“I’ll take the cat back,” I said. “If the stink don’t get me first.”
For some reason my irreverent description of Auntie Braxton’s house triggered Call. “Did you hear what she said?” he asked the Captain. “‘If the stink don’t get me first.’” Then he and the Captain were laughing their heads off.
I grabbed the cat from Call just as it wriggled free. “Come along,” I said, “before I call you a stinking name or two.” I wasn’t quite bold enough to use the forbidden curse word aloud, but I thought of it several times quite happily as I made my way up the path and to Auntie Braxton’s house.
I hadn’t exaggerated the smell. The windows of the house were open and the overwhelming ammonia essence of cat stood like an invisible wall between me and the front yard. The tom was scratching and struggling to get out of my grasp, leaving stinging red lines all over my bare arms. If I hadn’t been afraid that he would turn and run straight back to the Captain’s, I would have dropped him on the front walk and run back myself. I had, however, a duty to perform, so I marched bravely up the walk to Auntie Braxton’s door.
“Auntie Braxton!” I yelled her name over unhappy cat sounds coming from the other side of the door. If I let go the tom to knock or open the door, I might lose him, so I just stood there on the dilapidated porch and hollered. “Auntie Braxton. I got your cat.”
From within a cat howled in reply, but no human voice accompanied it. I called again. Still no answer from the old lady. It occurred to me that I might be able to push the cat through the torn window screen. I went over to the window. The hole was large enough if I stuffed the creature in a bit. As I stooped to do so, I saw something dark lying on the front room floor. There were cats perched on top of it and cats walking across it, so for a minute I simply stared at it, not recognizing it for what it was—a human form. When I did, I panicked. Throwing the cat down, I half tripped over it in my hurry to be gone. I raced back to the Captain’s house where I nearly fell over the door stoop, panting out my terror.
“Auntie Braxton!” I said. “Lying dead on the floor with cats crawling all over her.”
“Slow down,” said the Captain. I tried to catch my breath and repeat myself, but after two words he was already past me and walking, almost running up the path toward the old woman’s house. Call and I followed. We were both terrified, but we ran to catch up to him and stayed at his heels. No matter what terrible thing was going on, we wanted to be with him and each other.
The Captain pushed open the door. People never locked their houses on Rass. Most doors didn’t even have locks. The three of us went in. No one was bothering about the smell anymore. The Captain knelt down beside the old woman, scattering cats in every direction.
Call and I hung back a little, wide-eyed and breathing fast.
“She’s alive,” he said. “Call, you go down to the dock. As soon as the ferry docks, Captain Billy’s going to have to take her to the hospital.”
Relief washed over me like a gentle surf. It wasn’t that I’d never seen a dead body. On an island, you can’t get away from death. But I’d never found one. Never been the first person accidentally to stumble in on death. It seemed more terrible somehow to be the first one.
“Don’t just stand there, Sara Louise. Go find some men to help me carry her down to the dock.”
I jumped and ran to obey. It was not until later that I realized that he had called me by my full name, Sara Louise. No one bothered, not even my mother, to call me Sara Louise, but he had done it without thinking. Strange how much that meant to me.
I got my father an
d two other men from their crab houses, and we raced back to Auntie Braxton’s. The Captain had found a cot mattress, and he and my father gently rolled the old woman over and lifted her to the mattress. The Captain covered her with a cotton blanket. I was glad, for her thin legs seemed indecent somehow poking out from her faded housedress. Then the four men began to lift the awkward makeshift stretcher. As they did so, the old lady moaned, like someone disturbed by a bad dream.
“It’s all right, Trudy, it’s me, Hiram,” the Captain said. “I’ll take care of you.” My father and the other two men gave one another funny looks, but no one said anything. They had to get her to the hospital.
9
“Trudy” was what did it. Simply by using Auntie Braxton’s first name, the Captain confirmed himself as the true Hiram Wallace. He still didn’t go to meet the ferry in the afternoon like most folks, or hang around Kellam’s after supper matching water stories, or go to church. But despite these aberrations he seemed to be accepted as an islander, simply because he had called Auntie Braxton “Trudy,” a name nobody had used for her since she was a young woman.
Call’s life and mine took a strange turn at that time. The Captain decided that while Auntie Braxton was in the hospital, the three of us should tackle her house. I tried weakly to argue that it was like trespassing to clean up someone’s house without her permission, and trespassing was something Methodists were forever bent on getting forgiveness for, so it was likely to be a fairly serious sin. The Captain just snorted impolitely at that. If we didn’t do it, he said, the Ladies’ Society of the Methodist church was likely to take it on as a good deed. Although Auntie Braxton went regularly to church, she had, for years, been considered strange, and once her cat population had passed four or five, she had been on very strained terms with the other women of Rass.
“Would Trudy rather have them poking about her property than us?”
“She’d rather have nobody, I bet.”
He sadly admitted that I was right, but since the alternative to our doing the cleaning was having it become a missionary endeavor, I had to agree that we were certainly the lesser of two evils.
The problem, of course, was the cats. Until something could be done about them, there was no hope of getting the house in any kind of order.
“How in the world did she feed them?” I asked. It had always seemed to me that Auntie Braxton was below even Call’s family on the poverty scale.
“The wonder is she didn’t feed them better,” the Captain said. “These poor things look half-starved.”
“Cat food costs a lot of money,” I said, trying to remember if Auntie Braxton had ever been known to buy fish from a local waterman to feed to her cats. Anyone else would have used scraps, but anyone else would have had more people than cats in the house.
“I would have thought Trudy had more money than most people on the island,” the Captain said.
Even Call was flabbergasted. “What makes you think a thing like that?” he asked. We both remembered that Auntie Braxton got a basket from the Ladies’ Society at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Not even Call’s family rated a basket.
“I was here when her father died,” the Captain said, as though the two of us should have known such a simple fact as that. “Old Captain Braxton had plenty, but he never let on. He let his wife and child scrimp by on next to nothing. Trudy found the money after they both died. And it scared her something silly to suddenly find all this cash, so she come running to my mother. My mother treated her like she was her own daughter. Poor Momma,” he shook his head, “she never gave up hoping I’d marry Trudy. Well, anyway, Momma told her to put it in a bank, but I doubt that Trudy did. What did she know about mainland banks? What’s left of it after all these years is probably hidden right here in this house, if the damn cats haven’t chewed it up.”