“Henry’s awful cranky today,” I said.
“It’s those New York bloodsuckers.”
“Why does he even talk to them?”
“It’s how he makes his living. Henry had a contract with their father, but now his contract’s with Lillian and Sid. Henry owes their art gallery a fifteen-sculpture show by year’s end, and they’re holding him to it.”
“That’s less than two months away!” I said.
“And if Henry doesn’t deliver, Lillian says she’ll sue. She’ll have her pound of Henry’s flesh one way or the other.”
I felt for Henry. It frosted my grapes when people tried to pull my strings like I was some kind of puppet. Mama had done that to me. When she couldn’t sweet-talk her way to what she wanted, she’d say I was contrary, plain and simple, that if she said run, I’d walk, and if she said walk, I’d stand still as stone to spite her—which, come to think of it, was probably true. She liked to tell about the time when I was three and we were about to cross a busy street. She snapped, “Give me your hand,” and I snapped back, “No, it’s mine!”
When the art vultures flew off around three o’clock, Fred went home to Bessie, and Henry stomped out to his studio. I heard his grinder going and I let him be. He was clearing Lillian and Sid out of his system. The rain had eased up enough for me to do the same, bad cold or not. I put on my boots, coat, and a rain slicker and headed up to the cabin.
By the time I got there, though, the rain and wind had started up again. I didn’t even try to light a fire. Gusts whistled down the chimney and blew ashes and rainwater all over the floor. The woodpile outside was soaked through.
I kept my coat on and sat shivering at the table, trying to record the day in my journal. But the damp pages curled, my writing hand got stiff with cold, and my head filled up with snot. I managed just half a page before I decided to read instead. I lit both oil lamps and lay in the bed fully clothed with all the old quilts pulled over me, but it was so dark outside that even with the lamps going I could barely make out the words on the page. I was cold to the bone.
It struck me then how much good light and warmth mattered to me. If I lived in that cabin all the time I’d be stuck with whatever wretchedness the weather brought. There’d be no heat when the wood got wet, and even if I managed to keep it dry, that pile wouldn’t last. I’d have no warm, dry clothes when mine got wet. There’d be no home-cooked meals hot in the oven when I got home. And there’d be precious little light, especially on winter days.
I looked at my little cabin and saw it for the shack it was. The unchinked cracks in the log walls that let in the bitter cold. The floor still so filthy it might as well have been dirt. The skin of ice in the bottom of what passed for a sink. Could I really live like this? All the time? And not just one or two hours a day, but day and night, spring, summer, fall and winter, year after year? I might not miss TV, but wouldn’t I miss hot and cold running water or clean clothes? Heat that I didn’t have to generate myself? Electric light? Could I go without a flush toilet or a bath? Would I want to even if I could? And what would I eat? Would I steal what I couldn’t grow or kill with my own hands? Could I actually kill an animal? Then skin, cook, and eat it? Would I get lonely? Would I miss having other human beings to talk to? And what if I got sick, like now? Or needed help?
I was a tangle of questions as I sniffled and shivered in that miserable bed. In my sorry state, the answers were distressingly clear. I looked up at the shelf with the sad woman’s picture on it, some pitiable child’s woebegone mama, and it seemed to me that even the roughest lives I’d read about in books were warmer and softer than theirs must’ve been.
And that’s when I saw it. It was set in casually among the others, shoulder to shoulder with the squirrel and the deer. I stood up to look closer. There on the shelf, beside the picture of the woman and the six small animal carvings, was a seventh creature, a tiny wood carving of a cat, no bigger than half a walnut shell. The cat was curled up, sound asleep, in every detail like my own cat, down to his oversize head, raggedy ears, and the splotch on the right side of his tiny, perfect nose. It was beautiful. I knew at once that it was meant for me.
I picked it up and cupped it in my hands, marveling at the likeness, but then it hit me. Whoever had made it and left it there had to be watching everything I did. I whirled around, half expecting someone at the window or door, but there was only wind and rain.
I slipped the carving into my pocket and hurried back to Henry’s, fingering the little wooden cat all the way. I was actually glad to see Henry’s sculptures spinning in the yard to greet me and relieved to hear his welder running out back. I switched on all the downstairs lights and set the supper in the oven on warm, then sat turning the little cat in my hands, running my fingers over the curve of his back and the points of his ears. I wasn’t scared, exactly. No one who meant me harm would carve me such a beautiful thing. What unsettled me
