Isn’t That Your Cat?

    (Another one from Stories of Freedom)    
    
          “Your cat! Isn’t that your cat?”

          The school bus dropped us off in the center of the village. I didn’t have far to walk and wasn’t in any hurry. Most of the boys had run ahead as if getting off the bus was like being shot from a cannon. There wasn’t much in our village. On the right hand side the store, then some empty space overgrown with grass and tall weeds. It used to be the lumber yard for Banton Brothers Mill, now a long gray wooden building in the process of returning to the earth. On the left there was an old store front known as the Boy Scout building, the little white post office and a few houses including mine, directly across from the old mill. Two of the boys, Everett Larrabee and Kippy Cunningham, had turned around and were running back to me.
          
          “Your cat got hit!”
        
          I went with them into the web of weeds next to the decaying mill. The cat was trembling, shaking really. Rapidly and non-stop. We figured it got hit by a car and managed to get just that far.
        
          “That’s your cat, isn’t it?”

          I started crying. By then a few more kids had gathered. We all seemed to agree it would be best to put the cat out of its misery. Everett ran to his house so his father could come with a gun to shoot it. He and his father, a tall, tall man with shining black eyes, came back quickly but his father carried a hammer. He said he wasn’t going to fire a hunting rifle right in the village – not to kill a half dead cat anyway. He hit the animal squarely on the head and its troubles were over.

          I went into my house and told my father. He hadn’t noticed or hadn’t paid any attention to the commotion outside.
  
          My cat was Tareyton, named for the white ring around its neck like the popular cigarettes with the same feature. He would jump up on one certain window sill whenever he wanted to come in. I was sad, but reminded myself it was just my cat. My mother had died a few years before and I hadn’t gotten over that yet.

          The next morning I missed Tareyton more than I thought I would. I was sad all day at school, but didn’t want to tell anybody why. At our regional school, I didn’t have any classes with the boys from the village. I didn’t have to talk about it if I didn’t want to. Nobody asked what, if anything, was wrong and I didn’t offer any information. I understood the cat got hit; the cat died.

          When I got home, I figured my father would tell me to get over it. I expected him to tell me to put the potatoes on for supper, to do something useful for a change. He was usually pretty quiet, but when I got home that day he seemed almost excited. He might even have seemed happy to see me.

          “I almost called the school,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. The damn thing scared the hell out of me.”

          Then, with a great big grin, he told me he'd been in the living room reading the paper and heard a noise at the window.

          “There was your cat scratching on the glass to come in.”

         I looked in the kitchen and saw Tareyton eating from his bowl on the floor next to the black cast iron stove. Sometimes I think I know and understand everything. Sometimes I don’t.

Here is one from my collection Stories of Freedom, about growing up in Freedom, Maine. I read this in an earlier draft at the Women's Writing Retreat at the Pyramid Life Center in 1996 and then in this version this past July. 

Marigolds

One Sunday a few years after my family moved to Freedom, Maine, I was up at the church. Freedom was the kind of town where tracks in the snow left ruts in the lawn and that would be your driveway right there. I was up at the only church in town for the Mother’s Day morning service because that’s what my father said to do.  My family used to live in the city and be Catholic but, the way Daddy explained it to me, my mother had a falling out with the Pope so we were raised High Episcopal.  She apparently didn’t believe in infallibility and I didn’t even know what it was.

            Things seemed all right when we lived near Boston until Daddy became really sick with malaria he originally picked up in World War II.  He did get better, and the family might have made out better than we did, but Mommy got sick next. There was something wrong with her heart. They decided we’d be better off moving far away into a small, small town. We didn’t know anybody in Freedom; we just moved there on our own. They said it was good because we paid cash for the house. I thought that meant we had lots of cash, but now I think it meant the house didn’t cost much. We didn’t have a car to get to either the Episcopal or the Catholic church in Belfast, about fifteen miles away, so we went to the Freedom Congregational. 

I went to the morning service wearing a light green cotton Sunday dress, the nicest one I had, because it was Mother’s Day.  Daddy didn’t go.  He said he was still Catholic, so he just didn’t go anywhere.  I guess he was Catholic, because he had a picture of Kennedy hanging in our living room.  Kennedy had been elected the first Irish Catholic president, the first president like us.  Except that I thought that if John Kennedy met us, he wouldn’t think that we were like him.

            I don’t remember where my brother went that day, but he didn’t go to church.  I just remember sitting there alone surrounded by the other children.  Special for Mother’s Day, all the dozen or so kids sat down near the front, so I did, too.  The Mothers in church told me to sit there.  I was the flowering city weed among sturdy country wildflowers.

            We listened to the minister talk about the joys of motherhood, and we were told to be grateful for what we had.  I guess we sang hymns about motherhood, and I guess I sang right along.  I would have at least held an open hymnbook and mouthed the words.  Wishing that I hadn’t come that morning, I kept looking at the front of the church, wanting to leave quietly.  During the final hymn, each pew of children got a turn to file past open boxes of potted marigolds that seemed way down in front, even though they were only a few feet away.  Each child picked one up to take home to their mother.  I just walked past.

            As I got to the back of the church, the Mothers questioned me.  “Why didn’t you take a marigold?”

            I would never say I didn’t have a mother, because I really did get one.  I just didn’t get to keep her.  I would never want to say that she was dead, because I just didn’t like to say that and wished that it wasn’t true.  So I said, “I don’t have a mother at home that I could give it to, so I didn’t think I should take one.”  Marigolds surrounded me as the Mothers remembered in horror why I was there alone.

            “Here, take this to your father.”

            “No, thank you.  That’s all right.  He doesn’t really care about flowers.”

            They didn’t understand.  I just didn’t think that it would be right for me to take a marigold meant for a mother.  When I think of it now, there might have been part of it that I didn’t understand.  I guess they weren’t leaving the church with their marigolds until I left with mine. Maybe that’s why the Mothers won.  Just to be polite, I walked home with two marigold plants - one for my father and one for me. 

                

Bayonet

People sometimes ask me to post some of my own writing so here is one of the first of these. This was published a few years ago in Wolf Moon Journal. It was started at Pyramid Life Center a few years before that.

Bayonet


One night, in the early 1960’s, the volunteer fire truck of our village in Maine went past the house in the middle of the night. I woke up when I heard the firehouse bell ringing. Daddy was already in the living room when I got there, and we both reached the window in time to see the truck crank by. I had been woken from a deep sleep and asked him, “What time is it?”

“Why?” he asked. “Are you writing a book?”

So I thought, what if I were. What would I write about? The volunteer fire truck? The snow in the woods? How easy eighth grade is, except for the social stuff? Maybe. Maybe I’d just decide to write about Daddy. Maybe I’d talk about how he once put my report card on the floor to read it, saying that he was farsighted. Maybe I’d tell about the time he asked me my middle name. Maybe I’d tell about the time he showed me that long, deep groove that ran along his calf.

I don’t remember what I asked, but I do remember what Daddy, who was from Cork, Ireland, said back.

“Do you want to talk about the British? I’ll tell you about the British.”

Daddy grew up Catholic in occupied Ireland. He had been baptized in Saints Peter and Paul in Cork City Centre and had attended the Christian Brothers School. As he started to tell me about the British, to my astonishment, he reached down to the bottom of his pant leg. Up over the all white one hundred per cent cotton socks that he always wore, he started to roll his cuff. His skin was white; the leg was thin. I don’t think that I had ever seen his leg before. He didn’t swim; he never wore shorts. And now he’s showing me something about the British. There was a furrow of hairless skin that started just below the mid-calf. As he traced it with a long spindly finger from the bottom and then abruptly out at the knee, he said, “See this? I got this when I was a boy. It came from a bayonet on a British soldier’s gun. They came after us - me and a few of my friends.”

I stood still as I pictured the scene. “They attacked boys?” I asked, realizing my father had said bayonet. What an exciting word. “They attacked boys?”

“They did,” he said and then smiled. “Of course, we had thrown stones at them first.”

I had to make room in my mind for this. My father had shown passion. He had it in him. Whether it was misguided or well directed, he, at least as a boy, had shown some spirit. And I, his daughter, got a glimpse of it.