One-Eyed Cat by Paula Fox Read Free Book Online

hand as though it were alive.
    â€œUncle Hilary left an écu for you. Papa has it. It’s a gold coin from France, very old. I think this is a golden birthday.” She smiled. He thought she looked uncertain. He sensed she wanted to say something more and was searching for words. He felt a sudden impatience and wished he was gone, out of the house and on his way. It was something he didn’t often feel when he was with her. But he had waked up that way, uneasy and in a hurry.
    â€œHe was sorry about the gun,” she said slowly, looking down at her hands. “He realized he should have spoken to your father first—before giving it to you.”
    Ned felt his face turn red. She was looking at him now. He didn’t meet her eyes. “I don’t like guns either,” she said softly. “I’m afraid of them.” Standing there silently, unable to speak, he felt he was lying to her. “Oh, Ned!” she exclaimed, “I’m sorry, too!”
    â€œI have to go,” he mumbled, and backed away out of the room and ran downstairs.
    His class sang “Happy Birthday” to him. Some of the boys snickered and some of the girls giggled. Miss Jefferson had brought cookies she had made and a basket of Jonathan apples. In honor of Ned, she read a chapter from The Call of the Wild by Jack London. It was stuffy in the classroom, as hot as though it were still August. The other children looked at him, then at each other, and grinned from time to time, the way they always did when it was someone’s birthday, as if it were a thing a person had done, accomplished. It isn’t anything at all, he said to himself, just a day that comes along.
    In the evening, Mrs. Scallop brought the cake she had made for him up to Mama’s room. Papa carried a big pitcher of fresh lemonade and Ned’s presents. Miss Brewster had sent him Treasure Island, and the Ladies’ Aid Society of the church had sent an anthology of poems by Rudyard Kipling. Papa gave him a new winter coat, a book called Robin Hood and His Merry Men and an atlas so he could learn where the countries were which his stamps came from.
    â€œYou must blow out all the candles or a strange fate will befall you,” warned Mrs. Scallop.
    His mother laughed loudly. “Oh, Mrs. Scallop!” she exclaimed. “A strange fate befalls us all!”
    Ned blew them out. Everyone clapped and he cut pieces of the cake and handed them around. Mrs. Scallop presented him with the most hideous rug, Ned thought, of all the rugs he’d seen her make. It would look nice beside his bed, she said, cozy to walk on when the weather changed. Ned was glad when he could be alone in his room. He found a pile of animal stories he had cut out of the newspapers over the years and kept in an old shoe box. He felt slightly embarrassed at his age to be still reading Thornton Burgess, but it was comforting to gaze for a long time at an illustration of the plump rabbit standing in front of a tree or in a vegetable patch. His birthday was nearly over. The house grew silent except for the leaking of the toilet flush which his father was never able to repair permanently.
    Suddenly he tore up the handful of stories and dropped the pieces into his wastebasket. The gold watch ticked on his dresser, his new books piled up beside it. It had really been a very hard day. He knew it was all because of the gun, his worry over what he had done. In just a few days, that worry had come to be part of whatever he was thinking about. Had he really seen a face that night looking down at him from a window in the house? If he had, it must have been Mrs. Scallop’s face. But if it had been she—and if she had noticed the gun—why hadn’t she said anything? Perhaps he had been carrying the gun in such a way she couldn’t have seen it. Had the rifle made a much louder noise than he had thought and waked her up?
    As though it had slid into the room, the