Old Souls Inn

Old Souls Inn

By Patricia Allwood

Copyright 2011 © by Patricia Allwood

Smashwords Edition

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This book is dedicated to my granddaughter Kirstan, the new generation of writers.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 1

Pepper, Mr. Anderson’s neurotic Dalmatian, was wrong-side-up as he blurred by me over and over again. He was barking at Jeepers, the old gray striped alley cat who was, in fact, heading down the alley to Mrs. Simpson’s trash barrel. Jeepers’ tail got busted last year; I don’t know how. Some cat fight, I’m pretty sure. Anyway it hung in the dirt creating this miniature dust storm falling down into the sky below. Sighs were becoming most of my speech now, and I sighed at Pepper’s barking for no reason other than to sigh. Then I raised my arms, still tanned from summer, to the steel bar above my head, grabbed the bar, rolled my skinny little body between the bar and the ground as I had done hundreds of times before, and landed right-side up on the earth. I felt the hard knots of calluses as I rubbed my hands together. I had been swaying upside-down, hanging by my legs on my trapeze for several minutes, but I didn’t feel lightheaded a bit when I stood. I had been swinging upside-down on that trapeze since I was six years old. It soothed me like a granny rocking chair most of the time, but nothing soothed me today. Not even swinging through space.

No other kid in town had a trapeze, and all the kids thought it looked hard to swing on it, but it never did take an effort for me; I was knew I was meant to fly. The hardest part was touching the earth again.

I walked to the edge of the yard; I might as well have been walking off the end of the world.

Hush, I whispered uselessly to Pepper. This caused his tail to wag in a haze of spots as he ran toward me, barking and jumping, but not even a toenail crossed the small ditch between my yard and his.

Hey, boy, I said softly. Cool it. I looked at Jeepers in the alley and Pepper did the same. Spastic and daring as Pepper was, the dog never left his yard, no matter what the temptation.

I’ve tried to drag him out, Mr. Anderson explained one day when my daddy was in the yard, but he hyperventilates. I’m afraid if I force him, he would pass right out, stupid dog. I can’t get him in a car. If I so much as back out of the driveway with him, he sounds like he’s going to have an asthma attack, sucking air so hard. We have to give him a nerve pill that almost conks him out to take him to the vet.

Jeepers walked on now as he did every day, somehow aware of Pepper’s neurosis. But then, Jeepers knew a lot of things. The old cat stopped and turned his square head toward what must have looked like a hundred Mexican jumping beans dancing in front of him as Pepper bounced up and down, up and down, barking first at me standing in my yard, then lunging a few feet across the corner of the lot near the back alley for a pretend attack on Jeepers. I could see that Jeepers had his tongue stuck out at Pepper. Of course, Jeepers always had his tongue stuck out; he didn’t have enough teeth to hold his tongue in his head. But his attitude said, Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.

I made a small jump across the little ditch that divided my back yard from the alley and took a couple of steps toward the cat.

Come on, Jeepers, I breathed. Just let me get a little closer. I had been trying to earn the trust of that old alley cat for years. Jeepers’ alley instinct sensed human immediately. He turned his head from the barking jumping beans and looked at me.

There was no fear in Jeepers’ green eyes. We knew one another well. I fed him behind the shed, late mornings in the summers and earlier, before school, when school was in. He would wait under the tin shack across the alley from my house while I filled an old pan with leftover breakfast. I always kept a pan of water next to his food bowl. In winter my fingers would sting when I brought the frozen pan inside. I would run hot water over it until the ice fell out in a huge, hard round chunk. Then I would refill his pan with hot water so it wouldn’t freeze until I got back from school. I didn’t know why I did that; I just knew there was something about Jeepers.

I could hear my mother’s voice. Rosa, give it up, baby. That cat’s wilder than a deer. You’ll never touch him. But I couldn’t. Couldn’t give it up. We had an understanding. I didn’t want to touch him; I just wanted to earn his respect. For some reason that was important to me.

Jeepers was an out of the ordinary creature. I never knew quite how to define it, but when I looked into his eyes—always at a distant—I saw something there. Wisdom? Stupid thing to say about a cat, I know, but he did seem wise. It wasn’t just that Jeepers knew how to survive; all old alley cats knew that. It was that he seemed to get pleasure from the process. Contentment dripped off him.

Every once in a while, not too often, Jeepers would honor me by sitting on my window sill in the evenings, peering inside my room with those piercing green eyes. Sometimes, when brushing my hair or picking at my face, I’d see two shining green eyes through the mirror and I’d know. He never looked as if he wanted to come inside. Mostly he looked as if he were studying me and my crazy lavender room piled with books and games and records.

Just curious, I imagined him saying. Happy I’m on the outside. And in the winter, just before bedtime, I had seen Jeepers in the side yard by my bedroom window on full-moon nights, especially after a snow fall. He would sit on his back legs; pounce his cat feet forward into the soft snow; then chase the floating silver snowflakes that flew above him, catching them so softly that I bet not one of them broke into. I think if I could have opened my window without scaring him, I would have heard him cat-laugh. One time last year, I tiptoed out of the house at night to join him. I walked down the hall to the nothing room, opened the back door to the screened-in porch, and then opened the screen door. Of course, Jeepers ran away on hearing me, but I walked on in my flannel pajamas and fuzzy purple house shoes out in the yard and the snow. I walked to where he had been playing. I saw his small cat prints in the snow. The air was razor-sharp, fresh, crystal clear, and I breathed as deep as I could; it was such a change from my bedroom air. Something out there, late at night, with everyone asleep whispered freedom. My feet sunk into the snow over my house shoes but I didn’t care. The full moon made it look as if my street had street lights, but our small town didn’t have street lights in the 1950s. I had seen them in St. Louis, though. And that’s how my yard looked-white and gold.

I looked up at the stars. Ice diamonds, blue and white and dancing. Then I bent down and grabbed the airy, dry snow with both hands and tossed it high. The silver flakes turned and sparkled back to earth, barely touching my face. My short brown hair was damp with the snow, but I didn’t care. I stuck out my tongue and some soft flakes landed, cotton-candy light but not sweet—pure, untainted, elusive. I turned to sneak back in when I caught a glimpse of Jeepers, his head peering around the walnut tree and his green eyes sparkling in the moonlight. He really was cat-smiling; at least I think he really was.

And now, walking down the dusty alley, I was within six feet of him. Jeepers’ green eyes narrowed and his one ear bent forward. He only had a piece of his right ear left, but I could see that it twitched just a little. When the twitching stopped, I knew Jeepers would scurry off. He didn’t bolt from me any longer like he used to do a couple of years ago; he just walked faster. I never chased him. Because of that, he’d sometimes let me get as close as five or six feet to him. Jeepers and I had known each other over the five years, and I was making progress. Cats were supposed to live a long time; I might get near enough to walk beside him yet. But not today. Today his ear stopped twitching. When I took one more step, off he trotted.

I sighed again and turned back toward my house with that sick feeling that had been in my stomach for a couple of days now.

R-r-rosa! My grandmother’s voice sounded like a huge zipper being unzipped, scratchy and quick. I looked back at Jeepers, and his rear end and broken tail was hanging out of Mrs. Simpson’s trash can now. Then I turned to look at my sprawling, while clapboard house that until just three days ago I had thought of as home.

My father, the only architect in town, had kept adding to our house until the result was what must have looked like a crossword puzzle from the sky. There was a little green grass here, then a white addition jutting out there, then a little more grass and another jut. Once he had tried to buy the empty lot next door where Pepper ran, but Mr. Anderson said, Not on your life, Hank. You’d have that all under roof, too. Until three days ago, I had loved those rambling rooms: the long breezeway; my father’s office away from his office, always a Pepsi bottle sitting on the table next to his plans; my mother’s bright yellow kitchen; and all the rooms in between. A sewing room was added when mother took up sewing for a month. Now it was a junk room holding my mother’s Baldwin piano that she had planned to learn to play but never did. The next addition to our house was the exercise room with my mother’s exercise bike and steel bars on the wall and mirrors so she could make certain her butt was lifted and her stomach tucked. Then there was my used-to-be favorite rooms—the nothing room. We had laughed and called it the nothing room because there was no reason to build it. Daddy added the long room across the entire back of the house just because he loved knotty pine.

It’s an inside-out tree house, I said when it was finished, and I immediately claimed it as my own. Mother and daddy didn’t seem to mind because there was plenty of room in the rest of the sprawl. The day it became my nothing room I brought in all my stuffed animals that previously lined my bedroom: Pallie Penquin; Lion the Lionhearted; Spot the Leopard; Charlie Parrot; Carrot Top, my scruffy old gray rabbit; Silly Sam, my bucked-toothed