Ширли Мерфи - Tomcat

Tomcat

Shirley Rousseau Murphy

The disappearance of Rebecca Duncan, the week before her wedding, shook the town of Greeley like a tornado shakes a Georgia cabin, right down to its pinnings. Long before the Greeley paper was on the street, everyone knew that Rebecca had never come home from work on Thursday night, the word traveling door-to-door, phone-to-phone, and by the simple osmosis known only to the residents of a small and clannish community. A few old women passed along the word with a laugh and a wink, implying that Rebecca had run off on a lark before settling down to married life, the old gossips clucking and scowling fit to be tied. Well, Rebecca did have plenty of beaux before she got engaged to Tommie Glenn. But Rebecca's friends knew she wasn't out on some wild fling, not Rebecca Duncan, who went to church of a Sunday and was kind to old folks and babies and always ready to help a person; she wouldn't just up and walk away, not when her and Tommie was so happy. Tommie'd already rented a little house, and Rebecca'd bought the goods for her wedding dress, that her aunt Belle was a-making up.

Rebecca was only twenty-three, same age as Florie Mae Harkin, too young for bad things to happen. Rebecca and Florie Mae, and Martha Bliss, had all went through school together. Rebecca disappeared the same week that Florie Mae and Martha was trying to trap that big ole tomcat up around Harkin's Feed and Garden. That animal was so big it looked like a bobcat, except it had a long, lashing tail. It was mean as a bobcat, but it weren't no wild animal, weren't a bit afraid of people. If it came in your yard it would glare at you and go right on stealing your baby chicks, pay you no mind at all until you taken a rock to it.

The last two people to see Rebecca the evening she disappeared—the last, so far as anyone knew— was the attorney she worked for, Daryl Spalding, and the client who was sitting in Daryl's waiting room that evening when Rebecca left work. Her ma was expecting her home early to help with her little niece's seventh birthday party, Rebecca was to pick up the cake, and she sure wouldn't miss little Patsy's party. A foolish waste of money, a store-bought cake, but Patsy's best friend had got one for her birthday, and Patsy was real set on the notion.

According to Daryl Spalding, when he stepped out of his inner office to take the client on back, Rebecca was picking up her purse to leave. He said goodnight to her and stood for a minute talking with the client in the waiting room, there by Rebecca's desk, idly watching through the front window as she cut across Main Street to her car. That was at 5:00 p.m. Her mother said Rebecca had planned to pick up the cake at the Corner Bakery before they closed at 5:30 and then go straight on home. Daryl said he saw her get in her car and drive off. He told the sheriff that he saw no one else in her car, and saw no other car pull out behind her as if to follow her white Grand Am. He'd gone on back to his office with Jimmie Shakes, who was having a heated property-line dispute with his neighbor, and that was the last, Spalding said, that he saw of Rebecca.

Her car was found three hours later in front of the Corner Bakery with the cake box inside, the icing melting down through the folds in the box onto the upholstery, the evening was that hot, a scorcher even for June. Her car wasn't locked. Rebecca's mother had waited at home for her, distracted from the party, which was in full swing around her as she grew increasingly worried. Sometime after seven, she called Rebecca's fiancé. He hadn't seen or talked with Rebecca. She'd called the Corner Bakery, but it was already closed. She called the bakery's owner at home, but there was no answer.

Tommie answered her second call from his car, where he was already driving around town looking for Rebecca. It was Tommie who found her car. He called the sheriff at once, then called Mrs. Duncan. They could hardly hear each other, for the shouting children that filled her house. Rebecca's car, its location, and the melting birthday cake were the only evidence the sheriff was able to procure that evening. Nothing in her car, or in her desk at work, or in her room at home, gave any indication of some destination or activity she might have wanted to keep secret. "Well," some wag said, "maybe she's went off trappin' cats with Martha Bliss—trappin' cats all night with the cat lady. Haw haw haw."

Most everyone in Greeley, one time or another, called Martha Bliss the cat lady, even if she was young and pretty, not the old hag that "cat lady" seemed to imply. With her long black hair and big blue eyes, Martha Bliss could melt a young buck right down to his boot tops. The studs around Greeley played up to Martha just like they did to Rebecca, but they laughed at Martha behind her back, her and her big city notions about caring for a bunch of cats.

Generally, folks in Greeley considered cats about as low on the scale as the crows that steal seeds from your corn rows, gobbling up the kernels right behind a fellow as he walks along the rows planting. Crows slipping out of the sky silent as death to eat up your garden plot afore it gets started. Well, the stray cats was just as pesky, to most folks' way of thinking—except the cats did do their share of mousing, you had to give 'em that.

Most of Greeley's cats wandered the rutted Main Street and home-places half wild, living in the bushes and fields or in the barn rafters, breeding mangy kittens all spring and summer. The chicken growers around Greeley valued them cats, though, to patrol their hundred-foot-long chicken houses. Be overrun with rats otherwise, rats killing and eating the young broilers; cats ate the rats, and the growers were glad to have 'em, cats as wild as coons or foxes. Only a few folk in Greeley, like Martha Bliss and Rebecca Duncan, and a few lonely old ladies, kept a cat indoors, right inside the house. But Martha's foolishness over cats went a sight farther.

Martha's big city talk about what she called controlling feral cats, and neutering them, she got those fancy notions the year she spent away from Greeley down in Atlanta with her Aunt Hazel—come home as full of citified ideas as a pig full of slop. Imagine castrating all the tomcats in Greeley Enough to make a donkey laugh. Martha wasn't that old, neither, to have growed so peculiar in her ways, her being the same age as Rebecca, and as Florie Mae her ownself. Them three girls graduated high school just two year before Grady Coulter, Grady with his red hair and those flirty green eyes; all the girls had a crush on Grady in school and a lot of them still did, of which Grady was well enough aware.

The Coulters was one of the first Irish families ever to settle in Greeley back before the War Between the States—called themselves Northern Irish. Most folks in Greeley was of Scotch descent, and some Cherokee blood mixed in. But you could bet your best hound pup that since that first Coulter arrived, back when Greeley was just a few log shacks and garden patches, ever' generation since, there'd been at least one redheaded Coulter eyeing the ladies, and more than eyeing them.

There was always redheaded children in Greeley, though in mixed company folk didn't talk much about where that red hair come from. Grady Coulter and his daddy and his granddaddy before him and on back—the young ladies, and some not so young, flocked 'round the Coulter boys thick as flies 'round the sorghum pot. There's stories a feller could tell, and more stories, about them Coulter boys. Granny Harkins knew all them tales. Granny likened Grady to a tomcat his ownself, the way he went a-ruttin' after the women. Though maybe even Grady wasn't as randy as that tomcat that agonized folk that spring, a hollerin' and wailin' up around Harkins' Feed and Garden. You could hear that tom caterwallin' all over Greeley as loud as a pack of coon-hounds. Cat was near as big as a coon-hound. Big, and mean enough to whip one of Luke Haber's fighting pit bulls that got loose, sent that bulldog home just whimperin' and bleedin'. That cat was so mean that when the neighborhood dogs around Harkins' Store saw it coming they'd run the other way.