Joe Hill - Horns

“And I care…why?” Lee asked.

“Because it’s the same with you,” she said, opening her great shining eyes and turning her head to stare at him. Her smile widened to show what teeth remained, small and yellow and uneven, and she started to laugh. “You ought to ask for your money back. You got gypped. You’re just packaging. Just a good-looking box with nothing in it.” Her laughter was harsh and broken and gasping.

“Stop laughing at me,” Lee said, which made his mother laugh more, and she didn’t stop until Lee gave her a double dose of morphine. Then he went into the kitchen and drank a Bloody Mary with a lot of pepper, his hand shaking as he held the glass.

The urge was strong in Lee to pour his mother a scalding mug of salt water and make her drink the whole thing. Drown her with it.

Instead, though, he let her be; if anything, he looked after her with particular care for a week, running the fan all day, changing her sheets regularly, keeping fresh flowers in the room and the TV on. He was especially careful to administer the morphine on schedule, didn’t want her going lucid again when the nurse was in the house. Telling tales out of school about her treatment when she was alone with her son. But his anxieties were misplaced; his mother was never clear in the head again.

HE REMEMBERED THE FENCE. He did not remember much about the two years they lived in West Bucksport, Maine-did not, for example, even remember why they moved there, a place at the ass end of nowhere, a small town where his parents knew no one. He did not recall why they had returned to Gideon. But he remembered the fence, and the feral tom that came from the corn, and the night he stopped the moon from falling out of the sky.

The tom came out of the corn at dusk. The second or third time it appeared in their backyard, crying softly, Lee’s mother went outside to greet it. She had a tin of sardines, and she put it on the ground and waited as the cat crept close. The tom set upon the sardines as if he had not eaten in days-and maybe he hadn’t-swallowing silver fish in a series of swift, jerky head motions. Then he twined smoothly between Kathy Tourneau’s ankles, purring in a satisfied sort of way. It was a somehow rusty-sounding purr, as if the cat were out of practice being happy.

But when Lee’s mother bent to scratch behind his ears, the tom slashed the back of her hand, laying the flesh open in long red lines. She shrieked and kicked him, and he ran, turning over the sardine tin in his haste to get away.

She wore a white bandage on her hand for a week and scarred badly. She carried her marks from the run-in with the tom all the rest of her life. The next time the cat came out of the corn, yowling for attention, she threw a frying pan at it, and it vanished back into the rows.

There were a dozen rows behind the Bucksport house, an acre of low, ratty corn. His parents hadn’t planted it and did nothing to tend it. They weren’t farmers, weren’t even inclined to garden. Lee’s mother picked some in August, tried to steam a few ears, but none of them could eat it. It was tasteless, chewy, and hard. Lee’s father laughed and said it was corn for pigs.

By October the stalks were dried out and brown and dead, a lot of them broken and tilting. Lee loved them, loved the aromatic scent of them on the cold fall air, loved to sneak through the narrow lanes between the rows, with the leaves rasping dryly around him. Years later he remembered loving them, even if he couldn’t exactly recall how that love felt. For the adult Lee Tourneau, trying to remember his enthusiasm for the corn was a little like trying to get full on the memory of a good meal.

Where the tom spent the balance of his day was unknown. He didn’t belong to the neighbors. He didn’t belong to anyone. Lee’s mother said he was feral. She said the word “feral” in the same spitting, ugly tone she used to refer to The Winterhaus, the bar Lee’s father stopped at every night for a drink (or two, or three) on his way home from work.

The tomcat’s ribs were visible in his sides, and his black fur was missing in hunks, to show obscene patches of pink, scabby skin, and his furry balls were as big as shooter marbles, so big they jostled back and forth between his hind legs when he walked. One eye was green, the other white, giving him a look of partial blindness. Lee’s mother instructed her only son to stay away from the creature, not to pet him under any circumstances, and not to trust him.

“He won’t learn to like you,” she said. “He’s past the point where he can learn to feel for people. He’s not interested in you or anyone, and never will be. He only turns up hoping we’ll put something out for him, and if we don’t feed him, he’ll stop coming around.”

But he didn’t stop. Every night, when the sun went down but the clouds were still lit with its glow, the tomcat returned to cry in their backyard.

Lee went looking for him sometimes, as soon as he got home from school. He wondered how the tom spent his day, where he went and where he came from. Lee would climb onto the fence and walk the ties, peering into the corn for the cat.

He could only stay on the fence until his mother spotted him and yelled for him to get down. It was a split-tie fence, splintery wooden logs slotted into leaning posts, which enclosed the entire backyard, corn and all. The top rail was high off the ground, as high as Lee’s head, and the logs shook as he walked across them. His mother said the wood had dry rot, that one of the ties would shatter underfoot, and then it would be a trip to the hospital (his father would wave a dismissive hand in the air and say, “Whyn’t you leave him alone and let him be a kid?”). But he couldn’t stay off it; no kid could’ve. He didn’t just climb on it or walk across it as if it were a balance beam, but sometimes he even ran across it, arms stuck out to either side, as if he were some gangly crane attempting to take off. It felt good, to run the fence, posts shaking underfoot and the blood pumping in him.

The tom went to work on Kathy Tourneau’s sanity. He would announce his arrival from the corn with a plaintive, off-key wail, a single harsh note that he sang over and over again, until Lee’s mother couldn’t stand it anymore and burst from the back door to throw something at him.

“For God’s sake, what do you want?” she screamed at the black tomcat one night. “You aren’t getting fed, so why don’t you go away?”

Lee didn’t say anything to his mother, but thought he knew why the cat reappeared every evening. His mother’s mistake was, she believed that the cat was crying for food. Lee, though, thought the tom was crying for the previous owners, for the people who lived in the house before them and who treated him the way he wanted to be treated. Lee imagined a freckly girl about his age, in overalls and with long, straight red hair, who would set out a bowl of cat food for the black cat and then sit at a safe distance to watch him eat without troubling him. Singing to him, maybe. His mother’s idea-that the cat had decided to torture them with incessant, shrill crying, just to see how much they could take-seemed an unlikely hypothesis to Lee.

He decided he would learn to be the tomcat’s friend, and one night he sat out to wait for him. He told his mother he didn’t want dinner, that he was full from the big bowl of cereal he ate when he got back from school, and could he just go outside for a while? She allowed he could, at least until his father got home, and then it was right up into his pajamas and bed. He did not mention he planned to meet the cat or that he had sardines for him.

It got dark fast in mid-October. It was not even six when he went outside, but the only light left in the sky was a line of hot pink over the fields on the far side of the road. While he waited, he sang to himself, a song that was popular on the radio that year. “Look at ’em go-o-o,” he whisper-sang, “look at ’em ki-i-ick.” A few stars were out. He tipped his head back and was surprised to see that one of these stars was moving, tracing a straight line across heaven. After a moment he realized that it had to be an airplane, or maybe a satellite. Or a UFO! What an idea. When he lowered his gaze, the tom was there.