Whiskers & Smoke

by Marian Babson

  “It wasn’t entirely Dexter’s fault,” Pixie said. “How was he to know the boy had a weak heart?”

  “Not even his parents had suspected it,” Greg agreed, “but it was a rough way to find out. And expensive—he was in an Intensive Care Unit for ten days. They were willing to be reasonable because no one had ever known about the weakness. The point is, it should never have happened.”

  “It might be just as well it did,” Pixie argued. “At least, when he goes to college, he’ll know better than to let himself in for any hazing. Some fraternities have actually killed a candidate or two in the past.”

  “Listen,” Greg said. “I’m not worrying about what might happen in the future. And I’m not worrying about what’s happened in the past. I’m carrying the can for this gang here and now. From now on, we’re going to run a tighter ship! Tonight I’ll read them the Riot Act—and ban all campfires until we’ve had some rain. The episode is now closed!” He turned and strode away.

  “Well!” Pixie murmured. “Well, well, well!”

  Chapter 11

  Strange, the sadness a holiday can bring—even a borrowed holiday. The Fourth of July had nothing to do with us, except by ancient association—or, rather, disassociation—and yet an all pervasive heartache engulfed us. John was not here to see it.

  As a family, we had planned an American holiday some day; we had talked about the delights of unfamiliar customs and celebrations of unknown festivities. Now, all the discussion, all the laughter, all the happy celebrations—all were dust and ashes.

  The future had arrived and John was not here to share it with us.

  Oh, we laughed at the eccentric costumes of the Horribles Parade, we drank the iced lemonade and ate the hot dogs, hamburgers and sandwiches at the Town Picnic, we applauded the fireworks display; but, before the first starburst had faded against the midnight blue sky, Tessa yawned and turned to me pleadingly.

  “Can’t we go … go back to the house now?” she asked. “I’m tired.”

  I knew that she had nearly said “home” and then remembered where she was—and where her home was.

  “Don’t you want to see them try to light the bonfire?” Celia asked in surprise. “They might be able to. They’ve pulled away the wettest wood and—” she laughed—“some of the kids have been out here with portable hair-driers trying to dry out the rest of it. There’s a sporting chance it will catch. I hear they’ve been betting on it in the town.”

  It would make another amusing little story to tell; another in-joke for the townspeople—another joke John would never share.

  “I’m tired, too, Mummy.” Timothy leaned against me. “Let’s go now.”

  The last time the sky had been bright with fireworks had been Guy Fawkes Night. John had been there last November, coaxing our bonfire to ignite. There were too many poignant memories being carried in the hot smoky night air.

  “It’s been a long day,” I apologized to Celia. “Too much excitement. If the fire catches—” I added as a sop to her local pride—“we can watch it from the lakeshore, the way we did the other night.”

  “All right,” Celia sighed. “Just hold on a minute and I’ll get Patrick to drive you home.”

  “It seems a shame to drag him away from the festivities. Can’t we just ring for a taxi? I don’t want to be a nuisance to you.”

  “Patrick will do it, don’t worry. It may be quite a good idea. I think all the noise is getting on his nerves.”

  Patrick did not seem to feel any sense of deprivation at being called upon to desert the festivities and drive us back to the house. He even joked a bit and only grew serious as we turned into Cranberry Lane.

  “You know, you ought to apply for an International Drivers Licence, Rosemary,” he said. “If you don’t want to use the Harpers’ car, you could pick up a cheap secondhand car while you’re here and sell it again before you leave. It’s not that anyone minds chauffeuring you around,” he added hastily. “It’s just that it would be better for you.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just … don’t want to get behind a wheel … not yet.” I glanced into the back seat, but Tessa and Timothy were huddled together in the swift easy sleep of childhood. For a moment, I envied them. Then Tessa gave a soft whimpering cry and Timothy frowned and clenched his fists. Sleep was no longer such a desirable thing, after all. Perhaps they were beset by nightmares, too.

  “Here we are.” Patrick slid the car to a silent halt. In the sudden stillness the night sounds grew louder: the frogs croaking by the lake; the trees stirring sporadically; the occasional hoot of an owl and, over all, the muffled explosions of the fireworks in the distance.

  “Tessa, Tim—” I called softly. “Come on, you can make it up to the house, can’t you? You don’t need Uncle Patrick to carry you. You’re getting too big for that.”

  “I’m too big for that,” Timothy echoed, lurching out of the car.

  “So am I.” Tessa rubbed her eyes.

  “Can you manage?” Patrick asked.

  “Yes, thanks. Don’t bother to get out.” I closed the doors quietly behind us. “Celia and Luke will be waiting for you.”

  “Well, if you’re sure you’re all right—” He gave us a smile, a wave of farewell, and the car moved off as quietly as it had arrived.

  We walked up the path hand in hand watching the sky. The starbursts from the highest rockets could be seen above the treetops and showers of red, blue, green and silver illuminated the heavens before diving into the shadows of earth.

  We were at the porch steps when an anquished yowl assaulted our ears.

  “That’s Errol!” Timothy snapped to attention, shaking off the last vestiges of sleep. “Errol!” he called. “Errol, where are you?”

  The long answering yowl seemed to come from somewhere behind and above us.

  “He’s out here,” I said. “Timothy, I told you to shut him in the house so that the fireworks wouldn’t upset him.”

  “I did,” Timothy protested. “He must have got out when we weren’t looking.”

  “He’s up a tree, from the sound of it.” We turned and moved in the direction of Errol’s cries. “I hope he can get down by himself, I don’t fancy listening to that all night.”

  “If he can’t, I’ll go up and get him,” Timothy said. “Or else we can call the Fire Brigade.”

  “The Fire Brigade have more important things to do than—ooof!” I had collided with a dark solid shadow at the foot of the tree, too solid for a bush. “What on earth—?”

  “It’s that man, Mummy,” Tessa said. “What’s he doing here?”

  “A very good question, Tessa. Good evening, Mr. Peterson, would you care to answer that question?”

  “Good evening, folks.” Noah Peterson straightened up from his furtive crouch; he had obviously been hoping to escape notice. “Did you have a good time at the fireworks? Or—” his voice expressed concern—“did something go wrong? You’re home early.”

  “What’s he doing here, Mummy?” Tessa was not to be diverted.

  “It’s such a nice night—” Noah Peterson sounded as though he might be speaking between clenched teeth. “I just decided to take a little walk, that’s all. I didn’t mean to trespass—”

  “Why is Errol up that tree?” Timothy demanded. “You were trying to get him, weren’t you? You were trying to catch Errol and hurt him!”

  Errol howled agreement and, now that reinforcements had arrived, began a precarious backward skittering descent of the tree-trunk.

  “I wasn’t going to hurt him,” Noah Peterson said. “He’d have had anæsthetic and excellent post-operative care. I’d have taken him to the best vet in the state—the same one who takes care of Pitti-Sing.”

  “You admit it!” I was aghast. “You were going to kidnap the Harpers’ cat and—and—”

  “And have him neutered. It should have been done long ago. They’re anti-social to keep a brute in that condition. He’s a menace to every female cat in the neighborhood.”
>
  “That isn’t for you to say!” Feeling rather catty myself, I couldn’t resist a dig. “None of the female cats seem to object. In fact, yours seems to have found him particularly irresistible.”

  Errol gave a final triumphant squawk and slid down the last few feet of tree-trunk, fragments of bark spraying out from his claws. He landed on the ground at our feet and hurled himself at my ankles, purring wildly.

  Noah Peterson stared down at Errol, his hands twitching.

  “You leave Errol alone!” Timothy swooped and caught Errol up into his arms.

  “All right, Timothy, take Errol up to the house.” I handed him the keys. “You go, too, Tessa. I’ll be along in a minute. I just want to have a word with Mr. Peterson.”

  “Okay, okay.” Noah Peterson lifted his hands in surrender. “I apologize. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried it. But every time I look at Pitti-Sing, I get so damned mad—”

  “If you ever try it again, I shall call the police. Is that quite clear?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I sure have got off on the wrong foot with you folks. Can’t we start all over? Let’s pretend we’ve never met before and—”

  “It’s been a long day,” I told him, “and I’m too tired for games. I mean what I said. If you ever again—”

  “You’re tired,” he said, “and I’m keeping you up. Good night.” He disappeared into the shadows.

  I walked slowly up the path to the house. Noah Peterson might think I hadn’t noticed it, but I had. At no point in our conversation had he given any undertaking not to try to get at Errol again.

  After the long holiday weekend, the heat wave settled in with a vengeance. The thermometer hovered close to the 100°F mark and weather forecasters gave their reports with a grim relish: it was even worse in the South and Midwest; no relief was in sight anywhere in the Nation.

  We lived on salad and iced drinks. It was easy to see why refrigerators and air-conditioners were necessities of life rather than luxuries. What amazed me was the way people refused to give way to the heat. Out of stamina, stubbornness, or the Yankee bloodlines that reached back to their Mad-Dogs-and-Englishmen heritage, everyone seemed to rush about, their only concession to the heat being the clothes—or lack of them—worn.

  Timothy bronzed and thrived on it, but Tessa was nearly as wilted as I. We spent long sessions trying to puff talcum powder down inside her cast to relieve the discomfort. Other, longer, sessions were spent with Errol and tins of flea powder. It was impossible to keep him out of the woods and the woods were full of fleas, ticks and sand mites.

  Pixie Toller seemed the most tireless person I had ever met. Her Welcome Wagon was never parked anywhere for very long. Of course, the summer people were arriving in their hordes and she was hard pressed to keep up with the stream of arrivals. I was grateful that she somehow managed to find time for us.

  “I’ve got to do my store rounds—” Pixie had dropped in unexpectedly one morning. “Come and help me. We’ll collect the boxes of freebies, then you can come back to the house and we’ll drink iced tea and pack another couple of dozen Welcome Baskets.”

  “I’d love to,” I said. “Tessa’s up at Camp with Timothy today and I was just beginning to feel a bit bored—and blue.”

  “I know.” Pixie nodded wisely. “The first year is the hardest and yet everybody expects you to ‘snap out of it’ and ‘pull yourself together’ and all the other silly things. As though you’d lost your purse instead of your husband. They act as though it was a lamp that was broken—and not your whole life.”

  “Oh! I hadn’t realized you were a widow, too.”

  “Grass, dear, not sod.” Pixie revved the engine and we leaped away from the kerb.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Oh, sorry. Over here we call a divorcee a grass widow. A sod widow is a woman who’s buried her husband—he’s lying underneath the sod, see? Mine—” her mouth twisted—“is lying somewhere else. And lying in every sense of the word, if I know him.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I decided not to go into any etymological explanations of my own. “I hadn’t realized … No one mentioned it.” And I would have a quiet word with Celia about that. Forewarned, I wouldn’t have put my foot in it.

  “Don’t worry. It’s such a common state nobody thinks anything about it at all. Only us walking wounded.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really want to hear the story of Pixie Toller’s life, but I had the uneasy realization that there was no way I could avoid it. We were driving along the main highway at forty-five miles an hour and I was literally a captive audience.

  “Loss is loss,” Pixie said, “and nobody knows what it feels like until it happens to them. That’s the real gap between people, you know, not the Generation Gap. I divide people into two groups: the ones it hasn’t happened to yet—and the rest of us. One way or another, it comes to us all eventually. The thing is, you’re one of the lucky ones.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Sure. At least you know where your husband is! No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that—not that way.” She reached over and patted my hand. The Welcome Wagon was doing forty-eight miles an hour now, as though trying to outdistance her thoughts.

  “I mean,” she said, “yours is a clean hurt. He didn’t want to leave you. He died. He didn’t come home one night and tell you he’d met somebody who really understood him. Younger, prettier—” The speedometer needle swung up to fifty, poised there momentarily, then went creeping upwards.

  “And wasn’t it lucky we hadn’t had any children? We could have a nice neat break. No, there was no point in trying to talk it over. There was nothing left to say—” Her voice rose.

  “Nothing left to say? I hadn’t said anything at all. Of course, he was right. It was too late for talking. She was pregnant.”

  Fifty-five … sixty … the highway sped past in a blur. I blinked my eyes and the road cleared. I hadn’t realized I’d been so close to tears. It had been so different for me. John hadn’t wanted to leave me and the children. Where else would I be when you needed me?

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re right. John didn’t leave of his own accord. He died in an automobile accident. It … it was a clean hurt.” I had never thought of it that way before.

  “That’s it,” she said. “And I’m left with this dirty, miserable, festering hurt that will never go away and never be clean. Talk about automobile accidents—that’s what frightens me sometimes. I have this recurring dream …”

  Sixty-two … sixty-five … sixty-eight …

  “I dream, too,” I said softly, but she didn’t hear me.

  “In this recurring dream … I’m driving the Welcome Wagon down a deserted road … and I see him ahead of me … walking along. He doesn’t see me … his back is to me … he’s walking away from me—again. He doesn’t hear me … he doesn’t know I’m there. I step on the gas …”

  Seventy … seventy-two …

  “Pixie—” We were approaching the outskirts of town. The speed limit signs read: thirty m.p.h.

  “He turns … he sees me … for a minute, he’s afraid … then he smiles … he waves … he thinks he can make a fool of me again. I know … he’s going to make up … to come back to me … to take up where we left off …”

  Seventy-five … seventy-seven …

  I reached over stealthily, switched off the ignition and removed the key.

  “And I hit him!” Pixie’s knuckles were white from her grip on the steering-wheel. She hadn’t even noticed what I’d done.

  “He sort of goes splat! all over the radiator … and I can see his hands clutching at the radiator cap … then sliding, sliding away … as he goes under the front wheels …”

  Seventy-seven … seventy-five … seventy-three …

  Pixie was grinding her foot on the accelerator in her agitation. If I hadn’t removed the key, we’d be doing over one hundred now.

  “He keeps calling out to me … ‘Come back’ �
��Come back.’ So I go back. I back up right over him … then I go forward over him again … and back again … I can feel the bump every time the wheels go over his body … and I do it again and again …”

  Sixty … fifty-five … fifty … I began to breathe more easily.

  “And when I finally stop and go back to look at him … he’s spread out like a mat—and he has WELCOME printed right across his back. And I keep on saying, ‘I’ll “Welcome” you! I’ll “Welcome” you!” … and—” She looked across at me in bewilderment, coming back to the present.

  “And that’s where I wake up.” The Welcome Wagon coasted to a stop and Pixie burst into tears.

  I found that my hands were shaking. I waited for her to regain control.

  “Look, Pixie,” I said, as the emotional storm abated, “why don’t we call it a day? I mean, you can go to the shops tomorrow just as well. Why don’t we—?”

  “No!” Pixie dabbed at her eyes savagely. “I’m all right now. Sorry. I haven’t let my hair down like that since I can’t remember when. But it’s all over now. Business as usual—” She reached out automatically for the ignition key and looked at the empty keyhole in surprise.

  “I’m sorry—” I held the key out to her. “I’m afraid I took it. We were going so fast—and the town was straight ahead. I got frightened—”

  “Probably just as well.” Pixie took the key and stabbed at the keyhole several times before fitting it in. Her emotional upset wasn’t as over as she’d have me believe.

  “Pixie—” I tried again. “I really do feel it would be better if you didn’t try to do anything more today. Let’s go back to the house and I’ll make a salad for lunch and you can rest in the hammock this afternoon.”

  “No!” Pixie was on the verge of shouting. “No, I can’t! I’ve already telephoned the stores—they’ll have everything ready for me to pick up. Can’t you understand? I need this job! I don’t know—I don’t know what I’d do without it!” She burst into tears again.