One-Eyed Cat by Paula Fox

Author:Paula Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781504037426
Publisher: Open Road Media Teen & Tween
Published: 2016-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

As it turned out, Mrs. Scallop didn’t cook the Thanksgiving turkey for the Wallis family. She asked for the day off and went to Cornwall, down near the Hudson, to spend the holiday with a cousin of her dead husband’s who lived there. Mr. Scully had his turkey with the Kimball family, and Ned and his father fixed their Thanksgiving dinner together. The church ladies provided three pies: mince, pumpkin and sweet potato. When the table was spread, it looked to Ned as if there was enough food on it to feed all the Kimballs for a week.

Mama wore her silk dress that was the color of lilac blossoms. On one of her fingers was an amethyst ring, her favorite stone she had told Ned. She was able to wear the ring because her finger joints were hardly swollen today. When Papa said grace, he added special thanks for Mama being at the table with them. When Papa looked up from his prayer, he gazed across the table at Mama for a long time. His face looked young the way it had years ago when he used to play with Ned before bedtime, playing hide-and-seek with him and laughing even harder than Ned had when Ned found him.

Except for the dark trunks of trees, there was hardly any color outdoors, but at the table there was a feast of light: the bright food, the blue and white dishes which were used only on holidays, the reflected glow from the lamp shade around which the wild animals paraded.

The three of us, Ned thought, and for no reason at all, he suddenly saw the cat in his mind’s eye, not smooth and motionless and perfect like the animals on the Tiffany shade, but scruffy and dirty and wounded.

His mother was saying that she was specially thankful today that Mrs. Scallop had gone to haunt another household, and Papa laughed but reminded her—as he always did—that Mrs. Scallop had her virtues. Mama said they really ought to think about moving into the parsonage. Ned saw her father make a face.

“It would make life easier, Jim,” Mama said. “And if you dislike the parsonage so much, we could think about a house in Waterville. Just imagine! No more Mrs. Scallop, no more leaking roof, driveway upkeep, tree pruning, paying the farmer to mow the fields. And we’d be closer to the church by several miles, and you wouldn’t be driven to distraction by your worries about me.”

Papa was staring down at his coffee, stirring it slowly and thoroughly. Ned knew that Papa liked coffee more than he liked most food. He drank cups of it while he prepared his sermons. He looked up at Mama.

“We love the place so,” he said quietly. “What would you do without your view? What would Ned do without the maple branch he swings on, and the meadows he can run through and the trees he can climb?”

“I think of all the burdens it would lift from you—moving away,” Mama said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.