One-Eyed Cat (3 page)

Two miles after they had passed the turnoff to Waterville, the big town on the river, they reached the balm of Gilead tree under which George Washington was said to have sheltered during a thunderstorm. Papa turned off the blacktop and onto a steep dirt road. At its first sharp curve stood a tall stone house whose windows were always shuttered. Behind it was a small forest of birch trees where Ned sometimes lingered on his way home from school if he happened to be alone, not with the other children, Janet or Billy or Evelyn, who also walked home along the dirt road.

Papa told him the stone house had been empty for many years, as had the Makepeace mansion, whose land abutted the Wallis land, and like the Wallis house had been built on the crest of the hill. Eight wood columns rose from its long veranda on which stood an enormous, nearly rotted wicker settee and a rocking chair with its seat gone as though a boulder had fallen through it. Ned had looked through the dusty windows at shadowy rooms where light barely penetrated. Papa said the reason there were so many empty houses around was because of the Great Depression. The country was only beginning to recover from that terrible time because of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But it was too late now for many people to save their homes; often, they simply abandoned them.

It always felt a little strange to Ned to be driven along the road he was accustomed to walk—to see the small forest from the car window, and the Makepeace driveway choked with underbrush and weed, only one of its tall stone gates still upright, and to pass so quickly the rough clearing where Evelyn Kimball, a year older than Ned, lived in a big shabby house full of brothers and sisters and scrawny cats. He caught sight of Sport, the Kimball dog, running back and forth on his chain, barking at the hens that scratched in the dirt nearby. Ned knew that if a person walked straight over to Sport, he would lie down at once as though his legs were on springs and wag his tail violently. In an emergency, Mrs. Kimball would come to stay with Ned's mother, but it was hard for her to get away from home because she had so many babies, one on her hip, one hanging from her neck, and sometimes a third on her lap. At least, that's the way it seemed to Ned who was pretty sure he'd never seen her without an infant clinging to some part of her body.

They were almost home. There was the driveway, nearly a quarter of a mile long, leading up the long slope to the house. The westering sun brought a gleam to the attic windows and struck the west side of the new lightning rods Papa had had installed recently. Right across from their driveway was old Mr. Scully's house. Ned earned thirty-five cents a week doing chores for Mr. Scully every afternoon except Sunday. Mr. Scully darned his own socks and mended his own clothes and cooked for himself. But it was getting harder for him to do heavier work, so he'd hired Ned last July to cut wood for the winter and putty up the windows and go way down the hill to the state road where Mr. Scully's mailbox was and fetch him his newspaper and the occasional post card from his daughter who lived in Seattle.

Ned loved their driveway that nearly floated away during the spring rains and filled up with rocks which bit into the worn tires of the Packard. The condition of the road was one of the two things that aroused Papa's temper; the other was the roof which always needed new shingles.

For a moment after they parked, Ned sat in a haze of sleepiness as his father lifted out his old leather briefcase from the back seat and bent over, as he usually did, to check the state of the worn tires.

“Come along, Ned …” his father said.

He opened his door and stepped onto the running board, then shook his head to clear away the sleepiness and raced toward a maple tree that stood on a bank below which his mother's old rock garden still flourished. He grabbed a low branch and swung out over the edge. The bells from the monastery, half a mile down toward the river, suddenly began to ring, and the week seemed to slip from Ned's back, and for no special reason, he called out, “Hurrah!” as he let go of the branch.

On the porch, next to the drooping branches of the lilac bush which was older than the house itself, stood a large yellow suitcase nearly covered with seals and stamps. Ned stared at it a second then cried, “Uncle Hilary!”

His father turned quickly away from the car. Ned pointed at the porch, and he and Papa ran up the three steps and bent over the suitcase as though it were Uncle Hilary himself. Ned put his finger on a seal that read,
Shepheard's Hotel, Cairo,
then flung himself against the screen doors which, because of the warm weather, had not yet been taken down and stored for the winter. As he walked into the central hall, he heard his mother laugh. He could tell she was happy in the special way that Uncle Hilary's visits made her happy.

At the end of the hall, just past the staircase, was the door to the kitchen. Mrs. Scallop stood there, her hands crossed on her stomach. “Your uncle came,” she whispered to him as though it were a secret.

From now on, it was her day off. Ned knew Papa had offered to drive her into Waterville every Sunday she'd been here, but she'd never taken him up on the offer.

“I know that,” said Ned. “I can hear him talking.”

Mrs. Scallop withdrew slowly into the kitchen like a shadow passing into darkness. She is so
silly
, Ned thought. He started up the staircase. On the landing floor there were pools of color, reflections from the stained-glass window through which the sun poured. In the upper hall, a great pier glass leaned against the wall, and sometimes the mirror glinted as though sparks had been struck from it or as though it had borrowed sunlight from the stained glass.

Straight ahead, its windows golden with sun, was Mama's room. She was leaning back in her wheelchair, an afghan half-fallen from her knees. Standing in front of her, thin and tall, dressed in a gray jacket nipped in at his waist, his long, narrow feet in low boots, his hair as silvery as a rain cloud, stood Uncle Hilary, one ankle crossed over the other, grinning. They look so much alike, Ned thought; it made him feel odd to think of them as brother and sister, not only as uncle and mother. Maybe Mrs. Scallop had been right to whisper; they looked as if they had old secrets between them.

Papa had come up behind Ned. “Hilary! What a grand surprise!” he said.

“Hello, Neddy, dear,” Uncle Hilary said, “And James, dear, too. I should have telephoned but I didn't know until the last minute whether I could leave New York. I had to find a place to work on my essay about the Camargue, and a friend suddenly had to go out of town and gave me his flat key and there you are! But I can only stay the night—if you don't mind putting me up, then I'll take the train down to the city in the morning. Ned! You look as though you'd grown a foot since I last saw you—let's see, has it been eleven months? Indeed, it has! And you have a birthday soon! James, you're looking well.”

“I'll tell the housekeeper to make up the bed in your old room,” Papa said.

Mama gave him a warning look. “It's the witching hour,” she said. “Mrs. Scallop's time off. You don't want to insult her.”

“I'll do it myself,” Papa said.

“We all will,” Uncle Hilary said, putting his arms around Ned and Papa and hugging them.

“Hilary,” murmured Mama, “you change the day.” Her head dropped against the back of the wheelchair; she smiled up at her brother.

She had been so nearly motionless for so many years, stuck in that chair, or wherever else Ned's father carried her, that Ned thought he'd seen everything about her. He knew her face better than anyone else's face. But he'd not seen that smile before. It seemed to tell him that she and Hilary knew a special thing that Ned couldn't know—and perhaps his Papa couldn't know, either. Ned felt jarred by anger as though someone had shoved him.

“How was dinner at the Brewsters'? Cold mashed potatoes and dry cake?” Mama asked him. He looked at the fine creases at the corners of her eyes, at the gleam of her rather large teeth. Her smile was for him now. He nodded. His anger was gone. But he felt a touch of strangeness, as though Uncle Hilary's presence had changed the day for him, too.

II

The Gun

Uncle Hilary said as they went into the hall that it was splendid to be away from the hurly-burly of the city, and he told Papa he was lucky to live in an atmosphere of such meditative silence.

“What's that?” Ned asked.

“A place where you can think,” Papa said, smiling at Ned as he halted in front of a closet and collected bed linen for Uncle Hilary.

Papa and Uncle Hilary went on to the spare bedroom, but Ned paused, noticing that the door which led to the back staircase was open a crack. Mrs. Scallop's room was there, off the narrow landing. He thought he glimpsed her sitting on the edge of the iron bedstead, her stout short legs not reaching the floor. He was pretty sure she had been listening to them, that she often eavesdropped, and that whatever she heard filled her up like a big supper.

He stood for a while at the doorway of the spare room and listened to the pleasant rumble of his father's and uncle's voices. It was a comforting noise. The old house was so often silent. Uncle Hilary was talking about the essay he was writing about some place in the south of France. They were tucking the ends of a blanket under the mattress. Uncle Hilary suddenly leaned toward Papa and asked, “How is she really, James? She looks worn. Pain, I suppose. Isn't there anything they can do—” He looked up and saw Ned and fell silent.

“Ned knows all about his mother's condition,” Papa said, looking gravely at Ned. “It's a help to me that he does,” he added.

Ned was glad Papa had spoken like that to Uncle Hilary. He didn't know if his words were true, though. He knew Mama's illness got worse at times; he knew there were times, too, when she was better, when she might even be able to walk a little ways with the help of a cane. But Ned didn't really understand how their life could have so entirely changed six years ago. It almost seemed as though, overnight, they'd moved into another house in another part of the world, a house whose walls and floors were made of glass that might, if Ned wasn't very careful, shatter.

Thoughts about his mother were filling up his head, perhaps because Uncle Hilary had come. He hardly ever saw anyone with her except Papa. Mrs. Scallop didn't spend much time in her room lately except to make the bed or dust a bit or bring her the tray with her meals. Mama was very still when Mrs. Scallop was in the room, Ned had observed. People from church had used to visit quite a bit but not for the last year. He thought he knew why.

One night when he'd not been sleepy but had been lying awake in his bed, he'd heard Mama say, “Jim, please! I don't want to see them anymore. I can't bear all that
goodness
! Try to understand me … When someone is as helpless as I am, that goodness is like being drowned …” He'd puzzled over her words, wondering if what she meant was something like what he felt when Papa spoke in his preaching voice to him about someone being poor or afflicted or miserable.

He went back to Mama's door and peeked in at her. Her eyes were closed. Papa must have turned on her bedside lamp but it was weak and the room was full of shadows. Darkness was filling the windows, pressing up against them like black smoke. Through it he could see little flickers of light from Waterville. Mama was sleeping. He wished she wasn't. If she'd talk to him, he might be able to stop thinking about her so hard.

Sometimes he could forget her altogether. That was especially true when he was outdoors. Then, if he happened to glance back at the house, at her windows on the second floor, he would imagine her sitting in her wheelchair, her twisted fingers and hands resting on the wooden tray that could swing out from one arm and be attached to the other so that she was imprisoned the way a baby is imprisoned in a high chair.

He could not run into her room and see her whenever he felt like it. But Papa might say, “Your mother's had her sponge bath and is feeling quite refreshed. Why don't you take up her tea to her, Ned?” He would climb the stairs wondering why the tea in the cup sloshed more and more the higher he went. He would glimpse himself in the hall mirror as he passed it, his lip caught in his teeth in anticipation of dropping the hot cup—he never had, so far—and he would walk softly into her room and place the tea in front of her, the slice of lemon in the saucer occasionally moldy because Papa hadn't had time to go to the grocer's in Waterville to get fresh lemons.

“Well, Ned,” she would say, turning her gaze away from the windows and looking at him. Some days she would smile very faintly, and he would know she was feeling bad, that that smile was all she could manage, that she had to be very careful not to move, careful the way he was with her cup of tea, so that something in her would not spill over. As far as anyone knew, she wouldn't get better; she would have good days and bad days—that was all.

There were nights when his parents' voices awoke him. Hers would be high and anguished, his father's, steady and persuasive, the way he sounded from the pulpit in church. As Ned lay listening, his room luminous with star shine or moonlight or else as dark as a well, a darkness as thick as fur pressing against his face, he knew that pain had awaked her and that his father was trying to persuade it away.

When they had fallen silent and he couldn't get back to sleep, he often walked through the house. Since Mrs. Scallop had come, he was nervous about going up the narrow splintery stairs in the back hall which led to the attic. Yet there was something thrilling about his passage there, too, a chance he might dislodge an old
National Geographic
from a heap in the dusty corner of a stair, or trip and bang his big toe, or kick over a box with a thousand old buttons in it that would cascade down the stairs right to Mrs. Scallop's threshold and scare her out of her sleep! The very thought of exploding her awake made him shudder and laugh at the same time.