The Black Cats

The Water Giants

HORRIFIED BY THE CAT cookery book, I lurched against the cage, thinking to knock it sideways and break it open. The Butcher responded by depositing my prison beneath the table and draping a large kitchen cloth over its top. I thumped my tail. I was a cat, nay, a tortoiseshell cat, and I would not be hidden away like a noisy parakeet. There I keened with great volume: yoooow, yoooow, yoooow, yoooow. I hoped George and Margaret would heed the call since they—not Eddy—lived close enough to hear it.

“Hush now, pretty kitty,” he said. “Just a little longer.”

The Butcher’s admonishment mattered not, and I continued to wail, stopping only when he banged lid and pot together. Alarmed by the noise, I ceased and prayed for deliverance. I imagined Eddy at the kitchen table, drinking tea and eating gingersnaps, his shirtfront full of crumbs. With the strong connection between us, my visions usually held some veracity of mood, if not manner, so it jarred me to picture him joking with Sissy and Muddy, giving no thought to my whereabouts. Who could blame him after my spat with Mr. Jolley? I crouched in the corner, remaining quiet lest the Butcher bang another pot.

Come sundown, the Poe household would suffer if I weren’t there to help Muddy with the leftovers, warm Sissy’s lap, or coax another page of writing from Eddy. The Butcher tossed another log into the woodstove. Come sundown, I would suffer. I had but one option left: wait until the cage door opened and come out fighting like Auntie Sass. If the old man were to make a meal of me, he would earn it.

For an agonizing period, I listened to the clink of teacups and the clatter of cupboard doors as the Butcher prepared for the feast. The cadence of his footfall created music upon the floorboards that would have soothed me in brighter circumstances. Now the vibrations jarred my muscles, plucking them like the strings of Sissy’s old harp. Just when I’d become accustomed to his steps, they increased in speed, traversed the kitchen, and faded from hearing. “Goodbye, Silas! Goodbye, Samuel!” he called.

Silas and Samuel? To whom did these names belong? The Butcher’s offspring? The wondering petrified me more than the knowing.

The front door opened and closed.

The house fell quiet, save for the crackle of the woodstove.

Clever Butcher. He’d said these names as a ruse to keep me inside my cage. He hadn’t counted on my tenacity. I reached my paw through the bars to try the latch again. The wire held fast. A second and third try yielded disappointment as well. I’d just begun to study the lock when paws padded toward me. Silas and Samuel? I ducked low to see beneath the kitchen cloth, but dash-it-all, the fabric reached the floor. I sniffed through the bars, detecting toms of middle age, perhaps from the same litter. If they supported the Butcher as I did Eddy, crisis had just given way to calamity.

“Should we say hello, Silas?” the first tom asked.

“It would be rude not to, Samuel,” the other said.

Silence.

“Well, aren’t you going to say something?” Samuel said.

“Oh, I thought you were going to say something,” Silas said.

A sneeze. More silence.

“Won’t someone speak?” I said.

A large cat ducked beneath the kitchen cloth. Dark and light gray stripes graced his fur, and tufts of white adorned his chest and underbelly, giving his coat a dapper suit-and-shirtfront pattern. Large did not begin to describe him. I had never seen a cat of such grandiose proportion. And his ears! Fur tipped their ends, swooping them even higher than mine, like those of a lynx. Had I not been scared, I would have been envious. “Hello,” he said to me. “I am Samuel.”

“Please,” I begged him, “let me out before the man comes back and cooks me.”

Samuel cocked his head. “Cooks you?”

Silas joined us beneath the cloth. His markings were almost identical to Samuel’s, save for white-tipped toes. “Cooks you?” Silas repeated. “No, no, no. He does not cook cats. He has another end in mind. He’s going to—”

The front door opened and closed.

“Our Robert returns,” Samuel said to Silas. “To the parlor, brother. At once!”

The two toms vanished from view.

“Go? Wait! What fate? What fate!” I shouted after them.

Two humans entered the kitchen, one with the gait of the old man, one with a lighter step. Splendid. A dinner party. With renewed vigor, I reached a paw through the bars and tried to bat the lock open one last time. When that failed, I sank my teeth into the metal. Imagine my surprise when a hand snatched the cloth from my cage.

“There you are, Cattarina!” Sissy said. Her face burned red beneath her bonnet. The walk to Green Street had winded her. “I’m glad you are safe.”

Sissy, dear Sissy! I yowled to state my displeasure. Then I yowled again, varying the intonation to let her know I unabashedly approved of her presence. The Butcher pulled my enclosure into the open and set it on the tabletop again. He motioned Sissy to a chair and took one for himself, placing his leather-bound cookery book on the table.

“I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Eakins,” Sissy said. She untied the strings of her bonnet and removed it. “Cattarina wanders off with some frequency, causing my husband undue worry.” She smoothed her hair into place.

“You do not worry?”

“No.” She winked at me. “Cattarina is a first-rate gadabout.”

“In any event, I’m glad to be of service. To all cats.” He wiggled a finger inside my cage.

It took some restraint, but I didn’t bite him. Doing so now would complicate matters, as it had done with Mr. Jolley. So I sniffed his hand instead. Great Cat Above! The Butcher’s scent varied from the one on the rope, which meant he hadn’t hung the black tom. I had been so preoccupied that I hadn’t noticed before. While this conclusion reassured me, I had, nevertheless, drawn it from parrot prison.

“Cats are your business, aren’t they, Mr. Eakins?” Sissy wiped a bit of sweat from her neck with a handkerchief. “That is what I heard on the street today.”

“You heard right.” His eyes crinkled at the corners. “Tea?”

“Yes, please.”

Tea? The woman had lost her faculties. Could she not fathom my predicament? I was a captive, for kitty’s sake.

The Butcher—or Mr. Eakins?—crossed to the cook stove and poured hot water from the once-boiling pot into two waiting cups. He returned with their refreshments, taking a seat once more. “I have no cream or sugar, Mrs. Poe. Please accept my apologies. My meager income is spent on my…business, as you say.”

Sissy took the cup from him and placed it on the table. “That’s a lovely book you showed me earlier. The one with Cattarina’s sketch.”

“Oh, me, yes,” he said. “It’s taken years of meticulous work.” He, too, set his teacup aside and reached for his notebook. “Every cat I rescue gets a page. I sketch their picture and make notes about their health, the location in which I discovered them, any distinguishing marks, and so on before I find them a new home. It’s quite consuming. Philadelphia is overrun with the creatures.” He opened the book to my entry and handed it to Sissy with a shaky hand. “Now that I’m too old to work for Mr. Lansing—I was a law clerk, you know—I spend my days on this. It keeps me from thinking too much about Mrs. Eakins, God rest her soul.”

“So the cat hanging this morning…”

“Shocking.”

She flashed her teeth. “You had nothing to do with it!”

“Dear, me, no. In fact, just talking about it upsets my stomach. I feel partly to blame.”

“Why? Because despite saving so many strays you couldn’t save the one?”

Mr. Eakins hesitated. “As I said, Mrs. Poe, I’d rather not talk about it.”

“You have done enough good in this world. Let that be of comfort.” She thumbed through the book, perusing a few sketches before shutting it. “Mr. Eakins, I’m glad we crossed paths.”

“As am I. I knew the tortoiseshell belonged to you because I saw you out with her this morning. She’s a pretty thing, isn’t she?” He unhitched the latch and opened the cage door.

I flew onto Sissy’s lap, anchoring my claws into the brown checked fabric of her dress. Sweet freedom at last! She laid her hand on my back to comfort me, and I settled at once into the folds of her skirt, shifting to an uneasy calm. To make my position clear, I turned my ears back and fixed the old man with a stare. I would not suffer the cage again.

Before long, Silas and Samuel trotted into the room, their fat tails bobbing behind them. Sissy touched her collarbone. “Mr. Eakins, those are the largest felines I have ever seen. They are as big as bobcats. And their tails! Why, they look like feather dusters!” She replaced his book on the table and leaned forward to study the pair.

“They are from Maine, Mrs. Poe. Do you like them?” When she nodded, Mr. Eakins added, “They are called Coon Cats. If you think they’re special now, just wait.” He retrieved a bucket of well water from the bottom of the cupboard and set it in front of Silas and Samuel. They took no interest. “Prepare to be fascinated,” he told Sissy. At this, he produced a jug cork from his pocket and floated it on top of the liquid, giving it a spin to set it moving.

To my bewilderment, Silas and Samuel dipped their paws into the bucket and played with the cork, batting it as one might a fish. Before long, water covered the floor, even dampening their tails with the vile liquid. I shuddered at the thought of it between my toes. How much grooming would it take to put them to rights again? When my paws tingled at the thought, I licked them. Why, Silas and Samuel might not even be cats at all. They might be— I looked again to the brothers. I had found the Water Giants mentioned by George and Margaret. Mr. Thaddeus Beal’s companions had been right, or partly right, about the cookery book as well. But they had been wrong about the old man. The Butcher was nothing more than a false goliath built of rumor and dread.

“Hello,” Samuel said to me. He shook the water from his paws and hopped to Mr. Eakin’s lap, engulfing his companion in a mat of fur and bones.

Sissy and Mr. Eakins continued their conversation, which we ignored.

“Why didn’t you tell me before that Mr. Eakins meant no harm?” I asked Samuel.

“No one is ever in danger here,” he said. “I thought you knew that.” He looked to Silas. The other tom had fished the cork from the bucket and was chewing it to crumbles. “She didn’t know, brother,” Samuel said to him. “Brother?”

Silas turned his back to us and finished killing the cork.

“Don’t mind him,” Samuel said to me. “Once you do away with all the mice, that leaves little else to hunt.”

“The feeling is familiar.” I thought about telling him of my escapades but decided against it. The City of Brotherly Love had room for only one feline ratiocinator. “Mr. Eakins took you in and gave you a home?”

“Yes, a very good one. We don’t leave much. He thinks it best that we stay inside. But we sneak out on occasion. Mostly at night.”

“And the book he keeps?”

“It’s a record of all the feral cats he’s rescued over the seasons.” Samuel jumped to the table and pawed the notebook open. “There are many pictures. Too many to count.”

I joined him and looked over his shoulder at the sketches. “And what becomes of them?”

“He finds them homes, of course.”

“What do you know about the hanged cat this morning?”

Samuel crooked his tail. “What hanged cat? We do not get out much.”

With Samuel’s next swipe, the book fell open to the middle. A tom with luxurious fur and a white mark on his chest stared back at me from the page, his coat the color of…Midnight. My old pal from Rittenhouse did not come from noble lineage, as he’d once said. He’d been born feral, like me, the cad.

Sissy picked me up and laid me over her shoulder like a fox stole. “Thank you again, Mr. Eakins. I don’t know how I can repay your kindness.”

“You have repaid it by giving Cattarina a good home.” He showed us to front the door.

Samuel followed, scampering behind Sissy. “What was the black cat’s name?” I asked him. “The one with the white mark on his chest?”

“Mr. Eakins named him Crow because he was as black as—”

“Yes, how fitting,” I said. This very afternoon, I would confront Midnight about his lies. He would soon eat an uncomfortable portion of his namesake.