The Painted Ponies of Partequineus and The Summer of the Kittens

by Peter H. Riddle

  Mom draped her towel over the back of a chair and leaned over to look out the window and up at the tree. She looked at it for a long time, then straightened up and kind of shook her head.

  “More expense,” she muttered.

  “So is Mr. Harding right?”

  “I’m afraid so, dear,” Mom said. “We always knew it might happen, the way the elms at the university have been dying, but it could have chosen a better time.”

  She picked up her towel and headed back to the kitchen, and a couple of minutes later we heard her talking on the phone. I could tell from the way she sounded, all sort of sad and mad at the same time, that she was talking to Dad at his office. I couldn’t hear everything, but she was saying something about the tree, and how he had to arrange to have it taken down, and then “You’d damn well better look into it! You’ve still got some responsibilities around here, unless you want to pack your bags and get out for good!”

  I heard the phone slam down, and avoided looking at Jimmy so he wouldn’t see how embarrassed I was. I’d never heard his Mom and Dad fight or anything, and I wished Jimmy didn’t know that mine did. But he never said anything about it.

  “What do you want to do now?” I asked him.

  “We could play with Maggie,” he said.

  “Okay, I’ll go let her in.” I went out into the kitchen, and Mom was sitting at the table with her face buried in her hands, only she jumped up kind of fast when I came in and turned away so I wouldn’t see she’d been crying. I didn’t know why she was so sad, unless it was about the tree, ’cause I was sad about that too, only I wasn’t crying, even though I felt like it a little bit. I went to the back door and called Maggie, and she crawled out from under the steps and sort of slinked inside. I guess she was still scared from the way Mr. Harding yelled at her.

  “Mom,” I said, “Mr. Harding was real mad about Maggie being in his yard, and he nailed the loose board in the fence shut again.”

  “It’s just as well,” she said, standing at the sink with her back turned to me. “We don’t want her bothering anyone.”

  “Mom…” I wanted her to look at me, and finally she turned around.

  “What?”

  “Do you think Mr. Harding might hurt Maggie? Hit her or poison her or something?”

  Mom smiled at me. That hardly ever happens lately. “Mr. Harding would never hurt an animal.” She turned away again, and I decided not to ask how she knew for sure, but I wanted to know why he acted so mean.

  “Why is he so mad all the time?”

  Mom sort of shrugged her shoulders, and then she put away the dishcloth and sat down at the table. She motioned for me to join her, and I did.

  “Mr. Harding had some very bad luck about fifteen years ago,” she told me. “His wife died of cancer, and then a year later his whole family was killed in a highway crash. He had a son and daughter and five grandchildren, and they were all together in a van, coming back east for a reunion. He hadn’t seen them in a long time.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “So that’s why he hates everybody.”

  “He doesn’t hate them, exactly. He’s just very much alone in the world now. I don’t think he finds much meaning in life.”

  “I did a bad thing today,” I said. “I kind of yelled at him a little.”

  “I understand. It’s hard to be nice to him sometimes, the way he is. It’s best if you just stay away from him. There isn’t anything anyone can do to help.”

  I found Maggie up in Jimmy’s lap in the living room, and I made a toy for her out of a piece of wadded up paper and a string, and we played with her for a while. Jimmy stayed for supper. He called home and his mother said it was okay. He was feeling really good, no headaches or anything, and it was nice to have someone in the house besides just Mom and me, ’cause Mom made an effort to talk and be cheerful, which she hardly ever does any more. I felt sad when it was time for Jimmy to go home.

  After he left I went outside and sat in my tree until it got dark, and then I only went inside because Mom said I had to. I talked to it. The tree, I mean, and I said thank you for letting me see the world from so far up, and for all the days when I was up there and Jimmy was down in his wheelchair and we talked about school and about life, and for the times when I was sad and I sat there real quiet so that birds came and sang to me and made me feel better. I can see across the dykes to Port Williams real good from up there, the feed mill down by the dock and the church spire that looks like a page out of Yankee magazine. And all the people there are happy, and all the children have parents who love them, and each other, and everybody has a cat.

  At least I have a cat.

  Just before he left tonight, Jimmy kissed me.

  June 15th

  Hello, Diary!

  I’m really sad today. My tree is gone. Some men came on Saturday with a truck that had this thing like a big claw mounted on it, and they cut off the branches up top and then parts of the trunk, one at a time, and loaded the parts on the truck with the claw and took them away someplace. I watched the whole thing. There’s nothing left now but a stump.

  Now I don’t have anywhere to sit where I can see the world. I know how Jimmy must feel.

  June 26th

  Hey, Diary!

  School’s out! And I get to stay up later now. I went to the flying field with Jimmy and his Dad after supper tonight, and they let me fly his plane, and I even got to land it, only I kind of messed up, ’cause it went over on its nose and the engine stopped. I was afraid I broke it, but Jimmy just laughed and said he used to do that lots of times. He made me try again right away, ’cause he said it’s like when you fall off a horse you have to get right back on, or you’ll always be afraid later on. I know that’s a cliché, but I guess it’s true, ’cause when I tried to land the next time I was so nervous I was afraid to push the joystick that makes the plane come down, and it overshot the end of the field and fell into some weeds, only that was okay, because the weeds were soft so nothing got broken that time either. And Jimmy said, “See? You didn’t hurt it. So try again.” And guess what? The next time I tried it, I put that old plane right down in the middle of the field, and it only bounced once - well, maybe twice - and Mr. Morris told me I was a “natural,” whatever that means.

  Maggie seemed really strange today. She’s been prowling around the house, trying to get into the closets and acting kind of restless. I let her out when I got home from flying with Jimmy, but I guess she did her business real quick because she came back inside right away. Dad got mad at her ’cause she was snooping around in his den, and he hates that, so I took her upstairs and put her in my room, and right away she scratched at my closet door as if she wanted to go in, so I opened it for her and she went inside and sort of poked at my stuff on the floor, so I shoved things around to make space for her and she sat down and started to wash. I waited a while and then tried to coax her out, but she just curled her feet under her chest and looked at me. I swear, I think she wanted me to close the closet door. If I did, at least she wouldn’t be able to go downstairs and bother Dad, but I was afraid if she couldn’t get out, she might pee in there.

  Mom says I have to keep Maggie out of Dad’s way. He’s been home all week, during the day and at night too, but he and Mom aren’t talking much. They don’t even look at each other unless they have to. I get the idea something happened between Dad and that woman at the university, but I’m not going to ask. That’s between them, Mom and Dad, I mean, only it’s worse for me now because they’re so tense all the time, as if they’re afraid whatever they say will start a fight. I just keep quiet when they’re around each other so I don’t set them off.

  I think it may be my fault that Dad never wants to be around here much. I must have done something wrong.

  Anyway, I went downstairs and found Mom in the kitchen. She’s almost never in the same room as my father if she can help it.

  “Mom, is Maggie sick?” I asked her.

  “I don’t think so. Why?”<
br />
  “She’s acting kind of funny.”

  “Funny how? Did you let her out?”

  “Uh, huh, and she did her business and came right back in. She ate her supper, though, so I guess maybe she’s feeling okay.”

  “She doesn’t look like she misses many meals,” Mom said. “She’s twice as fat as when you found her.” And then she got this funny look on her face, as if she’d just thought of something.

  “That’s probably because the college students who had her didn’t feed her very well,” I said.

  “What makes you think there’s something wrong?” Mom asked.

  “She’s upstairs in my closet. She was scratching on the door like she wanted to go in, and she’s never done that before, so I opened it and now she won’t come out.”

  “Uh, oh,” Mom said.

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  “I think I might know what her problem is. Look, you go upstairs and get that old blanket out of the linen closet. You know which one I mean? The faded yellow one with the cornflowers on it.”

  “What’ll I do with it?”

  “Spread it out on the closet floor for her so she can make herself a nest.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “She always sleeps on my bed.”

  “I don’t think she will tonight,” Mom said.

  “How come? Mom, tell me!”

  “I’d better not. Maybe I’m wrong, and if I am, you’ll be disappointed. Anyway, it won’t hurt to put the blanket down for her.”

  “I hate it when you do this!” I said, meaning when she kept things from me, but I didn’t really. She was sort of excited and she looked almost happy for the first time in a really long time, and that made me happy and excited too.

  “Get going now,” she said. “I’ll be up in a minute to see how she is.”

  I ran upstairs and dug around until I found the blanket, and Maggie was still on the floor in my closet, and when Mom came up she helped me fold it into a soft pad and spread it out, and right away Maggie sat on it and began to push it around with her paws.

  “She’s making bread,” Mom said. “She wants to make herself a soft bed.”

  “What’s ‘making bread’?” I asked.

  “That’s an old saying of your grandma’s to describe how cats poke at a blanket, as if they were kneading dough.”

  “Why does she do it?” I asked.

  “You’ll see. Maybe by tomorrow morning, if I’m right. Now close the door almost all the way. Leave it open just far enough for her to come out if she wants to.”

  I did what she told me, even though I didn’t know why. Mom said I should stay away from her when she’s in the closet.

  I wish I knew what’s going on.

  June 27th

  Hey, Diary!

  This was the most amazing day!

  When I got up this morning, Maggie was still in my closet, and she didn’t come out for breakfast. I made Mom come up and look at her in case she was sick, but Mom just said to leave her alone, that she’d be fine. “She knows how to take care of herself,” Mom said, only I didn’t know what she meant, exactly.

  After breakfast I thought about calling Brittany or Emily to see if they wanted to come over, only I wasn’t really in the mood for girl talk. To tell the truth, they kind of bore me, even though we’ve been friends ever since kindergarten. I’m just not like them, I guess. They’ve started wearing makeup, and they get all moony over rock stars, and they talk about boys all the time. They’re not any older than me, for gosh sakes! It’s like they don’t ever think about anything that’s important in the world. They’ve probably never read an actual book, except for schoolbooks when they have to. Their heads are always buried in magazines like Seventeen and Cosmo Girl with all those pictures of what are supposed to be teenagers, only they look like fashion models and I bet they’re like twenty or something.

  So I called Jimmy.

  He was busy working on a new model airplane, so instead of him coming to my house, I went to his. Jimmy has a really neat house. It’s not new, but his dad had it all remodelled with wide doors for Jimmy’s wheelchair, and this real cool elevator thing called a lift that’s like a seat mounted on the stair railing, and when you press a button it goes up or down. Jimmy has to leave his wheelchair downstairs, of course, but he has another one upstairs, a smaller one, so he gets out of his chair and onto the seat and rides upstairs and gets into the other wheelchair. He can do it all by himself.

  The upstairs bathroom is fascinating. There’s a regular basin for his Mom and Dad and a lower one that Jimmy can reach from his chair, and there’s this really big shower that’s level with the floor, since he can’t climb over the side of a tub or anything, and it’s so wide he can wheel himself inside and get out onto a kind of a seat with rails on the sides to take a shower. I’ve never seen him do it, of course, only he told me how it works.

  I don’t think Jimmy would want me to talk about the toilet, even in my private diary, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

  The only place Jimmy can’t get to by himself is down in the basement, so his Dad built him a hobby room on the main floor at the back of the house. When I got there he was putting some shiny covering on a new plane. He does it with a tool that looks something like Mom’s iron, only smaller, and it gets really hot and makes the covering stick to the wood, and then he’s got this hair dryer thing, only hotter, that he uses to blow air on the covering and make it shrink tight. The plane looked kind of funny to me, with its wing mounted up on top of where the people would sit if it wasn’t a model, and it had these real long things that look like skinny boats where the wheels should be.

  “What kind is it?” I asked him. “And what’re those things on the bottom?”

  “It’s a Piper Cub, and these’re floats,” he told me, “so I can take off and land on water. It’s called a seaplane.”

  “Cool,” I told him. “Where’ll you fly it?”

  “Dad knows a farmer out near Canning who has a big irrigation pond. He’s got a little rowboat too, just in case the engine quits when the plane’s somewhere out in the middle and we have to go get it.”

  “Can I come watch when you try it out?”

  “Sure,” Jimmy said, as if there wasn’t any question about that.

  He worked for another twenty minutes until the wings were all covered with the shiny yellow stuff, and I just sat and watched. We didn’t talk much. We don’t have to talk to be happy with each other. That’s the way it used to be with Mom and Dad, only now when they don’t talk much it’s because they aren’t happy with each other.

  Life’s strange, isn’t it?

  Finally Jimmy unplugged the little iron and put the plane aside. “You want to play a game or something? I’ve got some new marbles, or we could get out the Monopoly.”

  “It’s too nice a day to stay inside,” I said. “Let’s go down to Hennigar’s farm market and get some ice cream. They’re making real good waffle cones this year.”

  “It’ll be crowded, ’cause everybody’s buying strawberries now,” Jimmy said. I knew what he really meant. He doesn’t like going to places like the farm market. People always stare at him and then look away real quick, and it makes him feel sad. Not sad because he’s in a wheelchair, but sad because he knows that seeing him makes some people uncomfortable. And he’s always worried that some of the kids from school might be there, ’cause some of them still treat him like he’s different, only not all of them.

  Some even make fun of him sometimes. I don’t understand that. Anyway, Jimmy stays home a lot. That’s why he’s gotten so good at making model planes.

  So anyway, Mom says I have this “mission in life,” my secret plan to help Jimmy get to be just like everybody else, at least as much as he can be from his wheelchair. I guess she’s right. I’m always bugging him to go places with me, and when we’re around the other kids I don’t let them leave him out of whatever they’re doing. I can be pretty pushy where Jimmy’s concern
ed, like when we had our class picture taken. Besides, I didn’t want to go to Hennigar’s all by myself.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun!” I said. “And I’ve got some money. We can stop at Stirling’s U-pick on the way back and pick a couple of quarts of berries, one for your folks and one for mine. They’ll like that.”

  I knew that would get him. Picking strawberries is one thing he can do even better than people who can use their legs. His wheelchair is real low to the ground, and the wheels slant in at the top. All he has to do is lean over the side a little bit and pick and put the strawberries in the basket on his lap, and he can use both hands ’cause he doesn’t have to carry the basket or move it from place to place, so he can pick really fast.

  “I’ll ask Mom if she’ll take us,” he said.

  “No, let’s walk. It’s really nice out.”

  “It’s too far,” Jimmy said.

  “No it’s not. Besides, if your arms get tired I’ll push you.” Sometimes I needle him a little to get him to do what I want. That’s called psychology.

  “Your legs’ll get tired a lot faster than my arms!” he said.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  Hennigar’s was even more crowded than usual, and there was a long line-up at the ice cream counter. Some people offered to let Jimmy go ahead of them, but he wouldn’t do it. They were just trying to be nice, but he never wanted to do anything that would call attention to himself. Only it didn’t work, because other people noticed him more when he refused to skip the line-up than if he’d just gone ahead when they offered.

  We each got a medium-sized waffle cone, peanut butter caramel cookie dough for Jimmy and cherry vanilla for me, and Jimmy insisted on paying for mine. That made me feel a little bit uncomfortable. In fact, ever since he kissed me the other day I’ve felt a little bit funny around him. Not that it was a real kiss, not like the one Emily described that she read about in Cosmo Girl where they used their tongues and everything. Yuck! Jimmy just sort of leaned over and brushed my cheek with his lips, and that surprised me and I turned my head sort of fast and our mouths came together for just a couple of seconds. We were both kind of embarrassed.