Cats of Lothar

A girl from a troubled home finds solace in her friendship with a new neighbor and her pet.

***Content warning: This episode deals with themes of physical and psychological familial abuse, racism, and cruelty to animals. Listener discretion is strongly advised.***

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Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

It is a story you will find in many villages and hamlets across this country: the mostly shunned family who lives in a house haunted not by evil spirits, but by a twisted living soul—a family whose supposed benefactor is in fact their jailor and tormentor. And while this may be suspected or known by all the community, no one will raise either voice or hand in defense of these victims, because it just isn’t anyone’s business what happens behind closed doors—no matter what weeping or wailing may find its way through the cracks and out into the night. And to assuage their own guilt, they will blame not the wrongdoer, but the victims for not fighting, not escaping—even when such escape is either impossible or can lead only into darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Nine: Cats of Lothar.

(Sounds of cat mewing and purring)

NARRATOR

Lothar sits, humble and sleepy, awash in the golden light of the warm Missouri sun. There are less than six hundred souls living in the whole town, and the little white school building at its center has only barely escaped consolidation these last few years. Only two businesses remain afloat: the tiny gas station at the edge of town, and the small, family-owned grocery store on main street.

To some, it might seem a peaceful, idyllic place. To ten-year-old Ada, it is hell.

She cuts across an unfenced backyard, stumbles as she runs. Falling, she scrapes her palms and knees in the gravelly soil, grits her teeth against the stinging, bleeding tears in her skin as she regains her feet and runs once more. An angry woman yells at her through a window, a dog barks from the next yard over, but Ada pays them no mind.

She was at her on-and-off friend Allie’s, playing on the Nintendo Entertainment System that Ada so envies and looking forward to pizza and her first sleepover in more than a year, when her mother Doris called and said her father was coming home a day earlier than expected.

Her mother’s voice was sharp, hard, but Ada knew it for the crystalline hardness of abject fear. Even when Curt is not home, the specter of what Doris calls his temper is like a physical presence in the house, a smothering miasma. Ada has never thought temper is the right word, though; there is something else that lives in her father, some appetite less nameable and more terrible.

When she turns the corner onto the street that ends in the peeling white house shaded under ill-kept boxelders and sycamores, Ada stops in her tracks. The black Peterbilt 379, with its custom detailing of blood-red flames, sits parked beside the yard, facing her.

She thinks it looks like some crocodilian predator, waiting motionless for her to draw just close enough for a swift and lethal strike.

Ada utters a swear word that she learned from one of the fouler-mouthed boys at school. She doesn’t quite understand it’s meaning, but from the teacher’s reaction upon overhearing it which Ada still distinctly remembers, she knows it must be something vile.

She is about to turn away, to see if she can talk Allie into letting her sleep over in secret for one night, when there comes from the darkness of the yard that whistle that she knows so well. It is long and low, rising sharply at the end, and it is both a summons and a mockery.

Ada has no choice. She continues toward home, going as slow as she can without appearing to dawdle. It will be worse if he knows she is making him wait.

He meets her at the edge of the yard. Her father isn’t tall, but he is a large man, both muscular and overweight. His grey eyes seem to light up as he catches sight of her, the corners of his mouth curl into something that is half-smile, half-sneer.

He asks her where she’s been, and she answers that she was playing with a friend. Her father shakes his head, clicking his tongue, as though she is lying and he knows it. He says, as he often does, that she can’t run around like that, that she can’t be that sort of girl. Ada has never known what that means, not exactly. Once, she asked her mother, but Doris only shook her head and said she was too young to understand, that she just needed to avoid getting on her father’s bad side, and Ada had thought he had no other side. Sometimes, Ada wonders if her father even believes the ugly things he says, or if the cruel injustice of his words is a crucial part of his entertainment.

Curt asks if he needs to use his belt. She learned long ago never to say definitively that he shouldn’t, that such an answer would only make it inevitable, so she instead she says that it’s up to him. That brings a grin to his face, but nevertheless he is silent for a long moment. Thinking he might be waiting for her to squirm, Ada forces herself to stand there with a façade of calm, looking at her father levelly without seeming too defiant.

Finally, he says that she should get inside and wash up, that Doris has supper ready.

Two opposite sensations tug at Ada’s insides as she steps through the front door: relief that she has escaped a belting for the moment, and dread for what will come later. There is no leniency in her father, and the appearance of such is always a harbinger of some more terrible future punishment.

The dinner is Hamburger Helper, a sparse tossed salad, and lemonade brewed from a can. It is obvious her mother rushed to have something finished before Curt arrived. Curt chews ponderously, making occasional grunts of dissatisfaction. With each such utterance, Ada watches her mother wilt just a little bit further.

After he has finished, Curt says that’s the sort of meal that makes him wish he’d stayed on the road, gives a long, low chuckle. His eyes, fixed on his wife, are sharp and bright, like a snake’s eyes.

Ada thinks that she wishes the same thing, that he would stay on the road forever and leave them in peace.

Then Curt says that Doris had best have something better for dessert. Doris begins to reply that she didn’t have time to make anything else, but Curt shakes his head, still smiling. Doris tells Ada to go outside and play, but Ada hesitates, expecting her father to explode at the suggestion. He says nothing at all, though, his eyes still fixed on Doris.

Go, her mother whispers, and Ada does.

As she begins to play in the backyard, beneath the shade of the trees, she notices a little Black girl standing in the next lot over, by the pale blue mobile home that has sat empty for the past four months. The girl is cradling a small black smoke tabby kitten in her arms.

Shyly, the girl says hello. Ada rises and moves toward the wire fence between the two lots, returns the greeting and asks the girl what her name is. Her voice very faint, the girl gives the name of Minnie.

The mobile home door opens, and a man calls from within for Minnie to come inside. The girl mumbles a rushed farewell, and disappears into the mobile home. The man’s head emerges briefly to give Ada a measuring, inscrutable stare, then the door closes once more.

As Ada stands there, wondering at the new neighbors, a series of muted cries from her own house reaches her ears. It is her mother’s voice, but Ada doesn’t move. She doesn’t want to see whatever is happening in there, and any interference on her part will only make it worse in the end. She cannot help her mother, just as her mother has never been able to save her. They are both trapped, helpless, lost in Curt’s ever-present shadow.

Against her will, Ada’s eyes drift over the backyard, toward the shed on the other side. She has never entered it, Curt having made it clear since she was old enough to walk that it was forbidden to her. But she has heard, at times, the sounds that come from within it, late at night, has seen the freshly turned earth behind it.

And she suddenly wishes she had told Minnie to keep a close eye on her kitten, to never let it stray into their yard.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

When Curt leaves again, and Doris tells her that he will be gone for almost a full month, Ada can hardly contain her joy. Though the day is overcast and rainy, her steps are light and almost dance-like as she walks toward school. After school has been dismissed, she walks home, excited at the promise the evening holds, rather than dreading the sight of the old house under the trees.

As she eats one of the chocolate chip cookies her mother has just pulled from the oven and set in neatly ordered rows upon cooling racks – a sure sign of the joy Doris will never admit to feeling at Curt’s absence – Ada looks out the window and sees that Minnie is in the yard again, playing with her kitten. Ada hesitates, but finally decides that she will never forgive herself if anything happens to the adorable little pet, and she leaves the house, crosses the backyard to talk to the girl, gives her the overdue warning.

Minnie is plainly confused by it, but Ada insists until the girl says that she will never let the kitten, whom she has named Shade, out of her sight.

Then, shyly, Minnie asks Ada if she wants to play with her and Shade. Ada smiles and says yes. And by the time their respective parents call them both home for supper, Ada has already begun to think of Minnie as the little sister she always longed for.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

Over the next few weeks, Ada spends many of her evenings and weekends with Minnie and little Shade.

Minnie tells Ada about her friends in Kansas City, about how happy her family had been there before her mother died. She speaks of the woman with great pride, about how beautiful and clever she was, how skilled at painting and sewing, and talks at length about her father’s endless campaigning on behalf of his fellow Cherokee Freedmen for official recognition of their tribal heritage and membership, about the way he has of telling stories and of his perennial ability to make her laugh. But Minnie will not speak of how her mother died. She says only that her father always seems sad and tired now, that he is endlessly working and yet they never seem to have any money.

Though she is ashamed of it, Ada often feels jealousy toward the younger girl’s apparent love for both her parents, even as she knows Minnie has lost more than Ada ever has. Ada wonders what it would be like to have a father she adored rather than dreaded and loathed.

Charles, Minnie’s father, softens toward Ada, and sometimes even has a smile for her. One afternoon, as the girls are helping him start dinner and Minnie leaves to use the bathroom, he tells Ada that he hasn’t seen his girl so happy since his wife passed, and that he’s thankful she has found a friend in the little town where they have often felt out of place, even unwelcome.

Ada almost cries at that, and after that day, often finds herself wishing that she and Minnie were truly sisters.

Shade seems to grow by the day, his eyes turning from baby blue toward bright gold, his limbs and body lengthening and growing strong. He takes to climbing trees whenever he can, and Ada feels the old misgiving stir, makes Minnie renew her promise.

Even so, she often wakes in the night, and looks out her bedroom window, across the backyard and toward the shed, which, like the truck, seems like a living, hungry thing full of malign intent.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

Finally, there comes the day Ada has long dreaded: the day that Curt returns. As though to match her mood, the weather suddenly shifts toward an unseasonable cold.

But those first few days back, Curt seems different. His mood is even, almost placid, and he mostly sits in his recliner either watching television or dozing. No matter how much she tries to keep it from taking root, hope creeps stealthily into Ada’s thoughts that maybe things will be different from now on.

The fourth day after his return, though, as Ada is coming home from a brief visit with Minnie and Shade, Curt meets her at the yard gate and tells her she cannot go over there anymore. Before she can stop herself, Ada asks why not, more sharply than she has ever spoken to him. His eyes narrow, and he says in a low, measured voice that no daughter of his will mingle with such people, calling Minnie a word that Ada has never heard before.

Later, after her father has dozed off in his chair, Ada asks her mother what the word means. Doris’s face goes pale, and she says that it’s an ugly word for Black children, and that Ada should never repeat it.

Ada goes to bed early and cries into her pillow, missing Minnie and Shade, thinking bleakly that she can only have a life when Curt is away on a long haul – which are too few, and never long enough.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

The next few days, Ada sees Minnie only on the school grounds, briefly at the start and end of the day and during recess. She tries to explain why she can’t come over, tries to explain what her father is like, but can see that Minnie doesn’t really understand and is deeply hurt. And so, every afternoon, Ada trudges home with a heavy heart, foreboding of her father’s unpredictable wrath laced with guilt at having hurt the smaller girl with the bright, wide smile.

So, when one morning over breakfast, Curt says he is sorry for speaking ill of her new friend and tells her to invite Minnie over for dinner, Ada is completely shocked, and can barely manage to murmur a word of startled gratitude. Her mother flashes a rare smile at her from across the table.

She runs to school, determined to get there early enough to talk to Minnie before they go to their separate home rooms. Ada finds the younger girl sitting on the playground swings, waiting for the doors to open. Something about Minnie’s posture, her downcast gaze, sours Ada’s excitement.

When she asks Minnie if something is wrong, Minnie says that Shade got out of the house last night, and never came home. And suddenly, something hard and cold congeals around Ada’s innards, and she hesitates before telling Minnie that she is invited over for dinner.

Minnie’s face brightens a little at the news, though, and she suggests that after they eat, maybe they can search the neighborhood together. Ada, not knowing what else to do, says that of course she’ll help look for Shade, that she’s sure he’ll turn up safe and sound.

But throughout the school day, the ball of apprehension within Ada grows and grows until she feels like her body has grown far too heavy and will plunge downward into the earth.

(Short pause)

NARRATOR

When Ada returns home, she finds the table already set, though it is still more than an hour before they are expecting Minnie to arrive. More surprising still, it is her father in the kitchen. Her mother lies on the couch, and will not look at Ada, barely speaks to her. She says only that she isn’t feeling well, that Curt will be making dinner tonight.

A smell of cooking meat fills the air, the particular fragrance unfamiliar. Ada feels ready to cry. She feels like one of the characters she sometimes sees on Saturday morning cartoons, tied to the tracks, utterly helpless before the oncoming train.

She almost cannot bring herself to open the door when the knock comes. Minnie stands there with her loveable smile, and Ada cannot help but wrap the smaller girl in a tight hug. Minnie is confused by the gesture, and says that Ada is acting like a weirdo. Trying to blink away the tears burning at the back of her eyes, Ada says she’s sorry and leads her into the house, each step feeling like the toll of a funeral bell.

Doris rises from the couch and joins the rest of them in the dining room. Her eyes look puffy, as though she too has been hiding tears. When she sits at the table, she welcomes Minnie kindly, but still will not meet anyone’s gaze, stares either at the tabletop or an empty corner of the room when she speaks.

Curt sets a heaping bowl of tater tots on the table, another of peas. Then, Curt reenters the kitchen and comes out with a covered platter, which he sets upon the table. With a theatrical flourish, he uncovers the platter and says they are having rabbit tonight, that he hunted, cleaned, and cooked it all himself.

Ada looks at the meat skeptically. Something is scrambling in her stomach, the vilest suspicion hissing in her mind. When he cuts and dishes up a portion of the meat onto her plate, she picks at it without eating until at last he says that it is impolite to play with one’s food, that Ada should be more like their guest. Minnie is setting into her meal with innocent enthusiasm, and when Curt looks at the small girl, his eyes glitter with what Ada can only think of as predatory glee.

Ada digs at the meat with her fork, sniffs at it as unobtrusively as she can. It has been a long time since she has eaten rabbit, but she thinks the meat seems wrong. She looks across the table at her mother, who is eating the other portions, but is likewise only picking at the meat.

Minnie finishes her food, asks politely for another helping, which Curt serves up cheerfully. Curt also eats with obvious relish, again chastises Ada for being rude, for not eating properly.

Looking at the growing piles of small bones on their plates, Ada feels like she will throw up.

Just as Minnie has almost finished her second plateful, Curt says, as though he has almost forgotten, that he has a gift for the two girls. Ada’s mind swirls blackly at the words, but Minnie grins with surprised delight. Curt rises from the table, leaves the room. He returns with a blue box, carefully wrapped with a pink ribbon. He sets it on the table before Minnie, and tells her with a wide smile to open it.

(Tense music)

NARRATOR

Ada almost reaches out to stop her, but as she begins to move, catches her father’s eyes, which are suddenly cold. She freezes, feeling again that horrible sensation of mental paralysis.

Minnie unties the ribbon, pulls it away, lifts the lid. She reaches in and slowly extracts the contents, staring at first in confusion, then in utter horror at the smoky black pelt. Screaming, she drops it and runs out of the house. Ada looks at the fresh hide where it lies upon the floor, then stumbles out of her chair and toward the bathroom. As she vomits into the toilet, she can hear her through the walls her father’s loud, lingering laughter.

(Long pause)

NARRATOR

Ada does not sleep that night, instead lies staring at the ceiling, alternating between tears of sorrow, and those of impotent fury and hatred. The old and useless prayer for her father to just disappear keeps rising up her throat, burning and sour as the bile she spewed earlier.

Around midnight, she rises, puts on her shoes, and, as quietly as she can, opens the window and slips out into the backyard. She crosses the fence where it has been crushed by the falling of a dead sycamore branch, raps softly on the window of Minnie’s bedroom. It is a long while before the younger girl’s face appears in the window.

When she shifts it open, Minnie hisses she doesn’t want to talk to Ada ever again, that Ada had to know what would happen. Ada says that it was all her father’s doing, that he is a terrible man and that she hates him. Minnie murmurs, very softly, that she hates Curt too.

Then, weeping, Ada admits that she should have known, should have said something. And after that, she cannot stop herself from spilling the words she has never spoken to anyone, from divulging the existence of the shed and the many little unmarked graves behind it. Minnie says that she doesn’t believe Ada, but her eyes belie her uncertainty.

Finally, the younger girl says if it’s all true, she wants to see it. Ada agrees to show her, helps her to clamber out through her bedroom window and then to cross the fence.

The newly risen moon lights their way fitfully under susurrating boxelders. When they reach the little shed, Minnie pushes at the door that Ada has never even tried. It is locked, but there is a stout spade propped against the side of the building, dirt still clinging to its head from recent use.

Her residing anger quelling her fear, Ada takes it and wedges the metal between the door and the frame, pries until she hears the rending of the unpainted, thoroughly weathered wood fibers, and the door gives and swings open, splinters falling from the cheap and rusted bolt.

The interior smells sharp and unpleasant, like sawdust and rusted iron, with the faintest hint of spoiled meat. By the light of the moon, they can just make out the blades and tools that hang orderly upon the wall, glittering, and the worktable in the corner that seems to have dark, old stains all across its surface. And as her eyes adjust, Ada realizes that many pelts dangle from the ceiling, some with holes and slashes in them, one seeming almost singed. Several bleached skulls sit upon the crude shelves on the far end, one of them probably a dog’s, but the others clearly feline.

Minnie breathes a curse far too foul for one so young, but Ada hardly notices.

The younger girl says that Curt is a monster. Ada nods, and says that he buries them behind the shed, in the corner of the backyard that is most hidden from sight. Her steps seeming almost dazed, Minnie walks around the shed to look down at the graves. Some are fresh enough to still be mounds, others are grown over and have sunk, but looking at them, the girls can tell that there must be two dozen, at least.

Minnie begins to cry. Ada reaches out and touches her gingerly upon the shoulder, and the girl turns and throws herself into Ada’s waiting embrace. The two girls stand there, both weeping now, both seeking their strength in the other.

After a while, Minnie whispers that she wishes there were a way to bring them back, bring them all back. Ada at first thinks she is talking only about the dead pets and strays, but then wonders if maybe the girl is also talking about her mother. Minnie says then that she has prayed so often, but that her prayers are never answered, and Ada replies that her prayers have also always gone unfulfilled. The younger girl asks how that can be, and for that, Ada has no immediate answer.

But as she stands there, a dim memory drifts up from a summer Bible study her parents had pressed her into, a vague recollection of Old Testament stories that involved something called a burnt offering. And suddenly Ada wonders if their prayers have been flawed and incomplete, if perhaps something more than words is required. She shares these musings with Minnie, and Minnie murmurs that maybe Ada is right and that they should try something new.

Ada goes into the shed, turns on the electric lantern that hangs near the door. She finds a butane lighter, a short hunting knife, and an old, partially filled ashtray on the stained worktable. After a few moments of preparation, she calls to Minnie

Together, they kneel upon the earthen floor of the shed and offer a shared, heartfelt prayer, unlike any either of them has ever uttered. The night wind rises, moans through the trees. Just as the acrid reek of their mingled, singed blood rises from the ashtray, there is a sound outside. The two girls look at each other in mingled disbelief and terror.

Then Curt’s voice drifts coldly in through the doorway. He asks Ada just what the hell she thinks she is doing. The two girls turn to look at him. His eyes, though merciless, do not seem angry to Ada; they seem instead to be hungry, delighted, as though he’s looking at a delicious meal spread before him.

Ada tries to think of an excuse, fumbles for anything that might save her.

Just when she has realized she can muster nothing, there is a stirring in the night behind Curt. It is a dry rasping and muted clattering, the skittering of many small things through the grass. Curt turns to look, frowning slightly, and Ada finally catches sight of the many delicate little bones that snake along the earth.

Curt begins to utter a blasphemous question, when the first of the bones reaches his feet. It turns in the grass, a pointed, broken end driving up and piercing the soft flesh above his ankle. More of the bones skitter toward him, some of them crawling up his body like legless insects, some leaping from the earth like darts, all of them burying themselves deep into his body. Curt cries out in bewildered pain and rage, begins to thrash wildly. A small femur erupts from his chest, newly coated in scraps of his flesh, which are knitting themselves together over the yellow-white bone even before Ada’s eyes.

Curt falls to the earth as dozens, hundreds, of little bones dive in and out of him, always taking something with them when they emerge. And in a few moments, he lies still upon the earth, little more than bones himself.

There is another soft rustling from above, which Ada at first thinks is the wind in the trees, but then she notices that the pelts hung above are slithering down from their perches, wrapping themselves around the bones and their newly won flesh.

And when at last the movements in the night cease, two dozen ragged, malformed cats sit upon the grass, staring at the girls with eyeless sockets. As one, they utter a yowling, windy, eerie chorus toward the sky, toward the moon.

One of them, a small smoke black tabby, pads forward and bunts at the wide-eyed Minnie’s hand.

Hesitatingly, Minnie reaches out and strokes its, and a hollow, rattly purr issues from its unnatural throat in answer.

Minnie looks at Ada, and a slow, wide smile spreads across her features.

The other cats cease their eldritch song, and, one by one, they disperse, each taking a small portion of Curt’s meager remains with them, until even his bones are gone. When at last the cats have all disappeared into the dark, the girls sit in the shed a long moment, speechless.

When they do find their voices, they whisper a solemn vow to never speak of that night to anyone. Then they kill the light and leave the shed, each going to their own house and their own bed. As they part, Ada watches the thing that was Shade slinking silently behind Minnie’s feet.

And for a while, Ada lies awake, thinking of what she has seen that night, thinking that prayers are sometimes answered after all. Finally, oblivion takes her, and it is the deepest and most untroubled sleep she has ever known. A smile plays faintly upon her peaceful face as another chorus of unearthly mewing rises in the outer dark, drifts through the still open window to meld with her bright dreams.

(Sounds of cats yowling eerily)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]