Colter's Path (9781101604830) (17 page)

“I don't deny I took it, sir. Not for me, but for my sister. She's little, and she's very sick, and she needs to have a toy, something to hold and play with and make her happy while she still has life in her.”

“Not this,” McSwain said, holding Cicero's stuffed and stiffened form even tighter to his chest. “It cannot be this particular thing.”

“Please, sir. She has nothing to take her mind off what is happening to her.”

McSwain said nothing. One of the men in the tent called out to the pair and told them to come in out of the rain. He referred to Squire as “son.”

“Why, sir?” Squire asked McSwain. “I know I was crossing a line to steal it, but she's my own sister, just a sick little girl, and it's only a stuffed dead cat. You're a grown man! Why would you care about such a thing?”

“There are reasons you cannot possibly know.”

“I'll pay you for it, sir. My father will pay you for it.”

“You could in no way afford it.”

“It's just a dead
cat
!”

“It's far more than that. You cannot know.”

A small-framed man emerged from the tent where McSwain had taken refuge earlier. He grabbed the boy's shoulder, pulling him toward the tent. “Friend,” the man said to McSwain, “I can't tell you what to do, but I'll not be having folks say that anyone with the last name of
Napier doesn't have sense enough to come in out of the driving rain! Come on, Squire, son…get into the tent!”

“Yes, sir.”

McSwain followed the Napiers into the tent and stood, dripping like a dog fresh from a splash in a farm pond. The senior Napier looked at McSwain nervously. “What is the problem, sir?” he asked. “And why are you holding that…thing?”

“I had it before, but I fell in the mud, dropped it, and he got it. I had found it in the next camp,” Squire said. “I picked it up because I thought Winnie could play with it. It might make her feel better. Get her mind off things.”

“Sir,” said McSwain, “this ‘thing' is mine. If this boy ‘found' it, he did it by digging around in my wagon, uninvited. I had put Cicero away there, stowed and hidden.”

“Cicero?”

“That's the name of the cat. It was a pet of mine for years, very precious to me. Very important. And I must not let it be taken.”

“Even though it's dead?”

The other men in the tent, listening to the exchange, chuckled among themselves and shared glances.

“It's a situation I can't fully explain. Suffice it to say, that cat belongs to me, and though I understand this boy's motivation in taking it, and even admire it, I cannot let Cicero be taken from me. Even for such a noble cause as brightening the spirits of an unfortunate young girl.”

“‘Unfortunate,'” Joe Napier repeated. “Unfortunate indeed, sir. Let me let you meet someone, Mr…. Swain, was it?”

“McSwain.”

“Sorry.”

Napier motioned for Squire to follow and all but dragged McSwain out of the tent. He led the way through the rain to another, slightly smaller tent nearby. At the flap door he called in, alerting his wife that he was bringing in a visitor. The flap parted and a wan-looking woman whose face resembled Squire's peered back at them. She
managed a weak smile at McSwain, who she assumed was some new friend of her husband's, being brought in out of hospitality. Then her eyes fell on the sodden, preserved animal corpse clutched in McSwain's hands, and she grew puzzled.

“We'll explain shortly, dear,” Napier said, hustling the others into the tent and then following.

The experience shook McSwain. As he had guessed, the person Napier had brought him to meet was the little girl herself, and a more heartbreaking sight McSwain had never seen. The girl was sallow, sickly, her pale skin a grayish hue, her eyes listless and full of sorrow and the tracks of infirmity. The impression made at once upon Zeb McSwain was that little Winnie Napier was a girl destined for childhood death.

Even so, he forced out a smile and put a brighter tone in his voice as he met her. He introduced himself as a man from Tennessee who had come to meet her and wish her the best. The little girl smiled back, but it was clear that what drew her interest was not McSwain himself, but the unmoving cat he held. Winnie pointed a pale finger at the animal and asked in her thin voice if it was a doll.

“It's a cat that used to be my pet, but it isn't alive anymore. I had it preserved and stuffed so I could remember it as it looked in life. So I suppose, in a way, it is kind of a doll. Its name was Cicero.”

The girl shook her head. “Cat,” she said. “Its name is Cat.”

McSwain realized the spot the Napiers had placed him in. Obviously they knew their own little girl well enough to know she would be drawn to the cat as a plaything, a toy. By having him bring it into her presence, they had caused her to focus upon the cat and begin to think of it, as children will, as something that was hers, or might become hers. The other side of the coin was that, in letting McSwain see with his own eyes the dreadful shape the girl was in, he was put into the place of looking like a hard and heartless man if he, an adult, chose to
cling to such a seemingly meaningless item as a preserved dead cat while a dying young girl clearly wanted it.

At one level, the situation broke his heart because he knew the Napiers merely were doing what any parent would do, trying to brighten the life of a child who knew mostly grim darkness. On another level, he was infuriated, because the assumptions under which they acted were uninformed ones. It wasn't their fault that they did not know the true significance of this bit of fur and bone and stuffed hide, and that sentiment played only the most minor role in his protectiveness toward Cicero the cat.

Winnie held out her hands, asking without words to be allowed to hold the cat. McSwain looked uncomfortably at Mrs. Napier, who said, “Don't fear…. What she has does not spread to other people.”

So McSwain placed the cat in the girl's hands and she pulled it to her chest, smiling down on it, unconcerned that it was dampened by the rain and had the musty, vaguely decayed smell that accompanies even well-done taxidermy. As Winnie received the cat, it actually seemed that a bit of color returned to Winnie's face, as if Squire Napier's notion that his little sister would improve if she had a plaything to cheer her might actually have merit.

McSwain knew he'd been manipulated, but the smiles lighting the faces of all the Napier family, including Winnie, all but forced him to search for a way he could let the child have the remains of his old pet. There was a complication inherent in doing that that McSwain alone knew about and was not free to explain.

He thought hard and found the only solution possible. Turning to the Napiers, he asked, “Sir, do you have a small, sharp knife, and, ma'am, might you have a needle and sewing thread you could spare?”

They did. McSwain let the little girl play with the cat for several minutes, then told her he was going to make a gift of it to her. Cat would be hers. But first he had to borrow the animal back for just a few moments. He would bring it back directly, he promised.

Reluctantly, Winnie let him take Cicero back again
and he took as well the items he had asked for from the adult Napiers. Noting that the rain had ceased, McSwain asked the family to excuse him a few moments and let him step outside and make a repair on the cat's body, some small thing he'd noticed needed doing and hadn't gotten to yet. It was a false pretext, but it served its purpose.

Someone had stowed some wood under a tent flap and kept it dry through the rainfall, so already a good fire was burning in the sodden encampment. McSwain took Cicero and his borrowed knife, needle, and thread, and positioned himself where he could benefit from a bit of firelight yet work without drawing much attention to what he was doing. He worked first with the knife, then with the thread, and when he was done, examined his threadwork and found it virtually undetectable. Clutching in his fist what he had extricated from beneath the skin of the cat's belly, he walked to the Napier tent and presented the former Cicero, now named simply Cat, to a very ailing little girl, who beamed brightly at him in gratitude. McSwain told her good-bye and departed the Napier tent.

He returned briefly to the tent, wherein he had conversed with the other men, said a quick good-bye to the Pennsylvanians, and expressed hope that he and his new acquaintances would see each other again on the trail or in California. Then he returned to the Sadler camp and his wagon, wherein he found Ben Scarlett snoring and reeking of liquor.

Ben's prized flask, now drained, lay on the bed of the wagon near Ben's flopped hand. McSwain picked up the flask and dropped into it the items he had held in his fist, then stoppered the flask and put it away among his own wagon-stowed gear and goods, hidden.

“I lost something tonight, Ben, and now you have, too,” he whispered to the unhearing drunkard. “Such is life, I suppose. Such is life.”

I
t was my fault, and I own right up to it,” a hungover Ben Scarlett said the next morning, pain in his head and his voice. The fact that Cicero was no longer present was now known. “I should have chased after that boy when I saw he'd took something from the wagon. But I couldn't see what it was.”

“Well, we know now. It was my cat. But don't fret over it, Ben. The fact that you didn't stop him doesn't matter much since I ran into the boy myself after that. All he was trying to do was help his sick little sister. I gave the cat to her, Ben. It was the right thing to do.”

“I'll be! I'm surprised. You seemed mighty attached to that cat.”

“Yes. I suppose I was.”

“Why was that? I know it was an old pet, but it was dead and gone. So why did you keep it so close all the time, and hide it when you weren't around, like it was some treasure? Lord, my head hurts. Why do I do this to myself?”

“It wasn't the cat itself that mattered, really. It was something inside it.”

Ben's addled, hurting brain puzzled over that comment. “Something inside it…. Love, you mean? Affection?”

“What?
What?
”

Ben was embarrassed. “Well…I don't know what you mean by something inside it. I figure a cat has bones and blood and guts and such as that inside it. But that can't be what you're talking about. So it must be something that ain't flesh and blood. Like the cat loving its owner, you know.”

McSwain had to chuckle. “You're a strange man, Ben.”

“Not strange. Just drunk a lot. You, you're the strange one. No offense meant by that.”

“I know, Ben. I know.”

“So, what was inside the cat?”

“Something I put there. Something important.”

“So you gave that to the little girl, too?”

“No. I got it out in secret before I gave Cicero away.”

“You got it now?”

McSwain became conscious of the weight of the flask in one of his pockets. “It's hidden again,” he said to Ben. “So I won't lose it.”

Ben sighed. “I hate to lose things. You know that new flask of mine? Already lost it. I was drinking out of it just last night and it was in my hand when I went to sleep. Now it's gone.”

“Strange.”

“Yep. Strange.”

“You got to come, Jedd. He's hurt. He's sure 'nough hurt himself.”

Jedd Colter looked up from his wooden plate and for a few seconds quit chewing his beans. The person who had spoken to him was Keller Buck, a man Jedd had barely known during his Knoxville years. Buck had been a carriage maker who doubled as a finish carpenter; all across the town of Knoxville and its surrounding region the work of Keller Buck filled parlors and dining rooms and carriage houses.

Jedd sat his plate to the side and looked Buck in the eye. “Who's hurt?”

“Treemont Dalton. Your old partner.”

Jedd was on his feet in half a second. “What happened?”

“I don't know for sure…. I didn't see it happen. But he must have been either out for a walk or maybe looking for a fishing spot, 'cause he was walking along that little creek running just south of here. There's trees growing along the north bank of that creek, and Tree had stepped out on some roots that grew out over the water. They were wet, and his right foot slipped down through a gap in the tangled-up roots, and he jammed his leg all the way up to the kneecap into that hole and tilted forward so he nearly snapped the knee.”

“Lord,” Jedd muttered. “Where's he now?”

“Lying on the ground by the creek like a turtle on its back, moaning and groaning. The knee hurts him too much to walk on just yet.”

Guided by Buck, Jedd went to where Treemont was and found matters just as Buck had described them. Now, though, some of the initial pain had worn away for Tree, but not enough for him to do more than come to his feet and stand with most of his weight on his left, uninjured leg, with his left hand against the tree trunk for balance.

“I done it up good, Jedd,” Tree said. “That was the same knee I hurt years and years back, when I was a boy and you and me took a tumble in that cave we'd found. You remember that, I reckon?”

“I remember. You hurt your knee, I busted up my elbow. I can still feel a twinge in it every now and again.”

“Same for me with the knee, even before I went and damn fooled myself up again in that root tangle over there above the creek bank just now.”

Jedd knelt beside his friend and studied the injured leg, though he could not really see anything because Treemont still had his trousers on. Knowing he needed to check the knee for bruising, blood-swelling, and the like, he opened his mouth to ask Treemont to drop his pants, though he knew this would inevitably launch Tree into all kinds of highly improper, joking commentary. Then Jedd noticed something that held him silent a minute.

“Treemont, you've broken the skin on that leg.”