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

  “Atta boy,” the flea called like a tiny, parasitical coxswain. “Now swim! Swim!”

  They wouldn’t survive long in this cold. Many of the bodies bobbing around them, held afloat by cork life vests, were already corpses.

  Beyond this frightening flotsam, they made out a familiar shape. A lifeboat, like the one they’d soared the skies in.

  “Boat straight on,” the flea directed.

  Up ahead, a baby was crying. Pudding set out for that voice, noisily alive.

  There were so many crammed into Lifeboat 16 that some, like Violet Jessop, had to stand. She was jiggling a howling baby in her arms — whose she didn’t know. The purser had thrust him at her just before the boat was lowered. What a fracas on deck at the last minute! Wild-eyed men rushing to get on, threatening to tip them and spill them into the black ocean. An officer waved a gun and they backed off.

  “Hush, baby, hush,” she whispered to the child.

  This lost infant wasn’t the only terrified one. The boat was filled with women and children, a handful of crew who were working the oars, and Violet and two other stewardesses. The men pulled the oars, yelling to each other.

  “Row! Get clear of the ship or we’ll be sucked under with her!”

  Violet offered the baby a finger to suck. It stopped crying at once, which only meant they better heard the thunderous smashing from the tipping ship and the screams of those still clinging to it.

  The rowers slowed. A chilling silence fell upon them now.

  Soon flotsam began drifting past — a suitcase, a violin, a chair — lit only by the hopeless glints of the stars. Several women began to cry again, but quietly now, for everyone in Lifeboat 16 knew that they had got out with their lives when so many others hadn’t.

  At least for now.

  Then something small and pale caught Violet’s eye. Fearing another lost baby, she asked a woman to take the whimpering one she held, another to hold her skirt while she leaned over the side.

  “Miss!” one of the oarsmen shouted. “Don’t do that!”

  Ignoring him, she lifted Pudding by a hind leg.

  “A cat,” the oarsman said. “He’s dead. Throw him back.”

  Years ago, when Violet was a little girl, her family had left their native Ireland for Argentina. On that crossing she had been very ill. No doctor on board, they hadn’t expected her to survive. The captain had tended to her. All he had for medicine was a song.

  She’d remembered that song her whole life.

  Rocked in the cradle of the deep

  I lay me down in peace to sleep;

  Secure I rest upon the wave,

  For thou, O Lord, hast power to save.

  Violet looked down just as the sodden cat stirred in her arms.

  “Look!” she cried. “He’s alive.”

  “It’s a sign!” one of the other women gasped.

  7. The Western Front, 1914

  More than fifteen hundred perished when the Titanic sank, including Ida and Isador Straus and the eight musicians of the White Star Line Orchestra who had valiantly played until the very last moment. The survivors numbered just over seven hundred.

  Hours after the tragedy, another ship, the Carpathia, arrived to rescue those in the lifeboats and transport them to New York. The few crew left alive were offered a return passage to England.

  Violet had lost everything in the sinking, so she wasn’t about to part with the cat. She took him to England and left him with her mother while she went on working as a stewardess.

  In the house in Ealing, Pudding could safely come and go as he pleased, thanks to the flea, who warned him when an electric tram was passing on Uxbridge Road, or when a fox appeared on the commons green.

  But Pudding didn’t stray as far, or as often, as he had in the past. The electric lights that now lined the streets bothered his eyes. Also, Ealing was crowded with cats. All of them had staked a territory and would shred fur to defend it. Why accidentally trespass when mice were plentiful in Mrs. Jessop’s garden?

  Also, he was growing old. His bones seemed to ache more and more.

  The flea didn’t want Pudding anywhere near those Ealing cats either, or their mooching fleas.

  “Back off,” he’d say when an interloper hatched in the grass and came pronking over to catch a ride. “This is my host. Find yourself some other Felis domesticus.”

  There he would perch in Pudding’s ear, preening his shaggy mouthparts, feeling very satisfied with his life, while Pudding enjoyed another long, long nap.

  If Pudding was growing old, his flea was ancient. Back on the Willoughby farm, none of his brothers and sisters were still singing and dancing. He’d outlived them all.

  While Pudding napped, he dreamed. In his dreams, he often found himself blinking into blackness. The blackness he’d seen beyond the edge of the hayloft in the barn. The blackness of the inside of a barrel. The blackness all around the Titanic’s sloping deck.

  What it meant, he didn’t know. Whenever he woke from these troubling dreams, he found himself longing for home.

  All this time the wide world was changing still, but not fast enough anymore. Mrs. Jessop hosted suffragette meetings in her parlor, which often drove Pudding from his favorite napping spot on the divan. Women wanted the right to vote just like men. They were marching in the streets and hunger-striking for it.

  And it wasn’t just women. All over, people were growing restless with their old rulers and kings. In Europe, alliances were shifting, borders moving. Armies began gathering. Dark clouds floated closer.

  Storm! Storm! Storm!

  * * *

  When Violet next got home to London, anxious to see her dear white cat, her mother met her at the door in tears.

  “Have you heard, Vi?” she cried. “We’re at war!”

  Violet knew what she had to do. She signed up with the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a junior nurse. Within two weeks she was on a ship bound for Belgium with a giddy group of new nurses.

  “I’ll be back for Christmas,” she told her mother when she left.

  All the nurses believed this.

  “Absence makes the heart grow fonder anyway, don’t it?” one said. She took a photograph out of her bag and passed it around. “This is my Jimmy. He’s in France. Having a great time, I’m sure!”

  “Dashing! How about you, Vi? Do you have a sweetheart?”

  “I do.” Violet patted the bag in her lap.

  “Let’s see his picture.”

  Violet clutched the bag to her chest. She was having misgivings about what she’d done, but like the others were saying, it was only for a month or two. Then they’d be back home.

  She unzipped the bag and let them have a peek. Pudding squinted up at the women’s surprised faces.

  “A cat!”

  Violet put a finger to her lips. “I couldn’t bear to part with him again. He was with me through the darkest hours of my life.”

  They decided that Pudding would be their mascot. After they docked and the cavalcade of motorcars arrived to transport them to the hospital in Antwerp, they had their first chance to show him off. In every village they drove through, people lined the road, calling, “Vive la Croix-Rouge! Long live the Red Cross!”

  Violet would lift Pudding out of the bag and hold him up for the villagers to see.

  “Vive le chat!” they shouted, waving their hats in the air. “Long live the cat!”

  “Listen to them shouting to you!” the flea gloated.

  Pudding shut his eyes tighter. He smelled blood in the air — human, not mouse.

  Later, the cavalcade passed a line of mud-spackled soldiers marching grimly along the roadside. These men didn’t look up, only limped along staring at the ground.

  The nurses stopped laughing. Violet slipped the cat back into her bag. They traveled the rest of the way
in an uneasy silence.

  The hospital was in an evacuated palace. No sooner had Violet been assigned a bunk than she was ordered down a marble staircase to a long ballroom where seventy beds stood side by side, all filled with groaning soldiers. She and one other nurse just as inexperienced as she had to care for all these wounded. Sometimes all they could offer to relieve the men’s pain was the hem of a sheet to clench between their teeth.

  With the work and the suffering, Violet barely thought of Pudding over those months. She simply left the door to her room ajar so he could roam.

  Roam he did. Pudding padded through the once-elegant rooms in this palace of misery.

  “This is awful,” the flea said. “Anywhere is better than here. Let’s go.”

  Pudding prowled on, restless, uneasy, as though in one of his own foreboding dreams.

  Violet sat beside a feverish French soldier whose left leg had been blown off. Every night she sat this vigil, for he told her it helped him endure his agony to have her near.

  The night the soldier died, Violet heard him muttering as she mopped his brow.

  “Ange, ange.”

  She leaned closer. He pointed with a bandaged hand and Violet turned.

  There, on the foot of the bed, her white angel of a cat sat blinking in the darkness.

  * * *

  In December, Violet was transferred to a hospital closer to the Front. From the back of the motorcar, she stared out at the ruined countryside, the trenches scarring the muddy fields, the tangled bales of barbed wire. The villages were deserted, their churches blasted to rubble, the colored glass from their windows scattered.

  “Why?” she asked out loud.

  “Why what?” answered the soldier who was driving her.

  “Why are we fighting?”

  The man snorted. “Because somebody we never heard of shot somebody else we never heard of in a place we never heard of. It’s called war.”

  “It’s terrible.”

  “Truer words were never spoken, miss.”

  The makeshift hospital was in an old stone farmhouse that shook with the continuous roar of guns. Pudding huddled under Violet’s cot in the attic where all the nurses slept in one large cold room — when they could sleep. Every blast shook the walls. Pudding’s nostrils filled with the scent of death.

  The flea whimpered. “That sound.”

  Along with the hammering of the shells came the rumble of the ambulances that delivered stretchers full of wounded and carried off the dead. When Pudding ventured out — which he did as seldom as possible — he asked the flea what he saw.

  “Mud. It just goes on and on.”

  Less than a mile away, John Willoughby was standing knee-deep in muck at the bottom of a trench. It had been four months since he’d joined up. He was a Canadian with a scholarship to study at Oxford, the world’s finest university. Just a farm boy from Welland County. Little Johnny Willoughby, a scholar! His parents were bursting with pride.

  But the war broke out before he even opened a book. Off he raced, hoping for adventure. He’d dress up in khaki, blast a rifle, march. Every night they’d hit the pubs. By Christmas, he’d be back in school.

  Well, it was Christmas, and instead he was freezing in this hole in the ground with a tin hat on his head. He wouldn’t make it out alive. But if he did? If he survived? He was going home. Forget Oxford. He’d already got more education than he could ever use.

  His first day in the trenches, the man beside him got shot in the neck. Lesson: keep your head down. Two weeks in, his feet started to rot in his boots. Lesson: dry your feet every night or you’ll lose your toes to trench rot.

  Lately, he’d been crying for no reason. Lesson: nobody cares how you feel.

  Oh, yes. He was educated now.

  The soldier next to him shimmied up the wall of sandbags and peeked over the top of the trench, trying to see where the enemy was positioned. A shot whizzed by.

  “Merry Christmas to you, too!” John shouted.

  Of course the German soldier who’d fired the shot was himself huddled miserably in his wet trench on the other side of No Man’s Land. This is what got to John. Whoever was over there probably only wanted to be home for Christmas, too. Warm and safe and dry with people who loved him rather than people who were trying to kill him.

  Why was John trying to kill him? Why was that German trying to kill John? Who knew?

  “I forgot it was Christmas,” said the soldier beside him in the trench. “Do you think they’ll give us pudding in our rations or just the same old muck?”

  John turned away, tears in his eyes. His mother always made pudding at Christmas, and afterward John’s father took a bowl of it to the barn for the cats. The sweetness of that memory made his present circumstances unbearable. He was going to cry again if he didn’t do something else.

  “Let’s have a carol.”

  His trench mate scoffed, but John sang anyway. He started with “Silent Night.” His mate grinned then and joined in, prompting the other soldiers along the muddy line to turn and look.

  At that moment, Pudding was creeping along the burned fringe of trees, having walked out that morning. He’d thought of something in the night. Maybe there were no corners. If there weren’t, all he had to do was keep walking in a straight line. Then he’d be home.

  Pudding heard the singing then — one clear voice at first, then others joining in and gathering force under the ringing bullets.

  “Whoa!” said the flea as they stepped into No Man’s Land. “Hold on! Stop!”

  On the German side, some of the soldiers had heard the carol, too, and shouted for their gunners to cease. They knew the song as “Stille Nacht.” One soldier volunteered to peek over the top of the trench. When he clambered back down, his expression was so strange that the others leaned their weapons against the sandbags and climbed up to look for themselves.

  Pudding, drawn by the music, stepped delicately into the broad stretch of horror.

  “Far enough!” the flea said. “Buddy, you are lucky you can’t see this.”

  Nothing grew around the charred tree trunks and the mortar craters filled with oily water. Several dead soldiers lay twisted in the mud, German and British. Walking through this desolation, carefully skirting the water, was a pure white cat so utterly calm that his eyes were closed.

  The German stared at the white cat with its tail raised high. A living flag proclaiming a truce on this day of peace.

  On the British side, John volunteered to find out why the firing had stopped.

  “Careful, Willoughby,” someone said. “It’s probably a trick.”

  John looked over the trench. He saw forty or more German heads with their curious spiked helmets looking back at him.

  No, they were looking at something in the middle of No Man’s Land. And all of them were singing.

  “Eine Katze!” one of the Germans called across to him.

  A cat. It was almost the same word in English. There it was, a small white cat with muddied legs, stepping lightly through this hell.

  A memory flooded back. John must have been about five. An albino kitten had been born on the farm. It was the only kitten that he ever got near enough to touch. One day it dashed out of the barn and was never seen again.

  Cat and Katze. The carol was the same, too. So why were they trying to kill each other? And what was that cat doing out there where it would be blown to bits?

  John did something then that surprised even himself. The night before, one of their brigade had tried to enter the No Man’s Land to collect a body. He, too, was shot. Now two of their men lay there.

  John wasn’t going to see that innocent animal hurt on Christmas Eve. They could shoot him first if they wanted. He heaved himself over the top of the trench. On both sides the singing stopped. It hadn’t been this quiet for months.

 
; As John walked toward the cat, the eyes of two armies followed his every step. When he got close enough, he crouched.

  “Here, kitty. Here, kitty.”

  “Turn back,” the flea roared. “Don’t listen to him.”

  But there was something in the cadence of that friendly voice that sounded familiar to Pudding. He rushed right to him and rubbed himself against John’s leg.

  “Heads up, Johnny!” someone shouted.

  A German soldier came sidling over. He didn’t seem to be armed. He, too, crouched down and John saw that he was young.

  John had never seen a German this close. Not a live one, anyway.

  Shyly, the German boy smiled and said, “Merry Christmas.”

  His accent was so funny that John threw back his head and laughed.

  From this place on Christmas Eve, 1914, peace spread all down the Western Front. Within hours, two entire armies had climbed out of their miserable ditches, crossed over, and shaken hands.

  John shook the German boy’s. “I wish I had a present to give you,” he said.

  He patted the pockets of his trench coat. Nothing but a pad and pencil, his pocket knife, a picture of his mother.

  And buttons! He tore one off his coat and offered it to the soldier, who did the same. A brass reminder of the German he didn’t kill.

  He would keep it all his life.

  Out of nowhere a soccer ball came flying and a jubilant cry rose up. Two pairs of helmets became the goalposts, spiked German ones on one side, domed British ones on the other. John and the German watched the game, the cat purring in John’s arms. Then John took the damp pad from his pocket. He wrote, John Willoughby, Welland County, Ontario, Canada, tore the page out and gave it to the German.

  “Write to me when this is all over, brother. Write to me if you’re alive.”

  * * *