Mom had stayed married to Pop in spite of everything he did that made her mad. She usually managed to be looking the other way when Pop pulled a lot of his shenanigans. If she didn’t see it, she wasn’t responsible for it. She was a very practical lady. She had scruples but they were flexible.
Pop said they just needed to keep her in the dark until the kittens were born and he could sell a couple, because she was apt to be more reasonable once she saw they were the start of a lucrative enterprise.
Jubal kept himself to a walk until he reached the kitchen door, then lit out for the barn as fast as he dared.
The cats were settled down snug and cozy in the little rag beds he had made for them in the hay. They seemed to be getting along fine. The momcat had moved right in with Chessie to the stall room Pop and he had built to protect her—and to protect Pop, Jubal was pretty sure.
The momcat meowed and yowled about the closed door, though, so Pop took the truck to town and brought home one of those cat doors that could be keyed to open only for a cat wearing a special collar. It took both Jubal and Pop to put the collar on the barn cat, which she obviously considered was taking undue liberties. She had not liked that collar even a little, but being a sensible cat, when her gyrations and scratchings didn’t get it off, she seemed to forget about it and went about her business.
Chessie didn’t get a collar but didn’t seem to mind the door. Pop said she was used to being indoors and in confined places a lot so he figured she probably liked it that way.
Jubal opened the door a crack. If he’d been a little taller, he could have looked through the crescent moon carved through the front of it. The door had been on the privy that used to stand in back of the house, before they got hooked up to the Locksley sewer system. They’d had to saw off the top and add a board to the bottom to make it fit, but it worked okay. It still stank a little, but cats didn’t seem to mind that kind of thing.
He meant to just peek at them before bringing the cows in for the night, feeding the chickens, and milking, but when he saw both cats licking a sticky-looking kitten while part of another kitten was coming out of its mom’s back end, he couldn’t leave. Even though he’d seen that other newborn animals were a sticky mess just out of the mama, he somehow thought the kittens would be all fluffy and cute and bright-eyed.
But the first kitten out of the chute had its eyes stuck shut, and what little fur it had was glued to its teeny-weeny body with sparkly slimy stuff from its mother’s insides. Its tail was no longer than Jubal’s pinky, and the rest of the entire kitten would have fit inside a teacup. When he reached out with one fingertip to pet the kitten’s head, which was now fairly clean, its mother gave him a dirty look.
“Don’t worry, girl. I wouldn’t hurt your baby. You know me, right? We’re friends, aren’t we? I was just going to pet it.”
Chessie turned her head to give him a long look too, calmer than the momcat’s but a warning. It came to him all of a sudden that the kitten was probably too little and too new to be petted right then. “I didn’t know, okay?” he said. “Gimme a break here. I haven’t seen baby cats get born before.”
The little kitten might be blind, but it found one of its mom’s teats quick enough and set about nursing while she popped the rest of the next kitten out. The two cats were doing an assembly line kind of thing: the tortoiseshell momcat popping them out, Chessie washing one end while the new mother washed the other, and then if Momcat was busy with birthing the next kitten, Chessie would nudge the clean kitten over to get its dinner.
He was still watching when he heard Pop call, “Jubal! How come the cows are still out in the pasture? It’ll be getting dark soon.”
“Pop, come and see this!” he cried without getting up. In a minute the latch was raised and Pop came in behind him.
“Well, looks like your barn cat is showing her ladyship how it’s done. I don’t reckon they need supervision, son.”
“But, Pop!”
“You go do your chores before your mama wants to know why you didn’t. I’ll make sure the cats are okay.”
And that was that. Jubal hung around the barn as long as he could, going out in the yard to feed the chickens, putting down fresh food and hay for the cows, getting the milking gear ready for when he brought them in. Pop slipped out in the middle of the milking and came back with a piece of equipment that he took into the cat room with him. Jubal wondered what it was. Pop wouldn’t hurt the cats or the kittens, he was pretty sure, but it was hard to say for certain what he would do. He wasn’t exactly a predictable kind of guy.
When Jubal put the cows into their stalls and was measuring out their food, he heard a cat squall. He hastily set down his bucket and ran to the cat room, flinging open the door. Pop had one of the kittens in one hand and a syringelike thing in the other hand, the tip against the kitten’s neck. Momcat was snarling at him.
“I’m not going to hurt your offspring, madame,” Pop told her. “I am elevating him—or her, as the case may be—to a higher station in life. You’ll thank me for this later.”
Jubal didn’t think Momcat was buying it.
CHAPTER 6
CHESTER’S STORY: A BARN ON SHERWOOD
Having finally attained the maturity and skills to render a full account of the events surrounding my entrance into the universe, I can now tell the story of my birth, the births of my siblings, and our fate at the hands of our captors.
Because of the humans’ interference, my mother wisely chose to deliver her litter in the middle of the night. I was born first, the most beautiful of the lot, my mother assured me, though I heard her say the same thing to each of my subsequent siblings. I had to take her word for it since my eyes were still closed.
Inconvenient bit of biology, that. Fortunately, my blindness made my other senses preternaturally acute and I quickly assessed my surroundings. My nose led me to a source of nourishment.
“Hey, you, new kid, that’s our milk you’re stealing!”
“Yeah, get away from our mother and go back to your own!”
These were the unkind and uncouth cries that greeted me from the other youthful feline denizens of our lair, the offspring of my mother’s companion and my sometimes nanny, a tortoiseshell queen named Git. Though lacking our careful breeding, Git nonetheless proved herself to be a noble creature of the highest order. Fortunately for me, Git’s kittens had been born only the day before and were also blind and of precarious balance, so their feeble swats at my poor unsuspecting newborn self did no harm except to them as they fell back on their own tails with the effort of swinging their paws.
“Now where did I put that kitten?” I heard my mother’s melodious voice inquire. “I hope I didn’t sit on him while I was birthing this one. Git, have you seen—”
“He’s right here, Chessie. Causing trouble.” Larger paws and a nudge from an adult muzzle herded me back toward my own mother, who nudged me toward an appropriate dispenser of sustenance.
“Ah, not my fault, Git. He gets that from his father’s line. Space Jockey is a notorious brawler.”
“Aren’t they all?”
My sister was already at an adjoining milk outlet and we applied ourselves to nursing with great zeal while two more siblings were born, washed, and deposited beside us. Then things began to go badly.
I noticed this because I was sleeping on top of Mother when she began heaving and panting to a degree that I have since felt only during take-offs, landings, and meteor showers. My brother did not survive. Neither my other siblings nor I found this terribly distressing as it meant more available food for us, but Mother was vexed, rather ashamed, she complained to Git, since she had never before lost a kitten, and, by the time she finally succeeded in pushing it out, she was hurt and bleeding to an apparently irregular extent.
“Where is that boy now that he might come in handy?” Git asked, dumping her own brood unceremoniously, as I divined from their indignant minuscule mewings, and trying to help my mother clean her injuries.
Her cries, strong at first, quickly grew softer as she lost more blood. The tang of it was strong and it made the straw sticky beneath our paws.
Git’s louder complaints were joined by the sound of her claws rending some resistant substance followed by the thud of her body against the same. “The dirty rats locked my entrance!” she cried. “How are we supposed to provide for these young’uns if we can’t hunt? Let me owwt!”
I did not understand the full implications of the situation, nor did any of the other kittens, poor blind stumbling little things that we were. But we could hear that Git was distressed and sense that Mother was in mortal pain, so we added our feeble squeaking voices to those of the older cats.
In between my verbal complaints, I licked my mother as she had licked me to clean and dry me. Although I had not the words to articulate it, I knew that she was on the verge of leaving us, that help must be sought, if only to remove the barrier Git found so irksome. Mother trembled beneath me, and her heartbeat—our steady and strong companion as we awaited birth—had become too quick to give proper emphasis to each thud. Were we all to end before we had made a proper beginning?
“Boy!” Git called over and over again, and suddenly I saw as clearly as if my eyes had opened a strange-looking biped with blue hind legs and chest, dirty white hind paws, furless arms, and spidery looking forepaws with wormlike things on the ends of its pads. A large round head bore the only fur on the boy’s entire body, and he seemed to have no ears. His eyes were also closed when I first saw him, but when I gave an inner exclamation of surprise, they opened. They were the first eyes I saw, although mine remained closed. They were large, a lighter shade of the same color as his legs and chest. Their initial expression was one I would come to recognize as startled. It quickly shifted so that his whiskerless face with its flattened, split muzzle reflected the fear I felt rising from my mother and through me. I smelled his fear but I also smelled his wonderful boy smell, tangy and warm mixed with wood and dirt and a bit of what I later identified as onion.
I had at the time no idea how I conjured this apparition, but was as gratified as I felt after nursing when a short time later there were rustling steps outside, a rattle, a snick, and a rush of clean air, along with a beam of light I saw even through the membranes covering my eyes. “Chessie! You’re having your babies. What’s the matter, girl?”
The boy’s large warm presence loomed over us and one of the wormlike things descended to stroke my mother between the ears and then me, from my ears to my tail. The sensation was not unpleasant. The boy stroked each of my siblings in turn, then Git’s kittens. Git had taken advantage of the opening to leave the enclosure, but I heard her return and the sound of her fur brushing the boy’s hind leg and paw, which were cramped awkwardly beneath him.
Then the boy said, “What’s that? Looks like you lost one of your babies and—shite oh dear, kitty, you’re bleedin’ like a stuck pig.”
He rose so quickly that Git fell sideways and, without closing the opening, he thudded away, yelling, “Dad! Hey, Dad!”
My memory gives me no account of what happened next. Although I now possess the maturity and faculties I mentioned previously, at the time I was newborn, with closed eyes, had been through a great deal during my first few moments of life, and I needed my rest.
I can say only that my mother and I survived, as did the three siblings that were born after me. That made it even. Four of us and four of the others, Git’s get. The boy announced that he would call me Chester. Mother said I was the spitting image of her illustrious forebear Tuxedo Thomas. I am largely black, with a white chest and paws. My younger sisters were Silvesta, a silver tabby whose stripes twined into butterfly shapes on her sides, and Buttercup, gold and white with deeper orangish stripes along her legs and decorating her tail. My brother Sol, when he was little, was pale peach and cream-striped and insufferable. No matter which outlet on which mother I chose, Sol was right there to argue with me about it.
The kittens born to Git were our seniors by a day, according to her. They were all males. The boy called them Virgil, Wyatt, Bat, and Doc, after dead humans whose exploits he had read in stories. Apparently Bat was the one whose name came first, since he batted at the boy’s finger when the boy tried to pet him. The other names came by association.
We got to know Git’s get quite well, as they were essentially also our littermates and shared our meals. While Mother recovered, Git often gathered us to her to nurse and give Mother rest.
Then came the time when their eyes began to open while we were still in the dark. It seemed wrong somehow that we, who Mother and Git agreed were quite special and of celestial lineage, should be blundering around blindly while Git’s kits pounced us, rolled us over, and generally behaved in an exceptionally aggressive and aggravating manner, punctuating their attacks with squeaky growls.
“You had better stop that,” I told Wyatt, who had landed on me while I was suckling. “The boy and the man are coming, and they don’t want to see any of us damaged. We are valuable.”
“You are whupped, that’s what. I don’t hear the boy’s steps or the man’s so don’t try to get out of it that way. No one can save you now from the paws of doom!”
Then he heard the footsteps too.
“How’d you hear them before me?”
“I saw them,” I told him. “I see the boy.”
“Hah! You can’t. Your eyes are closed.”
“I have my ways,” I told him mysteriously. It was not hard to be mysterious since I didn’t understand it myself. However, ever since my cries for help had summoned the boy to my mother’s side, I had retained the ability to see him through my closed eyes and to compel him to do my will. This would have given me a great sense of power except that most of the time I had no idea what my will was concerning the boy. My urgent needs, as I understood them, were met by Mother and Git. If my littermates had similar powers and visions, they didn’t mention it. Perhaps it did not occur to them that such abilities were not a normal part of a cat’s equipment, but I tend to think that theirs took longer to develop than my own, as I was the only one to know in advance when the boy was coming. When the man came to tag us, I tried to hide under Mother, but to no avail. I was scooped up and my neck stung for a reason I did not understand. I cried lustily at the cruelty and injustice of it all. Afterward, Mother gave my poor neck a weak lick, but I forgot about my injury almost before her tongue was back in her mouth.
That particular day stands out in my memory, however, because, as the boy scooped me up and put me on his shoulder, where I huddled under the fringe of hair curling down his neck—the part of him that seemed most like Mother—I slowly realized that I could see not only him but the man as well, and that I was looking down at my beautiful mother, at Git, and my littermates. The light was not good and colors were not strong but my new eyes were very sharp and I could see everyone and everything around me. I began mewing excitedly, and the boy plucked me from his neck and turned me to face him so that his huge blue eyes looked into my new ones.
“Pop, look, Chester opened his eyes!”
“Excellent! That means the rest of the litter will soon. Not too much longer and we will be wealthy, son.”
“But not Chester, right, Pop? We don’t have to sell them all. You said I could keep one and I want to keep him. That’s okay, right?”
The man sighed as Mother sometimes does when we are exploring her too actively. “I’m sorry, son. I meant it when I said that you could keep one when I brought the Duchess home, but with her only having the four kits instead of seven or eight, like we thought, our profits were cut in half. So how about picking out one of Git’s babies instead? You can have any one you want.”
“No, Pop. Chester is the one who likes me.”
“Cats like whoever feeds them, Jubal. A
nd he’s likely to get a better life than you do once we get him a good berth. Now you look after them while I’m gone and don’t let on to your mama, you hear? I have a little job to do on the station for the next few days.”
“You know I’ll take care of them, Pop.”
To the best of his ability, he did too, and the tragic events that followed were not really his fault. He was simply doing what we wanted.
During the time the man was gone, we kittens began to grow hungry for something besides milk. This became apparent the day Virgil, while nursing, bit Git and got himself slapped tail over nose into the hay pile.
Then she shook all of the others off and stretched her forepaws out in front of her and her hind end toward the ceiling and whipped her tail back and forth a few times before announcing, “Time for you young’uns to learn to hunt.”
I’d like to say that this happened at once and we all became the superb predators we were always destined to be, but first we had to learn to eat solid food. The boy helped. He brought us table scraps of cooked meat. The others growled and fought over it, but I realized immediately that the meat lacked something in juiciness and savor—that indefinable quality that I was hungry for without even realizing what I was missing. I looked up at him and mewed. He picked me up and asked, “What’s the matter, Chester? Don’t you like rabbit?”
Git rose and went to the door—that was what the opening was—and scratched.
“Okay, girl,” the boy told her. He pulled something out of a pouch in a fold of his blue hind leg, reached down, and buckled the long tail-shaped strip around Git’s neck. “You can go hunting now if you want.”
Git streaked through the door. “Freedom!” I heard her cry as she disappeared.
The man returned and entered our room. “Hmm,” he said. He took something from his coat, very small, and aimed it at us. Several times light blossomed around his hands and the colors of our coats, the hay, the boy’s clothes and skin, all became bright and distinct.
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