Free Body and Soul: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy

Body and Soul
for Annie Dillard and Marius von Senden
    In the apartment building across from theirs, six storeys above the ground, a cat walks along a balcony railing.
    “Cat,” Julie announces, then stretches open her mouth in a pantomime of her mother screaming when there was a cat in their toilet.
    “What colour is it?” Terry asks.
    “Black and white.”
    “Oh, black and
white.”
Terry’s disdain is her second foster mother’s disdain for black-and-white movies.
    “Black and white and black and white and black and white,” Julie shouts, hitting her doll on the window-ledge.
    “I heard you,” Terry says primly. As she turns from the window there is a sound from outside like a siren starting up. She is about to ask, “What was that?” but instead she screams, “Aunt Bea!” because Julie has begun to make the sink-draining noise in her throat. “Aunt Bea!”
    “I’m coming,” Aunt Bea says, her sandals clicking into the room. Terry is bumped aside by her big hip, while Julie, who isn’t having an epileptic seizure, pushes away Aunt Bea’s arm.
    “Now,” Aunt Bea chides, but Julie slaps the pencil out of Aunt Bea’s hand, then abruptly shuts up, providing a moment of dreamlike silence that signals to Aunt Bea the presence of the Lord. She feels her blood pressure draining from her temples like mercury down a thermometer. She smiles into Julie’s pearl-coloured eyes and says, “I guess we had a false alarm.”
    Julie’s features contort into an expression of ugly, inconsolable, private and measureless grief.
    “You’re all right now?” Aunt Bea says. She can never be sure, but she assumes that Julie is smiling back at her.
    “Penny—” Julie points her doll at the window.
    “Yes?” Terry says. “Penny” is what Julie calls Terry, nobody knows why.
    Julie forgets what she was going to say. She begins hitting her doll on the window-pane.
    “Hold your horses, I’m looking,” Aunt Bea says, inserting her hand between Julie’s doll and the window. She clutches the knob of the doll’s head. “Good heavens,” she says.
    “What?” Terry cries.
    Aunt Bea dips her chin to see out the top of her bifocals. “Well,” she says, “there seems to be a cat lying out there in the parking lot.”
    “Fell,” Julie says in an anguished voice.
    “Oh, did it,” Aunt Bea says. “Oh, dear.”
    “Dead,” Julie says.
    “No, no, I don’t think so,” Aunt Bea says, although from the pool of blood and unnatural angle of the cat’s head she’s thinking, Dead as a doornail.
    “Is it bleeding?” Terry cries.
    Aunt Bea hears, “Is it
breathing?”
and her heart constricts. It never fails to constrict Aunt Bea’s heart how eagle-eyed this little blind girl imagines everybody is. “Yes,” she says slowly, as if she is scrutinizing, “yes, you know, I think its chest is moving up and down.”
    “Is it
bleeding?”
Terry repeats. She holds her hand out.
    “It is
not
moving up and down,” Julie says in a severely reproachful voice.
    Aunt Bea would swear that the only time Julie speaks in complete sentences is to catch her in a lie. “It’s hard to tell, of course,” she says.
    “But is it
bleeding?”
Terry cries. The faint emanation of heat that she senses in her extended hand is Aunt Bea’s blood pressure going back up.
    “Nobody seems to be coming down,” Aunt Bea observes to change the subject.
    “You better phone the Humane Society,” Terry cries.
    “I guess so,” Aunt Bea says. She snatches Terry’s hand and squeezes it to calm the child. “All right, I’ll go call them,” she says, and leaves the room.
    “Is it bleeding?” Terry asks Julie. Blood concerns Terry. Eyes, she was disturbed to learn, can bleed.
    “Dead,” Julie says.
    “But is it bleeding, I asked.”
Terry is on the verge of tears. She wants an answer to this question even though she never relies on what Julie says. Whenever Julie answers the phone and it’s a woman, she always says, “It’s my