Old Tom Cat

“I was about the age you are now,” my grandmother began her story, gently crossing her weathered hands in her lap and placing them on the seed stitch blanket she had been diligently working on for what seemed, at the time, like months. “We used to have a cat, a mean one too-” she looked upset as she said this, “and he would scratch and scratch at me whenever I tried to hold him. He even gave me a scar you can still see, right here,” She pointed to a spot on her wrinkled face, next to her eye. I couldn’t make out any sort of marking but I nodded like I did. She had a penchant for exaggeration, but that’s what made her stories so good. “Mean old Tom that cat was. But, anyhow, one day he went missing. One of us girls had left the screen door open that night and he had gotten loose. My mom had me search those fields out behind our house for him. She said if we didn’t find him quick that he’d get taken up by a coyote or some other animal, and, let me say, I didn’t want to find him-” She looked into my eyes with hers, searching for a glimmer of laughter like she always did when she made a joke, “-but eventually I did. He was lying far from the field, and my mom was right. He was dead.” She wiped the corners of her mouth with her fingers.

I gasped at the horror of it all, I was sure he had been mauled by something. Only a beast could have done to him what he did. Like he was nothing more than roadkill, like whatever took his life didn’t even want to eat him; it was just sport. I didn’t want to scare my sister, she was always tearful in that awful way that girls like her always are, so, I said to myself I’m gonna take this cat up and bury him in the clearing. He may have been a mean old thing but he didn’t deserve what happened to him, that's for certain. Oh, I felt so guilty. That poor, mangled, thing.

So, I carried him in an old flour sack past the treeline at the edge of our property. I knew a clearing in there that I used to visit when I was a little girl and I always remembered it as such a gorgeous spot, with the elderberry trees there that would bloom, oh, and the boulder there at the edge. There was this huge boulder, with a crack straight down the middle. The fracture looked like a lightning bolt, a big old scar across its massive face. So I took him there. 

By the time I got there, it had started to get cold. Very, very cold. It was a chill to the bones like Jack Frost was in there waiting to nip at my nose. But it was the first day of May, I kept thinking. I must’ve been coming down with something. I started to feel like I was getting lost too, I knew how long it should’ve taken me to get to that clearing. I had been there a million times when I was young. It felt far too long for how much distance I had already covered. But, finally, the clearing opened up and I had made it there.

“But there was a man waiting there for you.” I finished setting up the scene for her, overexcited for her to start the next sentence. Her stories poured from her mouth like rivers and I was only a kid running around with a bucket trying to catch every last word. I was enraptured by her. “Yes,” she smiled and pursed her lips, forming her response, “... there was a man in there waiting for me. A handsome man, with dark shifting eyes, although he was probably closer to his late teen years. I was a young girl then. There was something off about him. He was sitting on that great big boulder and smiling at me, a sharp toothy grin, but one of his legs looked shorter than the other. He tilted his head from side to side when he looked at me like, mountain lions do when they decide whether or not to kill you. The longer I looked at him the more uncomfortable I felt, like I was trespassing somewhere I ought not to be.” 

I was frozen that way for a long time. Looking back at him, holding a dead cat in a flour sack by my side. Finally, I thought, I must be the queer one here. I’m sure he must think me mad, or at least he might be unnerved by a girl with blood-covered hands holding a bag of guts. So I spoke, finally, and I said how sorry I was to be there. I was just looking for a place to bury my cat, I said, and I remembered this part of the forest was a good place to be. He looked back for a moment and studied my words as they floated across the air and into his ears. “This is a good place to be” he agreed, “but why bury the cat?” he had asked me. I was confused then, I remember, and I said, “Because it’s the right thing to do.” But he disagreed with me. He told me I had already done the wrong thing; that I had already got what I wanted.

She always stopped at this part of the story and made an excuse to finish it, “But what happened after that?” I asked her impatiently, bouncing my legs, hoping that maybe tonight was the night when I might hear the ending. “He was right. I don't remember why, but he was right.” She looked at her palms then, examining them for something she had forgotten like a butcher might check their ungloved hands for blood. “I asked him if he could forgive me, but…” she hesitated, “I guess he couldn’t.” She sat up and removed the blanket from her lap, placing it back on the chair behind her. It was starting to get late and, as was routine, she moved to the back door. She laid out a plate with a single slice of bread she had baked earlier that morning and a small saucer of cream. She delicately secured the back screen and clicked the lock in place. After it was closed, she gently pressed the seam between it and the wall as if to remind herself it was, indeed, shut.

I never went far into the forest near my house because of my grandma’s stories of the man with the hobbled leg. My mom told me not to listen to them, grandma had a habit of disappearing into the woods for days at a time when was young, and it had done something to fracture her mind. But even when I was miles and miles away from home, it always felt like he was somewhere nearby, watching me. She never told me stories about him like he was some boogeyman who would steal me away if I acted bad; only that he was there, past the tree line, and sometimes he got hungry.