The Underneath

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by Kathi Appelt




  There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road.

  A calico cat, about to have kittens, hears the lonely howl of a chained-up hound deep in the backwaters of the bayou. They are an unlikely pair, about to become an unlikely family. Ranger urges the cat to hide underneath the porch, to raise her kittens there because Gar-Face, the man living inside the house, will surely use them as alligator bait should he find them. But they are safe in the Underneath . . . as long as they stay in the Underneath.

  Kittens, however, are notoriously curious creatures. And one kitten’s one moment of curiosity sets off a chain of events that is astonishing, remarkable, and enormous in its meaning.

  Visit the author at kathiappelt.com.

  Cover design by Russell Gordon | Cover illustrations copyright © 2008 by David Small

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers | Simon & Schuster, New York | Ages 10 up

  Watch videos,

  get extras, and read exclusives at

  KIDS.SimonandSchuster.com

  Praise for The Underneath

  • NEWBERY HONOR BOOK •

  • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST •

  • AMAZON.COM’S #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR •

  • 2009 PEN USA LITERARY AWARD WINNER FOR CHILDREN’S LITERATURE •

  • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •

  • ALA NOTABLE BOOK •

  *“Joining Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting as a rare example of youth fantasy with strong American underpinnings.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “The Underneath is as enchanting as a hummingbird, as magical as the clouds.”

  —Cynthia Kadohata, Newbery Medal-winning author of Kira-Kira

  “A magical tale of betrayal, revenge, love and the importance of keeping promises.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “A mysterious and magical story; poetic yet loaded with suspense.”

  —Louis Sachar, Newbery Medal-winning author of Holes

  “[A] fine book . . . most of all distinguished by the originality of the story and the fresh beauty of its author’s voice—a natural for reading aloud.”—Horn Book Magazine

  “Rarely do I come across a book that makes me catch my breath, that reminds me of why I wanted to be a writer. . . . A classic.”

  —Alison McGhee, author of the New York Times bestselling Someday

  “An extraordinary tale of epic scope.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Kathi Appelt’s novel, The Underneath, reads like a ballad sung.”

  —Ashley Bryan, Hans Christian Andersen Award nominee and three-time Coretta Scott King Award medalist

  “[Exerts] an almost magnetic pull that draws the reader into the book’s trackless, treacherous world.”

  —The Wall Street Journal Online

  “Every so often a literary work of surpassing beauty arrives in the unlikely guise of a book for children or young teens. There is a deep and inexplicable magic underlying the apparent simplicity of such works. From the gemlike Goodnight Moon to novels such as The Wind in the Willows or A Wrinkle in Time, children’s literature is that place where a young, open mind can catch life-changing glimpses of the majesty of the written word. Twin narratives, spinning like twin tornadoes, on course to merge into a perfect storm—and, if this critic can hazard such a prediction, into a modern classic.”

  —San Antonio Express—News

  “Haunting in tone and resonance, The Underneath weaves a heartrending and magical tale that speaks to love and hope, loneliness and loss, ancestral forgiveness and a deep abiding reverence for the natural world that surrounds us, the ethereal world that entices our imagination and the real world that may bruise us, haunt us, but eventually set us free.”

  —The National Book Foundation

  “Appelt in her debut novel has somehow managed to write a book that I’ve been describing to people as (and this is true) Watership Down meets The Incredible Journey meets Holes meets The Mouse and His Child.”

  —Elizabeth Bird/Fuse # 8

  The

  Underneath

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2008 by Kathi Appelt

  Illustrations copyright © 2008 by David Small All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Also available in an Atheneum Books forYoung Readers hardcover edition. Book design by Russell Gordon The text for this book is set in Bembo. The illustrations for this book are rendered in Prismacolor pencil.

  1209 FFG

  First Atheneum Books forYoung Readers paperback edition January 2010

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Appelt, Kathi, 1954–

  The underneath/Kathi Appelt ; illustrated by David Small.

  p. cm.

  Summary: An old hound that has been chained up at his hateful owner’s run-down shack, and two kittens born underneath the house, endure separation, danger, and many other tribulations.

  ISBN 978-1-4169-5058-5 (hc)

  [1. Survival—Fiction. 2. Dogs—Fiction. 3. Cats—Fiction. 4. Bayous—Fiction.] I. Small, David, 1945– ill. II.Title.

  PZ7.A6455Un 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2007031969

  ISBN 978-1-4169-5059-2 (pbk)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-41699-858-7 (eBook)

  For Greg and Cynthia, because there is love

  and then there are cats,

  and aren’t the two the same

  —K.A.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

&nbs
p; Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  1

  THERE IS NOTHING lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road. A small calico cat. Her family, the one she lived with, has left her in this old and forgotten forest, this forest where the rain is soaking into her soft fur.

  How long has she been walking? Hours? Days? She wasn’t even sure how she got here, so far from the town where she grew up. Something about a car, something about a long drive. And now here she is. Here in this old forest where the rain slipped between the branches and settled into her fur. The pine needles were soft beneath her feet; she heard the water splash onto the puddles all around, noticed the evening roll in, the sky grow darker.

  She walked and walked, farther and farther from the red dirt road. She should have been afraid. She should have been concerned about the lightning, slicing the drops of rain in two and electrifying the air. She should have been worried in the falling dark. But mostly she was lonely.

  She walked some more on the soft pine needles until at last she found an old nest, maybe a squirrel’s, maybe a skunk’s, maybe a porcupine’s; it’s hard to tell when a nest has gone unused for a long time, and this one surely had. She was grateful to find it, an old nest, empty, a little dry, not very, but somewhat out of the rain, away from the slashes of lightning, here at the base of a gnarled tupelo tree, somewhere in the heart of the piney woods. Here, she curled up in a tight ball and waited, purred to her unborn babies. And the trees, the tall and kindly trees, watched over her while she slept, slept the whole night through.

  2

  AHH, THE TREES. On the other side of the forest, there is an old loblolly pine. Once, it was the tallest tree in the forest, a hundred feet up it reached, right up to the clouds, right beneath the stars. Such a tree. Now broken in half, it stands beside the creek called the Little Sorrowful.

  Trees are the keepers of stories. If you could understand the languages of oak and elm and tallow, they might tell you about another storm, an earlier one, twenty-five years ago to be exact, a storm that barreled across the sky, filling up the streams and bayous, how it dipped and charged, rushed through the boughs. Its black clouds were enormous, thick and heavy with the water it had scooped up from the Gulf of Mexico due south of here, swirling its way north, where it sucked up more moisture from the Sabine River to the east, the river that divides Texas and Louisiana.

  This tree, a thousand years old, huge and wide, straight and true, would say how it lifted its branches and welcomed the heavy rain, how it shivered as the cool water ran down its trunk and washed the dust from its long needles. How it sighed in that coolness.

  But then, in that dwindling of rain, that calming of wind, that solid darkness, a rogue bolt of lightning zipped from the clouds and struck. Bark flew in splinters, the trunk sizzled from the top of the crown to the deepest roots; the bolt pierced the very center of the tree.

  A tree as old as this has a large and sturdy heart, but it is no match for a billion volts of electricity. The giant tree trembled for a full minute, a shower of sparks and wood fell to the wet forest floor. Then it stood completely still. A smaller tree might have jumped, might have spun and spun and spun until it crashed onto the earth. Not this pine, this loblolly pine, rooted so deep into the clay beside the creek; it simply stood beneath the blue-black sky while steam boiled from the gash sixty feet up, an open wound. This pine did not fall to the earth or slide into the creek. Not then.

  And not now. It still stands. Most of its branches have cracked and fallen. The upper stories have long ago tumbled to the forest floor. Some of them have slipped into the creek and drifted downstream, down to the silver Sabine, down to the Gulf of Mexico. Down.

  But the trunk remains, tall and hollow, straight and true. Right here on the Little Sorrowful, just a mile or so from a calico cat, curled inside her dry nest, while the rain falls all around.

  3

  MEANWHILE, DEEP BENEATH the hard red dirt, held tightly in the grip of the old tree’s roots, something has come loose. A large jar buried centuries ago. A jar made from the same clay that lines the bed of the creek, a vessel with clean lines and a smooth surface, whose decoration was etched by an artist of merit. A jar meant for storing berries and crawdads and clean water, not for being buried like this far beneath the ground, held tight in the web of the tree’s tangled roots. This jar. With its contents: A creature even older than the forest itself, older than the creek, the last of her kind. This beautiful jar, shaken loose in the random strike of lightning that pierced the tree’s heart and seared downward into the tangled roots. Ever since, they have been loosening their grip.

  Trapped, the creature has waited. For a thousand years she has slipped in and out of her deep, deep sleep, stirred in her pitch-black prison beneath the dying pine. Sssssooooonnnn, she whispered into the deep and solemn dark, my time will come. Then she closed her eyes and returned to sleep.

  4

  IT WASN’T THE chirring of the mourning doves that woke the calico cat, or the uncertain sun peeking through the clouds, or even the rustling of a nearby squirrel. No, it was the baying of a nearby hound. She had never heard a song like it, all blue in its shape, blue and tender, slipping through the branches, gliding on the morning air. She felt the ache of it. Here was a song that sounded exactly the way she felt.

  Oh, I woke up on this bayou,

  Got a chain around my heart.

  Yes, I’m sitting on this bayou,

  Got a chain tied ’round my heart.

  Can’t you see I’m dyin’?

  Can’t you see I’m cryin’?

  Can’t you throw an old dog a bone?

  Oh, I woke up, it was rainin’,

  But it was tears came fallin’ down.

  Yes, I woke up, it was rainin’,

  But it was tears came fallin’ down.

  Can’t you see I’m tryin’?

  Can’t you hear my cryin’?

  Can’t you see I’m all alone?

  Can’t you throw this old dog a bone?

&
nbsp; She cocked her ears to see which direction it came from. Then she stood up and followed its bluesy notes, deeper and deeper into the piney woods. Away from the road, from the old, abandoned nest, away from the people who had left her here with her belly full of kittens. She followed that song.

  5

  FOR CATS, A hound is a natural enemy. This is the order of things. Yet how could the calico cat be afraid of a hound who sang, whose notes filled the air with so much longing? But when she got to the place where the hound sang, she knew that something was wrong.

  She stopped.

  In front of her sat a shabby frame house with peeling paint, a house that slumped on one side as if it were sinking into the red dirt. The windows were cracked and grimy. There was a rusted pickup truck parked next to it, a dark puddle of thick oil pooled beneath its undercarriage. She sniffed the air. It was wrong, this place. The air was heavy with the scent of old bones, of fish and dried skins, skins that hung from the porch like a ragged curtain.

  Wrong was everywhere.

  She should turn around, she should go away, she should not look back. She swallowed. Perhaps she had taken the wrong path? What path should she take? All the paths were the same. She felt her kittens stir. It surely wouldn’t be safe to stay here in this shabby place.

  She was about to turn around, when there it was again—the song, those silver notes, the ones that settled just beneath her skin. Her kittens stirred again, as if they, too, could hear the beckoning song. She stepped closer to the unkempt house, stepped into the overgrown yard. She cocked her ears and let the notes lead her, pull her around the corner. There they were, those bluesy notes.

  Oh, I woke up, it was rainin’,

  But it was tears came fallin’ down.

  Yes, I woke up, it was rainin’,

  But it was tears came fallin’ down.

  Can’t you see I’m tryin’?

  Can’t you hear my cryin’?

  Can’t you see I’m all alone?

  Can’t you throw this old dog a bone?

  Then she realized, this song wasn’t calling for a bone, it was calling for something else, someone else. Another step, another corner. And there he was, chained to the corner of the back porch. His eyes were closed, his head held back, baying.

 

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