RSS 2.0 FeedWhite Lie
“Andrew, I’ve got something to tell you,” my mother said. She stroked the gold locket around her neck. I waited. “Don’t expect to see Tabitha the next time you’re over at Grandpa’s house.”
“Why not?”
“She passed away.” I tried to look surprised but I already knew.
Tabitha was my grandfather’s old cat, an obese red tabby he’d picked up as a stray. She was scraggly and sick when he found her lying by the side of the road. The upper and lower portions of her left eyelids had grown together and fused over an empty eye socket. Not sure he would keep her, he referred to her as “the tabby.” She had a gentle disposition and, as she healed, my grandfather grew increasingly fond of her. One day my grandmother dryly referred to her as Queen Tabitha, and the name stuck.
We lived in a small bungalow out past the edge of town on a narrow road off the state highway. My grandparents lived a couple hundred yards away, back off the road in an old farmhouse. The property had been an active strawberry farm when my grandfather was a boy. He had moved back in after his parents died even though he worked in town as an insurance agent. I asked my mother once why we didn’t live in town like the rest of my school friends. “We’re just simple people, Andrew,” she replied.
It could be lonely growing up out there but there were advantages, too. There were wide open spaces to run, dense woods to explore. There was a slow moving brook out back where I would hunt for tadpoles. I’d trap them in a jar and stare at them through the glass until I finally got bored and set them free. Sometimes Tabitha would tag along and watch silently from a distance, her amber eye blinking in the sun.
My grandfather built me a tree house at the edge of the woods. I was his helper. He patiently guided me as I cut a two-by-four with a hand saw, the blade bowing and vibrating as I struggled to drag the teeth back and forth across the wood. He showed me how to properly countersink a screw. When the house was done, he rigged up a doorbell at the bottom of the tree and wired it so that it rang on top.
My grandfather was a man of few words. I loved following him around while he did his chores. That was what I had hoped to do the previous afternoon when I wandered over to his place. As I got closer I could hear my grandmother yelling. Down on all fours, I crept forward and crouched beside the front porch.
“You must do something about that animal, Harold. I just can’t abide her any longer.” Although we were simple people, my grandmother used big words and spoke in a very formal manner. “She’s grown too old. She urinates on the floors, slavers all over the cushions on my sofa. And her breath…what a foul, fetid odor.”
“What do you want me to do with her, Mary?”
“That’s none of my concern. The animal belongs to you, after all. Take her to the SPCA. I don’t know. Just make certain that she is not in this house come tomorrow.”
“What about Andrew?”
“What about him?”
“The boy loves that cat.”
“He’ll get over it. He’s young, not old and sentimental like you.”
A few minutes later the front screen door creaked open. I slid down to the ground between the porch and a row of bushes. When I poked my head up, I could see my grandfather slowly trudging toward the small outbuilding where he kept his workshop, Tabitha tucked under his arm. I sat in the shade hiding until I was sure it was safe, then I got up as quietly as I could and walked over to the workshop. It was a small square building with a tar paper roof, grey wood showing where the paint had begun to blister and peel off the clapboards. Although the exterior was worn, the interior was meticulously kept.
I looked in the window at the tools hanging neatly on pegboard, coffee cans full of screws and nails and bolts carefully organized by size, the big table saw under the fluorescent light in the middle of the room. My grandfather was nowhere in sight, so I pulled open the door and went inside. Everything looked normal. Then I noticed his old hunting knife resting on a piece of white rag; the blade was covered with blood.
Back outside I heard scraping sounds and a metallic ping coming from behind the building. When I went to investigate, I found my grandfather shoveling dirt back into a freshly dug hole. If he saw me, he didn’t let on. I watched him push shovel after shovel of dirt back into the hole, occasionally stopping to knock clumps of soil off the blade with the tip of his work boot. He was sweating, and his breathing seemed labored. When I called out to him, he looked over at me briefly. His eyes seemed old. He grimaced, shook his head and went back to work without saying a word.
When the phone rang after dinner, I tiptoed out of my bedroom into the hallway to listen. It was my grandmother.
“Oh, my,” my mother said softly. I could picture her lifting her hand to her face and covering her mouth. “How sad. What happened?” There was a long silence, then I heard her gasp.
“He did what? Why? Wasn’t there anything else he could have done?” I wondered if my grandmother had told her the whole truth, admitted that she had banished Tabitha from the house. “Yes, of course I’ll tell Andrew. But I’ll spare him the gory details.”
My mother smiled at me now. “I know how much you loved Tabitha. You’ll miss her I’m sure, but at least she didn’t suffer.”
“She didn’t?”
“No…Grandma found her lying on the floor like she was resting. She must have died in her sleep.” She kissed me softly on my forehead and rubbed her hand through my hair. “Poor Tabitha.”
At first I wanted to tell her – about grandmother forcing him to do it; about the bloody knife; about how sad my grandfather looked as he made Tabitha’s grave. And then I was angry –angry at my grandmother; angry at my grandfather for not standing up to her, for killing an innocent cat; angry at my mother for lying to me, even though it was only a white lie intended to comfort me. Tears rolled down my cheeks. My mother tried to wipe them with her handkerchief but I turned away. I said nothing. Simple people.
Ralph Uttaro is an attorney and real estate developer who lives with his wife Pamela outside of Rochester, New York. Writing was his first love, but his father convinced him that it was wiser to earn a decent living. He enjoys the craft of writing, choosing the perfect words and phrases to paint a portrait of a character or a snapshot of a place in time.