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Even I, wanting so much to believe, could tell it was mimeographed. The only thing typed in was my name, and that had been misspelled. I was a fool, but I’m proud to say, not that big a fool. Heartsick, I ripped the letter down to its last exclamation point and flung it like confetti out into the water.
August and February are both alike in one way. They’re both dream killers.
The next day the orange tomcat reappeared. It was the same cat, I’m sure, that had scared Call and me that time four years before when we had decided to investigate the house, and the same cat that the Captain had finally driven out after the first week or so he had lived there. The cat marched in through the open front door as though he were the long-absent landlord popping in to check out the tenants.
The Captain was furious. “I thought I got rid of that fool thing months ago.” He got his broom and took after the huge tom, who calmly jumped onto the kitchen table. When the Captain took a swing at him there, he leaped daintily to the floor, taking a cup down with his tail.
“Damn it to hell!”
I had the capacity to imagine such language, but neither Call nor I had ever really heard it spoken. I think we were as fascinated as we were shocked.
“Captain,” said Call, when he recovered himself slightly, “do you know what you said?”
The Captain was still stalking the cat and answered impatiently, “Of course I know what I said. I said—”
“Captain. That’s against the commandments.”
He took another futile swing before he answered. “Call, I know those blasted commandments as well as you do, and there is not one word in them about how to speak to tomcats. Now stop trying to play preacher and help me catch that damn cat and let’s get him out of here.”
Call was too shocked now to do anything but obey. He ran out after the cat. I started laughing. For some reason, the Captain had at last said something I thought was funny. I wasn’t just giggling either. I was belly laughing. He looked at me and grinned. “Nice to hear you laugh, Miss Wheeze,” he said.
“You’re right!” I screeched through my laughter. “There’s not—I bet there’s not one word in the whole blasted Bible on how to speak to cats.”
He began to laugh, too. Just sat down on the kitchen stool, the broom across his knees, and laughed. Why was it so funny? Was it because it was so wonderful to discover something on this island that was free—something unproscribed by God, Moses, or the Methodist conference? We could talk to cats any way we pleased.
Call reappeared carrying the struggling tom. He looked first at the Captain and then at me, apparently baffled. He had never seen us laughing together, of course. Maybe he didn’t know whether to be pleased or jealous.
“Who—who—” puffed out the Captain. “Who is going to take that damned animal back to Trudy Braxton?”
“Trudy Braxton!” I think both Call and I yelled it. We had never heard anyone call Auntie Braxton by her Christian name. Even my grandmother, who must have been nearly the old woman’s age, called her “Auntie.”
After the first shock, my feeling was one of pleasure. It really was. I no longer wanted the Captain to be a Nazi spy or an interloper. I wanted him to be Hiram Wallace, an islander who had escaped. That was far more wonderful than being a saboteur to be caught or an imposter to be exposed.
“I’ll take the cat back,” I said. “If the stink don’t get me first.”
For some reason my irreverent description of Auntie Braxton’s house triggered Call. “Did you hear what she said?” he asked the Captain. “‘If the stink don’t get me first.’” Then he and the Captain were laughing their heads off.
I grabbed the cat from Call just as it wriggled free. “Come along,” I said, “before I call you a stinking name or two.” I wasn’t quite bold enough to use the forbidden curse word aloud, but I thought of it several times quite happily as I made my way up the path and to Auntie Braxton’s house.
I hadn’t exaggerated the smell. The windows of the house were open and the overwhelming ammonia essence of cat stood like an invisible wall between me and the front yard. The tom was scratching and struggling to get out of my grasp, leaving stinging red lines all over my bare arms. If I hadn’t been afraid that he would turn and run straight back to the Captain’s, I would have dropped him on the front walk and run back myself. I had, however, a duty to perform, so I marched bravely up the walk to Auntie Braxton’s door.
“Auntie Braxton!” I yelled her name over unhappy cat sounds coming from the other side of the door. If I let go the tom to knock or open the door, I might lose him, so I just stood there on the dilapidated porch and hollered. “Auntie Braxton. I got your cat.”
From within a cat howled in reply, but no human voice accompanied it. I called again. Still no answer from the old lady. It occurred to me that I might be able to push the cat through the torn window screen. I went over to the window. The hole was large enough if I stuffed the creature in a bit. As I stooped to do so, I saw something dark lying on the front room floor. There were cats perched on top of it and cats walking across it, so for a minute I simply stared at it, not recognizing it for what it was—a human form. When I did, I panicked. Throwing the cat down, I half tripped over it in my hurry to be gone. I raced back to the Captain’s house where I nearly fell over the door stoop, panting out my terror.
“Auntie Braxton!” I said. “Lying dead on the floor with cats crawling all over her.”
“Slow down,” said the Captain. I tried to catch my breath and repeat myself, but after two words he was already past me and walking, almost running up the path toward the old woman’s house. Call and I followed. We were both terrified, but we ran to catch up to him and stayed at his heels. No matter what terrible thing was going on, we wanted to be with him and each other.
The Captain pushed open the door. People never locked their houses on Rass. Most doors didn’t even have locks. The three of us went in. No one was bothering about the smell anymore. The Captain knelt down beside the old woman, scattering cats in every direction.
Call and I hung back a little, wide-eyed and breathing fast.
“She’s alive,” he said. “Call, you go down to the dock. As soon as the ferry docks, Captain Billy’s going to have to take her to the hospital.”
Relief washed over me like a gentle surf. It wasn’t that I’d never seen a dead body. On an island, you can’t get away from death. But I’d never found one. Never been the first person accidentally to stumble in on death. It seemed more terrible somehow to be the first one.
“Don’t just stand there, Sara Louise. Go find some men to help me carry her down to the dock.”
I jumped and ran to obey. It was not until later that I realized that he had called me by my full name, Sara Louise. No one bothered, not even my mother, to call me Sara Louise, but he had done it without thinking. Strange how much that meant to me.
I got my father an
d two other men from their crab houses, and we raced back to Auntie Braxton’s. The Captain had found a cot mattress, and he and my father gently rolled the old woman over and lifted her to the mattress. The Captain covered her with a cotton blanket. I was glad, for her thin legs seemed indecent somehow poking out from her faded housedress. Then the four men began to lift the awkward makeshift stretcher. As they did so, the old lady moaned, like someone disturbed by a bad dream.
“It’s all right, Trudy, it’s me, Hiram,” the Captain said. “I’ll take care of you.” My father and the other two men gave one another funny looks, but no one said anything. They had to get her to the hospital.
9
“Trudy” was what did it. Simply by using Auntie Braxton’s first name, the Captain confirmed himself as the true Hiram Wallace. He still didn’t go to meet the ferry in the afternoon like most folks, or hang around Kellam’s after supper matching water stories, or go to church. But despite these aberrations he seemed to be accepted as an islander, simply because he had called Auntie Braxton “Trudy,” a name nobody had used for her since she was a young woman.
Call’s life and mine took a strange turn at that time. The Captain decided that while Auntie Braxton was in the hospital, the three of us should tackle her house. I tried weakly to argue that it was like trespassing to clean up someone’s house without her permission, and trespassing was something Methodists were forever bent on getting forgiveness for, so it was likely to be a fairly serious sin. The Captain just snorted impolitely at that. If we didn’t do it, he said, the Ladies’ Society of the Methodist church was likely to take it on as a good deed. Although Auntie Braxton went regularly to church, she had, for years, been considered strange, and once her cat population had passed four or five, she had been on very strained terms with the other women of Rass.
“Would Trudy rather have them poking about her property than us?”
“She’d rather have nobody, I bet.”
He sadly admitted that I was right, but since the alternative to our doing the cleaning was having it become a missionary endeavor, I had to agree that we were certainly the lesser of two evils.
The problem, of course, was the cats. Until something could be done about them, there was no hope of getting the house in any kind of order.
“How in the world did she feed them?” I asked. It had always seemed to me that Auntie Braxton was below even Call’s family on the poverty scale.
“The wonder is she didn’t feed them better,” the Captain said. “These poor things look half-starved.”
“Cat food costs a lot of money,” I said, trying to remember if Auntie Braxton had ever been known to buy fish from a local waterman to feed to her cats. Anyone else would have used scraps, but anyone else would have had more people than cats in the house.
“I would have thought Trudy had more money than most people on the island,” the Captain said.
Even Call was flabbergasted. “What makes you think a thing like that?” he asked. We both remembered that Auntie Braxton got a basket from the Ladies’ Society at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Not even Call’s family rated a basket.
“I was here when her father died,” the Captain said, as though the two of us should have known such a simple fact as that. “Old Captain Braxton had plenty, but he never let on. He let his wife and child scrimp by on next to nothing. Trudy found the money after they both died. And it scared her something silly to suddenly find all this cash, so she come running to my mother. My mother treated her like she was her own daughter. Poor Momma,” he shook his head, “she never gave up hoping I’d marry Trudy. Well, anyway, Momma told her to put it in a bank, but I doubt that Trudy did. What did she know about mainland banks? What’s left of it after all these years is probably hidden right here in this house, if the damn cats haven’t chewed it up.”
“Maybe it ran out,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”
“Maybe. It was a lot of money.” He suddenly looked at us both, changing his tone abruptly. “Look,” he said, “don’t say anything about any money. If she’d have wanted anyone else to know about it, she would have told them. I’m not even supposed to know. Just my mother.”
Call and I nodded solemnly. Real intrigue was far more delicious than the pretend kind. The fact that there might be money hidden convinced me beyond a doubt that the Ladies’ Society must not take over the housecleaning.
But the distasteful problem of the cats remained. The Captain made both me and Call sit down in his clean, refurbished living room. He served me tea and Call some of his precious tinned milk, and then, very gently, he tried to explain to us what he believed had to be done.
“The only way to resolve the problem of the cats,” he said, “is to dispose of them humanely.”
Either I was a little slow or the language was too elegant, because I was nodding my head in respectful agreement when, suddenly, it hit me what he meant.
“You mean shoot them?”
“No. I think that would be hard to do. Besides it would make a mess and bring the neighbors running. I think the best method—”
“Kill them? You mean kill them all?”
“They’re almost starving now, Sara Louise. They’ll die slowly with no one to care for them.”
“I’ll take care of them,” I said fiercely. “I’ll feed them until Auntie Braxton gets back.” Even as I heard myself say it, the words hacked at my stomach. All my crab money, my boarding school money—to feed a pack of yowling, stinking cats. I hated cats.
“Sara Louise,” the Captain said kindly, “even if you had the money to feed them, we can’t leave them in the house. They’re a health hazard.”
“A person’s got the right to choose their own hazards.”
“Maybe so. But not when it’s getting to be a problem for the whole community.”
“Thou shalt not kill!” I said stubbornly, remembering at the same time that only the day before I had been rejoicing that not one word of the blasted Bible applied to cats. He was gracious enough not to remind me.
“What are you fixing to do with ’em, Captain?” Call asked, his voice cracking in the middle of his question.
The Captain sighed, polishing his mug with the back of his thumb. Without lifting his eyes, he said softly, “Take them couple miles out and leave them.”
“Drown them?” I was getting hysterical. “Just take them out and throw them in?”
“I don’t like the idea, either,” he said.
“We could take them to the mainland,” I said. “They have places there like orphanages for animals. I read about it in the Sun.”
“The SPCA,” he said. “Yes, in Baltimore—or Washington. But even there, they’d just have to put these creatures to sleep.”
“Put them to sleep?”
“Kill them as gently as possible,” he explained. “Even there they can’t take care of everyone’s unwanted cats on and on.”
I tried not to believe him. How could anything that called itself the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” engage in wholesale murder? But even if I was right, Baltimore and Washington were too far away to do Auntie Braxton’s cats any good.
“I’ll borrow a boat,” he said. “One that will get us out fast. You two round up the cats.” He started out the door and up the path. In a moment he was back. “There’s three gunnysacks on the back porch,” he said. “You’ll need something to put the cats in.” Then he was gone again.
Call got off the bench. “C’mon,” he said. “We can’t catch neither cat sitting here on our bottoms all day.”
I shuddered and got up reluctantly. It would be better not to think, I told myself. If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought? Thus, the catching of the cats became a sport with no consequences. We took turns, one holding the bag while the other dodged about the furniture and up the stairs in pursuit. They were amazingly lively despite their half-starved appearance, and once seiz
ed and thrown into the sack, they went after one another with ungodly shrieks. Five were in the first bag—they proved to be the hardest to get—and the bag was tied tightly with cord I found in the kitchen drawer.
By the second bag, I had become more wily. In addition to the cord, I had found some cans of tuna and sardines in the kitchen. I divided a can of sardines between the two remaining gunnysacks and then smeared the oil on my hands. I risked being eaten alive, but it worked. I lured those fool cats right to me and into those infernal sacks. We got them all, all that is but the orange tom, which was nowhere in the house. Neither Call nor I had the heart to track him down. Besides, sixteen snarling cats were more than enough.
I sneaked down to our house and got the wagon. Very gingerly we loaded the live sacks onto it. We were already scratched and bitten enough. Those claws could reach through the burlap as though it weren’t there. Once one of the sacks writhed and wiggled its way off the wagon and into the street, but we got it back on and down the path to the Captain’s dock. He sat there waiting for us in a skiff with an outboard. He was wearing a black tie and his old blue seaman’s suit. I had the feeling he was dressed for a funeral.
Without a word, Call and I put the sacks into the bottom of the boat and climbed in after them. The cats must have exhausted themselves fighting, for the sacks lay almost quiet at our feet. The Captain yanked the starter cord two or three times and the motor finally coughed and then hummed. Slowly he turned the bow and headed for open water.
It was midafternoon and the heat closed in on us unmercifully. I was aware of the smells of cat and the awful spoiled sardine smell of my own hands. I jerked them off my lap.
Just then, a piteous little cry rose from the sack nearest my feet. It sounded more like a baby than a cat, which is why, I suppose, it suddenly tore the blinders from my mind. “Stop!” I screamed, standing up in the boat.
The Captain cut the motor abruptly, telling me to sit down. But as soon as the motor died, I jumped over the washboard and swam with all my might for shore. I could dimly hear the Captain and Call yelling after me, but I never stopped swimming or running until I was home.