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

  It was a little too early to feed them, but I did it anyway. Mom heated up their formula - that’s what they call the food, just as if they were human babies instead of kittens - and everybody watched while I fed Veronica, and they told me how good I was at it, so I felt really proud. Then I even showed them how to make her pee, and that made Jimmy laugh.

  I like it when he laughs.

  I fed Jesse next, and then Jimmy asked if he could feed Thomas, so I let him. He caught on really quick, although it isn’t so hard now that the kittens are bigger, so you don’t have to be so careful about choking them. He didn’t want to do the bathroom thing, though, so I did it and Thomas pooped about two litres worth! He’s a real boy! I fed Smudgie last, and she only took about half of her bottle. I thought maybe that was because I was feeding them too early, only she never eats as much as the others.

  Mom had some lemonade already made and we all sat in the living room and ate cookies, and then Jimmy and I went outside so Mom could talk to his parents. He must be getting better, ’cause he’s allowed to go by himself in his wheelchair now, and we walked - wheeled and walked - down to the fence at the end of the street across the tracks, and guess what? The chain was hanging loose on the gate! There were fresh tire tracks in the sand, and whoever made them must have forgotten to fasten the padlock again.

  “Let’s go ask our moms if we can go out on the dykes,” I said.

  “I don’t have to ask,” Jimmy said. “I can go wherever I want to.”

  That didn’t sound like Jimmy, at least not the way he used to be, and when I acted like I didn’t want to go through the gate without asking permission, he pushed himself forward and shoved the gate open and rolled right on through. There’s a little hill on the other side, and he picked up speed and bounced along over the stones and I thought he was going to tip over, and I ran after him, but when I caught up he was laughing and hollering like he’d just won a soccer game or something.

  “We really shouldn’t be here,” I said, and Jimmy said, “I want to go up on top.” See, Diary, the dykes are like long dirt hills, all built up to keep the water out when there’s a flood tide, and some of them go all the way to Grand Pre. There’s a one-lane dirt road along the dry side and another one, kind of rough, along the crest where the hikers go who don’t pay any attention to the “No Trespassing” signs. The way to get up on top is kind of steep and it was really hard to get Jimmy’s chair up there, but we managed it, him spinning the rims and me pushing for all I was worth.

  Jimmy took off like a race car driver, bumping and rocking over the ruts. “Wow! This is great! Come on!” I had to run to keep up.

  “Wait a minute!” I yelled. “Where are you going?”

  “As far as I can. I’m off to see the world.”

  “We shouldn’t be out here. Listen, your Mom and Dad’ll be worried about you if they can’t find you when they’re ready to go home.”

  “No they won’t.”

  “But you’re sick!”

  He grabbed his wheels and stopped dead, and spun the left one so hard that the chair whirled right around so that he was facing me. “I’m not! I’m not sick!” Then he mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

  “What?” I said.

  “I won’t be sick,” he said in a quiet voice. “I refuse to be sick.” He turned the chair again and started off down the path, only slower this time. He wasn’t going to pay any attention to what I said about not being allowed, so I just had to follow along.

  There really isn’t much to see out on the dykes, just the little creeks that come in off the Minas Basin and all the grassy flats where the high water comes up sometimes, but Jimmy kept finding things to be happy about, even the bugs that buzzed around his head and tried to bite him on the neck, and the weeds that grew up along the edge of the dyke and got caught in the spokes of his wheels. When he spotted a red-winged blackbird, I thought he’d go nuts. And I really didn’t like getting so far from home.

  “Jimmy, let’s go back,” I begged him, and he stopped and pointed out toward the mud flats that are all covered up at high tide. There were crows down there, poking at what was left of some kind of dead animal, and I didn’t like looking at that.

  “You can go if you want to,” he said, “but I’m staying. There’s too much to see out here.”

  “It all looks the same to me,” I told him, and he said, “Use your imagination. That’s the Amazon River right there. Look, it’s full of crocodiles and everything, and a native canoe coming down the middle, and he’s got a blowgun and darts tipped with curare poison, and he knows we’re here!”

  “Huh?” He sounded really nuts.

  “And piranhas! Mean, ferocious little fish that can eat a whole cow in like twenty seconds, and if you fall in, there won’t be anything left of you except your shoes.”

  “Stop it! You’re scaring me!”

  “Hanna, look back there.” He was pointing toward the North Mountain. “That’s where we were in the airplane, remember? After that we flew over Wolfville, and I was flying it. Me! I was flying the plane, I really was, and then we were over Mount Everest and the Rockies and China and all the way to the moon! You were there, don’t you remember?”

  And I did, of course, just Jimmy and me, and we were so free, no wheelchair, no elm tree to tease me with just a glimpse of the world from a few metres up, no fences and no parents that fight, no college students who toss their pets out when they no longer want them and no fathers in cars that run over your dreams and squash them flat. And it was real, not just in my imagination, and we were so high up that the tigers couldn’t ever reach us, not then, not ever.

  And I was crying, and Jimmy said, “Hey! I didn’t mean to make you sad,” and I turned away and wiped my eyes real fast and said, “I’ve just got something in my eye, that’s all,” only Jimmy knew I was lying, but he didn’t say anything.

  After that we turned around and went back. There wasn’t anything else to do. And when we got to the gate, Jimmy’s Mom and Dad were waiting there. I guess they saw us out on the dykes, but they didn’t call for us to come back or anything, they just waited. And when we came through the gate, Mrs. Morris said, “It’s time to go home now.” That was all she said, not mad or anything because we went where we shouldn’t have, and when I went in the house, Mom wasn’t mad at me either.

  I figured it out later. It was because everybody knows something about Jimmy that I don’t, only I wish I did.

  July 14th

  Hey, Diary!

  Big news today. I don’t have to rub the kittens’ behinds with the washcloth any more, ’cause they can pee and poop by themselves now, only I have to wash them and change the towels a lot more often, and Mom says she’s spending twice as much money for laundry soap now, but she was smiling when she said it, so I know she was only kidding me. Mr. Harding says that it won’t be too long before we can give them a kitty litter pan, except that we can’t use real kitty litter yet because they might eat it, so I’ll have to save our newspapers and tear them up real fine to use instead.

  They’re starting to walk, too. I think they can see better, and they even play with each other a little bit, sort of rolling around like fighting, only gently, and when I pick them up, they act like they know me.

  Brittany and Emily came over to see them this morning, and I let them each feed one, Jesse and Thomas. I fed Veronica myself because she’s going to be mine, and Smudgie too, because she needs extra care. She still doesn’t seem to want to eat as much as the others, and I have to coax her and pet her a lot, and even then she almost never finishes her bottle. I guess that’s why she’s so small.

  They’re pretty wiggly now, but they settle down once they’ve got the nipples in their mouths. Brittany wanted to turn Jesse over and hold her like a doll, but I said no, just in case she might get milk in her lungs, even though now that she’s older there isn’t so much chance of that. Brittany acted like she was mad at me for a couple of minutes. I don’t understand that. After all, th
ey’re my kittens, and I’m the one who knows best how to take care of them. I wouldn’t go to her house and tell her what to do, or act snotty if she didn’t let me do whatever I wanted to.

  After lunch I heard a car drive up outside and stop in front of Mr. Harding’s house. It was a taxi cab, because that’s how Mr. Harding gets his groceries. Someone delivers them from the store downtown because he can’t walk that far and doesn’t drive. Every so often a little car comes that says “Medicine Dropper” on the side, and I think it’s from Cochrane’s Pharmacy, so he must have to take some kind of medicine, too. I wonder if he’s sick.

  I waited a while until I figured he had time to put everything away, and then went outside and looked around the end of the fence to see if he was sitting on his front porch, and he was. He doesn’t come over as often as he did when the kittens were really little, ’cause he says it’s just too hard going up and down stairs, so I go to his house, just to talk. He always asks how they are, and I think he likes it that I go over to visit him almost every afternoon, and sometimes after supper, too. Maybe he even waits for me to come.

  It’s hard to remember when I thought he was mean.

  Mr. Harding knows a lot of stuff. He was born before World War Two, which is really amazing. I didn’t know there was anybody still alive who remembers things that are in history books. He even saw President Roosevelt once - in person I mean, not on television, ’cause they didn’t have television sets then - when he was on a school trip to Washington in nineteen thirty-six. My Mom and Dad weren’t even born then.

  I wanted to know why he decided to be a vet, and he told me it was so he could help people who lived on farms to take care of their cows and horses and sheep and stuff, ’cause it was really hard to make a living back before the war, and without healthy animals to give milk and for wool and meat to sell, the farmers would starve. Only by the time he was ready to go to college to be a vet, the war was on and he had to go fight overseas. He joined the Royal Air Force in England and flew fighter planes.

  I have to remember to tell Jimmy that.

  Mr. Harding told me all about going to Guelph University in Ontario after the war, and about coming back to Nova Scotia to start his business, and how he took care of people’s pets as well as farm animals, and he did that for a long time. He doesn’t say much about the war, though, just that he was in it. I think talking about it makes him unhappy. Once he said that most of his friends didn’t come back from overseas, which I think means they got killed.

  This afternoon I asked him what it was like to shoot at other airplanes, and he tried to change the subject, but I kept after him. He told me that he hated having to fight, because the pilots in the German planes were people too, somebody’s sons and brothers and husbands who were just trying to survive, like him. So I asked him why he did it, and he said, “‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’”

  I asked him what that meant, and he told me, “A very wise man named Edmund Burke said that. It means that it’s every individual person’s responsibility to try to fix whatever’s wrong with the world, just like you did when the college students abandoned Maggie and you made a home for her so she could give birth to her kittens in a safe place. The war was evil too, and we had to do something to stop it, even if it meant shooting at the soldiers on the other side.”

  I guess I was quiet for a while, thinking about what he said, because he asked me, “Something bothering you?”

  “I was just wondering,” I said. Then, “Never mind.”

  “Why won’t you tell me?”

  “Because it’ll sound rude.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay. If it’s so important to try to make things right when other people do something that’s wrong, how come you told Jimmy and me not to feed Maggie?”

  I felt bad as soon as I said it, because I knew it made him unhappy. I could tell from the way he looked at me.

  “Hanna,” he said, “everybody makes lots of mistakes in their lives. That was one of mine, and I wish I could take it back.”

  “I’m not mad at you or anything.”

  “I’m glad. Anyway, I tried to make up for it by showing you how to take care of the kittens.”

  “Why did you do that, anyway? You acted at first as if you didn’t care.”

  He didn’t answer me right away, just stared out toward the dykes as if he was remembering something that happened a long time ago. Finally he said, “I think I stopped caring when things happened in my life that I couldn’t do anything about. I found out that no matter how much you care, you can’t always stop people from dying. I’m not sure how to explain to you how I felt. It was self-pity, I guess.”

  I knew he must be talking about his wife when she had cancer, and then the crash that killed his children and grandchildren. “So what made you change your mind?”

  “You reminded me of my son when he was your age. He was a reformer too, out to save every stray cat or dog that wandered by. He once even brought home an injured bird perched on his finger. It wasn’t the least bit afraid of him. He used to capture tadpoles from the pond in the meadow behind our house and put them in the goldfish tank until they became frogs, and then he’d return them to the pond.” He laughed a little. “One year he waited too long, and we had frogs hopping all over the house.”

  I laughed at that, but he looked kind of sad, remembering, and I scootched over close to him. We just sat there for a while, and I was happy. I have two best friends now, Jimmy and Mr. Harding.

  July 17th

  I’m in trouble, Diary.

  I made a really big fool of myself in church on Sunday. But I don’t care. Somebody had to say something, so I did, and I’m never going back there, no matter what Mom says.

  I usually don’t pay any attention to what Reverend Davis is preaching about, except this time he was going on about why people are different from animals, so I listened for a change. He said that the Bible is right about God creating the whole world and everything in it, including all the animals that are on the earth, and that evolution is a bunch of crap. Okay, he didn’t say “crap” ’cause he never swears, being a pastor and all, but that was the gist of it, only I’m not sure what evolution is so I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong about that. But I do know that if there was really a big flood way back then, like it says in the Bible, there’s so many different kinds of animals in the world that you couldn’t fit two of each of them on even a hundred boats like the Ark that Noah was supposed to have built. Besides, they’d eat each other up, right?

  Anyway, it was what he said next that made me so mad. He said that the biggest difference between people and animals is that people have souls and animals don’t. That didn’t bother me much, on account of I’m not really sure what a soul is, but then he said that it’s only people who go to Heaven when they die, and not animals. I couldn’t believe he’d say that! He went on and on like that, about how people are special and not like anything else on earth, and I thought about Jimmy’s little tiny guppies, and about how they’ve got bones and a heart and eyes and stuff just like me, so why couldn’t they have a soul too?

  I got to thinking about Maggie being killed and buried under the maple tree, and how that’s what happens to people too, they get buried in the ground when they die, and why is that so different? And if I get to go to Heaven when I die, provided I don’t commit any really big sins and have to go to Hell, why doesn’t Maggie, who never did anything bad in her whole life and took such good care of her kittens?

  And that’s when I did it. I stood up right there in church, and I guess I looked mad because Reverend Davis stopped preaching, and he said, “Is something wrong, Hanna?” and I said in a real loud voice, “You’re wrong!” and I pushed out of the pew and accidentally stepped on old Mrs. Beaton’s feet and ran out the door.

  Mom followed me out, and she was really mad. I tried to explain, only she said it was no excuse, that I had no right to be rude like tha
t and disrupt the church service, and that I had to go back inside when the service was over and apologize. I didn’t think I should have to, ’cause after all, he was wrong about animals not having souls or whatever and being different from us, only Mom said I had to, so we sat in the car for another twenty minutes, and after all the other people left she made me go back inside the church and we found Reverend Davis in his little room back behind the choir loft. He invited us in, and Mom said, “Hanna has something to say to you.”

  “I’m sorry I walked out,” I told him. I had on what Dad calls my sullen face.

  “Thank you, Hanna,” he said. “But I don’t understand why you did.”

  “Because you said animals don’t go to Heaven.”

  “Hanna’s pet cat was killed a couple of weeks ago,” Mom said.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “So it isn’t true, is it?” I said. “Maggie’s in Heaven, right?”

  He didn’t answer right away, so I knew I wasn’t going to like what he said next, and I felt myself getting mad again.

  “The Bible says that people have dominion over the earth, and everything that lives in it,” he said, and I said, “What’s that mean?”

  “That we’re unique,” he told me. “Different. That’s what I was explaining to the congregation, that human beings are made in the image of God, and that’s why when we die we go to be with Him.” I tried to interrupt, but he kept on talking. “That’s the glorious promise made to us by our Lord Jesus Christ, and it’s nothing to be sad about. Animals don’t go to Heaven because they don’t have souls like we do.”

  “Whatever that means,” I said, and Mom looked at me as if to say, “Watch yourself, young lady,” but I kept on going. “The Bible says all that, does it?”

  “That’s right,” Reverend Davis said.