And in the white, two-story farmhouse, the people argued.
The house belonged to Bess Gibson, a widow for the last three years. Her grandson Harry had come with his bride Marylou, a few days ago, for a visit, Bess had thought, and to introduce Marylou. But Harry had plans also. He wanted some money. His mother hadn’t enough, or had refused him, Bess gathered. Bess’s son Ed, Harry’s father, was dead, and Harry’s mother in California had remarried.
Now Harry sat in the kitchen, dressed in cowboy clothes, a toothpick alternating with a cigarette between his lips, and talked about the restaurant-drive-in-bar-and-café that he wanted to buy his way into.
“If you could only see, Gramma, that this farm isn’t even paying its way, that the money’s sitting here doing nothing! What’ve you got here?” He waved a hand. “You could get a hundred and twenty thousand for the house and land, and think for a minute what kind of apartment in town you could have for a fraction of that!”
“That’s true, you know?” Marylou parroted. She was dawdling over her coffee, but she’d whipped out a nailfile and was sawing away now.
Bess shifted her weight in the wooden chair, and the chair gave a creek. She wore a blue and white cotton dress and white sandals. She suffered from dropsy. Her hair had gone completely white in the last couple of years. She realized that Harry meant an apartment in town, and town was Danville, thirty miles away. Some poky little place with two flights of stairs to climb, probably belonging to someone else to whom she’d have to pay rent. Bess didn’t want to think about an apartment, no matter how many modern conveniences it might have. “This place pays its way,” Bess said finally. “It’s not losing money. There’s the chickens and ducks—people come to buy them or their eggs. There’s the corn and the wheat. Sam manages it very well—I don’t know about the immediate future, with Sam gone,” she added with an edge in it, “but it’s home to me and it’s yours when I’m gone.”
“But not even a tractor? Sam still uses a plow. It’s ridiculous. That one horse. What century are you living in, Gramma?—Well, you could borrow on it,” Harry said not for the first time, “if you really want to help me out.”
“I’m not going to leave you or anybody a mortgaged house,” Bess replied.
That meant she was not completely convinced of the safety of what he wanted to do. But since Harry had been over this ground, he was too bored to go over it again. He merely exchanged a glance with Marylou.
Bess felt her face grow warm. Sam, their handyman—hers and her husband Claude’s for seventeen years, a real member of the family—had left two days ago. Sam had made a speech and said he just couldn’t stand Harry, he was sorry. Sam was getting on in years, and Harry had tried to boss him around, as if he were a hired hand, Bess supposed. She wasn’t sure, but she could imagine. Bess hoped Sam would write to her soon, let her know where he was, so she could ask him back when Harry left. When she remembered old Sam with his best jacket on and his suitcase beside him, hailing the bus on the main road, Bess almost hated her grandson.
“Gramma, it’s as simple as this,” Harry began in the slow, patient voice in which he always presented his case. “I need sixty thousand dollars to buy my half with Roscoe. I told you Roscoe’s just a nickname for laughs. His name is Ross Levitt.”
I don’t care what his name is, Bess thought, but she said a polite “Um-hm.”
“Well—with sixty thousand dollars each, it’s a sure thing for both of us. It’s part of a chain, you know, twelve other places already, and they’re all coining money. But if I can’t put up my part in a few days, Gramma—or can’t give a promise of the money, my chances are gone. I’ll pay you back, Gramma, naturally. But this is the chance of a lifetime!”
To use such words, Bess was thinking, and to be only twenty-two! Harry had a lot to learn.
“Ask your lawyer if you’re in doubt, Gramma,” Harry said. “Ask any banker. I’m not afraid of the facts.”
Bess recrossed her thick ankles. Why didn’t his mother advance the money, if it was so safe? His mother had married a well-to-do man. And here was her grandson, married, at twenty-two. Too early for Harry, Bess thought, and she didn’t care for Marylou or her type. Marylou was pretty and silly. Might as well be a high school crush, not a wife. Bess knew she had to keep her thoughts to herself, however, because there was nothing worse than meddling.
“Gramma, what fun is it here for you any more, all alone in the country? Both the Colmans dead in the last year, you told me. In town, you’d have a nice circle of friends who could . . .”
Harry’s voice became a drone to Bess. She had three or four good friends, six or eight even in the district. She’d known them all a long time, and they rang up, they came to see her, or Sam drove her to see them in the pick-up. Harry was too young to appreciate what a home meant, Bess thought. Every high-ceilinged bedroom upstairs was handsome, everyone said, with curtains and quilts that Bess or her own mother had made. The local newspaper had even come to take photographs, and the article had been reprinted in the . . .
Bess was stirred out of her thoughts by Harry’s getting up.
“Guess we’ll be turning in, Gramma,” he said.
Marylou got up with her coffee cup and took it to the sink. All the other dishes were washed. Marylou hadn’t much to say, but Bess sensed a terrible storm in her, some terrible wish. And yet, Bess supposed, it probably wasn’t any worse or any different from Harry’s wish, which was simply to get his hands on a lot of money. They could live on the grounds behind the restaurant, Harry had said. A fine house with swimming pool all their own. Bess could imagine Marylou looking forward to that.
The young people had gone up to the front bedroom. They’d taken the television set up there, because Bess had said she didn’t often watch it. She did look at it nearly every night, but she’d wanted to be polite when Harry and Marylou first arrived. Now she wished she had the set, because she could have done with a little change of thoughts, a laugh maybe. Bess went to her own sleeping quarters, which in summer was a room off the back porch with screened windows against mosquitoes, though there weren’t ever many in this region. She turned on her transistor radio, low.
Upstairs, Harry and Marylou talked softly, glancing now and then at the closed door, thinking Bess might knock with a tray of milk and cake, as she had done once since they’d been there.
“I don’t think she’ll be coming up tonight,” Marylou said. “She’s sort of mad at us.”
“Well, that’s too bad.” Harry was undressing. He blew on the square toes of his cowboy boots and passed them once across the seat of his Levi’s to see if the shine came up. “Goddamn it, I’ve heard of these situations before, haven’t you? Some old person who won’t turn loose of the dough—which is really coming to me—just when the younger people damn well need it.”
“Isn’t there someone else you know who could persuade her?”
“Hell—around here?” They’d all be on his grandmother’s side, Harry was thinking. Other people were the last thing they needed. “I’m for a small snort. How about you?” Harry pulled from a back corner of the closet a big half-empty bottle of bourbon.
“No, thanks. I’ll have a sip of yours, if you’re going to put water in it.”
Harry splashed some water from the porcelain pitcher into his glass, handed the glass to Marylou for a sip, then added more bourbon for himself, and drank it almost off. “You know Roscoe wanted me to call him up yesterday or today? With an answer?” Harry wiped his mouth. He wasn’t expecting a reply from Marylou and didn’t get one. I damn well wish she was dead now, Harry thought, like a curse that he might have said aloud to get the resentment and anger out of his system. Then suddenly it came to him. An idea. Not a bad idea, not a horrible idea. Not too horrible. And safe. Well, ninety percent safe, if he did it wisely, carefully. It was even a simple idea.
“What’re you thinking?” Marylou a
sked, propped up in bed now with the sheet pulled up to her waist. Her curly reddish hair glowed like a halo in the light of the reading lamp fixed to the bed.
“I’m thinking—if Gramma had something like a hip injury, you know—those things old people always get. She’d—” He came closer to the bed and spoke even more softly, knowing already that Marylou would be with him, even if his idea were more dangerous. “I mean, she’d have to stay in town, wouldn’t she—if she couldn’t get around?”
Marylou’s eyes swam in excited confusion, and she blinked. “What’re you talking about?” she asked in a whisper. “Pushing her down the stairs?”
Harry shook his head quickly. “That’s too obvious. I was thinking of—maybe going on a picnic, the way she says she does, you know? With the horse and wagon. A watermelon, sandwiches and all and—”
“And beer!” Marylou said, giggling nervously knowing the climax was coming.
“Then the wagon turns over somewhere,” Harry said simply, shrugging. “You know, there’s that ford by the stream. Well, I know it, anyway.”
“Wagon turns over. What about us? If we’re in it?”
“You don’t have to be in it. You could’ve jumped off to lay the cloth, some damn thing. I’ll do it.”
A pause.
“You’re serious?” Marylou asked.
Harry was thinking, with his eyes almost closed. Finally he nodded. “Yes. If I can’t think of anything else. Anything better. Time’s getting short, even for promises to Roscoe. Sure. I’m serious.” Then abruptly Harry went and switched on the television.
To the little gray cat, Fanny the horse had become a protectress, a fortress, a home. Not that Fanny did anything. Fanny merely existed, giving out warmth in the cold of the night before dawn. The gray kitten’s only enemies were the two older cats, and fortunately these chose to be simply huffy, ready with a spit, a swipe of a paw full of claws. They made life unpleasant, but they were not out for the kill, or even to drive her off the premises, which was something.
The kitten spent not much time in the stable, however. She liked to play in the ducks’ and the chickens’ yard, to canter towards a chick as if with evil intent, then to dodge the lunge, the terrible beak of the mother hen. Then the kitten would leap to an upright of the wooden fence and sit, washing a paw, surveying alertly the area in front of her and the meadow behind her. She was half-wild. She was not tempted to approach the back door of the house. She sensed that she wouldn’t be welcome. She had never had anything but ill-treatment or indifference at best from the creatures that walked on two legs. With her grandmother and great-grandmother, she had eaten the remains of their kills, what was left of rats, birds, now and then a small rabbit, when her elders had eaten their fill. From the two-legged creatures came nothing reliable and abundant, maybe a pan of milk and bread, not every day, not to be counted on.
But the big red horse, so heavy, so slow, the gray kitten had come to recognize as a reliable friend. The kitten had seen horses before, but never any as huge as this. She had never come close to a horse, never touched one before. The kitten found it both amusing and dangerous. The kitten loved to feel amused, to feel as if she were playing tricks on other creatures (like the chickens) and on herself, because it eased the realities of existence, the fact that she could be killed—in a flash, as her mother had been—if the gigantic horse happened to step on her, for instance. Even the horse’s big feet had metal bottoms: the kitten had noticed this one evening when the horse was lying down. Not soft, like the horse’s long hair there, but hard, able to hurt.
Yet the kitten realized that the horse played with her too. The horse turned its great head and neck to look at her, and was careful not to step on her. Once when the horse was lying down, the kitten in a nervous rush of anxiety and mischief dashed up the horse’s soft nose, up the bony front, and seized an ear and nipped it. Then at once the kitten had leapt down and crouched, fearing the worst in retaliation. But the horse had only tossed its head a little, showed its teeth and snorted—disturbing some nearby wisps of hay—as if it were amused also. Therefore the gray kitten pranced without fear now on the horse’s side and haunch, leapt to tackle the coarse hair of the horse’s tail, and dodged the tail’s slow flick with ease. The horse’s eyes followed her. The kitten felt those eyes a kind of protection, like her mother’s eyes which the kitten remembered. Now the kitten slept in the warm place under the horse’s shoulder, next to the great body which radiated heat.
One day the fat woman caught sight of the little kitten. Usually the kitten hid at the first glimpse of a human figure coming from the house, but the kitten was caught unawares while investigating a well-pecked chicken bone outside the stable. The kitten crouched and stared at the woman, ready to run.
“Well, well! Where’d you come from?” said Bess, bending to see better. “And what’s happened to your tail?—You’re a tiny little thing!” When Bess moved closer, the kitten dashed into the raspberry bushes and disappeared.
Bess carried the bucket of oats into Fanny’s stable—poor Fanny was standing and doing nothing now—set the oats on the corner of the trough, and led Fanny out for water. When Fanny had drunk, Bess opened a fence gate, and led Fanny into an enclosed meadow.
“You’re having a fine holiday, aren’t you, Fanny? But we’re going on a picnic today. You’ll pull the wagon. Down to the old brook where you can cool your feet.” She patted the mare’s side. The top of Fanny’s back was on a level with Bess’s eyes. A huge creature she was, but she didn’t eat a lot, and she worked willingly. Bess remembered Harry at thirteen or so, sitting astride Fanny for his picture to be taken, legs all bowed out as if he were sitting on a barrel. Bess didn’t like to recall those days. Harry had been a nicer boy then. Engine Horse, Harry had called Fanny, impressed by her strength, as who wouldn’t be, seeing her pull a wagonload of wheat sacks.
Bess went into the stable, poured the oats into Fanny’s trough, then went back to the house, where she had a peach pie in the oven. She turned the oven off, and opened the oven door so it stayed ajar about four inches. Bess never measured or timed things, but her baking came out right. She ought to give the little kitten a roast beef rib to chew on, Bess thought. She knew the type this kitten was, half-wild, full of beans, and she—or maybe it was a he—would make a splendid mouser, if it could hold its own against the pair of cats here till it grew up a little. Bess took the plate of leftover roast beef from the refrigerator and with a sharp knife cut off a rib about fourteen inches long. If she could manage to give it to the kitten without the other cats noticing and stealing it, it would do the kitten a power of good.
The ham and cheese sandwiches were already made, and it was only a quarter to twelve. Marylou had deviled half a dozen eggs this morning. Where was she now? They were both upstairs talking, Bess supposed. They did a lot of talking. Bess heard a floorboard squeak. Yes, they were upstairs, and she decided to go out now and see if she could find the kitten.
Bess approached the chicken yard in her waddling gait, calling, “Here kitty-kitty-kitty!” and holding the bone out. Her own two cats were away hunting now, probably, and just as well. Bess even looked in the stable for the little one, but didn’t see her. Then when she glanced at Fanny in the meadow—Fanny with her head down, munching clover—Bess caught sight of the little kitten, gamboling and darting in the sunlight around Fanny’s hooves, like a puff of smoke blown this way and that. The kitten’s lightness and energy held Bess spellbound for a few moments. What a contrast, Bess was thinking, with her own awful weight, her slowness, her age! Bess smiled as she walked towards the gate. The kitten was going to be pleased with the bone.
“Puss-puss?” she called. “What’ll we name you—if you stay?” Bess breathed harder, trying to walk and talk at the same time.
The kitten drew back and stared at Bess, her ears erect, yellow-green eyes wary, and she moved nearer the horse as if for protect
ion.
“Brought you a bone,” Bess said, and tossed it.
The kitten leapt backward, then caught the smell of meat and advanced, nose down, straight towards her objective. An involuntary, primal growl came from her small throat, a growl of warning, triumph and voraciousness. With one tiny foot on the great bone, in case an intruder would snatch it, the kitten tore at the meat with baby teeth. Growling and eating at the same time, the kitten circled the bone, glancing all around her to see that no enemy or rival was approaching from any direction.
Bess chuckled with amusement and gratification. Certainly old Fanny wasn’t going to bother the little cat with her bone!
Marylou was already loading the wagon with baskets and thermoses and the blankets to sit on. Bess pulled a fresh tablecloth out of the kitchen cabinet.
Harry went out to hitch up Fanny. He strode like a cowboy in his high-heeled boots, grabbed the curved brim of his Stetson and readjusted it to reassure himself, because he was not an expert at throwing a collar over a horse’s head.
“Whoa, Fanny!” he yelled, when the mare drew back. He’d missed. Damnit, he wasn’t going to call for Bess to help him, that’d be ridiculous. The mare circled Harry, facing him, but drawing back every time he tried to slip the heavy collar on. Harry jumped about like a bullfighter—except that the collar was getting damned heavy in his hands, not like something a bullfighter had to carry. He might have to tie up the beast, he thought. He seized the bridle, which dangled from a halter. She hadn’t even a bit in as yet. “Engine hoss! Whoa, girl!”
Fortified and exhilarated by her half-eaten banquet, the little gray kitten leapt about also, playing, pretending she had to guard her bone, though she knew the man hadn’t even seen her.
“Whoa, I said!” Harry yelled, and lunged at Fanny and this time made it with the collar. Harry turned his ankle and fell to the ground. He got up, not at all hurt by the fall, and then he heard a cry, a rhythmic cry like something panting.
The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder Page 10