Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (3 page)

"Kee-rist," Curt said, but not loudly.
"We’ve woke the old lady up. Now there’ll be two of you, and
we’ll never get out of here. Get a move on, will you?"

"I’ll go," Harold said. "I’m all
set."

Curt had opened the door a crack, but now he closed
it again, grinning, and shook his head. He watched Arthur cross
slowly to his bunk and take his blue flannel shirt from the wall, and
then he looked at Harold.

"I gotta have Art," he said, "in case
the cat’s black, and big as a horse. I wouldn’t know what to do
with a cat that was black and big as a horse. And Joe Sam won’t be
any good this mornin’. He was already talkin' to himself last
night, before the snow’d even started. Besides," he added,
looking back at Arthur, and still grinning, "he’d be for the
cat."

"You can’t blame him," Arthur said
mildly.

"Don’t even know as I can trust Art, for that
matter. He’s gettin’ awful fond of that black painter himself."

"I am at that," Arthur said, "I was
just dreaming it was loose."

"Gee," Curt said, making the big eyes of a
child in awe.

"No wonder you’re in no hurry. "I’ll
tell you what, Art," he said confidentially, "I’ll make
me a special bullet. I’ll melt up some of your dreams—they’re
plenty heavy enough—and make a magic bullet, and you can put the
medicine on it, huh? Only," he finished sharply, "do it
some time this week, will you?"

He opened the door again, and through the opening
they could see the mother standing at the stove in her old gray
flannel bathrobe, with her gray hair still hanging loose down her
back. The light from the lamp was on her back, but her face was
toward the stove and in the dark.

Harold looked at her out there, and said, "I’l1
go, Curt."

He grinned. "It’s a hundred to one anyway it’s
not black."

"I don’t know, kid," Curt said seriously,
still mocking Arthur. "It’s the first snowstorm, and you
remember how upset Joe Sam was last night. No, kid," he said,
grinning back at him, "you gotta stay here and tend to the
future. You’re the white hope of the Bridges. You don’t think she
wants to talk to Arthur, do you?" He laughed, and went into the
kitchen, leaving the door open.

Arthur sat down on the edge of his bunk to pull his
boots on. "He’s right about that, Hal," he said. "You
better break Gwen in to the rest of us kind of gradual, and you
better do it yourself."

Min the kitchen Curt was saying, "Something’s
at the stock, Ma."

"I heard ’em," the mother said.

"I’m goin’ up there."

The two in the bunk-room could see him taking the
lantern down from the shelf behind the stove. Then he went out of
sight toward the table with it.

"By yourself?" the mother asked.

Curt’s voice, half laughing, and muffled by the
wall, answered, "No, ma’am. I’m takin’ Art with me. We got
a notion it might be the black painter."

The mother set the stove lids back on and pulled the
big iron skillet over onto them, and without looking around said,
scornfully, "Black painter." She moved away toward the sink
in the far corner, saying, "It might as well be, though, for all
you’ll ever find, goin’ out there now."

Harold said, "He’ll be like that all the way,
if you go."

Arthur stood up and stamped his heels down into his
boots and crossed to the big pine chest in the corner beyond his
bunk.

"I’m used to it," he said. "After
about so long, you don’t hear it."

He lifted the lid of the chest and began to search
down through the blankets and clothes packed in it.

In the kitchen the mother’s voice was saying, the
little Arkansas drag in it, slow and fflat, "You’ll put some
food in your stomach before you go," and then, after Curt had
answered something they couldn’t understand, "It won’t even
be daylight for an hour yet. Shut that door, will you? There’s a
draft comin’ in here like out of an ice-house."

Curt’s boots sounded across the kitchen floor and
the bunk-room door was closed.

Arthur let down the lid on the chest and straightened
up with the cowhide parka in his hands. He held it up and sniffed at
it.

"Mother goes a little heavy on the camphor,"
he said. He took the camphor bag out of one pocket, and poked it back
under the lid of the chest. There was more than a camphor bag in the
other pocket, though, and when he had emptied it, he stood there
looking at what he held on his hand.

"Got some unfinished whittling," he said.
"This one’s an Indian skinning something, you can see that.
But this one," he said, smiling and holding it up between his
thumb and forefinger for Harold to see. Only the first cuts had been
made on it, many small, stubborn cuts, like ripples on a wave, but
all going with the grain and the shape of the wood.

"Might as well be God, for all I can make of it
now," he said. "Mountain mahogany," he added, letting
the piece down into his hand again and staring at it a moment longer,
trying to remember. "Probably I just got worn out tryin’ to
whittle it."

He dropped the two pieces of wood back into the
pocket of the parka and poked the camphor that had come out with them
into the chest. He remained there, bent over and holding the lid of
the chest up, as the wind returned, wrestling the house and chafing
the window with snow, and then rose roaring into the steep of pines.
There was no other sound behind it, and he let the lid down and
straightened up. He looked at Harold and smiled and shook his head.

"There won’t be many tracks left in that,"
Harold agreed.

"It’s not the little dreamers that hunt black
painters," Arthur said softly. He crossed to the table, carrying
the parka over his arm, and turned the lamp down.

"Get the door, will you, Hal?"

Harold went to the kitchen door and took hold of the
latch, and Arthur curved a hand around the far side of the lamp
chimney and leaned over and blew against it. For a moment the huge
shadow angel his shoulders made across the beams of the ceiling
fluttered wildly, and all the tiny, watchful, metal eyes winked
rapidly, and then the room was dark.

"Curt generally gets what he goes after,
though," Harold said.

"He generally does," Arthur said, and his
boots sounded, coming slowly toward the door. "But he likes a
few tracks to go on," he added.

"They help, all right," Harold said, and
opened the door and held it, watching Arthur come up the shaft of
light it let in.

2

The kitchen was already full of the sound and smell
of the bacon on the hot pan. The mother was standing at the stove,
cutting chunks of potato into the pan with the bacon, and she didn’t
look around when Arthur, and then Harold behind him, came in.

Curt was sitting facing her at the round table in the
middle of the room, with the big east window full of darkness behind
him. He had his red coat on, and the old black sombrero was on the
back of his head. The lighted lantern stood on the door beside his
chair. Its flame appeared small and smoky in there, making only a
little pool of orange light in the shadow under the table.

The ceiling of the kitchen was very high, to make
room for the stairs that went up against the north wall to a small
landing with one closed door on it, and there was only one lamp, with
a china bowl and a big china shade, hanging from a long, spring-chain
over the center of the table. The walls and the ceiling were
whitewashed though, and all the doors, the outside one in the corner
behind Curt, and the one on the landing, and the two in the north
wall, one under the landing and the other at the foot of the stairs,
were painted white, so the room seemed full of light after the
bunk-room. There were small, hand-painted flowers scattered over the
shade of the lamp that made separate, fluttering shadows, like moths,
on the walls and ceiling, and the bowl of the lamp made a circle of
shadow on the table. Curt peered across through the
shadow
of the bowl when Arthur came out, and saw him stop for a moment to
get used to the change from the bunk-room. He looked at the cowhide
parka over Arthur’s arm and grinned.

"My God," he said. "I ask for a
medicine man, and what do I get? A priest again. A damned monk. Well
that’s next best, I guess, ain’t it? Not too much difference.
Especially when the monk’s a prophet too. Did you know your monk
was a prophet too, now, Ma?"

"Don’t blaspheme," the mother said, but
she spoke flatly, as if only out of habit, and she didn’t look
around this time either. "You may as well set down," she
told Arthur and Harold. "There’s nothing to hurry for, that I
can see, and I’ll be a few minutes yet with your breakfast."

Harold closed the bunk-room door and went around the
table and sat down with his back to the stairs. Arthur, moving more
slowly, came to the chair on the near side and hung the parka over
the back of it and sat down. He leaned both elbows on the table and
rubbed his eyes slowly with his long hands, and then sat there with
his eyes still covered by his hands.

"He really is, though," Curt said. "He
had a dream that showed him it was the black painter out there.
That’s why I gotta take him along."

"I had a dream of my own," the mother said,
"and it ain’t left me much in the mood for jokes."

"More dreams," Curt said, chuckling. "And
Joe Sam was at his before he went to bed even. The place is crawling
with ’em. Did you have bad dreams too, young ’un?" he asked
Harold.

Harold smiled a little and shook his head.

"Good ones, eh? By Chrimus, so would I, if I was
you. I w0u1dn’t want to ever wake up. If I had a girl like . . ."

"Watch your mouth," the mother said
sharply.

"Now, what did I say to make you go jumpin’ on
me like that?" He winked at Harold. "It’s not as if Hal,
here, hadn’t ever heard of such things. Or Gwen either, as far as
that goes," he added judiciously. "Now I have a notion,
just to look at her, that. . ."

The mother turned around with the knife and a potato
still in her hands and looked at Curt. Her face was like Arthur’s,
long and narrow and tired-looking, with deep hollows at the temples
and under the cheek-bones, and her eyes set back in deep hollows. The
lines across her forehead and beside her mouth were much deeper and
less broken than Arthur’s, though, and her tired look wasn’t
gentle or quiet. It wasn’t the look that comes from lack of sleep,
or from too much work, or from struggling against someone else’s
will. It was the look that comes from war inside which is never
ended, but never lost, either. When the will that sustained her in
this war was turned outward, free of the enemy it had inside, it
became like the threat of a weapon. No matter who she was looking at,
everyone there would feel that she was looking at him, and that a
weapon was pointed at him.
 
It was
like that now. She was looking at Curt, but Harold, seeing her face,
laid his big fingers over the edge of the table and looked down at
them, and Arthur, almost at once, looked away from her and watched
the shadows like moths on the wall.

"I told you to watch your mouth," the
mother said.

Curt tried to keep it a joke still. "Now,
Mother," he said, too loudly, "it’s not Hal that’s the
monk. He’s pretty near twenty, and he . . ."

"Did you hear me, Curtis?"

The anger gathered suddenly in Curt’s face, and his
eyes began a little, blinding dance. "Look," he said, “I’m
no kid either. I’m thirty-seven years old. Arthur here’s forty,"
he said to make an ally. "The old man, for Christ’s sake, is
over seventy. And you go bossing the whole bunch of us like we was
kids. We can’t even make a little joke, for God’s sake. Well, we
ain’t kids, even if you never. . ."

"You don’t have to shout," the mother
said. "My hearing’s as good as it ever was, and the girls is
already awake in there. Do you want Gwen Williams to hear the names
you’re callin’ her?"

"Jesus," Curt said, not so loudly, but as
if he would burst. He doubled his hands into fists and pressed them
down on the table hard enough to lift his shoulders. "What did I
call her? Just tell me one thing I called her." He looked at
Arthur, and then at Harold. "Did you hear me call her anything?"

"It didn’t take any fancy guessing to know
what you meant."

"Look," Curt said, "if we’re going
to start guessing, then what I’ve thought about Gwen Williams is
goddamned brotherly love compared to what you. . ."

Harold said, "Let it go, Curt, will you?"

Curt turned on him. "You stickin’ up for her
now? You know as well as I do what she thinks of your . . ."

"I think what I think," the mother said
sharply, “and I’ll keep it to myself till there’s some use to
say it. If you’re in such a tearin’ hurry to get out there and
see what you can see in pitch dark and a blizzard, you better be
gettin’ them ponies saddled while I’m puttin’ the breakfast
on."

The veins began to bulge on Curt’s throat and
forehead, and he stared at her back with the little, mad dance in his
eyes. "By Jesus," he began finally, but got no further
before the mother said, turning over the potatoes with a fork as she
spoke, "And there’s no need that I can see for your takin’
holy names in vain every time you open your mouth."