Black Cat (Gemini 2)

Prologue

Our Family History

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I have never doubted that the day my daddy

died my mother knew about it long before his construction business partner. Mr. Calhoun, came to our house with the dreadful news. Earlier that day she had swooned and had remained unconscious long enough to terrify my brother. Noble, and me. Afterward, she would tell me that the spirit of a cat as black as Death itself had passed right through her heart.

When she spoke about these things, her eyes were wide with amazement, an amazement that nearly kept my heart from beating. I know I was holding my breath while she talked. My chest wanted to explode, but I didn't dare take a breath and risk interrupting her.

"I saw it come out of a shadow in the corner of the ceiling where it had nested in anxious anticipation. I swiped at it when it descended and came at me, but my hand didn't push it aside, and in seconds it had done its dark deed." she said. and then her eyes grew small and she told me of a similar event her

grandmother had experienced on the occasion of her grandmother's brother's accidental death. He had fallen from a horse and hit his head on a boulder.

"The sound of a horse's hooves pounded through her head, and when she looked up, a black cat leaped through the air, its paws set to claw right through her chest. She actually fainted on the spot, and when she woke up, the first words out of her mouth were 'Warren is gone.' No one had found his body yet, but everyone knew someone soon would," Mama added in a deep whisper, the sort of whisper that passes through your heart like the black cat she described.

Our family history on my mother's side was rife with example after example of someone being able to see the future, sense an upcoming tragic event, or read signs in nature that foretold someone's sickness or death. It was a rift of prophecy she believed would be handed down through her to Noble and me, but most likely to Noble. Why she believed that so strongly. I do not know, but I do know it was the main reason why he could never be permitted to die.

Often at night after Baby Celeste was born. Mama would sit in Grandpa Jordan's old rocker with her cradled in her arms and rock her to sleep while she told me these family stories, I felt as if she were wiping away the cobwebs and dusting off the past that lingered in every nook and cranny, under every shadow. She would look out at the darkness that draped our house like a heavy satin veil, and she would talk about that dreadful day when my daddy died and all the days of her past with such vivid recollection, as if she were able to look back through a microscope for time seeing the smallest of details. She would speak not to me as much as to herself and to the spirits that she said sat with us, uncles. aunts, and cousins, all joining us to hold what now seemed to me to have been an eternal wake.

There was indeed so much to mourn.

I didn't have to have the gift of prophecy to know that there was so much more yet to come before that dark veil would be lifted from our home and our lives.

I

Noble's Pleas

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"Noble," Mama called with urgency resonating

in her voice. I turned to see her waving at me from the front steps of the porch. Her hazel brown, shoulder-length hair fell straight alongside her cheeks. She had a radish-red bandanna tied across her forehead, which she said would ward off recent curses whenever they were thrown in her direction, so I knew something had spooked her today.

She was standing there with Baby Celeste beside her, which was quite unusual. Mama never brought her out during the daytime for fear someone, even from the distance in a passing car, might see her and learn that she existed. This secrecy had existed from the moment Baby Celeste had been born, a little more than two and a half years ago.

Today was one of those summer days in July when clouds seemed hinged to the horizon, not a single sliver of one interfering with the orange disk of sun sliding gracefully over the icy blue toward the mountains in the west. I was on my hands and knees pruning weeds in the herb garden. The redolent aroma of rich, wet soil filled my nostrils. Worms, lubricated and shiny from the night's rain, slipped through my muddied fingers. A wisp of a breeze teased me with a promise of some relief that had yet to be fulfilled. I was already quite tan, the farmer's tan. Daddy used to call it, because my arms were dark up to the edges of my sleeves and my neck down to my collar. It was evident only when I was naked.

Mama took another step toward me and away from the house to call again. Through the hot, undulating air that lay between us, the house seemed to shimmer and swell up around her and Baby Celeste as if it were determined to block them from the view passengers in cars along the highway would have. The house would always protect them, protect us. Mama believed that. She believed it was as sacred as a church.

Anyone looking at the house might readily accept that it held some special powers. It was large and unique in this area of upstate New York, an eclectic Queen Anne with a steeply hipped roof, two lower cross gables, and a turret at the west corner of the front facade. The turret room was a fairly good size round room with two windows that faced the front. Mama told me that her grandfather had often used the room as a personal retreat. He would spend hours and hours alone in it, reading or simply smoking his pipe and staring out at the mountains. Perhaps because of that story or simply because the room was so private and hidden at the top of the small stairway that led up to it. I used it as a retreat, a secret place, as well.

Sometimes at night after Baby Celeste was asleep and Mama was distracted. I was able to sneak up to the turret room. where Mama had put all our mirrors except the ones on the bathroom walls above the sinks. There were many antiques and boxes of very old things stored there. She put the mirrors there because she said our good family spirits avoided them, especially full-length mirrors like the gildedframed oval one with a rose carved at the top.

"Despite the eternal joy they share in the other world, they do not like to be reminded that they are out of their bodies, that their bodies are long decayed into dust. What they see of themselves is more like an image captured in a wisp of twirling smoke," she explained.