THE CAT WHO SANG FOR THE BIRDS

Across the road from the handsome new building was a dilapidated farmhouse surrounded by a hundred acres of well-tilled farmland. The house was sadly neglected and would have appeared abandoned but for the chickens pecking around the wheels of a rusty truck in the front yard. As Qwilleran approached, five elderly mongrels limped and waddled from behind the house.

“Good dogs! Good dogs!” he said as he headed for the front stoop. They followed him with benign curiosity, too tired or too old to bark.

Nevertheless, the front door was flung open, and a scrawny woman in strange clothing screeched, “Who be you?”

Qwilleran raised the bakery box and replied in a pleasant voice, “A messenger from the Moose County Something, bringing a present to one of our favorite readers!”

“Laws a’mighty!” she exclaimed. “I declare it be the moustache from the paper! Come on in and have a sup. There be a pot o’ coffee b’ilin’ on the stove.” She spoke in a local patois common among old-timers in the area. Polly was doing research on Old Moose as an almost forgotten dialect. Qwilleran was glad he had brought his tape recorder.

The entrance hall was totally dark. Groping blindly in her wake he found himself in a large, dusty, cluttered kitchen. Besides a pot-bellied stove, pots and pans, and a dry sink with hand pump, there were such furnishings as a narrow cot, a chest of drawers, and a large, old-fashioned Morris chair with tom upholstery. This was where she lived!

She cleared rolled-up newspapers and assorted litter from a wooden table and a scarred wooden chair. “Sit ye down!” she invited as she poured coffee from an enameled tin pot into thick china mugs with chipped handles. It had been boiling on a kerosene heater. The cast-iron stove, not needed in this weather, was piled high with rolled-up newspapers.

Qwilleran said, “I hope you like these muffins, Mrs. Coggin. They’re carrot and raisin.”

She bit into one with good teeth, large but discolored. “So they be! Ain’t had nothin’ so fancy since Bert passed on. That were twenty year ago. Livin’ alone, a body gets to livin’ mighty plain. He were seventy-eight, Bert were, when he passed on. I be ninety-three.”

“You don’t look it,” Qwilleran said. “There’s something youthful about you.” She was indeed spirited and agile.

“Yep. Can read the paper ‘thout glasses. Never had no store-bought teeth. Live off the land and work hard, that be the ticket.”

Yet her face was furrowed and leathery, and her scant white hair was untamed. This wild aspect, plus her screeching voice and odd attire, could easily give rise to gossip. In spite of the mild weather and glowing kerosene heater, she was wearing a long heavy skirt over farmer’s workpants, topped with layers of men’s shirts and sweaters. She clomped around the raw wood floor in sixteen-eyelet field boots, somewhat too large.

“How long were you married, Mrs. Coggin?”

“Sixty year. This be Bert’s chair.” She flopped down in the Morris chair and propped her boots on a wooden crate. “And these be Bert’s boots.”

“Have you had this land all that time?”

“One acre, we started with. Worked it together. Di’n’t have a horse. I pulled the plow. I were young, then. I be ninety-three now. Do my own chores. Grow my own turnips and kale. Drive my own truck.”

“But how do you cultivate all this acreage, Mrs. Coggin?”

“Some young lads been tillin’ it since Bert passed on. Hunnerd acres, all-a-ways back to the river. With them big machines, it ain’t like it were. Good lads, they be. Paid me rent, they did, for twenty year, ‘thout missin’ a month.”

“I think I know them - the McBee brothers.”

“Don’t rent the land no more. Sold the whole caboodle! No more taxes to pay, an’ I can live here ‘thout payin’ rent. This new feller loves the soil, he does, like Bert did, He’s gonna plant food crops - taters an’ beans, not just hay and field corn.”

“Sounds like a good deal. Have you

always lived in this area, Mrs. Coggin?”

“Nope. Growed up in Little Hope.”

“Then you probably know Homer Tibbitt.” The retired high school principal was now official county historian.

“Yep, Lived on the next farm. Set my cap for that boy, I did, but he up and went away to school, so I married Bert. He were a good farmer and a good man. Give me three boys, he did, All moved away now. No tellin’ where they be. Passed on, mebbe.”

“You probably have great-grandchildren.”

She shrugged, “Don’t know where they be.”

Qwilleran glanced at the hand pump in the kitchen sink, He counted four oil lamps. “I don’t see any electric lights.”

“Don’t need none.”

“Do you have a telephone?”

“Nope. Waste o’ money… Want more coffee?”

He declined politely, Though notorious for his powerhouse coffee, Qwilleran was floored by the thick brew that had been boiling on the kerosene heater all morning. “What do you think of your new neighbors across the street?” he asked.