Israbestis rested under an elm that was dying of disease. Was that Mabel Fox? Mabel Fox's head was larger and her ears were a fox's ears. When he was a kid, and Mabel was a little girl, the boys used to say: do you know Mabel Fox? and then laugh raucously. They used to chant: Mabel Fox has ears like a fox; put her head in a box and let's throw rocks. That couldn't be Mabel Fox. Her head was too small. What had become of Mabel, he wondered. Put her head in a box. Dead likely — too. He stared at the ground until his vision blurred. Do you know Mabel Fox? He saw a blade of dry grass, suddenly, as something strange, not grass at all. It was like looking at a word until it melted. Mabel Fox has ears like a fox. The world seemed to dwindle in his vision of the blade. Then he reached down and snapped it off. Let's throw rocks. He held it for a moment on the tips of his fingers. It lifted, halted in the air, dropped between his feet. He studied its eaten edge, its blunted point. He carefully set his heel on one dead end.
Furber-like behavior. Tott laughed explosively, in pain.
There was the story of the man who went to pieces, and there was the story of the high and iron fence. There was the saga of Uncle Simon, the Hen Woods burning, and the hunt for Hog Bellman. He had them all. Hours, weeks, months — a life — they'd cost him. Were they all as wrong as the one about the cradle? Well, he'd said he'd see the summer under, and he had… a small success. He'd see… It was on the morning of the sixth of April… on the morning of the sixth… Dickie Frankmann found two of his Tamworth hogs with their throats cut. That made, between Huff and Staub and Gustin, eight in six days, and Ernie said Hog Bellman, mad as a man can be, had done it. Curtis Chamlay rode out to Frankmann's as he'd ridden out to Huff's and out to Staub's and Gustin's. Frankmann riding by him, standing in the stirrups too much. He looked at the carcasses and blood. There wasn't a print though the sty was mud and Chamlay's weight forced water to the edges of his boots. So far it's only Tamworths, Dickie Frankmann said, and there ain't many of them. What has a ghost got against English pigs?
The shoes in front of his were like his own. Black and cracked like his, they laced with hooks and went above the ankles. Soiled white cotton socks oozed out of the shoes and piled up into limp and shiny gray serge pants. The pants were dotted with grease spots. Dirt was caked in the wrinkles, the fly misbuttoned. Suspenders of yellow webbing and brown leather held the pants to a shrunken chest where a frayed, collarless, formal shirt bunched under them and under flowered blue elastic bands. Don't you hear good anymore, the chief shouted. A car backed roughly out the drive. The chief retreated, fanning the air. Israbestis blew the dust from his nostrils, but it lodged in his broken teeth and filmed his shoes. Israbestis rubbed the stubble on his chin. He sank to his back with a weary groan.
How big of a cat have you ever saw, the boy asked.
Well now I've seen some pretty big, said Israbestis Tott.
How big?
Oh let's see. There was Mossteller's cat — huge with yellow eyes — he was near twelve when he died and the size of a dog.
How big of a dog? As big as a pony?
Don't be silly. No cat's as big as that. I swear, though, Skelton's cat might of grown up to it, give him time and rats enough, where he hunted by the station. It was alive. At night stars were scattered in between the shed crates, all by twos, a mean red. Why I remember if you rattled a stone in there, there'd be a scuttering like leaves blown down a road by a strong wind. Skelton's cat would snarl at you for spoiling his stalk, and you'd see his eyes beam up sudden from on top of a box where he sat, lashing his tail, I figure, to the beating of his heart.
You can't hear that.
Of course you can't. I didn't say so. But cats have got the hunter's heart. If you knew how to, minding it ain't easy, not to be picked up like a marble and pocketed to home, you can hear them beat at dusk, just at the time when you can see through their swallowing eyes, if you look hard and straight in at them as they grow fat for the evening, and see backwards down their tight cat strings to their very hunger.
Honest?
You just listen. It ain't easy. Quieter than paws is all their inner talking; just the same, their hearts are speaking to the grass and to the falling dew and to the stone.
What do they say?
Nothing you can put in words. But you've seen cats and how they get low in the grass and put their eyes on what they're after. Have you seen them with their mouths aquiver and not a sound coming out? They want the whole world to be still while they move.
So the rat won't run?
Yes, certainly — so the rat won't run. So the bird won't fly either. So the longlegged hopper will brush his teeth and the goldfish float close to the claw water.
How old was Skelton's cat when he was near to a dog's weight?
Mossteller's cat?
Skelton's cat.
He was about the age I was then.
How old was that?
Fourteen maybe.
That ain't very old. Mine's twenty-nine.
Really? That old?
Well twenty-nine or thirty-three.
That's as old as I ever heard of.
I knew it.
But he lived too long and got too fat.
What happened to him?
There's a story in that.
I knew it.
I know you knew it.
Tell me the story, then. I like cats — soft ones anyway, that don't scratch.
Here was no soft cat, boy. No sir. Leather fur he had, and as for scratching, why he could leave his mark on brick as Guy, well, as a rake makes ruts in the spring dirt.
Boy. I knew it.
I know you did.
Please — tell me the story then, if he had leather for his fur — boy. I like that. I like stories about Kick Skelton.
Did I tell you about Kick Skelton? He's the man who went to pieces.
Sure you did.
No I didn't.
Yes you did — did his cat go hunting with him like his dog did?
Just wait. Like I said, Kick's cat lived by the station. He lived around it in the spring and fall and summer like birds live around their nests. I suppose like rats around trash too, because they did. Maybe Kick's cat didn't live by the station at all. Maybe, because the dump was near, and the rats came to live around it, Kick's cat came to live around the rats, and the station just happened to be there. I was never sure about that. Anyway, he did, though he was no particular place ever, when you looked. But it was all his and he was never far. If something happened strange: if two things different noised together, or if someone laughed a way he hadn't heard before, or squeaked new boots or made a funny motion, like Able Hugo who used to leap straight in the air sometimes, just for the fun of it; whenever anything happened the least from the usual, for he was terrible against that, he'd be to see — and all the trains. When a train was late he'd sit in the bed and stare down the track and lash his tail until the whistle sounded. Still he'd sit there until the train came down on him and at the last second, as slow and lazy as you please, he'd turn his back and walk away.
Golly.
In the winter he often slept inside the station. He knew to an inch how far from the stove to sleep. He knew where everybody spat and where we stamped the snow from our boots, shaking the floor, and where the wind came pouring, snowflakes with it, rattling the paper spills we kept in the woodbox. He knew where a live ash from a pipe might land or a whittler's shavings, and he'd figured the fall and roll, I'm sure, of every checker to the corner when the board was spilled, as it often was if Jenkins played. Jenkins. Now there was a fellow. . However. . Kick's cat knew everything about the station. He knew where most of the light fell, and the talk, and where the smoke went. He knew even, I bet, how many flakes would blow to the stove when Kick came in. He balled up on a piece of canvas under a bench and covered his nose with a paw. He sighed and sucked in his sleep sometimes, and sometimes he snored.