The Painted Ponies of Partequineus and The Summer of the Kittens Read online

  “I’m old enough! I can do lots of things! Somebody just has to show me how! Besides, Mr. Gallico says in his book that ‘can’t’ catches no mice, and he’s right.”

  “What?”

  “It’s in a story I read, and I know what it means. If you decide ahead of time that you can’t do something, you won’t try hard enough, so you’ll fail.”

  Then he said something really soft, and it sounded like “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “Never mind.” He took a really deep breath. “Taking care of orphan kittens is too much work. You won’t have time for anything else, not for your friends or going out to play or anything. For example, you’ll have to get up in the middle of the night to feed them every two hours for the first week or so.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  He just stared at me, but at least he wasn’t yelling. At last he said, “Wait here,” and he closed the door and left me standing there. I sat down on the steps, and it was about ten minutes before he came back, only this time he had on cleaner clothes and his hair was combed, and I think he’d washed up a little, ’cause the stubble on his face looked cleaner, and his fingernails too. And he had a little box of something in his hand, and he was brushing dust off it.

  “All right,” he said, “show me your kittens.”

  Mom just told me it’s time for bed, so I can’t write any more. I better go to sleep quick because I have to get up in a couple of hours to take care of the kittens. I’ll tell you the rest of what happened tomorrow.

  July 4th

  Dear Diary,

  I know I usually write to you at night before I go to bed, but I’m sitting here this morning with the kittens, waiting until it’s time to feed them, so I can tell you now what happened when Mr. Harding came to my room the day before yesterday.

  Mom looked surprised when we came to the front door. I think she figured Mr. Harding would just tell me to go away or something, or maybe only tell me what I should do with the kittens and send me home. She let him come in and took him upstairs, which took a long time because he has trouble climbing, even with his cane, and she got him a chair and set it down in front of the closet so he could have a look. He put down the little box he was carrying and sat down, and stared into the closet for what seemed like a long time.

  “Mrs. McCormick,” he said to Mom at last, “it isn’t too late to save them, but it’s best if you try to find a veterinarian who’ll take them in.”

  “Hanna doesn’t want to do that,” Mom said. “She says it’s her responsibility.”

  And then I remembered who told me about taking responsibility for pets. It was Mr. Harding, the day he fixed his fence. I guess he remembered too, ’cause he looked at me kind of funny.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he said to me, and I nodded my head, real hard. “Get me a wash cloth, then, and we’ll get started.”

  I ran out to the bathroom and brought him back a washcloth, and he wrapped it around the end of his finger. He reached down and picked up one of the kittens, and he was so gentle I couldn’t believe it. It cried and wiggled at first, but he reached under it and began rubbing its belly with the washcloth, down near its tail, and the kitten peed on him.

  “Was that supposed to happen?” I asked.

  “They can’t do this for themselves,” he said to me.

  Mom sent me out to get him a towel so he could clean up, and when I came back he was doing the same thing to the next kitten, and that one peed too, and even pooped a little.

  “How come you use a washcloth like that?” I wanted to know.

  “Mother cats help their babies to pee by washing them. Cats have rough tongues, and a washcloth is a good substitute.”

  “How does the mother know to do that?”

  “That’s one of life’s great mysteries. Most cats are wonderful mothers, and they seem to do it by instinct, but no one is really sure how they know without being taught.” He put the kitten down and wiped his hands on the towel. “You do the next one.”

  He handed me the washcloth and I picked up the grey kitten and tried to rub its belly the way he did, but nothing happened, and he showed me where to press, right around where the kitten poops, and I tried twice more, and all of a sudden the kitten sprayed all over my hand.

  “Now I have to ask you again,” Mr. Harding said. “Are you really sure you want to get into all this?”

  I didn’t answer him. I put the kitten down and picked up the last one, the calico, and that time I did it right the first time, and it was a little messy, but I didn’t mind, and when I put it down I said to him, “What else do I have to do?”

  He kind of shook his head a little, and he looked at Mom and she shrugged her shoulders.

  “Have you got a heating pad?” he asked her.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “They have to be kept warm. They can’t maintain a high enough body temperature for very long without their mother. And we’ll need some more towels, too. They’ll have to be changed every day.”

  Mom found the heating pad and two more towels in the linen closet, and Mr. Harding took out the bottom drawer of my bureau and dumped my clothes out on the bed, and he put the drawer on the floor across from the window. “The high sides of the drawer will help keep the heat in and keep drafts away,” he told us. He showed us how to spread a couple of towels on top of the pad, half on and half off, and he plugged it in and turned it to “low.”

  “Only put part of the towels on the heating pad,” he said. “There has to be a cool spot they can move to in case it gets too hot for them.” Then he did the strangest thing. He looked all around the room and spotted my stuffed animals on the shelf, and he told me to bring him my favourite, which was a fuzzy white rabbit. I gave it to him and he put it in the drawer and then picked up the kittens, one by one, and put them next to the rabbit, and they kind of poked their noses into its fur. I guess they thought it was Maggie or something.

  “Now we have to feed them,” he said. He handed me the box he brought. “I found this feeding kit with some supplies I never got around to throwing out when I retired. But I don’t have any food, so you’ll have to go to the veterinarian right away and ask them for powdered kitten formula.”

  “I don’t have the car,” Mom said. “Hanna’s father took it.”

  Hanna’s father, she said. Not my husband.

  “I don’t have one either,” Mr. Harding said. “When will he be home?”

  Mom said she didn’t know.

  “We can’t wait,” he said. “We’ll have to make a substitute to tide them over until you can get the right food. I’ll need some milk and an egg. Not the white part, just the yolk.”

  He took these really tiny bottles and nipples out of the box he brought and told Mom exactly what to do, and I followed her downstairs to the kitchen where she put the little bottles and nipples into a pan of boiling water to sterilize them. Then she measured out some milk and a little water and mixed it up with the smushed-up egg yolk, and heated it up in a pan and brought it back upstairs. Mr. Harding poured it into the tiny bottles.

  What happened next was kind of a blur, and later on Mr. Harding had to write down everything for me so I wouldn’t forget. It’s really complicated. You have to test the temperature of the food by dripping some on your wrist, and if it doesn’t feel either hot or cold, then it’s just right. Then you have to feed the kittens one at a time, lying on their stomachs on your lap as if they were hanging on to their mother’s nipple. You have to put the nipple in their mouths down low. Mr. Harding said if you don’t do it that way, or if you turn the kitten over, the milk might go into their lungs and make them sick. And you have to burp them, just like a baby! Isn’t that amazing? The mother cat does that with her tongue, too.

  Mr. Harding fed the first two and I did the others, and then we put them back in the drawer to sleep. “You’ll need a schedule,” he told me. “I t
hink about ten feedings a day should be right for the next week. After that you can cut back to maybe eight times until they get bigger. And you’ll have to learn how to bathe them too, because they don’t have a mother to keep them clean. Can you do all that?” I nodded at him, because I knew I could.

  “What we just fed them isn’t good enough,” he said. “I’ll call a taxi and get you the right kind of formula so you’ll have it in time for the next feeding.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Mom said.

  “I think I do,” Mr. Harding told her. “From the time I walked into this room, these babies became my responsibility too, not just Hanna’s.”

  And that’s what he did, and he spent his own money, too. You know what? If it hadn’t been for the kittens, I’d never have known that Mr. Harding isn’t so mean, after all.

  I have to stop writing now. It’s time to feed my kittens again.

  July 4th

  Oops, it’s the 5th already

  Hi, Diary!

  It’s night now, well, tomorrow actually, ’cause it’s a little bit after midnight. Mom just left. She sets her alarm clock and gets up with me every two hours and helps me mix the kittens’ formula, and she sits with me while I feed them, even though she said before that I had to take care of them all by myself. I’m supposed to go to bed right away, ’cause I have to get up again at two o’clock, but I have to tell you some things.

  First of all, Dad finally came home yesterday afternoon. I don’t know where he spent the night. He came up to my room and knocked, and I let him come in, and he sat on my bed and tried to hug me, only I wouldn’t let him, and he told me how sorry he was that he’d killed Maggie, and I didn’t say anything. He asked me if I wanted to help him bury her, and I said I didn’t, and he went down in the basement and he made a wooden box with his new saw and other tools, and after supper he went out in the back yard and dug a hole under the maple tree. I went out and watched, even though I said I wouldn’t, and he put Maggie in the box, still wrapped in the towel, and nailed the cover shut and put it in the ground and covered it up. I don’t think the town wants you to bury pets on your property, but he did it anyway.

  I asked him if Maggie was in Heaven now, and Dad said that nobody really knows if there’s a Heaven or not, no matter what Reverend Davis says, but that if there is one, then Maggie would be there, because she was a good cat who took care of her kittens and made me happy, a least for a little while. That was good enough for me.

  I guess I can forgive him for running over her. He didn’t mean to, even though if he hadn’t acted so mean to Mom, it wouldn’t have happened. And I still think it’s my fault that they fight all the time, no matter what Mom says, so I have to try extra hard to be good from now on.

  Right after we buried Maggie Dad said he’d like to watch me feed the kittens, and I said “Okay” and we went upstairs, and he watched me the whole time, and told me what a great job I was doing. Then he said the strangest thing. He said that Maggie was still alive through her kittens. I didn’t understand exactly what he meant, only it made me feel a little bit better.

  Later on, after I was supposed to be asleep, I heard Mom and Dad talking down in the living room, and I got up to listen. They were both sitting on the couch, although not very close together, and they didn’t see me watching them. I didn’t understand everything they were saying either, only that it had something to do with Maggie, and with me, and with what was going to happen to us all. It scared me a little, but at least they weren’t fighting.

  July 6th

  Dear Diary,

  Jimmy came home from the hospital today. And my kittens are nine days old, and one of them has his eyes open. They’re blue, only Mr. Harding says they’ll change colour when he gets older. And I’m pretty sure he’s a he, even though Mr. Harding says it’s hard to be absolutely sure when they’re this small, only they’re getting bigger every day, and if he’s right about the others, there are three girls and one boy.

  I’m happy about the kittens, but not so happy about Jimmy.

  Mr. Harding came over three times today. I thought he’d just forget all about me, but he didn’t. He climbed the stairs all three times, even though I could tell it was really hard for him, and he sat and held the kittens and looked in their tiny little ears and their mouths, and he said they’re doing okay. He says they’re about twice as big as when they were born now, and I guess he’s right, ’cause each one just about fills up my hand now, and they can crawl around a lot better than they used to.

  He’s almost kind of nice, you know? Mr. Harding, I mean.

  After I fed them at noon time, I went over to Jimmy’s house. He’s got some bandages on his head, and on his back too, he says, but he looks okay, maybe just a little skinnier than before. Mrs. Morris met me at the door and told me I could only stay for about half an hour because Jimmy gets tired easily, and I said I would, and I asked her how he was, ’cause she looked kind of sad, but she said the operation was a success, so I guess he’s going to get better now.

  “How’re your kittens?” was the first thing Jimmy said to me, and I had to tell him about how Maggie got run over, and that made him sad, but that I was their mother now, and all about how it was Mr. Harding who showed me how to take care of them.

  “You’re kidding!” he said when I told him that, and I said, “No, really!” and I explained how he used to be a vet and that he wasn’t really mean once you got to know him, just lonely ’cause of losing his whole family and all. Jimmy said he didn’t know about that, and he was sorry for thinking bad things about him.

  “Want to play a game?” Jimmy asked, and we agreed on Scrabble, even though I almost always win, except if there was a math Scrabble game I bet he’d beat me every time. We only played for about fifteen minutes, though, because Jimmy got this real vague look in his eyes, like he couldn’t see the board, and he put down a word that didn’t make any sense, no vowels, t-r-k-n-p, only he insisted it was a real word, and we almost got into an argument until I realized that something was wrong with him, and I let him keep the score. I spelled my next word - “quiet” - and put the “q” on a triple letter space for thirty points, only when it was Jimmy’s turn he just sat there, and a tiger came out of his closet and walked all around his wheelchair. It opened its mouth and growled sort of soft and rumbly, and sat down beside Jimmy and put one huge paw up on his knee, and I ran out of the room and called Mrs. Morris, and she came and looked at Jimmy and told me I had better go home now, and that I could come back tomorrow. Even though I was scared of it, I wished that old tiger would follow me home instead of staying there with Jimmy, only it didn’t.

  When I got home, I broke a rose off of one of Mom’s bushes and put it on Maggie’s grave.

  July 9th

  Hi, Wonderful Diary!

  I have lots of good news. I’m a little confused too, but I’ll tell you the happy stuff first, and then maybe I’ll be able to figure out the rest.

  The last kitten opened her eyes today, the grey one. She’s smaller than the others, and Dad says that’s because she’s the runt of the litter, and she’s really cute.

  Dad comes up to see the kittens every day, some-times even twice.

  It’s so funny watching them try to walk. They can’t seem to coordinate all their legs, but they crawl pretty good, and when I pick them up they try to look at me, except I don’t think they can see very well because they still bump into stuff.

  I wonder if they think I’m their mother.

  I don’t have to feed them so often now because they eat more each time, and I’m getting more sleep, which is good because I was getting so tired I even fell asleep in the afternoon a couple of times.

  Mom says I shouldn’t give them names, because when they go to whoever is going to adopt them they’ll get new names then and they might get confused, only I did it anyway. Mom says I can only keep one, and we have to find homes for the other three, but I’m saving one for Jimmy, so that leaves only two, and if they get c
onfused over their names, that’s just too bad.

  Maybe I can tell the people who adopt them that they have to keep the same names that I give them, or else they can’t have them. Jimmy too.

  The grey one is Smudgie, ’cause that’s the name Peter gave his kitten at the end of The Abandoned, on account of my Smudgie has the same kind of little black spot on her nose. The orange one that’s a boy I wanted to call Dempsy, ’cause he’s got one ear that sort of flops over at the top and makes him look tough, and Dad says there was a famous prize fighter by that name once, only that was also the name of the tomcat that Peter killed in a fight in the book, and that made me sad so I changed my mind. His name is “Thomas” instead, for tom cat. I know, not much imagination there, but it fits him. The other orange one is a girl, I think, even though Mr. Harding says most orange cats are boys. Her name’s Jesse, ’cause that can be either a boy’s name or a girl’s name, just in case.

  I think the calico one is the one I’m going to keep. She almost has to be a girl, ’cause she’s at least four different colours, and her name’s Veronica.

  I wish Mom had named me that when I was born. But Hanna’s a nice name too, don’t you think? Dad used to make a joke about that. He read in the paper that Hanna was one of the top two or three most popular names for girl babies in Canada, and he said “Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named Hanna.” I don’t think that’s very funny.

  More good news. Jimmy felt well enough to come over to see the kittens today, and Mr. and Mrs. Morris came too. He looks a lot better. His bandage is much smaller now, and he was all excited about coming. He held every one of the kittens, one at a time, and when I told him that Thomas was the only boy, he said that’s the one he wants, only he didn’t like the name. I told him that’s okay, that if he wants to change it he can pick out his own name right away, and that I’ll call him by his new name until he’s old enough to be adopted. Jimmy said he’d have to think about what name to choose.