THE WHITE CAT

Will Musham

His house was on the slope of a gorge, and there was a seven hundred foot long path that he had to walk down to pick up his mail. There was a thick conifer forest all around filled with many old Indian and deer trails, but he had never really explored them. His wife had died years before when they were living in the city, and he told himself that had she still been alive, they would have walked the trails together. Once he almost entered the forest, but feeling guilty that she was not there to share the experience, he stopped himself and trudged back to the house.

Still, on the pleasant days of the seasons, he would walk up and down the long path to the road just for the exercise and the company of the trees, the sighing winds and the black birds that fluttered noisily from branch to branch. It was on such a walk that one summer afternoon he happened to see a white cat calmly sitting by the edge of the forest. He slowed his pace and waved to the cat, and half-shouted “Hi there! How are you, white cat?” The cat expressionlessly looked back at him. He continued walking and the cat turned its head to watch him, but otherwise did not move. When he reached his house and looked back, the cat was gone. Just a feral cat, he thought, and I’ll probably never see it again. That night, he had strange, tumbling dreams about his late wife, and in the dream he remembered that his wife had once told him that before they had met, she had owned a white cat that she had loved dearly, and he sensed that somewhere in the dream, the white cat was watching.

A week later, while on his walk, he saw the white cat again. This time it followed him down the path while keeping a distance. He called to the cat, but the cat drew no closer. He wished he had some food to offer. The cat followed him back to the house, and he said, “Stay here, I’ll bring you some food.” Then he went to his kitchen where he chopped up some cooked chicken and brought it outside. The cat had disappeared again. He actually doubted the cat was starving; it was on the thinnish side, he had clearly seen, but its coat was quite glossy, almost shimmering. Perhaps it belonged to his distant neighbor who lived a mile away. He found himself thinking it would be nice to to own a cat, a white cat in particular.

The next day, he drove into the nearest town and bought a bag of hard cat food. Returning home, he filled his work shirt pocket with the cat food, then set out on his walk. But the white cat did not appear that day. Nor did the cat appear the day after, nor the day after that. Well, he thought, the white cat had probably returned home after having its adventure, or much worse, it had encountered a predator in the forest, perhaps a coyote or raccoon. He tried, not entirely successfully, to push the white cat out of his mind.

Several weeks passed by, and he began to have trouble breathing. It was the summer heat, he told himself, and the plain fact he was getting on in years. He decided to take his walks after darkness had fallen and the air was cooler. He found however, that though the night air was refreshing, he was still huffing and puffing on his walks. As much as he disliked the idea, he resolved to see a doctor, if not immediately, then soon.

Then one night while walking the path, he sensed a presence behind him, and he turned to see what appeared to be a dab of moonlight soundlessly following him. It was the white cat, he realized with a strange thrill. The white cat had returned. He stopped, hoping the cat would come up to him. Instead, the white cat trotted off in the direction of the forest, stopped, and looked back at him. The white cat wants me to follow, he thought, and so he did. The cat entered the forest and he followed, finding himself on a trail the wound deeply into the woodland, turning this way and that, and it seemed his way was illuminated by the white cat’s glowing fur. His mind felt stuffed and strange, and he marveled that time seemed suspended, and that he was young again and no longer had trouble breathing. It occurred to him that he would never find his way back to the house again, but that didn’t bother him, and all there was to do was to follow the white cat.

TORNADO, SOUTHERN ILLINOIS, 1959

Will Musham

He plummeted from the sky, straight through a jagged hole on the barn roof and landed with a heavy whomp on a pile of haystacks. He just lay there on his back, calmly looking up at the sky through the hole in the roof. He could see the sky clearing slightly as the tornado moved away to the west. A shredded car tire wobbled by in the air, followed by something that looked like a river eel, and they clattered against the sides of the barn. Bits of plywood and dirt clumps continued to rain down.

He remained in a serene bubble of thoughtlessness. It seemed everything had been decided for him; he accepted all of it, even the howling in his head. It hadn’t as yet occurred to him that his survival was nothing short of a miracle.

After a time he sat up slowly on the haystack. Nothing in him seemed to be broken. Without thinking, he gingerly slid off the hay. Dusting himself off, he walked across the barn’s dirt floor toward the open door. Once outside, he looked around. The corn fields, the land, everything, seemed coated in a profound silence. There was a strip of highway in the distance, and just beyond it, piles of colored wood. Houses, he thought, those were houses. Then he remembered. Hitchhiking, trying to steal something from someone’s yard, running after someone, a woman, had seen him. Then not long thereafter, the screaming black funnel cloud, the mad god, suddenly descending, catching him, lifting him skyward.

He’d been terribly frightened, then he’d passed beyond fear, and he was sure he had seen faces, colors, creatures circling around him, and ... and now he was walking toward the highway and the rows of broken houses. He felt like a scarecrow come to life.

He crossed the highway, passing by a shattered spinet piano and a sign that read “Trinity Church” that had embedded themselves in the cracked cement, and he heard the rise and fall of sirens in the distance. He saw a woman wearing a pink blouse and blue Bermuda shorts, holding a wailing infant and pulling futilely at a pile of rubble with one hand. Blood was running down the side of her face. “My children”, she whispered at him. “My children. Help me.” He recognized her. She had been the one who had caught him stealing. The tornado had spared him and brought him back to the scene of his crime.

He began clawing at broken planks and mounded drywall while the woman, finding her voice, shouted, “They were right next to me! Two of them!”. Hands bleeding, he tunneled himself into the rubble. He found a boy, perhaps age six, clutching a stuffed toy horse and appearing dazed, but not badly hurt. Next to the boy lay a girl who he guessed to be about seven. She was still and her eyes were closed, but he saw she was breathing. Clutching the boy with one arm, he backed out on his knees and handed him to the woman, then crawled back into the rubble for the girl. This time when he backed out, a blue-shirted cop was waiting to take the girl. The cop told him, “I’ll get them in the ambulance. Take care of your head there.”

He reached up and found that his scalp was sticky with blood. He saw the ambulance with the woman and her three children inside drive away. More ambulances were arriving. He moved on to the next house.