As it happened, the Old Man was overwhelmed equally by his most recent illness, which had started yesterday, on the boat, and by the resonance of Catta’s information. At Chateau-Thierry, in what they now called the First World War, there were ten owls in each abandoned barn. On the same day that the order came for them to go over the trenches, he had woken up with a dual premonition: first, that he would survive the fighting that day, which as it turned out was a horrific bloodbath, and second, that owls would in some way figure prominently in his fate. The second half of his vision was obviously preposterous, and yet his escape that day had been so narrow—so many others had died—that in this sense, the owls were tied inextricably to his own salvation. As a boy, he had seen two white ones in the Adirondacks, and then the multitude in France and Germany during the war. Never since then, though, and never here on Seven, which for him was the only place that really mattered. But he was willing to wait, and, since the appearance of owls had been both predicted and in a larger sense preordained, the reality was that every day when he did not see an owl was also a day when it was impossible for him to die.
This was relevant because, lately, he had begun to have these shocks. He did not consider them to be a disease since they went away quickly (although they came back). He had no acute symptoms. No bleeding or unbearable pain. The doctors had seen nothing. He would, however, grow suddenly weak: feverish, intensely hungry, only in the morning and only for eggs. The shocks had grown more frequent; the membrane between life and death seemed to him especially thin. He could now hear, every day, the valediction of the sun. He had consulted his more farsighted friends, including Peregrine Wilkie, who argued that they must reject the temptations of passivity. He often spoke like that, Peregrine did, as if he were at the head of an army, and a thousand men stood in the shadows behind him. At a certain point, Peregrine said—at a point which was unknowable, until it was not—they must find the will to walk cheerfully into the gathering storm.
His grandson had filtered in and out of the Old Man’s half-sleep ever since they’d returned from Baffin, but this last vision of Catta, his torso covered in cuts and slashes and with a strange mark on its left shoulder, clearly a seven, had made him suspect delirium. It was possible, he concluded, and even likely that his body was strangling his mind. The apparition’s talk of owls confirmed it. He could not approach this great reckoning in a state of dementia and fog. He must act, insofar as he could.
As he unfolded the heavy woolen blanket back over himself, the Old Man saw at last, like mist burning off to reveal a mountain range nearby, that the deeper meaning of the owls’ long absence had been simply this: to certify the truth of a messenger who would come to announce his moment of decision. This effigy of Catta was that messenger. He stacked the books, tidied his bedsheets, swept the night table items into a drawer, and embraced the pseudo-Catta’s message in the same spirit of ferocity with which he had lived.
He died three hours later, in relative peace, with an obscure verse of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” echoing through his head.
76
When he left the Old Man’s room, after telling him about the owls, Catta had retreated to the basement. He stood by the outside door and realized that he was effectively trapped. He could not get back to the tree line, or even the barn, without being seen from the Hill House windows. Sheila had, however, left behind the wheelbarrow that brought him from the barn. And here, hanging by the door, was a large bright-yellow foul-weather coat. Firewood lay piled by the door. Catta reckoned that anyone looking out the window who saw someone pushing a wheelbarrow full of logs while wearing a raincoat on a beautiful day would assume some staff member had been left behind from the Migration for unknown reasons. No questions would be asked. The real danger was meeting someone between here and the barn, so he had to move fast, before the breakfast window closed.
It worked: he did not see anyone and no one called out to him. Colt was sleeping, and Sheila was not in the barn. Catta took off the absurd rain gear and laid it carefully on one of the stalls. He climbed up to the hayloft to scout the clearing.
Catta approached the Cottage from the rear, from the woods. There was no movement inside the house, but every ten yards he stopped and waited, to make sure he could not be seen. It was still early enough that the small boys would be asleep if they were lazy, which they usually were, and Martha was gone for the Migration so nobody would wake the stragglers. Martha would have left long trays of food in the refrigerator with precise instructions for heating them up, all of which would be ignored—the kids would eat everything cold. Catta could fill up a bag with food and be set for the day and the night, too, if it came to that.
When he got close to the Cottage, he looked in each window. No one was awake or around. Then he was in the front hallway. He stopped to listen. Everything was quiet. Different boys’ clothes were on hooks in the hallway, and he felt more human when he put a shirt on his back and a sweater, too.
He was through the hardest part, he thought. He was more than halfway home. Next was the kitchen—to eat or at least to pack up food for the day, if possible. He walked silently through the living room, pausing for a few seconds to see if the fireplace ashes were still warm. They were not. Then he stepped through the kitchen door into the butler’s pantry. His luck, Catta thought, had been good. He had been right to leave Baffin. Now starving, he walked into the kitchen.
And there was James.
He sat on the floor of the kitchen, eating cold pancakes out of a large metal tray. He smiled before he spoke.
“You must be hungry,” he said.
Catta turned and ran, but he slipped trying to turn the corner. Behind him, he heard the metal tray slam onto the floor.
James would sell him out to his father right away. Catta’s only option now was to throw himself into the Hill House dining room and tell them everything before James made up something horrible, before he told his father all the lies he could think of.
Catta slammed through the screen door and jumped off the porch to the ground. He still did not have shoes on and he was running too slowly, like in a bad dream. Catta heard James just behind him, and then he felt him. James was fast. He swerved but not soon enough, and James hit him across the back of the head. Catta lost his balance and fell down, landing hard on his back, and before he could cover up James punched him in the stomach. For a long time he could not move or breathe, while James ran up the hill to seal his fate. And the cuts on Catta’s back were on fire.
77
Lila Hillsinger was carrying a large tray of scrambled eggs and bacon into the dining room when her son James appeared at the head of the table.
“Catta’s here!” James shouted.
No one spoke. For her own self-preservation, Lila could not even hope that it was true—James had a history of indiscretion, even outright lies.
“Please explain yourself,” Jim said.
“He’s out there,” James said, pointing toward the lawn. “He ran away, but I can find him.”
Since Lila could not yet commit to believing it, she was able to bend over and gently place the china tray safely on the table. When she straightened up again, Catta had appeared behind James.
“Look!” James said. “He was afraid and he came home.”
Catta had been terrified of James’s relentless prosecution, of his lies, of everything. And yet James sounded absolutely ridiculous in this room, with his empty words exposed to the air.
Lila moved across the room and tried to embrace Catta, but he jumped back before she could touch him.
“What?” Lila said, now recoiling, almost falling over backward.
Under the borrowed shirt, Catta’s back was a patchwork of raw cuts, but he did not want to say that. Just now, any form of speaking felt like a lie. He didn’t know what to do.