“Call him anything you like.” Caleb went on whittling. “All I know is, he was so scairt he would be buried alive, he made Mattie promise she would watch him for a week.”
“And did she do it?”
“Yep. It was two years after the first time that he died the second time, and they had it all planned out. She sat there in the back room, with the shutters closed, and never took her eyes off him. Folks would go in and out and offer her a cup of tea once in a while, but she let on as how she didn’t know them. She never was a hand to speak to any one before that, and after that she never has spoke to any one at all. If you ask her anything, like I’m obliged to, strictly business, she looks as if she didn’t have it on her mind what you was talking about. Nor on anything else, for that matter. It turned her.”
“I should think it would!” said Ruth and I together.
“Yep,” Caleb continued, “he was dead all right when they took him out. Leastwise, as dead as he will ever get. I didn’t see him; nobody went to the funeral except Judge Bell, but he O. K.’d it. An’ if Mattie decided he was beyond recall, why he was; that settles it. For if he had been only halfway, like the other time, she would ’a’ fetched him back herself.”
He gave us a look profoundly mysterious.
“You think, then, that Mattie has the power to raise people from the dead?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to have it said I say so,” he evaded. “Not humans, maybe, but cats! I’ve seen her take a dead cat up off the beach in her apron, drowned or starved, no difference to her, and the next day there it would be, lapping up milk on the doorstep.” He paused a minute to let us weigh this, and then he added, “An’ cats ain’t the only things that has nine lives.”
Ruth and I stared blankly at him and at each other, and back to the faded ink-written pages of the New Captain’s will.
“Did Mattie ever show this—power—in any other way?”