So it wasn’t until he emerged the third time with the third kitten between his teeth that he was able to sigh and relax and peacefully start toward the house, triumphantly shouldering the explosives box as if it were spoils of a mighty battle. And when he met the old coon waddling toward him on the muddy path he saluted the inscrutable animal and advised him, “Maybe you better leave off the thickets t’day, Mister Jig; it’s fierce in yonder for a old man.”
Henry was in the woods. Uncle Ben and Ben, Junior—a boy called Little Joe by everyone but his father, shorter and younger than Hank and already showing his hell-raising father’s heavenly good looks—were staying at the house while Uncle Ben’s present woman cooled off enough to take them back into her home in town. They saw the kittens and Hank’s scratched and bleeding condition and both arrived at the same conclusion.
“Did you really?” asked the boy. “Did you really, Hank, fight a wildcat for ’em?”
“No, not really,” Hank replied modestly.
Ben looked at his nephew’s scratched and muddy face and triumphant eyes. “Oh, you did. Oh yeah you did, kid. Maybe not head on. Maybe not a wildcat. But you fought something.” Then surprised both Hank and his own boy by spending the rest of the afternoon helping build a cage out near the river’s edge.
“I don’t care much for cages,” he told them. “I’m not keen on cages of any kind. But if these cats are ever to get big enough to hold their own against those hounds, it’s gonna have to be in protected confinement. So we’ll make it a good cage, a comfortable cage; we’ll make the world’s
best
cage.”
And that short, beautifully featured black sheep of the family, who prided himself on never working with more than his wink and his smile, slaved away all afternoon helping two boys build a true paragon among cages. It was made from an old pick-up-truck box that had once been on Aaron’s pick-up but had sucked too much dust to suit him. When finished, this box was painted, calked, reinforced, and stood majestically a few feet from the ground on sawn four-by-four legs. Half of it, including the floor, was of wire mesh to make it easy to keep clean, and the door was large enough that Hank or Joe Ben could get right in with the regular tenants. There were boxes for hiding, straw for burrowing, and a burlap-covered post for climbing to the peaked top of the cage, where a wicker basket was lined with an old pair of woolens. There were a little tree to climb and rubber balls hung from the mesh ceiling with string, and a dishpan full of fresh river sand in case bobcats, like other cats, were inclined that way. It was a beautiful cage, a strong cage, and, as comfort in cages went, the goddamned cat cage—as Henry came to call it whenever smell indicated it was past time for cleaning—was as comfortable as a cage could be.
“The
best
of all possible cages.” Ben stepped back to regard the job with a sad smile. “What more can one ask?”
Hank spent a large part of that summer in the cage with the three kittens, and by fall they were all so accustomed to his morning visit that if it was delayed by so much as five minutes there was such a howl raised that old Henry would pardon his son from whatever chore he was doing and send him running to attend to that damned menagerie in the goddam boogering cat cage. By Halloween the cats were tame enough to bring into the house to play; by Thanksgiving Hank had promised his class-mates that on Playday, the day before Christmas vacation, he would bring all three to school.
The night before this event the river had risen four feet in response to three hard days of rain; Hank was worried that the boats might be swept loose from their moorings, as they had been last year, and prevent him from making it across to the school bus. Or, worse, that the river might even rise clear up to the cage. Before going up to bed he put on rubber boots over his pajamas and pulled on a poncho and went out with a lantern to check. The rain had slowed to a thin, cold spitting that came with occasional gusts of wind; the worst of the storm was over; the white blur above the mountains showed the moon trying to clear a way through the clouds. In the buttery yellow light of the lantern he could see the rowboat and the motorboat covered with green tarpaulins, bobbing in the dark water. They tugged at their ropes, pulling to be away up river, but they were safe. The tides at the river’s mouth were flooding, and the river was flowing inland instead of toward the sea. The current usually flowed four hours toward the sea, then stood an hour, then turned and flowed two or three hours in the other direction. During this backward up-river flow, as the salt water from the sea rushed to embrace the mud-filled rainwater from the mountains, the river would be at its highest. Hank noted the water’s height on the marker at the dock—black water swirling at the number five; five feet, then, above the normal high-tide mark—then he went on to the end of the dock and followed the rickety plank walk around the edge of the jetty to the place where his father was clinging with a crooked elbow to a cable, seemingly glued to the side of the foundation by the sticky light of his lantern while he hammered spikes into a two-by-six he was adding to the tangle of wood and cable and pipe. Henry held his hammer and squinted against the blowing gusts of rain.
“Is that you, boy? What do you want out here this time of night?” he demanded fiercely, then as an afterthought asked, “You come out to give the old man a hand at floodtime, is that it?”
The last thing in the boy’s mind was freezing for an hour in this wind, hammering aimlessly on that crazy business of his father’s, but he said, “I don’t know. I might, then I might not.” He hung, swinging outward by the cable, and looked past old Henry’s streaking features; by the light coming from his mother’s upstairs window he could see the outline of the cat cage against black clouds. “No sir, I just don’t know. . . . How much higher you reckon she’ll raise tonight?”
Henry leaned out to spit his exhausted wad of snuff down into the water. “The tides’ll shift in an hour. At the rate she’s risin’ now she’ll come up two more feet, three at the darnedest, then start easin’ back. Especial now that the rain’s quittin’.”
“Yeah,” Hank agreed, “I reckon that’s about the way I see it.” Looking at the cage he realized that the river would have to rise a good fifteen feet to reach even the legs, and by that time the house, the barn, probably the whole town of Wakonda would be washed away. “So I guess I’ll go on in an’ hit the sack. She’s all yours,” Hank called over his shoulder.
Henry looked after his son. The moon had finally made it through, and the boy moving away down the planks in his shapeless poncho, black outlined in glistening silver, was as much a mystery to the old man as the clouds he resembled. “Feisty little outfit.” Henry dipped out another charge of snuff, jammed it into the breech, and resumed his hammering.
By the time Hank was in bed the rain had stopped completely and patches of stars were showing. The big moon meant good clamming at the flats as well as colder, drier weather. Before he fell asleep he could tell by the absence of sound from the river that it had crested and from here on would drain back to the sea.
When he woke in the morning he looked out and saw the boats were fine and the river wasn’t much higher than usual. He hurried through breakfast, then took the box he had prepared and ran out toward the cage. He went first to the barn to pick up some burlap sacks to put in the bottom of the box. The morning was cold; a light frost was sifted into all the shadows and the cow breath was like skim milk in the air. Hank pulled some sacks from the pile in the feed room, scattering mice, and ran on out through the back door. The chill air in his lungs made him feel light and silly. He turned the corner and stopped:
the bank!
(About the time I went to nodding into my dream about the cats, Floyd and old man Syverson who used to run the little mill at Myrtleville had really got into it about something; they snapped me out of it, hollering back and forth at each other to beat hell.) . . .
The whole bank where the cage stood is gone; the new bank shines bright and clean, as though a quick slice had been made into the earth last night with the
edge of a huge moon-stropped razor.
(“Syverson,” Evenwrite yells, “don’t be so dunderheaded; I’m talkin’ sense!” And Syverson says, “Bull. What you mean, sense!” “Sense! I’m talking
sense!
” “Bull. You talkin’ sign over t’ you all the say-so I got of my business is what you talkin’!”)
At the bottom of this slice, in the mud and roots, the corner of the cage protrudes above the turgid surface of the river. Floating in the corner behind the wire mesh are the contents of the cage—the rubber balls, the torn cloth Teddy bear, the wicker basket and sodden bedding, and the shrunken bodies of the three cats.
(“How much’s it want,” Syverson yells, “how much, this organization you tell us about?” “Dang it, Syve, all it wants is what’s fair—”
“Fair! It wants advantage is what.”)
Looking so very small with their wet fur plastered against their bodies, so small and wet and ugly.
(“Okay! okay!” Floyd hollered, getting rattled, “but all it wants is its
fair
advantage!”)
He doesn’t want to cry; he hasn’t allowed himself to cry in years. And to stop that old scalding memory mounting in his nose and throat he forces himself to imagine exactly what it must have been like—the crumbling, the cage rocking, then falling with the slice of earth into the water, the three cats thrown from their warm bed and submerged in straggling icy death, caged and unable to swim to the surface. He visualizes every detail with painful care and then runs the scene over and over through his mind until it is grooved into him, until a call from the house puts a stop to his torture. . . .
(Everybody laughed when Floyd made that slip, even old Floyd himself. And for some time after folks kidded him about it. “All it wants is its fair advantage.” But me, not paying attention, nodding on and off; thinking about my drowned cats and my new Johnson outboard at the bottom of the drink, I kind of switched what he said to something else.)
Until the pain and guilt and loss are replaced by something different, something larger . . .
After putting the box and gunny sacks down I went back into the house and got my lunch along with that bony little peck the old lady laid on my cheek every morning. Then I went out to where old Henry was readying the boat to ferry me and Joe Ben across to wait for the school bus. I kept still, hoping neither of them’d notice me not having the box of cats like I’d planned. (
. . . replaced for good by something far stronger than guilt or loss.
) And they might not of, because the motorboat wouldn’t start, it being so cold, and after Henry had jerked and kicked and cussed and raved at it for about ten minutes he finally barked the hide off his knuckles and then he wasn’t in any shape to notice anything. We all got into the row boat and I thought I was gonna make it, but on the way across old bright-eyed Joe Ben gave a yell and pointed at the bank. “The cat cage! Hank, the
cat
cage!”
I didn’t say anything. The old man stopped rowing and looked, then turned to me. I frigged around, acting like I was all wrapped up tying my shoe or something. But pretty quick I saw they weren’t gonna let me off the hook without I said something or other. So I just shrugged and told them, cool and matter-of-fact, “It’s a dirty deal, is all. Nothing but just a crappy deal.”
“Sure,” the old man said. “The way the football bounces.”
“Sure,” Joe Ben said.
“Just a tough break,” I said.
“Sure,” they said.
“But boy, I’ll tell ya I’ll tell—
you
. . .” I could feel that cool, matter-of-fact tone slipping away, but couldn’t do diddle about it. “If I ever—
ever
, I don’t care
when
—get me any more of them bobcats—oh, Christ, Henry, that crappy river, I should, I should of—”
And when I couldn’t go on I went to beating at the side of the boat until the old man took me by the fist and stopped me.
And after that the whole thing was done and shut and forgot. None of the family ever mentioned it. For a while kids at school asked me how about them
bobcats
I was always blowing about, how come I hadn’t brought them
bobcats
to school? . . . but I just told them to fuck off, and after I told them enough times and showed them I meant what I said a time or two,
nobody
mentioned it any more. So I forgot it. Leastways the part of a man that remembers out loud forgot it. But years later it used to wonder me just how come I’d sometimes get all of a sudden so itchy to cut out from basketball practice, or from a date. It would really wonder me. To other people—Coach Lewellyn or a drinking buddy, or whatever honey I might have been necking with—I would say that if I waited too long the river would be up too high to cross. “Report of high water,” I’d say. “If she gets up too big there’s a chance the boat might be pulled loose and there I’d be, you know, up that ol’ creek without that ol’ canoe.” I’d tell buddies and coaches that I had to beat it home “on account of that ol’ Wakonda is risin’ like a wall between me and the supper table.” I’d tell dates just ready to tip over that “sorry kid, I got to up and hustle or the boat might be swamped.” But myself, I’d tell myself, Stamper, you got deals going with it, with that river. Face it. You might’ve put all kinds of stories on the little girlies from Reedsport, but when it comes right down to it you know them stories are so much crap and you got deals going with that snake of a river.
It was like me and that river had drawn ourselves a little contract, a little grudge match, and without me knowing exactly why. “It’s like this, sweetie-britches,” I might say to some little high-school honey we was parked someplace, steaming up the windows of the old man’s pick-up in some Saturday-night battle of the bra. “It’s like if I don’t go
now
, then it might be shiver all night long waitin’ to get across; it’s rainin’,
look
out there at it come down like a cow wettin’ on a flat rock!” Feed her any dumb tale but know what you meant was you
had
to—for some reason I didn’t know then—
had
to get home and get into a slicker and corks and get a hammer and nails and lay on the timbers like a crazy man, maybe even give up a
sure hump
just to freeze a half an hour out on that goddamned jetty!