The Underneath
Kathi Appelt
There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road.
A calico cat, about to have kittens, hears the lonely howl of a chained-up hound deep in the backwaters of the bayou. They are an unlikely pair, about to become an unlikely family. Ranger urges the cat to hide underneath the porch, to raise her kittens there because Gar-Face, the man living inside the house, will surely use them as alligator bait should he find them. But they are safe in the Underneath . . . as long as they stay in the Underneath.
Kittens, however, are notoriously curious creatures. And one kitten’s one moment of curiosity sets off a chain of events that is astonishing, remarkable, and enormous in its meaning.
Visit the author at kathiappelt.com.
Cover design by Russell Gordon | Cover illustrations copyright © 2008 by David Small
Atheneum Books for Young Readers | Simon & Schuster, New York | Ages 10 up
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Praise for The Underneath
• NEWBERY HONOR BOOK •
• NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST •
• AMAZON.COM’S #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR •
• 2009 PEN USA LITERARY AWARD WINNER FOR CHILDREN’S LITERATURE •
• NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •
• ALA NOTABLE BOOK •
*“Joining Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting as a rare example of youth fantasy with strong American underpinnings.”
—Booklist, starred review
“The Underneath is as enchanting as a hummingbird, as magical as the clouds.”
—Cynthia Kadohata, Newbery Medal-winning author of Kira-Kira
“A magical tale of betrayal, revenge, love and the importance of keeping promises.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A mysterious and magical story; poetic yet loaded with suspense.”
—Louis Sachar, Newbery Medal-winning author of Holes
“[A] fine book . . . most of all distinguished by the originality of the story and the fresh beauty of its author’s voice—a natural for reading aloud.”—Horn Book Magazine
“Rarely do I come across a book that makes me catch my breath, that reminds me of why I wanted to be a writer. . . . A classic.”
—Alison McGhee, author of the New York Times bestselling Someday
“An extraordinary tale of epic scope.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Kathi Appelt’s novel, The Underneath, reads like a ballad sung.”
—Ashley Bryan, Hans Christian Andersen Award nominee and three-time Coretta Scott King Award medalist
“[Exerts] an almost magnetic pull that draws the reader into the book’s trackless, treacherous world.”
—The Wall Street Journal Online
“Every so often a literary work of surpassing beauty arrives in the unlikely guise of a book for children or young teens. There is a deep and inexplicable magic underlying the apparent simplicity of such works. From the gemlike Goodnight Moon to novels such as The Wind in the Willows or A Wrinkle in Time, children’s literature is that place where a young, open mind can catch life-changing glimpses of the majesty of the written word. Twin narratives, spinning like twin tornadoes, on course to merge into a perfect storm—and, if this critic can hazard such a prediction, into a modern classic.”
—San Antonio Express—News
“Haunting in tone and resonance, The Underneath weaves a heartrending and magical tale that speaks to love and hope, loneliness and loss, ancestral forgiveness and a deep abiding reverence for the natural world that surrounds us, the ethereal world that entices our imagination and the real world that may bruise us, haunt us, but eventually set us free.”
—The National Book Foundation
“Appelt in her debut novel has somehow managed to write a book that I’ve been describing to people as (and this is true) Watership Down meets The Incredible Journey meets Holes meets The Mouse and His Child.”
—Elizabeth Bird/Fuse # 8
The
Underneath
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2008 by Kathi Appelt
Illustrations copyright © 2008 by David Small All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.
Also available in an Atheneum Books forYoung Readers hardcover edition. Book design by Russell Gordon The text for this book is set in Bembo. The illustrations for this book are rendered in Prismacolor pencil.
1209 FFG
First Atheneum Books forYoung Readers paperback edition January 2010
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Appelt, Kathi, 1954–
The underneath/Kathi Appelt ; illustrated by David Small.
p. cm.
Summary: An old hound that has been chained up at his hateful owner’s run-down shack, and two kittens born underneath the house, endure separation, danger, and many other tribulations.
ISBN 978-1-4169-5058-5 (hc)
[1. Survival—Fiction. 2. Dogs—Fiction. 3. Cats—Fiction. 4. Bayous—Fiction.] I. Small, David, 1945– ill. II.Title.
PZ7.A6455Un 2008
[Fic]—dc22
2007031969
ISBN 978-1-4169-5059-2 (pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-41699-858-7 (eBook)
For Greg and Cynthia, because there is love
and then there are cats,
and aren’t the two the same
—K.A.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
&nbs
p; Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
1
THERE IS NOTHING lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road. A small calico cat. Her family, the one she lived with, has left her in this old and forgotten forest, this forest where the rain is soaking into her soft fur.
How long has she been walking? Hours? Days? She wasn’t even sure how she got here, so far from the town where she grew up. Something about a car, something about a long drive. And now here she is. Here in this old forest where the rain slipped between the branches and settled into her fur. The pine needles were soft beneath her feet; she heard the water splash onto the puddles all around, noticed the evening roll in, the sky grow darker.
She walked and walked, farther and farther from the red dirt road. She should have been afraid. She should have been concerned about the lightning, slicing the drops of rain in two and electrifying the air. She should have been worried in the falling dark. But mostly she was lonely.
She walked some more on the soft pine needles until at last she found an old nest, maybe a squirrel’s, maybe a skunk’s, maybe a porcupine’s; it’s hard to tell when a nest has gone unused for a long time, and this one surely had. She was grateful to find it, an old nest, empty, a little dry, not very, but somewhat out of the rain, away from the slashes of lightning, here at the base of a gnarled tupelo tree, somewhere in the heart of the piney woods. Here, she curled up in a tight ball and waited, purred to her unborn babies. And the trees, the tall and kindly trees, watched over her while she slept, slept the whole night through.
2
AHH, THE TREES. On the other side of the forest, there is an old loblolly pine. Once, it was the tallest tree in the forest, a hundred feet up it reached, right up to the clouds, right beneath the stars. Such a tree. Now broken in half, it stands beside the creek called the Little Sorrowful.
Trees are the keepers of stories. If you could understand the languages of oak and elm and tallow, they might tell you about another storm, an earlier one, twenty-five years ago to be exact, a storm that barreled across the sky, filling up the streams and bayous, how it dipped and charged, rushed through the boughs. Its black clouds were enormous, thick and heavy with the water it had scooped up from the Gulf of Mexico due south of here, swirling its way north, where it sucked up more moisture from the Sabine River to the east, the river that divides Texas and Louisiana.
This tree, a thousand years old, huge and wide, straight and true, would say how it lifted its branches and welcomed the heavy rain, how it shivered as the cool water ran down its trunk and washed the dust from its long needles. How it sighed in that coolness.
But then, in that dwindling of rain, that calming of wind, that solid darkness, a rogue bolt of lightning zipped from the clouds and struck. Bark flew in splinters, the trunk sizzled from the top of the crown to the deepest roots; the bolt pierced the very center of the tree.
A tree as old as this has a large and sturdy heart, but it is no match for a billion volts of electricity. The giant tree trembled for a full minute, a shower of sparks and wood fell to the wet forest floor. Then it stood completely still. A smaller tree might have jumped, might have spun and spun and spun until it crashed onto the earth. Not this pine, this loblolly pine, rooted so deep into the clay beside the creek; it simply stood beneath the blue-black sky while steam boiled from the gash sixty feet up, an open wound. This pine did not fall to the earth or slide into the creek. Not then.
And not now. It still stands. Most of its branches have cracked and fallen. The upper stories have long ago tumbled to the forest floor. Some of them have slipped into the creek and drifted downstream, down to the silver Sabine, down to the Gulf of Mexico. Down.
But the trunk remains, tall and hollow, straight and true. Right here on the Little Sorrowful, just a mile or so from a calico cat, curled inside her dry nest, while the rain falls all around.
3
MEANWHILE, DEEP BENEATH the hard red dirt, held tightly in the grip of the old tree’s roots, something has come loose. A large jar buried centuries ago. A jar made from the same clay that lines the bed of the creek, a vessel with clean lines and a smooth surface, whose decoration was etched by an artist of merit. A jar meant for storing berries and crawdads and clean water, not for being buried like this far beneath the ground, held tight in the web of the tree’s tangled roots. This jar. With its contents: A creature even older than the forest itself, older than the creek, the last of her kind. This beautiful jar, shaken loose in the random strike of lightning that pierced the tree’s heart and seared downward into the tangled roots. Ever since, they have been loosening their grip.
Trapped, the creature has waited. For a thousand years she has slipped in and out of her deep, deep sleep, stirred in her pitch-black prison beneath the dying pine. Sssssooooonnnn, she whispered into the deep and solemn dark, my time will come. Then she closed her eyes and returned to sleep.
4
IT WASN’T THE chirring of the mourning doves that woke the calico cat, or the uncertain sun peeking through the clouds, or even the rustling of a nearby squirrel. No, it was the baying of a nearby hound. She had never heard a song like it, all blue in its shape, blue and tender, slipping through the branches, gliding on the morning air. She felt the ache of it. Here was a song that sounded exactly the way she felt.
Oh, I woke up on this bayou,
Got a chain around my heart.
Yes, I’m sitting on this bayou,
Got a chain tied ’round my heart.
Can’t you see I’m dyin’?
Can’t you see I’m cryin’?
Can’t you throw an old dog a bone?
Oh, I woke up, it was rainin’,
But it was tears came fallin’ down.
Yes, I woke up, it was rainin’,
But it was tears came fallin’ down.
Can’t you see I’m tryin’?
Can’t you hear my cryin’?
Can’t you see I’m all alone?
Can’t you throw this old dog a bone?
&
nbsp; She cocked her ears to see which direction it came from. Then she stood up and followed its bluesy notes, deeper and deeper into the piney woods. Away from the road, from the old, abandoned nest, away from the people who had left her here with her belly full of kittens. She followed that song.
5
FOR CATS, A hound is a natural enemy. This is the order of things. Yet how could the calico cat be afraid of a hound who sang, whose notes filled the air with so much longing? But when she got to the place where the hound sang, she knew that something was wrong.
She stopped.
In front of her sat a shabby frame house with peeling paint, a house that slumped on one side as if it were sinking into the red dirt. The windows were cracked and grimy. There was a rusted pickup truck parked next to it, a dark puddle of thick oil pooled beneath its undercarriage. She sniffed the air. It was wrong, this place. The air was heavy with the scent of old bones, of fish and dried skins, skins that hung from the porch like a ragged curtain.
Wrong was everywhere.
She should turn around, she should go away, she should not look back. She swallowed. Perhaps she had taken the wrong path? What path should she take? All the paths were the same. She felt her kittens stir. It surely wouldn’t be safe to stay here in this shabby place.
She was about to turn around, when there it was again—the song, those silver notes, the ones that settled just beneath her skin. Her kittens stirred again, as if they, too, could hear the beckoning song. She stepped closer to the unkempt house, stepped into the overgrown yard. She cocked her ears and let the notes lead her, pull her around the corner. There they were, those bluesy notes.
Oh, I woke up, it was rainin’,
But it was tears came fallin’ down.
Yes, I woke up, it was rainin’,
But it was tears came fallin’ down.
Can’t you see I’m tryin’?
Can’t you hear my cryin’?
Can’t you see I’m all alone?
Can’t you throw this old dog a bone?
Then she realized, this song wasn’t calling for a bone, it was calling for something else, someone else. Another step, another corner. And there he was, chained to the corner of the back porch. His eyes were closed, his head held back, baying.
