One-Eyed Cat

by Paula Fox

  It was dark in the kitchen. There was one window and it was dirty. Mr. Scully wouldn’t turn on any kind of light, electric or kerosene, until nightfall. Ned began his chores. He pumped water to wash the dishes Mr. Scully had left in the chipped enamel basin from his supper last night and his breakfast and lunch today. There were a cup, two plates, a small pot, a frying pan, two forks and a sharp little knife with a blade worn thin. When he finished washing up, Ned swept out the kitchen and the parlor. Though Mr. Scully had plenty of wood chopped and stored in the shed, he might ask Ned to break up kindling. He worried about having enough wood for the cold weather. Some afternoons Ned made up his bed. Mr. Scully didn’t use sheets, only blankets. After that, it would be time to go through Mr. Scully’s boxes. They usually managed two a week. The boxes were piled up in the parlor where Ned had stacked them after bringing them down from the attic.

  “Once I was young David Scully. Now I’m old David,” he’d told Ned when he first decided to sort through all his things. “It’s time I put my house in order,” he had said. Whenever a post card turned up in a box, he’d give it to Ned for his collection. Most things he put into old pillowcases to be thrown away.

  Mr. Scully could still drive his old Model A down the dirt road to the state road and two miles further to a small general store to pick up groceries. He could still make his own bread, and his applesauce. But he was worried, Ned knew, about how much longer he’d be able to take care of himself. He was afraid of winter.

  The house was very old and hadn’t been much to start with; the floors creaked, and the window frames were nearly rotted away. When the wind blew, it sifted through the house as though it had been a sieve. When Mr. Scully’s daughter had come East last time, she’d had inside plumbing put in the house, and she’d bought a gas stove and a refrigerator for him. Mr. Scully wouldn’t give up the kitchen pump though. And he never put a thing in the refrigerator. He had said to Ned once, a bit grudgingly, that the water closet was an improvement over the outhouse.

  Still, the old man could do a great deal for himself. Ned had come to realize, after working for him several months, that Mr. Scully really wanted company an hour or so a day. He had enough wood for ten winters.

  “One of these days, we’ll have to clean up that yard,” Mr. Scully said. He and Ned peered through the dusty window. The yard did look pretty bad. There was a heap of tires, all worn smooth, a rusty scythe leaning up against a tree, the discarded icebox just beneath the shed roof, an old ragged quilt piled on top of it, and many other objects that were gradually becoming indistinguishable from the ground itself.

  “How old are you, Ned? I know you must have told me. I forget so much.”

  “I’m just eleven,” Ned replied. “My birthday was last month.”

  “I’m sixty-nine years older than you,” said Mr. Scully. He pursed up his mouth as though to whistle but gave a tight little laugh instead.

  The leaves on the maple tree just outside the window were brown and spotted like the skin on Mr. Scully’s hands and forehead.

  “You notice how the days are getting shorter? Soon, it’ll be Thanksgiving. Look at those crows out there. They know winter’s coming.”

  Ned put the dishes he’d washed on the tin counter to drain. There was no drying cloth. It was hard to imagine winter now, hard to imagine all the fields as bare as the breadboard that hung from a nail behind the pump.

  The old man was fussing with the gas flame of his new stove that sat next to the big black Franklin stove he used in the winter to heat the kitchen. He was making tea as he always did for himself and Ned. He would add a few drops to his cup from a small bottle he kept on his shelf with his canned goods. “Rum,” he’d told Ned on the first day Ned had come to work for him. “To make me warm. When you’re old, it’s hard to keep warm.”

  When the chores were done, they would begin to sort through a box in the parlor. When he’d put aside trash to be burned or old clothes to give away, Mr. Scully would pick up the mementos he had saved and tell Ned about them. Ned understood that that was what Mr. Scully wanted most—for Ned to listen to his history.

  “See this stone?” he said, after he’d filled a sack with old newspaper clippings about the sinking of the Titanic, remarking that he couldn’t think why he’d saved them in the first place. “It’s a soapstone actually. Look how it’s carved.” He put it in Ned’s hand.

  The soapstone had an oily feel to it. Ned couldn’t make out what the carving was.

  “It’s Chinese, and the symbols mean good luck. Well—I’m giving you that for your birthday—even though it’s past. My poor uncle wouldn’t have agreed there was much luck in the stone. He was in the San Francisco earthquake. When they pulled him up from under his house, the stone was embedded in his chest. It’s a pagan thing. I can’t think why he was wearing it.” He laughed suddenly. It was more of a cackle than a laugh, Ned thought.

  “Thank you,” he said. It made him feel queer, knowing the stone had been buried in a man’s chest almost thirty years ago.

  “Imagine!” exclaimed the old man. “Everything you touch in this world has a history. Drink your tea. It’ll cool you off. Did you know that hot tea cools a person? Life is full of paradox.”

  They looked through the black pages of an album thickened with tintypes and yellowed photographs. Mr. Scully turned the pages very slowly. “My mother,” he said, pointing to a tinted tintype of a young girl with a thick frizz of hair on her forehead. “I hadn’t even been born when that was taken,” he said meditatively. “Life is strange.” He pointed to another of a man in a uniform, leaning on a gun. “There’s my father.”

  “Why does he have a gun?” asked Ned.

  “It was during the Civil War. My father fought in it and was killed by it. He was wounded in the Antietam campaign in the battle on South Mountain on September 14, 1862, and he came home to die. I was six years old, Ned. I can see him now, as clear as I can see you, lying in the bed in our house in Poughkeepsie. His face was as white as the bed linen. My mother was bending over him when I came into their room. Her hand was stretched out over his forehead. I remember how thin her fingers were, how her wedding ring slipped forward to the knuckle, how white my father’s skin was next to that living healthy hand. Then she pressed it to his face.”

  He looked up suddenly and sniffed the air. “The weather’s changing. I can feel a storm coming up.”

  Ned would have liked to know more about the battle on South Mountain. He stared down at the gun in the tintype. A remembrance of the feeling of a gun came to him.

  “He looks so proud, don’t he? Maybe it was because he was holding his head so stiff and serious. Just think! Some Southern boy that was going to kill him may have been getting his picture took, too, in his uniform and leaning on his gun.” He closed the album. “I’ll keep this,” he said.

  Mr. Scully looked tired; his jaw had fallen open slightly. At times, his speech would grow slurred as though a sponge were being passed over his words. Ned took their cups out to the kitchen and washed them. The sky had darkened but there was still a glow of sunlight on the distant hills that rose up on the other side of the state road.

  He put the cups on the counter. Next week, maybe, he’d start cleaning up the yard. As he looked through the window, thinking of where he would begin, he saw a gaunt cat move slowly away from the outhouse.

  “There’s a cat in the yard,” he called out to Mr. Scully.

  “I get one once in a while,” said the old man from the parlor. “Some of them live in the woods up your way. Feral cats—gone wild. They do all right in the warm months but winter kills most of them off.”

  Ned watched the cat a moment.

  “There’s something wrong with this one. It looks sick,” he said.

  He heard Mr. Scully groan as he got to his feet, then shuffle into the kitchen. Ned had noticed that he was wearing his slippers. He must not be feeling too well today, Ned knew. If he had been, he would have worn his black shoes that buttoned up
the side. He came up next to Ned and leaned toward the window.

  “He looks like he’s already been through the winter,” Mr. Scully said. “Poor devil. Take some of that loaf and break it up into pieces and pour a little milk on them,” he directed Ned. “You can use that bowl and set it outside near the shed. He does look wild.”

  The cat was as gray as a mole and its fur was matted. As it peered toward the house, it shook its head constantly as though to clear away something that made seeing difficult.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Ned asked.

  “Hunger,” replied Mr. Scully. “No. Wait a minute. There is something wrong.”

  “One of its eyes is shut tight.”

  The cat came closer to the house.

  “The eye isn’t there,” Ned said. “There’s just a little hole.” He felt a touch of fear.

  Mr. Scully pressed against the counter. Ned could feel his breath.

  “You’re right,” Mr. Scully said. “The cold does that to them sometimes, and he looks big enough to have been born last year. Or else someone used him for target practice. A boy would do that. A living target is more interesting than a tin can. Or he might have been in a bad fight with another animal.”

  “That looks like dried blood on his face,” Ned said. His voice sounded odd to him, far away. He took the bowl with the bread and milk and went out to the shed and placed the bowl just inside it, near the stacked wood. As he stood up, a faint breeze stirred the hot air, then it died away.

  The stillness was deep as though the earth itself had drawn in its breath. The only thing moving was a wasp near the roof of the outhouse. Ned watched it as its circles grew smaller and smaller until, all at once, it disappeared. Probably its nest was there just under the roof. Maybe there were snakes in back of the outhouse where the tangled grass grew thick. He suddenly recalled how Janet had flung her whole self against Billy, how the snake had flown out of his hands. A thought was buzzing and circling inside his head, a thought that stung like a wasp could sting.

  Mr. Scully had said wild cats lived up in the woods among the thick-boughed trees where Ned had read books in the summer. Between the house and the woods was the old stable.

  Ned had taken the gun and fired it. He had seen something move along the stones of the foundation. It hadn’t been tall grass stirring in a current of air. It had been something living. He had disobeyed his father and he had shot at something that was alive. He knew it was that cat. What would Janet have done to him if she had seen him that night, shooting at something he had told himself was a shadow. Had he really thought it was a shadow? Would a shadow make you feel so alert? Sharpen your hearing? Make your heart drum?

  Years ago, the church ladies had outdone themselves and packed a hamper of cakes for his father’s birthday. Papa had brought the hamper home and put the cakes on the kitchen table, five of them. Papa had said, “The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. I can’t think why they don’t plan things a little better!” and shaken his head. He’d taken three of the cakes to the Kimballs and one to Mr. Scully but he kept the chocolate cake. Ned, who loved chocolate better than anything, had gotten up after everyone was asleep and gone down to the kitchen and eaten handfuls of cake until he could hardly stand up. He was sick the next morning and stayed home from school.

  He recalled exactly how it had been, standing in the dark, the cake moist in his hands, stuffing pieces of it into his mouth, knowing he shouldn’t be doing what he was doing, but shutting his eyes tight with the joy of it.

  In the morning, as he clutched his belly, Papa had pulled a chair to the side of his bed and sat down and spoken to him in an especially gentle voice, that spooky voice he used when he was trying to teach Ned something. “I know it was good,” Papa had said. “Just because a thing is good doesn’t mean we can have as much of it as we want.”

  He hadn’t been able to figure out at first how his father had known what he’d done. Later, when he was able to creep downstairs, he saw the crumbling ruins of the cake on its plate.

  “Come here, my little hog,” his mother had said. “I understand you made a chocolate cake miraculously disappear during the night.”

  Thinking about that now, remembering how he’d put his face down on his mother’s lap, how he’d said he’d never do that again, and how she’d touched his hair and said, “Yes, that’s what we always say,” he realized how childish it all had been. How childish all the bad things he’d ever done were compared to what he’d done on the night of Uncle Hilary’s visit.

  He looked around the yard. The cat was gone. He hoped he’d never see it again. He went back into the kitchen.

  “The storm is closer,” Mr. Scully said. Standing next to him, Ned stared at his soft old mouth, his stained teeth, and smelled his dried-leaf-and-old-wood smell.

  “I left the bowl for the cat,” he said.

  “Hunting will be hard for him now. These cats live pretty good off rodents until the ground freezes over. I’ll keep food out for him. Maybe he’ll manage.”

  Ned didn’t think he would. He’d seen the gap, the dried blood, the little worm of mucus in the corner next to the cat’s nose where the eye had been.

  He walked slowly up the long road home. The house in the pale storm-light looked like a picture of a castle in a book. He couldn’t remember from which window that face had looked out at him that night. It might not have been a face, after all, he thought; it might have been the old gondolier’s hat which hung from a nail in the attic. The hat couldn’t have moved itself to a window. It must have been Mrs. Scallop. It seemed to him now that if she’d seen him carrying the gun, she would, somehow, know about the cat. Yet it wasn’t like her—not to let him know what she knew. He shivered suddenly the way he did when Papa opened the cellar door.

  He stayed on the porch a moment looking down at the river. A single line of birds drew a black thread across the swelling gray clouds. His mother would know what kinds of birds they were. She was probably watching them, too, from the bay windows. Suddenly, he wanted to see her more than anything in the world.

  “Come in, Neddy,” whispered Mrs. Scallop from behind the screen door. “I have some nice cold milk for you. How’s Mr. Scully? He looked very feeble to me when I saw him last week puttering around his house. They’ll come to take him away one of these days.”

  He didn’t want to ask her but he did. “Who? Take him where?”

  “Ah, well …” she said, sighing. He pushed open the screen door and she backed slowly away toward the kitchen entrance. He clenched his jaw; he wouldn’t ask her again. As he put his hand on the newel post of the staircase, she said softly, “To the old folks home, of course. That’s what happens to all of us when we get old and useless. Yes, Ned. That’s why I’m so tolerant of folks. What I say is—people suffer enough in this life. Why should I add to their suffering? But then I’m like that—I wear my heart on my sleeve.”

  Ned took the stairs two at a time.

  “Don’t be so noisy!” thundered Mrs. Scallop. “Think of your poor mother!”

  Mama was looking toward the river. A tremendous longing rose up in him. If she would only stand and walk to him and put her arms around him! He had seen her walk—not only in memory or in dreams—but with the help of a cane and Papa’s arm. But so rarely!

  She turned to look at him. She barely lifted the fingers of her left hand from the tray to wave at him. He walked to her. “Ned,” she said, saying his name strongly the way she would say yes or river.

  “Mrs. Scallop says that Mr. Scully is going to be taken away to the old folks home,” he told her. “She said she wears her heart on her sleeve.”

  “Mrs. Scallop knows nothing about the future,” she said, touching Ned’s wrist with her warm, crooked fingers, “and you must beware of people who wear their hearts on their sleeves; it’s not the natural place to keep your heart—it turns rusty and thin, and it leaves you hollow inside.”

  There was a book on the tray, Middlemarch. “W
hat’s that about?” he asked, suddenly very tired. He felt his shoulders droop. Even his knees felt tired.

  “Nearly everything,” she said. “It is about lives. I think you’ve had a hard day, Ned. Is there something on your mind? Something worrying?”

  There was a good deal on his mind. His mother’s fingers had slipped from his wrist. What if he told her about the cat? He imagined how she would look if he told her—horrified!

  Mr. Scully had said the winter cold could affect their eyes. It might have been in a fight, just as the old man had suggested. If the cat came back to the yard while he was there, maybe he would get a closer look. Maybe the eye was there after all! Maybe another cat had scratched its lid so severely it only looked as if the eye had been torn out.

  “There’s Papa,” said his mother. Ned heard the Packard struggling up the long slope and rounding the north side of the house where his father would park it beneath the crab apple tree. But the car didn’t stop. Ned realized Papa was driving it to the stable.

  “I’m glad he’s home,” said his mother. “I think we’re going to have a fierce storm.”

  Mrs. Scallop was muttering in the doorway.

  “Speak up, Mrs. Scallop!” Mama said sharply. “I’m not dead yet!”

  “Oh—I was just saying, Ned’s milk will be all warm the way he don’t like it.”

  Mama gave him a conspiratorial smile and said in a low voice, “Better go down and drink it …”

  He felt almost happy, suddenly, and he went swiftly past Mrs. Scallop, down the stairs to the hall where he met his father carrying two large bags of groceries. “Help me, Neddy,” he called out. Ned grabbed a sack of potatoes. “Heavens! I nearly ran down a wretched cat at the foot of the driveway. I think we’re in for a big storm.”