Scarborough Fair and Other Stories (12 page)

Sassafras relaxed and sprawled across the kitchen table while Sophy drank. This was no time for her friend to be backsliding just when she had been making so much progress. Already Sass had taught Sophy to produce food, open doors, stroke and groom on request. Not command. Sassafras didn't like being pushed around and she didn't reckon anybody else did either. Besides, Sophy could do all this with just little hints and nudges, unless the poor girl was terribly preoccupied. Then, Sassafras had to allow that it took a little stronger language and a slightly louder voice to produce results. Generally speaking, though, the girl was intelligent and cooperative, mostly biddable, and predisposed to be kind. But those two old hissycats who had come to steal and pry had none of those good qualities. Why, and would drive an orphaned girl and an orphaned kitten from their home and laugh about it afterward.

It was pure and simple up to Sass to help Sophy save their home from those sneak thieves or they'd be out on their ears before the sun set again.

The kitten was studying on the matter when there was a loud commotion at the door, like someone was about to pound it in. Sophy blew her nose and went to see who it was.

A massive sullen puppy of a boy stood in the doorway. His boots were black and muddy and smelled like the blood of slaughtered animals.

“What do you want here, Willie Pewterball?” Sophy asked. Sass could tell by the girl's tone she didn't like him.

“Come for that brass bed and sideboard my mama wants—and the TV and stereo too. You can help me load ‘em in the truck.”

“I'll do no such thing. Those are mine. My mama left ‘em to me.”

“That's not what
my
mama says. She sent me to get ‘em and I'm gonna get ‘em. If you don't want to help, get out of my way,” he said, and knocked Sophy aside when she tried to bar his entry. Sass attacked his ankles and he kicked her away.

Sophy, who was half knocked to the linoleum herself, reached down to pet Sass and make sure she was all right.

Sass felt a little jolt, like someone had rubbed her fur the wrong way on a cold dry day and made sparks jump from it. Suddenly she was Sophy and Sophy was her and what they felt and who they were was the same. They were linked. This was the kind of thing Sass's mama had been talking about. What was in Sophy made what was in Sassafras bigger than ever it could have been had the kitten been on her own. And if the kitten had already been in a huge snit, it was nothing compared to the bottled up store of anger and grief that poured into her from Sophy. It was as intense and painful as the fit that came over Sass at Tom Fool when he hurt her poor dead mama's ear. Outrage and anger flooded from the girl into the cat, who had far fewer scruples about directing it back where it belonged. She growled at the boy.

“You keep that damn cat off me or I'll kill it,” Willie said, but then he made the mistake of looking down at Sassafras.

He didn't have to look near as far as he thought he would. As it had with old Tom Fool, Sass's rage had made her as big as it was, and bigger, because she had Sophy's anger too. Sass's back was up, her ears were flat, her fur was all bristly and her tail like a many-barbed whip of righteousness lashing behind her. She hissed, and spat through fangs like the blades of pocket knives and lashed out at him with claws that looked five inches long to Willie.

He turned tail and lit out like his britches were on fire. “You're gonna get it!” He yelled back to Sophy. “You're not allowed to keep wild animals in the house!”

He jumped in his truck and roared away and Sophy, puzzled, looked down at Sass, who sat grooming her neat small self, licking the last few tufts of fur on her white right paw back into place.

“He's on drugs,” Sophy said, fists on hips. “Has to be. Nothing else explains it. Somehow or other, even though he kicked you, you scared the pee-waddin' out of him and I say good riddance to bad rubbish.” Then the air went out of her and she scooped Sass up and rubbed the kitten's side against her cheek. “But oh, Sassafras, what are we going to do if he comes back with help? Other folks aren't gonna be scart of a little pussycat like that fool. Shoot, he's likely to come back with the sheriff and try to arrest me for keepin' a dangerous animal.”

Sass yeowed once and then reflected that both of them carrying on didn't do much good, so she started to purr a little song her mama used to purr to her. She purred the melody into Sophy's ear and beat time with her little tail, which was now a good four inches long, on the back of Sophy's neck.

Hush little baby don't you cry

You'll have your own place by and by

Mice in the walls and moles in the lawn

Feed my kit when Mama's gone on

Sophy sat down and went back to her tea and stared into the cup. Sass kept on purring and pretty soon, Sophy began to run her finger around the top of the cup as she hummed. She wet the end of her finger and her cup made a whirring, chiming noise. Sass didn't like it at first, but it grew on her. It was part of the magic they were going to make between them to take care of their troubles.

They had to make them some protection. “Wards.” The word came into her mind and she knew right away that's what they needed. It wasn't like it was just a human kind of idea. Cats did it all the time when they marked their territory. They needed something to mark this house and all the things in it and all the property around it.

Sass jumped down and began racing around rubbing her face at things and wondering why there were no tomcats around when you needed them. They had that handy tail-shaking thing they did that would be just the thing in this situation. Sass stopped rubbing and looked up at Sophy. Sophy looked back at her. Didn't people have anything to ward off intruders? Surely they didn't expect their cats to do everything by themselves.

Sophy screwed up her face and said, “You know, kittycat, you've got a point there. What we need is something to keep people away from our property without knowing why they're doing it. Nothing you or I can say or do is going to make them go away if they know it's us doing it, but if they just DID it. I don't know anything about that stuff, but Old Miss Ally did, and she was a friend of my Mama's. That old biddy niece of hers was awfully keen on havin' her recipe book and I know my Mama got it from Miss Ally before she died but I'm durned if I recall what she did with it.”

Sass, who had been wound tighter than a fiddle string, collapsed with relief and began grooming herself. The girl was coming along real well.

Sophy hunted high and low for the book but at last she found it under her mama's mattress, between the ticking and the box springs. The idea came to Sass that if she hadn't been making herself invisible when the awful niece was in the house, the woman would have found the book.

Hugging it to herself, Sophy sat back down at the kitchen table while the kettle boiled again. Sass hopped back up to see what was in there.

“Hmmm,” she said. “I was right, Sass. This is no book to make biscuits from. This is Miss Ally's witchin' book.”

Sophy said, and stroked her, nose to tail tip. “You know, Miss Ally had her a cat too. She was so worried about her. Asked my Mama not to let her cat nor her recipe book go to that niece of hers. Mama was fixin' to bring the cat over here when Miss Ally died and we couldn't find hide nor hair of that cat. Then Mama got sick before we could look any more.

“Too bad Miss Ally died before Mama or she might have been able to save her. She was wonderful with cures, Miss Ally was. Miss Ally was a witch, of course, but Mama didn't hold with witchin' so she always said Ally was a ‘nature doctor.' But she was more what folks here call a white witch because she didn't do any harm. And whatever Mama liked to think, Miss Ally had cures for more than just bodily diseases and injuries.

“She knew how to mend a broken heart or incline love in someone's direction—the girls in school talked about goin' to see her for such things. I reckon all that is in the recipe book.”

Sass yawned and put her chin down on her paws. She took a nap while Sophy hunted around the house for things needed for a protection spell.

Sophy was pleased and that pleased Sass. Kittens needed a lot more sleep than she'd been getting lately, and she dozed off again while Sophy chanted happily to herself, “Iron filings—got them and some rusty nails, mountain ash berries from right out in the yard, three times three yards of red thread—why don't they just say nine?” she asked Sass and scratched her behind the ears. Sass yawned and curled her small pink tongue out from between her teeth, then blinked sleepily and rearranged herself into her compact napping posture.

Sophy continued. “Will you listen to this, Miss Sassafras? It says here we need to draw this picture of an eye here on a brown egg shell and break the egg on our doorstep. I reckon that way if someone comes that shouldn't, they'll slip on the egg and fall and break their necks. What do you think?”

Sass thought that sounded a little silly and wondered how it was supposed to do anything. It seemed to her something was missing from all this but she could hardly be expected to figure it out, young as she was, and without her sleep.

After a time during which something tangy and herbal boiled on the stove, Sophy scooped her up again, along with a sugar shaker full of stuff and the egg with the eye drawn on it, and carried her outdoors. It was growing dark later now and Sass realized with surprise that she had been here more of her life than she had been in the barn with Mama. She woke up and wriggled out of Sophy's grasp to climb up on her shoulder and watch what she did. Sophy walked around the house three times sprinkling a sugar shaker full of the herby smelling stuff and broke the egg on the doorstep. She said some words too but they didn't make much sense to Sass.

They both felt vaguely uneasy as Sophy carried her back inside the house, picked up the recipe book and tied it in a plastic bag from the grocery store.

“I thought of the best place to hide this when we're not here, Sass. I'm gonna put it in the bottom of your pan and sprinkle litter over it so don't scratch none too hard, okay? It's got oilcloth on the cover so the top and bottom will be all right.”

Sass watched while Sophy did this and then went to her box and dampened the litter to add a little touch of realism to the scheme. Then she jumped up on the bed and stretched out diagonally across the middle of the bed. A few minutes later Sophy picked her up, and laid her back down against the curl of her own body.

A stinging sensation in her nose woke Sass sometime later. She opened her eyes and they began to water. The room was dark and fuzzy looking. Smoke.

Sass mewed and when Sophy didn't wake up that very minute, so she hooked her hard on the hand for the good of them both and jumped down before Sophy's reaction sent a wrathful hand to bat a cat off the bed.

Sophy opened her eyes, sniffed and cried, “Lord have mercy, what now?” She shoved her feet into her fleece lined moccasins and staggered after Sass, who was near the door already.

The old outhouse was in flames. Before Sophy could unroll the garden hose and turn on the outside faucet, the smell was way worse than smoke. Sassafras retreated as far as she could while still keeping an eye on Sophy. She didn't want to return to the house where all the smoke was trapped inside either, so she ran up the road a ways thinking she might hop a mouse while Sophy put out the fire. That's when she saw Luly Pewterball's boy's truck. Good thing she
hadn't
returned to the house. That boy was not kind to small animals.

Still, she thought she had better warn Sophy. She sprinted back down the road to where Sophy was standing away from the soaked and smoldering ruins of the outhouse.

“You suppose somebody'd been smokin' in there, kittycat?” Sophy asked, and headed back for the house, but Sass meowed and meowed and snatched at her legs and ran away from the house and snatched again. The girl didn't have the sense God gave a goose though and went right in, even though the front door was still standing wide open.

Luly Pewterball and her boy came out of the bedroom as Sophy walked in.

“
You
set that fire!” Sophy said.

“What if we did?” the boy asked belligerantly. He paused to cough. The smoke was still thick in the house.

But Luly's mean little eyes narrowed up and she said, “No such thing.
(cough cough)
We saw the smoke and come to see if you were safe.”

“You did (cough) not!” Sophy exclaimed hotly.

“That's right,” the boy said, and moved menacingly toward her. “We
(cough)
did. Cause we figured if you were
(cough)
safe, we'd
(cough)
change that. Now, my mama really wants her
(cough, cough cough)
inheritance and we can't
(cough)
find it
(cough)
anyway. Where'd you
(cough)
put it?”

“You better not
(cough)
hurt me,” Sophy said. “I told people about you
(cough)
comin' here. I could have
(cough)
you charged with assault.”

The boy had spotted Sass, and said, still coughing between all his words, “There's no law in this state against killin' feral cats though. That one fooled me once, but I see she ain't so big now. Maybe I should open her up and see how she did that.”

“Don't you touch her!” Sophy screamed and tried to catch Sass to put her out the door but only succeeded in blocking the exit. Sass scrabbled on the linoleum for a half a second before rocketing in under the bed, then cursed herself for a fool. Now she was cornered.

Soon she was backed against the wall with a big ugly face looking down at her on two sides. She heard Sophy's steps and saw her feet edging toward the bedroom window. Bless her, she was going to open it and try to let Sass escape.

A long arm lashed out while Sass was watching Sophy and pulled the kitten's tail. It was a short tail though and the grasp was only a couple of fingers so Sass got it back and huddled closer to the wall. Then the bed started to move.