The Painted Ponies of Partequineus and The Summer of the Kittens

by Peter H. Riddle

  When we got home I went straight to bed. But first I looked in every room in our house. No tigers.

  July 31st

  Hey, Diary!

  Thomas started using the kitty litter today, so I guess he’s okay. All of my kittens are pretty smart. They’re five weeks old now, and they’re all toilet trained already and eating solid food. Mr. Harding never got the chance to tell me what kind to get for them, so we went to Cornwallis Veterinarians in Kentville yesterday and a really nice lady there told us what to buy. It was fun watching them try to eat it. Veronica kept sneezing, but she seemed to like it. Mom says maybe they won’t want their bottles so much any more, but so far they still do.

  Mr. Harding is still in the hospital. I asked Mom what was wrong with him, and she said he had a stroke, whatever that is. She doesn’t know when he’ll be able to come home. I hope it’s soon.

  The kittens play all the time, except when they’re sleeping. They like to pounce on each others’ tails, and they chase each other all over my bedroom. What’s really funny is, they can be running and playing and jumping one minute, and all of a sudden they just fall down all together in a heap and go to sleep. Mom says that’s because growing up is hard work, so they need plenty of rest.

  I play with them lots. We bought them some toys from the vet, a couple of balls and a feather on a stick and two furry mice. But what they really like is a little twist of paper on the end of a string like the one I made for Maggie. They chase it and leap up in the air and pounce on it, and sometimes they even stalk it. Mom says they’re learning how to chase real mice, but I’m not ever going to let them do that. The vet told me that cats should always live indoors because so much can happen to them outside, like catching diseases and getting run over like Maggie did. And we don’t have any mice inside our house, at least I hope we don’t.

  Jimmy still has to stay home, so I took Thomas over to his house to play this afternoon. I took a ball and the paper on a string, and Jimmy thought up a new toy. He was drinking some orange juice from a glass with a straw, and he took the straw out and kind of dragged it along the floor and wiggled it back and forth. Thomas all crouched down and looked very fierce, and when he jumped at the straw Jimmy pulled it away, so Thomas had to chase it. Jimmy let him catch it eventually, and he chewed on it with his little sharp teeth and put holes in it. I bet he thought it was a mouse.

  I only stayed half an hour. Jimmy gets tired so easily. Just before I left I asked him if he’d fixed his seaplane yet, and he said he doesn’t need it any more.

  Dad finished the tree elevator yesterday, and I can work it all by myself. It’s really neat, with lots of ropes and a whole bunch of pulleys. You sit in it and pull on the rope, and up it goes. Even if you pull really hard, the seat only goes up a little at a time, and Dad put some kind of a brake on it so that if you stop pulling, it doesn’t fall back down again. He says that’s for safety when Jimmy is in it. I meant to tell Jimmy about it today when I took Thomas over to see him, but I forgot again.

  I won’t use the elevator much. That’s for Jimmy. It’s faster for me to climb up the two-by-fours.

  I wish Jimmy could climb, too.

  I sat up in the tree for a really long time today, and didn’t come down until Mom called me for supper. At first I just looked around. Nothing looks the same from up there. The clock tower at the university seems to be growing right out of the trees, and the steeple on the chapel too. Most of the houses have black roofs, but not all. There’s grey and red and brown, too. And everything looks cleaner from up high, and neater.

  After I figured out where everything was, the stores downtown and all the university buildings and where my friends live, I started to make improvements. I planted flowers and trees in all the yards that didn’t have them, and I cut down the weeds in the vacant lot across the street and all the other vacant lots I could see. I painted some of the houses in really bright colours, especially Mr. Harding’s house next door. Then I decided to do something about the dykes.

  The first thing I did was tear down the fence and the No Trespassing signs, and then I widened the old dirt road and smoothed it all out so I could ride my bike there, and Jimmy could take his wheelchair all the way down to the water. I made all the ditches deeper and filled them with water from the bay so they looked just like shiny silver rivers, and I planted rows of giant trees on top of the dykes. Finally I cut down the tall weeds so I could see all the tigers, and when they couldn’t find anyplace to hide anymore, they ran off toward the bay and jumped in the water and swam all the way to Quebec.

  I never knew there could be so many tigers.

  Then I discovered the most amazing thing. When you’re up in a tree, you can see bird nests that you don’t ever notice from the ground. One of them was in my maple tree, and it was below the platform so I could look inside. There were two baby blue jays in it, only they were really big babies, almost as big as their mother. I watched them for a long time. They’re all kind of ruffled up, not smooth like you’d expect.

  And insects. The tree is full of them, beetles and crawly things with long legs and some that look almost like ants, but with wings. And spiders! I don’t like those.

  Did I mention we have squirrels, too?

  Mom keeps five bird feeders in the back yard, two on poles and three hanging from tree limbs. Lately she’s been complaining that the seeds are disappearing too fast, and I discovered why. A little striped chipmunk was sitting on one of the feeders, stuffing seeds into his cheek pouches just as fast as he could.

  The world is so full of life.

  The cat from down the street wandered into the yard. It’s a yellow one like Thomas, and it poked around in Mom’s flower bed for a while, and then all of a sudden it got really still and all hunkered down. Its tail started twitching and it sort of wiggled its rear end back and forth like I’d seen the kittens do, and it pounced! I thought I heard something scream, and I could see a dark grey something in the cat’s mouth, and it stood up and started out of the yard and began to grow, bigger and bigger, until it was a really big tiger, and just before it disappeared around the corner of the house next door I got a really good look at what it was carrying in its mouth, and it was Jimmy, and I screamed too.

  August 5th

  Dear Diary,

  I went to church on Sunday. It’s the first time since I embarrassed Mom and myself by running out. The only reason I went is because when I don’t, Mom has to go alone, and that makes me feel bad. At least this time Reverend Davis didn’t say anything in his sermon that upset me. Most of the time when he was talking I just daydreamed, but something he said caught my attention. He was reading some words from the Bible. I think it was, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.”

  That really confused me, because I’d always heard that Heaven was a perfect place, so how could there be any suffering there? I asked Mom about it while we were riding home. She said that the word has a different meaning in the Bible, that it’s more like Jesus was saying allow the children to go to him.

  I thought about that for a while, and than I asked her, “Is Jimmy going to Heaven soon?”

  I was hoping that Mom would tell me he was going to be fine, but she didn’t. “I hope not,” she said very quietly.

  “Why won’t anybody tell me what’s wrong with him?”

  “I think you deserve to know,” she said, “but you mustn’t let on to Jimmy that I told you. He doesn’t want anyone to find out. Especially you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Jimmy is a very brave boy. He hates being sick, and he doesn’t like anyone to think of him that way, or to feel sorry for him.”

  “I know. He gets really mad if I try to do anything that he can do for himself. But if there’s some way I can help, I want to.”

  “Hanna, there isn’t anything you can do. Jimmy has cancer.”

  And all of a sudden the road was filled with tigers, racing alongside the car and leaping high up
in the air, growling and snarling and gnashing their teeth until the air was filled with the sound of a thousand kittens crying, until I realized that the only one who was crying was me.

  August 15th

  Hey, Diary!

  I bet you’ve been wondering why I haven’t written in so long. It’s because until today there hasn’t been anything happy to write about. But now there is.

  Jimmy came here today! To my house. And he stayed for the whole afternoon!

  It’s the first time he’s been out of his house in a couple of weeks, except to go back and forth to the hospital. He’s been really tired lately, sleeping most of the time and not doing much of anything, and I’ve only been able to stay for a few minutes when I go to visit him. But today his mom brought him over right after lunch, because he felt really good.

  He looks so different. He wears a ball cap all the time now because his hair is so thin. That’s on account of all the medicine he has to take. And he’s really skinny. But I don’t care, because it’s so good to see him, no matter what he looks like.

  And guess what? He can make Dad’s rope-and-pulley elevator work all by himself. It took him a long time to get to the top ’cause he’s not strong like he used to be, but he wouldn’t give up, and when he reached the platform he was able to get into the special chair that Dad made for him without any help from me.

  We took the Scrabble board up with us and played for almost an hour. All the words he used were right, not like that other time when we played. We were going to play Monopoly too, but the wind kept blowing the paper money away.

  I’m so happy!

  The best thing was, Dad came out about three-thirty and climbed up the tree with a long rectangular package under his arm. “This is a house-warming present,” he told us, “for your tree house.” He gave it to Jimmy to open instead of me, but I didn’t mind. In fact, that’s what I would have done, too. And guess what. There was a telescope inside!

  “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  “From the attic,” Dad said. “It was mine when I was your age. I just remembered that we still had it.”

  Jimmy was already looking out across the dykes, turning the lens to get it in focus. “Wow! Wait’ll you see this!”

  Dad climbed down while we were handing the telescope back and forth, and he was almost to the house before we noticed he was gone. “Thanks, Dad!” I hollered, and Jimmy did too, and Dad waved back at us.

  Dad is back living with us again, all the time. I wonder if Mom is as happy about that as I am.

  “Where shall we go?” Jimmy said to me when Dad disappeared inside.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He waved the telescope over his shoulder toward the university, then in the other direction toward the farm markets. “We can go anywhere in Wolfville. See?” He aimed it at the traffic on Main Street. “It almost looks as if we’re right down there in the middle of town. Or we can go to Grand Pre or Hortonville or…” He squirmed around to look in the other direction. “Hey! I can see all the way to Halifax!”

  “You can not,” I said. “The South Mountain is in the way.”

  “I can so! There’s the Citadel, and the harbour, and all the tall buildings down on Barrington Street, and there’s the ferry going to Dartmouth.”

  “You’re nuts,” I said, and he put the telescope down and grinned at me.

  “You haven’t forgotten how to fly, have you?” he said.

  Jimmy always makes me laugh. “Gimme that thing,” I told him, and he handed me the telescope. I turned toward the bay and lifted it to my eye. I could see the dykes, almost close enough to touch them, and the Port Williams wharf, and even the road that goes out around Starr’s Point.

  “Wow!” I said. “There’s the CN Tower in downtown Toronto. And all the grain elevators in Saskatchewan. Hudson’s Bay and Baffin Island!”

  “I told you so,” Jimmy said.

  I put the telescope down. “You’re really going to do it,” I said. “You’re going to fly someday.”

  “Of course I am. All over Canada and the United States and Mexico and South America and Europe and Asia and the moon!”

  And right then, I believed him. I really did.

  August 16th

  Hey, Diary!

  Guess what? Thomas went to Jimmy’s house today. To stay. Mom called up the lady at the vet’s, and she said it was okay, because he’s about seven weeks old right now, which is really a little bit too young for a kitten to leave its mother, but since Maggie had to leave Thomas way back when, and since he doesn’t need a bottle any more and eats solid food and everything, it was safe to let him go.

  Jimmy loves him.

  I love Jimmy.

  August 19th

  Dear Diary,

  Yesterday was one of the days that Jimmy has to go to the hospital, and he’s always kind of beat after that, so I didn’t go to visit him today. Instead I stayed up in my tree house with the telescope for a couple of hours, but I didn’t see much that was new. I can’t fly very well when Jimmy’s not with me.

  I’m sad today. This morning a big moving van came down our street and stopped in front of Mr. Harding’s house, and some men carried out all of his furniture and stuff. I asked Mom about it, and she called up the hospital and found out that he died last week.

  “Try not to be too upset,” Mom said. “You should remember that he had a very long life, and a useful one, too. He was a veterinarian for years and years, and he helped many animals to get well. He helped you save your kittens. And I’m very proud of you for being his friend, and for helping him when he was sick.”

  I know Mom is right, but I can’t help feeling sad. Everything around me seems to be dying. Maggie and my elm tree and Smudgie, and now Mr. Harding. And…

  No! I’m not going to write that! Because Jimmy isn’t going to die! He’s going to get better, and he’s going to fly all over Canada and the United States and Mexico and South America and Europe and Asia and the moon!

  That’s what he told me, and I believe it.

  After supper I asked Mom if I could stay up late and go outside after dark. I wanted to look at the moon through the telescope so I could see where Jimmy is going to land someday. But the most amazing thing I saw wasn’t the moon, but all the stars in the sky, hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of them. I learned in school that they’re too far away for us ever to visit them, ’cause it would take lots of lifetimes to get there.

  Then I remembered that Reverend Davis said the stars are where Heaven is, and I tried to imagine that Mr. Harding was up there somewhere. And Maggie and Smudgie, too, even though Reverend Davis says that Heaven is only for people, except that he has to be wrong because Heaven is supposed to be a perfect place where everybody is happy all the time, and how could I be happy anywhere if I didn’t have Maggie and Smudgie there with me? And an elm tree to climb so I could see all over everything.

  I thought about Mr. Harding for a while, and about Jimmy being sick, and then I climbed down and went in the house and found Dad in his office, where he was working on his courses for the fall term at the university.

  Dad leaned back from the computer and swivelled around. “Isn’t it time you were in bed?”

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “I’ve been thinking about why Jimmy is sick. Reverend Davis says God made the whole world and everything in it, especially us, and that everything that happens is God’s will. So does that mean he made Jimmy get born with his spina bifida? And if Jimmy dies, is it because God wants him to?”

  “Hanna, I’m not the person you should be asking about this,” Dad said.

  “Is that because you don’t believe in God or Heaven?”

  “I don’t believe, and I don’t not believe. I think I told you before, no one really knows for sure whether there’s a God, or if Heaven exists.”

  “But what do you think?”

  Dad had a really strange lo
ok on his face right about then. It looked like he was trying to make up his mind whether to tell me something. “Sit down for a minute,” he said, and I reached for the chair from Mom’s desk and pulled it over close to him. “I’m sure Reverend Davis believes all the things he says about God,” Dad said, “and you should respect him and listen to him, because he’s a good man who tries very hard to help people. But you don’t have to believe everything he says. You should make up your own mind about some things.”

  “Well, I think he’s wrong,” I said, “just like he’s wrong about animals not going to Heaven, because why would God make some people healthy and other people sick? That would mean that God is cruel, but the Bible says he cares about us. And Reverend Davis says that if we pray to God, he’ll look after us and give us what we want. If that’s true, then if I pray really hard, he’ll make Jimmy get well, right?”

  That part just sort of came out. I didn’t know that was what I was thinking about until I said it.

  “Maybe,” Dad said.

  “But you don’t think so,” I said. “I can tell. So who am I supposed to believe?”

  “I don’t believe God made Jimmy sick in the first place, and if you pray to Him, and if Jimmy doesn’t get better, it isn’t because God wants him to die. I just don’t believe the world works that way. No one knows why some people get sick and others don’t. It just happens, and it’s very sad, and that’s why all the doctors and nurses try so hard to help as many people as they can. So I think it’s all right if you pray for Jimmy to get well, but you should do more than that. You should continue to be his friend, and visit him whenever Mr. and Mrs. Morris say it’s all right, so that he’ll know someone cares about him. That’s the most important thing you can do to help him.”

  “I wish I could do something else,” I said.

  “Maybe you can,” Dad said, “when you’re older.”