One-Eyed Cat (6 page)

The river was ink-blue and looked as unmoving as water in a basin.

“Are you all right, Neddy?” Her question took him by surprise. She had spoken urgently, and although her words were ordinary, they pierced him as if they'd flown straight to the painful place in his mind.

“I have to write a poem about autumn,” he said hurriedly. “It's supposed to be for tomorrow and I haven't done it yet.”

She rested her head against the back of the wheelchair and looked at him silently.

“Well, what I thought was that I'd write about the gypsies Papa and I saw today, just where the Waterville road is, two caravans”—he paused for a moment, staring at the interest that had come into her eyes as plain to see as a light going on—“and lots of thin black dogs running around, and children, and the women all dressed in bright clothes. Papa says they usually come in October.”

“That's a wonderful idea, Ned,” she said. “Gypsies in the fall.”

He
did
have a homework assignment but he didn't have to hand it in for a week, and it wasn't a poem but a nature description. He'd been able to trick his mother. It made him feel a little sick.

A lie was so tidy, like a small box you could make with nails and thin pieces of wood and glue. But the truth lay sprawled all over the place like the mess up in the attic. At the thought of the attic, of the unfinished room and what lay in it, he felt as though a giant hand had been clapped over his mouth.

His mother was staring at him. He suddenly knew she was trying to
read
his face, and he felt a strange burst of relief. He hadn't quite convinced her; in a way he couldn't understand, that made him feel safer.

The next morning, the last Monday in October, started off hot, but Ned felt something different in the air. Perhaps it was the absolute stillness of the leaves and the blades of grass—a kind of waiting.

Ned, and the children he walked home with most afternoons, crossed the hot asphalt of the state road quickly, then drifted apart as they went up the steep curving dirt road. Ned glanced longingly at the stone house, so cool and mysterious-looking. Billy Gaskell, who was Ned's age but taller and heavier than he, began to pick up pebbles and fling them ahead. They sent up puffs of smoke where they landed, and Evelyn Kimball, whose shoelaces were often untied and whose hair never looked combed, shrieked as though she were being pinched each time Billy flung a pebble. But Janet Hoffman, thin as the long pigtail that hung down her back, trudged along the road off by herself. Ned wished Evelyn would shut her mouth. She made the heat worse. He wandered over to the ditch thinking he would pause there and let everyone get ahead. There was an interesting-looking stick lying on the ground. As he bent to pick it up, it wriggled quickly away. He glanced further along the ditch. He saw two more snakes. One was orange and brown like the first, the other was white with green wedge-shaped markings.

“Ooh! Snakes!” breathed Evelyn, coming to stand next to him.

Billy lumbered toward them. “What're you looking at?” He saw the snakes. Like lightning, he bent over and grabbed one. “Take out the fangs!” he cried.

Everything happened fast. Janet put her head down and aimed herself at Billy's belly like a small goat and knocked him flat on the ground. The snake flew out of his hand, landing in the high grass on the other side of the ditch, and curled itself away out of sight. “Snakes are human, too!” Janet yelled. “You big bully!” She sat down on Billy, her skinny, scabby knees clutching him around his thick waist, and grabbed his lank brown hair, pulled up his head and let it bang back on the road.

Billy heaved himself up. Janet tumbled onto the road and Evelyn grabbed her arms and pulled her to her feet, spanking the dust from her dress. Ned was astonished to see that Billy was grinning. Then he started laughing, bending over himself and smacking his knees.

“Yah!” jeered Evelyn. “You got it this time, Billy. And from a nine-year-old girl. Ha! Ha!”

Billy was unperturbed. He marched on down the road, his big shoulders somewhat stooped, looking, Ned thought, like the buffalo engraved on the nickel. He lived a good mile beyond Ned's turnoff, and nobody ever drove him to school, no matter what the weather was like. Janet's path through the woods was already in sight. Just before she turned off to it, Ned said admiringly, “That was pretty good—what you did. But snakes aren't really human.”

“They're alive,” she said.

“Billy's too dumb to know he got beat up,” Evelyn said as she kept step with him. Billy was far ahead of them now. “My daddy says the heat drives the snakes down from the mountains,” she went on. “I saw two in the yard near the henhouse.”

“Why'd he want to take their fangs out?”

“Those old snakes don't even have fangs. They ain't poisonous. He's mean. He just wanted to do something to them.”

“But—why?” Ned muttered.

“Did you see the way Janet got him down! He didn't even try to fight her back. And he's twice as big. Big old dumb boy …”

She stumbled over a hummock of earth and the dust flew up around her. He looked at her face with its slanty pumpkin eyes as she righted herself. As long as he could remember, the Kimballs had been living in their big, ramshackle house, and he and Evelyn had walked home from school together since he'd been eight. But she'd never spoken to him so much before. The snakes had made her talkative. He knew his mother liked Mrs. Kimball. When she came to take care of Mama, he'd heard Mrs. Kimball call her “precious,” and “dear heart.” Mr. Kimball was a carpenter but he didn't get much work. Papa had once said he couldn't think how the poor man provided for all those children.

“I chase the chickens sometimes,” Evelyn said to him in a confiding voice. “They run and squawk like they're crazy.”

“But you don't hurt them, do you?”

“No. I just scare them. Ma wrings their neck and we eat them.”

“That must hurt.”

“Well … it finishes them.” She burst into a shout of laughter. “That Janet! Skinny little beetle like that!” She waved and turned off up the road to the Kimball yard where chickens scratched in the earth around old car parts and piles of planks. Ned saw a raggedy little boy wearing a man's shirt sitting on an upturned washtub. “Evie!” he shouted. “Evie is home!”

Ned turned left off the dirt road to the path he'd worn through the field that went all the way down to the state road, several hundred yards below, where Mr. Scully's mailbox stood, nailed to a splintery post. He took the Waterville newspaper and the one letter out of the mailbox and went back up the hill to Mr. Scully's house. He knocked on the kitchen door. Pretty soon he heard Mr. Scully moving inside like a mouse in a paper sack. Through the screen, whose rusty grid kept out horseflies but not houseflies, Ned could smell wood ash and dried apples.

“Hello, Ned,” Mr. Scully said. He was standing just behind the screen, a small stooped man dressed as always in an old green and black plaid wool shirt and black trousers. He opened the door suddenly, and Ned had to jump off the step then jump back on it and scoot inside before the screen door swung to. Mr. Scully stared at the letter in Ned's hand. Although most of the time he moved as slowly as molasses moves across a plate, he snatched up his spectacles from the kitchen table and held out his hand for the letter. He peered at it and sighed. “Bother! It's only a doctor bill,” he said. Ned knew he was always hoping to hear from his daughter, Doris, who had gone out West years ago.

It was dark in the kitchen. There was one window and it was dirty. Mr. Scully wouldn't turn on any kind of light, electric or kerosene, until nightfall. Ned began his chores. He pumped water to wash the dishes Mr. Scully had left in the chipped enamel basin from his supper last night and his breakfast and lunch today. There were a cup, two plates, a small pot, a frying pan, two forks and a sharp little knife with a blade worn thin. When he finished washing up, Ned swept out the kitchen and the parlor. Though Mr. Scully had plenty of wood chopped and stored in the shed, he might ask Ned to break up kindling. He worried about having enough wood for the cold weather. Some afternoons Ned made up his bed. Mr. Scully didn't use sheets, only blankets. After that, it would be time to go through Mr. Scully's boxes. They usually managed two a week. The boxes were piled up in the parlor where Ned had stacked them after bringing them down from the attic.

“Once I was young David Scully. Now I'm old David,” he'd told Ned when he first decided to sort through all his things. “It's time I put my house in order,” he had said. Whenever a post card turned up in a box, he'd give it to Ned for his collection. Most things he put into old pillowcases to be thrown away.

Mr. Scully could still drive his old Model A down the dirt road to the state road and two miles further to a small general store to pick up groceries. He could still make his own bread, and his applesauce. But he was worried, Ned knew, about how much longer he'd be able to take care of himself. He was afraid of winter.

The house was very old and hadn't been much to start with; the floors creaked, and the window frames were nearly rotted away. When the wind blew, it sifted through the house as though it had been a sieve. When Mr. Scully's daughter had come East last time, she'd had inside plumbing put in the house, and she'd bought a gas stove and a refrigerator for him. Mr. Scully wouldn't give up the kitchen pump though. And he never put a thing in the refrigerator. He had said to Ned once, a bit grudgingly, that the water closet was an improvement over the outhouse.

Still, the old man could do a great deal for himself. Ned had come to realize, after working for him several months, that Mr. Scully really wanted company an hour or so a day. He had enough wood for ten winters.

“One of these days, we'll have to clean up that yard,” Mr. Scully said. He and Ned peered through the dusty window. The yard did look pretty bad. There was a heap of tires, all worn smooth, a rusty scythe leaning up against a tree, the discarded icebox just beneath the shed roof, an old ragged quilt piled on top of it, and many other objects that were gradually becoming indistinguishable from the ground itself.

“How old are you, Ned? I know you must have told me. I forget so much.”

“I'm just eleven,” Ned replied. “My birthday was last month.”

“I'm sixty-nine years older than you,” said Mr. Scully. He pursed up his mouth as though to whistle but gave a tight little laugh instead.

The leaves on the maple tree just outside the window were brown and spotted like the skin on Mr. Scully's hands and forehead.

“You notice how the days are getting shorter? Soon, it'll be Thanksgiving. Look at those crows out there. They know winter's coming.”

Ned put the dishes he'd washed on the tin counter to drain. There was no drying cloth. It was hard to imagine winter now, hard to imagine all the fields as bare as the breadboard that hung from a nail behind the pump.

The old man was fussing with the gas flame of his new stove that sat next to the big black Franklin stove he used in the winter to heat the kitchen. He was making tea as he always did for himself and Ned. He would add a few drops to his cup from a small bottle he kept on his shelf with his canned goods. “Rum,” he'd told Ned on the first day Ned had come to work for him. “To make me warm. When you're old, it's hard to keep warm.”

When the chores were done, they would begin to sort through a box in the parlor. When he'd put aside trash to be burned or old clothes to give away, Mr. Scully would pick up the mementos he had saved and tell Ned about them. Ned understood that that was what Mr. Scully wanted most—for Ned to listen to his history.

“See this stone?” he said, after he'd filled a sack with old newspaper clippings about the sinking of the Titanic, remarking that he couldn't think why he'd saved them in the first place. “It's a soapstone actually. Look how it's carved.” He put it in Ned's hand.

The soapstone had an oily feel to it. Ned couldn't make out what the carving was.

“It's Chinese, and the symbols mean good luck. Well—I'm giving you that for your birthday—even though it's past. My poor uncle wouldn't have agreed there was much luck in the stone. He was in the San Francisco earthquake. When they pulled him up from under his house, the stone was embedded in his chest. It's a pagan thing. I can't think why he was wearing it.” He laughed suddenly. It was more of a cackle than a laugh, Ned thought.

“Thank you,” he said. It made him feel queer, knowing the stone had been buried in a man's chest almost thirty years ago.

“Imagine!” exclaimed the old man. “Everything you touch in this world has a history. Drink your tea. It'll cool you off. Did you know that hot tea cools a person? Life is full of paradox.”

They looked through the black pages of an album thickened with tintypes and yellowed photographs. Mr. Scully turned the pages very slowly. “My mother,” he said, pointing to a tinted tintype of a young girl with a thick frizz of hair on her forehead. “I hadn't even been born when that was taken,” he said meditatively. “Life is strange.” He pointed to another of a man in a uniform, leaning on a gun. “There's my father.”

“Why does he have a gun?” asked Ned.

“It was during the Civil War. My father fought in it and was killed by it. He was wounded in the Antietam campaign in the battle on South Mountain on September 14, 1862, and he came home to die. I was six years old, Ned. I can see him now, as clear as I can see you, lying in the bed in our house in Poughkeepsie. His face was as white as the bed linen. My mother was bending over him when I came into their room. Her hand was stretched out over his forehead. I remember how thin her fingers were, how her wedding ring slipped forward to the knuckle, how white my father's skin was next to that living healthy hand. Then she pressed it to his face.”