One-Eyed Cat Read Online Free Page B

room, Ned had observed. People from church had used to visit quite a bit but not for the last year. He thought he knew why.
    One night when he’d not been sleepy but had been lying awake in his bed, he’d heard Mama say, “Jim, please! I don’t want to see them anymore. I can’t bear all that goodness ! Try to understand me … When someone is as helpless as I am, that goodness is like being drowned …” He’d puzzled over her words, wondering if what she meant was something like what he felt when Papa spoke in his preaching voice to him about someone being poor or afflicted or miserable.
    He went back to Mama’s door and peeked in at her. Her eyes were closed. Papa must have turned on her bedside lamp but it was weak and the room was full of shadows. Darkness was filling the windows, pressing up against them like black smoke. Through it he could see little flickers of light from Waterville. Mama was sleeping. He wished she wasn’t. If she’d talk to him, he might be able to stop thinking about her so hard.
    Sometimes he could forget her altogether. That was especially true when he was outdoors. Then, if he happened to glance back at the house, at her windows on the second floor, he would imagine her sitting in her wheelchair, her twisted fingers and hands resting on the wooden tray that could swing out from one arm and be attached to the other so that she was imprisoned the way a baby is imprisoned in a high chair.
    He could not run into her room and see her whenever he felt like it. But Papa might say, “Your mother’s had her sponge bath and is feeling quite refreshed. Why don’t you take up her tea to her, Ned?” He would climb the stairs wondering why the tea in the cup sloshed more and more the higher he went. He would glimpse himself in the hall mirror as he passed it, his lip caught in his teeth in anticipation of dropping the hot cup—he never had, so far—and he would walk softly into her room and place the tea in front of her, the slice of lemon in the saucer occasionally moldy because Papa hadn’t had time to go to the grocer’s in Waterville to get fresh lemons.
    â€œWell, Ned,” she would say, turning her gaze away from the windows and looking at him. Some days she would smile very faintly, and he would know she was feeling bad, that that smile was all she could manage, that she had to be very careful not to move, careful the way he was with her cup of tea, so that something in her would not spill over. As far as anyone knew, she wouldn’t get better; she would have good days and bad days—that was all.
    There were nights when his parents’ voices awoke him. Hers would be high and anguished, his father’s, steady and persuasive, the way he sounded from the pulpit in church. As Ned lay listening, his room luminous with star shine or moonlight or else as dark as a well, a darkness as thick as fur pressing against his face, he knew that pain had awaked her and that his father was trying to persuade it away.
    When they had fallen silent and he couldn’t get back to sleep, he often walked through the house. Since Mrs. Scallop had come, he was nervous about going up the narrow splintery stairs in the back hall which led to the attic. Yet there was something thrilling about his passage there, too, a chance he might dislodge an old National Geographic from a heap in the dusty corner of a stair, or trip and bang his big toe, or kick over a box with a thousand old buttons in it that would cascade down the stairs right to Mrs. Scallop’s threshold and scare her out of her sleep! The very thought of exploding her awake made him shudder and laugh at the same time.
    In the attic, he would feel his way among the huge old trunks and boxes, the piles of books and magazines and broken furniture, to one of the small windows from which he could see the river if it was a clear night. As he stood there on tiptoe, gripping the