Me and Momma and Jacob all wake up the next morning and we’re stiff and still stomach achy from the eating of the wilds. Daddy has already been up and was tinkering around with the cat cages. “You’re up! I done thought up some things while you all were sleeping! I was in that truck what with the radio on the show what they sell tractors and tell all about lost dogs and a couch some ol’ grouch called Georgie is selling and the like and right as I was about to turn it off and get you all up, I heard one of them fellas on the radio talking about cornflakes, and I get to thinkin’, and my mind was a white hot fire with the idea what I come up with. We need us some corn! Real corn! Like the kind of corn that you put inside the ground and it comes up with even more corn! I figure we’re about to be rich with corn pretty soon. And Momma!”
He pointed at Momma, “you is in charge of putting the corn in the ground. And Jacob!” he clapped his hands in applause “you is in charge of digging small-like thumb sized holes to put the corn in! And you! Gabe! The Scamp!” he stomped his feet like a drumroll “you is the one going to make sure nothing gets at the corn! No birds! No deers! No other plants what can choke a corn! While you all been sleepin’, I been fixin up these here cat carriers and now they’s pretty much like brand new now, and I expect along with that pipe what Jacob found together with these here carriers, they’ll fetch a pretty price so we can get some corn for us! Straight up trade em’ all for that corn! These here all will give about 8,000 kurns which is what theys called when they is small enough to put in the ground and all we gotta do is wipe off the ground out there, and put em right in! Will be snackin’ on all kinds of corn in likely two or three weeks is what we’ll be doing!”
Daddy is rubbing his hands together with glee and he stands there doing that for a while then stops and stares at the ground for a while with an empty look on his face. We all wait for him to say more but he’s probably deep in thought figuring out how he’s going to do this thing. About ten minutes passes and we’re all still sitting there and Momma clears her throat and Daddys head snaps up “what you say? Whattsit?” and Momma holds out her hands in a shrug and he looks at her for a while and then gives his head a shake and the blank look goes away and he’s smiling now only curious like he ain’t sure how he got there.
He says “welp! I best be off! Time to get us something to fill us up all the time while we carve out a little place in these here woods!” Daddy's outside now and in the truck and is blatting away backwards down the driveway and is gone. I wonder how he’s going to get all that corn if he’s left the cat carriers. Maybe he’ll get the corn on credit and will bring them down later, but he’s roaring back up the driveway and brakes right next to the house and is back inside “cat carriers please! Get em! Stack em! Get em on in!” and we scramble over to them and each grabs a couple and he says “nawp! Like a bucket brigade is how you do it! Get in line and pass em along right quick! Got business to get to!” So we line up and I’m handing them to Jacob who’s handing them to Momma who puts them in the truck and again and again until all that’s left on the floor is ghosts of cat carriers leaving brown and hairy rectangles and Daddy is back in the truck and is off again and we see the back of the truck disappear and we all look around at each other.
Momma is in charge now.
“This is what we’re doing today” she says, “we’re tackling that job so we’ll be ready when Daddy gets back with a truck full of corn.” Jacob wonders if we can have some food first and Momma says “well, let’s look right into that, let’s see what we got.” And we wander around the house, checking the corners and under the table and in the dusty cupboards and her hands are on her hips as she slowly revolves in the middle of the room, searching the walls and says “I ain’t too hungry, who’s hungry in here right now?” and me and Jacob both raise our hands and she nods and says “now let’s see what all we can muster around here until Daddy gets back. Jacob, you get on outside and peep around the house, see if you can find some things to munch on.”
This is fair seeing as how I brought back poison mushrooms for dinner last night and since Jacob is older, he’s probably smarter about what all we can eat without getting sick. “Imma find something sure as anything!” Jacob says and scurries out the door and starts nosing around the house hungrily. I throw up my hands “what I do Momma?”
Momma puts on a hard thinking face and rubs her chin “now let’s see. Name your skills” and I list them off. “Good at looking in cracks, good at stacking rocks, I can do six pushups all at the same time...” she cuts me off “that’s real good, that’s a real good start. Tell you what, why don’t you wander around out there and peer into some cracks for us for I know for a fact that Mitch’s grandpa let them cats roam free and I seen cat paw tracks all about this place and maybe they’s caught something and hid it for eating later, like a kitty refrigerator” I laugh at this real hard and Momma is laughing and she says to get on outside now and start peeking around too, like Jacob and I set outside right quick because I want to find something before Jacob does to make up for us barfing all night and my mouth still had a taste of red evil from those mushrooms.
I’m outside now and I seen Jacob has moved some of the moldy hay bales away from the house and is peering thought the opening to underneath and it looks spooky and Jacob wonders if that’s where all the spiders go when it gets dark outside and I think it very likely and then he is wondering if you can eat a spider.
“I think you can eat pretty much anything out here if it’s moving around a bit, and maybe they’ll be an easy catch since they’re probably sluggin’ around in the cold under there and Jacob agrees and he spits and rubs his hands together like we seen on T.V. when a hero is about to do something brave. He gets on his hands and knees and is gone from sight just like that. I’m on the hunt in the yard now, scouting around for some likely cracks where something might have hid a morsel for later. I spy a fresh hole of dirt coming out of the ground and I lean down and listen for something, maybe a chirping or a squealing but I ain’t heard nothing so I reach slowly into the hole and my arm is elbow deep and I touch something cold and hard and I grasp it out real quick before I lose my nerve and I drop it fast.
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I look down and it’s covered in dirt, but I see white poking out and I brush it off some with my sleeve and there’s two round holes about as big as dimes on it. I finish wiping it with a corner of my shirt sleeve and it’s the head of something I think. I grab it proudly for maybe there’s something we can eat off it and I rush back to the house and inside to show Momma. I run right inside and shout “look what I found! In a hole! I reached right in and I wasn’t even scared and then this came out and now here it is!” I present it to her and she takes it and says “why, that’s a cat skull and I’d say we’re in for a treat seeing as how we can mash it open and maybe they’s something inside its head we can nibble on!” I’m beaming at Momma and she’s smiling and showing her teeth and I see something brown between the two front ones and some ashes around her mouth. When she sees me looking at her mouth and not her eyes she brushes it with a sleeve and says that these darn ashes get everywhere and I better check on Jacob to see what he found too.
I’m happy that I found the cat skull and maybe they’ll be more on account of how Momma says there’s about a million cats wandering around here and they’re probably mean so they’ll be ok if we need to eat them.
I head on outside and over to the opening that leads under the house and I peer in a bit and call out “Jacob! Seen anything tasty under there? I got me a cat skull what we can probably smash open and eat the brains!” I say proudly. I hear a muffled sound under the house coming from the far corner and a lean in more to try to catch a glimpse of him but I ain’t see too well that far away on account of how dark it is, so I get down and start to crawl into that adventure area which was dusty but at least weren’t muddy so my pant knees wouldn’t get wet so that was ok.
I call out again and I hear him “I’m under a pipe and stuck! Pull on my legs some and I’ll show you what I found!” so I crawl on my belly over to where I hear Jacob and I see his legs sticking out under a black pipe so I takes each one in my hands and give a yank and the pipe moves toward me and he slides a little.
“More! I got something in my hands what is heavy and you need to pull about twice harder than what you pulled!” I gathers my strength and give a big yank and one of his shoes almost comes off and it smells like cabbage to me but he's pulled out enough to wiggle backwards now and there’s something big in his hands but I can't make it out in the darky must. He says “we’ll hightail it and crawl backward like cowboys!” and we both done that until we get to the entrance and it was fun.
I come out first and I’m dusting off and Jacob’s feet come out first, then his legs and I grab a handful of dirt and put it on his back where his shirt come up and I hear a yelp from under the house and I laugh like I don’t ever remember laughing before and Jacob comes out and is looking mad but he also thinks it’s funny and now he can pay me back the same way sometime, so that’s good. “Look here!” and he holds up proudly what he found in the corner of under the house and it’s draped over his hands and it’s something like I never saw before, and it’s stiff and white and has a mouth full of needles.
I take a step back and Jacob holds it by its mouth and opens and closes it and says, “eatin’ on ya! Ya ya!” and he chases me around a bit with it and I’m out of breath with laughing and I forget how hungry I am and Jacob is laughing so hard he ain’t make a single noise, just wheezing and with a big red face. He finally catches his breath and picks up the creature where he dropped it on the ground while he was busting a gut and he dusts it off so we can get an even better look. I’m about done laughing but I still get the hee haws and my eyes are watering and I croak out “what in all Jesus on high is that what you found, Jacob? Hee Haw!” and Jacob gets to laughing again for he has the funny hee haws now too and about anything we say for a while will get us going again and he’s laughing just out his nose and that strikes me funny now and I have to look away because those funny hee haws is catching back on me again.
We settle down a bit and get into serious mode since we ain’t seen the likes of this thing before us and we start to wonder. “Maybe it’s a cat what turned mutant from living under the house for so long?” I ask and Jacob crosses his arms and says that ain’t no cat like one he ever saw and maybe it was an escaped zoo animal or maybe something that only lives in the dark where no one has ever seen one before.
He picks it up by the fat pink tail and it dangles there and I stick out a finger to poke it and it’s about made out of cardboard for the stiffness of it and it gives off an odor like dusty old leaves and a dry piece of leather when I put my nose close to it and we both shrug and hightail it back into the house to show Momma.
She’s looking into the green stove in the kitchen and she has he head inside like she’s looking at something and we both tromp up to her like we killed a lion ourselves and we’re proud and she exclaims, “well now! My two scavengers found something to snack on and you just plop it right on this table so we can get a proper look at it!”
Jacob plops it down and we all gather around and she is poking around the edges of it and it seems dry as anything. She flips it over with the very end of her pointer finger so as to not get any possible juices on her and the underside is extra white and has a big sour looking yellow patch and she reckons we can do something with this.
She points to the door and says now we need a big big fire if we’re going to cook up this mess of food. “We’re going to need at least two handfuls of sticks so get on out now and get that wood, but don’t get too far since we ain’t sure still all what’s out there.”
Jacob and Me scurry out the door and is on the hunt