The beast is not even mine to eat, and yet the woman weeps over it as though it were her own child dying of the fever.
I have watched a good dog die in a ditch and thought only that the crows would come, and no man wept, for a dog is a dog and there is turnips to be pulled. But here she holds the small trembling thing wrapped in cloth softer than any my wife has worn to Mass, and she strokes its ears, and she murmurs to it as one murmurs to the sick before the priest is sent for.
There is a healer here, though not one I would trust, for he wears no blood on his apron and his hands are clean, which no honest healer's hands ever are. He does not bleed the animal nor burn it nor bid it drink foul things. He listens to its chest with a horn and speaks gently. For a creature that cannot plow, cannot guard the flock, cannot even be salted down for the lean months. A cat.
They wait upon a hard bench, the both of them, the woman and her useless little cat, in a room where no one is starving and no one is cold, and still there is grief thick as smoke. I could not fathom it, at first.
Then I saw her face when the healer came, and I knew it. It is the face my mother wore over my brother. Love does not ask if a thing is useful. Only we, who have nothing, must ask that.
She is rich enough to weep for a cat, and the good Lord keep her, for I would give my winter's grain to be so foolish.