With one swipe of his palm his father wipes the top of the bookshelf clean.
Anyway, he says. We used to talk about these kinds of things, your mother and me. Long time ago.
He rubs his palm against the thighs of his pants, leaving a faint gray streak.
She liked that idea, he says after a moment. That the only thing separating her from a beast was a few little strokes.
I didn’t know you knew Chinese, Bird says.
I don’t, his father says absently. Not really. But I can understand some Cantonese. I studied it, for a while. With your mother. A long time ago.
He turns to go, and then, just as suddenly, turns back.
That book.
And then, after another long pause: Your mother used to tell you that story, didn’t she.
Bird nods.
I remember, his father says.
And as he begins to speak, it comes back to Bird, all of it: not the words on the pages of the book, not the few bare-bones sentences his father uses to tell it to him now, but the way he remembers hearing it, in his mother’s voice. Painting a picture with words on the blank white wall of his mind. Long buried. Crackling as it surfaced in the air once more.
Once, long ago, there was a boy who loved to draw cats. He was a poor boy, and most of the day he worked in the fields, planting rice with his parents and the others in his village in the spring, harvesting the paddies beside them in the fall. But whenever he had a spare moment, he would draw. And what he most liked to draw, what he drew most often of all, were cats. Big cats, little cats, striped and calico and spotted. Cats with pointy ears and skinny eyes, cats with black paws and black muzzles, cats with white patches on their chests like eagles. Shaggy cats, smooth cats, cats leaping, cats stalking, cats sleeping or cleaning their fur. On the flat rocks by the river, he sketched them with a burnt stick. He scraped them into the sand on the shores of the nearby lake where the fishermen pulled in their nets. On dry days, he scratched them into the dust of the path to his house, and after the rains he carved them into the thick mud where puddles had once glistened.
The others in his village thought this was a waste of time. What use is it to draw cats, they scoffed. It doesn’t put food on the table or bring in the grain. The richest man in town had beautiful scrolls on the walls of his house: paintings of fog-tipped mountains and elegant gardens, far-off things no one in their village had ever seen. But you could simply step outside and see a cat; they were everywhere. They had never heard of an artist choosing to draw cats. What was the point?
The boy’s parents, however, did not agree. Although they had to work many hours in the field—and the boy often had to help—they were proud of his talent. After the day’s work was done, the father collected pieces of bamboo the length of his hand and gave them to his son for brushes. The mother cut the tips of her own hair and bound them into tufts for the bristles. The boy gathered stones—every color he could find, from deep red to pure black—and ground them to dust to make his paints. And every night, he painted cats—on flat pieces of bark, on scraps of paper and worn-out rags—until it was time for bed.
One year, sickness struck the village, and the boy’s parents died. No one in the village would take him in: he had a reputation. A boy who wasted time, a boy who did useless things. Besides, the villagers had little to spare. They had been sick, too; there was little food, nothing left for one who wasn’t their own. Each family took a handful of rice from their stores, bound it all in a cloth, and gave it to the boy. Good luck, they said. May fortune smile on you. He thanked them and shouldered the bundle, tucked his brushes in his pocket, and set off on his way.
It was winter, and bitterly cold. The boy wandered for hours through the dark until he came to a small village, where every door was shut tight. Though he could see the glow of firelight through the windows, no one would answer his knock. A harsh wind began to blow; snow began to whirl around him in the air like ghosts clawing at his face. At the last house, an old woman peered out. I’m sorry, she said. If I let you in, my husband will kill me. We dare not take in strangers. This whole town is afraid. Afraid, the boy said, afraid of what? But the woman simply shook her head.
In desperation, the boy looked around the deserted street. At the end, just past the outskirts of town, he spotted a small building he hadn’t noticed before. What about that, he said, that deserted house? Surely I can stay there just for the night.
The old woman seized his hands. That place is dangerous, she said. Cursed. It is said that a monster lives there. No one who enters at night ever returns.
I am not afraid, the boy said, and anyway, I may as well be eaten by a monster as freeze to death out here in the street.
The old woman bowed her head and gave him a torch lit from her cooking fire. Take this, she said. And keep to the small. Then she blessed him and wiped a tear from her cheek. May you see tomorrow, she said. And if you do, I beg you forgive us.
The boy made his way to the deserted house. Snow had begun to stick to the ground and to the bare branches of the trees, and when he reached it he found a small drift just beginning to form at its door. But it was unlocked, and he let himself inside. He lit a fire in the fireplace and looked around. There was only one room, with only one piece of furniture: a small cupboard, the kind that his mother had once kept their blankets in. There were no carpets on the floor, no decorations on the walls: only whitewashed walls, a plain dirt floor swept clean.
Well, he thought, this place may be cursed, but at least it’s dry and warm. He was about to unroll his blanket on the floor and go to sleep when the white walls caught his attention. They seemed so bare, so empty. Like a face without features. He dug into his pocket and pulled out his brushes, and before he had thought it through, he had painted a cat on one of the walls. Just a little one, a small striped gray-and-white thing. A kitten, really. There, he thought, that’s better. And again he prepared to go to bed.
But the cat seemed lonely, all by itself on the wall—and there was so much wall. He painted it a friend, a bigger cat, a tabby sitting beside it, licking its paw. Then he forgot himself completely. He painted another cat, a big orange tom, asleep by the fire. A black cat ready to pounce, a white cat watching with big blue eyes, a calico clambering among the rafters. He painted cats until all the walls were covered, a whole coterie of cats to keep him company, and only when he ran out of space—and the fire was sputtering down to embers—did he put his brushes away.