Rama the Gypsy Cat Page 5

  “The cat listens to me,” the peddler answered with a smile.

  “Now, Peddler,” the widow said, winking slyly, “you don’t have to have no cat to talk to. There’s women around who’d like nothing better than the sound of your voice. Why, I could name you one.”

  The peddler laughed but he did not ask for the name. Instead he said quickly, “And how’s that fine daughter of yours, Widow Bowman?”

  “Rebecca!” the woman called. “If she know’d you was here, Peddler, she’d be out here. Oh, Rebecca!”

  A young girl, stout and red of face like her mother, ran into the clearing.

  “Come here, Rebecca, here’s the peddler and look what he’s got—a kitty.”

  The girl ran to the wagon and caught Rama up in her firm arms. Rama, knowing his struggles for freedom would be of no avail against that tight grip, remained motionless, his eyes wide and alert.

  “Oh, Peddler, let me have him, please, Peddler. Oh, Mama, ain’t he just the prettiest thing? Look at his sweet little face.”

  Rama, eyes wide, almost black in the late afternoon shadows, waited tensely for a chance to escape.

  “Can I have him, Peddler? Please! Oh, kitty wants to stay with me, don’t you, kitty?”

  “Miss Rebecca, I. ...”

  “Please, Peddler, please—please—please,” she interrupted. She clutched Rama to her and swung around, her feet turning briskly on the dusty ground.

  “The girl’s mightily took up with the cat,” Widow Bowman said. “How come you both don’t stay?”

  The peddler shook his head quickly. “I appreciate that, Ma’am, but we got to be on our way—me and the cat. I got some piece goods that Mrs. Hawkins up the way is going to be wanting.”

  “Well, you’ll stay the night, won’t you?”

  “Not this time, Ma’am.”

  “But you always do.” She pouted. “Anyway, my boy’ll be home before long and he’ll be wanting to see you. He always says there ain’t nobody he enjoys seeing much as he does the peddler.”

  “Now, that’s right kind of him,” the peddler said with a smile, “only we do have to be on our way.”

  “You ain’t taking the cat,” Rebecca said, turning her back to the peddler.

  “Now, Miss Rebecca, nothing I’d like better than to see you have a pretty little cat of your own, only my way would be mighty lonely without that one.” He realized as he said the words that it was true. He would be lonely without the cat.

  She remained with her back to him.

  “Miss Rebecca!”

  “Oh, all right. Here. Take your old cat!” She came toward the peddler and held out Rama. Now Rama knew freedom was near, and he sprang from her arms to the wagon seat and then back into the darkened wagon.

  The peddler, almost as quickly, climbed up on the wagon seat. “Well, goodbye to you, Widow Bowman, Miss Rebecca.”

  “You sure you won’t stay the night now, Peddler? There’s nice clean hay in the barn.”

  “No’m, not this trip.” The peddler drove away quickly and did not slow the wagon until the Widow Bowman’s house was far behind. Then he leaned back and said to Rama, “Nor any other trip, friend.” He liked his solitary life. The lonely countryside gave him a sense of freedom that he found nowhere else.

  “Too-rah-lie-oh!” he sang.

  Slowly, seemingly without direction, although the peddler’s route was carefully planned, they made their way to the north.

  “We’ll swing west soon,” the peddler told Rama, “and maybe you’ll get to see a jack rabbit bigger than you. How would you like that, Gyps?”

  “Miaow.”

  “You really would like it, huh?”

  “Miaow.” Rama licked his bib and settled comfortably on the coat in the corner of the wagon.

  GOING WEST

  ONE NIGHT AT DUSK, just before the peddler was to turn his wagon west, they made camp beside the river. It was a lovely spring evening. The moon was full and bright, the breeze was easy, and the grass beneath them was beginning to have the softness of new life.

  But Rama was restless. His uneasiness had begun when he had jumped from the wagon and had heard from across the river the long, low mooing of a cow. He had heard this sound often when he was living at the cabin. The cow would moo, and frequently Rama would go and stand at the door to the cow’s shed, drawn by the sound and the pleasant odor of dry grass. Sometimes he would lie there in the morning sun. Now Rama stood by the wagon, waiting to hear the sound again.

  He ate with the peddler and then he sat by the peddler’s feet. Always before, on a pretty evening, he would move off on his nightly hunt. But tonight he remained, looking up at the peddler.

  “What’s the trouble, Gypsy?” the peddler asked. “Still hungry, are you?”

  He offered Rama the remaining piece of meat, but Rama did not take it.

  “What’s the trouble, old friend?” the peddler asked again.

  Rama did not know. He only sensed that this place was somehow familiar, yet unfamiliar, too. He moved his front paws with a tiny, restless, up-and-down movement that betrayed to the peddler the depth of Rama’s uneasiness.

  The peddler stroked him, and Rama responded by rising and rubbing against the peddler’s leg. Yet when he took his hand away, Rama was restless again.

  The peddler filled his long pipe and began to puff slowly. He did not smoke often, only when he felt especially content. A satisfactory meal and the lovely evening had made him so tonight. Then, too, the western part of the trip was his favorite, and the anticipation of the long days, the favorable dry weather, the even trail, made him smile with contentment.

  He blew a perfect smoke ring in the air and it stayed a moment before it drifted out of shape on the evening breeze.

  Rama waited at the peddler’s feet for more attention, but tonight the peddler was lost in his own thoughts. “Too-rah-lie-oooooh!” he sang quietly before he drew on his pipe again.

  Rama rose and walked toward the river. The moonlight was bright. The river, though higher than usual, was calm and moved unhurriedly between its banks. Rama sat with his front paws close together in the new green grass beneath him.

  Beyond, on the opposite bank, the light of a cabin glowed in the trees. It was a faint light and Rama did not see it, but his keen ears heard again the cow mooing in the night. Rama mewed once. It was the long, loud mew he used to give at the cabin door when he wanted to get in. He waited and mewed again.

  In the grass at his feet a beetle stirred. Rama looked down. He watched it as it moved awkwardly through the weeds. Then he covered it with his paw. The beetle wriggled free and continued on its way. Again Rama covered it. He felt its movements beneath his paws and he pounced lightly. Shaking his head, he pounced again.

  Then, abruptly, as quickly as the game had begun, it was over. Rama turned, yawned, and walked slowly back through the woods. His tail was high, his gait even. Behind him, the beetle scurried through the weeds again.

  Rama joined the peddler, who was still lying contentedly before the fire. He sat beside him.

  “Still restless, Gypsy?” the peddler asked.

  “Miaow,” Rama answered, looking at the peddler with eyes that were pale gold in the firelight.

  “Sometimes I am restless, too, friend.” He laid his hand on Rama’s head and moved his thumb over Rama’s forehead. “When I was a young man, I worked two years in my uncle’s store. Two years, friend, and my restlessness was a thing to behold. Like an animal in a cage I was.” He withdrew his hand and began to clean his pipe carefully. “Now I go where I please.” He leaned on one elbow and put his pipe in his pocket. “And now I am not so restless.”

  Rama stretched out beside the man, his body curled toward the fire. He watched the flames grow smaller and then he closed his eyes. The rabbits and the night birds were safe, for Rama would not roam the woods. Tonight he felt the need of a human friend.

  In the morning the peddler was not surprised to find him gone. Just before dawn, when the co
w across the river had begun to moo again, Rama had gone to stand on the riverbank. He had leaped on a fallen tree and crouched there as the first rays of the sun shone on the river.

  The peddler put out his fire and went about his usual routine before departing.

  “HI—OH, GYPSY,” he called as he hitched the horse to his wagon.

  Rama did not move.

  “Going west, Gyps!” the peddler called. He stepped up to his seat and took the reins in his hands. “You don’t want to miss that. HEY, GYPSY!”

  Rama jumped lightly from the tree and ran to the wagon. He leaped up on the wagon seat. The peddler waited for him to step back into the wagon and settle on the coat, but Rama sat looking straight ahead.

  “Too nice a morning for sleeping, friend?” the peddler asked.

  “Miaow,” said Rama.

  “You over your restlessness?”

  “Miaow.”

  “That’s good. Can I start up the wagon then?”

  Silence.

  “I said, Can I start up the wagon?”

  Silence. Rama blinked slowly, continued to look straight ahead, and waited.

  The peddler leaned down. “Now, Gypsy, we’re going to just sit here all day unless you give me the sign. Tell me, friend, can I start up the wagon?”

  “Miaow.”

  The peddler threw back his head and laughed. Then he jiggled his reins and set the little wagon in motion. Slowly at first, then gaining speed, the wagon moved away from the river and toward the west.

  “Too-rah-lie-oooooh!” he sang happily, and Rama licked his bib once, and then looked with alert eyes toward the horizon.

  A Biography of Betsy Byars

  Betsy Byars (b. 1928) is an award-winning author of more than sixty books for children and young adults, including The Summer of the Swans (1970), which earned the prestigious Newbery Medal. Byars also received the National Book Award for The Night Swimmers (1980) and an Edgar Award for Wanted . . . Mud Blossom (1991), among many other accolades. Her books have been translated into nineteen languages and she has fans all over the world.

  Byars was born Betsy Cromer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her father, George, was a manager at a cotton mill and her mother, Nan, was a homemaker. As a child, Betsy showed no strong interest in writing but had a deep love of animals and sense of adventure. She and her friends ran a backyard zoo that starred “trained cicadas,” box turtles, leeches, and other animals they found in nearby woods. She also claims to have ridden the world’s first skateboard, after neighborhood kids took the wheels off a roller skate and nailed them to a plank of wood.

  After high school, Byars began studying mathematics at Furman University, but she soon switched to English and transferred to Queens College in Charlotte, where she began writing. She also met Edward Ford Byars, an engineering graduate student from Clemson University, whom she would marry after she graduated in 1950.

  Between 1951 and 1956 Byars had three daughters—Laurie, Betsy, and Nan. While raising her family, Byars began submitting stories to magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post and Look. Her success in publishing warm, funny stories in national magazines led her to consider writing a book. Her son, Guy, was born in 1959, the same year she finished her first manuscript. After several rejections, Clementine (1962), a children’s story about a dragon made out of a sock, was published.

  Following Clementine, Byars released a string of popular children’s and young adult titles including The Summer of the Swans, which earned her the Newbery Medal. She continued to build on her early success through the following decades with award-winning titles such as The Eighteenth Emergency (1973), The Night Swimmers, the popular Bingo Brown series, and the Blossom Family series. Many of Byars’s stories describe children and young adults with quirky families who are trying to find their own way in the world. Others address problems young people have with school, bullies, romance, or the loss of close family members. Byars has also collaborated with daughters Betsy and Laurie on children’s titles such as My Dog, My Hero (2000).

  Aside from writing, Byars continues to live adventurously. Her husband, Ed, has been a pilot since his student days, and Byars obtained her own pilot’s license in 1983. The couple lives on an airstrip in Seneca, South Carolina. Their home is built over a hangar and the two pilots can taxi out and take off almost from their front yard.

  Byars (bottom left) at age five, with her mother and her older sister, Nancy.

  A teenage Byars (left) and her sister, Nancy, on the dock of their father’s boat, which he named NanaBet for Betsy and Nancy.

  Byars at age twenty, hanging out with friends at Queens College in 1948.

  Byars and her new husband, Ed, coming up the aisle on their wedding day in June 1950.

  Byars and Ed with their daughters Laurie and Betsy in 1955. The family lived for two years in one of these barracks apartments while Ed got a degree at the University of Illinois and Byars started writing.

  Byars with her children Nan and Guy, circa 1958.

  Byars with Ed and their four children in Marfa, Texas, in July 1968. The whole family gathered to cheer for Ed, who was flying in a ten-day national contest.

  Byars at the Newbery Award dinner in 1971, where she won the Newbery Medal for The Summer of the Swans.

  Byars with Laurie, Betsy, Nan, Guy, and Ed at her daughter Betsy’s wedding on December 17, 1977.

  Byars in 1983 in South Carolina with her Yellow Bird, the plane in which she got her pilot’s license.

  Byars and her husband in their J-3 Cub, which they flew from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast in March 1987, just like the characters in Byars’s novel Coast to Coast.

  Byars speaking at Waterstone’s Booksellers in Newcastle, England, in the late 1990s.

  Byars and Ed in front of their house in Seneca, South Carolina, where they have lived since the mid-1990s.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1966 by Betsy Byars

  cover design by Elizabeth Connor

  978-1-4804-1064-0

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY BETSY BYARS

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

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