felt his face get warm and he looked

Now I’ll know when he is coming home, Catherine thought. All through breakfast, Rufus had wanted to ask questions, but now he felt so shy and uneasy that he could hardly speak. “Who hurt him?” he finally asked. “Why nobody hurt him, Rufus,” she said, and she looked shocked. “What on earth made you think so?” Mama said so, Catherine thought. “Mama said he got hurt so bad God put him to sleep,” Rufus said. Like the kitties, Catherine thought; she saw a dim, gigantic old man in white take her tiny father by the skin of the neck and put him in a huge slop jar full of water and sit on the lid, and she heard the tiny scratching and the stifled mewing. “That’s true he was hurt, but nobody hurt him,” her Aunt Hannah was saying. How could that be, Catherine wondered. “He was driving home by himself. That’s all, all by himself, in the auto last night, and he had an accident.” Rufus felt his face get warm and he looked warningly at his sister. He knew it could not be that, not with his father, a grown man, besides, God wouldn’t put you to sleep for that, and it didn’t hurt, anyhow. But Catherine might think so. Sure enough, she was looking at her aunt with astonishment and disbelief that she could say such a thing about her father. Not in his pants, you dern fool, Rufus wanted to tell her, but his Aunt Hannah continued “A fatal accident”; and by her voice, as she spoke the strange word, “fatal,” they knew she meant something very bad. “That means that, just as your mother told you, that he was hurt so badly that God put him to sleep right away.” Like the rabbits, Rufus remembered, all torn white bloody fur and red insides. He could not imagine his father like that. Poor little things, he remembered his mother’s voice comforting his crying, hurt so terribly that God just let them go to sleep. If it was in the auto, Catherine thought, then he wouldn’t be in the slop jar.