by Paula Fox
Ned had been about to tell her that he was scared of the very idea of bears, but now he shut his mouth. He decided he’d better keep certain things to himself.
Mr. Scully was standing next to the pump looking out the kitchen window. The gray cat was close by the shed, eating from its bowl.
“He’s getting a little plump,” Mr. Scully noted. “I guess he’s fond of the food I give him.”
“Where do the wild cats go when it freezes at night?” Ned asked.
“I expect they have all kinds of spots for sleeping, a hole in a tree trunk, or an old chicken coop, or a hollow in the woods. Creatures like that get pretty clever about taking care of themselves. They have to do it every minute, I suppose, and that makes them alert and tough,” Mr. Scully said.
“I wonder where he was born,” Ned said.
“It might have been to a wild mother. Though he doesn’t seem quite as timid as cats born in the wild. No—I think maybe he was a kitten of someone’s pet, and he ran away or got lost, or else they put him out to fend for himself. People do that, you know.” The old man suddenly leaned forward. “Ned! Look at that! He’s playing!”
The cat was leaping in the air, chasing a leaf as it spun down from a maple tree.
“He’s feeling better,” said Mr. Scully.
Ned stretched over the counter and pressed his face against the window. As he watched the gray cat circle and leap and pounce, he felt light and hopeful; he felt free of an oppressive weight. Then he saw the emptiness of the cat’s left eye which the lid half revealed. He saw the way the cat still shook its head from time to time as though something had crawled inside its ear.
Mr. Scully had gone to sit at the table. “He sleeps on that old quilt all the time,” he said. The cat was sitting down near its bowl now, cleaning its thin little tail. Ned sat down with Mr. Scully. “I was going to throw the quilt out,” the old man said, “but I’ll leave it. The cat likes it so much. He probably feels it’s his home. Another thing that happens when you get old—you wake up so early in the morning like you were going backwards through the night—and when I’m standing at the window, pumping water for my tea, I can hardly tell whether he’s there or not … gray cat, gray quilt and gray autumn morning. It all seems one grayish haze. Then he lifts up his head and cocks it and stares at the window … looking to see if I’m up. He’s getting to know my habits. Animals learn you, Ned, just as much as you learn them.
“Well, then he stretches front and back, and looks around and yawns and that’s the first bit of color I see, that little pink spot of the inside of his mouth. He jumps down from the icebox and arches his back and runs about for a minute, disappears for maybe five or ten minutes. Pretty soon, when I’m drinking my tea, he turns up, ready for his breakfast. So I put something in his bowl and get my sweater off the hook and go out the back door and put the bowl down where he’s used to it now, by the shed. He’s less timid and lets me get a closer look, a little more every day or so.
“I close the door and come back to the window. He looks up at it, spots me with his good eye, then goes to the bowl and eats his breakfast. I do like to watch him clean himself. He licks a paw and runs it right over that empty socket. It don’t seem to hurt him. After he’s washed about every bit of himself, he struts off to do the day’s business.”
Mr. Scully’s voice was so lively that Ned was surprised. He hadn’t thought the old man was interested in much except the past, and whether or not he was going to get a letter from Doris.
“It’s funny how alone an animal can be,” Mr. Scully said in a musing tone, “and still be all right.”
In the afternoon they sorted through boxes of buttons which had belonged to Mr. Scully’s mother. “Just think how old these are,” he remarked, some of the animation with which he’d spoken about the cat still in his voice, like the afterglow of a sunset. “How strange it is that the hands which formed them are long gone from the earth. How pretty they are! Look, this one is pearl—here’s a bone button—this one is silver. It’s a shame to throw them away, so much human thought went into them. What I’ll do is take them to the Kimballs. With all those children, Mrs. Kimball can make good use of them. They don’t have nearly enough buttons, I’m sure.”
He poked Ned’s arm and let out a cackle of laughter. “Now they’ll have more buttons than clothes,” he said. “Of course, Mr. Kimball is an independent sort of fellow, never wanted to work for anyone, so they struggle along. She used to be a practical nurse, I think. Imagine having so many children …”
“Evelyn is pretty nice,” Ned said.
“I can’t tell them apart,” Mr. Scully said, looking cranky. “My wife never much cared for them. She was very particular.”
“What does it mean—if you’re particular?” Ned asked.
“It means you don’t like much,” Mr. Scully said gruffly.
It was time to go, Ned thought. The newspaper was folded on a chair, the floor swept, the wood piled up near the stove, handy for Mr. Scully. The two of them had emptied out a big box today. There weren’t many boxes left to go through. But there would always be more to do. There always was when you lived in an old house, Mr. Scully had told Ned.
“I’ll be going,” he said.
“Thank you, Ned,” Mr. Scully said, looking at him with a kindly expression. He wasn’t smiling, but there was a certain softness around his eyes as he gazed at him.
“When the snow comes, where will the cat go?” Ned asked him.
“Maybe you can shove that icebox a little further into the shed,” replied Mr. Scully. “That’ll keep the wind and snow off of him. Makes a kind of winter nest.” He looked out the window. “If I’m still here …” he muttered.
“Where are you going?” asked Ned. His voice trembled a little.
“I’m not planning on going anywhere,” said Mr. Scully sharply. “But it isn’t up to me anymore. See this?” He held out his thin, bony hand. “Now watch …” He very slowly tried to ball up the hand into a fist, but he couldn’t. “I don’t know how much longer I can manage, Ned,” he said.
His words alarmed Ned but there was nothing he could think of to say to them. He muttered that he’d go out and push the icebox further under the roof of the shed. Mr. Scully nodded absently at him.
Later, as he walked home up the hill, Ned thought of Mr. Scully’s hand which wouldn’t clench and of his mother’s hands, so often twisted and balled up. He stooped and picked up handfuls of stones and flung them into the meadows on either side of the driveway, hoping Papa wasn’t looking out of a window and seeing what he was doing. It was bad enough, thinking about hands that weren’t strong and straight like his, but added to that was the worry about his report card in his back pocket. It said Ned hadn’t been paying attention in class. His grades were lukewarm, not failing. Papa would be serious; he’d speak in that cemetery voice and remind Ned that school was his job and he must try to do it well.
The late afternoon was cold and hard like slate. It would be cold in church on Sunday. The Sunday school classes would be held close to the door of the furnace room. After their Bible stories, the little children would cut turkeys out of orange paper with blunt scissors and nibble on the corn candies left over from Halloween. Holidays had an orange tinge to them except for Christmas which was red and green.
It was one of the busiest times of the year for the Reverend Wallis. There would be a special Thanksgiving service, arrangements to be made for the delivering of food baskets to needy people in the valley—some of them never came to church but were given baskets anyway—and, at the end of November, a pageant would be presented showing scenes of historical events since the founding of the church. Ned was to play the part of a carpenter’s assistant in a scene in which the first meeting house was razed to make way for the present church. After that would come Christmas time when the church, lit up every evening, was like a village, with people coming and going, committees meeting, presents for the children being wrapped in bright paper, choir practice,
and the whole church filled with the forest smell of the great evergreen tree that would stand in the corner below the gallery.
The church ladies used to provide a good deal of Thanksgiving dinner for the Wallis family. Ned had liked driving home from Tyler with their food hampers on the back seat of the Packard, carrying them into the kitchen and opening them up. It was a little like opening Christmas presents. Papa had cooked the turkey. When it was all done and carved, Papa would carry Mama downstairs and place her in her wheelchair, which had been drawn up to the round oak table beneath the Tiffany-glass shade.
This year, Ned imagined, Mrs. Scallop would be rushing about the kitchen, glowing like a hot coal, making huge cakes and pies, mashing potatoes, basting the turkey, telling anyone who passed through what a wonderful cook she was.
Do bullies know they’re bullies? Ned wondered. Do people know when they’re boasting? He walked up the porch steps and, through the window, saw his father sitting at his desk. He was only half glad Papa was home.
“Here’s my report card,” he said when he went into the study.
Papa smiled and took it from his outstretched hand and looked at it for what seemed a night and a day.
“Ned, I don’t believe you’ve been working very hard,” he said at last in a solemn voice. “Marks aren’t so important. The fine thing is to do your best. Neddy, this isn’t your best. Is it?”
Ned shook his head. His father uncapped his fountain pen to sign the report card. In two minutes, this would be over. In a week, he would have forgotten it. In ten years—
“Ned?” his father inquired, looking up at him. “Have you something to say?” When Ned didn’t answer, his father sighed. “I don’t see quite how I can send my boy away for a splendid holiday with his uncle if he is indifferent to his work,” he said, looking down at his desk.
Hope stirred in Ned’s heart. But he could hardly tell Papa that. “I’ll try to do better next month,” he said, wondering if he could get his grades down so low that Papa wouldn’t let him go to Charleston with Uncle Hilary. Papa was smiling now. “That’s the spirit,” he said.
Ned was disgusted with himself. Bullies might not know they were bullies, but a liar must know when he had lied. Ned did.
As it turned out, Mrs. Scallop didn’t cook the Thanksgiving turkey for the Wallis family. She asked for the day off and went to Cornwall, down near the Hudson, to spend the holiday with a cousin of her dead husband’s who lived there. Mr. Scully had his turkey with the Kimball family, and Ned and his father fixed their Thanksgiving dinner together. The church ladies provided three pies: mince, pumpkin and sweet potato. When the table was spread, it looked to Ned as if there was enough food on it to feed all the Kimballs for a week.
Mama wore her silk dress that was the color of lilac blossoms. On one of her fingers was an amethyst ring, her favorite stone she had told Ned. She was able to wear the ring because her finger joints were hardly swollen today. When Papa said grace, he added special thanks for Mama being at the table with them. When Papa looked up from his prayer, he gazed across the table at Mama for a long time. His face looked young the way it had years ago when he used to play with Ned before bedtime, playing hide-and-seek with him and laughing even harder than Ned had when Ned found him.
Except for the dark trunks of trees, there was hardly any color outdoors, but at the table there was a feast of light: the bright food, the blue and white dishes which were used only on holidays, the reflected glow from the lamp shade around which the wild animals paraded.
The three of us, Ned thought, and for no reason at all, he suddenly saw the cat in his mind’s eye, not smooth and motionless and perfect like the animals on the Tiffany shade, but scruffy and dirty and wounded.
His mother was saying that she was specially thankful today that Mrs. Scallop had gone to haunt another household, and Papa laughed but reminded her—as he always did—that Mrs. Scallop had her virtues. Mama said they really ought to think about moving into the parsonage. Ned saw her father make a face.
“It would make life easier, Jim,” Mama said. “And if you dislike the parsonage so much, we could think about a house in Waterville. Just imagine! No more Mrs. Scallop, no more leaking roof, driveway upkeep, tree pruning, paying the farmer to mow the fields. And we’d be closer to the church by several miles, and you wouldn’t be driven to distraction by your worries about me.”
Papa was staring down at his coffee, stirring it slowly and thoroughly. Ned knew that Papa liked coffee more than he liked most food. He drank cups of it while he prepared his sermons. He looked up at Mama.
“We love the place so,” he said quietly. “What would you do without your view? What would Ned do without the maple branch he swings on, and the meadows he can run through and the trees he can climb?”
“I think of all the burdens it would lift from you—moving away,” Mama said.
“The lilac bush,” murmured Papa. “I’d miss that. When I imagine my father sailing up the Hudson and seeing this hill … when I imagine strangers sitting in this room …”
“It would be hard,” Mama said. “But we must try to think. Ned, what would you say to our moving?”
“You’ve spent your whole life here,” Papa said to him.
“I know it,” Ned said. “What would happen to Mr. Scully? Who would bring his mail to him? Or chop the wood?”
He was thinking to himself: who will take care of the cat?
“We wouldn’t move for a long time,” his mother said quickly. “It is only that we must begin to think seriously about it. Once Papa finds work for Mrs. Scallop—”
“—Ned,” interrupted Papa. “Why are you making that heap of turkey bones and skin next to your plate?”
Ned started. He felt a blush spreading all over his face and neck.
“It’s leftovers,” he said, stammering slightly. “It’s—” He stopped speaking. For, perhaps, the time it took for his heart to beat twice, he nearly told them everything. Their faces looked so gentle in the lemony light. They were looking at him so fondly.
“It’s for Evelyn Kimball’s dog, Sport, that they keep on a chain. I thought—the dog looks skinny and the Kimballs don’t have much, so it gets only a few scraps. I thought I’d give it a treat—”
He closed his mouth. They smiled at him. He knew his father might even praise him for his charity. His father often spoke about charity as though it was a person he loved.
He felt his stomach sink the way it did when he had to go to the dentist to have a cavity filled.
It would take him three minutes to fetch the gun down from the attic. It was with the gun that his trouble had started. Yet the gun hardly seemed to matter now. It was as if he’d moved away, not to the parsonage next to the church, or to Waterville, but a thousand miles away from home. What did matter was that he had a strange new life his parents knew nothing about and one that he must continue to keep hidden from them. Each lie he told them made the secret bigger, and that meant even more lies. He didn’t know how to stop.
He got up from the table hurriedly and gathered up some dishes to take to the kitchen, miserable and ashamed as he glanced at their faces and saw written there their pride in him.
V
The Strength of Life
Ned loved snow, the whisper when he walked through it, a sound like candles being blown out, the coming indoors out of it into the warmth, and standing on the register in the big hall through which the dusty, metal-smelling heat blew up, and the going back out again, shivering, cold, stooping and scooping up a handful to make a snowball, packing it hard with wet mittens, hefting it, tossing it as far as he could, and the runners of his sled whispering across it as he sleighed down the slopes which were smooth and glittering and hard, like great jewels.
On the first of December, there was a heavy snowfall. When Ned looked out of his window the next morning, the river glowed like a snake made out of light as it wound among the snow-covered mountains.
He ate breakfast hastily, too preo
ccupied to read the story on the cereal box. Mrs. Scallop was broody this morning and left him alone, her glance passing over him as it passed over the kitchen chairs.
On the porch, he paused to take deep breaths of air which tasted, he imagined, like water from the center of the ocean, then he waded into the snow, passing the Packard, its windows white and hidden, the crabapple tree with its weighted branches, down the long hill trying to guess if he was anywhere near the buried driveway. By the time he reached Mr. Scully’s house, his galoshes were topped with snow and his feet were wet. Mr. Scully’s shades were drawn; the house had a pinched look as though it felt the cold.
Ned went around to the back until he could see the shed. There were boot tracks in the snow leading to it and returning to the back door. He guessed the old man had taken in the cat’s bowl; it was nowhere to be seen. You couldn’t leave anything out in this weather, it would freeze. Mr. Scully had told him that finding water in the winter was a big problem for animals. Licking the snow or ice could make them sick.
Ned stared hard at the shed. Perhaps the cat was inside, squeezed in behind logs in a tight space where its own breath would keep it warm. He was going to be late to school if he didn’t get a move on, but he kept looking hard all over the yard as though he could make the cat appear out of snow and gray sky. Twice, his glance passed over the icebox. The third time, he saw that the motionless mound on top of it was not only the quilt but the cat, joined into one shape by a dusting of snow.
Ned held his breath for a moment, then put his own feet in Mr. Scully’s tracks and went toward the shed. The tracks had frozen and they crunched under Ned’s weight, but the cat didn’t raise its head. Ned halted a few feet away from it—but of course, he realized, it wouldn’t hear him because of its deaf ear. He could have gone closer to it than he’d ever been but he had a sudden vision of the cat exploding into fear when it finally did hear him.
When he got back to the front of the house, he saw fresh footsteps on the road. He could tell it was the road because of the deep ditches which fell away to either side. He guessed they were Billy’s tracks. It was odd to think that Billy, huffing and puffing, had gone past Mr. Scully’s place, thinking his own thoughts, while he, Ned, only a few yards away, had been searching for the cat. He found Evelyn’s tracks, too, and later on, Janet’s, the smallest of all. He felt ghostly as if he’d been left alone on a white, silent globe.
