Today, at least she was kind.
The day before, she’d snapped at him, trying to push him where he would not go. She’d lacked all sense of danger, while he’d caught its stink at once on the air. Couldn’t she smell it? The stench reminded him of the savage, brought back the old fears.
After the boy’s mother died, the savage had seemed changed. The day after his son was born, he’d buried the woman’s body under the dogwood in the cabin’s yard, whispering soft words. He tidied the silver house and grounds as the woman had, and tended to his son.
The cat had been a kitten then. From time to time, as he hunted in the woods, he glimpsed the boy and his father. By autumn the boy had learned to walk, and by spring he was agile and quick. The cat would come upon him in the woods, naked and laughing, chasing squirrels and birds and sometimes the cat himself, calling kitty, kitty, kitty, delighting in everything, the savage not far behind. The boy learned to pee and squat away from the house, marking his territory. The cat marked it back. The boy learned to feed himself, stuffing his mouth with his chubby open hand and dropping half his meat on the ground for the cat.
While the boy explored, the savage rebuilt the log house not far from the silver one. Quickly a porch appeared, then two simple chairs, windows, a door. The boy watched his father work in a kind of rapture, and in the evenings, when the man pointed to the stars and to the moon rising over the tree line, he gaped at his father in amazement, as though the savage had put them there.
By the sixth winter, the savage began to leave the boy by himself more often, first locking him in the cabin alone for a few hours, then overnight. The boy cried bitterly when the man left him, and once he grabbed hold of his father’s leg. The savage shook him off and ran, and the boy’s short legs could not keep up.
As the boy grew older, the savage stayed gone for a day or two at a time. When he returned he was loud and rough and unsteady on his feet. He came and went on the guttering two-wheeled machine that sent the cat flying but mesmerized the boy. The boy pestered his father, who taught him to drive it and let him circle the clearing on its back, until one day it spun out from under him and stopped.
The savage spent most days in the woods with his other contraption, tinkering. He swilled from a jar as he worked, and by afternoon’s end he staggered back to the cabin and to the boy. Evenings, the savage sat in a porch chair with a knife and a piece of wood, paring off little shavings onto the ground, carving small objects. The boy watched him as if under a spell. In time, his father gave him the knife, showed him how to carve the objects himself.
One full moon, when the cat had a rabbit cornered nearby, the savage filled jars from his contraption, screwed on the lids, and packed the jars in a box. As always, the boy’s eyes grew big when he saw his father leaving, though he’d learned not to beg. He stood and watched mutely as his father started out. The savage caught sight of the cat crouching in a blackberry bramble. He picked up a stone and hurled it at the cat’s head. The cat bolted before it fell.
A few days later, the savage still gone, the boy started to wail. He wailed all night, and by morning the cat moved farther off to rest his ears. When the wailing stopped for a few hours at sunset, the cat crept up the trail. The boy lay sleeping in the dirt, curled into a tight ball. His face was swollen, streaked with dirt and misery.
The cat killed a rabbit and dragged it back, dropping it silently at the boy’s side. He waited nearby. He thought the boy might be hungry. This time, though, the boy woke staring into the dead eyes and started up again. He clutched the stiff bunny and raged all the next day and the next.
Stupid boy, the cat thought. Didn’t he know luck when he had it?
The cat kept clear of the boy after that. Sometimes he caught glimpses of him running through the woods, but until the girl came, the cat wanted no part of savage fathers or the idiot sons who worshipped them, no part of humans at all.
He watched the girl race up the path, thinking how much, today, she reminded him of the boy. By the time he arrived at the cabin, she was furious. Broken objects spilled out the door onto the porch and littered the yard. Others were stomped into the ground or crushed with large, muddy footprints.
She took in the mess, ranting, angry tears spilling down her cheeks, then squatted to pick up the bent feathers, broken eggshells, the shards of colored glass.
12
Beyond the cabin, in woods I hadn’t explored, I found a rusty heap of dented metal, the remains of the old still. Pieces of it lay scattered in every direction with beer cans and cigarette butts all round.
I picked up what I could find of my treasures, but the few feathers and eggshells I found were bent or smashed to bits and the little carved animals were gone. You didn’t have to be a detective to see that Hargrove and his cousin had lied up and down about what happened. They’d used the porch chairs to break the cabin windows, then tramped inside, pushed over the table and stools, stomped on the bedcovers, and left their muddy footprints everywhere. I couldn’t fix the windows, but I stuffed the
