all the pictures in the paper.”
“What pictures? What paper? What are you talking about?”
“The War pictures. The soldiers. They all wear uniforms. I see them every day in The Boston Post and The Record. And, and those good ones in Life magazine. Those are the best, Pa.”
“Oh, Francis, you are the cross I have to carry. My only child and –” he paused. “Francis, you are not a soldier, you are not a baseball player anymore, you, you, you’re just my son. Come in the house and take off the uniform and do not drink any more wine. Your shouting woke up your mother.”
“I’m sorry, Pa. Honest. I’ll take off the uniform. But, can I still look at Life?”
“Ah, O.K., I suppose so. Please come in for the night.”
Mr. Casey closed the door, snuffing out the light as Jugger stumbled up the porch steps. “Frog bastard,” he shouted to the woods and then he went inside.
I let out a long, deep sigh. I felt almost sick. I had been part of something strange and kind of sad and scary at the same time and I didn’t know how to react at first. But, as my body unstiffened, I realized I better get out of there, so I raced through the high grass of the driveway and out onto the Street and on past my house.
My mother and father were really going strong now with
“You’ve got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the pos-i-tive,
E-lim-my-nate the neg-a-tive,
Latch on to the af-firm-a-tive,
Don’t mess with Mister-In-be-tween.”
I caught sight of a gang furtively sneaking up from the Park and I took off through my yard and over Leavit’s fence and double backed through Fagan’s, running like a wild horse, until before I realized it, Bessie O’Leary’s house materialized before me as though emerging from some inky, subterranean cave. One light burned from an upstairs room, the remainder of the house barely visible in the jet-black night.
A slight rustle of leaves from a silent maple brought my breath in short, rapid gasps. From the Street, sharp commands, quick and pointed from Birdie to his searchers, reached me as I crouched behind the Witch’s Wall. I knew they would never go into the Witch’s yard, but they could double back the way I did and come up behind me. So, I made the decision to jump the wall and sneak out behind them and race back to the Park and the Green Box. According to the rules, you had to stay out at least twenty minutes and I had already done that.
I took a short jump and bellied my way over the wall, slipping quietly to the ground. I waited until I knew they were halfway up the hill and then I picked my way through the dark past the clothesline where a white, linen gown or something, hung limply in a ghostly pose. I continued across the yard and then suddenly a cat cried, and was answered by the sound of other cats.
My eyes narrowed to the location of the sound. I was curious. I was insanely frightened, too, but I began walking to the rear of the old house. I was doing exactly what I warned others not to do in those Class B horror films, when in spite of the warnings from the first four rows of the Paramount, the hero began his long walk upstairs to the attic and whatever was lying in wait.
The cellar door was open and at the far end, the Street side of the cellar, a vague, blue bulb threw just enough light to make objects distinguishable. What manner of madness drove me on I could not explain to the thumping heart or throbbing brain that seemed the only parts of my body that were alive. I was always a reader, ever since I could pick the colors and the names of animals from the large print books my mother got from the children’s library, and now in Bessie O’Leary’s midnight black yard, I was a character out of Edgar Allen Poe, and I was in search of The Black Cat. I ducked under the low frame of the door and felt my way along the damp, fieldstone walls. Before me, cats of all sizes slept or crawled or pawed at each other as they collected in large pockets.
Charles Webber was right, but Webber had never walked through and around slinking, sloe-eyed cats. They lay in heaps on top of wooden S. S. Pierce boxes or in furry mounds on top of last winter’s ash heaps. Some peered out from the coal bin with yellow, jungle eyes as I stepped gingerly over them. Was I crazy? What was I doing here? My mouth was filled with cotton and sweat poured off my forehead. My armpits prickled. There must have been a hundred cats in that cellar and scattered all over the cement floor was corn meal that the cats picked at and then settled back into their individual colonies.
The cellar itself was stacked with newspapers that reached the ceiling, yellowed parchment that smelled of mildew and cat. Everywhere there were newspapers and cats. I walked several feet deeper into the cellar and then I could feel something near me almost touching me. I raised my eyes to a pile of newspapers directly in front of me, and there perched in unmoving black fur was a thick-chested, oval-bellied cat that sat with olive eyes fixing and piercing. I froze at the size of this cat that was almost as big as a small dog. My heart left my chest and disappeared somewhere down into my thighs.
The black cat, Poe’s Black Cat, I was convinced, began a hissing sound like gas escaping from a jet, and then a mournful, tormented, almost painful bawl, and then the hissing sound, followed again by the tortured cry.
I can’t remember how long I stood there, paralyzed. I just remember being slightly freed of my paralysis when I felt a hand on my shoulder and as I turned around I looked directly into the cracked and wrinkled face of Bessie O’Leary. The Witch. I stared into that face for three thousand years and then my eyes popped, while my whole body shook and trembled into action and I darted past her, tripping over screaming, squatting cats that scattered, frightened, in every direction, toppling over each other in a riot of confusion.
I raced so fast that I ran headlong into the white gown hanging out to dry. It was wet and clammy like a sweating body and I furiously tried to disentangle myself from it. When I finally succeeded, I didn’t know which direction to turn. It was as though Bessie O’Leary was everywhere. She was guarding The Witch’s Wall - her wall. She was at the front of the house. She was behind Margie McIntyre’s barn next door. She was on top of the roof of her own house, watching me, staring at me with powerful witch’s eyes.
A figure appeared at the cellar door and I plummeted off into deep bushes that bordered the path to Joe Cushing’s store. I burrowed down to unfathomed depths, covering and camouflaging myself with branches and leaves like the marines. I lay there, trying not to breathe. I waited for the sound of approaching footsteps but none could be heard. After a while I heard a door slam, and then an upstairs window squeak down the ropes and close. I looked up at Bessie O’Leary’s house. It was in darkness and the night was still.
Suddenly, I felt warm and shivery all over. I had done what nobody else had ever dared to do. I had gone directly into the bottomless pit of Hell, Bessie O’Leary’s cellar, and I saw the cats. I stood in front of the leader, the Big, Black Cat. And, Bessie O’Leary touched my shoulder and I looked right into her face and I would never forget those watery, red eyes of hers staring straight at me out of deep, sunken sockets. I had done something that Stretch or Birdie or Poirier never would have dared to do, and Charles Webber could only guess about. I would have them eating out of my hand at the Park.
I crawled out from under the branches and leaves and sat up in my forest den that kept the outside world away and was hidden by thick vines that were like prison bars—but I did not feel like a prisoner. I felt free in a quiet world that only I knew existed. Only two years before when I was twelve, I would climb a tree high above my house and sometimes I’d sit high on my perch, concealed in leafy shadows while I read James Fenimore Cooper, Albert Payson Terhune or my comic books. My mother would come out and call
