One-Eyed Cat (14 page)

He had never run up the hill so fast, he thought to himself as he gasped for air. He met his father in the hall just as he came out of his study.

“Papa, Mr. Scully had a stroke,” he said. “Mrs. Kimball is there and says to call the hospital.”

The Reverand Wallis made the telephone call, then told Ned he was going to Mr. Scully's to see if he could help. Ned had gotten over the sinking feeling in his stomach whenever he pictured Mr. Scully lying there on the floor, and he wanted to go too, but Papa said Ned had done enough for one day.

Ned watched his father's tall straight figure as he marched down the slope. For quite some time, there was no movement at Mr. Scully's. Then the ambulance bumped up, and two men got out of it carrying a stretcher. Pretty soon they returned carrying Mr. Scully beneath a bright red blanket. Ned could see Mrs. Kimball as she crossed the road on her way home. After the ambulance left, Papa stood alone for a minute looking at the little house. For Ned, it had all been like watching a pantomime.

What he hoped was that the cat wouldn't be frightened away for good by all the people coming and going. He hoped Mr. Scully would be all right, too, but it didn't seem a separate hope. It was as if Mr. Scully and the cat were one large, perplexing trouble. Just as he saw Papa start up the slope, he heard Mrs. Scallop clumping down the back stairs.

“What's the matter with you, Neddy, my darling boy,” she said, “you are all red in the face and your knees are quaking.”

He opened his mouth and she said at once, before he could speak, “Calm down, calm down.” He hated the way she spoke in that false soothing voice, as if she owned the country of calm and he was some kind of fool who'd stumbled across its borders. He waited a moment. It didn't seem to bother her—she was smiling at him as though she knew exactly what thoughts were in his head.

“Mr. Scully is sick,” he said finally, and started to go out of the kitchen, thinking to himself how glad he was she was going away.

“I know all about that,” she said sharply, “of course I do! Don't you think your Papa would tell me anything that important? In any case, I heard the telephone call he made. I've had experience with old people living alone—deserted by ungrateful children.”

Ned went into the hall thinking that if Mrs. Scallop had Doris in mind when she spoke of ungrateful children, he couldn't help feeling sorry for Doris.

His mother seemed to be waiting for him. She was looking eagerly toward her doorway.

“I'm so sorry about Mr. Scully,” she said. “I think you'd grown quite fond of him, hadn't you?”

“I thought he was dead,” Ned said. “He looked dead.”

She looked at him intently. “Was it you who found him? I thought it was Mrs. Kimball.”

“I did. I went to see—” he paused. He had been about to say that he had gone down to see how the cat was faring. He began again. “I went to see him, see if he was all right.” He felt an odd little stir of excitement that he was using “him” for both the cat and Mr. Scully, and that his mother couldn't guess what he was doing.

“You must have been so frightened,” she said. “Seeing a person you know like that, lying so still on a floor. Oh—I know you must have been scared!”

“My stomach was scared,” Ned acknowledged.

“You may have saved his life,” Mama said.

Whose life? wondered Ned.

“When people have strokes, the faster a doctor gets to them the better chance they have.”

He wished suddenly that he could go into his room and lock the door and not talk for a while, not even to his mother. He felt a painful confusion; the excitement he had felt a minute before was gone. He wished there was someone who could make him speak of the cat, a magician, perhaps, who would magically draw the words from him.

His mother was still looking at him closely.

“Can people die from a stroke?” he asked dully.

“Yes,” she said. “It used to be called apoplexy, I think. The blood the brain needs gets blocked by something, and it can't reach the brain cells. A person's speech can be affected, or the movement of their right or left sides. Mr. Scully is quite elderly. Even if he recovers, Ned, he may not be the same.”

“He won't be coming back to his house?” Ned asked.

“It isn't likely—unless there is someone to take care of him,” she replied.

“But what will happen?” Ned cried out. “What will happen to his house?”

“His daughter will have to come and see to things. Oh, Ned, I didn't know you cared so much about him! There's nothing we can do now, only wait. By the time you get back from your trip with Uncle Hilary—”

“No!” exclaimed Ned. “I can't go anywhere with Uncle Hilary.”

“Neddy, what is it?”

Mrs. Scallop entered the room noiselessly. “Ned, you will upset your poor mother with all this noise!”

“You, Mrs. Scallop, will please not speak for me,” said Mrs. Wallis in such a stern voice that Ned forgot about himself for a moment. “I'm very thirsty,” Mama continued, her voice softening only slightly. “And I feel a chill. Would you please bring me something hot to drink?”

When Mrs. Scallop had reluctantly left the room, Mrs. Wallis whispered to Ned, “I'm not chilled or thirsty, Neddy … You do look surprised!” She smiled at him and touched his chin. “I'm not good like your father. Sometimes I tell fibs.” She took his hand then and pressed it in her own. “Ned, why can't you go with Uncle Hilary? A person shouldn't have to tell everything, but sometimes a thing gets in the way of a person's life. I feel as if something has happened to you.”

He stared at her, feeling a desperate hope that she might guess it all. But would she still hold his hand the way she was holding it now if she knew he had shot away a cat's eye? Made something alive suffer? He'd brought her a field mouse once that he'd caught near the lilac bush, and she'd petted it with one swollen finger, her face wreathed in smiles, and she loved birds, and she'd loved her own cat, Aunt Pearlie.

But wouldn't she understand that he hadn't really known the shadow was alive?

“Oh—” she groaned suddenly. “If only I could move about!”

Had he known it was alive?

“I don't want to go to Charleston,” he said, his voice trembling slightly. “I don't want to go away from home.”

Mama stroked his hand.

“All right, Ned,” she said in a very quiet voice. “You don't have to go. We'll get in touch with Uncle Hilary. I know he'll be sorry. But there'll be another time.”

Mrs. Scallop left a couple of days later, wrapping her rugs up in thick cord and refusing to let anyone help her carry them to the Packard. She did not behave in the least put out by her leaving. She told Ned she was moving on to higher things. It had been hard on a woman as active as she was to be stuck out in the country. Now she'd be in the middle of town, with more people to talk with than a child and an invalid. She left a vast pile of rich chocolate brownies on the kitchen table. He made up his mind not to touch them but even as he did so, he found he had one in his hand.

After Papa had driven off with Mrs. Scallop, Ned went up the back stairs to her room. It was emptier, it seemed to him, than it had ever been, as though she had taken some invisible substance from it. The oak dresser was dusted, a thin white coverlet covered the mattress ticking. Mama said the house felt larger now that Mrs. Snort-and-Bellow had gone.

Mr. Scully would not be coming home for a while, Ned learned from Evelyn, who had heard the news from her mother. He had had a stroke; he couldn't speak or move his right arm and leg. Doris had been sent for and was coming East to see her father.

Every afternoon, Ned went to Mr. Scully's back yard and waited for the gray cat. When it was bitterly cold, he stayed inside the woodshed, holding the paper bag of leftovers he had collected against his body so the food wouldn't freeze. As soon as he saw the cat coming from behind the outhouse, Ned would fill up the old bowl and put it on the ground. The cat would approach the shed with great caution, its head cocked as it kept its eye on Ned. He would back into the shed until the cat appeared satisfied at the distance Ned was standing from the bowl.

When Ned saw him eating, Ned felt as though he himself were being filled up, and that as the cat's hunger was eased, Ned's thoughts were freed from it. When he was with the cat, he could be unmindful of it.

He couldn't carry milk to school and back to Mr. Scully's shed. One day Papa took him for a haircut to the barbershop on River Street in Waterville. Afterwards, Ned told his father that he'd like to go down to the wharf where the Hudson River Dayline boats stopped to pick up passengers or drop them off. He told Papa he'd like to go by himself. His father had looked faintly surprised but had said, “All right,” and gone off to Schermerhorn's, the big department store in town, to buy Mrs. Wallis a bed jacket.

Ned went to a grocery store and bought several cans of evaporated milk with the money he had earned from Mr. Scully, then to the hardware store where he found a small ice pick. He was pretty sure his father wouldn't notice the bulging pockets of his coat. His father tended to look mostly at peoples' faces, not at what they were wearing.

When he got back into the Packard that day, his neck feeling cool and light after his haircut, he almost giggled because the cans of milk thudded noisily against each other as he settled into the seat. Papa didn't even look over at him.

“What do you do all the time behind that house,” Billy asked him one afternoon after school.

“I'm cleaning up things for Mr. Scully,” replied Ned without hesitation. “When he comes home from the hospital, the yard will be the way he wanted it.”

“But there's snow over everything,” Billy said.

“I'm working in the shed right now. There's lots to do there,” Ned said.

He wondered if there was anything he couldn't lie about now. It seemed to him he didn't even care anymore.

A week after Mr. Scully was taken to the hospital, Ned found the old Waterville taxi parked in front of his house, and Mr. Grob, the ancient taxi-driver, sitting in the front seat and blowing on his hands to keep them warm. The flivver had sunk into the snow past its windows.

Ned went around to the shed. He had some pork scraps in his lunchbox from last night's supper. He emptied them into the bowl, then poured evaporated milk over them from the can he'd punched holes in with the ice pick.

“Boy!” said a loud voice.

He turned to look at the kitchen door. A woman in a very thick, brown coat was standing on the step.

“What are you doing there?” she demanded.

“I'm feeding the cat,” he answered, too surprised by the woman's presence to say anything but the truth.

“My father didn't have a cat,” the woman said severely. “He would have told me if he had.”

“I work for him,” Ned said.

“He didn't have anyone working for him. He didn't need anyone,” she said.

“I chopped wood and brought it in for him, and got the mail from down the hill—when there was any mail—and I kept him company,” Ned said.

He felt a strange kind of exhilaration, a consciousness of strength as he stood there, talking to the resentful woman in the brown coat whom he knew was Mr. Scully's daughter, Doris. He realized suddenly that it had been a long time since he'd been able to give a true account of what he was doing and why he was doing it.

“Well, you won't be keeping him company anymore,” she said.

He was afraid to ask her what she meant, although he was pretty sure his mother would have known, and would have told him, if Mr. Scully had died. He stared dumbly at her.

“He can't do for himself at all now,” she said in a slightly less stern voice. “He can't speak. He certainly can't come back to this hovel.”

Hovel! It was true Mr. Scully's house was small and old and a bit decrepit, but it had fit so nicely around him, like a shell around a snail. Ned wondered what Doris's idea of a house was.

“I'm going to try to sell it,” she said. “He'll need every cent he can get for the nursing home.”

“Isn't he in the hospital?”

“He'll be moved out of there pretty soon.”

Ned had a powerful wish to see the old man, to watch him pouring out a drop of rum into his tea.

Now Mr. Scully's daughter drew up the collar of her coat, nearly hiding her face. She was staring across the valley to the low range of hills on the other side. “Snow!” she exclaimed scornfully. She turned her head and looked at Ned.

“Well, I guess you can feed the cat until someone buys this shack,” she said.

“Could I see Mr. Scully?”

“I suppose so,” she replied grudgingly. “Though it would be like visiting a wall, the way he is now. The doc says he might get better—you can't tell with that sort of thing. He can hear though. If you want me to tell him something …”

“Tell him I'm taking care of our cat,” Ned said. Doris nodded without looking at him and withdrew into the house.

Whether it was Mr. Grob and his taxi, and Mr. Scully's daughter being in the house, or for some other reason, the cat didn't show up for a few days. Ned would empty out the nearly frozen food he'd left the day before and replace it with fresh food and milk. Now that Mrs. Scallop was no longer at home, keeping a watch on him with her little blue-dot eyes, he took whatever he thought the cat would eat. Mrs. Kimball was friendly and pleasant to him, but she didn't pay any attention to what he did in the kitchen or the pantry. He guessed she was pretty accustomed to children coming and going and poking about and doing things that mostly didn't concern or worry her.

Three days before Christmas, Ned found a sign on a post stuck into the ground in front of Mr. Scully's house. It said: “For Sale.” There had been no Waterville newspaper in the mailbox for several days. As Ned started up the hill, he thought he glimpsed the cat a hundred yards or so away slipping behind a spruce tree. He didn't go after it, he figured it had been scared enough by the taxi and Doris. When he got to the shed, he was elated to find the bowl empty of the food he'd put in it before he went down the hill to the mailbox.