Cats and girls

Today’s photo was taken in our Chicago apartment in August 1977 with a Polaroid. The cat absorbing the compact OED is Gremlin, our second black cat. The plywood case is one Thomas knocked together to replace the deteriorating cardboard case that came with the dictionary. We still have dictionary and plywood case. Gremlin we have only in fond memory.

For text, I offer you some more views of a Eudora Welty cat. The selections are from the story “Moon Lake” in The Golden Apples, the passage I talked about previously, in which the girls slip away from the summer camp. The first image just nearly made me gasp the first time I read it, probably about 1977:

Cat . . . was sunning on a post and when they approached jumped to the ground like something poured out of a bottle, and went with them, in front.

. . .

Cat was stalking something at the black edge of the ditch. The briars didn’t trouble Cat at all, it was they that seemed to give way beneath that long, boatlike belly.

. . .

Cat edged the woods onward, and at moments vanished into a tunnel in the briars. Emerging from other tunnels, he—or she—glanced up at them with a face more mask-like than ever.

. . .

There was another fairy sound, and the pried-apart, gentle silence. The woods seemed to be moving after it, running—the world pellmell. Nina could see the boy, in the distance, too, and the golden horn tilted up. A few minutes back her gaze had fled the present and this scene; now she put the horn blower into his visionary place.

“Don’t blow that” Jinny Love cried out this time, jumping to her feet and stopping up her ears, stamping on the shore of Moon Lake. “You shut up! We can hear!—Come on,” she added prosaically to the other two. “It’s time to go. I reckon they’ve worried enough.” She smiled. “Here comes Cat.”

Cat always caught something; something was in his—or her—mouth, a couple of little feet or claws bouncing under the lifted whiskers. Cat didn’t look especially triumphant; just through with it.

They marched on away from their little boat.

Here is a nice plot synopsis of “Moon Lake” that I found in James Shimkus’s Aspects of King MacLain in Eurdora Welty’s The Golden Apples:

“Moon Lake” takes place at a summer camp for girls at Morgana’s Moon Lake. The action of the story centers on Jinny Love Stark . . ., Nina Carmichael, and an orphan girl named Easter. . . . Jinny Love initially looks down on the orphans, but Nina befriends Easter. Thereafter, the three girls spend their free time together, playing mumbledy-peg, hiking around the lake, and taking an impromptu ride in an abandoned boat. [Except the boat is tethered so the ride is very short.] Later, Easter is standing on the diving board above the lake when a young black boy named Exum McLane brushes her heel with a willow switch. Easter drops “like one hit in the head by a stone from a sling” (GA 141). Loch {Morrison] dives in and retrieves Easter, who has apparently drowned. The campers gather to watch as Loch attempts to resuscitate Easter in what appears to be a violent parody of sexual intercourse. . . . Easter eventually revives, and the campers glimpse what Welty later characterized as “the secrets of the world, of life and death, in spite of a ring of chaperones. Childhood, ready or not, is jolted forward into adolescence.”