Whittington

by Alan Armstrong

  The cat was pleased to be asked. He had a deep voice. The horses leaned close to hear. From the rustlings around you could tell that every ear in the barn was listening.

  “When I was growing up, the boy in my home …”

  Whittington choked up, remembering the boy he’d loved. Coraggio fluttered noisily to straighten a feather. The duck looked away. The horses snorted; they understood.

  The three young rats snickered. The Old One cuffed them so hard they went sprawling.

  “Listen to your blood enemy and you may learn enough to save your lives,” he hissed.

  “My boy,” the cat continued, “told me about a Christmas pageant at his school, ‘Dick Whittington and His Marvelous Cat.’ Whittington was English. He lived a hundred years before Columbus. The thing is, I’d already heard about him and his cat before from my mother. I am descended from Dick Whittington’s cat.

  “Dick Whittington was a merchant. He traded the woolens of England for the finest fabrics from all over the world—silks from China and India, brocades and taffetas from Spain, velvets, damasks. He grew rich. He left his money for a college, libraries, a hospital, and an almshouse where the poor could rest and get food. He saw to the laying of pipe and setting up spigots to bring clean water to the slums. He knew what it was to be poor.

  “He owed his fortune to his cat.”

  “What was the cat’s name?” the Lady asked.

  “Nobody knows,” said Whittington. “History records the names of men because men write it. Dick Whittington’s name survives but his cat’s name is lost. That’s what’s wrong with history. If it hadn’t been for his cat, no one would remember Dick. Now no one remembers his cat.”

  Suddenly Whittington slipped into the shadows like smoke.

  There was a long silence; then the cat screamed as he had the morning he flew at Havey. There was a thud and a thrashing noise that slowly faded. Then they heard the high, sharp shriek of death.

  Whittington came back with a rat in his jaws. His front paw was bloody. He laid the rat at the Lady’s feet.

  “Bravo,” she said grimly. “Eleven to go.” Then she looked down at the soft brown body and imagined the barn without rats. There were four red dots on the pelt.

  They heard Bernie’s truck and Havey’s yelling. They heard the kids. The kids had a snow day. They were underfoot at the Texaco, so Bernie had brought them along.

  Abby and Ben had carrots for the horses, canned milk and tuna for the cat. They saw the dead rat and called Bernie.

  “Don’t touch it,” he said. “I’ll get rid of it outside.”

  While Bernie unloaded, the kids put down extra grain for the Lady and the chickens and doled out carrots and sugar cubes to the horses. Whittington circled around, waiting for his treat. There was a problem: no can opener.

  “That’s okay,” said Whittington, “I’ll have rat.”

  Abby took the cans to Bernie. He opened them with his knife. The kids fed the cat tuna with their fingers, then filled the empty can with milk. The three of them ended up smelling like tuna.

  “This is better than rat,” said Whittington, licking up the last bits. “Rat is tough and gamy.”

  Ben reached over to pet him. Whittington was startled; then, almost inaudible, came an uneven rumble.

  “You can purr too!” Abby exclaimed.

  “Doesn’t sound like you’ve done it for a while,” Ben said. “You’re out of practice.”

  The cat smiled, stretching out his toes and rumbling away.

  BERNIE HAD TO LEAVE while he could still get the truck up. The kids wanted to stay. He said okay. Abby had a watch; he’d collect them at three by the highway.

  They could hear the storm. The wind sent flakes in through the cracks and the broken-out window up top. Ben shivered. The Lady had the kids pull down fresh hay. It fluffed up and smelled like summer. She made the horses lie down close together and had the kids snuggle next to them. She settled herself on one fluff, Coraggio on another. The bantams made a show of flying up to the rafters and perching where they could look over everything in comfort.

  The cat was full of tuna and canned milk. He wanted to lie down in a warm place too. The Lady told him to get up on the stall railing where everybody could see him.

  “Now go on with your story,” she said.

  “Story? What story?” the kids chorused.

  Whittington shook himself. “This is the story of rats and the cats that hunt them. Rats carry the fleas that carry plague. Plague makes your groin and underarms swell up and your tongue turn black. You get buboes and spots and foam at the mouth and die in agony. It’s called the Black Death.

  “Dick Whittington’s cat won him a fortune because she was a rat-hunter. Centuries before they figured out what plague was and how it spread, people knew that a good rat-hunter could save your life.

  “The man I’m named for was born about the time the Black Death hacked through England like a filthy knife. By the time he was five years old a quarter of his town was empty. It was a horrible loneliness.

  “His family was poor. The soil was thin and ill-tended. There wasn’t enough food. There were no schools. The grandmother who lived with his family taught him to read. The priest had taught her. There were no printed books. She copied out things on scraps of stiffened cloth and scraped animal skins called parchments. She wrote down remedies, recipes, family records, and Bible passages the priest taught her.

  “She smelled of the oils, herbs, and mint she used in the remedies she made. She was a midwife and a healer, one of the cunning folk they called her. The priest taught her reading and writing so she could copy recipes for remedies and keep the parish records. Dick gathered simples for her. He had a good eye. That was his work. Other boys his age picked stones from fields, gleaned corn, scared crows, drove geese. If you were idle, you didn’t eat.”

  “What are simples?” the Lady wanted to know. The kids nodded. They didn’t know either.

  “Plants,” the cat said. “They made medicine then from leaves and blossoms, sap, roots. Dick’s grandmother boiled and ground plants into ointments and syrups to heal people.”

  “We fowl do that,” the Lady said, looking at Coraggio. “When we’re ill, we know what to eat to get better.”

  “We do too,” said Abby. “When we’re sick to the stomach, Gran makes tea from the mint that grows around, and stuff for hurts from tansy, the plant with yellow button flowers.”

  “For colds she makes yarrow tonic and rose-hip paste,” said Ben. “She puts honey in the tonic. The rose stuff is bitter.”

  “When I’m sick, I eat new grass,” the cat said.

  “Okay,” said the Lady. “Go on with your story.”

  “Dick was always surprised how warm his grandmother was when they sat close together. She read aloud the same things over and over, leading with her finger as she sounded out the letters. What he read to himself at first was what he remembered hearing as he followed her hand. He’d mouth the words as he went along, sounding them out. Not many of his time knew how to read and few of those learned silent reading. He was a mumbling reader all his life.

  “One afternoon in the village he saw a gold coin. He’d been loitering around a stout stranger, hoping to perform some service and earn a tip, when the man went into the baker’s. Dick followed him in and watched as the stranger bought a halfpenny’s worth of bread. The stranger got three round wheat loaves, honey-colored and heavy. He stuffed two into his coat and gave one to the boy. The man fumbled in his purse for a coin. He held it out for Dick to see. It was the size of a fingernail, stamped with a face. It gleamed like nothing Dick had ever seen before. What impressed him almost as much as its gleam was how carefully the baker studied it and weighed it and how many coins he gave in change.

  “Then one day outside the inn he overheard a carter telling the men helping him unload barrels of cider that he had heard from a man who had been there that London’s streets were paved with gold and all the people were plump and health
y.

  “That night Dick had a dream. He dreamed he went to London and became the stout stranger, filling his purse with the small, gleaming rounds of gold that lay like pebbles in the streets. He went to the baker and stuffed his pockets, he went to the inn and was served roast meat and cider. In his dream he was never hungry again. He wore warm clothes and was never cold again either.

  “He had heard talk that he was to be put in service to a tanner, a hard man who beat his boys and fed them poorly. Working with hides was a dirty, stinking business. The boys had to scrape off rotting flesh and hair and lift the heavy skins in and out of the tanbark vats. A boy in the tanner’s service had hawked up blood and died. Dick figured he’d better get out on his own pretty quick.”

  THE HORSES SHUFFLED. They needed to go out for a few minutes. The bantams fluttered, the Lady took some water. Whittington was hungry. Dick’s dream of roast meat made him think of food. Then everybody came back and settled and the cat resumed.

  “Every morning on awakening, Dick told himself his dream to keep courage. He didn’t think about what he would be leaving, only where he was going. ‘London’ rang in his head like a bell.

  “No carriages passed through his town. The farmers’ carts never went much beyond the village. The boy watched and waited for another stranger to come through. He knew he’d get to London somehow. He knew his dream was a prophecy.”

  “What’s prophecy?” Ben asked.

  “It’s telling about what’s going to happen,” the cat replied. “As part of her learning to read, the boy’s grandmother had copied out Bible prophecies with the priest.”

  “How did you learn to read?” Ben asked. He wanted to know because he was having trouble.

  “I never learned,” said Whittington. “Do you know how?”

  “Some,” said the boy.

  “No he doesn’t, not really,” said Abby, shaking her head. She didn’t say it in a mean way; she said it with the worry of love.

  “Gran got a note from his teacher that he’s not reading like he’s supposed to. They’re going to put him in Special Ed if he doesn’t get better.”

  Ben’s face darkened.

  The Lady looked up angrily. “Who is Special Ed?”

  “It’s not a person,” Abby said. “It’s a class they take you to so you don’t hold up the others. They take you out of the room and everybody knows you’re stupid. They call the Special Eds ‘re-tards.’”

  Whittington studied Ben’s face, remembering another boy.

  “Do you know how to read?” the cat asked Abby.

  She nodded. “Gran helped me.”

  What she didn’t say was that after her mother died Abby wouldn’t do anything in school. It was a battle to get her to go at all. Finally Marion started taking her. So long as her gran sat in the classroom Abby would work along with the others, but she was way behind. If Gran left, Abby fought and cried. Marion quit doing the books and car rentals at the Texaco and signed on as a teacher’s aide.

  “Imagine me, with no college, helping out in a classroom,” she told Bernie. “I’ll tell you, those teachers are heroes, all what they do.” The kids assigned to Marion—Abby and two of her classmates—were struggling and angry. There’s a lot of anger in not being able to do what people think you should be doing. Marion’s job was to help them read the special books they’d been assigned. She brought in gingerbread men she made with a lot of ginger; she gave pats and pushes. As they progressed from one book to the next, she’d tell them, “Look what you did!”

  The Lady asked Abby, “Why doesn’t your gran help Ben the way she helped you?”

  “He won’t let her. She gives him a book or even a cereal box to read and he throws it across the room. He does the same thing in school sometimes.”

  Ben looked down. He was scared. Reading was too hard. It was the hardest thing he’d ever tried. Reading aloud meant dragging words out, even easy words. He’d get three words right, then there’d be a baffler. There were giggles when he missed. His reading aloud was flat, just words. If the teacher asked him about what he’d read, he’d shrug. He was ashamed. He learned best watching and listening. If he could see something done, he could do it. But writing and arithmetic—things got blurred and turned around. Sometimes the word he read didn’t make sense, or it wasn’t a real word at all. The marks didn’t read for him the way they did for others. In arithmetic he got a different answer, or no answer. There was a bigger and bigger gap between his world and everybody else’s.

  “Do you?” the cat asked him.

  “Do I what?” asked the boy, startled out of his reverie.

  “Throw the things they give you to read?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  The Lady looked hard at Abby. “Could you help Ben like your grandmother helped you?”

  “He wouldn’t let me,” Abby said.

  “Oh, yes he would!” said the Lady, flexing her huge wings and taking charge.

  “Wouldn’t you?” the Lady asked, giving Ben a meaningful look.

  He nodded a small nod.

  “But he sees backward,” said Abby. “You need a specialist to fix that. It isn’t glasses. They checked him for glasses. I had a hearing problem, so I couldn’t read at first either. I had earaches. Even when I didn’t have earaches, I couldn’t hear the sounds of some of the letters. W and r sounded the same to me, so ‘white’ and ‘right’ sounded the same. They were going to send me out until I fell down the stairs. I went to the hospital for an operation on my ears. It fixed my balance and I heard better. The specialist helped me get the sounds of the letters. The night I was in the hospital Mom sat up with me so I wouldn’t be scared. …” She broke off.

  The Lady coughed and looked at Ben.

  “Do you hear okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you see me backward?”

  “No….”

  “Okay,” said the Lady, turning to Abby. “Tomorrow bring the book.”

  “Which one?”

  “There’s more than one book?”

  Abby nodded.

  “Whittington, what book did Dick learn from?”

  “His grandmother didn’t have a book,” said the cat. “She taught from what the priest had helped her write down. She wrote on scraps. Dick learned the Bible sayings and parables the old woman had copied, sounding out the words after her, letter by letter, as she pointed.”

  The Lady turned to Abby. “Do you have a book with the things Dick learned to read?”

  “Some of them,” said the girl.

  “Okay,” said the Lady. “Bring it tomorrow.”

  She turned to Ben. “Look, it’s not so bad. You’re not stupid. Abby had a reading problem. She got over it. You will too.

  “Now let’s get the rest of Whittington’s story before you go up to meet your granddad.”

  THE CAT ROSE and settled on the railing like a blown leaf. He would have preferred to speak from his nest in the hay, but the Lady was of the firm opinion that audiences should look up. She said if folks looked down, they’d fall asleep. Where the cat perched, it was cold and drafty A snowflake brushed his nose.

  Whittington cleared his throat and hunched and settled, wrapping his ringed tail around his feet the way a gentleman wraps his scarf. He resumed in his rumbling, gravelly voice.

  “One day, after the harvest, the land agent arrived. He came every few years in a carriage to inspect his master’s properties and collect the rents. He was short, fat, and red-faced. His dark green coat buttoned tight over his belly.

  “His driver was a quick, muscular man of thirty with a long scar down the side of his throat. His name was Will Price. He wore a tall black hat and a uniform patched with leather at the elbows, cuffs, and knees. His coat was black with green piping, but the piping had mostly worn off and the black was dulled with dust. His hair was lank and greasy, brown with gray in it.

  “The boy asked Will if he and the agent were going to London.

  “‘Aye, in a roundabout
way, collecting all that’s due and righting all that’s wrong,’ said the driver. ‘It’ll be two months and more afore I see London again.’

  “‘May I go with you?’ Dick asked.

  “‘Nay, lad. Many’s the ones that’s asked, though they’ve all been some older than you, but the agent would never have it. Besides, London’s no place for a boy….

  “‘For all of that, how old are you?’

  “‘Eight,’ said Dick.

  “Will was surprised. The boy had the manner of someone older but he looked about six. The driver muttered to himself that in this county, with food so poor, the children grew up runty.

  “‘Too young, lad. Try when you’re fourteen and brawny.’”

  Ben interrupted the cat’s story. “I’m eight too. Am I bigger than he was?”

  “Yes,” said the cat.

  “Hmm,” said Ben.

  The cat continued. “Dick offered to help on the road. He made every argument why Will should take him along.

  ‘I know grooming, harness, tack, I can carry, keep the carriage nice, run errands. I can help dig it out and push in the miry places. I could spell you on the reins. I can sing.’

  “Will just shook his head. He knew what the agent would say.

  “When it was clear to the boy how it was, his face worked but he did not cry. It was a point of honor with him never to show tears.

  “He made a plan. He put on all the clothes he owned and filched three loaves from the baker’s rack. If he’d been caught, he would have been beaten, but he wasn’t caught. He stuffed the loaves inside his shirt.

  “Early the next morning as the carriage was pulling away, Dick jumped on the back and tangled himself in the luggage straps. He was scrawny but he was tough. Will couldn’t dislodge him.

  “‘But your home! Your ma!’ the driver pleaded, tugging at him.

  “‘I have to go to London,’ the boy panted as he struggled to fix his grip tighter.

  “The driver was not mean, but the agent was. When he saw a strange boy tangled in the straps on the back of his carriage, he was all for slashing at him with the horsewhip. He was too fat and out of breath to do it himself, so he screeched to his driver, ‘Hit him, Will! Beat him! Whip the dirty beggar off’