The Widow Finster’s Cat

Mrs. Ulgene Finster has been the librarian in our town for almost as long anybody can remember. Old Sam Warner says he was there when Moses gave her the Ten Commandments for safe keeping, but that’s an obvious exaggeration because Sam wasn’t born until Deuteronomy. Everybody that grew up in our town has been shushed by Mrs. Finster at one time or another in their life, some of us many more times than others.

Mrs. Finster lives in the big old Victorian house that stands quietly observing the town from the hill at the top of Main Street. As kids we imagined that the turret on the top of that house was a prison tower where she kept the children that didn’t shush. Other than possibly imprisoning unshushable children, Mrs. Finster has always been greatly loved and admired by everyone in our town. Everyone, that is, except her late husband Harlon. Harlon and Mrs. Finster waged a fierce and bitter war almost from the day they married until the day Harlon died. Ever since her husband’s death, Mrs. Finster has steadfastly maintained that she won that war fair and square, strictly by attrition. Harlon would have argued otherwise.

Some say it was Harlon’s hatred of cats that set them at such terrible odds, Mrs. Finster being a devoted feeder and lover of stray cats. Every time she would bring one of her strays into the house to make a pet of it, it mysteriously disappeared. Harlon forever denied any hand in the vanishing of Mrs. Finster’s cats, but he always made a point of loudly and triumphantly expressing his profound glee at their disappearance:

“Cats ain’t safe around that old woman!” he would shout for anyone who would listen, waving his arms at the world of misplaced cats. “Now she’s gone and lost herself another one!” Then he would laugh maniacally at his own cleverness.

Others say it was the fact that Harlon Finster was lazy and indolent and an incorrigible drinker given to spending his days in Ernie’s Bar rather than doing something productive that drove Mrs. Finster to loathe him so. She made a point of calling him out publicly for his sloth and lack of any redeeming qualities every chance she got. Whenever Harlon left the house, Mrs. Finster waited until he was just to town, a distance of about a block and a half, then called after him from the porch so that everyone could hear: “You do something useful today, Harlon Finster, instead of laying about in that dreadful bar all day!”

Her public admonitions never failed to turn Harlon instantly in his tracks to taunt her back: “Don’t you worry about me, old woman!” he would shout, “I know my business! You mind yours!” Then he would turn back and head for the bar.

The actual truth about the Finster War is something else entirely. I know because I’ve seen the evidence. Mrs. Finster calls me every spring and every fall to oil the hinges of the 31 doors in her big old Victorian house. I’m the town carpenter, and a pretty good handyman, too, so I get just about all the squeaky doors in town on top of all the carpentry. The only thing more annoying to Mrs. Finster, it seems, than unshushable children and her worthless late husband are squeaky doors. She has me give them all a preventative oiling twice a year so one of them doesn’t start squeaking in the middle of the night or when company comes to visit when I might be sleeping or fishing and not hear the phone. Most of her doors are generally well-behaved. The two exceptions are the attic door, which has a mischievous mind of its own — sometimes swinging open unbidden to squeak at me playfully as I pack up my tools — and the big parlor door, which she says began squeaking decades ago to warn her when her shiftless husband was sneaking into the room, which she forbade. Until Harlon died, that was the only door I was not to oil. “The parlor is for refined people,” she would tell him. “You are not refined.”

“I’m as refined as anybody,” he would argue. “I can stick my pinky out and sit proper just as good as anyone else. And I clean off my boots, too.”

“You’re gauche,” she would say.

“I ain’t whatever that is!” he would shout back.

“You slouch,” she would say.

“I gotta bad back!”

Then she would call him vulgar and a Neanderthal and he would call her evil and a shrew, and they would go back and forth that way until he became incensed and needed a drink and stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him and kicking a cat on his way down the stairs. She would watch him quietly from the big bay window in the parlor until he reached the edge of town, then go to the porch and call after him. He would turn and shout back, then they would both go on about their day. This was the cycle of their lives.

The big parlor door no longer needs to warn Mrs. Finster of her husband’s illegal incursions, so she now has me maintain its hinges twice a year along with all the others to keep it from embarrassing her when the ladies from the Mah Jongg Club come to call on the second Tuesday of every month.

In Mrs. Finster’s parlor there is an authentic antique Queen Anne console table in the middle of the big bay window overlooking the street. On that console table next to a genuine Edward Miller cut glass lamp is a yellowed and worn unpunched bus ticket from August 16, 1960, tucked safely beneath a beautiful wood carving of a cat, its ears pricked up attentively, its tail curled contentedly around its feet, serenely monitoring the street outside. The cat is the only inside cat Mrs. Finster has ever owned, or ever owned that didn’t disappear anyway. She talks to it when she stands quietly at the bay window and they study the street together. She says it’s the only cat she needs anymore, but she still feeds the strays that congregate around her door. The yellowed and worn unpunched bus ticket marked the beginning of the great Finster War. The wooden cat marked the end of it.

On August 16, 1960, the young and newly credentialed town librarian, Mrs. Ulgene Finster, hired her husband, on behalf of the Library Foundation, to go up to the city and pick up the new books she had ordered. The job paid ten dollars and came with a round-trip bus ticket and 75 cents for a sandwich and a cup of coffee and a slice of pie at the Kresge lunch counter. The no. 4 bus left for the city at 9:27 every morning in those days, which gave Harlon exactly 27 minutes to get oiled up for the trip after Ernie opened the bar at nine.

“Set it up!” he told Ernie, sliding onto a bar stool. “Just enough time to get my head right for the bus ride.”

Ernie slid a whiskey down the bar. Ten minutes later he slid another whiskey down the bar. Ten minutes after that, another.

At precisely 9:27 the bus driver gave the horn a warning toot, the bus doors squeaked closed and the air brakes hissed their derision at Harlon Finster’s unpunched bus ticket. Harlon, working on his third whiskey, didn’t even look up.

“Now you’ve gone and done it,” Ernie told him. “That’ll get Ulgene’s back up for sure.”

“Them books ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Harlon growled with a wave of his hand. “Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off indefinitely, I always say.” He held his empty glass in the air triumphantly and Ernie slid another whiskey down the bar.

The next day the front page story in the Daily Bugler was all about the big wreck on Highway 37 involving the no. 4 bus and a dairy truck carrying milk to the Red and White IGA. Two people were killed and five were in the hospital. The driver of the dairy truck escaped unharmed. Milk men seem lucky that way.

“See there?” Harlon shouted up and down Main Street, waving the newspaper in one hand and the unpunched bus ticked in the other. “”See that? Wicked shrew tried to kill me! Tried to have me offed on a doomed bus ride!”

Trixie Bellows pulled down the window shade of her bakery and locked the door. Millard Avery came out of his law office to see what the commotion was about. “Go home Harlon,” he told him. “You’re drunk and it’s not even lunch yet.”

“Sure I’m drunk,” Harlon shouted. “Whiskey saved me! Woman tried to murder me with a bus ticket!” He waved the evidence at Millard. “Right here, see? Saved by whiskey I was. That’ll show her! Woman made me immortal is what she did. I’m indestructible. Nothin’ can kill me now.”  He waved the ticket at Millard again. “See that?”

Mrs. Finster watched this pageant silently from her porch, stray cats rubbing affectionately around her feet.

For the rest of Harlon Finster’s miserable and aimless life he carried that unpunched bus ticket in his shirt pocket wherever he went as evidence of his immortality and his wife’s unrequited treachery. He never failed to produce it for anybody that would sit still long enough to hear the story, which by the time he met his final demise was down to just the occasional unsuspecting out-of-towner and anyone too drunk to move away from him at the bar. I never asked her of course, but it could be that for all those intervening years, Mrs. Finster never forgave her husband for not being on that bus.

One day last May a storm of biblical proportions blew through our town. It ripped a hole in the horizon and shook the very foundations of the earth. My neighbor Phil Darnley’s above-ground pool sailed across my backyard, barely missing my garden shed, and got shredded against the tree trunks at the edge of the woods behind us. At one point I could have sworn I saw one of Deke Lawson’s cows fly past, but I couldn’t call him to tell him where she was, or at least which direction she was going, because the phone service was out. The next morning the town looked like a war zone and smelled like ozone.

“Some storm,” I told my best friend, Ludie Carper, sliding onto a barstool at Ernie’s. “Did you see that tree laying against the roof of the Citizen’s Bank?”

“Yup,” he said. “Had to call a tree company from up in the city to come get it off.” Ludie is on the town council and gets calls about things like trees laying on bank roofs at all hours of the day and night, which is why I don’t want to be on the town council — I get enough squeaky door calls as it is. “Way too big for anybody local to cut it up,” he went on. “Be about a week before they can get to it. Lots of trees down.”

It was too big all right. The trunk of that tree was almost three feet wide. It had crushed about a five-foot section of the parapet wall around the roof of the bank and stayed there, leaning ominously across the sidewalk, daring anyone to walk under it. But Harlon Finster, immortal survivor of the bus ride he never took, could never ignore a dare after that  fateful day. He danced back and forth under that tree, daring it to come down on him, sure in the certainty of his immortality and the protection of his unpunched bus ticket.

“See that?” he taunted, trying to provoke the tree with the ticket. “Try somethin’. I dare ya!” The tree leaned silently against the roof of the bank, ignoring him, as trees do. Mrs. Finster watched all of this serenely from her porch, as silent as the tree, stray cats rubbing against her ankles.

“Did you know,”” she asked when I came to see about a loose stair tread the next day, “that that tree is — or rather it was — an American Linden tree? It was more than 150 years old. It was planted by the town to mark the end of the Civil War.”

“I did not know that,” I admitted. A life spent avoiding places where I am likely to be shushed has deprived me of that sort of information, whereas a life spent in the library has turned Mrs. Finster into something of a library herself. She stared thoughtfully at the tree.

“I’ll just check the other steps,” I said, happy to leave her to her reverie. I heard a tiny squeak from the attic door, inviting me to come up and play in the tower with the other unshushables.

A few days later a crew showed up with a bucket truck and a crane and cut the great old American Linden tree into sections, which they stacked neatly at the back of the parking lot of the bank awaiting removal to wherever great old American Linden trees go when they’re finished being great old American Linden trees — probably the great old chipper/shredder at the mulch plant outside of town. A few days after that a crew of brick masons set up and started rebuilding the parapet wall on the roof. Mrs. Finster, standing primly erect as always, watched it all in detached silence from her big bay window.

The next day I stood on the sidewalk in front of Ernie’s nursing a beer with a few of the other guys watching the masons work. An apprentice on the sidewalk mixed mortar in a five gallon bucket, which he then hooked to a rope and hauled through a pulley up to an apprentice on the roof. A third apprentice loaded a hod with bricks and carried it up a ladder. They all changed places every hour or so. The mason turned the fruits of their back-breaking labor into a new parapet wall. He didn’t even break a sweat.

Up the street, Mrs. Finster’s door slammed and Harlon shouted “Wicked old shrew!” and started down the street, kicking a cat as he went.

“Oh boy,” Ludie said, “here he comes.”

“Look at that stride,” Lank Boreman said. “Must have been a big one. He’s on fire.”

Harlon marched furiously down the street, his eyes narrowed into a glare that resembled an angry bird. He leaned into his stride, power-walking, his fists balled tightly at his sides, legs stretching out to cover the distance quickly, visions of whiskey likely dancing in his head.  The mason and his apprentices stopped what they were doing and watched, the load of bricks halfway up the ladder and the mortar bucket halfway to the roof. The whole town stopped and watched with them.

Harlon covered the block and a half in a hurry, mumbling ferociously to himself as he went, occasionally punctuating his diatribe with a sharply barked “Shrew!” or “Witch!” loud enough to make sure everyone understood the object of his indignation.

Just as he crossed Maple Street at the edge of town, Mrs. Finster appeared on her porch. Cats swarmed to her feet as Harlon fired off another “Witch!” and “Shrew!” Then, just as he marched right through the yellow-and-black DANGER: KEEP OUT tape surrounding the apprentices’ work area, Mrs. Finster called to him:

“You ask that man on the roof for some work, Harlon Finster!” she said. “Surely they have something constructive you can do besides spending the whole day in that awful bar!”

Harlon stopped dead in his tracks and turned, glaring: “Don’t you worry about me old woman!” he shouted back, “I know my business! You mind yours!” Then he wheeled and slammed right into the apprentice holding the mortar bucket aloft, knocking the rope out of his hands. Gravity is a terrible thing. The bucket of mortar fell to earth, extinguishing Harlon Finster instantly.

Mrs. Finster, watching quietly from her front porch, turned and went inside.

Harlon Finster was a changed man after he died, far less repellent and far more reserved. Nevertheless the Widow Finster was the only person in attendance at the burial of her late husband other than Reverend Walker from the Unitarian Church, Reverend Walker being the only clergyman in town willing to send Harlon Finster on to his just rewards, Unitarians being relatively tolerant of the Harlon Finsters of the world.

A few days later The Widow Finster appeared in the rain at the workshop of Wing Harper, a local woodcarver known for his remarkably lifelike duck decoys. Behind her she pulled the shopping cart she uses for her weekly trips to the Red and White IGA. In the cart was a paper bag from which she removed a section of the great American Linden tree that had fallen on the bank. She handed it to Wing. “Would this be suitable for a carving?” she asked.

Wing inspected the log. “Good color,” he said. “Nice tight grain. Old tree, that’s for sure. It’ll carve fine. What do you want carved?”

“A cat,” she replied. “Sitting peacefully. Quietly. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” Wing told her. “Take about a month to kiln and a month for the carving if that’s all right. I’m a little backed up.”

“That will be fine,” she told him. They agreed on a price and she left.

That fall when I oiled the 31 doors in the Widow Finster’s big old Victorian house at the top of Main Street, I saw the carving of the cat sitting on top of her late husband’s yellowed and worn unpunched bus ticket beside the cut glass lamp on the console table in the bay window of the parlor.

“Nice carving,” I commented. “Looks like Wing Harper’s work.”

“It is,” she replied. “He’s very good.”

“Why a cat?” I asked, “You have so many real cats to keep you company now — well, now that you don’t have to worry about them disappearing, that is.”

She studied the carving appreciatively for a moment, stroking its polished wooden fur as though it were alive. “Because,” she said, turning to me, “this is an authentic antique Queen Anne console table. A bucket of mortar  would be in rather poor taste, don’t you think?”