The Mostly True Story of Pudding Tat, Adventuring Cat Read online

“Vamoose,” the voice said. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Pudding knew they would soon be leaving the barn. Mother Tat had prepared them for that day all their lives. A new batch of kittens was coming. It was time for them to set out as independent cats.

  They would all leave together, of course. Not only was Pudding accustomed to following his brothers and sisters, but with fleas drowning out the most important of his senses, he depended on them.

  But when the day came, Mother Tat took Pudding aside. Since his accident, her doubts about his survival had only increased.

  “I’d like you to stay a little longer. I want to make sure you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine. I’m ready,” Pudding told her. “The voice says it’s time to go.”

  “Don’t tell her that!” the voice roared.

  “What voice?” Now Mother Tat was truly frightened. “Pudding, dear? You’re in no condition to leave. Wait here while I see your brothers and sisters off.”

  As soon as she was gone, the voice said, “What are you waiting for?”

  “I have to say goodbye. She’s my mother.”

  “So?”

  Over the parasite party, Pudding heard his brothers and sisters tearfully begging to stay.

  “You’re Tats,” Mother Tat told them. “Strong and brave.”

  It was only her mention of the farmer’s sack that convinced them in the end. If they didn’t leave, there would be too many cats in the barn.

  “I love you all!” she cried, before returning to the loft.

  “About this voice, Pudding?” she said. “Don’t listen to it.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” the voice said. “Aren’t you a Tat, too? Strong and brave?”

  Yes, he was! More than that, he longed to be like Grandfather Tat and visit the four corners of the world.

  Then the barn door squawked and opened. Hearing the clank of the pails and little Johnny’s chattering, Mother Tat fell silent.

  Johnny told his father, “The white one is my favorite. He always comes to say hello.”

  Pudding, seizing the moment, leapt from the edge of the loft.

  “Goodbye, Mother!”

  He landed on the shelf in the milking parlor, then jumped down to the straw-strewn floor as well any seeing cat. He’d done it a hundred times.

  “Stay!” Mother Tat cried.

  “I’ll be back!” he told her.

  This only made Mother Tat cry harder.

  “See?” Johnny said to his father. “I told you he’d come.”

  But before Johnny knew it, the little white cat had slipped out the barn door and was bounding up the path, the flag of his white tail held high.

  Johnny set down the pail. He was about to go after the cat, but his father put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Chores first, son. Feed the horse. Take the milk up to the house. Then you can play with the cat.”

  Farmer Willoughby settled on his stool and reached under Betsy, patient and brown. Milk streamed rhythmically into the pail.

  By the time it was full and Johnny was toting it with two hands up the path, legs wide, trying not to spill, the cat was long gone.

  2. Niagara Fall, Ontario, Canada 1901

  As he left the barn, Pudding Tat could hear his mother’s faint cries over the racket of the fleas, but he didn’t turn back. The wide world drew him on from the moment he stepped outside. The farm, the woods, the fields. He smelled it all.

  And something else. His sensitive whiskers tingled with it.

  Change.

  The wide world was changing. Like Pudding, people were on the move, leaving farms for the cities, the old world for the new. Some wanted a better life, others adventure. All of them were dreaming. Dreaming big — of automobiles and airplanes, subways and electric lights. Dreaming of the things we take for granted now, but which were new amazements then.

  The voice urged him on. “Giddy-up.”

  “Who are you?” Pudding asked.

  “We’re looking for water. Find some. Quick.”

  Pudding, eyes closed, moved through the confusion of odors. Hay freshly cut and waiting in the fields. Windfall apples softening in the orchard. Finally his nose picked out water. He ran for it.

  Straight into the side of a trough.

  “What the —” said the voice. “Why’d you do that?”

  Pudding rubbed his stinging nose with his paw. “I found water.”

  “We need more than this. We need a lot of water. A body of water.”

  So Pudding moved on until his next collision — with the split rail fence around the pasture. He slipped under it into a harvested field where the left-behind stubble pricked his paws.

  “Wide world” meant vast. Now that he was out of the farmyard he sensed it. And he remembered the stories Mother Tat had told him about Grandfather Tat. How he’d reached the first corner of the world, rubbed himself against it, then carried on.

  Pudding was following in his formidable footsteps!

  Before too long the footsteps bumped him into something else. A tree. Though he didn’t know it, he’d reached the woods dressed in the golden finery of fall. He began to pick his way through it.

  Somewhere, there would be a stream. Mother Tat had talked about it.

  When he lifted his head to sniff, he realized that night had fallen and he could open his eyes. He’d only ever seen the sky through the hayloft window. Now it spread above him, full-mooned, milky with stars, lighting the way painlessly for him.

  All this time the flea party was still going on.

  Where do fleas shop? At the flea market!

  And the voice in his ear kept complaining, “Boring, boring, boring …”

  Soon Pudding grew hungry. Mice scurried out of his way, uncatchable without walls and corners to serve as traps. He was cold now, too, and lonely. He’d never been alone in his whole life. Already he pined for the barn and that cozy, thrumming pile of cats.

  “Why’re you stopping? You can’t stop right out in the open with foxes all over the place.”

  Not alone.

  “I miss my mother,” Pudding said.

  “Keep moving. We need water.”

  “Water,” Pudding remembered and plodded on.

  “Atta boy.”

  After a minute, Pudding thought to ask, “Why are we looking for water?”

  “We’re going to drown these good-for-nothings.”

  Drown? How cruel the voice sounded now. Bloodthirsty.

  Pudding stopped again. “Who are you?”

  “A flea,” the voice said. “What did you think?”

  * * *

  Now is the time to tell you about Pudding’s traveling companion and how he, too, was different from his kin. Just as mannerless and bloodthirsty, yes, but unlike the hundreds of other fleas cohabitating with him on Pudding’s back, he wanted to improve his life.

  The flea, too, was born on the Willoughby farm. Born from one of six hundred eggs his mother had laid in the hayloft. Unlike Pudding, he wasn’t nourished from his mother’s body, not washed and warmed and taught how to survive. The flea’s mother simply laid her eggs and went on guzzling blood. If the flea ever clapped eyes on her, he wouldn’t even have recognized her.

  Worse, once he’d hatched, not as a flea yet, but a larva — wiggling and white, like a worm with hair — his mother still didn’t bother with him. She didn’t even feed him. And what he and his brother and sister larvae had to eat was almost too disgusting to mention.

  They ate the poo of the adult fleas.

  During his time as a helpless larva, the flea experienced neither tenderness nor encouragement. He heard not a single kind or well-mannered word. No one spoke to him at all. Instead, he wriggled through the hay, blind and legless, fighting over poo with his hundreds of siblings while the a
dult fleas danced and drank and utterly disregarded their parental responsibilities.

  Finally, the time came to make a cocoon. No one taught the flea how to do this. He had to figure out on his own what the sticky thread coming from his rear end was for. He wrapped himself in it until he was swaddled in a muffling sack.

  Now at least he could fall asleep and forget the awful life he’d been born into.

  His five hundred and ninety-nine brothers and sisters also spun themselves cocoons, but unlike this flea, they were eager to become adults so that they could start living a dissolute life — drinking and dancing and singing, not giving a hoot about anything or anybody. They fell easily to sleep, pupated for as short a time as possible, then kicked their way out of their hastily spun cocoons and joined the party.

  Pudding’s flea tossed and turned. It was so noisy! He squeezed out a little extra silk and stuffed his ears with it.

  Finally, he fell into pupation, which was so much better than being a larva that he wanted to stay in his cocoon forever.

  But in the end, he had to rejoin his family. It was Nature’s way. He emerged wiping the sticky threads off the six legs he’d grown while asleep, finding everything as before. The same unruly conversations, the same dumb jokes, the same four-hour ballads. Jumping and dancing and blood glugging.

  No one even noticed he was back.

  His new body was covered in bristly armored plates — hard, flat and brown. His moustachy mouthparts hung down. Each segmented leg ended in a pair of claws. He tried to squeeze out some more silk for earplugs but had lost the knack.

  What could he do now but dance and jump and drink blood?

  He didn’t want to do those things. He believed he was destined for a better life.

  So, though on the outside he was hideously identical to every other flea, inside, this flea was very different. He saw that he had a choice of hosts. Pudding was the one he picked, for he noticed how this cat followed the others, as though obeying them. Several times he saw Pudding cover his ears.

  Did he, too, hate those endless flea songs?

  He sprang on the white body and made his way through the fur forest on Pudding’s back and settled in his ear. From there he started on his plan for personal improvement.

  “You’re a flea?” Pudding said. “Then aren’t these your brothers and sisters singing on my back?”

  “Yep,” the flea replied.

  Pudding remembered Mother Tat’s stories about kittens snatched and stuffed in sacks and how he and his siblings curled tighter together to keep each other safe.

  “You want to drown your own brothers and sisters?”

  “As soon as possible.” He began to yell insults at the other fleas. “Drunks! Poo-eaters!” To Pudding he said, “Don’t get me started.”

  Wanting to drown your own relatives seemed cold-blooded to Pudding. And it was. A flea is an insect and insects have cold blood.

  “Giddy-up,” the flea said.

  “What if I drown?” Pudding asked.

  “Better not,” the flea told him. “A dead host isn’t any good to me.”

  Pudding walked through the night in search of water. What drove him on was the thought of hearing once again the buzz-huff-hum-twitter-thrum-scratch-squeak, the rustle-sigh of the world.

  The stream was there, but too far away to smell. Unbeknownst to him, Pudding was walking parallel to it, straight toward the mighty Niagara River.

  At dawn the sun peeped over the horizon, blinding him. Under his feet, the ground sloped into a shadowy basin, making a perfect place to rest after his all-night walk.

  Cats need sleep — a lot of sleep.

  The smell of water was so close. But it would be there, too, when he woke up.

  * * *

  A few miles from where Pudding had curled up in the ditch stood the luxurious Lafayette Hotel — five brick stories with a turret overlooking Niagara Falls.

  Every room in the hotel was fitted with modern conveniences — electric lights, hot and cold running water, a flush toilet. There was even a museum in the lobby showing photographs of the falls, arrowheads and clay pipes and other historical curios, as well as stuffed birds and animals.

  Recently a special display had been added — the oak barrel in which Mrs. Annie Edson Taylor, the “Heroine of Niagara Falls,” would take her death-defying plunge later that morning.

  No one had ever attempted such an impossible-to-survive feat. To be carried along with the six hundred thousand gallons of water that coursed over the falls every second, then plunge 167 feet straight down into the swirling Niagara River. In a barrel! It would be smashed to bits. She would be smashed to bits. Then she’d drown. The best thing that could happen was her heart would give out.

  She may as well go down in a coffin.

  At that moment, though, the heroine was still alive in her bed, sobbing into her pillow while her manager, Mr. Russell, pounded on her door.

  “Annie! Get up!”

  “No!”

  “I’m coming in. I’ve got a key.”

  “I’m not dressed!”

  “Then get dressed!”

  Mrs. Taylor had no choice. With a despairing sigh, she climbed out of bed.

  Was this really the day? She hobbled over to the window, drew back the heavy drapes and looked down at the furiously cascading water. She heard its ceaseless din along with her own imagined screams as she went down.

  All week hotel boys had peddled advertising handbills to the tourists strolling along the terrifying edge of the falls. Annie Edson Taylor Takes the Plunge! Thousands were expected to line River Road to watch her die.

  She shuddered and let go of the drapes. For a few moments she distracted herself by pushing the buttons on the wall and watching the magic show of electric lights. How the glowing bulb was connected to the falls outside, she couldn’t fathom, but Mr. Russell said that was where the electricity came from.

  “Annie!”

  “I’m washing!”

  The wonders of the modern world continued in the water closet. When she pulled the chain on the cistern above the toilet, a miniature Niagara Falls appeared inside the bowl.

  If only she could flush herself down the toilet instead!

  In the mirror, the face she washed, framed by long gray hair, seemed to have grown older overnight.

  Mr. Russell rattled the handle.

  “I’m getting dressed!” she called.

  She pulled on her woolen underpants and her stockings, squeezed into the corset and hooked it tight so she might actually fit inside the barrel. Strapped in like this, she felt calmer. She laced her boots and put on her new dress — black satin for a widow and a soon-to-be corpse.

  Then Mrs. Taylor put her hair in a bun. All the newspapers would be there. She wanted to look presentable when, dead or alive, they pulled her out of the barrel.

  At last she opened the door to a furious Mr. Russell. Even his moustache, waxed into sharply curled points, looked angry.

  “Ready,” Mrs. Taylor told him. With great dignity she hooked her arm through his so that he could escort her to that other wonder, the elevator, and down to the dining room.

  They put out a sumptuous spread at the Lafayette Hotel. As this was likely her last meal, Mrs. Taylor planned to stuff herself as much as the corset would allow.

  * * *

  You may be wondering what drove Mrs. Taylor to attempt her plunge.

  It was desperation.

  After decades as a dancing teacher in far-flung towns — from Sault Ste. Marie to San Antonio to Mexico City — she’d had to retire. She was crippled by bunions and corns — bumps and lumps all over her feet. At sixty-three, she was an old woman for that time.

  Where could an old woman with no family go? In those days it was to the county poorhouse. The old, the sick and the penniless got a bed there and some s
lop to eat. It was hardly better than a prison.

  The previous year, Mrs. Taylor had passed through Niagara Falls. She hadn’t stayed at the Lafayette Hotel, but in a cheap boarding house for tourists. One night at dinner another lodger told how he’d accidently dropped his cigarette case over the falls, then hurried down to the base and actually found it washed up there. Mrs. Taylor, whose feet throbbed terribly that night, listened to the story with great interest.

  Several months later, in another boarding house in another town, she met Mr. Russell, a talent manager with traveling acts. Bearded ladies, conjurers and sword swallowers were his usual clientele.

  She told him her idea, and the next day he produced a contract.

  Until a few days ago she’d been pleased with how Mr. Russell had arranged everything — the fancy room at the Lafayette, the publicity, the speaking tour that would follow her plunge. Even a new dress!

  But as the deadly day drew near and she began to lose her nerve, Mr. Russell became more and more impatient with her.

  That morning, as they stepped out of the hotel, Annie gasped at the sight of the crowd lining the promenade. Mr. Russell grabbed her arm and bustled her along, knocking her feathered hat askew. The cart that would convey them to the drop-off spot upriver was waiting there for them, the barrel in the back painted with the words MRS. ANNIE EDSON TAYLOR, HEROINE OF NIAGARA FALLS.

  She gripped Mr. Russell’s arm. “I don’t want to die.”

  How easy it would have been for him to say something kind. He could have told her that everything would be fine. Even if he didn’t mean it.

  Instead he hissed, “You should have thought of that before.”

  So Mrs. Taylor, who was a brave person, a survivor who had rallied her spirits that morning to face the day’s events, began to slump again.

  Outside town the road followed alongside the river, which babbled happily without giving any hint of the dramatic plunge ahead. Mrs. Taylor looked out at the fields stubbled in gold.

  Would she ever see fields again, or take a breath of autumn air?

  Once she’d had a family — a husband and a baby. But the baby had died and Mr. Taylor, brokenhearted, had run off to be killed in the Civil War, leaving Mrs. Taylor to fend for herself.