One-Eyed Cat

by Paula Fox

  Nurse Clay then told Ned that there had been a simple funeral on Thursday, attended by a distant cousin of Mr. Scully’s. All the time she was speaking, Mrs. Scallop stood there, her hands gripped over her stomach, staring intently at Ned.

  When Nurse Clay had gone upstairs to take care of patients—perhaps, Ned thought, of someone who was now in Mr. Scully’s former room—Mrs. Scallop said, “I hope you’ll come and see us even though your only reason for visiting was Mr. Scully.”

  “I have to go,” Ned said, not looking at her.

  “I see you have no tears for the old man,” Mrs. Scallop observed. “Sensible boy! There’s no use in crying for folks when they’ve passed on.”

  He didn’t know what to say to her. All the sadness he had felt for Mr. Scully had filled him in that first moment he’d seen him lying on the floor with his arms outstretched. All along Ned had been expecting Mr. Scully to die. There was no point in explaining that to Mrs. Scallop. She was a person to whom nothing, he thought, could ever be explained. She was locked inside of her own opinions like a prisoner. He said goodbye to her, caught a faintly be-wildered look on her face, and fled out the doors to the street.

  “They might have telephoned me for your sake,” Papa said when Ned had told him of Mr. Scully’s death. “Mrs. Scallop certainly knew you were concerned.”

  There was nothing more to be said about Mrs. Scallop.

  “He fixed up all his things,” Ned said to Papa. “He went through all the boxes and satchels in his attic.”

  “I never knew him as well as you did, Neddy,” Papa said. “He always kept to himself and didn’t seem to want company.”

  It was true, Ned thought. Mr. Scully had been his friend. As they drove past the little old house and then turned right, up the Wallis driveway, Ned was comforted by that knowledge. Together, he and Mr. Scully had taken care of the wounded animal, and in the end, Ned had told Mr. Scully what he had done. He would never know now what the pressure of Mr. Scully’s hand on his own had meant.

  He sighed aloud as he tried to imagine what the old man would have said if he’d been able to speak. “A boy would do that,” Mr. Scully had remarked the first time they’d seen the cat through the kitchen window.

  Ned strained to recall how Mr. Scully’s voice had sounded that day. It hadn’t been an angry or especially disappointed tone of voice, Ned was pretty sure, but more the way anyone might speak about Hudson Valley weather, something that wasn’t always pleasant but nothing you could change by complaining about it.

  Mr. Scully’s house was covered with workmen the next week; they seemed to be shaking the last of the old man’s presence from it. Men threw down the rotted shingles from the roof and painted the clapboard and extended the roof of the woodshed so that it looked big enough to shelter a car. Ned saw Mr. Kimball working on the kitchen window frame.

  The new gasoline station down near school on the state road was completed, and Mr. Kimball got steady work there, only doing carpentry to bring in extra money, Evelyn explained to Ned when she showed him her new shoes. She fussed about them all the way home because the ground was damp and spongy with spring rains.

  The big news among the four children was that Billy would be moving to Albany in May. His father had gotten a job there with a plumbing contractor. Times were getting better, but you still had to grab a chance when it was offered, Billy quoted his father as saying. For the first time, he mentioned his brother who had infantile paralysis and needed special care which cost a terrible lot of money. Ned was sorry that Billy was going North. They had begun to be friends.

  Everyone seemed to be disappearing. Mr. Scully was dead. Billy was moving away. Uncle Hilary was sailing in a Chinese junk somewhere on the China seas. Even Evelyn was disappearing in a way, becoming a different Evelyn, her hair brushed neatly, her feet in new shoes, her smile a little prissy as though she were trying on a grown-up face.

  One night in the middle of April, a few days before Easter, Ned woke to hear the boards creaking outside his door. He got up and tiptoed out into the hall and stood still and listened. He heard footsteps on the stairs. It was nearly pitch-dark but he could make out the flutter of something white going down to the central hall. He leaned on the bannister, knowing it was Mama. He didn’t call out to her. He thought she might like to walk about alone, the way he always had, feeling the freedom in the silence and darkness.

  It was strange to think of the two of them, awake, yet not speaking, both of them up in the middle of the night. The monks would be asleep in their monastery until matins summoned them to pray. And Sport would be curled up in his doghouse. All the Kimball babies would be sleeping in their rattling old cribs that had been passed on from one Kimball child to the next.

  But there would be creatures stirring in the woods. Owls would be hunting small prey. And the wild cats might be on the prowl in the pine woods north of the old stable or at the edge of the Makepeace property. And the earth itself, beginning to be warm now, would be full of creeping and crawling living things.

  For the first time in many weeks, Ned thought of the gun in the attic. A great longing came over him to go up there, to look at it. Papa had said he could have it, perhaps in a year or two. It was his gun.

  A shudder went through him; it was so violent, he held on to the bannister as though to keep himself from falling. Papa had said another thing. There was nothing to imagine with a gun except something that was dead.

  He let go of the bannister and went quickly to his room where he threw on clothes right over his pajamas. The only thing he could think of was to get out of the house, get as far from the attic as he could.

  When he was dressed, carrying his shoes in his hand, he went to the head of the stairs and listened. He could hear nothing. Mama must still be up, or else he would have heard her return to her room. Perhaps she was in the kitchen making herself a cup of tea.

  He didn’t even consider how strange an idea that was, that his mother should be able to do such a thing for herself. All he thought about as he went softly down the stairs and through the hall and opened the front door as quietly as he could was that he must get away.

  Once he was outside, he didn’t seem to have to make up his mind which way to go. It was as though he were being led. He went due south, to the maple woods, then through them until he was on the other side, looking up at the moon-white columns of the Makepeace mansion.

  VIII

  Cat’s Moon

  Ned shivered. He was wearing a sweater and his dark blue school knickers, but he hadn’t bothered to pull on stockings, just slipped his feet into his shoes, and around his bare ankles he felt the dampness of a ground mist which hung over the long meadow like a sheet of thin smoke. The moon was nearly full. Its light glinted on the water of the river. As a sickle cuts away tall grass, the moonlight had cut away a great swath of the dark, and raggle-taggle edges of light lay upon the boards of the veranda.

  He went to sit on the old settee. He put his arm along its rounded headrest, feeling through his sweater the rough tips of twigs which had worked free, and he leaned back until his head was resting against the wall. The clapboard was dry, slightly warm, as though the sun had shone upon it all day. As he began to see better in the dark, he could make out individual trees in the mass of woods to the south. Where moonlight cast their shadows on the ground, he saw white puffs like smoke, perhaps the petals of bloodroot or early everlasting.

  Now he was calm. His thoughts were quiet and fleeting and wordless. He could smell the new wild grass and wildflowers and the strong black odor of earth. He glimpsed the port and starboard lights of a boat southward bound on the Hudson, and he imagined himself standing on the deck, looking down on the kite tails of moonlight on the water. He got up and walked along the veranda. The old house shifted, the boards he stepped upon creaked. A breeze started up from the north and swept across the meadow, clearing away the mist and, like a single breath taken and expelled, it rustled and was gone. Home seemed far away and the gun i
n the attic weightless as a shadow. He turned back. Someone was coming toward him from the border of maple trees. He held his breath for an instant.

  The figure stepped up onto the veranda and raised one arm.

  “Neddy?”

  “Mama,” he said.

  She was wrapped up in her old tweed coat that fell nearly to her ankles. They sat down together on the settee.

  “In India—when you can’t sleep—they say it’s because there’s a cat’s moon,” she said in a low voice.

  “Every time I shut my eyes, I got more wide awake,” he said.

  “Just now when we were standing next to each other, I realized you’ve grown as tall as I am,” she said. “Did you notice that?”

  He hadn’t noticed it. What seemed strange was not to be looking down at her, not to be looking mostly at her hair and forehead.

  “Is it all right for you to be out walking around like this?” he asked.

  “I think it is,” she said. “Even if it weren’t, I think I would have to—it is marvelous …”

  “Will that medicine cure your sickness?”

  “It has given me a vacation. The doctor isn’t sure how it works. We’ll have to see.”

  They were speaking in very low voices as seemed right in the night’s softness.

  “I think there’s bloodroot growing down there,” he said.

  “You remembered the name of it!”

  “And early everlasting,” he said. “And trillium maybe.”

  She remarked that the names alone were so lovely, one needn’t see the flowers.

  “You’ll be able to walk into church on Easter Sunday,” he said.

  “Oh, yes. I hope so.”

  “Maybe the Makepeace family used to sit out here like we are,” he said.

  “Perhaps they did. Spring wakes people up. The girls and their young brothers might have run around the meadow on a night like this. It makes you want to run—this air.”

  “Then they went off to war,” Ned said. “And the Germans shot them.”

  “They went off to war with guns and other men shot them,” she said. She touched his arm. “Do you think we’re too heavy for this old thing?” she asked. “I heard a distinct crack.”

  They stood up and began to walk side by side.

  “I miss Mr. Scully,” Ned said.

  She was silent a moment. They were passing a huge dark window. She paused and leaned her forehead against it and peered inside.

  “Nobody there …” she murmured. She took his arm for a moment. “We must all part, Ned,” she said.

  The meaning of what she had said to him so quietly—almost shyly—came to him slowly as sleep sometimes did: I am falling asleep, he would say to himself, but not yet, not yet, and then he would. So now he said to himself, I understand what she said—we must all part, we must, we must—and at that moment, as the sorrow of it seemed to lodge in his throat so that it was hard to breathe, a cat walked straight out of the woods and into the moonlight.

  “Look!” he whispered.

  A second cat, smaller than the first, followed it. The first cat stood straight up on its hind feet, and the second made a wreath around it. They leaped, they tumbled, they jumped and pounced, into patches of darkness then back into the light.

  “They’re dancing,” Mama breathed.

  Ned stepped upon the ground from the edge of the veranda and walked a few feet down the slope of the meadow. The first cat cocked its head and looked in Ned’s direction, but the other, smaller animal, ran back into the shelter of the woods.

  “Mama! There are two kittens. I can see them, just there by the silver spruce.”

  He heard her low laugh. “How lovely!” she said. “It’s a cat family out for a walk. It really is a cat’s moon.”

  The dark small shapes of the kittens rolled each other up like snowballs and vanished. Now only the first cat remained. Ned crouched, the better to see. The cat looked directly at him. He saw the empty socket where its eye had been. Suddenly, as though that second was all the cat would allow Ned, it moved swiftly away and vanished, too.

  “We must go home,” Mama called. “The wind is rising … We’ll catch colds.”

  He stood up and turned back to the mansion. The moon was behind it and its shadow fell like a mantle upon the ground before it.

  His mother had stepped off the veranda and was looking up at the house, too. She recited something as if only to herself.

  “The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself …”

  “Is that from the Bible?” Ned asked.

  “No, it’s William Shakespeare—from a play called The Tempest.”

  They walked to the file of maple trees. The moon would be setting any minute. It had grown much darker. She took his arm as they stepped over the long-ago collapsed stone wall and emerged on Wallis land.

  “That cat had only one eye,” he said quickly to her. “I shot it, and that’s why.”

  She halted. She said his name once, inquiringly, as though she was not sure he’d spoken.

  “After Papa put the gun away when Uncle Hilary gave it to me, I went up to the attic and got it. I went to the stable, and I saw something move. I aimed at it and shot. A cat turned up at Mr. Scully’s with one eye. We fed it and took care of it. It almost died and then it got better. Then Mr. Scully got sick. And I kept feeding the cat. But it stopped coming to Mr. Scully’s woodshed. One time I saw it at the Makepeace place—where we saw it tonight.”

  The silence around them was immense. He imagined that all the creatures sliding and creeping and walking about in the dark were listening to him. He couldn’t see his mother’s face. She was so still, like a tree standing there.

  “It was the same cat we saw just now. The one that came to Mr. Scully’s. A one-eyed cat.”

  “Someone else, something else, might have hurt it,” she said. “You don’t know for sure.”

  He thought for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe. But I shot something. I knew it was alive. When I aimed the gun at whatever was moving, I didn’t care, Mama.” He heard, and was surprised, at how loud and sure his voice was. She reached out and took his hand and pulled him a little—he felt rooted to the spot. Then he gripped her fingers and they went on toward the house. When they came to the maple tree from whose branch he liked to swing out over the bank, over her old rock garden, she paused again.

  “I saw you that night,” she said. “I had gotten up, and it was one of those times I could walk. I was happy whenever that happened. I heard you going to the attic, then out the front door. After a time I tracked you. I went to the attic, too. I sat for a bit in that old Morris chair. Then I looked out a window and saw you coming back to the house, carrying something.”

  “It was you,” he said. “It was the gun I was carrying. I thought that face at the window was Mrs. Scallop’s. After a while, I began to think I just made it up, or dreamed that someone had seen me.”

  They were close to the porch. He could make out the steps and the shape of the lilac which would bloom in another month, he knew, and then the great purple blossoms would fill the hall with their scent.

  “All this time you’ve had it on your mind,” she said. “Since September.”

  “I told Mr. Scully but he couldn’t speak anymore. He couldn’t move. I know he heard me, though. I don’t know what he thought.”

  “Maybe he knew already,” she said. “Let’s sit on the steps a moment. I feel out of breath.”

  He sat down next to her, holding his chin in one hand. He felt the comfort of his own house behind him. When he sat on the Makepeace veranda, it was as if he’d gone to another country. He glanced at his mother. He wasn’t waiting for anything to happen now; he wasn’t waiting to say anything to her.

  “I want to tell you something about myself,” she said. “I ran away from home when you were three years old. I went north, to Maine. I found a cottage on a river and lived in it for about three months. It
was a tidal river, and the tides dropped around ten feet. At night, I could hear the water gurgling. I remember it sounded like several very large people in a bathtub.”

  He laughed a little. It didn’t stop him from being afraid of what she was telling him.

  “I bought a rusty old bicycle and rode to the village nearby every day, where I got my groceries. I bought jam and bread and cider and sometimes, apples. I ate like a child eats. And I went to the library once a week. It was so quiet where I was except for the river. I used to get up at dawn. Herons and egrets would be feeding in the mud.”

  He heard in her voice how much she had liked it there.

  “Why did you run away?” he asked.

  She said, “I was afraid of your father’s goodness. I’m not so very good.”

  He could not understand that. But he couldn’t remember that she’d ever been gone, either. It was as though he’d been suddenly let into a room where only grown-up people live and talk, and he couldn’t understand the language yet. But something stirred in his mind, in his memory, a kind of feeling of familiarity, of hearing something that—even if he didn’t understand it—he had heard before.

  “Why did you come back?” he asked softly.

  “Papa and I wrote to each other. He didn’t tell me right away about you walking all over the house at night. Yes … that’s what you used to do. You found your way everywhere, little as you were, and because you were up all night, you were sleepy all day. I came back because I missed you both so much. And I came back so you would stop that night-walking and get a night’s sleep.”

  He could tell by her voice that she was making a joke. She often made jokes when she was sad. He knew that just as he knew that Papa whistled when times were hard.

  She was silent for a little while.

  “Do you think you knew it was a cat—that night?” she asked finally.

  “No. I knew it was something. I pretended it was a shadow. Then I got so I didn’t know whether I was pretending or not.”

  He was thinking about her being so far away and how he had gone up and down the stairs in the house at night those months she was away, into all the rooms, probably up to the attic, too.