Dancing Cats of Applesap

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “Gracious alive! They’re bewitched!” gasped a woman.

  But they were not bewitched, almost everyone could see that. The cats’ dance was not weird or eerie. It was not a dark ritual left over from some unrecorded civilization. Neither did the cats appear hypnotized or crazed. They performed innocently and happily, like small children who, hearing the orchestra strike up at a party, dance out alone for the sheer pleasure of moving, unaware of how they may look, or of the grown-ups around them laughing and pointing.

  “How beautiful!” gasped Melba. She had arrived almost in tears at the crowd’s outer rim. Now she watched in fascination. The spectators were murmuring also. Some could not keep their own feet still, and swayed to the music’s throb.

  Then, too soon, the marvelous dance was over. Mr. Jiggs strummed a final chord. The cats came down daintily on all fours. The crowd shuffled and began to speak aloud.

  Their voices brought Mr. Jiggs back to earth. Abruptly, his head shot up and he looked around, blinking heavily. Then before anyone could clap or race over to shake his hand (“What a tremendous performance!” people were saying), he leapt to his feet. Mr. Jiggs dropped his guitar with a clatter on the ground. His face turned a deep purple and his eyes bulged like marbles. He opened his mouth, and bellowed:

  “Get out!” He clutched at the door with one hand. “Get away! All of you!” Astonished and hurt, the crowd stumbled backward.

  “Go home!” shouted Mr. Jiggs, quivering with rage. He could have been yelling at a threatening pack of dogs. “You have no right here spying on me. Get out of my yard. Get away from my cats!”

  A frightened child cried. People turned to flee. Here was the craziness they had expected to see after the wild chase down Main Street. Now the charm of the cats’ dance went out of their heads, and was replaced by fear and anger.

  Melba realized the danger at once.

  “No!” she shouted, jumping to Mr. Jiggs’ side. “No! Stay! This is a celebration! Free ice-cream cones for all and…”

  “Get out” roared Mr. Jiggs, cutting her off. “We are closed. Go away and don’t come back!” He picked up his guitar and stamped into the store.

  So, the crowd went. Melba couldn’t stop them. She tried, completely forgetting her shyness about speaking up. She pleaded and gestured and accosted everyone she knew by name. But nobody paid any attention, and Miss Toonie, who might have backed her up, was nowhere to be seen. One look at Mr. Jiggs, hunched over his wretched guitar, had been enough for her. One glance at the cats prancing eagerly at his spineless feet turned her heart to stone. Speechless with anger, she marched home, leaving Melba to face the furious throngs alone.

  “Melba! Have you gone crazy? Do your parents know where you are?” barked a woman who was a friend of her mother.

  “I’m going right home to phone the Glowville Humane Society,” a man growled. “This town is infested with cats!”

  Even the children went, called away by their parents. They mounted their bicycles and slowly pedaled off, glancing back over their shoulders.

  When the people were all gone, only Melba stood, stricken, on the front walk. Around her cringed the cats, now frightened and disoriented.

  “Poor things,” whispered Melba, looking down at them. “It’s all over for you now.”

  She opened the store’s front door to let them slink inside. Then Melba herself went home, and the route she chose was an out-of-the-way one, and gradually, as she walked, her shoulders sagged and her eyes fell shyly down to her feet.

  “It’s a funny thing,” said Victor that night, “but we didn’t see a sign of that groundhog all day. He seems to have disappeared somewhere.”

  Even this news couldn’t cheer Melba, who crept away to her room, refusing to answer any of her parents’ questions.

  “A cat march?” said Melba’s astounded father.

  “Hush,” said her mother. “Don’t talk about it now.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  NOW IT WOULD SEEM that Jiggs’ Drug Store was in a pretty hopeless position. Most would say, in fact, that it was in a worse position than if Melba and Miss Toonie had done nothing at all about the store’s going broke.

  For instance, if they had sat back and shyly twiddled their thumbs, nobody would have thought of calling the Glowville Humane Society to complain about the cats. Instead, the next morning, a large van pulled up outside the drug store and drove away shortly after with every one of Miss Toonie’s friends packed inside.

  Then again, Miss Toonie would never have been summoned to Hopsburg Civil Court and been fined five hundred dollars for obstructing traffic.

  “And starting a riot in the peaceful town of Applesap, New York,” declared the judge, shaking a finger at her.

  “But your honor! I don’t have five hundred dollars,” cried Miss Toonie.

  “Then borrow it,” he answered curtly.

  If Melba and Miss Toonie had followed Mr. Jiggs’ example and moped in a corner, Melba’s mother would never have received that angry telephone call from Irma Herring’s mother.

  “You must go and apologize to Irma,” said Melba’s mother.

  For Melba, this was worse than Miss Toonie’s five-hundred-dollar fine because it gave Irma the chance to snicker and tell everyone at school.

  “That’s what happens when you stick your neck out,” Mr. Jiggs could have told them, but he wasn’t talking to anyone. He was home alone behind his drawn shades, strumming his guitar.

  Meanwhile, the store just sat there on Dunn Street. No one moved out and, more importantly, no one moved in. The dry cleaning establishment had decided not to buy the place after all. They had heard about the grand march, you see, and didn’t want a building where one hundred cats had been cooped up, going crazy, for heaven knows how long.

  Of course, everybody had heard about the cats by this time. Even though they were over at the humane society now, people couldn’t stop talking about them. People who had seen the cats dance told others who hadn’t seen, and they in turn told more people. It became important in Applesap, and even in Glowville and Hopsburg, to know someone who had actually watched the dance in person. And if you happened to be a person who had been there, then that was even more important and you could feel very proud of yourself.

  So, within a matter of days, the cat dance became a legend. The more people talked, the more extraordinary the cats became, and the more exquisite their dance, and the more unusual the whole event looked.

  It wasn’t long after that folks began to look at Melba as if she were some kind of wizard.

  They stopped her on the street to ask questions. Curious children rode their bicycles slowly down the sidewalk in front of her house. Classmates who had hardly noticed that Melba was in their class turned around and stared at her sitting at her desk in the back of the room.

  When people did those things, Melba acted the way she had always acted. She blushed, and stammered, and held her breath until they looked away. But, for once, nobody seemed to think this was stupid at all. Some people, she noticed, smiled at her timidly, as if they wanted to say something, but didn’t quite dare.

  One day, about a week after the cat march, Melba received a telephone call from the Glowville City Crier.

  “The who?” asked Melba in alarm.

  “You know. The newspaper!” hissed Victor, who had answered the call. “They want to talk to you.” He held out the receiver to her impatiently, and with a look of long-suffering.

  This past week had been an irritating one for Victor. At every turn—at school, at the Super Queen, in the street—he had been accosted by townsfolk whose curiosity revolved, in a most annoying and repetitive way, around a single point. That point was Jiggs’ cat-ridden drug store, and by extension, his shy little sister’s strange connection with it.

  What was Melba up to? people asked. How had she gotten involved? Would the cats dance again? Was the drug store really closed?

  “How should I know?” shouted Victor, in exasperation, because, m
ore irritating still, he didn’t know anything. Melba kept to her room. She wasn’t talking.

  “Am I supposed to be your press agent or something?” howled Victor through her closed door.

  Now he held the receiver out to her as if it were yet another, deplorable insult.

  Melba didn’t like talking on the telephone any more than she liked going to parties. On the telephone, you had to talk fast, and clearly, and there was no time to think between words. People who talked to Melba on the phone nearly always ended by shouting at her: “Are you still there?” “Well, say something!”

  “Come on. They’re waiting,” Victor said.

  “But what will I say?”

  “First find out what they want, dummy!”

  Melba grasped the receiver as if it were Victor’s shotgun, and said hello at about the same pitch a groundhog might have said it from a hiding place deep underground.

  The voice that boomed out from the other end of the wire rocked her back on her heels. It belonged to Philip M. Riddle, editor-in-chief of the Glowville City Crier. Mr. Riddle was an impatient man with much on his mind. Foremost among his many worries was a dread fear of being beaten out for news by Hopsburg’s competing newspaper, The Howler. Therefore, he came right to the point.

  “Have they called?” he bellowed at Melba.

  “Who?” she quavered.

  Mr. Riddle took this answer to mean no.

  “Well, thank heavens for that, anyway!” he continued. “We’ve been tracking this story like bloodhounds for two solid days, and, from what I hear, The Howler is doing the same. Whoever this Mr. Jackson Jiggs is, he’s either never at home or not answering his phone. And this Angela Toonie, (you know her, I think) has had her telephone disconnected!” Mr. Riddle shouted in great disgust.

  “Because of the five-hundred-dollar fine,” Melba put in weakly. “She’s broke.” Mr. Riddle was unimpressed.

  “So it’s come down to you, young lady,” he went on. “And what I want to know is, when can you stage it again?”

  “Stage what again?” asked Melba, now feeling more amazed than frightened by Mr. Riddle’s bellows.

  “Why, the dance, of course! We’ve heard all about it. Everybody has. But a strange occurrence like that needs documentation. We want to run the story, but we’ll need photos to prove that it happened, and since we weren’t there the first time, naturally we’ll need a restage job.”

  Mr. Riddle talked faster than anyone Melba had ever spoken to, on or off the phone. By the time she hung up, he had covered so much ground on so few breaths, that Melba was gasping herself.

  “Whew!” she exclaimed, sitting back in her chair.

  “What’s up?” asked Victor. He had been slouching at the window, pretending an interest in the vegetable garden, where (further insult!) not a hair of any groundhog had been visible for over a week.

  “Come on. Tell,” he complained. Melba sprang to her feet and made for the front door.

  “Great news!” she shouted. “I’ve got to go see Miss Toonie right away!”

  A second later, she was gone. Victor shrugged. He picked up his shotgun and wandered out to the field to kick a few early-blooming daffodils.

  Hold on a minute. What’s all that noise? There is some sort of fight going on between Melba and the Guinness Book of World Records! Melba is yelling, and the Guinness Book is…is…Well, what is the Guinness Book saying? Are they coming to Applesap or not?

  Now Melba has hung up the phone and flopped back in her chair, deep in thought. Her face has a beaten-up look on it.

  “They say they’re not coming,” she answers at last.

  What?

  “They say they’re not interested.”

  But that’s impossible! These cats are fantastic. Who has ever heard of a shy, nervous animal like a cat getting up to dance right out in public? Who has ever heard of a hundred of them? It’s a world record if there ever was one!

  “I told them that,” says Melba, shrugging. “I said our cats were an inspiration to the world and a lot more important than someone who swallows twenty-five nails.

  “When you look at someone swallowing twenty-five nails, all you can think is: ‘How terrible. Will he live through it?’ But our cats, well, the way they dance makes people want to dance themselves. Their dancing makes you start thinking that maybe you can do things you never thought you’d be able to do. It’s a miracle, but the sort of miracle that shows you what is possible.”

  And what did the Guinness Book have to say about that?

  Melba frowns. “They wanted to know how old I was. And when I told them, ‘ten,’ they cleared their throats and said they’d put my report on file.

  “And then I got mad and said age had nothing to do with the cats.

  “And they said yes it did.

  “And then I yelled that they’d be missing something if they didn’t come look.

  “And they said no they wouldn’t.

  “And then I said how would they like it if I called up “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” instead.

  “They said that was all right with them, and hung up in my face.”

  Poor Melba. That’s the very thing she was afraid of. That’s why she was nervous about calling them in the first place.

  Melba shrugs again. “It’s a funny thing, but now that the Guinness Book of World Records has actually hung up in my face, it isn’t so bad as I thought.

  “In fact,” says Melba, brightening up, “it’s not bad at all!

  “Hey!” she shouts, jumping up. “You know what? I’m not scared of them anymore! It’s the same as when I pinched Irma Herring’s nose. I didn’t care what anyone thought about me, I just knew I had to do it. Only, with Irma, the feeling didn’t last. I was back to getting the jitters the very next day.

  “Now I think I’m onto something stronger,” says Melba. “I guess it takes practice to figure out how to stand up for your rights.

  “Do you know what I’m going to do now? I’m going to call the Guinness Book of World Records back. This time, I won’t yell. I’ll keep cool and keep on telling them why they should come out here and see the cats. And if they hang up again, I’ll call them back. You just wait. This story’s not over yet!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  MISS TOONIE HAD NEVER been a rich woman. She lived in a small, faded house on a seedy side-street in Applesap about twenty minutes walk from Jiggs’ Drug Store. On her soda fountain salary, she had managed to furnish her home comfortably, if sparsely, with secondhand furniture. To save money, she did not own a car, or a television set, or a clothes washer. But she had enough to pay her heating bills and her electric bills and, if she was careful, a little left over every month to put toward her garden.

  It was a small garden occupying a patch of ground in front of the house. In part of it she grew vegetables, which, during the summer months, saved on her grocery bill. But the larger section, the section Miss Toonie scrimped for every year, was given to flowers, a wonderful assortment which she purchased as seedlings in May from a local garden shop.

  Flowers pleased Miss Toonie. Usually, on a pleasant day this time of year, she could be seen out in her garden transplanting mounds of pink petunias, and white alyssum, and bright blue salvia from store-bought flats into the ground.

  Now, however, Miss Toonie sat listlessly inside her house. There was no money for this year’s flowers. The five-hundred-dollar fine had wiped out her savings and put her in debt. Occasionally, she rose to make herself a pot of tea, but even tea is expensive and soon…

  But Miss Toonie was not thinking about money. She had made do on little and could make do on less. Flowers were a luxury. Cats, however, especially cats whom one had grown fond of, who were in all the world one’s truest friends, were a necessity. Miss Toonie was lost without her cats. In the long week after the van had come to take them away (and how she howled against that! while spineless Jiggs merely turned his face away), in the long week afterwards, her face grew pale, the fuzz came out of he
r hair, her fierce, proud shoulders drooped and she walked like a slow old woman.

  Minute by minute Miss Toonie thought only of her cats, and twice, in a fit of worry, she had visited by taxi their cages at the humane society. But to see them there, cooped up, frightened, rubbing forlornly against each other, had depressed her further.

  “Well,” sniffed Miss Toonie. “At least you have each other.” Yet even this would not last, she knew. One hundred cats were too many for any humane society, even the most humane, to support for very long. There was the hope that a few of the least mangy and least broken-down might be picked out and taken to new homes. For the rest—no one wanted them, no one cared if they lived or died.

  “Who else but me could love Butch’s smashed face and awkward limp?” thought Miss Toonie, gazing through the bars at her old friend. Given the choice between a dirty brown cat who can answer the telephone when no one is looking and a brand new cuddly kitten, which would a new owner select?

  Miss Toonie came home, made another pot of tea, and sagged on her living room sofa. There Melba found her that afternoon, and it was a measure of Miss Toonie’s utter dejection that she did not so much as raise her tired eyes when Melba told her about Mr. Riddle. Even when Melba told her about Mr. Riddle’s promise to personally pick up the cats from the humane society and drive them to the drug store for a morning of picture taking, she could not be roused.

  “Useless. Useless,” was all she said in a faint voice. “Jiggs would never agree.”

  “But, Miss Toonie! It could make the cats famous!”

  “No, it couldn’t. After the photographs are finished they’ll be carted off back to prison again. People don’t care about cats, never have and never will. Don’t you start believing that one newspaper story can change that. I never believe anything I read in the papers, anyhow!” she added, getting up a bit of steam.

  She slumped again. In the silence that followed, Melba lapsed into a fidget. Miss Toonie’s limp misery was a strange thing to her, and Melba always grew nervous in the face of strangeness.