The House Guests

by John D. MacDonald

  They became accustomed to him, and the three cats romped, but Roger could not keep up the pace. About five frantic minutes would do him in and he would leave the game and go get some rest. And, in action, they were a little too speedy and agile for him, so that he wound up often cuffing at the empty place where a cat had just been.

  He enjoyed having them around. Johnny, Anne, and the cats lived in the guesthouse. The cat window was returned to service. In the dressing room there is a small, low chest of drawers. The top of it is eight or nine inches below the window sill, just the right height for Roger to sit on the chest with his forearms resting on the sill while he stares out at the night through the hole cut in the screen.

  Night after night after the visiting cats were gone, we would wonder where Roger was and go look for him and find him sitting in the dressing room in the dark, an absurd and touching sight from behind, like a tired woman at a tenement window looking out at the street. He did not want to go out into that darkness, but he sat there waiting for those other cats and looking for them.

  Here are some passages from a letter Johnny wrote us the following April (written on a Saturday after Jaymie had been gone since the previous Monday):

  We have looked and called and combed the roadsides, but he blended into the grass so well we could step right over him without seeing. We have gone through many theories and only one seems to fit. Two weeks ago we heard real wildcats screaming behind the house. We think nine pound Jaymie could cope with anything that moved except a forty pound Jaymie.… He died at night, not by human agency of car or gun, but in his own world; so, as our friend Tullio said, ‘He may have been beaten, but he wasn’t confused.’ … Anne is up to her nose in degree furies. I am simply waiting for James.

  • • FIFTEEN • •

  Johnny and Anne had acquired other livestock that spring—rabbits, some ducks, a pair of goslings. The geese adopted them as parents. By the time the geese were half grown, Johnny and Anne had become so enchanted with their responsiveness, intelligence, fastidiousness, and the ducks, by comparison, seemed such mindless, offensive, noisy, sloppy gluttons, they began to dine on duck.

  Geese are fantastically effective watchdogs. In the middle of one night there was a horrible racket out back. By then the wildcats had cleaned out most of the small creatures in their wood lot. That night they or it came to eat goose. They slew the gander and opened a long gash in the neck of the goose, before the kids were able to get out there and drive it away. Johnny and Anne had named the female Knees, a name which will seem apt to anyone who has stared with any objectivity at the knees of a goose. She was understandably agitated, and they brought her into the house, bandaged her neck, finally got her settled down.

  When they took walks, Knees and Grey would accompany them. Geese are not constructed for walks in the woods. They cannot see where they are stepping. She would do the best she could and wait noisily to be picked up and hoisted over obstacles she couldn’t manage. There were references to Knees in every letter. We felt that a goose could be nothing other than a rather absurd-looking idiot.

  They wrote us of leaving Knees alone outside one day when they went on an errand. When they came back she was gone. As they were looking for her, the phone rang. A farmer nearly a half mile down the highway had her, and they drove down to find the farmer and his wife and Knees standing on the porch. Knees acted nervous and gave them elaborate greetings.

  The farmer said that he had seen this here white goose going across that back lot out there, flat out, wings spread, running like hell, apparently with something chasing it. Thinking he might scare off whatever was after it, he had given a yell, whereupon Knees had spotted him, veered, and come directly to him to stand and lean against his leg, staring out into the field and talking a blue streak. Considerably rattled, he had headed back to the house with the goose practically underfoot, talking every step of the way. There it had climbed the steps to the porch, and damn if it didn’t act as if it knew they were going to come after it.

  Knees and Grey were at the camp when we got there last summer. Johnny and Anne had arrived first and opened it up.

  There is room for Knees in this cat book, because this book is concerned with how living creatures display their separate personalities only when there is trust and security and, most of all, attention.

  She was almost full-grown when she first saw water she could swim in. She went into it at once and headed off until she was a tiny white spot. At first she was a bad swimmer. She couldn’t stroke properly. Each thrust would swing her tail over toward the side opposite the thrust, so that instead of gliding she wobbled from side to side. When Anne went down to the dock and called her, Knees came heading back from far away, giving a resounding, triumphant QUONK every fifty feet.

  That first night she spent a happy hour in front of the floodlight by the deck, snapping moths out of the air with that multi-purpose beak. The kids were planning a trip very soon and were testing a tent they had erected under the pine trees back of the camp. When they went off to bed, they called Knees, and she went waddling along with them, keeping up a continuous conversation.

  In a few days they left, taking Grey, leaving Knees with us. By then Knees had given us her approval. We knew the formula for goose soup—cylindrical duck pellets which dissolve in water to make a greenish and singularly nasty-looking mess. Just as she was more responsive to Anne than to Johnny, she was more responsive to Dorothy than to me.

  We were most astonished by the “vocabulary” she had. There was a greeting noise, made when you approached her. This was accompanied by a series of low bows, strangely oriental in flavor. There was the eating noise when she was presented with soup, an ecstatic and delighted little chuckling that she could continue to make even when her bill was deep in the soup. She liked the soup donor to stay close by, preferably sitting on his or her heels on the other side of the bowl. Knees would stop the chuckling and soup-sucking at regular intervals to lift her head high and stare directly and fixedly into your face. For some reason a goose, head on, staring at you, looks cross-eyed.

  There was quiet conversation—when adult was inert and goose was paddling about or trudging about, a kind of peaceful little quabbling sound. There was excited conversation, such as when she was going for a walk, a swim, or a boat ride. This was a quabbling carried on at a louder and faster rate, punctuated every little while by one or two of those huge, resonant QUONK sounds. Sometimes QUANK!

  After Dorothy found that Knees adored having fresh grass pulled for her, she developed a con-artist sound, a tiny, inquisitive, plaintive queeping, head tilted, leaning hesitantly toward the thicket where the good grass grew, and which she dared not enter. Pull the poor little goose some grass.

  There were the almost inaudible little peeps she made when composing herself for sleep. There were the huge series of trumpeted quonkings giving warning of anyone or anything coming by land or by sea—in the daylight.

  There was the guttural little sound she made while preening and combing herself after the elaborate daily bath, a kind of expression of diligence and satisfaction.

  It surprised us to learn that geese yawn and also snore.

  The one kind of conversation which most intrigued us cannot be explained without discussing her daily routine. After the kids left she took over a small, shallow bay directly in front of the house. It lies to the left of the small, thickety peninsula leading to the dock. A spur of rock runs off to the left, making her bay into a U with the opening to the left, a U about ten feet across and ten feet long. Her dish was on the sand rim of the U opposite the opening.

  Geese apparently have phenomenal eyesight and hearing. In the flock they must somehow have a rotating-duty system for the sentry geese. Being a one-goose flock is a very serious and exhausting business indeed. She was very white. She was such an impressive, blazing white that even by starlight we could see her out there standing on the end of the dock, no matter at what time of night we looked out, head very high, tense a
nd alert and sleepless. We learned she seemed a lot more relaxed if we left the floodlights turned on. They did not reach that far, but at least she seemed to feel she could not see anything that might be coming after her from the bushes.

  In the daytime if you called to her, you would get the big, jolly QUANK routine. If you called to her at night, you would get an answer you could just barely hear. And so we fell into the habit of going down there each night to say good night to the goose. Her conversation was hilarious. It was a variation of the daytime excited gabbling, but it was carried on in such a hushed tone, it was exactly like a person whispering. She would keep turning her head from side to side, inspecting the darkness about, and she was obviously telling us of all the horrors lurking about It was such a convincing performance we would find ourselves talking very quietly too. One night she got so carried away with her recital of terrors, she gave out with one great, shocking, rusty QUONK that frightened her into an abrupt silence. She listened for a long time, then began muttering to us again.

  One night we saw her down there floating in her little bay. We spoke, and there was absolutely no response. We went down to the waters edge. Still without a sound she came out of the water and paddled around behind me and stood leaning against me and looking out around my leg. Only then did she make the faintest of sounds, and it seemed like controlled hysteria. She could not have said, more clearly, “It’s really after me tonight” She came back up to the house with us, glancing back, talking more bravely. I lifted her onto the deck. She went at once to the screen door to be let in. We let her in with certain reluctance. The venerable expression—loose as a goose—is soundly anchored to reality. But we couldn’t leave her out there. We piled furniture to keep her sequestered in the kitchen and bedroom hallway area and paved it with newspapers. Once inside she talked ever more loudly. When she began to settle down we went to bed, leaving our bedroom door wedged open about three inches so we could hear her if she got tangled up in anything out there. In bed, we heard her come flapping along the hall, muttering. She stuck her head through the three-inch gap, extended the full length of her long white neck, gave one huge, jolly, ear-shattering QUANK, and then padded back to the kitchen. That night we heard a wildcat scream.

  We were afraid a precedent had been set, but that was the only night all summer long she demanded refuge. I don’t think she was kidding.

  In daytime excited talk she loved to have Dorothy quabble back at her, and she would put that bill an inch from Dorothy’s lips, and they would go it at a great rate, Knees getting more and more agitated.

  She did a lot of sleeping each morning, from first light on, catching up from the night’s vigil, standing on one ridiculous foot, head laid along her back. By mid-morning she was hearty and cheerful. Because of a large and very shallow rocky shelf about 150 feet off our shore, I mark it with a buoy each summer to keep water skiers from bursting their primitive skulls upon it, and as a guide to friends visiting in their boats. The buoy is round, larger than a basketball, and floats high, painted half red and half white, the white side uppermost as it floats. Day after day, Knees would swim out, particularly when the lake had a slight chop, and float right beside that buoy, bobbing up and down with it. I imagine that, driven by the flock instinct, it was the nearest thing to another goose she could find.

  The daily ablution, performed in her little bay, was extensive. She would dip her head in a manner that would lift water up and send it running down her back, pausing to dig at herself, ruffle herself up, send small feathers drifting downwind. After at least ten minutes of this, she would do surface dives and swim underwater, going outside her bay and swimming ten and fifteen feet at a time, visible from the dock as a swift, white, and very graceful shape. If, as Anne discovered, people would gather around, clap their hands, and say Good Goose, she could be induced to keep the underwater act up for much longer than usual. After this portion of the routine, she would stand at the end of the rock ridge and preen herself for a half hour. There are oil glands under their wings, and these secretions are used to smooth down each feather. Twice in the summer some motorboat oil drifted in, giving her a ring like a nasty bathtub. Each time she just kept washing over and over until it was gone, hour after hour of effort.

  The first time the merganser family came along, Knees became terribly excited. She went after them, big white wings flapping, big web feet running along the surface of the water, neck outstretched, honking enthusiastic greetings. At this apparition, the ducks took off like rockets. She sat on the water and watched them go and paddled back to her bay. After that, she never paid the slightest bit of attention to them. She gave no evidence of hearing them or seeing them even when they passed within ten feet of the end of the dock.

  No one in the family could go out in a boat without Knees insisting on coming along. Rowboat, kicker-boat, canoe, sailboat, her self-assigned place was in the bow, standing tall, honking at everything in sight. Dorothy has a water bicycle at the lake which she uses during the last of the daylight. When she took it out, Knees would come paddling along, hollering. Dorothy would stop; Knees would flounder up onto one of the aluminum pontoons, and off they would go into the sunset. But on the water bike, Knees was usually very silent. She would make some sotto voce comments, watch the shore carefully, then manage to fall off as awkwardly as possible when they returned to the little bay.

  People liked to either troll slowly for bass out beyond our rocks, or anchor and fish. Knees trumpeted at every passing boat. The very slow ones and the ones which anchored got her so excited she could not contain herself. Sooner or later she would take off in that dead run, that half-flying, half-running zoom across the top of the water right at the boat. Reaching it she would settle down and then merely circle it if it was anchored, or go along with it if it was trolling, quabbling loudly. The smart fishermen learned they either had to lift her into the boat or go fish somewhere else. Once in an early morning mist she went so far down the lake shore, escorting some fishermen, I could no longer see her or them from the dock. But I could hear her, and I could hear the plaintive voice of the fisherman overriding hers, pleading, “Go home, duck! For God’s sake, go home!”

  I saw one friendly approach which could have turned out disastrously for Knees. A boat was about a hundred yards out from our dock. A man and a woman were in it, fishing. Knees, after considerable racket, worked herself up to the proper pitch and took off. She could be quite a sight to an unsuspecting stranger, big white wings flapping, feet slapping the surface of the water, coming right at you, quonking furiously, moving at perhaps twenty miles an hour. While the man merely stared at the oncoming goose, the woman sprang to her feet, grabbed an oar and took aim like Mickey Mantle. Some people are afraid of birds, and some have heard that geese are dangerous, confusing them, no doubt, with swans. Knees halted ten feet short of the boat. The woman sat down. The man started the motor, and they roared away from there, and Knees came paddling thoughtfully home.

  Usually, when boats did not leave, if we called to Knees she would often come chugging in, talking all the way about what she’d been doing.

  When anybody went swimming, she was transported. She would go right along with them, yap into their faces, and try to stand on their shoulders. With Johnny and Anne, she would dive and circle their legs, brushing against them under water.

  Best of all, Knees loved the catamaran. I had ordered it. It came in a cardboard box of suitable size to make a coffin for the Cardiff giant. The detailed instructions said the average twelve-year-old could put it together in an afternoon. It took me three days, plus considerable help the final afternoon from Dorothy’s brother. Under sail, the people sit on a canvas sling, about eight feet square, not unlike a trampolin, laced to a frame elevated six inches above the twin hulls.

  We had only to start rigging the sail, and Knees would come out of a sound sleep and come paddling around the headland toward the other bay, quonking with expectant pleasure.

  Not long before Labor Day, Do
rothy and I took Knees on her final sail of the summer. We crossed the lake and ran slowly before a light breeze down the row of camps on the other side, about sixty feet off shore. By then Knees was a celebrity bird all over that lake.

  We would hear child voices yell from shore. “Hey! There’s Knees! Hi, Knees. Hey, Knees!” And that bird would respond, each time, by gathering herself and giving out with such huge honks, they resonated and echoed off the hills and deafened us and delighted a whole lake shore of children.

  Our nephew, John Prentiss, visited us one day last summer and brought Kristin to meet us, the girl he is now married to. Kristin has lovely long hair, a natural strawberry blond shade. They sat down by the dock, and Knees circled Kristin, gabbling with excited approval. And finally she began to preen Kristin’s long hair, strand by strand, working her way around the girl’s head, uncannily gentle, making her small pleasure sounds for the entire fifteen minutes it took.

  I used the incident in a short story which This Week Magazine published in November 1963.

  The goose was the good thing last summer, and Grey was the bad thing. He had grown into a large and handsome cat and, I am afraid, a bold and reckless cat. The second trip Johnny and Anne took, they left Grey with us too. He was happy and busy. He despised Knees, probably resenting the attention she got. When he learned how afraid she was of any subtle rustling in the brush, he would torment her in the evening by stalking her, sometimes sending her in a wild honking dash out to where she would float beside her buoy, reluctant to return.

  It was his habit in the evening to go in and out through the window a half dozen times after dark, before we went to bed. One night he went out just before dark. He didn’t return during the evening. We went out and called him. He did not return all night. Had he returned, he would have made himself evident. He had a curious trick. He didn’t sleep with the people, but when he decided it was time they should get up, he didn’t holler. He merely walked across them, stomping. He would step lightly at other times. In the early morning he would deliberately stomp. There is no other word to describe it.