Two brothers brave a whirlwind summer in this taut and luminous coming-of-age novel
A twelve-year-old boy lives with his family in a small, poverty-stricken town in Vermont. His father works at a manufacturing plant, his mother is a homemaker, and his fifteen-year-old brother is about to enter high school. His family has gained enough financial stability to move out of the nearby trailer park, and as conflict rages abroad, his father’s job at a weapons manufacturing plant appears safe. But then his mother is diagnosed with cancer, and everything changes.
As the family clings to the traditions of their hard-line Catholicism, he meets Taylor, a perceptive, beguiling girl from the trailer park, a girl who has been forced to grow up too fast. Taylor represents everything his life isn’t, and their fledgling connection develops as his mother’s health deteriorates.
Set over the course of one propulsive summer, Soon the Light Will Be Perfect chronicles the journey of two brothers on the cusp of adulthood, a town battered by poverty and a family at a breaking point. In spare, fiercely honest prose, Dave Patterson captures what it feels like to be gloriously, violently alive at a moment of political, social and familial instability.
Soon the Light Will Be Perfect
A NOVEL
Dave Patterson
To Anna, without whom I would have no tongue to speak.
For I acknowledge my transgressions:
and my sin is ever before me.
—Psalms 51:3
What we are seeking is a fare
One way, a chance to be secure:
The lack that keeps us what we are,
The penny that usurps the poor.
—Theodore Roethke, “The Reckoning”
Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
They say people who fuck a lot fuck like rabbits; they should say they fuck like cats—that would be more accurate, at least in my experience.
My brother brings home the first cat. A brindle with green eyes.
“I found it in the woods,” he says. “It was alone.” He cradles the cat. I’ve never seen him hold something so tenderly. It frightens me.
My mother turns from the onions she’s sautéing in a cast-iron pan. “You should have left it,” she laughs. “The coyotes need to eat.” She picks up a burning cigarette from the green ashtray and takes a drag.
“It’ll need to get fixed,” my father says. He’s sitting at the old kitchen table—a white Formica table from the ’80s. It’s about to be given to a woman at church whose alcoholic husband moved to Montreal with a woman he met at a bar, loading the furniture into the bed of his truck before disappearing. My parents don’t tell us about this, but the altar boys at church talk about it. Giving away the table is more than an act of charity for my parents—it’s supposed to inspire my father to start building our new table.
“What will you name the cat?” I ask my brother. He glares at me in a way that says he doesn’t care what I think since it’s his cat. Little does he know what’s to come.
“Who’s going to pay the vet bill?” my father asks.
My brother shrugs and takes the cat to his bedroom.
My parents share a look and go back to their own worlds. My mother her cooking; my father his drawings for the new table. My mother looks healthy. We have a year before the cancer will bloom in her stomach. For now it’s a granular seed in her cells, waiting.
* * *
A few days later I bring home the second cat, because, fuck it, if my brother gets a cat, I get one. I’m riding my bike up our street when I see Travis Bouchard sitting on his lawn with four gray kittens. I lay my bike on the side of the road. “Where’d you get those?”
He’s on his back, letting the kittens nibble at his cheeks. He’s younger than me—ten.
He says, “Our cat had them in the garage. They’re finally old enough to take away from their mother.”
“Give me one,” I say. I don’t know where I’m getting the courage to be so forceful.
He looks up at me. “We’re supposed to sell them,” he says. “Frank wants to make money.”
Frank is his mom’s boyfriend. He moved in last fall. He has a beard and never combs his shock of brown hair. I heard my father say that Frank works at the plant as a janitor on the night shift. “We’re pretty sure Frank’s the one stealing from our desks,” he tells my mother after Frank moves into the neighborhood.
Behind Travis, their sad house lets out a sigh in the June heat. Frank removed the wood siding last fall and never replaced it. The paper house wrap is torn in places and flaps in the hot breeze. It’s common for people in our town to use this paper as siding. It’s no sin where I live. We just moved out of our old trailer park into this neighborhood.
“I’ll give you a dollar,” I say. “You’re not going to get more than a dollar for those cats.”
“Frank says twenty a piece,” Travis says. He sits up and looks at me. “Twenty’s what we need.” He must be echoing Frank’s words.
“A dollar today,” I say, “the rest later.” The only money I have is a dollar bill I keep in my sock so my brother won’t steal it. I remove it from my shoe and wave it in the air. I can’t imagine how I’ll get the rest, but I’m convinced I can take one of those cats home today for a dollar. I’ll figure the rest out later. I don’t know it now, but when I’m older I’ll discover that much of our country is built on the loose soil of this brand of lower-class economics.
“I don’t know,” Travis says. “They’re Chantilly-Tiffanys. At least that’s what the mother is. We don’t know about the father.” The kittens jump in his lap. One cat, a smaller one with yellow eyes, leaps and bites Travis’s nose. Travis lets out a yelp and smacks the cat on the top of the head. A pinprick of blood blossoms on his nose.
“That one,” I say. “That one for a buck.”
“The rest later?” Travis asks.
“The rest later,” I say.
He pinches the fur on the back of the kitten’s neck and holds it up to me.
Now there are two cats. My father says, “Who is going to bring these cats to get fixed?” But no one answers him.
* * *
When fall arrives, my brother’s cat fattens at the waist.
“She’s pregnant,” my mother says. The cat’s name is Storm and she’s curled up in my mother’s lap. My mother strokes the protruding belly. Storm has an affinity for my mother. Especially after my mother vomits, which is something new. The doctors have told her she has an ulcer. She’ll need surgery.
The television has good reception today. We watch a news anchor tell the camera that the war in the desert is imminent. The image of a man in a military beret and a mustache flashes on the screen.
“Look at what your cat did to mine,” my brother says.
“Your cat wanted it,” I reply.
“Watch it,” my mother says, continuing to run her hand over Storm’s belly.
But it’s true. Storm went into heat with a frightening desire. Her low mewling grew each day until her high-pitched cries sounded like a child yelling, Help! Help!
I named my cat Jo
hn the Baptist to please my parents, though I knew they didn’t want him. I call him JB. I saw the way he stalked in circles around Storm. It was the first time I’d seen carnal desire. I felt an animal inside me move, and I knew it was something to hide, what Father Brian calls the sin of lust.
A tan tank rolls across the sand on the television screen. My father comes into the living room, holding the plans for the table he’s going to begin in the spring. Since my mother became sick he’s started spending more time in the garage, troubling over his workbench.
“We used to build those tanks,” he says. “At the plant. They’re very efficient machines. Mr. Whittaker thinks we might get the contracts back if the war starts.” He’s standing in front of the Sacred Heart of Jesus poster framed on our wall. The eyes of Jesus follow us as we move throughout the room.
My brother laughs sometimes, saying in a mocking voice, “Jesus is always watching.”
My mother’s slow strokes over Storm’s belly catches my father’s eyes. “That cat is pregnant,” he says.
My brother says, “It’s because of John the Baptist. His cat ruined mine.” Outside, JB slinks along the lawn stalking a robin, ready to pounce.
* * *
Storm gives birth to seven kittens on Thanksgiving. We’re having the meal at our house with no other family because my mother has been vomiting more. The surgery for her ulcers was supposed to stop this. They opened her up, made the incisions and stapled her back together with a crooked row of twenty-five staples.
My brother finds Storm halfway through the labor. He yells. We huddle on the closet threshold, watching Storm clean the oily kittens.
“My shirts are ruined,” my brother says. A thick yellow liquid stains his dirty shirts. Storm licks at the liquid, and I think I may be sick. The smell of the turkey roasting in the oven mixes with the sour smell of birth. Despite my mother’s illness, she’s demanded she cook the meal, though she only manages a turkey, mashed potatoes and the cranberry sauce that comes in a can.
“It’s beautiful,” my mother manages to say. She hugs me close.
“We have nine cats,” my father says.
* * *
By Christmas, Storm is pregnant again and only one kitten has been adopted. No one wants our cats. Especially not my father.
My mother sleeps on the couch now so she won’t wake my father when she’s sick in the night. Storm sleeps on my mother’s stomach. The doctors aren’t sure why my mother isn’t getting better.
My father brings the plastic tree up from the basement, and while my mother lies on the couch stroking Storm, we set up the decorations. I arrange the nativity scene with the ceramic Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus and three wise men in the manger my father built from particleboard years ago.
The kittens stalk around us in the living room. They’ve grown bigger. They prowl around the house, lounge on the furniture, jump to the mantel above the fireplace, perch on the kitchen counter, claw at the wallpaper, shit under our beds, climb over our shoulders as we watch television, gnaw on our sneakers. We act as if we can’t see them.
When the tree has been erected and the colored lights strewn through the fake branches, my father says, “Turn off the lamp.” This is part of our tradition. I switch off the light in the living room. For a moment we’re all standing in the dark. The sun set hours ago. Outside, the soft sweep of snow blows against the window.
“Here we go,” my father says. He bends to plug in the lights. The holiday cheer breaks through a sadness that has settled over us like a layer of dust coating a window.
There’s a popping sound as electricity runs through the metal prongs of the Christmas lights and the tiny bulbs click on. The colored lights sparkle on the shiny needles of the fake Douglas fir.
The only sound in the room is my mother’s deep slow breaths—it’s what she does when she’s trying not to be sick. My eyes adjust to the dark room. The shadows of cats approach the illuminated tree. One by one, they are drawn to the light. Everything is still until one cat, probably Peter—we’ve named all the kittens after the Apostles—raises his paw and swats at the lights. The other cats join in until the tree begins to shake.
“Get out of here,” my father yells and rushes at the cats. “Get.” They dart in every direction. Even Storm is startled in her pregnant state as she leaps off my mother and disappears down the dark hallway.
* * *
I find Storm in my brother’s closet again, pulling out the slick bodies of kittens. She’s making a moaning sound. This time, when I yell down the hall that she’s giving birth, my brother comes into his room, and he’s only here to check on his clothes. He’s kept his closet clear since the last time.
He shoves me against the wall. “These cats are your fault.”
After Storm finishes giving birth to six kittens, we have fourteen cats in our house.
I try giving one to Travis down the street. I carry it under my jacket. Snow falls at an angle, stinging my face. I’m hoping this cat will pay off my debt to Travis and Frank. Maybe they can sell it, but in my experience no one buys cats.
I knock and Travis pulls open the front door. He says, “You owe me nineteen dollars. Frank is getting pissed.” I’ve been avoiding Travis all winter.
“How about I give you fourteen cats and we call it even,” I say. “Or maybe just one.” I produce the gray cat from under my coat and hold it up, its meow a faint whisper.
In the background Frank yells at a football game on the television.
“I need the money,” Travis says. “Frank knows you owe us.”
“That cat wasn’t worth twenty bucks,” I say.
“Frank wants the money.”
Travis closes the door and I stand for a moment on the front steps. Snow builds on my shoulders. I slide the cat back under my coat. The paper siding slaps against the house in the February chill.
* * *
We can’t escape the cats. When I try to take a shower two cats are in the tub. In the basement cats hide behind the broken washing machine. They saunter over my father’s workbench in the garage. Crawl across the kitchen counters. Piss in the hallway. Cry in the night.
My mother is getting sicker. She doesn’t want us to know, so she turns on the water in the bathroom sink when she vomits, but we can still hear. My brother and I stand at the closed bathroom door while cats weave through our legs and claw at our toes. The divide that’s starting to grow between my brother and me only disappears in these moments when we press our ears to the bathroom door and listen to our mother vomit.
* * *
The snow doesn’t thaw until April. It’s been a hard winter. In the middle of the night, I awake to the sound of an ambulance—red lights flashing on my bedroom walls.
I walk out of my room holding a cat that’s been sleeping on my chest. All the lights are on in the house. In the living room my mother is laid out on a stretcher. An oxygen mask obscures her face. My father stands over her while my brother is hunched on the couch behind them. Cats move over the mantel, the carpet, the couch. There are so many cats now we no longer name them. One jumps up on the stretcher and sits on my mother’s sternum.
A paramedic with a tight ponytail pulls the cat off my mother and drops it on the ground. Another one takes its place. The paramedic removes this one, as well. She looks at my father and says, “Do you guys raise cats or something?”
My father has been crying. He looks up at her. “What cats?” he says.
Annoyed, she goes back to my mother. For a moment I see our life through her eyes. Every cat comes into view. The woman shares a look with the other paramedic, a young guy, maybe twenty, with big hands that work at securing my mother on the gurney. He looks up at me.
“That cat looks pregnant,” he says. I look down at the black cat in my hands and run my fingers along its belly. Tremors of life ripple just below the ribs.
I drop the cat o
n the carpet and start to cry. My mother looks at me through the medicated mist that surrounds her. She smiles and tries to speak, but she can’t talk through the oxygen mask.
The paramedics wheel her out into the spring night. There’s a hard smack as the front door closes.
“Get dressed,” my father says. “We’re going to the hospital to be with your mother.”
None of us moves. The cats crawl all around us.
“Get dressed,” my father repeats. “We need to leave this house.”
In the hospital waiting room my brother falls asleep in a chair with his mouth open. My father turns the pages on a magazine he doesn’t seem to be reading. And I fall in and out of sleep on a couch next to my father.
“I shouldn’t have called an ambulance,” my father says, staring down at his magazine. “It’s too expensive. I could’ve driven her.” He turns the page of his magazine so hard he nearly tears the glossy paper. His legs are shaking rapidly; they vibrate the couch.
My father wakes me when the doctor comes out to get us. We’re led into a hospital room where my mother sleeps with tubes in her arms. My brother rubs his eyes as if he thinks he might still be sleeping in the waiting room.
“She’s stable now,” the doctor says. “It was just a little incident, nothing life threatening, but we have an idea why she’s still having these episodes.”
“Why?” my father asks.
“We think it’s cancer,” the doctor says. “We’ll have to run more tests.”
A machine connected to my mother beeps loudly. She stirs as if to wake but only lets out a sigh and falls back asleep.
* * *
By the time my mother’s cancer flowers to a diagnosis, thirty-four cats roam our house. We’re not to speak about it, the cancer or the cats, to anyone. My brother and I aren’t allowed to invite friends to our house anymore. Not that we would. My brother has deemed our house The Cat Farm. My father hates this term. My mother doesn’t understand. She’s medicated for the pain as she is readied for chemo.
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