One-Eyed Cat Read Online Free PDF Page A

unfinished attic windowsill in his hands, he felt as if he were the only person awake in all the great, empty night.
    He would go back down the stairs and walk through the spare bedroom, past his mother’s room, the small room off it where his father slept, past the hall mirror and down the stairs and into the living room with its dark wallpaper pattern of pussy willows which his grandmother, dead before he was born, had chosen, and by then his eyes were used to the dark and he could make out the glimmer of the silvery catkins. He would go into the dining room and touch the glass camel on the Tiffany shade, pass into the pantry with its smell of stale cake and sour mop and withered apples, into the big kitchen where the cracked old linoleum might nip at his bare feet like red ants. Before he went upstairs, he would pause in his father’s study, testing the floorboards until he found the one that creaked. Then he would be ready to go back to his bed, to sleep.
    Ned was able to visit his mother almost every day, even if it was only for a minute or two. At first, he would have a conversation with her that was not so different from the ones he had with other grownups, his teacher, Miss Jefferson, or members of his father’s congregation like the Brewsters. If he could spend a good, long time with her, the conversation would change. He would get a little stool and take it next to the wheelchair and sit down on it. He would tell her what he had done that day, what he had seen, and even what he had thought. That was what she seemed most interested in.
    When he brought her wildflowers in the spring and summer, she told him the names of each one. If he found an odd stone, she could name what minerals were in it. If he described a bird, she could sometimes tell him its name. When that was done, the flowers put aside with the stone, she would ask him what he thought.
    â€œWhat’s outside of everything?” he asked her once.
    â€œThe earth?”
    â€œI mean the sky. What’s outside of the sky and the stars?”
    â€œNo one knows,” she said.
    â€œThere must be something,” he said. “There can’t be nothing, can there?”
    â€œYour father would say God,” she said.
    â€œWhat would you say?” he asked, a little troubled and interested that she had a different idea than his father.
    â€œThe thought of it is too strange to fit inside my brain,” she said. “Maybe it’s like those dolls Uncle Hilary brought you back from Hungary when you were little. Do you remember? There must have been ten of them, each fitting inside the other until the smallest one, which was no bigger than your fingernail. In the universe, perhaps the dolls go on forever, getting larger and larger.”
    He always knew when she was getting tired. He didn’t know when he’d begun to learn how to tell. He would see a slight tightening of a muscle in her cheek; her shoulders would stoop. He’d get up from the stool then and kiss her cheek that was as soft as the flannel of his oldest pajamas. There was something clothlike about her skin. It made him sad for a moment though he didn’t know why.
    Often he didn’t think about the strangeness of his mother being an invalid. But when he went to visit a school friend, or spent the afternoon with a boy from the Sunday school when his father had extra church business to take care of after services, he would be astonished at the great noise and thundering in the house, at his friend shouting, “Mom!” and banging doors and slamming windows and thumping up and down stairs. It was so different at home. He couldn’t remember when he had learned to walk softly but he was pretty sure no one could make less noise than he did. If he brought someone home to play with—that did not happen often—they stayed outside or, if it was raining, on the porch.
    â€œWhen did you get sick?” Ned asked Mama once when the