunch, he read a few pages of it. But there were moments, even when he was reading, when he jumped up agitatedly and roamed through the rooms, thinking of Mr. Scully lying in a hospital bed, thinking about the cat, wondering if it could be alive in the frozen world outside the windows.

Finally the day came when he put his bathrobe away and dressed in outdoor clothes, when food tasted good to him for the first time in a while, and when he opened the front doors and gulped in a great draft of snowy air and started off to school. Ned half-forgot Mr. Scully and the gray cat.

The landscape didn't seem frozen anymore. He saw tracks in the snow, animal and human. Bare branches rattled, smoke rose out of chimneys, a small gray bird chirped on the branch of a pine tree and the sound of Evelyn's dog barking cracked the still air; the snow had its own noises, too; it shifted and thawed or hardened, it whispered or squeaked when he walked on it.

He was glad to walk home with Billy and Janet and Evelyn that day. It began to snow just as the four children went past the stone house. Ned was blinded by the great fast-falling flakes. Sometimes he listened to the sea in a large seashell Uncle Hilary had brought him from a Caribbean island. The heavy fall of snow muffled all sound; it made a kind of soft roaring, and Ned felt as if he'd been suddenly transported into that seashell.

One day followed another. The sun moved ever higher across the sky, and although its light was pale, it felt different, warmer, heavier. He hardly ever went directly home after school.

He wandered about the hills. He took paths through deep woods he'd not ventured into before. He cut across fields where he sometimes sank up to his waist in snowdrifts. His favorite spot was the Makepeace estate. He would go up the hill, following the old stone wall which ran along the Kimball property, and he would laugh to see Sport charge out on his running line and look up at the sky, barking, as though Ned were floating around somewhere just above him.

When he emerged from the pines onto the crest of the hill where the abandoned mansion stood, he knew he'd found his way into the heart of winter. If he looked north, he could, if the sun was out, catch the glint of an attic window in his own house.

The snow was piled up around the base of each column. Ned sat on the edge of the wicker settee and gazed out at the mountain across the river. Although he was on the same crest on which his house had been built, the view was entirely different. While he sat there, he could feel how rapidly his heart was beating. It was as though he were waiting for something to happen, something unexpected that could be either terrible or wonderful.

One afternoon when the woods were spongy with melting snow and Ned was standing on the Makepeace veranda, his galoshes soaked through, he saw the flicker of something unusual at the edge of his vision, a blur of movement, quick and indeterminate, just where the meadow ended and the woods began. He stared at the spot where it had been as though he were looking through his microscope. It was the cat. Or
a
cat. Even as he looked, it disappeared like a puff of Mr. Scully's tobacco smoke caught in a draft. It had been holding something in its mouth.

He went to sit on the settee. Evelyn had said the whole place was haunted. Ned wasn't afraid. The mansion looked ancient to him, like the Greek temple he'd seen on one of his post cards. He hadn't felt any impulse to go after the cat.
That
haunted him a little; that was a mystery. If the animal he'd seen was the cat with one eye, it had managed to live a long time without his help, he told himself. He was immensely relieved that he hadn't been able to see it clearly. He didn't want to feel sorry for it anymore.

On his way home he stopped briefly at Mr. Scully's house. The “For Sale” sign was gone. The Ford flivver had disappeared and the outhouse had been taken down and its lumber stacked near the back door. Ned found the cat's bowl in the shed. He walked a few yards down the hill toward the state road carrying it. Suddenly, he raised his hand and flung the bowl with all his might. He turned and ran to his driveway, not looking back, not hearing when the bowl landed.

“Where have you been, my wandering boy?” his mother asked. Mrs. Kimball had just brought her a cup of tea. Mrs. Kimball didn't make treats the way Mrs. Scallop had. She wasn't a very good cook, but she was so kind and agreeable, Ned didn't mind. Mrs. Scallop was a person who could interfere with you by just glancing in your direction, but Mrs. Kimball, even when she was reminding you of something you ought to do, somehow let you alone.

“I've been going to the Makepeace mansion a lot,” Ned said. He looked out of the bay windows and saw the Makepeace chimneys. In the summer, the line of maple trees would hide them from view. “What happened to them?” he asked. “Did you ever know them?”

“The family lived in this part of the Hudson Valley since the eighteenth century,” she said. “Parts of that house are pre-Revolutionary.”

“Evelyn says there are ghosts there.”

His mother looked at him over her teacup. He felt he hadn't seen her for some time—though he visited her every day for at least a few minutes. Perhaps it was that he hadn't really looked at her for a while. She seemed more stooped. Her voice had thinned out, too.

“I don't think there are ghosts,” Mama said slowly. “If it is haunted, it is only by the suffering of the people who lived there. They were still a large family when your grandfather bought our land. Three sons were killed in the World War. Two of the daughters married and moved far away from this part of the country. When I came here as a young bride, all that remained of the Makepeaces was a tiny old couple, nearly as small as the figures on a wedding cake. When they died, the eldest daughter took away all the furniture and closed up the house and put it up for sale. No one bought it. When I could still walk, I used to go over there and sit on an old wicker settee on the veranda. I took you there a few times, I think.”

“That's where I sit now,” Ned said.

“Do you?” she asked so gently that Ned had to look away. For some reason, his eyes filled with tears.

“It's not really haunted, Neddy,” she said, more firmly. “I think there are presences everywhere, the souls of all who have gone through this world.”

“I thought they were in heaven.”

“Yes, that's what Papa says.”

Ned reached out and touched her hair for a second.

“The ‘For Sale' sign in front of Mr. Scully's house is gone.”

She told him that the house had been sold, and that Mr. Scully had been moved to the Waterville nursing home.

“Isn't that where Mrs. Scallop works?” he asked, startled.

“Yes, it is. But we needn't worry. She is, well, nicer may not be the right word, but calmer anyhow now that she is in charge of things. Papa went to see Mr. Scully and says Mrs. Scallop pays a lot of attention to him, and to every other patient in the place.”

“Is Mr. Scully better?”

“He has some small movement on the side affected by the stroke, but he can't speak.”

“Did his daughter stay here?”

“She went back to the West.”

It didn't seem possible that only five months had passed since his birthday.

Mama touched his hand, which was resting on the arm of her wheelchair. Her fingers felt hot and dry. They looked at each other silently for a long moment. “In time, you'll feel happier,” she said at last. “Life often gets better all by itself.”

Ned went to his room, thinking about the things grown-ups said to him. Would his mother ever get better all by herself? There were moments when he felt his parents' words were trying to steer him in a certain direction—Papa's more than Mama's—like the stick with which he had pushed paper boats across puddles.

It was nearly hot in the pew on Sunday. He was looking up at Papa as he preached but not listening closely. He was trying to imagine the delicious skunklike smell of dandelions and realizing you couldn't imagine a smell. He heard his father say, “And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them.”

He thought of the Makepeace veranda filled with the blind and the lame; they crowded up against the doors and windows and climbed over the settee, and the cat with one eye slunk around their feet, trying to protect itself from being stepped upon. What if a fire started in one of those vast empty rooms he'd peered at through a window? And what if the fire raged along the hill and his own house was caught by it—sparks raining on the roof—flames licking up the boards of the attic floor and the long case that held the gun.

“Let us pray,” said the Reverend Wallis. Ned bowed his head and shut his eyes tight and the fire went out.

“Could we visit Mr. Scully?” Ned asked his father on the way home.

“We'll do it today,” Papa said. “It's been on my mind for a while. I'm glad you reminded me, Neddy.”

The Waterville Nursing Home was a large brick building with two towers on the wide main street of town, not far from the store where Papa occasionally bought a box of homemade chocolates. Papa and Ned stood in a large central hall that smelled a little sour, like milk on the edge of turning. The floor was shiny and slippery with wax. On their right was a door that said O
FFICE
, and on the left was a huge room filled with chairs and tables. Three old women were sitting in it listening to a radio. One held an ear trumpet toward it which looked like a stag's antler. As Papa went to the office door it opened, and Mrs. Scallop glided out. She wore a white uniform and her hair was tied up in a bun. Everything about her looked different except for her smile, slow and triumphant, that seemed to say to Ned, “I am wonderful and I know secrets.”