When my youngest sister Nancy had gotten past the terrible twos, she settled down. Compared to her temper tantrum years, she got so quiet that Mama had Dr. Lesher check her ears and vocal chords to make sure everything worked properly. But during the years after my other sister Carolyn came home from the hospital having survived polio, Nancy became her best friend.
On weekends, my sisters holed up in Carolyn’s room for hours. They’d make up stories that the two of them acted out with their dolls – swooning maidens rescued from the clutches of dark-bearded villains by hulking blond heroes that made professions of true love. I think they got their story ideas from The Guiding Light and The Secret Storm, daytime soap operas that they watched on the black-and-white television that my artist father had bought. He had finally caved in to the pestering from Mama and us girls. On weekends, the TV noise during the day interfered with his playing classical music and he’d yell, “Turn that bloody thing down!”
I spent most of my free time doing extra-credit school projects or roaming the Pennsylvania Dutch farm country with my sketchbook. I’d grown into a tall gangly girl and didn’t like being kidded by my sisters about how clumsy I’d become. Nancy was the pretty one, small, with wavy red hair, full lips and a delicate nose. She would start first grade in September. That scared her and she’d cry if any of us talked about it. None of us were ever that far from tears, but Nancy stayed the closest. Mama told us, “You girls got your sad faces from your father and his side of the family.” I wasn’t so sure about that.
When Carolyn and I came home from school, we’d find Nancy in the kitchen, peeling potatoes, greasing the muffin tins with Crisco, or ferrying spices from the wall rack to Mama, who stood at the stove tending to her latest caldron of soup. Nancy helped with the housework, pushing hard on the handle of the vacuum sweeper that was taller than her. She seemed happiest when helping Mama. Carolyn and I didn’t complain because it meant fewer chores for us.
One snowy winter’s day after school I holed up in my room and copied pencil drawings by Ted Kautzky from a book that my Uncle Alby gave me. The delicious odor of onion soup wafted in and made my stomach grumble. I crept downstairs to investigate. Mama and Nancy talked in the kitchen. I stopped outside the doorway, hugged the wall, and eavesdropped.
“Mama, do I hafta go?” Nancy asked, whimpering.
“Yes, all children must go to school.”
“But I don’ wanna. I wanna stay here with you.”
“I know, sweetie, I know. But your sisters liked Mrs. Knoxstead. You will too. She’s a good teacher.”
“But who’s gonna help you with the house?”
Mama chuckled. “Oh, I think I can manage.”
“Margaret and Carolyn won’t help like me.”
“Maybe not, but they’ll pitch in. I’ll make sure of that.”
“Why can’t you teach me here?”
“Because you need to . . . to be with other children, and not just your sisters.”
“I don’t wanna. They’ll be mean to me at school.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I just know. They were mean to Margaret and she’s a lot smarter than me.”
Mama sighed. “Yes, well sometimes being the smartest isn’t always the best.”
I peeked around the corner of the kitchen doorway, my ears burning. Mama stood at the sink washing her hands. She dried them on a towel and lifted Nancy into her arms.
“Look, sweetie, you know you’re my favorite, don’t you?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“We’ll have years together and talk, have fun.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“But you have to go to school. Even though those kids might find you different, you’ll always be my favorite, my best ever.”
Mama gave Nancy a big smooch on the cheek and, with a groan, set her down. “You’re getting too big for me to lift. Go set the table. Dinner will be ready in a little while.”
Their conversation ran and re-ran through my mind. Why did Mama call Nancy her “favorite?” Did that mean she didn’t love Carolyn or me as much? Would I be replaced as her confidant? Would my British father be my only ally? For a moment I felt like going to Nancy’s room and smashing all her toys. But what good would that do? And little sis depended on me to help her with reading and writing.
A fierce winter blizzard buried our farm. Head-high drifts blanketed the driveway and trapped us, kept Carolyn and me out of school and Dad away from the taverns. The water pipes in the basement froze and we melted snow on the stove and used the boiling water to unfreeze them. Three days went by before all of us bundled up and tackled the whiteness with shovels. It took another five days of steady work to clear the driveway and the yard, and uncover our car.
On one of those days, we girls huddled in the kitchen to down bowls of soup, half a grilled cheese sandwich and hot cocoa. Dad took the lamb roast we’d had for Sunday dinner from the refrigerator and sat it on the table. He carved off thin slices of the greasy meat and smothered them with horseradish, straight from the jar. It made him cough and his eyes water, but he hummed happily as he worked on the roast.
“Will you look at that,” Mama muttered. She stood at the kitchen window and stared.
We girls gathered next to her. Outside, a black and white mama cat picked her way across the yard, her swinging belly swollen with milk. A big kitten squirmed in her mouth. She moved unsteadily over the thin carpet of snow and deposited the kitten at the base of our back steps. She returned to the barn and reappeared with another kitten.
We stood spellbound, open-mouthed. Even Dad abandoned his gobbling and joined us at the window. The mama cat deposited four kittens. The furry bundles huddled together against the bitter wind. But the mama cat wouldn’t leave them alone. One by one she picked them up by the napes of their necks and staggered up the back steps and placed them outside the kitchen door, their mewing clear and pitiful. When the last kitten had been deposited, the mama cat lurched down the steps and made it halfway across the yard before collapsing. She flinched a few times then lay still.
“Bloody ’ell,” Dad murmured. “I knew that cat looked iffy.”
Tears wet Nancy’s face and Carolyn and I dabbed at our eyes with tissues.
“Go get my coat, Edith,” Dad ordered. “I’ll take care of the mother.”
We watched in silence as he crunched across the yard, knelt next to the motionless cat and placed a hand on the animal’s stomach. Shaking his head, he stood, grasped the cat by its loose neck skin and headed uphill into the woods, toting a shovel in his other hand. The sound of bubbling soup and Nancy’s sobs filled the kitchen.
“What’s Dad gonna do with the kittens?” Carolyn asked.
“Yeah, Mama, can we keep ’em?” Nancy begged. “Please, please.”
“You know how your father feels about cats,” Mama said and sighed.
“But they catch mice and rats,” I said.
“We’ll see when your father gets back.”
We stood at the window and watched the icy wind blow the kittens’ fur. Mama mumbled something, pushed outside and hustled across the yard to the storage shed. She came out with a cardboard box and a tattered piece of carpet. She set the box in the snow, placed each mewing kitten in it, and laid the rug over the top. Leaving the box outside, she hurried back into the kitchen. Her bare arms had turned blue and her teeth chattered. After standing over the hot soup pot, her color came back and she could speak.
“Are they boy or girl cats?” Nancy asked, the excitement building in her voice.
“I can’t tell,” Mama said. “They look like they’ve just been weaned, or are close to it.”
“Can we keep ’em, Mama?” Nancy repeated her plea.
“I don’t know.”
From up the mountain, Dad emerged from the woods with his shovel, moving briskly, his breath smoking in the cold air. We all hustled to grab our coats and meet him outside, four females against the cat-hating ogre. Nancy started to whimper.
“What’s this all about?” Dad demanded.
“We wanna keep the cats,” Nancy blurted.
“Like bloody ’ell we will. I won’t have cat shite inside my house, and they’ll freeze outdoors.”
“Please, Daddy, please,” Nancy whined.
The color came up in Dad’s face and he scowled. But before he could say anything more, Mama bent and uncovered the box. Four sets of bright eyes overlooking pink noses and whiskers stared up at us. Dad’s scowl grew darker.
“Come on, Charles,” Mama said, “they’ll make good mousers and the girls will watch after them. Look how well they’ve taken care of our dogs.”
“Yes, well a dog is a proper companion for a man. Cats are just . . . they’re just cute.”
“Well, don’t us girls deserve companions?” Mama shot back.
“For Pete’s sake, not a herd of them . . . and those things breed like rabbits.”
“What if we kept two?” Carolyn asked.
“Still too many. They’ll get into my paints and I’ll have cat hair everywhere. That won’t do at all.”
“I’ll keep them out of your art studio,” Mama said, the anger rising in her voice.
“Not bloody likely.”
“Charles, what if we keep just one of them?” Mama’s jawline hardened and the vein in her forehead stood out blue and distinct.
I stared at Dad, mentally pleading with him to say yes.
“All right, all right. You can keep one.”
We girls knelt next to the box and with trembling fingers scratched behind the ears of the squeaking fur balls and stroked their bellies. Their coats felt soft as birds’ under-feathers that I’d sometimes find in the woods.
Mama knelt and put an arm around Nancy’s shoulder. “Okay, little one, you have to choose.”
Nancy looked startled, her eyes wide and dripping. “But which one, Mama? They’re all so . . . ”
“Pick your favorite, sweetie, pick your favorite.”
Mama’s words bounced around in my head. Is that what happens to favorites? They become the chosen ones while the rest of us are left to . . .
Nancy stroked the back of a dove gray kitten with golden eyes and a fluffed tail. The cats’ mewing gave me a pain in the chest.
“This one, Mama, this one.” Nancy picked up the gray cat, cradled it in her arms, and rubbed its stomach. The other cats mewed the loss of their sibling.
Nancy, Carolyn and Mama turned to go inside. Dad reached for the box. But I snatched it up before he could get it.
“I know what to do,” I said. “I’ve watched the farmers. I’m old enough.” I hurried up the farm road, heading for the high ridgeline that divided our valley from the next. After crunching through the snow for some minutes, I turned to look back. Everyone had cleared out of the yard. I pictured Mama and my sisters gathered around the gray squeaking animal while Dad holed up in his artist studio with the stereo turned up, playing some opera, that somehow seemed right for the occasion.
My plan was to leave the pussycats high on the mountain. They’d freeze before finding any shelter, or the foxes and maybe the hawks would take them. I clenched my teeth and forced myself to continue upward. But in a few steps, I stopped. In some strange way I felt like those kittens, like one of the non-favorites. As the cold numbed my feet and burned my lungs, I realized that not being a favorite didn’t matter at all. Neither Dad nor Mama lugged the pussycats up that hill. I did. And I would decide their fate.
Turning, I left the road and skidded downslope, stumbling through the hip-high snow until reaching the far end of our bank barn that faced away from the house. Pushing a loosened board aside, I forced my way into the barn’s loft. In the musky shadows I made a nest of old straw against an interior partition and set the kitten box down. The squeakers lay shivering inside, staring up at me, waiting. I took off my thick scarf and lined their bed. They snuggled into its folds, purring. I pulled the rug part way over the box’s top. Pacing back and forth in the gloom, I wondered what I’d tell Mama, and what I’d do with the kittens, now that they were fugitives from my father.
Finally, I pushed outside and continued down the back road to our house. Inside, Dad’s stereo blared Madam Butterfly from his studio. I warmed my hands over a stove burner. Mama and my sisters didn’t say anything. I turned to face them. Mama stared into my eyes. A broad grin creased her face.
“You couldn’t do it, could you?” she said.
My sisters stopped playing with the gray cat.
“No.”
“Where are they?”
“In the barn, back by the far wall where Dad never goes.”
Mama let out a deep breath. “Good.”
“Are they all right?” Carolyn asked. “Can we go see them?”
“Now listen up girls,” Mama said. “We need to take care of those barn cats until they’re old enough to fend for themselves. And your Father can’t find out. So we’ve got to be careful. You understand?”
“Yes, Mama,” we answered.
“I’ll do most of it,” I said. “I’m outside on my sketching trips more than anybody. He’ll never suspect anything.”
Carolyn sighed with relief. Of the three of us she seemed to suffer the most on cold days and nights. She’d rub stinky Bengay into her left leg and hip, its heat easing her post-polio pain.
The gray cat kept Nancy occupied. But as the winter settled in, Fog, that’s what we named her, spent most of her time curled up in Dad’s lap at his drafting table, close to a space heater, with our old boxer Hilda sleeping at their feet. At the end of the day Mama grabbed Fog and wiped off the paint that Dad inevitably transferred from his commercial artwork to her soft fur as he stroked her back or pulled her tail, playfully.
One of the barn cats disappeared. The other two grew big and fat on a diet of table scraps, field mice, rats, and gophers. Dad never seemed to notice them, and they wisely stayed out of his way.
Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet wife (his in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He writes full time, producing stories, essays, and novels. His stories have been accepted more than 590 times by journals, magazines, and anthologies including Folio, Bryant Literary Review, and Shenandoah. He was nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes and once for inclusion in Best of the Net anthology. Terry is a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist – who once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing.