The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (10 page)

All the same, Sister believed he was in a good humor.

“Do you have chickens?” she asked.

They did, and ducks and one old gander.

“And a cow?”

She could not quite catch whether or not they had a cow.

But dogs they had. Three. And they had cats, she supposed? No? No, the last cat they had had got run over on the highway, it must be—oh, six, seven years ago.

Its name was Citronella. Or maybe he had that one confused with another that was a little bit lighter in shade.

And had they never had another since?

Never another. No'm.

Sister said she hoped that was not because they had lost their liking for cats.

Leonard stopped sucking on his pipe and looked at her out of the corner of one eye. Was she working her way around to trying to give him one of them measly kittens?

“Well, to tell you the truth,” he said, “we ain't much on cats. Dogs, now …”

Sister assured him that she was fond of dogs, too. Many people who loved cats were not, but she was.

“Now if it was puppies you was trying to get shut of, why, that'd be something else again,” said Leonard.

For a moment Sister did not understand. Then, “Oh, dear,” she cried. “You thought I wanted to—” She could hardly think of it. “Why, I'd never give one of them away. Not for anything.” And certainly not, she thought, to a man who had just said he did not like cats.

Leonard chuckled. “Well, miss, now I knew that was just what you'd say. I was just testing you. I knew you wouldn't part with one of your kittens. And to tell you the honest truth, I do like cats. Like 'em fine. Yes, indeed—cats.”

Sister smiled faintly.

Leonard knocked out his pipe. When he turned from picking up his gloves he found her gone.

“I'm sure it's very good of you to say so, Nancy—but it's perfectly inedible. And soufflé, you know, is a dish that Mrs. Hansen is so good at ordinarily.”

“No, no, Martha,” Nancy Taylor said. “It's fine.” And Enid and Evaline spoke up, “Yes, yes. It's fine. Really.”

Their table was in the grape arbor. Shashlik was slowly doing to a turn over a charcoal brazier within Martha's reach. The juices simmered from the meat and fell on the coals with a sizzle and a puff of smoke. The smell of sweet basil and fresh earth drifted in from the garden. The day was warm and still. Cats slumbered on the rocks.

“You are kind, all of you,” said Martha gratefully. “Poor Mrs. Hansen. She worked so hard on her soufflé, too—knowing you were coming. You can imagine how badly she felt. After what happened, she wanted to make another one, you know, though the poor woman could hardly get a grip on her nerves.”

“After what happened?” said Evaline.

“She saw a dead mouse,” said Edmond.

“Edmond. Dear. Not at the table,” said Martha.

“She always spoils the dinner when she sees a dead mouse,” said Edmond.

“Or a live one,” said Martha. “Which is considerably more often.”

It was true that Sister's cats were rather slack at mousing. She fed them too much, Martha said. Loving cats had not made Sister hate mice. She loved her cats all the more because they did not molest them.

Martha gave a toss of her head. “Madness!” she cried gaily. “Plumbing that never works, a horse no one can ride, a gardener who won't let you near your own garden—and a houseful of cats that won't catch mice. Where else but at the Walter Taylors'?”

“But really, Martha,” said Nancy, “I find the soufflé …”

“What that poor woman must think about this fantastic household!” cried Martha. “The stories she must tell in the village about the Taylors!—
us
Taylors, I mean,” she added with a smile.

“Oh, Lord!” cried Nancy. “And our Mrs. Porter about
us
Taylors!”

Martha smiled down the table upon her sister-in-law. And that smile dealt with all attempts to match her singularity.

Being poached upon by nineteen cats who caught a mouse a year was one of the most delightful of the Taylors' whimsicalities.

“Nineteen!” visitors exclaimed. They were answered by Martha's smile, bashful and guilty, a smile that said: I know it's a weakness in me, but isn't it an adorable weakness.

“Well, I'm afraid we shall simply have to call the soufflé a bad job,” said Martha, and pushed hers away. So did the others, their appetites for it fairly gone by now.

“May I have some more, please?”

This came from the end of the table.

Everyone turned and found it was Sister. A queer child.

Martha took the skewer of meat from the brazier. Cats stirred, yawning and stretching, sniffing the air.

Serving the plates, Martha said, “I suppose Sister has told you that three more were born this morning.”

“Why, no,” exclaimed Nancy Taylor, turning to smile at Sister kindly.

Perhaps she might have asked to see them, had not Huckleberry's paws appeared just then over the edge of the table. He jumped and landed near Evaline. Sister leaped from her chair. But Martha was already lifting him by the scruff and putting him on the ground.

“Do sit down, child,” she said. “I can lift a cat.”

When it happened that a cat could not escape punishment, Sister tried always to be the first to reach him. If it must be done, she would rather do it herself. There was never a person who could congratulate a cat while apparently scolding it, as Sister could.

A silence fell on the table. To break it, Aunt Nancy said, “What have you been doing with yourself since we saw you last, Edmond?”

“Oh,” said Edmond casually, “just running true to form.” He loved to spring phrases on them like that. There was a large family stock of the funny things he had said, and he was always hoping to add to it.

“Poor Mrs. Hansen had not quite collected herself, it seems, by the time she got to the pudding,” said Martha.

Roast for dinner was in the oven, and in the quiet, clean kitchen where the clock on the wall ticked contentedly, Mrs. Hansen sat at the table sucking her teeth. Before her was spread her tabloid. Her eyes were wide and her lips indignant as she read; she held her breath while fumbling for the page in the back section where her story was continued. When she finished it she had to sit back, breathing heavily, and pat her chest to soothe the outrage in her heart. She saw herself coming home from working late to support her three fatherless children on a cold night down a dark deserted street. Suddenly, out of the shadows a figure loomed, reeling drunkenly. It made a guttural sound. It was …

Queenie—prowling in from the sunroom.

Mrs. Hansen yelped. Little did those three children Mr. Hansen left her with appreciate all that she went through for their sakes.

Sister, coming down the hall, heard Mrs. Hansen's gasp, and having some idea what might have caused it, turned and stole off to the library. She curled up on the sofa and found her place in a book. But the windows were open; there was a breeze in the maple tree and the steady rasping of Leonard raking the gravel walks. Soon she was asleep.

“Sister,” said Martha, “bring me a pincushion.”

Evaline's party dress was almost finished. She stood with one arm raised for Martha to let out a seam.

“Can't you find one, Sister?” Martha called.

“Here's one, Aunt Martha,” said Enid.

“Thank you, dear. Never mind, Sister.”

“She isn't here, anyway,” said Enid. “She went downstairs long ago.”

Martha smiled. “Worried over her cats, I suppose.”

“Nineteen,” said Nancy Taylor.

Martha gave the dress a final tug, and settled back in her chair. The studio had been filling with gentle, late-afternoon light, and Martha was moved to think of her own gentleness, her patience. She let Sister keep nineteen disgusting cats, with never a thought for her lovely home.

“It is a lot, isn't it,” she said. She was filled with wonder at herself. “But you wouldn't want me to make her give them up?” She sighed. “I suppose it's what any other woman would do.”

“But, Aunt Martha,” said Evaline, “don't they make you—” She broke off with a shudder.

Martha said, “Yes—I forget, don't I, that they are disgusting to many people. That's selfish of me, isn't it? I mean, to allow my child to offend others.” She sighed and said, “Perhaps, my dear, you will understand better when you are a mother yourself. You know what they say about a mother's love.”

“There is more than one kind of blindness,” said Nancy, her voice grown suddenly hard.

Martha did not like her tone. She found herself getting excited. She said, “Well, I'd like to know of another woman with a house as fine as mine who let nineteen cats simply ruin it to please a child.”

“Or to please her conscience,” said Nancy. But she had not been able to say it as loud as she had meant to. The whine of a cat, beginning low and growing to a howl, had hushed them all. Nancy gave a shudder. Enid came to her and sat on the arm of her chair. Nancy hugged her reassuringly. Evaline came, too, a little jealous perhaps.

“Why,” said Martha with a little laugh, “it's hard to imagine Sister without her cats.”

They all sat trying to do it.

Dusk was turning to darkness. In the garden, under the balconies, among the plants in the rocks, cats were waking, yawning, and stretching. They prowled in from the woods, from the drive, from the stables. One cat licked the table in the grape arbor, growling at all comers, while another searched beneath the table, sniffing for scraps.

They gathered in the courtyard. They perched themselves on benches, on tables, in the dirt of potted plants. One old cat found a vase in his way, knocked it off the table, and settled himself comfortably. They all sat waiting intently, each securely in possession of his spot.

Sister yawned and rubbed the sleep from her eyes and raised herself to her feet with a mighty stretch.

She made her way down the dark hall, stepping over a pail someone had left in the way. Passing the windows, she could see the cats listening to her approach and gathering in the moonlight near the door, purring all together.

Sister held the door open. Huckleberry was the first one in, and Sister, with a smile and a nod, watched him make straight for his spot under the Swedish fireplace.

The Shell

T
HIS WOULD
be the season, the year, when he would have the reach of arm to snap the big gun easily to his shoulder. This fall his shoulder would not be bruised black from the recoil. The hunting coat would fit him this season. This would be
the
season—the season when he would have to shoot the shell.

It was a twelve-gauge shotgun shell. The brass was green with verdigris, the cardboard, once red, was faded to a pale and mottled brown, the color of old dried blood. He knew it intimately. On top, the firing cap was circled by the loop of a letter
P
. Around the rim, circling the
P
, were the two words of the trade name,
Peters Victor;
the gauge number, 12; and the words,
Made in USA
. The wad inside the crimp of the firing end read,
Smokeless
; 3¼; 1⅛-8. This meant 3¼ drams of smokeless powder, 1⅛ ounces of number 8 shot—birdshot, the size for quail. It was the one shell he had found afterwards that had belonged to his father, one that his father had not lived to shoot. So he had thought at first to keep the shell unfired. But he knew his father would have said that a shotgun shell was meant to be fired, and he, Joe, had added that any shotgun shell which had belonged to him was meant to hit what it was fired at. For four years now it had been out of Joe's pocket, and out of his hand fingering it inside his pocket, only to stand upon the table by his bed at night. For four years now he had been going to shoot it when he was good enough, but the better he became the further away that seemed to get, because good enough meant, though he did not dare put it to himself in quite that way, as good as his father had been.

He had been in no great rush about it during those first two seasons afterwards, then there had been time—though now it seemed that even then there had been less time than he admitted. But on opening day of the third, last year's season, he had suddenly found himself sixteen years old—for though his birthday came in May, it was in November, on opening day of quail season, that he really began another year—time was suddenly short, and then overnight gone completely, after that day when he returned with the best bag he had ever taken and, in his cockiness, had told his mother about the shell, what he had saved it for and what he meant to do with it.

He had not allowed himself to forget that at that moment he could hear his father saying, “Do it and then talk about it.” He had argued weakly in reply that he was telling only his mother, and then it was not his father but the voice of his own conscience which had cried, “Only!” Because whom alone did he want to tell, to boast to, and because already he knew that that was not what his father would have said, but rather, “Do it and don't talk about it afterwards either.”

She had seemed hardly surprised to learn about the shell. She seemed almost to have known about it, expected it. But she handled it reverently because she could see that he did.

“Aren't you good enough now?” she said.

“Hah!” he said.

She was turning the shell in her fingers. “I always knew nothing would ever happen to him while hunting,” she said. “I never worried when he was out with a gun … Well,” she brought herself up, “but I worry about you. Oh, I know you're good with a gun. I'm not afraid you'll hurt yourself.”

“Not with the training I've had,” he said.

“No,” she said. “What I worry about is the amount of time and thought you give it. Are you keeping up in school? The way you go at it, Joe! It hardly even seems to be a pleasure to you.”

Pleasure? No, it was not a pleasure, he thought. That was the name he had always given it, but he was older now and no longer had to give the name pleasure to it. Sometimes—often times when he enjoyed it most—it was the opposite of pleasure. What was the proper name for it? He did not know. It was just what he did, the thing he would have been unable to stop doing if he had wanted to; it was what he was.