“Look at his feet,” Wilkie said to Billy in his secret voice.
“Catta,” Billy said, “what happened to your feet?”
At first, Lila was irritated that Billy had spoken—it was not his place. But then she saw Catta’s feet. Everything was cut and scratched, and what was not cut or scratched was caked in blood.
“Did you come all the way back here barefoot?” Billy continued.
Wilkie was surprised by Catta’s silence. It was obviously true—why wouldn’t he say it?
Catta looked at the variety of surprised or confused adult faces. Maybe, he thought, the answer was just to lie: it seemed like what they wanted.
“Catta,” Jim Hillsinger said, “take off your shirt.”
When he’d obeyed this request, Wilkie turned to Lila. She looked like someone watching a body fall from high up in the air.
She was confused when Catta had jumped back from her touch, but still delighted—anything was fine with her, any reaction at all, so long as he was safe inside this house. And then she saw what had happened to his body. The cuts that almost looked like lashes, the blood.
“Turn around, darling,” Lila said.
If anything, his back was worse. For Lila, the most damning detail was that he had done this to himself. Jim had put him on an island, on its shoreline. Presumably he could have waited out his time there. But he had not waited, or he’d been forced to go inland on an island with notoriously impassable vegetation. And Catta had not merely done that, taken that rather extreme step, but then he had persisted in the face of this obvious pain. What would make a boy of twelve do that? In what sort of world was it even possible? Their house was not a place of safety, as she had thought. It was a coliseum.
And if that was true, if her marriage was not a partnership but a proving ground, or a stall for breeding violent oxen, then what was the rest of it? What was the meeting in Philadelphia, the ascending arc of intimacy, the unspoken knowledge—was that all just prelude to the sacrifice of warriors? Was the flaying of her younger son what her husband had meant when he spoke about his work on the psychological front? Had Lila in the end not been nurturing her children, as she had believed—had she instead been fattening them up for slaughter?
“This is a surprise,” Jim said to Catta. “Why don’t you tell us what happened?”
“The real surprise here,” Billy said in what Lila thought was more her sister’s old register of self-righteousness, “is that you almost killed your son.”
“Thank you, Billy, for your usual penetration,” Jim said, without looking at him.
“Catta, I want you to listen carefully.”
“I’m listening,” Catta said.
“Understand that if I were trying to kill you, you would be dead.”
Wilkie nearly laughed out loud. Hillsinger had posed an impossible question to his son, and against the odds Catta had answered it correctly. The question was, by Wilkie’s lights, a variant of Tell me something I don’t already know. And the answer was here in front of him, it was written all over Catta’s back, legs, feet, and torso, and it seemed—astonishingly, for Wilkie—that Hillsinger was delighted. Wilkie reckoned that if Catta had built a ziggurat from stones, or captured a songbird with a string and two worms, Hillsinger would have been almost equally pleased. He had wanted Catta to do something unexpected, something virtuosic. The contrast here between him and Lila was stark.
“Darling,” Lila said to Catta, “put your shirt back on.”
Before he did put his shirt on, before she turned away, Lila noticed what looked like a number 7 there on his upper arm. What could that possibly be? Her son had come back from Baffin a stranger.
78
When James Hillsinger saw that Catta would not be punished or humiliated or sent back to Baffin, he left the room and the Hill House. They’d fooled him again.
He went into the barn to see if the staff had left the little lamb-dog behind, when they left for the Migration. The other boys had loved seeing it the other night, and even if Sheila had stayed behind, too, James thought he could convince her to let him take it down to the Cottage for an hour. At worst, she would let them all come up to see it later in the day. As it happened, though, when James went in, Sheila was asleep next to the Border collie’s box, with its freight of newborn dogs and the one gray lamb.
There was an orange bucket hanging by the birthing-pen. James took the bucket down and placed it next to the box, and then, with infinite care, he picked up the tiny lamb in both hands and slid him into the bucket. He was so gentle that the lamb kept sleeping.
79
There was an odd, almost imploring silence, Wilkie thought, while the boy ate. Jim Hillsinger, who sat close to Catta but not next to him, remained completely still, while Billy Quick changed position every few minutes, crossing and uncrossing. All the other adults were quiet. Lila hovered and ran relays into the kitchen, bringing out more and more food that, once his first wave of hunger had passed, Catta no longer wanted.
“How did you get across?” Billy finally said. “I’ve tried to walk in from the beach and I couldn’t go more than a few feet.”
“I got small,” Catta said. “Most of the branches either don’t go all the way to the ground or, if they do, they don’t extend too high.”
Penny Quick, meanwhile, had been laughing quietly ever since Catta sat down. Wilkie could not imagine why, but Catta seemed to appreciate it. When he smiled for the first time, it was in her direction. George, the new boy, looked completely lost. What an introduction, Wilkie thought.
“How did you get off the island?” Hillsinger said.
That question silenced the room. It seemed to Wilkie that even the dense ones, like Christopher Templeton, recognized that this was the crucial question—even with his body punished, as it had been, even if he had in fact successfully crossed the island in the dark—even granting all these feats, if (for example) Catta had been picked up by a passing lobster boat or found a canoe by chance, then that would change the complexion of the thing entirely, and for the worse. Yet Hillsinger’s tone continued to be light. Wilkie reflected that he was a professional interrogator who would have routinely confronted dangerous men with at least the implied threat of violence. It was both remarkable and terrifying to see Hillsinger deploy skills he used against the KGB in questioning a twelve-year-old boy.
“I swam,” Catta said, precisely matching Hillsinger’s unconcerned tone.
“You swam the fast channel?” Billy Quick said.
“Yes,” Catta said.
“What time did you leave Baffin?” Jim Hillsinger said.