Shirley Murphy: The Cat, the Devil, and Lee Fontana

From the time Lee could handle a horse well enough to be of help, he had worked the ranch beside his daddy. His older brother was no good around cattle, and his two older sisters, Nora and Jenny, helped in the kitchen and in the vegetable garden—their parents didn’t believe in girls working with the cattle. Lee worked the ranch, but every waking moment he dreamed of a more exciting life. Even that day leaning on the fence beside Dobbs, staring out at the prairie at what looked like a twist of smoke moving and approaching, the boy was even more alarmed by the old man’s fear than by that half-seen specter, by the shadow of a man where there was no living figure. Dobbs had watched the figure so intently it seemed almost like it was speaking to him. Dobbs’s cheeks were pale beneath the leathered tan and when, after a long while, the haunt vanished, his grandpappy had started as if waking from a dream. And had looked down at Lee, trying to know for sure if Lee had seen it, too.

Well, the five pastured horses and that old steer had sure seen it, they were spooked as hell; but for some reason, none of them had spun and taken off away from it, none of them ran, they just stood staring, twitching and dumb in their fear. That summer, more than sixty years ago, something had visited his grandpappy there at the home ranch. Lee never doubted that Russell Dobbs knew what it was, and that he had seen it before.

Lee had heard talk, back then, that Dobbs drew the devil to him like fire drawn to tinder, some said that Dobbs had made a bargain with Satan, but others claimed that Dobbs, having beat the devil in a wager, would never be shut of him. Whatever the truth, in the pasture that morning, Lee’s grandpappy had been not only afraid, but angry.

After the steer and the horses had settled down, had stopped fidgeting and staring and gone to grazing again, and after his grandpappy had turned away, that was when Lee, still shaken, had turned and seen the yellow cat standing in the door of the barn watching him—and watching the empty prairie beyond, the cat’s back humped, its yellow fur standing up stiff, its golden eyes blazing.

That yellow cat had been afraid of nothing. Lee had liked that tomcat that would kill a rat as big as itself and, fast as lightning, could kill a rattlesnake—the yellow tomcat that was a dead ringer for the McNeil prison cat, for the cat that had slept on Lee’s bunk last night keeping him company after his visitor had vanished, the ragged and battered creature he wished was here now, beside him, to ease his fear of that little blue-eyed man, to calm the chill that, like a finger of ice, seemed lodged in Lee’s very soul.

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But the big yellow cat was near. He lay curled up on the dusty mohair seat, as invisible as the air around him, unseen but impressing the faintest telltale indentation in the rough gray cloth of the seat cushion. Knowing Lee’s fear and rage, the tomcat purred for Lee, a subliminal song too faint for Fontana to consciously hear, but a sound the cat knew Lee would hear deep inside himself, a purr that matched the rhythm of the rocking train, a rough-throated mutter of comfort meant to ease Lee’s soul, a rumble generated not only by love but by the joy of life itself that, even in his ethereal form, the ghost cat carried with him.

But now Misto purred out of discomfort, too, out of concern for the old convict. A cat will purr not only when he’s happy, he purrs when he’s frightened or distressed. A mortal cat will deliberately purr to himself when he’s hurt or sick, a muttering song to hold on to, perhaps to calm himself, to make himself feel less alone. Now Misto purred for Lee, wanting to hold him steady, wanting to drive away the old cowboy’s sense of that little man’s glinting, blue-eyed presence, to rid Lee of the evil that kept returning seeking to terrify or to win him, grasping hungrily for Lee’s soul.

The blue-eyed man was gone now, the incubus was gone, his black leather briefcase gone, too, the satchel he’d left behind on the seat when he followed Lee out to the vestibule. The moment he’d vanished from the train, the briefcase had dissolved, poof, as completely as a mouse might disappear into the tomcat’s sharp-toothed gulp. But though the man and his briefcase were no more, an aura of evil still drifted within the passenger car, a miasma as caustic as smoke, touching the other passengers, too. A sleeping man woke and stared up the aisle and twisted to look behind him, studying his companions, scowling at the tightly closed doors at either end of the car. Up at the front, a woman laid down her book and half rose up, looking around nervously. Two women stood up from their seats staring all around, seeking the source of whatever had made them shiver. Two seats behind Lee, a toddler climbed into his mother’s lap howling out his own sense of fear. And beside Misto, Lee Fontana sat unmoving, still pale from the encounter in the vestibule, still edgy with the sense of the dark spirit that he knew wouldn’t leave him alone, with the devil’s curse that would continue to follow Dobbs’s descendants.

Lee knew only rough details of the plan Satan had laid out for Dobbs’s heirs those many years ago. He knew only what he’d heard rumored among his neighbors, back on the ranch. Gossip that, when Lee entered the room, would make folks go silent. Stories that the devil had set Dobbs up to destroy a certain gang of brothers, but that during the train robbery as the devil planned it, Dobbs had turned the tables on Satan. That Dobbs’s deception had so enraged the devil, he had sworn to destroy every Dobbs heir, to force or entice each Dobbs descendant to drive their own souls into the flames, into the pit of hell itself. To destroy the soul of each, but particularly that of Lee Fontana who had so idolized the old train robber. As far as Lee knew, he might be Dobbs’s last heir, all Satan’s vindication against Dobbs’s supposed double cross could be focused, now, on Lee.

As the train slowed for the station ahead, Misto increased his purr, singing to Lee to soothe him; and as they pulled out again with barely time to take on one lone passenger, the cat purred until Lee settled back and dozed again; and beside him the ghost cat closed his eyes, lulled by the train’s rocking rumble.

The ghost cat did not need to sleep, sleep was a healing gift left over from life, a skill comforting and warm but not needed in the spirit world—a talent the newly released ghost must reconstruct from memory, must willfully summon back until he established the habit once more, if he chose to do so, if he wanted that earthly comfort. The yellow ghost cat had so chosen and, drifting now toward sleep, he purred to comfort himself as well as to comfort Lee.

The tomcat didn’t know what woke him. He rose suddenly, startled, half asleep. He shook himself and quickly left Lee’s side, drifting out through the wall of the passenger car, leaving a warm dent in the seat behind him. For a moment he rode the wind giddily, lashing his tail as he peered back in through the dirty window watching Lee, the cat gliding with pleasure alongside the speeding train, and then he somersaulted up to the roof, banking on the wind as agile as a soaring gull.

Landing lightly atop the speeding train, he settled down, still invisible, looking about at the world speeding by him, at the green fields beneath the snowcapped mountains and, off to his right, miles of green pasture and the dull and gentle cows; and they had left the dark, cold waters of Puget Sound behind them. But now, in the cat’s thoughts, he saw not the land that swept past the train, he saw back into a time long past, before ever that vast inland sea had formed, when all the land was dry, he saw into eons past, as it had been, saw a higher and mountainous shore, densely wooded, skirting the Pacific, a raised land with no hint of the deep bowl that would later be carved there to hold the deep waters of Puget Sound. He saw the great glacier to the north, easing slowly down over vast reaches of time, slowly scooping the land away, a gigantic beast of ice slithering and creeping down from the great northern ranges.