Not seeing me by the hatrack, he clumped into the parlor, nodded familiarly to Father Burner and Father Desmond, and said, again to himself, “Somebody changed my chairs around.”
Father Desmond suddenly shot up from his chair, said, “I gotta go,” and went. Mr. Keller seemed inclined to stick around. Father Burner, standing, waited for Father Malt to come away from the library table, where he’d spotted some old copies of Church Property Administration.
Father Malt thrust his hand under the pile of magazines, weighed it, and slowly, with difficulty, turned on his crutches, to face Father Burner.
They stared at each other, Father Malt and Father Burner, like two popes themselves not sure which one was real.
I decided to act. I made my way to the center of the room and stood between them. I sensed them both looking at me, then to me—for a sign. Canon law itself was not more clear, more firm, than the one I lived by. I turned my back on Father Burner, went over to Father Malt, and favored him with a solemn purr and dubbed his trouser leg lightly with my tail, reversing the usual course of prerogative between lord and favorite, switching the current of power. With a purr, I’d restored Father Malt’s old authority in the house. Of necessity—authority as well as truth being one and indivisible—I’d unmade Father Burner. I was sorry for him.
He turned and spoke harshly to Mr. Keller: “Why don’t you go see if you left the back door open?”
When Father Burner was sure that Mr. Keller had gone, he faced Father Malt. The irremovable pastor stood perspiring on his crutches. As long as he lived, he had to be pastor, I saw; his need was the greater. And Father Burner saw it, too. He went up to Father Malt, laid a strong, obedient hand on the old one that held tight to the right crutch, and was then the man he’d been becoming.
“Hello, boss,” he said. “Glad you’re back.”
It was his finest hour. In the past, he had lacked the will to accept his setbacks with grace and had derived no merit from them. It was difficult to believe that he’d profited so much from my efforts in his behalf—my good company and constant example. I was happy for him.
| 1951 |
(illustration credit 6.18)
(illustration credit 6.19)
(illustration credit 6.20)
(illustration credit p02.1)
THE CATS
Fiction
* * *
JOHN UPDIKE
hen my mother died, I inherited eighty acres of Pennsylvania and forty cats. Eighty-two and a half acres, to be exact; the cats were beyond precise counting. They seethed in a mewing puddle of fur at the back door, toward five o’clock, when they could hear her inside the kitchen turning the clunky handle of the worn-out can opener that jutted from the doorframe, beside the sweating refrigerator. One Christmas, when she was in her seventies, I had bought her a new can opener, but in time it, too, went dull and wobbly under its burden of use; I thriftily wondered whether or not it would last her lifetime. In her eighties, she as well was wearing out, as each of my visits to the farmhouse made clear. Walking to the mailbox and feeding the cats were the sole exertions she could still perform—she who had performed so many, from her girlhood of horse-riding and collegiate hockey playing to the days when, moving her family to this isolated farm, she had led us by working like a man, wielding the chain saw and climbing the extension ladder and swinging herself jubilantly up into the wide tractor seat.
She had been born here, in the age of mule-drawn plows. Neither my father nor I had understood her wish to return to this wearying place of work, weeds, bugs, heat, mud, and wildlife. She had led us in imposing some order—renovating the old stone farmhouse, repairing the barn, planting rows of strawberries and asparagus and peas, mowing a lawn back into the shadow of the woods. But, after I moved away and my father died, the fertile wilderness threatened to reclaim everything. Even the windowsills, the next owner of the house has discovered, were rotten and teeming with termites and wood lice. From inside the attic, the shingle roof looked like a starry sky. Not only did my mother allow mice and flying squirrels to nest in the house—she fed them sunflower seeds, whose shells, the new owner discovered, tumbled by the peck from their caches in the woodwork. The house in my mother’s last years smelled of stacked newspapers that never made it to the barn, and of cat-food cans in paper bags, and of damp dog. Her overfed dog, Josie, was going lame along with her mistress; she never got any exercise. It was pathetic, how happy old Josie was to accompany me to the barn with the papers, and out to our mountain of tin in the woods with the cans.
Was it my imagination, or did my mother use to hum as she revolved the handle, like some primitive, repetitive musical instrument, emptying one gelatinous cylinder of cat food after another into the set of old cake tins that served the cats as dinnerware on the cement back porch? Feeding these half-feral animals amused and pleased her—quite improperly, I thought. Their mounting numbers seemed to me a disaster, which grew worse every time I paid a filial visit, in spite of the merciful inroads of various feline diseases and occasional interventionary blasts from the guns of interested neighbors. Some neighbors threatened to report her to the humane society, and others, furtively, dropped off unwanted kittens in the night.
“Do you ever miss New York?” (illustration credit 7.3)
Being my mother’s son, I could follow her reasoning right into this quagmire. If you didn’t feed the cats, they would eat all the birds. She loved birds, that was why she had begun to feed the cats. Sitting right in the house with its closed windows, talking away on the sofa, she would cock her head and say, “The towhee is upset about something,” or, “The mockingbird is telling a joke,” or, at night, coming into my room in her white nightgown, her eyes going wide as if scaring a child, “Listen to Mr. Whippoorwill.”
In deference to my asthma she had never let the cats in the house, but the day after she died they could hear me through the screen door as I churned away with the can opener. I spoke aloud to them, much as she had. “I know, I know,” I said. “You’re ravenous. The lady who used to feed you is dead. I’m just her son, her only child. I don’t live here, I live in Princeton, New Jersey, where I have a job with the fabled university, a four-bedroom house, a haughty and elegant wife called Andrea, and two grown children, one of them with a child of her own. I don’t want to be here, I never did. And if you can think of a better place, go to it, because, my fine feline friends, the dole is ending. The cat food is down to its last case, and I’m here for just two more days. What are you going to do then? Beats me—it’s a real problem, frankly. Well, you shouldn’t have gotten sucked into the system. You shouldn’t have all become teen-age mothers.”
When I put the brimming cake tins, which smelled disagreeably of horse meat and pulverized fish, down on the bare cement, the cat bodies clustered around them like the petals of a fur flower. Yet the older cats managed, in the skirmish, to make way for the kittens among them. The calico kittens had mottled, wide-browed faces like pansies. The black-and-whites suggested Rorschach tests, or maps of a simpler planet than ours. My mother used to name the cats that came to the porch, and would say of one, “Isabel is a rather lackadaisical mother,” or of a wary, beat-up tom, “Jeffrey has a limp today. His boots must pinch.”
The cats that stayed in the barn didn’t earn names. When I opened the top half of a stall door, light glinted from eyes in the straw as if from bits of pale glass, and a violent slither sent several cats squirming under the partition into the next stall. The pan I set down would be empty, though, an hour later. The barn cats paid for their shyness with relatively dismal lives; they were prone to the diseases of the inbred, and a probe of the straw, left over from the days when cows bedded here, would turn up a dried corpse—a matted pelt as stiff as a piece of leather, the dead animal’s head frozen into an eyeless snarl.
Toward the end, my mother had been too frail to make it down to feed the barn cats, so my pan was only half-consumed the first night. The barn cats that had not perished or fled had be
come porch cats. “What are we going to do?” I asked the prowling animals as I returned from the barn in the early-September dusk. “I can’t give up my whole civilized life just to keep feeding you ingrates.”
Moving here when I was a boy had indeed felt like the loss of civilization. No phone, no electricity, no plumbing: a terrible regress. Amish workmen came and hammered snug a bright cedar-shingle roof and rather nicely built in the living room what none of the house’s previous inmates had needed: a bookcase. In time plumbers came and rendered the outhouse obsolete, and the electric company marched tall creosoted poles down through the orchard. Television entered the house, and instead of listening to weather reports and corn prices and country music on the Reading radio station we were watching the Philadelphia news, first in black-and-white and then in color. But I could never shake my impression that the farm was a trap from which my clear duty was to escape.
I asked my neighbor to the south, Dwight Potteiger, “What shall I do about all the cats?”
He grows sweet corn and snap beans for market and is second in charge of the township school-bus fleet. He confided to me, “I used to ask Irma, ‘What’s Frank going to do, in case you pass on, with all the cats?’ She’d say, so serene-like, ‘Oh, Frankie will find a way. He always has. He’s kept me here in style for twenty years.’ ”
She had become a widow in her sixties. My contributions to her upkeep, added to my father’s pension and their savings, had been barely adequate and, now that she was dead, seemed quite niggardly.
“She exaggerated,” I said.
“Well, now, one thing she didn’t exaggerate any was the size of that herd of cats. I can’t imagine what-all money she put into cat food. She’d call me up after shopping this last year or two, and I’d go carry the cases for her into the kitchen.”
“Thank you,” I said. Dwight was the son I should have been.
“A week or so, she’d have another trunkful to lug in.” Was he airing a bottled-up grievance, or trying to bring her back to life for me?
As apologetically as I could, I said, “They were company for her, of a sort.”
“They were stark wild,” Dwight said. “If I’d show up in the evening, they’d scatter off the porch like they’d never seen a man with a beard before.” His beard had alarmed me, too, when he first began to grow it—in this part of the country beards were left to Amishmen and to ancestors in stiff-leaved photograph albums. This beard had a surprising amount of red in it, among bristles of gray and brown, and gave its wearer a mischievous-looking authority that rather cowed me.
“She began to feed them, you know,” I wearily explained, “to keep them from eating the birds.”
He chuckled. “That was the theory, I know. But I used to tell her, ‘Irma, I still wouldn’t say your place here is any paradise for our fair-feathered friends.’ She didn’t appreciate my saying that.
“But I know for a fact she lost a couple nests of swallows, when the cats figured out how to climb the old stable doors. Barn swallows are hard to discourage, but Irma’s finally did stop coming back.”
I hurried on, away from such sadness. “My question is, Dwight, what do I do about them? The cats. I can’t just leave them to starve in the landscape.”
I was begging, he could see. Though I knew he thought it, he did not ask, “Why not?” He was indulging my fancies, as he had indulged my mother’s.
“I have to get back to New Jersey,” I said, “after I see the lawyer in town and the pastor up at the church and the undertaker again.”
He shifted his weight, standing there. “Well, I could take the shotgun and go over at suppertime when they gather on the porch. That would take out a few, and then the others might get the clue and skedaddle. If you’d like, I could ask Adam to come down with his woodchuck rifle and we’ll run a pincer operation. We need owner’s permission, but you’re giving that, isn’t that right?”
“I sure am. We have to do something.” Adam Wipf was the neighbor to the north, a plump orchard-keeper with a multitude of children and now grandchildren. We were, we three proprietors, about the same age, in our late fifties. They had been boys here when we moved. I had tried playing with them, but they had stunted ball-handling skills. An opaque earthiness about them frightened me—reminded me of death.
“I would be very grateful,” I emphasized, and in my own ears my voice sounded citified, weak, patronizing.
Dwight said, “We don’t want you worrying, over there with all those other smart folks at Princeton.” I had avoided mentioning Princeton, naming my home as “New Jersey,” but my mother had made no secret of my career, and I could not accept my neighbor’s favor without accepting his needle. My mother had shown a good grasp of these country transactions: a little “kidding” for every kindness. She rented fields to her neighbors, and they helped her out in blizzards and mechanical difficulties. If she could not stay on the land, it would likely go under to a developer, and the neighborhood would be changed forever, with septic tanks and fast traffic and higher taxes and a lowered water table. It had suited me, too, to keep her on her farm, out of my life. I had begun to worry, though, how she would survive this coming winter. She took any decision out of my hands by dropping dead at the kitchen sink, frying herself a pork chop while the Channel 4 evening-news team was chattering in the living room.
Next morning, as I fed them, I told the cats, “Eat up, sweeties—your days are numbered.” I had half expected rifle shots to ring out in my sleep, but the day broke still and dewy. The cement porch was decorated with wet paw prints. A continent of gray cloud was moving up into the sky beyond the telephone poles and the surviving orchard trees. When we moved here, there had been a pump on this porch, and all our water had been drawn up into pots and buckets. At first, it had been a challenge to my strength to work the metal handle through the first dry shoves, before the water began to flow. By the time we got plumbing and an electric pump, the action had become as automatic as turning on a faucet. Like turning the can-opener handle, pumping had its own catchy rhythm, its mechanical song.
My mother had set out a few potted geraniums at the corners of the porch and hung wind chimes from an overhead hook. She had seen them in one of the innumerable catalogues she received, and had ordered them; the idea amused her. It was a fortunate gift in life, it occurred to me, to be easily amused. These chimes, and inquisitive scratchings from inside the walls, had not kept me from sleeping, though I had feared they would. The day’s appointments clarified my future: I would get back to Princeton by nighttime, and in two more days would bring my family here for my mother’s funeral, with a moving truck to take away what of her furniture we decided not to give to the auction house.
(illustration credit 7.4)
Heading up the road with Josie in the car, I swung in to the Wipfs’ and asked Adam if he would keep an eye on the house. He and his wife live in a little new ranch house close to the road; his parents still live in the sandstone house, a twin to my mother’s, down by the barn that he had turned into a fruit outlet. He smiled as he said he would, implying that it wouldn’t be necessary. This part of the world might be changing, but people didn’t yet go around robbing the houses of the recently dead.
“I really appreciate,” I said, “your helping Dwight shoot the poor cats.”
He looked puzzled. “I haven’t heard any about that, but it’s I guess not so big a problem,” he said, as if he were reassuring my mother that he would get her tractor started.
When, two days later, at dusk, my family arrived in a station wagon and a yellow rental truck, the number of cats gathered on the back porch seemed no smaller than it had been, though visibly more frantic. They yowled upward, showing their curved fangs, their arched rough tongues, the rosy membranes of their throats. A few kittens were staggering with weakness, yet joined in the common mew of protest, of need. I kicked my way through the crowd but, once safely inside, gave my son, Max, a twenty and asked him to drive to the grocery store in Fern Hollow and buy
enough cat food to see us through. He looked alarmed and said he always got lost in Fern Hollow. My wife heard us and came over protectively. “Max hasn’t been to that store more than three times in his life,” Andrea said. “When we came to visit we always went to the supermarket in Morgantown. Why can’t he go there?”
FOSTER MOTHER
Gentleman connected with a construction company has been telling us about a cat his workmen have for a mascot. She is taken around from one job to another by the men, and lately she gave birth to a litter of five kittens on a location in Brooklyn. A few days after the event, a nest of baby rats was turned up when an old building was demolished and, while the cat was off foraging some place, the men put a handful of the ratlets—seven of them, to be exact—in the box with her kittens, and awaited results. When she returned, she purred with delight. She proceeded to suckle them with her own babies, she bathed them regularly, and gave them every maternal care. If they fell out of the box, she carefully put them back in. This went on for about a week. Then she started eating them. She ate one a day, for seven days.
| 1934 |
“It’s two miles further and closes at five-thirty. Also my mother thought the little stores should be patronized to keep them in business.”
My wife sighed and rolled her eyes upward. “Your mother is dead, darling. We can buy at big stores if we want to.”
“It’s closed, I just told you. We can’t stay here with these cats yowling all night.”
“Maybe they’ll stop yowling once we turn off the lights,” she said. “Isn’t it time they faced reality?”
“I’ll go, dammit,” I said, thinking they would all protest at having me, the leader of our mourning party, leave them alone in the old stone house, with its rustling rodents and airless, ill-lit rooms. We were all still in the kitchen, where my mother’s hand-wound mantel clock had stopped ticking and chiming. Its melancholy, gulping gong had kept watch over my insomnia on many a boyhood night.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 12
