“If your mother had died,” she said to me once, shortly after Mom took off, “we would mourn her. But she did something much worse than that, Kenny. Something a mother should never do, and so instead, we’ll pretend she never existed.”
Let me tell you: this was a troublesome and confusing task for a kid. How could I pretend my mother never existed when the only thing I ever thought about was her? I learned, though, that Lincoln’s reasoning held some weight. Over time, I didn’t think about my mother as much. Slowly, slowly, she began to dissipate from my mind, like a fog lifting and burning from sight, so that by high school, I barely thought of her at all.
“Which story, Finch?” I ask, squeezing in beside her on her little bed, my back propped against the wall.
“The one where she rescued the squirrels.”
“You sure?” I readjust, the round logs of the bedframe uncomfortable against my spine.
“Yes, come on with it.” She giggles and squirms.
“Your mother had a soft spot for animals. I’ve told you that before. Always wanting to rescue something, always in tune with the critters, and they were drawn to her. By that I mean, they would look at her different, the way sometimes the birds here will look at you.”
“‘I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them.’ Do you remember that one, Coop? Theodore Roethke. American poet, 1908 to 1963.”
Finch and her regurgitations of knowledge. “I remember.”
“It always reminded me of her. Well, it reminded me of how you say she was.”
Something pangs in my chest. “You want me to tell the story, or what?”
She nods.
“All right, where was I? Your mother. We had a cat at the farm, my aunt’s old pet, and she was a mean and feisty little thing. Hissed at you if you got too close, showed her teeth. Didn’t help that she was large, maybe fifteen pounds, which is big for a cat, and all black, which made her look even meaner, somehow. Her eyes sort of glowed more, you might say. Your mother loved animals, with the exception of that cat. Now, I will say, in your mother’s defense, she tried to make nice with Kitty, at first. Bought some cans of food, made her a little bed out of an old cardboard box, put some rags in it so it was soft. Well, Kitty would have none of it. She seemed to resent your mom even more for trying to befriend her. That’s just the kind of cat Kitty was. Cantankerous.”
Finch giggles, bites the sheet. Walt Whitman purrs on her lap.
“I asked your mother, you want me to get rid of that cat? She told me of course not. Like I said, she had a soft spot for animals, even mean ones.”
Finch interrupts. “She wouldn’t have approved of what you did with Susanna. My mother.”
“No, I reckon not. Anyhow. One day Kitty dragged a dead squirrel, well, half-dead, up onto the porch where your mother was sitting with a glass of lemonade and a book. She was pregnant with you at the time. The squirrel was writhing and twitching, and Kitty was batting at it, playing. Which that’s what cats do, that’s how they’re wired: they toy with something before they finish it off. Your mother shooed her off the porch, and Kitty hissed, ears back, eyes aglow, but then took off. There she went, right to the big oak tree in the front yard, clawing her way up the bark. Your mother was absorbed in her book—she was like you, reading all the time, and getting so wrapped up in the story that sometimes it was like the world around her disappeared. Next thing she knew, Kitty was dragging a baby squirrel out of the tree, thing was in her jaws, and she brought it right up onto the porch and put it beside the mother squirrel, who for the record was not yet dead.”
“What did my mother do?”
“Well, she hopped up then, picked up the broom and swiped that cat off the porch before old Kitty knew what hit her.”
Finch bursts into laughter here, squealing, kicking beneath the sheets.
“Kitty was fine—we saw her later that day, and trust me, she was just as surly as ever, and none the worse for the wear—but at this point, your mother came to get me. I was in the barn, clearing out junk. Made me climb up in that tree and gather the rest of the squirrels. Which, just to be clear, if it weren’t for her being pregnant, she would’ve climbed up there herself. She was wiry and strong, like you. Very fit, as I’ve told you before. Not one to ask for help unless she really needed it. So, up I went. Tucked those baby squirrels into my shirt like a marsupial and then shimmied back down, real careful. There were three of them. We put them in the box your mother had made up for Kitty, and moved them into the house where she couldn’t get them. Your mother made me go to the store and buy some eyedroppers and whole milk, and we fed them, multiple times a day. Nursed them right back to health.”