Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark Read Online Free PDF

way Curt’s takin’ on this morning."
    "No, Mother, it’s all right," Arthur
said. "He can’t very well go off with Gwen just come, and her
first visit, too."
    "There’ll be time enough to see her," the
mother said.
    She went to the stove and picked up the two heavy
coffee mugs and brought them back and set them down beside the
plates. "He wouldn’t be gone a lifetime," she said to
Arthur. "Either they’ll find something at the creek, or they
won’t. They’ll be back before noon."
    Arthur looked up at her, holding the knife still, and
smiled and shook his head. "You know Curt better than that,
Mother," he said.
    He looked across at Harold. Harold was staring at the
shadow in the middle of the table. His face was quiet, but set.
Arthur looked down, and began his careful whittling again.
    "No, I’m going," he said. "Anyway,"
he added, smiling, "Curt needs me, in case the cat is black."
    He held the little wooden lion up and away from him
and studied it, still smiling and then brought it back into his lap
again.
    "That heathen nonsense," the mother said.
    "I’m not so sure," Arthur said. "Joe
Sam just likes a god he can see."
    "A god," the mother said. "Well, I’m
sure, if you’re not. Stupid, childish nonsense."
    "And a black panther," Arthur went on, as
if she hadn’t spoken, "is as good a god as any to mean
the end of things."
    "You’re worse than Curt and his swearing,"
the mother said. "Your godless jokes. If you keep it up, you’l1
be believing them, next thing you know."
    "Not godless," Arthur said. "Full of
gods, like Joe Sam."
    “ Humph," the mother said, and went back to the
stove and took up the coffee pot again. The wind returned against the
house, and she stood with the coffee pot in her hand and listened to
it. The wind pressed briefly and without thunder, only making that
hollow beating of big wings under the eaves. Before it let the dry
snow off the little window over the sink, Grace and Gwen laughed
together again in the north bedroom, and Grace said something after
the laughter, with that same high gaiety in her voice.
    "If I’d had my way," the mother said
angrily, "I’d of turned that no-good old Indian off the place
the day he come. Him and his creeping ways and his crazy notions. But
no, your father had to be smart. He had to get him a hired hand for
nothing but his keep. Hired hand," she said scornfully. "Less
use than nigger help, and dirtier too. I’d ruther have a fool
nigger around. They’re mostly cheerful anyway."
    Harold looked across at Arthur, and then pulled his
chair in closer and began slowly to eat his breakfast. Arthur stopped
the knife again, and looked at the mother from under his eyebrows.
The mother took a deep breath and stood there for a moment, as if to
steady herself against her own anger, and then let the breath out and
poured coffee into a third mug. Arthur looked down and began to
whittle again.
    “ Joe Sam has his own jokes," he said.
    “ Jokes," the mother said, coming to the table.
"We’l1 be lucky if one of his jokes don’t wind up with us
all layin’ in our beds with our throats cut." She sat down and
set her coffee mug on the table in front of her.
    "He’s planning it pretty carefully,"
Arthur said, holding the wooden lion out again to study it, and
smiling at what he was thinking. "It’s about eighteen years
he’s been here now, isn’t it?"
    "Do you know what he’s thinking when he gets
this way?" the mother asked. "No more’n I do, for all
your gossipin’ with him. Or all your heathenish readin’ either."
She spoke quietly, but the little fury was dancing in her eyes the
way it did in Curt’s.
    Arthur went on carefully whittling at the lion, and
didn’t answer. Finally the mother looked away from him, and sighed
and put her hands up to the sides of her face and pressed hard at her
temples with her fingertips.
    "Was it a bad dream you had, Mother?"
Arthur asked.
    "Never you mind my dreams," the mother
said, but not angrily. "I don’t take