The Painted Ponies of Partequineus and The Summer of the Kittens (23 page)

“Sure,” I said.

“There's some fruit juice on the top shelf of the refrigerator. Would you pour me a glass?”

“Okay.”

“The glasses are in the cupboard on the right side of the sink.”

I left Veronica with Mr. Harding and went into the kitchen. I got the juice out of the fridge and a glass out of the cupboard. The glass wasn't very clean, so I decided to wash it first. I turned on the water, and while I waited for it to get hot I looked around. There were spots on the floor where it looked like some food had been spilled, and there were dirty dishes next to the sink. Something was bothering me about the fridge, and I checked it out again and saw that there was almost nothing in it, not like ours that has lunch meat and vegetables and salad dressing and all kinds of leftovers all the time.

When the water was hot I tried to find some dishwashing soap, but there wasn't any - at least not under the sink, where Mom always keeps ours - so I just rinsed the glass out and wiped it dry and filled it with juice. I took it back to Mr. Harding, and he said “Thank you” and drank it really fast at first, then choked and spit up a little on the front of his shirt.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I'm fine,” he said.

“Can I get you anything else?”

“No. Do you still want to bring Thomas for me to see?”

I told him “Uh, huh,” and I picked up Veronica and headed for the door, and just before I went out I looked back. There was this immense tiger sitting beside Mr. Harding's recliner, not growling or anything, just sitting there all calm and peaceful as if it was waiting for something to happen.

That tiger scared me more than any of the ones that ever chased
me
.

I took Veronica home. I put her in my room and got Thomas and took him down to the kitchen where Mom was making an apple pie for dessert.

“I'm going back to Mr. Harding's to show him Thomas,” I told her.

“That's nice, dear,” she said in that kind of voice that says she isn't really listening, and I just stood there waiting for her to notice me. Finally she did.

“Is something on your mind, Hanna?”

“I think Mr. Harding's sick,” I told her. She asked me why, and I told her about how I didn't think he was getting enough to eat, and how he acted like he couldn't get out of his chair, and that his house was dirty and smelled funny.

I didn't tell her about the tiger, although I wanted to.

She kept on cutting up apples for the pie, and when I didn't leave she said, “Why don't you ask him if there's anything we can do for him.”

“I already did that, and he said no.”

“Well then, I guess it isn't our business.”

I didn't know what to say to that, so I just stood there and looked at her. Finally I said, “I think he's sick” again.

Mom looked at her pie and she looked at me, and she put down the knife she'd been using to cut up the apples and said, “I'll go with you, and we'll see.”

When I knocked on Mr. Harding's door, he didn't say “Come in” like the last time, so I knocked again, and then once more. When we didn't hear anything, Mom opened the door and we went inside. Mr. Harding was sort of slumped over to one side of his chair. He wasn't asleep, 'cause his eyes were open, but he was breathing sort of fast and there was a really bad smell in the room. Mom said something to him but he didn't answer, and she told me, “Hanna, take Thomas back home and stay there. I'll look after Mr. Harding.” So I did.

About ten minutes later an ambulance came down our street and stopped in front of Mr. Harding's house. Two men got out and went to the door, and a few minutes later one of them came out again and got a stretcher that was on wheels like the one Mr. Morris put Jimmy on at the hospital, and he rolled it up to the house and took it inside. A little while later they came out again, and Mr. Harding was lying on the stretcher all covered up with a sheet except for his head. His eyes were closed, and they wheeled him to the ambulance and put him inside and drove away.

Mom came home after that.

“Is he okay?” I asked her.

“He's going to the hospital,” Mom said. “They'll take good care of him there.”

I felt really sad about that, only I felt kind of good too, because if I hadn't decided to take Veronica for Mr. Harding to see, maybe nobody would have known he was sick. And I was glad I didn't listen to Mom when she said it was none of our business. I took
responsibility
, which is the most important thing I learned from Mr. Harding, maybe even more important than how to take care of kittens.

Dad was home for supper. He almost always is any more, and Mom told him she had to go next door to Mr. Harding's house after we ate. He asked why, and she said she was going to do some cleaning. Dad looked at her kind of funny, and she told him about the ambulance coming and everything. And then the most amazing thing happened. Dad said he'd go too and help. Dad
never
offers to help do any cleaning around
our
house. After we had our pie Mom gathered up some cleaning stuff, like tile spray and powdered cleanser and a bucket and a scrub brush, and I said, “Can I help too?”

I'm pretty good at cleaning.

Mom and Dad did Mr. Harding's kitchen first. Mom washed the dishes and I dried them and put them away. Dad scrubbed the floor with a big bristle brush while Mom cleaned the sink and the counter, and I wiped out the fridge with a damp cloth. Then we worked on Mr. Harding's bedroom until that was cleaned up. Next I followed them to the bathroom so I could help, but Mom looked inside and then told me not to go in or even look.

She said I should see if I could find Mr. Harding's vacuum cleaner, so I did. I ran it over the rug in the living room and the runner in the back hall, and even the scatter rugs in the dining room and the two spare bedrooms. By that time Mom and Dad were done with whatever they had to do in the bathroom, so I vacuumed the bath mat in there too.

It was really late when we finished and I was pretty tired, but it was worth it because Mr. Harding's house looked a whole lot better, and smelled better, too. But the most important thing was, Mom and Dad worked on it together, and me too, and they talked while they worked, and Mom seemed almost happy, at least part of the time.

When we got home I went straight to bed. But first I looked in every room in our house. No tigers.

July 31st

 

Hey, Diary!

Thomas started using the kitty litter today, so I guess he's okay. All of my kittens are pretty smart. They're five weeks old now, and they're all toilet trained already and eating solid food. Mr. Harding never got the chance to tell me what kind to get for them, so we went to Cornwallis Veterinarians in Kentville yesterday and a really nice lady there told us what to buy. It was fun watching them try to eat it. Veronica kept sneezing, but she seemed to like it. Mom says maybe they won't want their bottles so much any more, but so far they still do.

Mr. Harding is still in the hospital. I asked Mom what was wrong with him, and she said he had a stroke, whatever that is. She doesn't know when he'll be able to come home. I hope it's soon.

The kittens play all the time, except when they're sleeping. They like to pounce on each others' tails, and they chase each other all over my bedroom. What's really funny is, they can be running and playing and jumping one minute, and all of a sudden they just fall down all together in a heap and go to sleep. Mom says that's because growing up is hard work, so they need plenty of rest.

I play with them lots. We bought them some toys from the vet, a couple of balls and a feather on a stick and two furry mice. But what they really like is a little twist of paper on the end of a string like the one I made for Maggie. They chase it and leap up in the air and pounce on it, and sometimes they even stalk it. Mom says they're learning how to chase real mice, but I'm not ever going to let them do that. The vet told me that cats should always live indoors because so much can happen to them outside, like catching diseases and getting run over like Maggie did. And we don't have any mice
inside
our house, at least I hope we don't.

Jimmy still has to stay home, so I took Thomas over to his house to play this afternoon. I took a ball and the paper on a string, and Jimmy thought up a new toy. He was drinking some orange juice from a glass with a straw, and he took the straw out and kind of dragged it along the floor and wiggled it back and forth. Thomas all crouched down and looked very fierce, and when he jumped at the straw Jimmy pulled it away, so Thomas had to chase it. Jimmy let him catch it eventually, and he chewed on it with his little sharp teeth and put holes in it. I bet he thought it was a mouse.

I only stayed half an hour. Jimmy gets tired so easily. Just before I left I asked him if he'd fixed his seaplane yet, and he said he doesn't need it any more.

Dad finished the tree elevator yesterday, and I can work it all by myself. It's really neat, with lots of ropes and a whole bunch of pulleys. You sit in it and pull on the rope, and up it goes. Even if you pull really hard, the seat only goes up a little at a time, and Dad put some kind of a brake on it so that if you stop pulling, it doesn't fall back down again. He says that's for safety when Jimmy is in it. I meant to tell Jimmy about it today when I took Thomas over to see him, but I forgot again.

I won't use the elevator much. That's for Jimmy. It's faster for me to climb up the two-by-fours.

I wish Jimmy could climb, too.

I sat up in the tree for a really long time today, and didn't come down until Mom called me for supper. At first I just looked around. Nothing looks the same from up there. The clock tower at the university seems to be growing right out of the trees, and the steeple on the chapel too. Most of the houses have black roofs, but not all. There's grey and red and brown, too. And everything looks cleaner from up high, and neater.

After I figured out where everything was, the stores downtown and all the university buildings and where my friends live, I started to make improvements. I planted flowers and trees in all the yards that didn't have them, and I cut down the weeds in the vacant lot across the street and all the other vacant lots I could see. I painted some of the houses in really bright colours, especially Mr. Harding's house next door. Then I decided to do something about the dykes.

The first thing I did was tear down the fence and the No Trespassing signs, and then I widened the old dirt road and smoothed it all out so I could ride my bike there, and Jimmy could take his wheelchair all the way down to the water. I made all the ditches deeper and filled them with water from the bay so they looked just like shiny silver rivers, and I planted rows of giant trees on top of the dykes. Finally I cut down the tall weeds so I could see all the tigers, and when they couldn't find anyplace to hide anymore, they ran off toward the bay and jumped in the water and swam all the way to Quebec.

I never knew there could be so many tigers.

Then I discovered the most amazing thing. When you're up in a tree, you can see bird nests that you don't ever notice from the ground. One of them was in my maple tree, and it was below the platform so I could look inside. There were two baby blue jays in it, only they were really big babies, almost as big as their mother. I watched them for a long time. They're all kind of ruffled up, not smooth like you'd expect.

And insects. The tree is full of them, beetles and crawly things with long legs and some that look almost like ants, but with wings. And spiders! I don't like those.

Did I mention we have squirrels, too?

Mom keeps five bird feeders in the back yard, two on poles and three hanging from tree limbs. Lately she's been complaining that the seeds are disappearing too fast, and I discovered why. A little striped chipmunk was sitting on one of the feeders, stuffing seeds into his cheek pouches just as fast as he could.

The world is so full of life.

The cat from down the street wandered into the yard. It's a yellow one like Thomas, and it poked around in Mom's flower bed for a while, and then all of a sudden it got really still and all hunkered down. Its tail started twitching and it sort of wiggled its rear end back and forth like I'd seen the kittens do, and it
pounced!
I thought I heard something scream, and I could see a dark grey something in the cat's mouth, and it stood up and started out of the yard and began to grow, bigger and bigger, until it was a really big tiger, and just before it disappeared around the corner of the house next door I got a really good look at what it was carrying in its mouth, and it was Jimmy, and I screamed too.

August 5
^th

 

Dear Diary,

I went to church on Sunday. It's the first time since I embarrassed Mom and myself by running out. The only reason I went is because when I don't, Mom has to go alone, and that makes me feel bad. At least this time Reverend Davis didn't say anything in his sermon that upset me. Most of the time when he was talking I just daydreamed, but something he said caught my attention. He was reading some words from the Bible. I think it was, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.”