One-Eyed Cat

by Paula Fox

“His daughter will have to come and see to things. Oh, Ned, I didn’t know you cared so much about him! There’s nothing we can do now, only wait. By the time you get back from your trip with Uncle Hilary—”

  “No!” exclaimed Ned. “I can’t go anywhere with Uncle Hilary.”

  “Neddy, what is it?”

  Mrs. Scallop entered the room noiselessly. “Ned, you will upset your poor mother with all this noise!”

  “You, Mrs. Scallop, will please not speak for me,” said Mrs. Wallis in such a stern voice that Ned forgot about himself for a moment. “I’m very thirsty,” Mama continued, her voice softening only slightly. “And I feel a chill. Would you please bring me something hot to drink?”

  When Mrs. Scallop had reluctantly left the room, Mrs. Wallis whispered to Ned, “I’m not chilled or thirsty, Neddy … You do look surprised!” She smiled at him and touched his chin. “I’m not good like your father. Sometimes I tell fibs.” She took his hand then and pressed it in her own. “Ned, why can’t you go with Uncle Hilary? A person shouldn’t have to tell everything, but sometimes a thing gets in the way of a person’s life. I feel as if something has happened to you.”

  He stared at her, feeling a desperate hope that she might guess it all. But would she still hold his hand the way she was holding it now if she knew he had shot away a cat’s eye? Made something alive suffer? He’d brought her a field mouse once that he’d caught near the lilac bush, and she’d petted it with one swollen finger, her face wreathed in smiles, and she loved birds, and she’d loved her own cat, Aunt Pearlie.

  But wouldn’t she understand that he hadn’t really known the shadow was alive?

  “Oh—” she groaned suddenly. “If only I could move about!”

  Had he known it was alive?

  “I don’t want to go to Charleston,” he said, his voice trembling slightly. “I don’t want to go away from home.”

  Mama stroked his hand.

  “All right, Ned,” she said in a very quiet voice. “You don’t have to go. We’ll get in touch with Uncle Hilary. I know he’ll be sorry. But there’ll be another time.”

  Mrs. Scallop left a couple of days later, wrapping her rugs up in thick cord and refusing to let anyone help her carry them to the Packard. She did not behave in the least put out by her leaving. She told Ned she was moving on to higher things. It had been hard on a woman as active as she was to be stuck out in the country. Now she’d be in the middle of town, with more people to talk with than a child and an invalid. She left a vast pile of rich chocolate brownies on the kitchen table. He made up his mind not to touch them but even as he did so, he found he had one in his hand.

  After Papa had driven off with Mrs. Scallop, Ned went up the back stairs to her room. It was emptier, it seemed to him, than it had ever been, as though she had taken some invisible substance from it. The oak dresser was dusted, a thin white coverlet covered the mattress ticking. Mama said the house felt larger now that Mrs. Snort-and-Bellow had gone.

  Mr. Scully would not be coming home for a while, Ned learned from Evelyn, who had heard the news from her mother. He had had a stroke; he couldn’t speak or move his right arm and leg. Doris had been sent for and was coming East to see her father.

  Every afternoon, Ned went to Mr. Scully’s back yard and waited for the gray cat. When it was bitterly cold, he stayed inside the woodshed, holding the paper bag of leftovers he had collected against his body so the food wouldn’t freeze. As soon as he saw the cat coming from behind the outhouse, Ned would fill up the old bowl and put it on the ground. The cat would approach the shed with great caution, its head cocked as it kept its eye on Ned. He would back into the shed until the cat appeared satisfied at the distance Ned was standing from the bowl.

  When Ned saw him eating, Ned felt as though he himself were being filled up, and that as the cat’s hunger was eased, Ned’s thoughts were freed from it. When he was with the cat, he could be unmindful of it.

  He couldn’t carry milk to school and back to Mr. Scully’s shed. One day Papa took him for a haircut to the barbershop on River Street in Waterville. Afterwards, Ned told his father that he’d like to go down to the wharf where the Hudson River Dayline boats stopped to pick up passengers or drop them off. He told Papa he’d like to go by himself. His father had looked faintly surprised but had said, “All right,” and gone off to Schermerhorn’s, the big department store in town, to buy Mrs. Wallis a bed jacket.

  Ned went to a grocery store and bought several cans of evaporated milk with the money he had earned from Mr. Scully, then to the hardware store where he found a small ice pick. He was pretty sure his father wouldn’t notice the bulging pockets of his coat. His father tended to look mostly at peoples’ faces, not at what they were wearing.

  When he got back into the Packard that day, his neck feeling cool and light after his haircut, he almost giggled because the cans of milk thudded noisily against each other as he settled into the seat. Papa didn’t even look over at him.

  “What do you do all the time behind that house,” Billy asked him one afternoon after school.

  “I’m cleaning up things for Mr. Scully,” replied Ned without hesitation. “When he comes home from the hospital, the yard will be the way he wanted it.”

  “But there’s snow over everything,” Billy said.

  “I’m working in the shed right now. There’s lots to do there,” Ned said.

  He wondered if there was anything he couldn’t lie about now. It seemed to him he didn’t even care anymore.

  A week after Mr. Scully was taken to the hospital, Ned found the old Waterville taxi parked in front of his house, and Mr. Grob, the ancient taxi-driver, sitting in the front seat and blowing on his hands to keep them warm. The flivver had sunk into the snow past its windows.

  Ned went around to the shed. He had some pork scraps in his lunchbox from last night’s supper. He emptied them into the bowl, then poured evaporated milk over them from the can he’d punched holes in with the ice pick.

  “Boy!” said a loud voice.

  He turned to look at the kitchen door. A woman in a very thick, brown coat was standing on the step.

  “What are you doing there?” she demanded.

  “I’m feeding the cat,” he answered, too surprised by the woman’s presence to say anything but the truth.

  “My father didn’t have a cat,” the woman said severely. “He would have told me if he had.”

  “I work for him,” Ned said.

  “He didn’t have anyone working for him. He didn’t need anyone,” she said.

  “I chopped wood and brought it in for him, and got the mail from down the hill—when there was any mail—and I kept him company,” Ned said.

  He felt a strange kind of exhilaration, a consciousness of strength as he stood there, talking to the resentful woman in the brown coat whom he knew was Mr. Scully’s daughter, Doris. He realized suddenly that it had been a long time since he’d been able to give a true account of what he was doing and why he was doing it.

  “Well, you won’t be keeping him company anymore,” she said.

  He was afraid to ask her what she meant, although he was pretty sure his mother would have known, and would have told him, if Mr. Scully had died. He stared dumbly at her.

  “He can’t do for himself at all now,” she said in a slightly less stern voice. “He can’t speak. He certainly can’t come back to this hovel.”

  Hovel! It was true Mr. Scully’s house was small and old and a bit decrepit, but it had fit so nicely around him, like a shell around a snail. Ned wondered what Doris’s idea of a house was.

  “I’m going to try to sell it,” she said. “He’ll need every cent he can get for the nursing home.”

  “Isn’t he in the hospital?”

  “He’ll be moved out of there pretty soon.”

  Ned had a powerful wish to see the old man, to watch him pouring out a drop of rum into his tea.

  Now Mr. Scully’s daughter drew up the collar of her coat, nearly hiding
her face. She was staring across the valley to the low range of hills on the other side. “Snow!” she exclaimed scornfully. She turned her head and looked at Ned.

  “Well, I guess you can feed the cat until someone buys this shack,” she said.

  “Could I see Mr. Scully?”

  “I suppose so,” she replied grudgingly. “Though it would be like visiting a wall, the way he is now. The doc says he might get better—you can’t tell with that sort of thing. He can hear though. If you want me to tell him something …”

  “Tell him I’m taking care of our cat,” Ned said. Doris nodded without looking at him and withdrew into the house.

  Whether it was Mr. Grob and his taxi, and Mr. Scully’s daughter being in the house, or for some other reason, the cat didn’t show up for a few days. Ned would empty out the nearly frozen food he’d left the day before and replace it with fresh food and milk. Now that Mrs. Scallop was no longer at home, keeping a watch on him with her little blue-dot eyes, he took whatever he thought the cat would eat. Mrs. Kimball was friendly and pleasant to him, but she didn’t pay any attention to what he did in the kitchen or the pantry. He guessed she was pretty accustomed to children coming and going and poking about and doing things that mostly didn’t concern or worry her.

  Three days before Christmas, Ned found a sign on a post stuck into the ground in front of Mr. Scully’s house. It said: “For Sale.” There had been no Waterville newspaper in the mailbox for several days. As Ned started up the hill, he thought he glimpsed the cat a hundred yards or so away slipping behind a spruce tree. He didn’t go after it, he figured it had been scared enough by the taxi and Doris. When he got to the shed, he was elated to find the bowl empty of the food he’d put in it before he went down the hill to the mailbox.

  But his elation didn’t last longer than two minutes. He thought of the hard months ahead, January and February and March. How would he be able to keep the cat alive until the warmer weather came?

  School, his classes, church, were like a faint mumble in another room. His conversations with Mama had become increasingly uneasy. He could see she was bewildered. Taking the gun from the attic and shooting it—his first disobedience—had happened years before, it seemed to Ned. All the lies he had told, the subterfuge, were piled up over the gun like a mountain of hard-packed snow. He felt his secret had frozen around him. He didn’t know how to melt it.

  Ned watched Papa take a long fur cape from a closet and unwrap the sheet that covered it. Mama’s grandmother had left it to her in her will, and Mama always wore it on Christmas Eve when Papa drove them all to the church.

  Ned drew his hand over the soft fur.

  “What’s it made of, Papa?” he asked timidly.

  “I think it’s seal,” Papa answered.

  He and Papa trimmed their own small Christmas tree that stood in the living room across from the library table. Ned’s throat began to feel very sore.

  “Neddy, you look so flushed!” said Papa. “Do you feel all right?”

  “No,” Ned said miserably.

  A half hour later, Ned was in bed, his teeth chattering, as Papa piled up blankets over him.

  He shivered or burned all the next day. “Mrs. Kimball will come and stay with you,” Papa said. “And Mama is going to stay home, too. I know how disappointed you are, Neddy dear. But you mustn’t go out as sick as you are.”

  He didn’t care now about missing the sight of the great Christmas tree with all its lights turned on any more than he cared about the trip with Uncle Hilary. He imagined himself throwing off the blankets and running down the hill to take food to the bowl. But he really knew he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, do that.

  In the past he had sometimes liked being sick. His father would bring him a tray with a tall glass full of eggnog on it, or dry, slightly cold toast that had a chewiness he liked, or milk toast, warm and comforting in a soup bowl. His mother would call out to him from her room, and tell him stories after Papa had wheeled her chair close to Ned’s door.

  But now he was frantic.

  It’s such an awful cat, he suddenly thought as his father stood beside his bed, waiting for the five minutes to be up when he could remove the thermometer from Ned’s mouth. It was ugly and battered; its fur was patchy; its toes stuck up and its whiskers were sparse. It would never be like one of Janet’s kitties that meowed sweetly and sat on her lap and purred. It had a black hole for an eye.

  The eye. His fault! His father removed the thermometer from his mouth. Ned whispered, “Die, cat, die!”

  His father bent over him and asked softly, “What, Neddy?”

  Ned shook his head. His father placed his long cool hand on his forehead.

  VII

  Disappearances

  Ned’s fever dropped to normal the day after Christmas. Papa said he could get up as long as he kept himself warmly dressed and didn’t come downstairs where the rooms were so drafty.

  For the first time that he could recall, Ned wished school vacation was over. Each day was a week long. He went from window to window and stared out at the snow-covered landscape. In other seasons of the year, something moved or fluttered or flew past, leaves, birds, insects, squirrels—the meadows waving like banners in a breeze—but now nothing moved that Ned could see except for the tiny drops of moisture from his breath upon a windowpane.

  He spent a few minutes with Mama each day. She wasn’t feeling well either. Upstairs was like a hospital. Papa went up and down with trays of food and emptied dishes, smelling faintly of evergreen tree. Papa had put the silver icicles, one by one, on their own Christmas tree on Christmas morning, but Ned hadn’t been down to see it yet. Everything was so separate, the tree, Papa, Mama, himself. His limbs were heavy; he could even feel the dullness of his own gaze. He moped around, occasionally galvanized by the explosion of a violent sneeze. His whole room smelled of cough medicine.

  Wearing his old brown wool bathrobe which he’d long outgrown—the belt loops were practically up under his arms—he halfheartedly played with his Christmas presents. He learned to tap out the distress signal on the sender of the Morse code set Papa had given him, and to adjust the eyepiece of the microscope Uncle Hilary had mailed to him from New York City. It was secondhand, Uncle Hilary had written, but it was real, and he hoped Ned would get some enjoyment from it, although it was no way near as wonderful as a trip to Charleston would have been.

  The only thing that really took his mind off the slow passage of the hours was Kidnapped. Each day after lunch, he read a few pages of it. But there were moments, even when he was reading, when he jumped up agitatedly and roamed through the rooms, thinking of Mr. Scully lying in a hospital bed, thinking about the cat, wondering if it could be alive in the frozen world outside the windows.

  Finally the day came when he put his bathrobe away and dressed in outdoor clothes, when food tasted good to him for the first time in a while, and when he opened the front doors and gulped in a great draft of snowy air and started off to school. Ned half-forgot Mr. Scully and the gray cat.

  The landscape didn’t seem frozen anymore. He saw tracks in the snow, animal and human. Bare branches rattled, smoke rose out of chimneys, a small gray bird chirped on the branch of a pine tree and the sound of Evelyn’s dog barking cracked the still air; the snow had its own noises, too; it shifted and thawed or hardened, it whispered or squeaked when he walked on it.

  He was glad to walk home with Billy and Janet and Evelyn that day. It began to snow just as the four children went past the stone house. Ned was blinded by the great fast-falling flakes. Sometimes he listened to the sea in a large seashell Uncle Hilary had brought him from a Caribbean island. The heavy fall of snow muffled all sound; it made a kind of soft roaring, and Ned felt as if he’d been suddenly transported into that seashell.

  One day followed another. The sun moved ever higher across the sky, and although its light was pale, it felt different, warmer, heavier. He hardly ever went directly home after school.

  He wandered about
the hills. He took paths through deep woods he’d not ventured into before. He cut across fields where he sometimes sank up to his waist in snowdrifts. His favorite spot was the Makepeace estate. He would go up the hill, following the old stone wall which ran along the Kimball property, and he would laugh to see Sport charge out on his running line and look up at the sky, barking, as though Ned were floating around somewhere just above him.

  When he emerged from the pines onto the crest of the hill where the abandoned mansion stood, he knew he’d found his way into the heart of winter. If he looked north, he could, if the sun was out, catch the glint of an attic window in his own house.

  The snow was piled up around the base of each column. Ned sat on the edge of the wicker settee and gazed out at the mountain across the river. Although he was on the same crest on which his house had been built, the view was entirely different. While he sat there, he could feel how rapidly his heart was beating. It was as though he were waiting for something to happen, something unexpected that could be either terrible or wonderful.

  One afternoon when the woods were spongy with melting snow and Ned was standing on the Makepeace veranda, his galoshes soaked through, he saw the flicker of something unusual at the edge of his vision, a blur of movement, quick and indeterminate, just where the meadow ended and the woods began. He stared at the spot where it had been as though he were looking through his microscope. It was the cat. Or a cat. Even as he looked, it disappeared like a puff of Mr. Scully’s tobacco smoke caught in a draft. It had been holding something in its mouth.

  He went to sit on the settee. Evelyn had said the whole place was haunted. Ned wasn’t afraid. The mansion looked ancient to him, like the Greek temple he’d seen on one of his post cards. He hadn’t felt any impulse to go after the cat. That haunted him a little; that was a mystery. If the animal he’d seen was the cat with one eye, it had managed to live a long time without his help, he told himself. He was immensely relieved that he hadn’t been able to see it clearly. He didn’t want to feel sorry for it anymore.