Wild Things

Humans were diggers and buriers, the cat thought, like dogs.
The day the girl came, men were digging again in the woods below the house. The cat waited patiently on the rise, hoping a mole might be unearthed for his supper. Once the hole was dug, the long black car would slink like a rat snake up the drive, winding through the wildflowers and the man’s contraptions in the field, and men dressed black as crows would slide a long box from the back, shoulder it down the wooded hill, and plant it in the little garden of stones.
The cat had watched this doggy ritual before: first, long ago, as a kitten, when the old couple lived in the farmhouse. The old woman had left him saucers of milk on the porch, but the saucers stopped once the first box was buried. Later, the old man disappeared when the crows buried a second box beside the first. Then the man who lived in the house now had come, and the digging and burying stopped until last summer, when the crows came back and helped the man put a third box in the ground.
The cat turned to the sound of crunching gravel and watched the black car snake across the field. As before, dark-clad men wrestled a long box down the hill and sank it into the earth with ropes, then left the diggers to fill the hole like dogs burying an enormous bone.
Once they’d all gone, the cat crept down the hill, squeezed under the fence, and leapt onto the dirt mound. Overhead a redbird sang for a mate and a squirrel hurled itself from branch to branch in the canopy of trees. The cat breathed in the rare quiet.
The man-big, growling, a noise with dirt on it-had driven off before dawn. Years ago, when the man had arrived with his screaming machines and piles of metal clattering in the trailer behind his truck, the cat had fled to the woods. Now, older and slower, he found advantage in the man’s odd ways.
True, the man daily drowned the quiet, hammered and pounded in his shop, made fire and sparks, forged huge twisted creatures that chased their tails when the wind provoked them. He barked and swore as he worked, hurled his tools across the yard, went silent only when he slept, and that seldom.
But the man kept clear of the woods the cat loved, shunned the creek, cold and thirst-quenching, to the south, and left the high weeds where the cat hunted and hid when raccoons, hunters, or the wild boy trespassed on the land. Best of all, the man left the crawlspace under the house open, and the cat slept by the furnace in winter and lay in the cool earth there on hot summer days. But since the last moon the man and his helper had begun to fix, mow, and prune the place, and the cat sensed that his life was about to change.
He heard the roar of the man’s truck in the drive, and soon after, the rustle of leaves above him. He ducked behind a stone. A child-small and wild-haired with big, curious eyes-stood on the rise, haloed in a blaze of sun. She lingered, staring, but hearing the man call, she headed back across the field toward the house.
The cat followed her at a distance, keeping hidden in the weeds. She waved at the man on the farmhouse porch and startled a flock of goldfinches feeding atop the wildflower blooms. The birds rose skyward in a chittering burst, and her astonished gaze followed their flight. She took in the landscape as the cat would: the rising wind, gathering clouds, a change in the air. The outward signs that she noticed these things were subtle, but he caught them: a flare of nostril, the twitch of an ear, a slight shift of her wide eyes. She looked like a stray, alone in the world, as he was. He liked how she acknowledged the man but kept apart. How feline of her, he thought, how cat.
The man took himself sweating and panting into the house. Explosions of rapping, tapping, whirring, and buzzing poured from the open upstairs windows, irritating the day. The man crossed back and forth in front of the windows, huffing, puffing, and cursing, shouldering lengths of wood, as if he were felling a whole forest inside the house.
The girl called up: You okay, Uncle Henry? You want me to call 9-1-1? The man snapped back: I’m fine! This house is an ancient piece of junk! Hardly fit for a man, much less a child!
I could help you if you want. I know about fixing things.
Don’t be stupid, the man shouted, and went back to work.
The girl stomped into the field, ripping wildflowers off their roots with both fists, muttering: Stupid! Nearly twelve and still I got to deal with grown-ups too dumb to see I can do for myself! Did fine with a crazy mama and no daddy, and I don’t need him!
The cat took in her meaning through every pore and trailed her back across the field, drawn as a thirst to water. The wind was picking up, and her hair blew about her angry face. She stormed over the rise and down the hill into the woods, but once inside the little fence she grew still and solemn. She set one fistful of flowers on the mounded dirt and the other against a carved stone beside it.
Hey, Daddy, she told the stone. Sorry we never met. And to the fresh-dug earth she said: Bye, Mama. You got your wish.
The air was heavy and cool and smelled of rain. Winds tossed the treetops, thunder sounded, and lightning veined the sky. Unafraid, the girl roamed the open field and scowled at each of the man’s makings while the cat followed in secret. Near the house she stopped and lifted her nose, as though she caught his scent on the air. She stared straight at his hiding place, then turned suddenly and ran inside. The screen door slammed, and that instant it poured.