Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson

any of us had ever seen a bobcat.
    â€œSo?” Caroline was undaunted. “We tame them.”
    â€œTame them?” I snorted. “Why don’t you just teach a crab to play the piano?”
    â€œNot permanently,” she said. “Just long enough to get them new homes.”
    â€œHow, Caroline?” Call was definitely interested.
    She grinned. “Paregoric,” she said.
    Call went to his house to fetch the family bottle, and I went to our house and got ours. Meantime, Caroline had prepared an assortment of sixteen saucers, cups, and bowls, rationing out the cans of tuna fish to each container. She laced each liberally with paregoric. We set them all around the kitchen floor and then brought in the gunnysacks and untied them.
    Lured by the smell of food, the cats came staggering out of the bag. At first there was a bit of snarling and shoving, but since there were plenty of dishes for all, each cat eventually found a place for itself and set itself to cleaning away every trace of the drugged feast set before it.
    In the end, it was as much Caroline’s charm as the paregoric that worked. She took one cat to each house along the street, leaving Call and me to mind the sacks, slightly out of sight. Nobody on Rass would dare slam a door in Caroline’s face. And no matter how determined the housewife might be against taking in a cat, Caroline’s melodiously sweet voice would remind her that it was no small thing to save a life—a life precious to God if not toman—and then she would hold out a cat who was so doped up with paregoric that it was practically smiling. Some of them even managed a cuddly, kittenish mew. “See,” Caroline would say, “he likes you already.”
    When the last cat was placed, we went back to Auntie Braxton’s. The Captain had put chairs on top of tables and was beginning to mop the floor with hot water and disinfectant. Call told him the whole story of Caroline’s feat, house by house, cat by cat. They laughed and imitated the befuddled women at the door. Caroline threw in imitations of the happy, drunken cats while the Captain and Call hooted with delight, and I felt as I always did when someone told the story of my birth.

10
    T he blow that I had been praying for struck the next week. While not as severe as the storm of ’33, which became a legend before its waters receded, the storm of ’42 is the one I will never forget.
    During the war, weather was classified information, but on Rass we didn’t need a city man on a radio to warn us of bad weather. My father, like any true waterman, could smell the storm coming up, even before the ominous rust-colored sunset. He had made his boat fast and boarded up the windows of our house. There was not much he could do about the peelers in our floats, except hope the storm would leave him a few of the floats and spare his crab shanty for one more season.
    It is a mysterious thing how cheerful people become in the face of disaster. My father whistled ashe boarded up the windows, and my mother from time to time would call to him happily out the back door. She obviously was enjoying the unusual pleasure of having him home on a weekday morning. Tomorrow they might be ruined or dead, today they had each other. And then there are things you can do to prepare for a hurricane. It is not like a thunderstorm on the water or sudden illness before which you are helpless.
    Just before noon Call came by and asked if Caroline or I was going down to the Captain’s.
    â€œSure,” said Caroline cheerfully. “Soon as we finish carrying the canning upstairs.” High water had more than once washed through our downstairs, and my mother didn’t want to take a chance on having the fruits and vegetables she had bought on the mainland and put up for the winter dashed to the floor or swept away. “You coming, Wheeze?”
    Who did she think she was, inviting me to go see the Captain?