One-Eyed Cat

Ned Wallis is the eleven-year-old only child of the Reverend James Wallis, a Congregational Church minister in the rural Hudson Valley of New York during the mid-1930s. The family lives in a large, aging house on a hill overlooking the Hudson River, fifteen miles from Papa's church in the village of Tyler. Ned's mother, Martha, has rheumatoid arthritis, which requires her to use a wheelchair; only rarely can she walk with a cane and Papa's assistance. Despite her condition, she is warm, perceptive, and witty. The household's third housekeeper in a year, Mrs. Scallop, is a domineering woman whose presence, though grating, provides security when Papa must leave for church duties.

On a late September Sunday, Ned's uncle Hilary, Mama's brother and a travel writer, arrives unexpectedly and proposes taking Ned on a Christmas vacation trip. Ned eagerly agrees but senses something in his father's voice and asks if Papa can come too. Papa says he cannot leave Mama. That evening, Uncle Hilary gives Ned a loaded Daisy air rifle as a birthday gift. Papa immediately objects, declaring there is nothing to imagine with a gun except something dead, and confiscates the rifle, storing it in the attic until Ned turns fourteen.

That night, unable to sleep, Ned creeps to the attic, retrieves the rifle, and carries it outside to the old stable where Mama's horse was once kept. He sweeps the rifle across the moonlit landscape. When he faces the stable wall, he sees a dark shadow that appears alive. Before he can think, his finger presses the trigger. Ned walks to the wall and finds nothing. Heading back toward the house, he looks up and sees what appears to be a face pressed against an attic window, watching him.

On his birthday, Mama gives Ned his grandfather's gold pocket watch. Standing before her, Ned feels he is lying by his silence about what he has done. The worry attaches itself to everything he thinks about. He wonders whether the face at the window was Mrs. Scallop's and why she has said nothing.

Ned does weekly chores for Mr. Scully, an eighty-year-old neighbor who lives alone across from the Wallis driveway. One afternoon, he sees a gaunt gray cat in Mr. Scully's yard. Its fur is matted, it shakes its head constantly, and one of its eyes is missing, leaving a small hole with dried blood. Mr. Scully suggests the cat might have been used for target practice, noting that a boy might find a living target more interesting than a tin can. The words cut through Ned. He realizes the cat likely lived in the woods near the old stable and connects the shadow he shot at with this wounded animal.

Mr. Scully directs Ned to leave bread and milk for the cat. Over the following weeks, they feed it together, and the cat begins to trust the yard, sleeping on an old quilt in the shed and growing less timid.

Ned's guilt branches into lies. When Mama asks if something worries him, he invents a homework assignment. When Uncle Hilary's Christmas trip to Charleston, South Carolina, is planned, Ned dreads leaving the cat but cannot explain why. He gathers turkey scraps at Thanksgiving, telling his parents the food is for a neighbor's dog. Each lie enlarges the secret and requires more lies to sustain it. He recognizes he now leads a hidden second life. Meanwhile, Mrs. Scallop tells Ned that his birth caused Mama's illness. Ned runs to Mama, who is furious and assures him this is entirely untrue.

When heavy December snow falls, the cat falls gravely ill, lying motionless for days. Ned and Mr. Scully conclude it has died. Then, after a thaw, Mr. Scully greets Ned with an enormous grin: The cat got up in the night and left paw prints in the snow. Happiness hits Ned like a blow.

Days before Christmas, Ned finds Mr. Scully's house dead cold and discovers the old man lying face down across the bathroom threshold. A neighbor, Mrs. Kimball, determines Mr. Scully has had a stroke, and an ambulance takes him away. Ned tells Mama he cannot go to Charleston, saying only that he does not want to leave home.

Ned continues feeding the cat alone now that Mrs. Scallop has left to run a nursing home in Waterville. Mrs. Kimball, who replaces Mrs. Scallop in the Wallis household, is kind and unobtrusive. Mr. Scully's daughter, Doris, arrives from Seattle, puts the house up for sale, and grudgingly allows Ned to keep feeding the cat.

Papa takes Ned to visit Mr. Scully at the nursing home on Saturdays. The old man cannot speak or move his right side, but his eyes burn with recognition. Ned whispers that he saw the cat at the edge of the woods, and Mr. Scully's eyes gleam. On what proves to be his final visit, Ned feels an unbearable pressure inside him. He leans close and blurts out: "It was me that shot the cat." Mr. Scully's hand begins a slow journey across the coverlet. His fingers cover Ned's and press with the faintest pressure. Then his eyes close and his hand goes still. Outside, Ned reflects that Mr. Scully would not have pressed his hand if the old man believed Ned was truly bad.

The following Saturday, Ned learns that Mr. Scully died in his sleep. Papa praises Ned's devotion, but Ned feels a surge of anger; he wants to shout that he went because of the cat yet recognizes this is only part of the truth. Mr. Scully was his friend. Meanwhile, Mama begins chrysotherapy, a treatment involving gold salt injections, which dramatically reduces her inflammation. She speaks of walking into church on Easter Sunday.

One night in mid-April, Ned wakes and sees Mama walking downstairs on her own. He feels a violent longing to look at the gun in the attic, then a shudder passes through him. He flees to the abandoned Makepeace mansion on the same hilltop and sits on the crumbling veranda until Mama appears, having followed him.

As they walk along the veranda, Mama says quietly, "We must all part, Ned." At that moment, a cat walks out of the woods into the moonlight. A second, smaller cat follows, and two kittens tumble nearby. The first cat cocks its head and looks at Ned. He sees the empty socket where its eye had been. After one moment, the cat turns and vanishes.

Walking home through the trees, Ned tells Mama everything: He took the gun from the attic, fired at the stable, and later saw the wounded cat at Mr. Scully's. He knew the shadow was something alive, and in the moment he aimed, he did not care. Mama reveals that she saw him that night. During one of her rare intervals of mobility, she watched from an attic window as he returned with the gun. The face at the window was hers, not Mrs. Scallop's.

She confesses something further. When Ned was three, she ran away to a cottage in Maine for three months, afraid of Papa's goodness. The toddler Ned walked through the house all night, unable to sleep, and she came back because she missed them and because Papa wrote about Ned's restless wandering.

They reach the porch. Papa stands in the doorway in his bathrobe, smiling, saying he guessed they must have gone for a walk on this beautiful spring night. "I'm so glad you've come home," he says.