Pebble In The Shoe Of Time

Abbacus ©2008


The Crumpling Letter


“That's when the cats come out,” she said to me. “When everyone else is gone: they come out.”
“So, where are all the cats?” I had asked, as I stepped into the house. I followed her into the kitchen and sat down with her at an old oak kitchen table that had been painted pale-yellow.
The smile-lines on her thirty-year-old face were already beginning to set. She was a happy woman. She bubbled on and on about her children, how special they were, but how they were always teasing the cats.
Down the dark, narrow hall of the remodeled farm house I could now see several of her cats; cautiously peering out from the shadows, moving forward, then quickly retreating to the safety of the laundry room.
Her husband and I had grown up together and were inseparable friends until college, marriage, and my choice of a try at a military career, had moved our lives apart. I ended up in Afghanistan where I was just another unwelcome American soldier playing hide and seek in the mountains for real life and death stakes. When she and John divorced, he took a government job in Asia. I knew at the time that he was just trying to get away from the pain and having to look into people's faces: The faces that seemed to be saying that they were thinking all the dark things he couldn't stop thinking about himself.
“She cares more about those five cats of hers than she does about me and she 's got the house and the kids. Why should I stick around?” John had said in a letter to me. I knew that it was himself and not me that he was trying to convince.
It had been five years since their divorce. John had wanted to see his children and had paid for their passports and plane fare to Nepal. They were going to spend their winter vacation with him and I was finally getting out of the army so the plan was I would get to spend about a week with them before I shipped back to the States.
Now I was sitting across a kitchen table from her trying to force the words out of me that would hit her like a cold shovel in the face. She was chattering on about the holidays, the kids and their school activities she expected them to excel at the coming semester. She warned me about the economy and competitive job market but emphasized the likelihood of a returning soldier who had served honorably getting preferential treatment from most prospective employers. When she got up to get another cup of coffee for me the strange, trance-like paralysis that held my tongue suddenly broke and I blurted out, “The reason I've come today is that, well, uh. . . .I have some bad news.”
She stopped pouring the coffee, and for the first time since I got there, really looked at me. The look on my face must have startled her because she gasped as I removed the letter from my coat pocket and held it out to her. A strange horror, peculiar to mothers, filled her face as she reached out for the letter. I had seen it many times in Afghanistan. “I'm so sorry,” I said, knowing that nothing I could say would help her. Yet I still said it: compelled by the threat of awkwardness that even the briefest silence would demand.
She read the letter, then the newspaper clipping that was stapled to the bottom.

Leopard kills 2 children and father
Kathmandu, Nepal-A Leopard killed two
children and their father in the Kaski district,
About 125 miles west of Kathmandu, and is
still on the loose, officials said Monday.
-From wire reports

She sat at the table, holding the letter in front of her. The dazed look on her face made her look like a boxer who had just taken a near-concussive punch. Her eyes glazed with tears as she began to speak. “I. . . . I don't understand. How could this happen? He. . . . He said it was safe. Oh my dear children,” she cried out.
I tried to find something to say. “In the winter, the snow falls heavily in the mountains and food gets scarce in the forests. The leopards come down to the fringes of civilization, closer than they normally would, to feed on farm animals. Sometimes people. . . . ” She began weeping convulsively. I was not helping her at all.
John's colleagues had persuaded the authorities in Nepal to send the letter to me first, hoping I would soften the blow. But I just sat there. In miserable, awkward, silence while she cried.
First one, then another two cats came out of laundry room and down the hall, stopping just outside the kitchen. They were eying me warily but seemed more interested in her. They began meowing and then, one by one, moved across the floor to her. One cat was circling her legs while the other two meowed piteously and sat at her feet.
The cats began to paw and and climb on her. She wiped her eyes with her hands and blotted her tear-streaked face with the crumpled letter. She picked up the largest of the cats a held it to her shoulder as if it were a baby. Two more cats appeared in the kitchen doorway. She looked at the cats, then at me. “What did I tell you?” She said. “When everyone else is gone, they come out.
She sobbed deeply into the big cat she held to her shoulder. The two cats in the doorway glanced calmly at me, then walked across the kitchen floor and disappeared into the living room. As I left I thought their purr sounded like little motors might sound covered by pillows of snow.