General Sherman bit Lily. Clara turned from the stove badly. "She's crying," Rose said. And then, as if this were the more alarming detail, Lily never cries. Clara was already moving.
She found Lily in the barn sitting on a hay bale with her hand pressed against her arm and her jaw clamped so tight the muscles in her cheeks were jumping. The scratch wasn't deep, barely worth a bandage. But Lily's eyes were red, and her breathing was the careful, controlled kind. That meant she had been crying and had stopped and was determined not to start again. "Let me see," Clara said.
Lily held out her arm. Clara cleaned it, wrapped it, tied it off with a neat knot. Then she sat down on the hay bale beside her, and did not say anything. Lily lasted about 45 seconds. "It's not the scratch," she said.
"I know," Clara said. It's Lily stopped, started again. Mama used to come to the barn with me when I was scared of General Sherman. She used to stand right there. She pointed to a spot near the far wall.
And she'd say, "Lily, that cat is only mean because nobody ever taught him to be kind." And then he'd let her pet him. He'd just let her every time. Clara did not say anything. He doesn't let anyone pet him anymore, Lily said.
The words came out quiet and stripped of everything except the bare truth in them. Not since she died. Clara looked at the cat. General Sherman was sitting in a patch of pale light near the barn door, watching them with the flat, judgmental gaze of an animal who had decided the entire world was beneath him. "Maybe he's grieving, too," Clara said.
Lily looked at her. "Animals know," Clara said. "They feel lost the same as we do. They just can't explain it, so they act out instead. Lily was quiet for a moment.
Then she said very carefully, "Is that why papa gets so angry sometimes? Because he can't explain it." Clara breathed in slowly. "I think your papa is carrying a great deal," she said. "And some of it is too heavy to hold steady.
He never used to get angry," Lily said. Before, no, Clara said. "I imagine he didn't." Another silence, the comfortable kind that had started to develop between them in the past two weeks. The kind where neither of them felt obligated to fill it.
Miss Clara, Lily said. Hm. Do you think he'll be okay eventually? Clara looked at her hands. She thought about the honest answer and the kind answer and decided, as she usually did with Lily, that they were the same thing.