The Cat, The Devil And Lee Fontana

14

It was hot in Georgia, too, but more humid. Earlier that same day, as a little breeze stirred the oak leaves, high among the branches Sammie sat straddling a gnarled limb, her bare feet swinging, her long pale hair tangled in the twigs and leaves. Life was good, her daddy was home now, at work at his auto shop just a few blocks away. Later in the afternoon she and Becky would walk down to join him and they’d head over to Grandma’s for dinner. Below her at the picnic table her mother had laid out the monthly figures for Thrasher’s Drugstore, her papers weighted with rocks, her ledger shaded by the sprawling tree.

Looking up, Becky watched Sammie with interest, the child completely absorbed in moving a little metal car along in the air above a leafy branch—she had attached a pair of paper wings to the car, stuck on with tape so it was now an airplane, and she had filled the hollow metal plane with white flour. Becky didn’t know where Sammie’s interest in flight came from, there weren’t many planes around Rome, just a couple of small ones that enthusiastic young men were learning to fly. She watched Sammie pass the little plane over a branch, shaking it so the flour would drift down and cover the leaves. “Dusting the crops,” Sammie said. Becky could swear Sammie had never seen a crop duster. Somehow, the child’s use of the word, her knowledge of the word, made her uneasy.

She was probably reacting to nothing, maybe to some chance remark by a neighbor that Sammie had overheard, but still she wondered. With Sammie, any unusual reference, like so many of her dreams, might have far more meaning than seemed obvious. Sammie’s dreams could affect their lives in ways that were far more real than the ephemeral world of nighttime fantasies.

Though many of Sammie’s visions were small, unimportant events, a neighbor’s truck breaking down late at night; the neighborhood cat who birthed five kittens, two black, three striped, just as Sammie foretold. Becky was used to those dreams, Sammie would tell them to her, then later would smile at her knowingly when the kittens were born just as Sammie said, or the truck broke an axle just before midnight and the neighbor called Morgan for help.

But some of Sammie’s night visions were ugly. When she was barely four years old she dreamed that the courthouse was on fire and she woke crying that the tower was falling all in flame. A week later the courthouse burned, the tower fell blazing, its flying parts breaking ladders, smashing the hood of the town fire truck, severing a six-inch hose, and injuring four volunteer firefighters.

Becky and Morgan had told no one about their child’s predictions, and they swore Sammie to secrecy. The same year she dreamed that her little dog was dead, the small spotted pup Becky had gotten for her from the animal shelter and for which she’d had a fence built to keep him from running in the street, the pup who slept with Sammie and spent every waking hour with her. Sammie dreamed that he followed their car to Main Street where a truck hit him, she dreamed his death in detail far too vivid for any child to have imagined, for any child to have to witness. Three days later the pup dug under the fence and followed their car when Sammie and her mother went shopping. He was killed on Main Street under the wheels of a delivery truck. The child’s grief had already reached its peak before his death; now, her response to the fatal accident was numbness, a cold silence that deepened day by day, badly frightening Becky.

But not all Sammie’s dreams were shattering, some were happy predictions, a new teacher she would grow to love; her grandmother Caroline’s new sewing machine on which Caroline, a tall, handsome woman, would fashion bright new clothes for Sammie. She dreamed the tale in a brand-new storybook, knew it nearly word for word before it was read to her. She dreamed of a school party with papier-mâché elephants and giraffes and a cake with a zebra on top, her school “circus party” about which she knew nothing at the time.

But now, this past week, a stranger vision had begun: Sammie had started dreaming of an old man, someone neither Becky nor Morgan had ever met. Sammie called him the cowboy, she would wake worried because he was worried, because he was frightened. “Scared because he’s growing old and weak,” she told Becky. It seemed that only by sharing her dreams could the child deal with her fears; and this old man seemed as close and familiar to Sammie as if she had known him all her life. Becky tried to say something reassuring about people getting old, how natural that was; she would hold Sammie and rock her until the child’s sadness seemed to ease, until Sammie’s pain and fear for the old cowboy drew back, the distress in the little girl’s dark gaze to soften, though she would remain pale and unnaturally quiet.

But now Sammie, flying her crop duster over the leaves saying the cowboy would be happy about the plane and that it would make everything all right, that the airplane would bring him what he wanted, the connection of Sammie’s play with those night visions indeed disturbed Becky. The powerful juxtaposition of dream and waking play left Becky warily on edge, left her waiting nervously for whatever would happen next, for whatever was destined to happen, for the inevitable conclusion to her little girl’s strange and unnatural predictions.