Dancing Cats of Applesap Read online

  Butch needed more attention then, and more towels and more cotton were hauled down from upstairs. The wound was properly cleaned, and a real bandage devised, of adhesive tape and sterile pads, by Miss Toonie. She’d had a good deal of experience at such things and knew just what to do. Finally, the old cat was settled in a cozy nest on the living room sofa. Mr. Jiggs sat beside him, ruffling his ears and admiring the results of Miss Toonie’s nursing. Miss Toonie sank back in an arm chair and drank a cup of tea, while Melba curled up cross-legged on the floor.

  “Now! Tell us how you got rid of the leather boots,” begged Miss Toonie. So Melba did, and between them all an easy conversation flowed, with much chuckling and joking. Mr. Jiggs told about a particularly terrible sneeze that he had avoided in the cellar by crossing his eyes and blowing out his ears. This made them laugh so hard that Butch woke up and had to be lulled back to sleep with more pats and rufflings.

  A peaceful silence followed. Miss Toonie gazed fondly at the cat. Then, she turned her eyes on Mr. Jiggs.

  “Dancing indeed!” Melba heard her mutter. “You might have told me, you know. It wasn’t as if I went home to a roaring fire and family dinner every night.”

  Mr. Jiggs glanced up at her. “I thought you would laugh,” he answered humbly. “And I couldn’t have anyone spoiling things between me and the cats.” He looked down at the bandage. “You fed them and petted them and talked to them all day long. But at night, the cats were mine. We took a long time to get to know each other. But when we did, well…we had some grand times together.”

  Mr. Jiggs sighed. “The cats were all I had, crazy or not. I didn’t want anyone taking them away from me.”

  “Well, they’ve been taken away now, all right!” sniffed Miss Toonie.

  “Yes. All but one, anyhow. We’ll keep Butch, of course. We couldn’t get on without him, I can see that now. Neither of us.”

  “But that is not good enough!” cried Miss Toonie. She sat forward in her chair and, catching Melba’s eye, gave her a slow cat’s wink. Melba grinned and winked back. Miss Toonie cleared her throat.

  “Now listen here,” she told Mr. Jiggs. “What would you say if I asked to see the cats dance again? Just once more, for old times. I didn’t get a proper view the first time, anyway.”

  Mr. Jiggs hesitated. He rubbed his hand over the top of his head. He ruffled Butch’s ears.

  “But how?” he said at last. “They’re in the pound?”

  “Not how, but when!” Miss Toonie struggled to her feet. “And I think tomorrow would do very well.” She turned to Melba for confirmation. “Tomorrow then? And to top it all off, we’ll have Mr. Riddle’s Glowville City Crier over for a look, too!”

  Mr. Jiggs sat straight up on the sofa.

  “What?” he shrieked.

  “Hooray!” shouted Melba.

  Chapter Twenty

  HOW IT WAS THAT every person in Applesap, and most of Glowville and Hopsburg as well, had heard about the cat dance restaging job by seven o’clock the next morning, no one could ever say.

  It wasn’t from Miss Toonie. She sat up all night making tea and talking Mr. Jiggs into a performance he didn’t want to make.

  It wasn’t from Melba, who ran home to call Mr. Riddle on the spot. She told only Victor and her parents about the dance. Not that she wouldn’t have dared to call up someone, and tell him, by now. After dispatching the leather boots and telephoning Mr. Riddle, she felt capable of practically anything. She just didn’t know anyone to call yet.

  The news didn’t come from Mr. Riddle. He spent his evening hounding the Glowville Humane Society, whose officials were doubtful at best about the idea of releasing ninety-nine cats into his care.

  Victor may have called a friend or two, and told them to bring along some cherry bombs to liven things up a bit, but that didn’t add up to the crowds that began arriving, shortly after dawn, on the sidewalk in front of Jiggs’ Drug Store.

  Somehow, from sources unknown, by a sort of osmosis perhaps, everyone for miles around had got wind of the news. And that night they talked about the news, and went to sleep and dreamed about the news. And the next morning they leapt from their beds and trampled down their doors to be the first out to see the news in person. No one was going to miss out on seeing the cats dance this time. No one wanted to wait around for Aunt Millie to call to tell them they should have been there.

  It didn’t matter that the day was a plain, old midweek Wednesday, with work to be done and schools to be attended. No one even bothered to proclaim a holiday. They simply came, men, women, and children, and stood on the sidewalk. And their cars clogged the Applesap streets bumper to bumper so that the mayor himself couldn’t get his own car out of the driveway. He had to huff all the way to the store on foot.

  By the time he arrived at eight o’clock, Miss Toonie had opened up and was selling hot coffee by the ton to anyone who could get close enough to the counter to grab a cup. The store was jammed, and the front steps were jammed, and the sidewalk seethed and swarmed with craning necks.

  People from Hopsburg were stumbling over people from Glowville and striking up conversations. Strange Glowvillers were button-holing strange Applesappers and deferring to their opinion of what, exactly, the correct time was. And Applesap folk, pleased as peacocks to be visited on home ground, were pointing out the beauties of Applesap (even if it didn’t have a roller-rink pavilion) and loudly proclaiming the advantages of shy, quiet towns.

  Victor was there talking guns and escaped groundhogs. Irma Herring was there terrorizing her friends with smart remarks. The woman who thought the cats bewitched was there waiting to see if they would be bewitched again. Even the man who had called the humane society to complain about cat infestation in the first place was there, peering down the street and wondering when on earth the celebrities would arrive.

  Melba was there, of course. She was helping Miss Toonie pour coffee and selling candy bars to the kids. Every five minutes she scooted into the back room to check on Mr. Jiggs. He was nervously tuning his guitar, and breaking strings, and predicting wholesale rout and ruination.

  “Are they here?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are they here now?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are they now?”

  They came at last. At a little past nine o’clock, a howl went up from the crowd as a black van edged to the curb and stopped. Mr. Riddle stepped out, triumphantly appraised the size of his audience, and walked around to open the back doors. The cats emerged. The spectators surged. The cats spat and bolted. The spectators roared and pushed. Then, there was chaos.

  APPLESAP CATS DANCE BEFORE CHEERING THRONGS! was the banner headline across the front page of the Glowville City Crier that afternoon. But, whether the throngs had actually cheered, or had been shoving and pummeling and shrieking at each other, was a matter for interpretation. As for dancing, there was doubt in the minds of a few as to whether the cats had performed at all. Somewhere in the mob, Mr. Jiggs had, presumably, played his guitar. Somewhere in the fray, a few cats may have risen to stagger briefly on their hind legs. People claimed to have seen them. Photos accompanying the news story seemed to show something of the kind.

  It was difficult, of course, looking at the photos, to tell precisely which blurry body might be cat, and which human. But the spirit of the event was there in a tangle of black and white. And the throngs were pleased to pieces to have been present on the spot. They went home to buy newspapers and to clip stories—stories to send their friends, and to stick on their bulletin boards, and to carry in their wallets, and to preserve and frame and read to their children’s children.

  “A thing like that doesn’t happen every day,” they advised each other, which was wrong, of course. It could have happened every day and might have if Mr. Jiggs hadn’t brought his fist down on the soda fountain counter and said once a week on Saturdays was certainly enough. The performance had aged him and the cats fifty years, he growled.

  “Don’
t be so bossy,” snapped Miss Toonie. “It’s not as if I like parading the cats out in public. I don’t. It goes against my grain. This is for the good of all of us, and the store. We’ve got to get business moving again!”

  “Business IS moving!” roared Mr. Jiggs, waving his arm around the store. “Look at it!”

  Business was moving, all right. The morning after the restaging spectacle, it had arrived with a clatter of feet at the store’s front door, pushed its way in, stayed all day, and complained about being put out at night. A week later, the shelves were emptying at such an alarming rate that Miss Toonie doubled up on her orders for everything. The next week, she tripled. The next week, well, by then it was obvious that once a week was quite often enough for the cats to dance. People came by in droves no matter what day it was. They came to stare at the cats, who were getting used to being stared at and beginning to feel rather proud of themselves. They came to stare at Miss Toonie and Melba and Mr. Jiggs. They stayed to buy. And to eat: hot fudge sundaes, chicken salad sandwiches, cherry sodas, scrambled eggs. Miss Toonie was learning to cook all over again. After school, Melba ran the cash register before the admiring eyes of the Super Queen crowd. They were the Jiggs’ Drug Store crowd now, a polite and friendly bunch who overlooked such minor details as spotty spoons and crusty counters.

  “And they’re ever so much easier to talk to!” exclaimed Melba.

  On Saturdays, though, there was no time to talk. Saturdays, the store turned into a one-room carnival.

  “We ought to start taking reservations by phone,” snorted Mr. Jiggs. “Either that or ask for police protection. The cats and I were nearly trampled to death last week.”

  He pretended to be as fiercely gloomy as usual. But underneath lurked a happy man, a proud and satisfied man who needed only more practice at success to become a thoroughly pleasant human being.

  For Mr. Jiggs had found, after the initial jolt, that he liked performing publicly. He was good at it, he discovered. He liked making money, too, and beating out the Super Queen for customers. And he liked, especially, the new, respectful way Miss Toonie looked at him when he came to work each morning. Why, Miss Toonie was a changed woman, Mr. Jiggs announced. She bid him good morning every morning and good night every night, and she made suggestions for running the store that proved to be extremely helpful.

  No longer did Mr. Jiggs cower in the dismal back room. He strode about in the open now, and took charge of matters that hadn’t interested him in years. He fixed the leaks, and ordered air conditioning, and made plans for expanding into the lot next door. The cats needed a dormitory of their own, he said, a place where they could be housed and fed and nursed in comfortable surroundings.

  “Befitting their noble talents!” declared Miss Toonie, whose respect almost hit the ceiling at this announcement, and had to be held down with a long series of unconvincing sniffs.

  “To get them out from underfoot!” grumbled the old man.

  The cats, of course, had moved back into the store the very day of Mr. Riddle’s restaging riot. The humane society was testy about it at first. But after they found out that only over Miss Toonie’s dead body, and Mr. Jiggs’ and Melba’s dead bodies as well, would the cats return to Glowville, they decided to head home alone.

  “Do you really mean it about the dormitory?” Melba asked Mr. Jiggs. “Won’t it cost a great deal of money?”

  “We’ll get striped red awnings for the windows, too,” he answered, trying to smother a smile. “We’ve got to smarten up if we’re to be a national landmark.”

  “Who said anything about national landmarks,” sniffed Miss Toonie, who was still trying to recover herself. “You’re turning my cats into a three-ring circus.”

  “Our cats, you mean,” retorted Mr. Jiggs. “And there’s another thing. We’re hiring a publicity agent. People are calling and writing from all over the state of New York to find out about this store and how to get here. We need someone to handle them.”

  “Publicity agent, my foot!” shrieked Miss Toonie. “Melba’s been handling those people for weeks, and helping me behind the counter too!”

  “That’s right,” said Mr. Jiggs. “And now she’s hired.”

  “Hooray. Hooray! Hooray!”

  That’s Melba in the living room, isn’t it?

  “They’re coming. They’re coming!”

  Look at her. She’s jumping up and down like some groundhog who’s just found a brand new, unguarded, vegetable garden way across town. Her glasses are falling off her nose. Her hair is a mess. Now she’s doing a hot shuffle and snapping her fingers, as if she were someone in the movies who’d fallen in love on Fifth Avenue.

  It’s a good thing Irma Herring isn’t here to see this. She’d laugh her head off.

  “Who cares!” screams Melba. “They’re coming! Next week. Next Saturday, to be exact. The Guinness Book of World Records is coming to Applesap, New York. Can you believe it?

  “It was a snap!” she yells, snapping her fingers once more. “This time I didn’t let them make me wait around for the right department. I asked for the editor-in-chief straight out. I must have sounded impressive because I got him almost immediately. ‘Why haven’t I been informed about these cats before!’ he demanded. He said he might come to see them himself.”

  Melba hoorays some more, spins around twice, and sits down suddenly in her chair. Now, she is trying to look calm and collected, the way a publicity agent should look in a situation like this. But how should a publicity agent look? Who knows? Who cares! Melba is up and dancing again, and she’s not at all worried that someone might be watching.

  “I’ve given up worrying about that,” she announces. “I took a lesson from the cats. You should come over to Jiggs’ Drug Store and watch them now. They don’t have to wait for Mr. Jiggs to play his guitar before they get up and dance. Of course, they still perform on Saturdays—that’s their big event—but even on off hours they’ll jump up and start twirling. Miss Toonie says they’ve turned into a bunch of showoffs and she doesn’t like the looks of it one bit.

  “I like it though. I love it. When you think of how those cats used to look, beaten-up and cringing, and how they look now, fat and proud of themselves, you can’t help but think that showing off is what they need to do most. I guess I’ve been doing some showing off myself. Victor says he doesn’t like to come down to Jiggs’ to watch the cats dance anymore because he has to watch me too, strutting around talking to people and boasting about the cats.

  “ ‘That’s what you do all the time!’ I told him. ‘Only you boast about rabbits and groundhogs and shooting up the town.’ He didn’t think much of that. Wait until I tell him about the Guinness Book! I bet even Victor would have been afraid to call them up on the phone the way I did.

  “Speaking of which,” says Melba, plunging into the kitchen. “I’m going down to the drug store right now to tell Miss Toonie and Mr. Jiggs the news. Why don’t you come with me? You’ll get to see Miss Toonie sniff and tell me I’m turning the cats into a three-ring circus. And you’ll get to see Mr. Jiggs forget about being gloomy for a minute so he can run over and shake my hand. And you’ll meet Butch. He still isn’t up to dancing because of his wound. Miss Toonie keeps him behind the counter with her, where he can listen to Mr. Jiggs’ guitar without getting stepped on. He’s a strange old cat, quieter and shyer than the others, and, if you ask me, he’s not ever going to be a public performer. Maybe it’s because he’s been beaten up once too often. Maybe it’s because he was born shy and would have been shy no matter what. It’s hard to tell.”

  Melba stops a minute and takes off her glasses to polish them thoughtfully on the edge of her jacket.

  “There’s one thing about Butch, though,” she adds, “and you’ve got to admire it. He may act shy on the outside sometimes, but inside, when he comes right down to it, he knows he can stand up for himself. Just because he’s shy doesn’t mean he’ll let people walk all over him. No, sir,” says Melba.

  “No,
sir!” she yells, heading out the door. “Come on. I’ll show you what I mean!” Then off she marches, with a kind of swagger in her step. It might make people think (those who happened to be looking out their windows right then) that Melba Morris was getting too big for her britches. She is, in fact, and she’s not the only one.

  These days, a lot of people in Applesap are outgrowing those small, timid britches they used to wear in the shadow of those louder and pushier towns of Hopsburg and Glowville. They’re exchanging them for a larger size: the right size for being a national landmark seven days a week and a one-room carnival on Saturdays; the right size for being listed in the Guinness Book of World Records; the perfect size for a roller-rink pavilion to beat the devil out of Glowville’s and Hopsburg’s.

  “The main thing,” shouts Melba from halfway down the block, “is to tell people how to get here. See, all you do is take a pin, or a thumbtack, or a jackknife and stick it, pow, in the very middle of the map of New York State. That’s where Applesap is, at dead center. You can’t miss it!”

  A Personal History by Janet Taylor Lisle

  I was born in 1947 to young parents starting a life together in a tiny New York City apartment, just after the Second World War. My father had been a bomber pilot flying out of England during the war, a shattering experience for him. Returning from Europe, he took a job at the New York Herald Tribune. City living worsened his anxieties, however, and so my family and I moved to a rented house on a quiet road near the Rhode Island seacoast.

  My first memories are of this place: the woods and fields around my home and the rocky shore nearby, where my father fished and gradually regained his emotional balance. By the 1950s, he had found a job at an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. I was the first of five children, and my four brothers and I grew up in outlying Farmington, walking to local schools and later attending private school in West Hartford. But every summer, my family returned to Little Compton on the Rhode Island coast. The place, a natural haven for sea birds and wildlife, was more home to us than any other. It would become the imaginative setting for many of the stories I later wrote, including Forest, The Lampfish of Twill, and The Great Dimpole Oak.