Pride

by William Wharton

  He pushes the last of his egg into his mouth, takes the final crust of his bread and scoops out his plate; pushes the bread into the side of his mouth.

  “One thing, Dickie. Don’t ever let anyone, I don’t care who it is, throw any erasers or anything at you again. You just walk out of there and when I come home, you tell me. I’ll take care of it. In fact I’m half tempted to go in and talk to that Sister Anastasia and Father Lanshee myself right now, but I’ve already got enough trouble to think about.”

  Over the next week I go every day to see the kittens. I never see the mother again. The third day I go, there are only four kittens; the black-and-white one is gone. All that’s left is one ear, the little paws with tiny claws and most of the tail.

  I figure a tomcat came in and ate it. Or maybe it could even be the mother. Jimmy Malony told me once how when cats are born in May the mother will eat them sometimes, but this is September. I can’t think of a way to keep tomcats out without keeping the mother away too.

  I start sitting across the alley in the areaway to see if I can catch the mother going in or out so I’ll know she’s feeding them, but she must only go in at night or during the day, when I’m at school. Or maybe she sees me hiding across the way and won’t go in while I’m there.

  Two days later, one of the striped cats is gone, all except two paws. The other kittens are starting to get their eyes open. This is the day Dad came home beaten up by goons the second time.

  He’d had to work overtime and they were waiting for him. Luckily he had his monkey wrench because he broke away, ran, got on a trolley car, where they couldn’t get to him.

  This time my mom is really crying. She wants Dad to stop being shop steward, to just do his job.

  Dad’s white and his hands shake while he’s reading the newspaper. He keeps making knots in his jaw, tight, the way he does when he chews, but he isn’t eating.

  I want to ask about the kittens disappearing and what I can do, but I’m afraid. He looks so strange. I don’t think of my father as somebody who gets scared, and it scares me seeing him this way.

  It’s Thursday of the second week after I found my kittens, when I go in and there’s only one left, the little brown one without a tail. I watch all the weekend, even eating lunch out there in the alley, but I never do see the mother cat go through that broken window; no other cat climbs through either.

  When I go in the garage he’s nuzzling in the mess at the bottom of the nest. By now, all the cloths are blood-soaked and there are pieces of kitten smashed into the cloth. As soon as that kitten sees me, he rears up on his hind legs and backs into the corner of the garage behind the nest. He’s standing up there with his claws out and his eyes fastened on me like a lion or a bear. I sit down on the garage floor in a part where there isn’t any grease and watch him. I also get to really look at him.

  He’s definitely like a burnt tiger except for not having a tail. There are darker stripes coming down between his ears, across his forehead, and between his eyes. There are also stripes going out from each of his eyes, almost like a raccoon, and there are dark drips coming down from the inside of his eyes right next to his nose. I can’t tell for sure if these are real marks or only something like sleep that gets caught in the corner of your eyes.

  His nose is pink on the end mostly but with some black parts on the top and outside. The bottom of his nose has a little slit in it to match his mouth and he has no lips. Whenever I move too fast, he opens his jaws wide and makes a hissing sound.

  I keep calling this cat “him” but I don’t really know. The kids in the neighborhood say it’s hard to tell a boy cat from a girl cat till they’re grown up; then it’s easy. The tomcats have big nuts and the females a round pink hole under the tail.

  This one has little sharp, white teeth and the inside of his mouth is pink in the front, the way you would expect, then it gets darker, almost blue or purple at the back of his tongue. When he opens his mouth to snarl, he tucks his tongue back away from his teeth; I never noticed that about cats before. But then I never really noticed much about cats; I don’t think I even really like cats. I know they eat rats and mice but they also catch all the pigeons and sparrows. There are practically no birds in the alleys, only at the front, and then it’s mostly starlings.

  But I’m beginning to like this cat and I’m becoming more and more convinced he ate his brothers and sisters. I figure he’d wait till they were all asleep then kill one by biting it on the neck or something and draining the blood. Probably the other kittens, when they were still alive, helped him eat them, too. Four would eat one, then three ate one, then two ate one, then this one ate the last other kitten, the black one that’s only one paw and a tail now. It must have been awful to see. I wonder if they ate the meat and milk I brought or some other cat came in and ate it. I don’t know for sure whether it’s true he ate his brothers and sisters but I decide to name him Cannibal.

  I sit there a long time, watching, not thinking much, and then he begins to fall down. He isn’t coming down on his four feet, he’s falling over sideways. He does this twice, then just lies there on his side, his thin stomach going in and out. His eyes are closed so I can sneak up on him. I wonder if I could pick him up now without getting bitten. Actually I’ve been too afraid to put my hand near him the last week, even though he isn’t much bigger than a mouse. He’s really like a miniature wildcat, not like a kitten at all, except he’s so tiny. I don’t think he’s actually grown much since the first time I saw him. Only he’s opened his eyes, learned to growl and stand up. I haven’t ever seen him walk. He just huddles in that bloody, messy nest or rears up in the corner behind it.

  So, carefully, I put my hand under his tiny body and pick him up. He’s limp and doesn’t move. I see he’s unconscious and I get scared. I tuck him against my stomach and run out from the garage, up the alley to our place.

  I go in the cellar and make a little bed for him with one of my dad’s clean paint rags, then sneak up the stairs. Mom must be upstairs in the bedrooms and I don’t see Laurel. I open the icebox and get some milk. I pour this from the bottle into the lid of a mayonnaise jar Mom has stored under the sink, then I add a bit of water to the milk bottle and put it back. I dash down into the cellar.

  He’s still breathing but sort of shudders at the end of each breath. His eyes are still closed.

  There he was, standing up, trying to fight me, and dying right in front of my eyes. I hold him over the mayonnaise jar lid and try sticking his pink nose into the milk. He doesn’t open his mouth, doesn’t try to lick the milk. What happens is he breathes in some of it with his nostrils and sneezes. He shakes his head, sneezes again, but doesn’t brush off his face the way cats do.

  Now he’s limp in my hand again. I keep trying but he’s too far gone to drink. He’s dying for sure. After all his struggle trying to stay alive, he’s going to die anyway.

  I put him down on the cloth again and tuck him in behind the small bucket-a-day furnace so he’ll be warm. I hear Mom walking around upstairs. I go out the cellar door, run down the alley, up Copely Road, then along Clover Lane and into our house from the front. I come in as if I’ve been playing outside in the street with the other kids. Mom’s busy cleaning house so she doesn’t notice me much. I run upstairs quietly and go into our bathroom. What I need is there. It’s the only place I can think to find one. I used to have one in my chemistry set but it got broken.

  I lift the Argyrol out of our medicine cabinet and unscrew the top. It has a rubber squeezer and an eye dropper that goes into the bottle. I put the Argyrol bottle back in the medicine cabinet and squeeze the rubber, washing the inside of the eye dropper, until it isn’t brown any more.

  When I’m sure it’s clean, I dash downstairs, out the front door, around through the alley, and back in the cellar door. I’m afraid the kitten’ll be dead by the time I get there; but if I go right through the house, past Mom, she’s liable to ask me what I’m doing, where I’m going, and I don’t want to tell any lie
s. If there really is a devil in me, he’d just love to have me lying to my parents, especially about a cannibal cat. That’s the first time I begin to think that this cat might be a devil himself. I read one time in a book about Halloween how witches’ cats had the devil in them. It’d explain a lot of things about this cat, Mr. Harding, and me.

  When I get there in the cellar, down on my knees, I pull Cannibal out from behind the bucket-a-day, half convinced he’ll be dead, but he’s still breathing. I hold him in my hand, fill the eye dropper with milk and start squeezing it into his mouth.

  First I try putting the point of the eye dropper right in the center under that slit in his nose, but the milk only comes flowing out and gets his chin all wet. Then I figure how to slip the point into the side corner of his mouth and squeeze it slowly. I begin to feel him swallowing and it all goes in if I do it very carefully. I sit there for a long time, slowly dripping in milk while he swallows. He still doesn’t open his eyes. I slide him under the paint cloth and push the cloth back behind the bucket-a-day again. I’ve used all the milk.

  I go upstairs directly this time. Mom is going shopping and tells me to watch Laurel till she gets back. Laurel’s jumping rope with some girls on the walk in front of our house. I tell Laurel to stay there till I come back.

  This time I warm the milk in a pan, then go back into the cellar. It was hard getting the milk just warm enough and not too hot. I put a few drops of it on my tongue and it felt fine. I’m hoping old Cannibal is still alive.

  When I slide him out, he opens his eyes at me but doesn’t try to get up. His eyes look almost as if they’ve been crying but it could be only all the milk I spilled on him. I try wiping him off, but it’s hard wiping off kitten fur, it’s so soft.

  I pick him up without any trouble and begin putting some of the warm milk in his mouth the same way. This time he begins sucking on the end of the eye dropper and it goes fast. He drinks down that whole second batch in about five minutes. I run back upstairs again. Mom still isn’t home. I look out the front door while the new milk is heating. Laurel’s fine, still jumping rope across the street. I dash back into the kitchen, the milk’s too hot so I add some cold milk till it’s just right. I’m using so much milk now Mom’s going to notice. If I add any more water it won’t taste like milk.

  I decide I’ll tell her I drank some. She’ll like that because she’s always trying to make me drink more milk to build strong bones and teeth, but I don’t like it much, unless it’s cold and with chocolate.

  I drink a quarter glass so I won’t be lying and leave it unwashed in the kitchen sink as proof. I wash out the pan I’ve been cooking in and put it back into the pot-storage part of the stove.

  In the cellar, when I reach in back of the bucket-a-day for Cannibal, he takes a bite at my finger. I pull my hand away fast. He’s worked his way up onto his stomach, still not standing but staring out at me with his yellow-green eyes. He has his mouth open again. I put the milk down just in front of his nose and sit back to watch. It’s the same; he won’t drink while I’m there.

  I run upstairs to check Laurel and see if Mom’s come home from shopping yet. It’s all O.K. When I come back down Cannibal hasn’t touched the milk.

  I don’t know what to do. I try waving one hand in front of him and then reaching back to grab him with the other, but he’s too quick for that and I get another nip on the finger. He doesn’t reach out to scratch me, the way you’d expect; he takes quick snaps with those sharp teeth. Maybe Devil would be a better name than Cannibal. No, it’s like Dad said about me; there’s no devil in there. He only seems that way because there’s something I don’t understand.

  Then I get another idea.

  I go upstairs and pinch off a piece of hamburger again. Most of the meat we eat is hamburger, except on Sundays. Then we usually have chicken. I do the same thing, pinching off a few bits, packing it together again and closing the paper the way it was.

  I run down the cellar steps. I’m beginning to feel guilty about stealing milk and meat; our family needs it. I’ll need to tell this in confession. I’ll make sure not to go to Father Lanshee; he’d recognize me for sure. I’ll go to Father Stevens or Father O’Shea. Father O’Shea never pays much attention to what you say anyway; he sort of half sleeps in there with a book, then always gives the same penance, five Hail Marys, five Our Fathers and a good Act of Contrition. He almost always slides the door shut before you’re half finished with the Act of Contrition. I’ll go to him.

  There’s no problem with the meat. Soon as I put it on the cloth in front of Cannibal’s face, he starts gulping it down, chewing it back and forth the way a grown cat would do. He’s a Cannibal all right.

  By the time he’s finished, he’s up on his front feet. It’s amazing how fast cats seem able to recover from almost anything. Everybody in our neighborhood, the kids that is, believe cats have nine lives. I’ve had some of the alley cats pointed out to me that everybody swears were killed by a car or something and there they are, alive.

  I think it’s only because cats can live through almost anything that happens to them, then most people think a particular cat’s had another life.

  The other thing everybody around here believes is if a black cat crosses your path you’ll have bad luck. Once, I watched Joe Hennessy, who’s a big guy and can beat up almost anybody at school, and does, lots of times, walk all the way around to Clinton Road when a black cat crossed in front of him. I wonder if Cannibal could be thought of as a black cat. Actually he’s dark brown but somebody could easily make a mistake and see him as black.

  Now I have to figure where I can keep Cannibal. If he keeps improving the way he is, he’ll be wandering all over the cellar and he’s sure to start making cat noises, meowing or growling or yowling or maybe purring. He’ll also start making messes, the way cats always do. I still haven’t heard him make any noise except the hissing he made at me when he was dying on his feet; but he could start making noises if he gets better. My mom would die if she knew I had an alley cat in our cellar. I haven’t even thought about the flea part. I wonder if I already have fleas.

  I rig up a place for Cannibal behind the big furnace. It’s almost impossible to see back there and the furnace gets so hot you can’t touch the sides so nobody’s going to sneak back there. We just started the furnace last week when it began getting colder and we bank it down at night.

  Last year, Dad taught me how to bank down our furnace, getting it to burn slowly and not use up much coal. This was after I learned how to sieve out the clinkers. In the morning, it’s my job now, before school, to start up the furnace again. First, I shake down the ashes with a handle on the side, then I put in one shovelful of real coal. Over top of that, I spread a half shovelful of my clinkers. That way it gets started fast and then slows down as it gets to the clinkers. Sometimes I think I might be saving the same clinkers over and over, but there’s no way to know.

  One thing I do know is I’ve got to tell my parents about Cannibal. I want to keep him if he lives through everything, but I can’t do it if they won’t let me. When you’re ten years old you can only do what your parents will let you.

  I want to have an excuse to stay down in the cellar, so I decide to shine shoes even though it isn’t Saturday. My dad’s made a little portable shoebox you can sit on. It has a lid so when you open it, there’s a place to put a shoe on, with little twist things on each side that are adjustable to hold the shoe tight.

  My dad made this box when he was fired from J.I. and couldn’t get any job, not even with the WPA. We were on relief but all we got was cornmeal, rice, and once some Spam. We ate an awful lot of cornmeal muffins.

  Dad made this box and went down outside the train station at Sixty-ninth Street and sometimes at Sixty-third Street to shine shoes. He told me he never made more than two dollars any day and sometimes he’d only be able to charge a nickel a shine. There were a lot of other men trying to shine shoes around there, and sometimes they’d get into fights about custom
ers. Sometimes the police would come down from the municipal building up the hill and chase them all away.

  But then Dad got a job working with the WPA. He’d walk to a place past Sixty-ninth Street, up on Westchester Pike, where they were fixing the streets. He’d walk all the way there and all the way back. He used to cut out cardboard or wooden soles for his shoes and tie them on to save shoe leather, also to keep his feet warm. Dad told me it was the coldest winter he remembers. I was too young to know; all I remember is the blankets we got from relief. We called them Indian blankets, like Indian givers.

  When I was seven, my dad showed me how to shine shoes. After that, shining shoes on Saturday for church Sunday morning was my job. Even when we were building porches, after we came in I’d do the shoes. Sometimes Dad would stay on to help me when he wasn’t too tired.

  Laurel’s are easy. They’re Mary Janes, patent leather, and I just brush them off, then rub Vaseline in to make them shine. Mom’s are white and brown in summer. They’re hard; you have to whiten the white part and shine the brown part. Now it’s getting colder, she only wears brown shoes with high heels. I have to do the heel, too. I know it’s about time Dad put on new heels; the bottom part on her shoes, that is, because it’s beginning to wear along the edge of the side where I shine them.

  Dad wears cordovan shoes with a straight-across tip. He’s had these same shoes more than four years I know of; I guess all the way from back when he worked for J.I. before. He wears an old beat-up pair for working. The leather’s all cracked and you can see his socks through the top, but the bottoms are perfect.

  Dad repairs all our shoes. Part of his work bench is a regular shoemaker’s bench. He has the right glue and the tiny square nails. He’s always saving a piece of leather from some trash or other. He cuts the soles out of this leather with a real shoemaker’s curved knife. I love to watch him when he fixes shoes; it smells good, too. I know I’m never going to be a man like my father; I don’t think I care enough about things.