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

  Would Mr. Taylor be waiting for her in heaven? Would she recognize him if he was? It had been more than forty years since she’d seen him.

  All her life she’d tried not to think of the baby. It was too painful. But now a thought came to her. If Mr. Taylor was there, would he have the baby with him?

  She turned her head so Mr. Russell wouldn’t see her tears. As she did, something caught her eye. Something in the ditch.

  “What’s that? Driver, stop.”

  The carter pulled the reins. Mr. Russell leaned over Mrs. Taylor to see what she was pointing at.

  “Some kind of animal. It’s dead.”

  Mrs. Taylor shivered, then roused herself to defy the omen.

  “How do you know? Let me see.”

  As she stepped down onto the road, Mr. Russell exploded. “No more stalling, Annie! We’re already an hour late!”

  Mrs. Taylor ignored him. Lifting her black skirt, she skittered down into the ditch — ouch, ouch, ouch. Her bunions would kill her if Niagara Falls didn’t.

  “Why, it’s a cat!” she cried.

  When she touched the cat, she felt life under her hand. Drowsily, the animal lifted its head. Its eyelids fluttered but didn’t open.

  Pudding had been sleeping soundly until that moment. The flea’s attempts to rouse him had had no effect. Not yanking on his ear hairs, or screaming over the general commotion.

  But Mrs. Taylor’s touch woke him up.

  “No, no, no!” the flea roared as she picked up Pudding.

  Mr. Russell slid over on the seat, making a space between him and the cat. Under his curled moustache his lips pursed with disgust.

  “Drive on,” Mrs. Taylor told the carter.

  She inspected Pudding from nose to tail. Satisfied that he was unhurt, she began to stroke him.

  Pudding enjoyed this very much. It reminded him of the boy in the barn who fed him warm milk from his cupped hand. But each time the huge looming hand came down, the flea shrieked.

  “Aren’t you beautiful?” she murmured to the cat. “Aren’t you precious?”

  “Isn’t this the pits?” said the flea.

  With the cart rocking back and forth, the horse’s rhythmic clops and the melodious river rushing past, Mrs. Taylor felt moved to sing.

  I love you truly, truly dear,

  Life with its sorrow, life with its tears,

  Fades into dreams when I feel you are near …

  Competing with Mrs. Taylor’s singing were the drunken fleas.

  Don’t give him water, don’t give him tears,

  It’s blood that feeds the flea.

  Hey ho! Hey ho! Blood feeds the flea!

  Pudding had heard the flea singing so often that he didn’t really hear it anymore. But he’d never heard real music until now. It was as beautiful as the buzz-huff-hum. The purr-mew-nicker-clank. The rustle-sigh.

  He was entranced.

  As she sang, Mrs. Taylor’s thoughts turned to her baby. He’d weighed so little. As little as this cat. He’d been nearly as pale, too. In fact, the cat’s mews reminded her of her baby’s sickly cries. And now the grief that she’d held in her heart all this time came pouring out.

  “Again?” Mr. Russell said. “You produce as much water as the falls.”

  Goat Island came into view in the middle of the river. They stopped at the spot where they’d chosen to launch. Mrs. Taylor climbed down with the cat and stood blotting her eyes while the men lifted down the heavy barrel and rolled it to the riverbank.

  “Precious,” Mrs. Taylor whispered Pudding’s ear.

  “Gag,” the flea said.

  “Give me that cat and get in,” Mr. Russell said.

  But now Mrs. Taylor felt brave again. She certainly wasn’t going to hand the cat over to Mr. Russell. Instead, she tucked him under her arm, pulled out her hatpins and gave Mr. Russell her hat.

  “Just in case I make it,” she told him.

  If she didn’t make it, she could accept death now. She would meet that little baby again, she was sure. Why, he’d be a grown man. Imagine that!

  She set the cat on the ground, made a shooing motion, then got down on her hands and knees. Inelegantly, due to the tight corset, she backed into the barrel. She had to push hard to get her rump in, but the oak staves widened in the middle and she fit.

  The moment Pudding’s paws touched the ground, the flea began to yell his head off for him to run. The river was right there. This was their chance.

  But Pudding didn’t run. He stood waiting for Mrs. Taylor to sing again. When she looked out of the mouth of the barrel and saw the cat still there, she clicked her tongue and beckoned to him.

  “No, no, no!” the flea roared, pointing with four pairs of claws toward the river. “Right over there? That’s water!”

  Mr. Russell had gone back to the cart for the lid. He returned in time to see the cat step daintily inside the barrel. He clamped the lid on anyway and tightened the screws.

  Inside the barrel, the warbles of the drunken fleas and the protestations of the sober one sounded even louder to Pudding. The barrel began to roll. They heard a splash. Mrs. Taylor shrieked.

  “What did I tell you?” the flea said. “Water.”

  Bob and swirl, bob and swirl. They picked up speed, clipping rocks. The terrified passengers — human, animal and insect — were jostled and jarred. The top of Mrs. Taylor’s head knocked against the lid but was protected by her bun.

  She clung to the cat, screaming, “My baby! Oh, my baby!” while Pudding struggled uselessly.

  Hey ho! Hey ho! sang the oblivious fleas.

  * * *

  The crowd lining River Road was growing restless. Many had decided it was all a prank and gone for lunch instead.

  Then someone with opera glasses cried out, “There it is!”

  The barrel was just a speck at that distance, falling too fast now and too far.

  Down,

  down,

  down,

  down!

  It hit the bottom and disappeared. The spectators held their breath.

  “She’s a goner,” the man with the opera glasses said.

  The barrel popped back up, miraculously whole.

  Waiting at the base of the falls were the newspaper reporters and photographers and two men hired to retrieve the barrel. The men leapt into the waiting boat, rowed out and snagged it with a hook. They already knew that Mrs. Taylor had survived by the screaming coming from inside.

  They towed the barrel to shore, rolled it up the bank, then set to freeing the hysterical heroine.

  The second they got the lid off something white shot out.

  “What was that?” asked one of the reporters.

  Pudding raced in a blind circle, around and around until he tumbled down the bank and landed in the water again.

  The men shrugged and returned to extricating Mrs. Taylor, who seemed to have swelled from the trauma of the ride. In the end it took two of them pulling on her arms and a third sitting on the barrel to liberate the now-famous lady.

  She was completely dry, but her hair was a mess.

  While this was happening, Pudding was in the river paddling in desperate loops, each moving him closer to shore.

  Water! That kitten-drowning substance. To think he had been seeking something so awful. He clawed his way up the bank and for a drenched moment stood there, shrunken-looking, more like a white rat than a cat. His beautiful fur pasted to his scrawny body, he sneezed and coughed and shook himself.

  “Atta boy,” came the voice of the flea.

  The only flea left.

  * * *

  Two days after her historic plunge, Mrs. Taylor’s nerves were still shot. She had yet to leave her room, let alone begin her speaking tour in the Lafayette Hotel museum.

  Mr. Russell grew even
more furious. Every day that they didn’t sell tickets, they lost money.

  Mostly Mrs. Taylor slept. Pudding, too, curled up in the bed with her. He was more traumatized from his plunge in the Niagara River — the icy water touching his skin and filling his lungs — than the ride down the falls.

  And now the falls roared on just outside the window, reminding him of his terror and drowning out the mostly flealess silence he might otherwise have enjoyed.

  The single happy creature in that room was Pudding’s remaining flea.

  “Eat,” he encouraged Pudding when a meal tray was brought to Mrs. Taylor. Pudding fed on the tidbits she gave him — boiled eggs and buttered toast, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. He barely tasted them.

  The flea did, second hand, smacking his shaggy mouthparts. Pudding’s blood was rich and roast-beefy now instead of thin and mousey like before. Within a day he’d drunk so much of it that, like Mrs. Taylor, he’d swelled.

  “You did good, kid,” he told Pudding. “I had my doubts there, especially on the way down. ‘Shoulda picked the tabby,’ I said to myself.”

  The Lafayette Hotel was something else as well. As he drank Pudding’s tasty blood, the flea looked around at the velvet curtains and the rose-garden wallpaper.

  Of course! No wonder he’d been unhappy. He belonged in a place like this, not in a dingy old barn. He was a higher class of Ctenocephalides felis. Not like the other washed-away, poo-eating riff-raff. Better looking, too!

  “Not only that. Do you hear it? No, you don’t. Because there’s nothing to hear! We got rid of those bums! Ah, silence …”

  Pudding put his paws over his ears to shut out the roar.

  3. Buffalo, New York, 1901

  On the third night after their plunge, Pudding woke and began to wash Mrs. Taylor’s face. He wanted her to sing again. The unbearable roar outside the hotel window was wearing down his nerves.

  Instead she clutched him to her chest and sobbed all over him. Fearing another wetting, he wriggled free and began to wash himself. As he washed, he pondered how to escape. He was ready to set out again in search of the four corners of the wide world.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Russell had also come to a decision. He was Mrs. Taylor’s manager, but in a way he was a parasite, too, like the flea — a man without special qualities of his own who made his living off other people. His moustache even resembled a flea’s shaggy mouthparts.

  Though he’d arranged for her historic ride down the falls and her speaking tour, as a parasite, Mr. Russell was concerned only with himself. It wasn’t long before he realized that he didn’t actually need Mrs. Taylor. The barrel would do. With it beside him, he could describe her thrilling descent and her sad nervous collapse. Without Mrs. Taylor, Mr. Russell could keep their entire share of ticket sales. He’d earn twice as much!

  That night, while the night clerk slept behind the desk, his head resting on his folded arms, Mr. Russell and the carter simply carried the barrel out of the hotel and loaded it into the waiting cart.

  Then Mr. Russell had another idea. Animal shows were the most popular. He’d probably earn three times as much with the cat.

  He went upstairs and snuck into Mrs. Taylor’s room. The frazzled heroine was snoring in her bed with the cat beside her, washing himself. Easy to see in the dark.

  * * *

  The first stop on Mrs. Taylor’s speaking tour was Buffalo, where the Pan-American Exposition was attracting thousands of visitors every day. The cart drove to the railway station on the New York side of the Niagara River, the stolen barrel rolling around in the back, Pudding and his flea tossed about inside it. Pudding meowed with terror. He didn’t want to get wet again.

  So it was a relief when the barrel was finally lifted down and set somewhere solid. Nowhere near water as far as Pudding could tell. They were far from that roar.

  “How are you going to get us out?” the flea demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Pudding said.

  “You have to do something,” the flea said. “Doing is what the host is for. That’s you, buddy.”

  In a way, a single voice echoing in the barrel was worse than the chorus of hundreds, for it was personal, addressed to him. What a boob Pudding was to get them in this situation, the flea told him in his brash, rude voice. The Lafayette Hotel was just the place for a high-class flea like him. They had to go back. Right this instant!

  Very faintly, in the pauses between these complaints, the sound of birds worked its way through the oak staves. Dawn had broken. Pudding hadn’t heard the birds so clearly for a long time. Soon a soft swishing and another kind of twittering — whistling — reached his sensitive ears.

  Then footsteps.

  Someone had opened the barrel before. Maybe they would again. Pudding meowed.

  Mr. Russell’s plan had been to take the first train and be gone before Mrs. Taylor woke. Since they’d reached the station in plenty of time, he paid a visit to the gentlemen’s room. There he massaged fresh wax into his moustache and shaped their tips into new curls. He took a tin of tooth powder out of his case, rubbed it on his yellow teeth with his finger, spat it out.

  When he was finished, he smiled at the mirror for giving back such a handsome picture of himself.

  By the time he returned to the platform, several other passengers had gathered. The porter was there, too, to help the passengers board and to load their luggage. At the moment, he was whistling as he swept around the barrel.

  “When’s the first train, George?” Mr. Russell asked him.

  No one called porters by their real names back then. They called them “George,” after the man who owned the train company, George Pullman.

  The porter, whose actual name was Asa Philip, hated to be called George. There were other things about the job he disliked. How his weekly wage, already low, was docked to pay off his uniform. How he had to get to the station early every morning to sweep, though he wasn’t paid for this chore. How he could never hope to rise to the position of engineer.

  But being called by your rightful name was to every man, woman and child a sign of respect. The wide world was changing in this way, too. Everyone, not just the Mr. Pullmans, deserved respect. So whenever anyone called Asa “George,” he would simply offer a courteous correction, as he did now with Mr. Russell.

  “It’s Asa.”

  “I didn’t ask your name,” Mr. Russell said. “I asked when the train goes.”

  “The Pan-American Express departs at seven-twenty,” Asa told him.

  Pudding was still meowing, trying to get someone to let him out of the barrel.

  “Sir?” Asa said to Mr. Russell. “There’s a cat in this barrel. Do you think it has enough air?”

  “Sure it does,” Mr. Russell answered. “If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be yowling like that.”

  With these words came a terrible rumble, followed by the screech of metal on metal, agonizing to Pudding. Then train station bustle.

  No passengers were disembarking. They were all on their way to the Exposition in Buffalo.

  Asa helped them board.

  “Name’s Asa, ma’am, sir,” he said, over and over.

  He returned to load the heavy barrel.

  MRS. ANNIE EDSON TAYLOR, HEROINE OF NIAGARA FALLS.

  Asa saw the bold white letters. An avid reader of left-behind newspapers, he knew about Mrs. Taylor’s plunge. Here he was, carrying the famous barrel to the baggage car on his strong back!

  He set it in the corner. The poor cat was still crying, so Asa tapped out a jaunty rhythm on its lid.

  “You just hang in there, Mr. Cat. I’m coming back.”

  Eventually Pudding heard the cry of “All aboard!” and the painful screech of departing wheels. The clacking accelerated and the car began to pitch and sway.

  The flea carped on.

  “This barrel is the pits! I want a be
d!”

  Pudding meowed and meowed until he heard Asa again.

  “I’m coming, Mr. Cat! I’m a coming!”

  Asa unlatched the wooden lid and peered down into the dim, sour-smelling prison.

  “White!” he exclaimed, whistling a descending note of surprise.

  The barrel was too tall to reach the cat crouched at the bottom, so Asa shifted the bags around and tilted it on its side. When Pudding crawled out, Asa scooped him up.

  “Why, you’re a dandy, Mr. Cat. But what’s wrong with your eyes?” He thumbed one open, causing Pudding to squirm. “Pink eyes! You are one special cat.”

  Asa settled on a trunk with Pudding in his lap. In a mournful voice, he began to sing.

  I may be blind an’ cannot see

  But I’ll meet you at the station

  When the train comes along.

  “You can’t see me, can you, Mr. Cat? Not with your pretty pink eyes closed like that. But why do you have to ride in that barrel? Why can’t your mistress hold you? You’re doing fine in my lap.”

  Pudding was purring madly now, for Asa’s singing voice, though deep, was as beautiful as Mrs. Taylor’s. Asa, too, felt pleasure sharing this moment of rest with this beautiful cat. In a quarter hour he’d be George again.

  “George Pullman doesn’t own me,” he muttered. “All he owns is the part of this uniform I haven’t paid off.”

  Mr. Pullman’s picture hung in the station office. Asa imagined him now, showing up in person and calling him George.

  “If he did that, Mr. Cat? You know what I’d do?”

  In his mind, Asa stepped right out of his pants and handed them to a shocked Mr. Pullman. “‘Here,’ I’d say. ‘These are all that belongs to you.’”

  He let out a soft whoop of laughter just as the door opened and another porter said, “Here’s the baggage car, sir.”

  Mr. Russell stepped inside. He’d decided to check on Pudding in case the porter was right about the air in the barrel. A dead cat wasn’t much use to him.