The Cat's Job Read Free

across the drive,
tangled in oak branch, and spitting like a mad cat.
    Agnes changed her course, moving
away
from those wires. Electric
could run through ice, same as through wire. She knew that. Jakey'd
worked for the power company a couple years when the farm didn't
bring in enough to satisfy the bank. Jakey'd told her all about
wires and how electric was nobody's friend.
    Agnes skittered back, aiming to put
distance between herself and a nasty shock. A stealthy movement
down low drew her eye, which was the cat, belly to the ice, bushy
tail straight behind, all its attention on the spitting, jerking
wire.
    Barn cats don't have much fear,
especially not a hearty, Maine-bred cat with furry feet as big as
dinner plates. The cat drew in on itself as Agnes watched, setting
up for the spring --
    She swooped, got a handful of neck fur
and an arm around solid animal, teetered and went flat on her can
again, both arms full of fighting, twenty-pound cat, which
commenced to screech, claws deep into Jakey's old barn
coat.
    "Stow it, you fool!" Agnes gasped.
"That thing'll kill you!"
    The cat went quiet. The claws
withdrew. Arms around the cat's middle, Agnes scooted them backward
along the ice, away from the wire, toward the barn.
    Her back hit the wooden entry ramp and
she let the cat go, following its dash into the barn at a more
sedate crawl.
    She collapsed just inside the shelter
of the roof, glad of a wooden floor and relief from a wind
determined to turn nasty.
    Outside, she heard more shots -- more
trees breaking under the weight of the ice. Sooner or later, a tree
would take down the main line on the road, or a power pole itself
would let go. At which point, she figured it would be safe to go
back across the ice to the house. Meanwhile, she'd be lucky if her
ears weren't frostbit and her tailbone sprained.
    "Brow-wow?" The cat, very
soft.
    Agnes turned her head and squinted
into the dimness of the barn. The cat was sitting about three feet
further in, pushing a paw against what looked to be a mound of
straw.
    "
Brow
-wow," the cat said again, and it was grief Agnes heard in
its voice, no question.
    Sure of what she'd see, still she had
to get up on her feet, walk over and look. It was only respectful,
to go and look, and to pay proper condolence.
    The dead one was orange and white, not
quite as big as the gray that was using its paw to gently push at
the dead one's shoulder, as if it couldn't quite believe what its
senses must surely tell it.
    But you
didn't
believe, she knew, not at first. She remembered finding
Jakey face down in the mud between the barn and the house. She'd
shaken him, yelling his name, took in that he was sick, ran inside
and called the Rescue, telling herself it looked bad, but it wasn't
death -- not dead. Not Jakey.
    She swallowed, throat tight, and sat
down on the floor by the cat.
    "We wear out and we go," she said,
which was how she'd finally settled the matter to her satisfaction,
months after Jakey's dying. "Those of us who've done our best, we
get to go easy. The ones left behind, we're lonely. But we go on.
Life goes on, until it ends."
    "Lone-ly?" The cat's big eyes were on
her face.
    "Lonely," Agnes agreed, and then did
something she knew better than, meaning only to offer comfort to an
equal independence, who right now sat in a pain she understood: She
put out a mittened hand to stroke the cat's head.
    The cat ducked, shied and bolted into
the depths of the barn, disappearing, like barn cats knew how to
do.
    Agnes sighed, took another look at the
dead cat, then went back to her post at the door. The town would be
by in a while to clear the road, is what she figured. Trees down
all over and more falling. Conditions like this, there was bound to
be accidents. Rescue had to get through, and it was the town's part
to keep the way clear.
    So, she sat at the door, waiting for
the town plow, or a road crew, or a wire team, and maybe she
drowsed, already used to the sound of cannon and gunfire in