The Sixth Sense
And Other Stories
To my parents,
with love and thanks
And thanks also to
Eileen Martin
and
Christina Major
CONTENTS
1. The Wake
2. Horse Man
3. Extended Family
4. The Sixth Sense
5. Thea
6. The Bottom Line
7. The Greyhound
8. Tanglewood
9. Winning
THE WAKE
I FIRST KNEW something was wrong by the quiet. The little brown yard within the picket fence was bare, silent, empty.
That wasn’t unusual for an early spring afternoon. It was slightly too cool for a cat to sun in comfort, and Aunt Mil herself was usually indoors, even on a warmer day. She would have heard the school bus stop at the corner, and she would be putting on the kettle, taking the gingersnaps out of the oven.
No scent of gingersnaps today, though. The kitchen windows looked blank and dark. Worry began to nip at me. Aunt Mil is old, older than my grandmother would be if she still lived. Anything could happen, and not just old age; burglars, or murderers, even …
“Use your imagination for something worthwhile!” Aunt Mil would snap, hearing any of this. I went boldly up the flagstone walk. The first crocuses were in bud, their yellow and purple heads piercing last year’s brown leaves like arrows shot from underground. Today’s job would be raking out the bulb beds.
As I opened the kitchen door I thought, Maybe she’s gone somewhere. The house behind the door seemed silent and empty, dark, and too cool.
“Aunt Mil?”
Sun streamed in the window over the sink, across the white-fuzzed cactus plants and colorful nylon pot scrubbers. “Aunt Mil?” I put my knapsack on the clean table and went toward the living room door, letting alarm in again. Oh, God, what if …
My heart gave a great frightened thump when I saw her. The house was so still and dim, I was sure it was empty. But Aunt Mil sat in her armchair before me, bolt upright; alive. I saw that at once.
Then I saw the tears, burning and carving down her face like silver acid. She sat utterly motionless, but the tears ran and dripped off her grim, straight jaw. They rooted me in my tracks. Aunt Mil, crying?
But when I looked in her lap, I knew. Curled there, fluffy and frail, was her ancient cat, Puttins, and he was much stiller than Aunt Mil.
The breath rushed out of me in a strange relief, and I started to go to her. Halfway across the rug, I began to feel like a fool. I felt awkward and miserable, and my foolish face smiled. Weird, hysterical laughter fluttered at my stomach.
“Oh, Aunt Mil!” I put one arm around her stiff shoulders. They didn’t relax. If anything, they seemed to push me away.
“Oh, Aunt Mil!” I said again. I dropped on my knees beside the chair and reached over the arm for her hand. Her hands curled around the old cat’s body, and I touched him. He was cold and unyielding, like a piece of wood covered with fur. She must have been sitting there with him a long time. I clasped her hand tightly. It was cool and slack.
Talk. Break through. “When did it happen?” I asked, and in the ensuing silence I heard how my harsh voice startled the house. Aunt Mil made no response beyond a slow, unseeing shake of the head.
I drew back to look at her. She seemed fierce, with her grim jaw and gash of a mouth, the bright, burning eyes that had never gotten old. She looked indomitable. She looked every inch the tough old battle-ax I’d always known. But …
“Aunt Mil?”
Okay, this was one for a grown-up. “I’m calling Mum,” I said, and I got up and went out to the sunny kitchen. The telephone receiver was warm, the old-fashioned dial stiff and loud.
The phone rang five times. I’ll let it go ten, I thought, but on number six Mum picked it up.
“Hello?” she said breathlessly. She would have been outdoors, looking at the new green tips of her own bulbs.
“Mum? It’s me. Uh—can you come over?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Aunt Mil—” For a second my voice squeezed off. Say it! I commanded, knowing the thoughts that would race through my mother’s mind. “Her … her cat is dead, and … she’s just sitting there. She won’t answer me.”
“I’ll be right over,” said my mother, and crashed down the receiver.
I hung up more slowly, relieved and dissatisfied. Mum would be here in ten minutes. She’d know what to do.
But I was Aunt Mil’s special relative. I was the one she liked best, the one who understood her. I was the one who knew poor old Puttins. I couldn’t say his name to Mum and rely on her to recognize it. How could Mum comfort Aunt Mil?
I heard a tearing sniff from the living room and remembered how even the most silent, unsobbing tears bring a runny nose. I picked up the box of tissues from its spot on the clean counter and went back to the living room.
The way she snatched the tissue, I knew it gave more comfort than my hug had. She dried her face before she blew her nose. I remembered the last time I cried, how the tears itched and burned like some chemical running down my face. Aunt Mil dropped the tissue on the brown rug and reached for another.
“Mum’s coming right over.”
She didn’t look at me. She was staring straight ahead. New tears came up in her eyes and started down her cheeks. She lifted the tissue to blot them, but opened it wide instead and buried her whole face, shaking silently.
I sat in the other chair and looked off out the window, embarrassed and feeling stupid. I thought of Gram’s funeral, three years ago, when I was twelve. Though Gram was her little sister, the last family member of her generation, Aunt Mil stood straight as an arrow, unshaken. Mum and my uncles clung to her, and she supported them all. Now she was shattered by the loss of a moth-eaten old cat, whom we’d known was going to die soon, anyway.…
I come two afternoons a week for house- and yardwork, and all winter I’d helped Aunt Mil fight for him. He needed special food, which he didn’t like, and we were always dreaming up ways to make it tasty and to keep him clean, free of fleas and free of colds. “If he can just make it through till spring …” she said. The most we hoped for was one last summer, a final season of sun in the garden, and a final subdued rapture in the catnip bed.
But we still lost, even after all that trying. So hard to believe that this was not just a temporary setback.
I sneaked a look at him, in Aunt Mil’s lap. How could it be that if I touched him now, he would not raise his head with a rusty trill? How could it be that he was no longer the cat we used to know?
His soul is fled, I thought experimentally, and because he wasn’t my cat, because I was pushed away by Aunt Mil’s solitary grief, I found I was excited. That sounds terrible, but since the shiny coffin that held Gram was lowered into the hole, I’ve been wondering about death. Now here it was, and how simple! How utterly strange!
Outside, a car ripped through an early-spring puddle, stopped quickly and noisily outside the picket fence. Aunt Mil’s eyes shifted around the room, and she curled her hands closer to the body of the cat. I wondered, in the remaining minute of silence, if I’d done the right thing.
Then the kitchen door opened, and Mum poured in; comfortably round, puffing a little as she struggled out of her heavy, camel-colored coat and straightened her clothes, bustling and rustling through the doorway. Aunt Mil put her chin up a quarter of an inch higher, and her mouth tightened in its downward curve. She glared at my poor bewildered mother for a minute. Then a fresh flood of tears; her face crumpled and she bent her head, pressing one hand across her eyes.
“Aunty Mil?”
It would have been better if Mum didn’t sound so shocked. But she rushed over and hugged Aunt Mil into her bosom. Aunt Mil collapsed there and wept loudly, with harsh, groaning sobs. My face heated. I went to look out the window at the backyard.
Like the front, it was bare and brown; neat from our work last fall, but bleak. All that showed to foretell summer’s gorgeous perennial border was a row of straw-colored stubble along the fence and the big compost pile, where all organic refuse underwent its miraculous transformation. A patch of dingy snow lingered under the forsythia, which showed as yet no sign of bloom.
As I looked, wishing I dared put my fingers in my ears, I saw Aunt Mil’s younger cat, Robert, squeeze through the pickets and tiptoe across the muddy yard. I went to the back door to let him in.
Robert arched his back in pleased surprise and stroked himself against my leg, giving me a direct, sentimental look from his yellow eyes. I scooped him up to hug. “Oh, Robert!” He was warm and sleek, vibrating with purrs and struggling with all his muscular strength to get free. He hadn’t asked to be picked up—hadn’t I noticed? But I hugged him a moment against his will, holding him like a poultice against the unexpected hurt in my heart. Poor old Putts!
Robert squirmed free and dropped to the floor with a heavy thud, still purring. I went back toward the living room. He followed slowly at first, then galloped ahead and dashed dramatically into the middle of the rug.
Aunt Mil was sitting up straight again, blowing her nose. Mum perched on the arm of the chair, one plump, warm arm around Aunt Mil’s shoulders.
“Kris can do it,” she was saying, “if you have a shovel.”
Oh, God, Mum!
Aunt Mil brought the blasted tissue down from her face and saw Robert taking his buccaneer stance in the center of the rug. More tears—where are they coming from?—poured down her cheeks. She bent forward over the dead cat in her lap and snapped her fingers.
Like a buccaneer deciding it might not be a trap, Robert swaggered over, keeping one eye on Mum. He rubbed his chin hard, once, on Aunt Mil’s fingers. Then his yellow eyes flashed beyond, to the cat in her lap.
There had existed between Puttins and Robert a kind of armed neutrality, tested from time to time. Each was jealous of the other. If Robert was playing with a piece of string and Puttins tapped it, even once, then no amount of coaxing would lure Robert back to the game for at least twenty minutes. They never shared a lap, so unless I was there, one of them would always be curled in a chair across the room from Aunt Mil, giving her the cold shoulder. Usually it was Robert.
Now, when his hot yellow glare found Puttins, I expected him to turn away in an ostentatious miff. Instead, he stood where he was, lifting his nose in tiny bobbing motions to test the scent. He knows, I thought. Aunt Mil’s eyes dried as she watched him, and even Mum saw something going on, and was silent.
Robert minced forward. Aunt Mil leaned slowly back, so that the old cat showed plainly on her lap. When he was close, Robert reared on his hind legs, placing one paw delicately and weightlessly on Aunt Mil’s thigh for balance. He stretched his neck to its utmost limit and smelled the tips of Puttins’s dull old hairs, bobbing his nose along them. His eyes glared beyond, into space. His ears were wild.
At the end of this long moment he sank slowly down to a sitting position and stayed there, thinking. We all watched him, still, as if we awaited some pronouncement. Eventually Robert stalked a little way off and lay down, ears back; definitely thinking. What he thought would never be revealed, and I think we all sighed.
In the silence Mum sighed again, looking at the four of us: old aunt, teenage daughter, dead cat, live cat. How was she going to tidy all this up and get home in time to make supper?
“Aunty Mil,” she asked at last, hesitantly. “What do you want?”
Aunt Mil’s face twisted for a second. What a stupid thing to ask, I thought. She wants him back!
Mum went on. “We can … bury him now, if you want, Kris and I. Or if you’d rather wait, I’ll take you home to supper with me.”
The expediency, mingled with her kindness, made me ashamed—but at least she was doing something, taking charge. Maybe I did understand Aunt Mil a little better, but I was useless.
Watching Robert, Aunt Mil had gone quite a way back toward normal, so I wasn’t surprised when she finally spoke. “Thank you, Grace, but I’ll do it myself. Later. I’ll come to dinner with you now.”
At home, Mum went to work in the kitchen, and Aunt Mil helped, slicing vegetables and setting the table. Outwardly she seemed all right, but I felt her quiet and saw how she was bowed down, darkened and diminished. Mum chattered; Aunt Mil answered. Feeling superfluous, I went to my room to do homework. Homework, on a Friday afternoon!
When supper preparations were over, I heard the television come on. Time for Mum’s favorite game show. Aunt Mil was plunked down on the couch to watch too. She despises game shows. Mum doesn’t know this, of course. Amiably she was trying to amuse and distract Aunt Mil, feeling it was the right thing to do.
Should I go down and rescue her? Bring her up to my room for a little rational conversation? That’s what she says when we bump into each other at a gathering of relatives. “Now, for a little rational conversation!”
But before, when we had rational conversation, it was about books and old movies, compost, plant propagation, and interspecies relations. Before, I had never seen Aunt Mil shattered, nor heard her sob. I stayed where I was, doing math problems that all came out wrong.
Greg and Amy came home on the late bus, full of news. Supper started to smell good. Then Dad came home. The house changed from a relaxed, boring place to a boring place humming with Standards, Expectations, and Responsibilities.
“What are you doing, Kris?” he asked outside my door.
“Math.”
“Good!” He was surprised. On the other side of the wall beside my desk, I heard Amy give an irritated tsk. She was only changing. Dad said she spent too much time on her appearance. True enough, actually.
Mum came rustling and puffing up the stairs, following Dad into their bedroom. I decided to go down and be with Aunt Mil and stepped out into the hall where I could hear everything.
“… never seen her go to pieces like that. She seems all right now, but she cried so, Steve!”
Dad made a noise that might have been concerned and sympathetic. Then he said, “Foolish to waste all that emotional energy on an animal!”
“They’re all she has!”
“Why doesn’t she go to the Senior Center, or spend time with the family?”
“Shh, Steve!”
“Well, it’s silly!”
“Yes, I know. I thought I’d send Kris to spend the night with her.”
Their footsteps were starting to leave the room. I closed my door sharply and headed downstairs.
Spend the night?
Normally I love to, because face it, Aunt Mil is my best friend. We drink a lot of tea and eat cookies, crackers and cheese, or popcorn. We have rational conversations or find a Leslie Howard movie on late, late TV. We make laps for the cats.
She still sat on the couch, apparently watching the news. I sat, too, facing halfway between her and the TV, ready to be there if she spoke.
She neither spoke nor looked. She kept her straight, unwinking gaze on the television set, even through commercials. By not one gesture did she acknowledge our special kinship.
I looked down at my empty lap. I wish I had a cat. We have no animals in our house, except a pair of goldfish that serve a decorative function. That’s why our house is so boring.
I think people need animals, and I have some theories why. The middle part of our brain, the one that handles emotions, is the same structure shared by all mammals; we’ve just added something more. Therefore I think we understand all mammals—or would if we would allow ourselves. To see an animal is to see an inner part of us, before it was hidden and hampered by our intellect. Little kids love animals, and fairy tales are full of them. Also, they’re more beautiful than us. When you consider all this, and you consider how boring this house is, with only people and goldfish, then you have to consider that my father is wrong.
Wrong or not, he now came brisk and hearty into the room and went to the bar to mix himself a drink. While he did, he talked cheerfully to Aunt Mil about a wonderful seventy-year-old man he’d met last week, who went to the Senior Center every day and had a tremendous lot of fun playing Bingo. The corner of Aunt Mil’s mouth compressed in a bitter smile. She asked him to mix her a drink, too, and he did, looking surprised.
It was a clear, cold gin and tonic. Watching the thirsty way she gulped it, I was reminded that alcohol is a drug. Aunt Mil doesn’t take it often. “I’m hoarding the few brain cells I have left to me,” she likes to say. She also says that alcohol is a depressant, so why she was drinking it now, I didn’t know.
When we’d watched the newscast right through to sports and weather, it was time to eat. Over supper, we heard what Greg and Amy did in school—again. We heard a little of what Mum did in school, where she teaches the morning kindergarten class. We heard a lot about what Dad did in school, where he teaches high-school chemistry. I have to take his class next year, and frankly I don’t look forward to it.
We heard nothing of Aunt Mil’s cat, companion of fifteen years, dying in her lap that very afternoon.
Aunt Mil had a poor appetite. Mum kept coaxing her to eat, as if that would solve something. Dad tried to draw her out on subjects like Motivating Students in the Sciences, and The Graying of America. She made him short answers which ended with periods. She had great, if searing, things to think about, and all this chatter kept her from them.
Supper was done. Dishes were washed. Over coffee, after a decent interval, Aunt Mil asked to go home.
Mum fluttered and protested, clearly showing that she thought it a morbid impulse. “At least take Kris,” she said. “You shouldn’t be alone.”
Aunt Mil’s eyes swung to look at me. They were tired but personal. They saw me, not a commodity to ward off loneliness.
“Does Kris want to come?”
I could only nod. I did and I didn’t. She nodded too. She did and didn’t want to have me.
I packed nightgown, toothbrush, and the book I was reading—The Ring of Solomon by Konrad Lorenz—in a shopping bag. I also packed homework, because it would look good, and I might even do some. We drove to Aunt Mil’s dark house.
Mum shone the headlights up the walk as Aunt Mil went ahead to turn on the yard light. As soon as she was out of the car, Mum said, “Thank you for doing this, Kris.”
“Mm.” I was doing it for Aunt Mil, not for Mum. I wasn’t all that willing.
“I worry about her, living all alone. It must be hard to stay rational.”
“Mm.”
“We’ll be at the hockey finals in White River tomorrow morning, but we should be back by one. Call when you want a ride home.”
“I might walk,” I said. The yard light came on, and I got out of the car. “’Night, Mum.”
As I closed the door I remembered for some reason the time when I would never say good night or goodbye to Mum and Dad. It was always, “See you in the morning,” and I thought if I didn’t say it, I might not see them. They might stop breathing in the night, or go away. If I ever forgot, I would have to trek down to the bathroom, blinking and pretending to have been asleep, in order to complete the ritual. They had to hear me too. It was a pact.
I opened the car door again, as I thought it hadn’t closed right, and before slamming it I said, “See you tomorrow.”
When I got inside, Aunt Mil was no longer in the kitchen. She stood in the bedroom doorway with her coat on, looking in. That must be where she laid him, on her bed or on the chair.
I went up to the guest room, carefully stepping on the carpeted middles of the stairs. The door squeaked, so I slid through the opening as soon as it was wide enough and left it open. I put my bag softly on the table and sat on the bed, not jouncing the springs.
It was the guest room, but the books in the case were mine; scroungings from secondhand bookstores, and more expensive ones, gifts from Aunt Mil. The theme—animal behavior; the relation between human and animal, the animal in human, and the human in animal. Serious books and silly books, side by side in rows. My father doesn’t know about them, and he won’t, until someday he’ll see them all gathered in my college room, and he’ll ask if I’ve picked my major.
Aunt Mil’s guest room, then, is really my room, where I may be truly alone, free of questions at the door and tsking from the other side of the wall, where I may do my real studying and not just my homework. But tonight the silence came in the open door, possessing, making the place as strange as a motel room. I sat still and listened.
After a while I heard Aunt Mil’s closet door open and shut. Nothing more. Half an hour went by on the bedside alarm clock. I thought, I’m not here just to sit in my room. So I went down again, treading in the middle of the stairs. To Aunt Mil’s room.
She was bending over the bed in her straight way, folding only at the hips and tucking a very old plaid bathrobe around something small: Puttins. So I had touched his fur for the last time.
She looked up as I came in, meeting my eyes honestly. Her eyes said to mine, I have to do this by myself. You understand. Then she said, “Kris, you could help me. Will you go out to the porch and find a box?”
I could see why she wouldn’t want to do that. On the porch were boxes that presents and groceries had come in, waiting to take presents out or to transport dug-up plants or books. They said WHISKEY on the sides, or VERMONT CHEESE, or TOMATOES. Which would be a suitable coffin for a good old cat?
The cheese box seemed the right size. It said VERMONT CHEESE on all four sides and the top. I thought of covering it with brown paper so Aunt Mil wouldn’t have to see, but that would take ages.
She didn’t seem to notice. She opened the box on the bed, then tenderly lifted old Putts in the bathrobe and laid him in it. For a second I saw a puff of fur and knew it as one of the long tufts of his pantaloons. Then Aunt Mil closed the box with quiet, final hands and picked it up. She looked around for a spot to put it, seeming almost helpless, and set it down at last on the bureau.
Now, for the first time I spotted Robert, lying between the pillows of the double bed. He was curled up as if asleep, but his eyes were open, clear and yellow, watching us. He looked like a wild animal. Usually when I look at an animal, I think of the similarities between us, but then I was reminded of the differences.
Meanwhile, Aunt Mil stood looking at the box, her mouth stretched long, like the beginning of crying and like a smile. When she felt me looking, though, her face softened. She said, “How about a cup of tea?”
She made Earl Grey tea, handling all the implements as if they were heavy. She paused often in the midst of doing things, looking down at her hands. Then she would push on.
While the tea steeped she got a tray and set out the cups, cream, and honey. No gingersnaps. When the color was right, she dumped the tea leaves into the bag beneath the sink, for the compost pile. She rinsed the basket, put it in the drainer, and took the tray into the living room.
The living room was where her husband died, so long ago that most people think of her as an old maid. Now Putts had died there, and I wondered what she thought of that. Maybe it should be called the dying room.
I took my usual chair, and she took hers. At this point Robert and old Putts would generally arrive, select laps, and inspect the viands. I watched nervously for Robert; it would be bad if he came in and chose me, leaving Aunt Mil’s lap empty. But for whatever reason, Robert stayed where he was between the pillows of the double bed.
Aunt Mil poured the fragrant tea. We added our milk and honey, with the silence gathering thickly around us. Aunt Mil stared straight ahead, sipping slowly. One good thing: I could see the tea was a satisfaction to her.
In the absolute stillness I could tell by the change in her breathing that she was about to speak. Was it a speaking that would have come earlier, if I hadn’t panicked and called for Mum?
“He came to get me, Kris,” she said at last. She gave me a proud look. “He knew—I believe he knew—and he came for me.” Her mouth twisted in a terrifying expression, a smile of grief and great love. “That’s not a bad last gift, is it?”
Tears had started to pour again. She reached for the tissues. Muffled in one, she said, “Sorry, Kris. If this is too much for you, go home. It’s all right.”
Yes, I wanted to go home. I was covered with guilt, to see Aunt Mil consider me in the midst of her pain. But I shook my head, which she didn’t see, and sipped my perfumed tea, hoping it might warm and loosen the cold, tight spot within. I knew I must respond, before this was over, or nothing would ever be the same.
Then I heard my voice ask, “What was it like?” and I could have slain myself.
Aunt Mil looked up, as startled as I, and after a moment gave a slow, considering nod. “Yes,” she said. “It was peaceful, and … terrible. He curled on my lap and seemed to sleep. Then I saw he wasn’t breathing. I thought he’d already died, but his ribs moved again, after a while … a harsh breath. I thought it was the last, but it went on. The breaths were so far apart that each one startled me. After a while, no more came. That’s all.”
I was trembling and couldn’t stop. I got up and poured another cup of tea, drank it straight down, hot and plain. Aunt Mil watched me.
“Brandy’s the thing for us,” she said. “You know where it is, Kris, in the cupboard by the telephone. Get two shot glasses.”
The brandy bottle has always been there, going down by slow inches over the years. The shot glasses are most often used as vases for tiny flowers; johnny-jump-ups, or forget-me-nots. I set them on the tray, and Aunt Mil poured them full.
“Alcohol’s a depressant,” I said.
“It warms you.” Aunt Mil raised the glass to eye level, turning it a little in the light. “Let’s drink to … the Old Boy, wherever he is.”
She drained the glass. They were big, man-sized shot glasses that used to belong to her husband, Kenny. I sipped and felt the brandy burn a thin trail down my esophagus. I waited, half expecting Aunt Mil to hurl the glass; not into the fireplace, for there is none. The wall? The TV set? No, her hand clenched around it, as if she would crush it in her fist.
“You don’t get in practice, Kris,” she said. “I used to think you would. I thought that making it through one death would prepare you for the next. It doesn’t. They just pile up.”
Oh?
She poured herself another shot of brandy and drank it down. I began to feel alarmed.
“Death is part of life. That’s what people say, to sound wise. But what does that do for me, Kris? How does that give me back my old cat, who loved me? Hmm?”
Nothing can do that, I could have said, but that would only be sounding wise. I sipped my brandy and looked, my eyes smarting from the fumes, at Aunt Mil’s angry, bleak face.
“You never cried when Gram died. That’s what Mum says, anyway.…”
“I didn’t. She knew what she was doing.”
She knew what she was doing? In Gram I remember a person softer than Aunt Mil, sweeter, yet much more distant. Like Mum, she hid herself deep in a cushiony layer of domesticity. She was a diabetic; I forget how she died.
“What do you mean?”
She took a moment to reply. “She’d been sick long enough to come to terms with it. I believe she did—I did. I thought she was lucky. She was spared a lot of suffering.”
“And—” But I lacked the courage to ask my question. Instead, I poured out a cup of tea. Last one, time to make another pot.