Whittington Page 5

  “The boy’s pay was such clothing as the cook turned up, room in the merchant’s drafty attic, his board. Breakfast was milk warm from the cow, porridge, and dark bread with butter. Dinner—what we call lunch—was hard-boiled eggs or a cold roast chicken he shared with Fitzwarren and washed down with bitter ale. For supper, roast meat of some kind, greens from Fitzwarren’s garden, a piece of fruit, bread, and cider. Sometimes there was a suet pudding if the cook was in good humor. The pudding was rich but it wasn’t sweet. Sugar was something rare.

  “It wasn’t long before Dick was on the docks alone with money to pay for the orders and something extra in case he saw a curiosity. He made the docks his own, recognizing the regulars, learning their names and trades. He got to know the wherrymen and porters, the loiterers, the ones to keep away from.

  “He would jump into the small boats that ran from the docks to meet the ships before they docked. He’d haul himself up the ropes like a sailor to vault onto the deck. He learned the merchant’s eye for rarities and his smiling skill at bargaining. Sometimes Dick had to pay with a promise. Word soon got around that if you sold him on credit, he was sure to be back early with what he owed. That word always gets around.

  “Within a year he was more the size of boys his age. The cook took pride in that. Her meals had got better with someone hungry to cook for. Her temper had sweetened too; she smiled sometimes. She was beautiful when she smiled. Dick managed now and then to bring her a bead that had come by land and sea from India, a bright bit of Africa cloth he’d got from one of the sailors.

  “London was a town of ocean fogs coming in with the smells of the river, sea moss, fish, old rope, decaying hulls, salt, smoke, hints of cooking. Bells sounded the hours, calls to worship, alarms, laments for the dead. Dick got up to the first tinkling ones. Then the large ones started. There was no pattern to the bells’ ringing, the deep ones galloping along, the smaller, high-pitched ones going as fast as they could like small dogs racing around big ones. Most of the London bells had more silver in them than the bell in his grandmother’s church at home. That one had made a harsh, dry clank. The few times he heard one in London that sounded like it he’d see his grandmother’s face and his knees would go weak with homesickness. He was nine years old.

  “This is where the cat comes in. …”

  “I was wondering about the cat,” said the Lady. “But now it’s time for the reading lesson.”

  WHITTINGTON SAID BEN should sit close beside Abby because that was the way Dick had done with his grandmother. Abby was to read very slowly pointing with her finger at each letter as she sounded it out, and then repeat the word as the old lady had done. Then Ben would read it aloud, sounding out the same way Dick had.

  They started with a psalm.

  Whittington said Ben should learn that word first, so Abby had him sound it out letter by letter. He could make all the sounds okay.

  “P-s-a-l-m.”

  The p was a problem. Abby explained that sometimes letters in words are silent, like the p in “psalm” and the s in “island.” Everyone looked blank.

  “What does ‘psalm’ look like?” Whittington asked. He’d seen words before but they’d never interested him. Now, watching Ben struggle with this word, he wanted to see it.

  Abby tried to show him in the book but the cat got lost in the sea of marks on the page.

  She fished a pencil from her backpack and drew the word in big capital letters across the nearest stanchion— “PSALM.”

  They all stared up at it—children, chickens, duck, cat, horses. The rats had gathered too, rocking on their haunches, whispering to each other nose to nose in their way. The animals gathered around like the devout witnessing a miracle. It was a miracle. Out of five black marks that had their origins a thousand generations back in a place lost to memory, Ben conjured up sounds that made a word that in turn evoked the presence of something that wasn’t there. He got the picture of “psalm” and how it should sound, and he locked it away forever. But he always had to be careful to skip the tricky p that started it.

  “So now you have one word already,” said the cat, who had no idea how many words there were but realized it was going to take more than a morning to get this boy reading half as well as his sister.

  “‘The Lord is my shepherd …,’” Abby read, sounding out each letter and pointing as she went.

  “‘The Lord is my … shhh …,’” Ben repeated.

  “‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures….’”

  “‘He maketh me to lie b-b-b-b …’”

  “No,” said the girl, “d, not b.”

  This went on for a while. When they finally got to the fourth verse and Ben read “beath” for “death,” it was as Whittington remembered and just as painful.

  “You’re reversing,” he said. “That’s what my boy did—the boy in my home before. They said he read b’s for d’s, d’s for b’s, p’s for q’s,a’s for e’s. They called it dyslexia, which didn’t tell him anything. Before he was sent away his parents were giving him lists of words to memorize so he’d know that since there’s no such thing as ‘beath,’ the word has to be ‘death.’”

  The cat didn’t tell how furious his boy’s parents got when he missed, how their anger added to the child’s confusion.

  “Maybe you could do what he did—memorize a list of words every week.” The cat figured Abby wouldn’t pressure Ben the way his first boy’s parents had.

  Ben looked dubious.

  The Lady was dismayed. She’d learned to swim in less time than it took this boy to do a Bible verse. She wondered if it was worth the effort. Animals had gotten along without reading for a long time.

  That night, when he came over to tuck in the animals, Bernie’s flashlight picked up “PSALM” written across the stanchion. He wondered for a moment, but his knee hurt and the water jug was leaking.

  IT GOT DOWN TO ten degrees below zero that night. The next morning a man in town who kept chickens went out and found his black hen frozen. Somehow she’d got out of the henhouse and became stuck in the snow. He revived her in cool water, everything except her feet. They were wrecked. She’d be too much trouble for him now, but how do you throw out a lame hen? Bernie was the only person he knew who would keep her. On his way to the Texaco he stopped and bought two cigars. Bernie was out on a road test when the man with the hen got to the station. He left her in a milk crate with a note and the cigars and drove off with an easy conscience.

  Bernie swore when he saw the hen and the cigars. Even without reading the note he knew why she was there. She didn’t seem to be suffering, though. She was cheerful, clucking and excited about everything; she just couldn’t work her feet. She hobbled and flutter-jumped to get around. She didn’t fall over. Bernie pocketed the cigars and drove her out to the barn.

  A while back the grandkids had kept rabbits. He’d built a hutch for them on an old table. The rats had done in the rabbits. The hutch was in the back of the barn somewhere among the abandoned cars, old gas pumps, skis, and everything else that gets tucked away in a barn. Bernie dragged it out and brushed it off, made a bed of hay in it, and cut down a milk carton for a water dish. He put the hen in the hutch with a cleaned-out tuna can of the sweet molasses grain. She flapped and staggered around in her new quarters, found the grain and water, and settled in.

  The animals watched all of this with interest. No sooner had Bernie headed back up the hill than Coraggio clambered up on the hutch and the two chickens started burbling away at each other, the cockerel telling his story, Blackie the hen telling hers. They became such friends Bernie had to cut a hole in the top of the hutch so Coraggio could sleep next to her. They churred softly together for hours every day, heads close like people whispering secrets.

  Outside, everything was covered in white except the mound of horse manure and spent hay Bernie added to every afternoon. The heat from the rot going on in that pile kept it warm for earthworms, grubs, maggots, insect eggs, and small animals like mice,
voles, and moles. The mound steamed across winter like a dark freighter.

  THE NEXT DAY after school, Abby brought her wordbook. She read aloud the first list, ei and ie words— “receive” to “grieve.” Whittington said those were too hard. The Lady said twelve were too many. With Abby reading, the choices they ended up with were “coming,” “hoping,” “weigh,” “foreign,” and “writing.” Abby wrote out the words in block letters and taped the list on the stanchion under “PSALM.”

  “Coming” and “hoping” went pretty well after some to-and-fro about the different sounds off. It was a relief that ing always sounded the same. Ben got stuck on “weigh.” “Why does it have ig in it? It doesn’t make sense!” Ben snapped. “I can say the letters in it okay, I just can’t make the word sound out. That’s what gets me in trouble in school, silent letters. You never know which ones not to say.”

  Abby admitted she couldn’t make “weigh” work either if she sounded out every letter. Ben jumped up and drew an angry line through it. Everyone was tense.

  “Stretch! Time to stretch!” the Lady yelled with a great flap. Coraggio had been holding his breath through “weigh.” Now he uttered a powerful crow. The horses and the kids headed out for a dash around. The bantams bickered furiously until the Lady hushed them.

  She looked at the cat. His mouth was pulled tight. Ben’s bewilderment reminded him of the boy in his home before. He didn’t want Ben to suffer and be sent away like that boy.

  When Abby and Ben came back in, the cat made them sit down together for a minute and take deep breaths. “We all fell down learning to walk,” he said. “We don’t remember how hard it was or how much it hurt. Once Dick learned to read he blotted out how his grandmother had thwacked him with a switch when he missed something she thought he should know. It was what the priest had done to her. He said the pain would help her remember the next time. ‘Make it sound alive,’ his grandmother would say with a swat. ‘Give it life, louder, like you’re sure of it.’

  “Now, back to the lesson.”

  “Writing” went no better. “What’s the w for? It’s tricking me!” Ben was wincing to keep back tears when the Lady ordered Whittington back up to his storytelling place on the rail.

  The cat waited for the horses to come back in. He needed a moment to gather himself. He was shaking.

  “Dick had been with Fitzwarren for almost two years. He was ten. He’d grown. He’d learned something of the mercer’s trade.

  “On New Year’s Day Fitzwarren gave Dick a halfpenny. It doesn’t sound like much but it was a valuable sum then.

  “As Dick walked to the docks, he fingered the coin in his pocket and wondered what he should buy. Suddenly he saw my great-great-grandmother’s grandmother, thirty generations back.

  “The strange cat eyed him in a knowing way and nodded.

  “Dick knew he had to have that cat. He’d thought about getting a cat to check the mice and rats that skittered in his room at night and gnawed his things. He knew the cook wouldn’t allow it.

  “There was something arresting about the way this cat engaged eyes. Most animals won’t lock eyes with men. Goats do, and snakes, which is why we associate them with evil. The rest of us look away in shame or embarrassment when someone looks us in the eye. But this was different, this was a stare of recognition, the way you can’t take your eyes off someone you’re eager to see: you want to embrace them with your eyes.

  “Dick’s hair went up. He knocked on the door behind where the cat was sitting.

  “Silence. He knocked again. Nothing. Again he knocked. At last there was a shuffling and the door opened a little and then a little more, as if whoever was opening it was having a hard time getting used to the light.

  “Finally there stood before Dick an ancient bald man in a long velvet coat the deep green color of sea moss. His brown fur collar was turned up. The man said nothing, he just looked at the boy. He was slight, his skin was milk white and almost transparent, wrinkled like tissue paper. His eyes were small and blue, red-rimmed, piercing. At first he seemed to recognize Dick. In the next instant it was as if he were staring through him.

  “‘S-sir,’ stammered the boy, ‘will you please sell me your cat?’

  “The man looked down at the cat as if he’d never seen her before. Then he looked back at Dick and studied him from head to toe. Finally he asked in a high old man’s voice how much money he had.

  “‘Ha’penny, sir.’

  “The man nodded and held out his hand. His hand was thin, he had long fingers.

  “Dick dug for his coin and laid it in the man’s palm.

  The palm was warm and dry. The long fingers closed slowly around the coin and the man slipped back inside.

  “Dick didn’t have to pick up his cat or lead her away on a string. The cat followed him as if they’d always walked together. When they got home, he tried to sneak her to his room. The cook caught him. She always knew everything.

  “‘What have you there?’ she asked, smacking his shirt. The cat heaved out and shot up the stairs.

  “‘Nay!’ she bellowed. ‘Nay to nitbags, nay to pets!’

  “She snatched her broom and took after the cat like she’d swatted at Dick that first evening. The stairs up to the attic were narrow. Dick’s room was low and tight. Wheezing and out of breath, she took a swipe here and a swipe there. Her broom never met the cat. It was like she was fanning a butterfly that, almost without her seeing, sailed downstairs and disappeared. ‘I’ll … I’ll have it out with your master, I will,’ she stormed.

  “She never did. She softened toward the cat when it presented the rat that had been spoiling the potatoes.

  “That evening Fitzwarren came home with a ship captain who shared the merchant’s passion for rare plants. Fitzwarren’s best knuckleboned bed was set aside for things the captain had brought him. In the last light the two men looked carefully at a thick shoot sprouting from a large nut found floating off the African coast. A few yards on there was a collection of aromatics—peppermint, catmint, lavenders, sages.

  “There was a gravel bed of thymes—some rough, some woolly, large-leaved and small, from France, Spain, and Greece. You picked up their scent if you so much as brushed them. The bees loved those plants.

  “Beyond, against a wall, was a row of grafted fruit trees the captain had brought Fitzwarren over the years. Dessert that night was compote of fruits from those trees: peaches, pears, and cherries in honeyed brandy. The cherries colored the syrup dark red.

  “Back inside the two men talked, heads close together. As the punch bowl emptied and filled, the captain’s tongue loosened and he told Fitzwarren about a powerful herb to be found on the Barbary Coast. The herb was said to melt painful stones of the kidney and bladder, a great affliction in those times and now.

  “The captain couldn’t tell his friend more about this precious herb because he’d been sworn to secrecy by the king who’d told him about it. It was the king’s dream to harvest this plant and make a fortune for his people, the way the ancient Phoenician princes at Tyre had profited from the secret of the purple dye they got from the shellfish Murex.

  “The captain had just finished speaking when the cat came in with a plump brown rat. She laid it at the captain’s feet.

  “Fitzwarren was embarrassed. He’d already scolded Dick about wasting his money on a pet; now this disgrace. The captain was delighted.

  “‘What a fine cat! In London you’re never more than six feet from a rat. It’s even closer on shipboard. They foul our food, they make stinks. Why, if I had this cat with me aboard the Unicorn …’

  “The captain took Dick Whittington’s cat on his lap. As he stroked her, he told her about the herb, Amapacherie, that would melt painful stones. He’d sworn to tell no man his secret, but he could tell the cat, and if the merchant and his boy happened to overhear, well, so much for that.

  “Fitzwarren and the captain talked long into the night. The cat stayed snug in the captain’s lap and purred and
purred—a most singular, deep, and musical purr.

  “That night it was arranged that Dick and his cat would sail for the Barbary Coast on the Unicorn and see to the buying of a cargo for Fitzwarren. Dick was to keep a sharp eye for plants. Fitzwarren gave him a purse, some sheets of stiffened cloth to press the leaves and flowers of plants he found, a few small cloth sacks for seeds and bulbs.

  “Fitzwarren came down to Limehouse Wharf to see them off. As Dick got ready to jump into the wherry that would carry him to the ship, Fitzwarren put out his hand, then started to wrap the boy in a hug. He caught himself and turned away.

  “The cat jumped into the wherry on her own.”

  BERNIE BROUGHT Ben and Abby along one night when he came to tuck in the animals. It was clear and cold, no moon. The air was still. The kids were curious about where the cat slept, but he wasn’t sleeping. He was jumpy. He waited until Bernie was busy with the jugs.

  “Ben,” he whispered, “can you whistle?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Let’s sneak out to the pond and whistle for owls. They’re claiming territory now. You can hear them. If you can whistle like they do, they’ll come. Get Abby. I’ll get the others.”

  The rooster wouldn’t go. Without him the bantams wouldn’t go either. The horses couldn’t go and neither could Blackie, so it was a small crowd that crunched to the far end of the frozen-over pond. The Lady had never been out so late. The cat had to guide her, she couldn’t see anything. Something told her it wasn’t a good idea for a duck to be out calling owls at night, but Whittington insisted. Ben held Abby’s hand hard.

  “When I was little and scared of the dark, Mom told me it’s never absolutely black out,” Abby said. “Once your eyes adjust it’s blue velvet because of the stars. Look up—it’s like somebody threw glitter.” They stopped and looked.