Лилиан Браун - The Cat Who Sang For The Birds

Concerning the new sign, Polly had questioned , whether it would be enough to discourage sightseers.

“If not, we’ll add ‘BEWARE OF VICIOUS ANIMALS,’” Qwilleran had told her. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll have to resort to a moat and drawbridge. It’s not that I’m being asocial; I simply don’t want strangers peering in the windows at the cats and getting ideas.”

-3-

Qwilleran, never an early riser by choice, now found himself routed out of bed at dawn when the birds convened for their morning singsong and the Siamese wanted to join them. Koko and Yum Yum would station themselves outside his bedroom door, the one yowling in an operatic baritone and the other uttering soprano shrieks until he got up and transported them to the gazebo. Yum Yum simply wanted to bat insects on the screens, but Koko was fascinated by the chorus of trills, chirrups, whistles, warbles, and twitters. The cacophony reminded Qwilleran of the Pickax high school band tuning up for Pomp and Circumstance.

Still, he would take coffee and doughnuts to the gazebo and marvel at the clarion sounds coming from feathered creatures half the size of his thumb. He used the time, also, for doodling ideas for the “Qwill Pen”

I column on a legal pad. He was working on a tribute to his tenth-grade teacher whose training in English composition had made his career possible. With a pencil he jotted notes:

Dear Mrs. Fish-eye, wherever you are … Great debt of gratitude long overdue… Your influence, precepts, and criticism… Something uncanny in your penetrating gaze… The arduous assignments that we all hated… And so on.

When he discussed the idea with Polly, she encouraged him, saying, “Remember the letter I received from a museum curator in New York? He thanked me for helping him with student assignments twenty years before, and for stimulating his appetite for research. I was thrilled!”

The highlights of Qwilleran’s life were his weekends with Polly Duncan, starting with Saturday night dinner.

She was a charming woman of his own

age, attractive in a classic way, and endowed with the qualities he admired: intellect, a gentle voice, a musical laugh, and literary interests that matched his own. Never before had he met anyone who knew, or cared, that it was Chesterfield who said: Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Polly lived in a condominium in Indian Village, a residential complex beautifully situated on the Ittibittiwassee River. When he picked her up on that Saturday evening in late May, her warm greeting was seconded by friendly nudges from Brotus, a dignified Siamese. Brutus had been Qwilleran’s enemy before having a name change. His disposition had been further improved by the advent of a little companion - same breed, opposite sex.

“Where’s Catta?” Qwilleran asked.

A tiny kitten, all ears and feet, struggled out from beneath a chest of drawers. “Be good kitties,” Polly said, stroking the husky male and hugging the featherweight female.

“Hail and farewell, good Brutus and gentle Catta!” Qwilleran declaimed with exaggerated respect.

On this evening they were having dinner at Onoosh’s Mediterranean Café. Driving downtown in the brown van, they discussed the cost of feeding wild birds… and the mud problem at the Art Center… and local efforts to eradicate illiteracy. Abruptly, as they reached the abandoned Buckshot mine, they were silent. They had passed it hundreds or even thousands of times, yet they always turned to look at the hushed scene posted as dangerous: the high chain-link fence, the evidence of a recent cave-in, and the ghostly shafthouse towering above the barren earth.

It was one often such monuments to Moose County’s affluent past - the delirious days before the economic collapse. Now nothing was left of the ten mines but legends and towers of weathered wood.

Polly said, “I wrote a sonnet to a shafthouse once, when I first moved here. I remember the first four lines, that’s all:

O silver temple to forgotten greed! How primitive, how stark, how deathly silent now, Where once a monster with a Golden Bough Upon the blood of shackled men did feed!

Qwilleran exclaimed, “Not bad! Not bad! Worthy of Milton!”

“Well, not quite,” she laughed, “but you have to admit there’s something poetic about the old wrecks. It’s not surprising that one of our local artists chose to specialize in painting shafthouses. People love Duff Campbell’s work.”

“Today,” he said, “I met the young woman who specializes in painting butterflies. She’s taken a studio at the Art Center.”

“I know her,” Polly said. “Her parents have the drugstore. She has a sweet personality and nice manners. Too bad she’s not prettier. Her chin is too pointed for the width of her brow.”

“She has fine eyes, though, and moves like a dancer.”

“Yes, she attended boarding school in Lockmaster, where they stress ballet and equestrian arts. Whenever you see a straight spine and sleek head in Moose County, you’re looking at a product of the Lockmaster Academy… Was there any other excitement at the Art Center today? I suppose they were preparing frantically for the grand opening.”

“Your favorite county commissioner was having his portrait painted in one of the studios.”

“Oh, no! Not Chester Ramsbottom!” Polly groaned. “Do you realize he automatically opposes any measure designed to benefit libraries, education, and the arts? Your paper called him a knee-jerk bottom-liner-not the terminology I would have used, but true! Will you explain to me why the voters keep reelecting him?”

“He serves the best barbecue in the county, they say, and the conscience of the Moose County voter is in his belly.”

“I suppose he’ll hang the portrait in his restaurant,” she said, “and contrive some devious way to bill the taxpayers for it.”

Qwilleran said, “I’ve heard that every customer celebrating a birthday in Chet’s Bar gets a cream pie in the face - free!”

“Disgusting!” she muttered. Onoosh’s Café in Stables Row was the first ethnic restaurant to open in Pickax and environs. The mood was set by the scent of rare spices, the twang of exotic music in the background, the soft light from hanging lanterns shaded with beaded fringe, and the flicker of candles reflected in hammered brass tables. This, plus the Mediterranean menu, was heady fare for Pickax tastes, but the cafe was attracting a steadily growing clientele.

The servers, costumed in pantaloons and embroidered vests, were students from Moose County Community College, and the bartender was a sandy-haired, freckle-faced son of the American heartland, but Onoosh was authentic. She could be glimpsed through the kitchen pass-through: olive-skinned, dark-haired, sultry-eyed, and wearing a chefs floppy white hat.

As Qwilleran and Polly started dipping hummus with morsels of pita, she asked, “Did you cover the museum reception for Roger this afternoon? How was it?”

“In a word, boring,” he said. “The volunteers have spent three years cataloguing the collection, and they deserve credit, but all we saw was a storage barn filled’ with boxes, crates, cabinets, and plastic-shrouded furniture. For five dollars, tax-deductible, you can get a printout of the inventory. For another five you can get your grandmother’s rusty eggbeater out of the vault and take a picture of it. The invited guests took one look at the situation and headed for the refreshment table.” Polly said, “The new manager seems to be a good organizer but lacking in imagination.”

“The museum has too much computer and not enough Iris Cobb. Even the cookies were boring. There’s no way, Polly, that I can cover this non-event with any journalistic integrity.”