Dubin's Lives by Bernard Malamud

Author:Bernard Malamud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

Dubin became aware of a presence, something within or close by, like a disturbing memory waiting to occur. Was the red-bearded ghost of D. H. Lawrence, risen in contempt of the biographer’s desecrations of his life, haunting the place to revenge himself? One day the feeling grew so oppressive he was drawn into the barn to look around. The old barn was dark, gloomy, wet-cold. Dubin, picking up a hammer handle from the floor, went cautiously among the boxes, garden tools and machines, fertilizer bags, the furniture junk there. He found nothing unusual and was about to return to the study when he was struck by the sight of a pair of glowing eyes. He heard a thud and the eyes disappeared. The biographer was momentarily frightened—had a wild animal got into the barn? After a minute of frozen silence he decided it wasn’t likely; yet it could be a stray dog or raccoon. He hoped it was not a skunk. As he approached the corner of the barn, still grasping the hammer handle, an animal hissed. Dubin raised his arm protectively. Behind a barrel he beheld a long black cat lying on a moldy burlap sack. The cat hissed thickly, then mournfully yowled, but was too sick to move.

He considered prodding the animal with the hammer handle, to force it out of the barn.

You mean bastard, he thought, the cat’s sick.

The black cat got to its feet, its yellow eyes glaring. It snarled weirdly, its matted soiled fur thickened by fear. The cat stank of shit. Bile leaked from its mouth.

Dubin went back to his table, found he could do nothing, then left the study, walking across the field to the house. He thumbed through the yellow pages of the phone book and called a vet. He said he had a poisoned cat in his barn. “What can I do for him?”

“If it’s poison,” the vet said, “not much, depending what poisoned him and when.”

“Would you want to see the animal if I can get him to you? Could you pump its stomach?”

“No, I handle horses and cows. We had a small-animal man in town but he died last year.”

Dubin hung up. What was he doing this for? He had to work. Going back to the barn he poured some water into the tin top of a jar he found. The cat, yowling low in its throat, let him approach but made no attempt to take the water. It coughed sickly, then tried a few licks. The cat choked, coughed hoarsely, then began to vomit, moving backwards as it regurgitated part of a rabbit or bloody rat. Dubin later flashed a light on the mess; the cat had gorged itself sick.

The next morning he went with Kitty to the barn. The black cat was better and lapped a little of the water she gave it. “Don’t feed it anything, William. I’m pretty sure it will get better by itself and then I’ll hose it to get rid of the smell.

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