Jacob Have I Loved

“Maybe it ran out,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Maybe. It was a lot of money.” He suddenly looked at us both, changing his tone abruptly. “Look,” he said, “don’t say anything about any money. If she’d have wanted anyone else to know about it, she would have told them. I’m not even supposed to know. Just my mother.”

Call and I nodded solemnly. Real intrigue was far more delicious than the pretend kind. The fact that there might be money hidden convinced me beyond a doubt that the Ladies’ Society must not take over the housecleaning.

But the distasteful problem of the cats remained. The Captain made both me and Call sit down in his clean, refurbished living room. He served me tea and Call some of his precious tinned milk, and then, very gently, he tried to explain to us what he believed had to be done.

“The only way to resolve the problem of the cats,” he said, “is to dispose of them humanely.”

Either I was a little slow or the language was too elegant, because I was nodding my head in respectful agreement when, suddenly, it hit me what he meant.

“You mean shoot them?”

“No. I think that would be hard to do. Besides it would make a mess and bring the neighbors running. I think the best method—”

“Kill them? You mean kill them all?”

“They’re almost starving now, Sara Louise. They’ll die slowly with no one to care for them.”

“I’ll take care of them,” I said fiercely. “I’ll feed them until Auntie Braxton gets back.” Even as I heard myself say it, the words hacked at my stomach. All my crab money, my boarding school money—to feed a pack of yowling, stinking cats. I hated cats.

“Sara Louise,” the Captain said kindly, “even if you had the money to feed them, we can’t leave them in the house. They’re a health hazard.”

“A person’s got the right to choose their own hazards.”

“Maybe so. But not when it’s getting to be a problem for the whole community.”

“Thou shalt not kill!” I said stubbornly, remembering at the same time that only the day before I had been rejoicing that not one word of the blasted Bible applied to cats. He was gracious enough not to remind me.

“What are you fixing to do with ’em, Captain?” Call asked, his voice cracking in the middle of his question.

The Captain sighed, polishing his mug with the back of his thumb. Without lifting his eyes, he said softly, “Take them couple miles out and leave them.”

“Drown them?” I was getting hysterical. “Just take them out and throw them in?”

“I don’t like the idea, either,” he said.

“We could take them to the mainland,” I said. “They have places there like orphanages for animals. I read about it in the Sun.”

“The SPCA,” he said. “Yes, in Baltimore—or Washington. But even there, they’d just have to put these creatures to sleep.”

“Put them to sleep?”

“Kill them as gently as possible,” he explained. “Even there they can’t take care of everyone’s unwanted cats on and on.”

I tried not to believe him. How could anything that called itself the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” engage in wholesale murder? But even if I was right, Baltimore and Washington were too far away to do Auntie Braxton’s cats any good.

“I’ll borrow a boat,” he said. “One that will get us out fast. You two round up the cats.” He started out the door and up the path. In a moment he was back. “There’s three gunnysacks on the back porch,” he said. “You’ll need something to put the cats in.” Then he was gone again.

Call got off the bench. “C’mon,” he said. “We can’t catch neither cat sitting here on our bottoms all day.”

I shuddered and got up reluctantly. It would be better not to think, I told myself. If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought? Thus, the catching of the cats became a sport with no consequences. We took turns, one holding the bag while the other dodged about the furniture and up the stairs in pursuit. They were amazingly lively despite their half-starved appearance, and once seiz

ed and thrown into the sack, they went after one another with ungodly shrieks. Five were in the first bag—they proved to be the hardest to get—and the bag was tied tightly with cord I found in the kitchen drawer.

By the second bag, I had become more wily. In addition to the cord, I had found some cans of tuna and sardines in the kitchen. I divided a can of sardines between the two remaining gunnysacks and then smeared the oil on my hands. I risked being eaten alive, but it worked. I lured those fool cats right to me and into those infernal sacks. We got them all, all that is but the orange tom, which was nowhere in the house. Neither Call nor I had the heart to track him down. Besides, sixteen snarling cats were more than enough.

I sneaked down to our house and got the wagon. Very gingerly we loaded the live sacks onto it. We were already scratched and bitten enough. Those claws could reach through the burlap as though it weren’t there. Once one of the sacks writhed and wiggled its way off the wagon and into the street, but we got it back on and down the path to the Captain’s dock. He sat there waiting for us in a skiff with an outboard. He was wearing a black tie and his old blue seaman’s suit. I had the feeling he was dressed for a funeral.