Town remained quiet for the next few days. The adults at least had nothing to say. And if Else Two thought it quiet in town, around their house the silence was deathly. More so even than usual. Nobody felt like speaking. But then, nobody ever felt like speaking, about much of anything – not even at the beast of times. The best of times. And this, this wasn’t one of those.
Else Two didn’t much fancy being around any of the other kids either. Certainly not Goody two face Goodman One. Not Sparks One, or Two. Chandler Two was… not even them anymore. And what kind of a name was ‘Toren’ anyway?
Else Two chose to spend most of their time wandering the woods alone – more alone now than at any time before.
A hummingbird’s wings buzzed, briefly, overhead. The lightest rustle among fallen leaves: a hop and a skip and a flash of brown rump. Was that a deer? Had that been a deer? They were meant to be dead – to be all of them dead, years gone by. Was it possible…?
Knapsack on, not even bothering to forage as an excuse, they wandered the lonesome woods, their racing thoughts pre-occupied – by more than a means of distraction – with birds, with beasts, with the birds and the bees, and the Beast.
Their new Magister moved out of the Chandler family farm to take up residence in the big house – the other “big house” – the former Spenser manse. “Disgracelands” as he now dubbed it, putting up a poorly-painted sign. It was as if, to assuage doubts – were there even any – Thomas Chandler took the previous Magister’s place in the most literal sense. The very grandest domicile in town: stone built, too many windows, and a portico with fat columns and everything. Suitably fitting. And so too the gossip went – even after everything else that had passed – what would anyway have become his eventual and rightful inheritance.
Jeffery Grant meanwhile had not moved in. Instead he conspicuously stayed put, quietly carrying on with his work for the Grant household. No one would account for where he might lay his head at night, although much surmise was laid on it.
Yes, the solemn peace hadn’t lasted for so very long – the townsfolk were back to their talking.
Else Two, musing – from the sanctity of their own cell, in the dark, in their bed – tried their best to figure out explanations for all they had witnessed. And, as much, for all that continued to go unsaid.
The Beast must have motivation beyond sheer animal ferocity. In order for it to attack old Spenser, it first had to be tortured. It had to be goaded. Admittedly, it had tried to eat Chandler Two as well. But not without provocation. They’d… He’d been asking for it. Yet at Else Two’s verbal command alone the Beast had let him go. Reasonable enough perhaps, for an animal, a trained animal. For a “Bastard” though? Or maybe it simply wasn’t hungry at the time. If that was true, what he, Chandler Two, had said: that it had just been fed. But that was a joke. Wasn’t it? Pulling at their leg. (Pushing into their side.)
By its action, much more of a reaction, the Beast had also expressed anger: anger and more beyond that by letting go when asked. Or maybe once its righteous fury had abated. Righteous. So then by extension did it also know, or at least recognise – no easy way to frame it – differing degrees of retributive “justice”? Some sense of right from wrong? Like a dog does. Did.
Now there was a surprise. Thoughts of a dog. A dog!
More to it than anything simply seen in a picture book. D-O-G spells “dog”. They’d had a dog once. A working dog, a working dog but also a pet dog. A pet.
One night Father had failed to let it out. The dog, it knew better. It knew better than to howl. Yet still it whined – and pitiably so, for hours or so it had seemed. It stood, then it pawed, and then it scratched at the door: kept them all awake much into the night – but no one, for some reason, would get up to see what the dog wanted. The next morning they awoke to find a “present” waiting for them in the darkest corner of the shack. Smelt it first. And it wasn’t any nice kind of a present at all. It was a poop. A dog poop.
How could they have forgotten this? How could they ever forget this?
Father had grabbed the cowering dog, held it by the collar. Took it and showed it the poop. And the dog knew it had done wrong. It knew it.
But all night it had whined. The dog had wanted to poop. The dog had wanted to poop outside. The dog wanted to do it right. To do right.
That heavy bar across sealed the shut door tight.
Overheated, Else Two threw aside the covers.
The dog, their pet, had never had a name. Father had trained it to respond to clucks and whistles. It wasn’t their “pet”, he’d said, it was a working dog. Else One and Two, they’d been told and they had promised not to give the dog a name. They gave giving it one no more thought, not having names of their own.
Yet here was another name all the same. “Piddlepuss.”
Piddle. Poo. Something of a theme emerging. And that wasn’t all. Else Two sat on the bucket in the far corner, the darkest corner, of their attic room. C-A-T spelled “cat”. Piddlepuss too, they had been more than a page gone missing from a book. Piddlepuss or “Pee Pee” was once a cat. Their cat. Also more than just any old cat whose job it had been to take care of mice and rats. Also their pet. Theirs.
Piddlepuss earned their stripes, their name, as a kitten – forever hitching up their skirts, as Mother put it, and pissing wherever they liked: in the bucket sinks: in the larder: smack bang in the middle of the kitchen table that one time: even in Father’s best moccasins, although Father never knew it – ‘cos they didn’t smell any much different!
Piddlepuss couldn’t care less for right from wrong. Oh they knew the difference, but Piddlepuss didn’t care one whit. P.P., you see, was a cat.
To think, the differences they knew of – that Else Two only now remembered they knew of – differences between cats and dogs, could twice upon a time come down to animal behaviour. That a cat, and a dog – memories of them long since suppressed, supposedly forever – could have once meant more to them. More than just a difference in taste, in the quality of their meat. Sweet dog flesh. Tough and stringy cat. Rat, when things had got really desperate. And mice two bites big.
Were they really, as humans, any better, any different to the animals? To a Beast? And if the Beast also knew there were degrees, that there were distinctions, did the Beast also know what they knew? Could the Beast also feel what they felt?
Anger. Fear. Guilt. Shame.
… Regret?