Hidden Places (6 page)

Becky squealed in delight. ‘‘Oh, look—kitty cats!’’ She crawled up on Aunt Batty’s bed and pulled off her mittens so she could pet them. ‘‘Do they have names?’’

‘‘Yes, that one is Queen Esther and that’s Arabella.’’

They were both tiger-striped—Esther in shades of gray and Arabella in orange—with splashes of white on their chests and faces. They stretched and yawned and blinked their yellow eyes sleepily at Aunt Batty.

‘‘Come on, girls. Rise and shine,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m afraid we have to move someplace warm for a few days.’’

I wanted to believe that it would only be for a few days, but I knew in my heart that it would likely be much longer. Even if we could find a carpenter who would come all the way out here in this snow, I doubted if he could get much work done on the house until the weather warmed up. It looked to me like Aunt Batty’s entire kitchen would have to be rebuilt.

‘‘Now, then,’’ she said. ‘‘Would you children like to help me?

We’ll let Samuel carry this satchel, and Matthew can—’’ ‘‘I’m Jimmy,’’ he said. ‘‘And he’s Luke.’’

‘‘Oh, that’s right. Young Matthew went off to France to fight in that awful war, didn’t he?’’ She gave Luke the carpetbag, then bent to snap a dog leash onto Winky’s collar. She held out the other end to Jimmy.

‘‘Does your dog bite?’’ he asked warily. Winky hadn’t stopped snarling since we’d arrived.

‘‘Heavens, no!’’ She bent over the little dog and said sternly, ‘‘Now, that’s quite enough of that, please.’’ Winky whined and lay down on the rag rug with a sigh.

‘‘I’ll carry Queen Esther,’’ Aunt Batty continued, ‘‘because she can be a bit crotchety after her nap. And your mother can carry Arabella.’’

‘‘What about me?’’ Becky asked.

‘‘Oh, you’ll have a very important job to do, Toots. You must carry my friend Ivy.’’

I was afraid to ask who Ivy was, but she turned out to be the sprawling ivy plant on top of the radio in the parlor. Aunt Batty nestled the pot in Becky’s arms, draping the trailing vines around her shoulders like a wreath so they wouldn’t drag on the ground. ‘‘I hope you have a radio. Ivy loves listening to the radio.’’

‘‘No, ma’am,’’ Jimmy said solemnly. ‘‘Grandpa Wyatt wouldn’t allow one.’’

‘‘Well, then, I suppose we’ll just have to sing to her instead. Can you children sing?’’

‘‘I guess so,’’ Jimmy said with a shrug, though I couldn’t recall ever hearing any of my kids sing.

‘‘Splendid!’’ Aunt Batty replied. She returned to her bedroom and rolled each cat over onto its back, then swaddled it in a blanket like a baby. She handed the orange one to me before picking up the gray one herself. Neither cat protested this undignified treatment—but then, they were both so enormously fat it would have been hard for them to put up much of a fight. Aunt Batty glanced wistfully around the cottage one last time before we all headed out the door.

I can’t even imagine what a sight we made, parading single file up the hill through the snow drifts to the farmhouse, all of us bundled to our eyebrows in hats and scarves and carrying a wornout carpetbag, two lumpy cats, a stubby misshapen dog, and an overgrown ivy plant. As we trudged along, I wondered how to explain the bedraggled-looking man in the spare bedroom to Aunt Batty. In the end I decided to let her think he was whomever she wanted him to be—she could call him President Hoover for all I cared. I would have my hands full reminding her that Luke and Jimmy weren’t my dead husband and his older brother. Next she would be calling me Lydia.

As it turned out, Becky pointed to the closed spare room door as soon as we got inside the kitchen and said, ‘‘We have to be real quiet because there’s an angel sleeping in there. He’s sick.’’

Aunt Batty held a finger to her lips and nodded as if it were the most natural thing in the world for people to have an ailing angel asleep in their house. We unwrapped the two cats and they waddled away like they knew exactly where they were going. Becky and Aunt Batty found a new home for Ivy in the parlor. And as soon as we unleashed Winky he sauntered up to the rug I kept by the kitchen stove, circled it three times, then fell over onto his side in the middle of it as if he’d been shot between the eyes. A minute later he was snoring. I longed to lie down beside him but it was already lunchtime and I still hadn’t even washed the breakfast dishes.

‘‘Becky Jean, take Aunt Batty upstairs and show her your room,’’ I said. ‘‘She’ll have to sleep with you for a couple of nights since my spare room is already occupied—that is, if it’s all right with you, Aunt Batty.’’

‘‘That will be just fine and dandy, Toots,’’ she said with a wave of her hand. ‘‘I can sleep just about any old place.’’

‘‘And you’re not
really
a witch, are you?’’ Becky said, as if to reassure herself.

‘‘I should say not! The Bible says that God hates witches...and since God is a good friend of mine, I certainly can’t be a witch!’’

‘‘Jimmy just made that up to scare me, didn’t he?’’

‘‘I expect so,’’ Aunt Batty replied as they headed toward the stairs. ‘‘I never had a brother myself, but I do know that little boys love to tease little girls.’’

I threw some food together and called it lunch. Afterward, when I went into Mr. Harper’s room to bring him some, I found him moaning and burning up with fever again. I sent Jimmy outside to fill a basin with snow and I soaked washcloths in it to lay on Mr. Harper’s face and neck to bring the fever down. I spent most of the afternoon doing that, along with changing the poultices on his leg to draw out the poison and tending the stoves and cleaning up the dishes and boiling some navy beans to make soup for our supper.

I heard the kids bundling themselves up while I tended to Mr. Harper, and they disappeared outside with Aunt Batty for a while. They all came trudging up the hill from her cottage an hour or so later, lugging something on Luke’s sled. I didn’t give it much thought, worried as I was about Mr. Harper.

Later, as I chopped carrots and onions to add to the navy beans, I heard the kids entertaining Aunt Batty in the parlor—or maybe she was entertaining them, it was hard to tell. The mysterious bundle had turned out to be a pile of books, and the kids paged through them with her, spellbound as they gazed at the colorful pictures.

Meanwhile, Winky woke up from his nap and decided to attach himself to me. Every time I took a step he was tangled underfoot. He had to be the ugliest dog I had ever seen, with stumpy legs and splayed feet and a tail like a stubby thumb. His short, white fur bunched in lumpy rolls in some places and wrinkled like a cheap suit of clothing in others. He had a bulldog’s body but his head was all wrong. Instead of a smashed-in face, he had a regular dog’s long tapered snout—and his tongue didn’t seem to fit inside it so his jaw hung open most of the time, lolling and slobbering. Or if he did manage to close his snout, the tip of his pink tongue stuck out like a rude child’s.

Winky was blind in one eye, and his good eye kept winking all the time, like it had a mind of its own. Every time I took a step, that one-eyed dog stepped with me, grinning foolishly and winking at me as if we’d just shared a private joke.

Next my kitchen towels started disappearing. I always kept one hung on a hook near the sink, but when I reached for it to dry my hands, it was gone. I took out a clean one and hung it there, but by the time I’d finished setting the table for supper, it was missing, too. I found them both behind the stove where the orange cat, Arabella, had dragged them. I watched her for a moment as she pawed and nosed the cloth around until it was just so, and it was clear that she was making a nest for herself back there. I groaned.

‘‘Is there any chance that Arabella might be about to give us a litter of kittens?’’ I asked Aunt Batty during supper.

‘‘Not a chance, Toots. She just thinks she’s going to. I figure it’s quite impossible.’’ Aunt Batty blushed so fiercely I decided not to pursue it. I just hoped she was right. Things had turned crazy enough around here without a litter of kittens thrown in.

Afterward, when the boys and I started bundling up to do our chores, their mittens were missing, too. My frustration mounted as we searched and searched. I had neither the time nor the patience for this nonsense.

‘‘You boys know you’re supposed to hang your wet mittens here by the stove to dry,’’ I scolded.

‘‘But I
did
hang them there,’’ Jimmy insisted. ‘‘Honest, I did.’’

‘‘Then why aren’t they there? Mittens don’t just sprout wings and fly away, do they?’’

‘‘Here they are!’’ Luke suddenly shouted. He pointed to Arabella’s nest behind the stove and I couldn’t believe my eyes. The cat lay sprawled on her side like a nursing mother with the mittens snuggled up against her like babies. I lost my temper.

‘‘You stupid cat!’’ I yelled. ‘‘Those are
mittens
, not
kittens
!’’

Aunt Batty patted my shoulder. ‘‘You won’t convince her, Toots. Arabella is a little hard-of-hearing, you know. The two words sound the same to her.’’

‘‘Well, she isn’t blind! Can’t she see they’re not kittens?’’

Aunt Batty smiled faintly. ‘‘We all see what we want to see. And Arabella, bless her soul, longs to be a mother.’’

When I came back inside after my chores I found the other cat, who was half the size of a lion, all sprawled out on my rocking chair in the parlor, smug as you please, as if she owned it. When I tried to move her so I could sit down for a few minutes’ rest, she hissed at me.

‘‘That Queen Esther can be just as mean as a snake sometimes,’’ Aunt Batty explained as she shooed the cat off my chair. She lowered her voice to a stage whisper and added, ‘‘It’s because she knows Arabella is prettier than she is.’’

Frankly, I couldn’t see much beauty in either one of them, fat as they were. And as I said, Winky was no prize, either. He sat drooling on Aunt Batty’s feet all evening, watching her knit.

‘‘Where did you find him?’’ I finally asked.

‘‘Oh, Winky found me. He arrived at my door early one morning like an angel sent from heaven. I kept a flock of chickens at the time, and I needed a good watchdog to chase away the foxes and the raccoons. We’ve been good friends ever since.’’

‘‘What kind of a dog is he?’’ Jimmy asked.

‘‘Winky is a hunting dog.’’

I nearly laughed out loud. All the hunting dogs I’d seen were sleek, long-legged, graceful creatures, not fat lumpy things that waddled around on splayed feet with their tongues sticking out. I pictured the deer falling over dead from hysterics at the sight of him.

‘‘That’s how he lost his eye,’’ Aunt Batty explained. ‘‘In a hunting accident.’’

‘‘Couldn’t you find it again?’’ Becky asked.

‘‘Oh, it didn’t fall out like a marble, Toots. He lost the use of it. He’s blind in that eye.’’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘‘He doesn’t like to talk about it.’’ Winky rested his muzzle on Aunt Batty’s foot, as if he understood that we were talking about him. She bent to pat his head. ‘‘He’s a good dog, my Winky.’’

‘‘What was his name before the accident?’’ I asked.

‘‘Oh, he was always called Winky.’’ Aunt Batty got a far-away look on her face. ‘‘Sort of prophetic, don’t you think?’’

I nodded, wondering how long it would be before I was as crazy as she and her pets were.

I got the kids to bed and Aunt Batty settled in Becky’s room and the fires dampened for the night before returning to Mr. Harper’s room one last time. I admit I felt scared to go in there. He’d been doing so poorly all day I thought he surely must be about to die. It’s hard taking care of someone who’s gravely ill because your natural instinct is to nurse him back to health, and when he gets worse and dies you feel like it’s all your fault. Maybe you should’ve done something differently, maybe you could’ve done something more.

I took a deep breath, telling myself not to get too attached to him, then went into his room. He was burning up with fever and so delirious he was out of his mind. I knew he’d reached a crisis point—tonight he would either live or die. I bathed him in cold rags until he shivered, then wrapped a bed sheet tightly around him so he’d stop thrashing. Most of his words made no sense, but when he started crying ‘‘Father...Father, I’m sorry....’’ it sent chills up my spine. I didn’t know if he was calling for his daddy or for his heavenly Father. It made me think about my own daddy, and I wondered if he ever thought about me.

Then Mr. Harper began to weep, and it was such a brokendown sort of weeping that I sat on the edge of the bed and took him into my arms and held him until he stopped. ‘‘Forgive me, Father,’’ he said over and over as he clung to me. ‘‘Please, please forgive me....’’

That’s how it went for most of the night. I changed the dressings on his leg, using up an entire bottle of iodine, and tried to keep him cool. He needed a doctor, no question about it, but I couldn’t drive anywhere in all this snow. I felt helpless. It was just like when Sam died all over again, except there hadn’t been any snow when Sam had gotten sick and nothing but Frank Wyatt’s stubbornness to keep me from driving to town to fetch the doctor. I’d finally walked all the way into Deer Springs to get help for Sam, but it was too late.

I couldn’t do anything else for Mr. Harper, either, but I wanted him to know that someone cared, that he wasn’t all alone. It must be a terrible thing to die all alone and unloved like my father-inlaw had. I pulled a chair close, held Mr. Harper’s burning hand, stroked his brow, and dropped water onto his tongue with a spoon. I talked to him about my own life, and I cried for Sam all over again because taking care of Mr. Harper brought it all back— how Sam had suffered so horribly, how he never should have died.

Then a miracle happened. Way past midnight, Mr. Harper’s fever finally broke. He stopped moaning and thrashing and fell peacefully asleep. I needed some sleep, too, but as I crawled into my own bed early that morning, I couldn’t stop my tears.

I had stepped off the train in Deer Springs ten years ago because I’d wanted to take control of my life, to find the home and the family I’d longed for. But now my life had veered wildly off course like a team of runaway horses, and I no longer held the reins in my hands. I thought about praying, then said aloud, ‘‘No. I’m not asking for any more angels. They’re too much work!’’