Ghost Cats of the South

by Randy Russell

  A few weeks later, the antique dealer in Jackson bought back the Newcomb College vase Anson had sold him, this time for only a thousand dollars because the widow didn’t care to dicker. The original customer, her husband, had died coughing in his sleep. He’d apparently been chewing on a piece of yarn, and it got balled up at the back of his throat, she said.

  The estate of William Barkeley, Jr., was settled without a will this time. The contents of his mansion were sold at auction at the request of an attorney from his law firm. The attorney lives in the house now. He has two cats in the yard.

  They say Jackson, Mississippi, has more lawyers than cats. And that’s no yarn.

  Some people say Jackson has more antiques than either lawyers or cats. People travel from around the word to buy antiques there. It is likely they’ll find small pieces of yarn hidden inside some of them.

  It’s something to chew on.

  BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA

  The Lightning Tree

  Baton Rouge was where early French explorers found a red pole stuck in the ground.

  Sieur d’Iberville and a group of two hundred men came up the Mississippi River from New Orleans in 1699. On March 17, the exploration party discovered the first bluff on the river. A potential town site free from the threat of flood, the bluff was quickly charted and investigated. The red cypress pole, upon which were mounted severed animal heads, was recognized as a boundary marker.

  The French guessed incorrectly when they decided the pole of heads marked a hunting boundary between Native American tribes. Tribal boundaries required no such demarcation. Some say the blood-smeared baton did not mark the limits of a culture’s domain. It marked the limits of human safety.

  The pole was a warning. The bluff above the river, legend has it, was a place where witches were killed.

  The heads were those of witches who had taken on the souls of woodland creatures. Witches were driven to the bluff and slain. Upon death, their bodies reverted to the wild animals they had become. Their human faces became the furred faces of animals. American Indians often took on the spirits of animals for battle. This was a common religious practice. Native American witches, however, took on the spirits of animals for convenience, for easy travel, for play, and for mayhem.

  A man who changed souls with a crow could travel great distances and return in a single day. A man who changed souls with a bat could overhear conversations whispered in the dark of night. A man who changed souls with a Louisiana panther could kill another person and not be suspected of the crime.

  The kitchen witchcraft of the Cajun and Creole populations, a witchcraft of potions and charms, formed an interesting mix with the Native American culture around Baton Rouge. It was an area where the swamp magic of graveyard spells met the animal magic of a dying Native American culture.

  Witches in Louisiana have been changing places with cats for hundreds of years.

  People traveling Highway 190 between Baton Rouge and Livonia sometimes see a flash of lightning late at night in a field north of the highway, even when the weather is clear. The lightning illuminates a large, old tree in the distance. In fact, the flash of hot, brilliant light seems to originate in the tree. The locals call this “the Lightning Tree.” Like other ghostly lights in the South, it has never been scientifically explained. Its branches have been burned, but the tree survives.

  No one is quite sure how long lightning has been flashing on and off in that tree. But it’s been years now. Few people who see the tree momentarily light up at night associate the phenomenon with witchcraft. Witches in Louisiana are associated with other things.

  “My grandfather said that witches will change you into a horse while you’re sleeping and ride you places at night,” a boy named Ralph proclaimed one day. “That’s how they get around in a hurry when they want to.”

  “Your grandfather is nuts,” fourteen-year-old Charley Hammond said.

  “Is not,” Ralph said.

  “Ever time you lie, I get to punch you in the arm. You’re still thirteen, and I’m not. I can punch you in the arm anytime I want.”

  “Okay, he’s nuts,” Ralph said quickly. “But you’ve been fourteen for only two days, so shut up.”

  Ralph lived in the house up the road. He was in the same class as Charley, and they rode the school bus together. Charley Hammond turned fourteen the year lightning first struck that tree north of Highway 190. Charley saw it happen. So did Ralph.

  For Charley’s birthday, he and Ralph were allowed to have a sleepover at the Hammond house. Charley wanted to camp out in the attic. His mother said it was okay, but they had to be quiet up there. The old house had crossbeams in the attic to support the rafters. It was just like a fort, with one small window at each end.

  If Charley had a tent, the boys would have used it in the attic. Instead, they spread out pallets on the floor. They used a big flashlight for a campfire and ate Vienna sausages right out of the can. After telling stories almost all night, Ralph mentioned Alice Webster. She was the most beautiful girl in junior high, and they had to say her name out loud before going to sleep.

  “She takes her top off to wash her hair,” Ralph said.

  “How do you know that?” Charley sat up. “I’m going to punch you if you’re lying.”

  “Because my sister does. I’m not allowed in the kitchen when she’s washing her hair, but I saw her once.”

  Charley lay back down. He didn’t have to punch Ralph.

  “My sister washes her hair in her bra,” Ralph said. “Alice Webster does too, I bet.”

  Charley Hammond was fourteen now and allowed to know things like this about Alice. He thought about it awhile, then fell asleep.

  Late into the night, a clap of thunder woke them. It was right on top of the house. It sounded like a cannon. Rain pummeled the roof. A flash of lightning lit up the attic windows. It was like someone was taking their picture. They found their flashlights and turned them on. They pointed them at each other, then across the attic floor to the window.

  “It’s going to leak,” Ralph said. He pointed his flashlight straight up.

  “Is not,” Charley said, but he looked up anyway.

  Both teenagers froze in mid-breath. A woman in a white dress sat scrunched over on the crossbeam above them. She was dripping wet. Her hair hung on either side of her face. It was soaked with rain. Her eyes glowed in the flashlight beams. She stared down at the boys, turning her head from one side to the other, studying each of them in turn.

  “Hello, boys,” she said. “Sure is a bad night for being out.”

  Charley dropped his flashlight. He barely noticed.

  “You’re the Hammond boy,” the woman said to Charley. “I know where I am, you see.”

  Both boys stared with their mouths open.

  The woman looked at Ralph. He began to shake.

  “And I know you, too. Your mother is active in the church. I’ve seen her there on Wednesdays and Saturdays both.”

  Charley tired to swallow without closing his mouth. He made a clucking noise at the back of his throat.

  The woman wrung her hair in her hands. Water poured down on the pallets. Both boys drew their legs up.

  “Guess I better go, if you got nothing to say to me. Now, don’t you boys be telling anyone you saw me tonight, you hear?” They nodded slowly, mouths still open.

  The woman in white dropped from the beam. When she landed at the end of their pallets, she was a white cat with a long white tail. The cat ran to the window at one end of the attic. There was another crash of thunder. The cat turned its head to look back at the boys. Then it leapt into the stormy night. It leapt through the window as if it could fly.

  Ralph’s flashlight fell.

  “That window is closed shut,” Charley said.

  Ralph didn’t reply. He had the edge of his blanket in his mouth.

  “It was just a cat,” Charley said. “The whole time, it was just a cat. Did you hear it talk?”

  The other boy was quie
t.

  “Ralph, did you hear it talk?”

  “No,” Ralph said around the edges of the blanket he held in his teeth.

  “She said she knew who you are.” A sheet of heavy rain pounded the roof. “Hey, do you smell that? It smells like pee!”

  Ralph didn’t say a thing. He wasn’t going to let a witch know who he was, if he could help it. He’d grow a mustache as soon as he could. He’d buy sunglasses and a hat to wear until then.

  Charley found his flashlight and walked across the floor of their attic fort to the window. Ralph wrapped himself in his blanket and followed. Charley touched the window. It was closed tight. Thunder and lightning came together in a single loud, crackling crash. A bright flash illuminated the sky above the big tree by the fence. Both boys jerked back from the window. They felt as if they’d been hit.

  In the sudden lightning, they saw a woman flying over the tree. She was dressed in white. It was not a cat. Cats can’t fly. Witches can.

  A shower of sparks burst from the top of the tree, then all the light went out. A branch fell to the ground with the rain. It sounded like the earth had been cracked. The image of the woman at the top of the tree was etched in their memories as the two teenagers continued to stare.

  “Did you see that?” Charley asked.

  “No,” Ralph said.

  Charley turned around and hit him in the arm, just below the shoulder.

  “I guess you saw something. You peed your pants.”

  It wasn’t much fun, being a witch caught in a Louisiana thunderstorm at night. Lightning struck at things flying in the air. She’d been about to land in that tree when the lightning hit. It hurt. The clap of thunder drowned out her scream. The witch was damaged, her hair singed. Her lips were hot to the touch of a fingertip. She didn’t know if she could fly. She wasn’t sure she ever really wanted to again. She could run around on cat feet and be just fine. And she could climb just about anything.

  She could climb about anything but down from that tree, the witch discovered. Every time she touched so much as a toe to the ground, electricity shot up her leg amid a bright flash of light. She quickly drew her leg back and rubbed it for comfort. She tried again, with the same result. Ouch, that hurt! And again.

  If I try one more time, she thought, I’ll surely catch fire. I’ll melt.

  The witch sat in the tree until the storm passed. As morning neared, she found she could fly, but just a little bit. Her control was damaged beyond repair by the lightning. She could fly in one short burst, and then the flying was gone. It was all through.

  She had to paddle air like crazy. She tumbled back to the tree and wrapped both arms around a branch. She was upside down to the world when she did. Being stuck in a tree was one thing. It was embarrassing. But being a witch stuck upside down was downright degrading. It took some fancy legwork to get herself pointed the right way again. Wet leaves stuck to her hair. A twig had scratched her face. Her cheek bled.

  The witch cursed the tree. She shouldn’t have done that. Witch-cursed trees sometimes live forever. And even if they die, they don’t fall down.

  An hour before dawn, she tried to fly again. She managed a little better this time but discovered she hit an invisible wall of electricity at the outer edge of the spread of roots under the tree. This was what had stopped her before when she tried to fly away from the tree in a straight line. The tree, not the ground, was holding the lightning, she realized. The tree had trapped her.

  She cursed the tree again, then told herself she had to stop doing that.

  Charley climbed down from the attic and got clean underwear and a pair of jeans from his drawer for Ralph. They were a little too big, but Ralph didn’t mind.

  In the morning, he folded his old clothes into his blanket, to be carried home later. The day was mostly dry by then. The rain had stopped. They had to go outside right then and look at the tree.

  It was a big, old tree. It had seemed closer to the house from the attic window at night. They had to leave Charley’s yard and walk through tall, wet weeds to get to it.

  The witch saw them coming. That was all she needed, some teenage boys throwing rocks at her. Or worse. She held her breath, closed her eyes, and changed as quickly as she could into a cat. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. Sometimes, she got headaches when she changed back to a woman. High in the tree was a hollow where two branches formed. It was just big enough to hold a cat, if she was careful with her tail.

  “I saw her here as we were coming, but now she’s gone,” Charley said. “You saw her, too, didn’t you?”

  “No,” Ralph said. To keep from getting hit, he quickly added,“I wasn’t looking.”

  “She was up there, all right. In a white dress, with that long black hair.”

  “There’s nothing here, Charley.”

  “You saw her. You saw her just like I did. You saw her last night, and she was here in the tree this morning.”

  “Last night was just a dream. I didn’t see anything you saw.”

  Charley wanted to hit him.

  Charley and Ralph kicked at a singed branch on the ground. It was burnt black from lightning at the fat end. If they both pulled from the same end, they could drag the branch back to the house.

  “Better leave it here,” Ralph said.

  Charley agreed. Neither boy knew that a piece of lightning wood is lucky. It is said in the South that a toothpick cut from a lightning-struck branch will cure a sore mouth. But the boys had never heard that. A small boat carved from lightning wood never sinks. You can put it on the river, and it will float all the way to the ocean. A dagger made from lightning wood is a powerful weapon. It will kill a vampire or a witch.

  The cat watched them leave. It didn’t mind being in the tree as much as the witch did. It waited until they went in the house, then changed back. The witch’s mind worked better as a woman than as a cat. The headache was worse this time than others. It will help, she thought, if I have something to eat.

  She had an important decision to make. Food was part of it. Her survival was at stake. A witch sitting in a tree would soon be discovered by someone. When people found her there, they would kill her. They would burn the tree down if they had to. There was nothing for a witch to eat in a tree. And she wouldn’t be able to cook a thing.

  Climbing down was out of the question. The lightning would kill her.

  She considered the cat. The only thing she could come up with was to make the change permanent. You aren’t given extra lives unless you’re a cat for good. She could live in the tree as a cat for quite some time, eat small birds when she could, chipmunks and a squirrel now and then. And bugs. A cat didn’t need to eat anything that was cooked to stay alive. A tree in Louisiana could provide a perpetual feast for a cat. It was a smorgasbord of creepy, crawly living things that cats liked to eat.

  The witch cast her spell. It was a very difficult process to become a permanent cat instead of a changeover one. With nine lives, the witch figured she could outlive the tree. It was an old tree to begin with. She hummed and chanted for hours, getting the spell right. The witch meditated her body into near oblivion and became a tiny white speck in a dark world. Then the white dot grew itself into a cat.

  Although now forever a cat stuck in a tree, a witch lives inside the thriving animal—a witch that wants out of the tree. Sometimes late at night, every few weeks or every dark moon, a white cat climbs down from the tree just to check. But things are pretty much the same. There’s always a flash of lightning and a jarring jolt of electricity that sends the cat quickly back to its hollow to lick its paws, especially the hot one.

  Travelers on Highway 190 between Baton Rouge and Livonia sometimes see lightning briefly illuminate a distant tree. The site is not far from were the Hammond house used to be, and not all that far from where Native Americans stuck a red cypress pole decorated with severed animals heads into the ground on the bluff above the Mississippi River.

  BLACK MOUNTAIN, NORTH CAROLINA OTTER CREEK PARK,
KENTUCKY

  Camp Cats

  Some cats go to summer camp. Some are already there.

  Pets from home were not allowed at the girls’ summer camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. Most of the younger campers brought favored stuffed animals to decorate their cabin bunk beds on Black Mountain.

  When Katie was ten, she brought a ceramic cat to camp. The tall porcelain animal seemed out of place with the plush teddy bears and stuffed bunnies that rested on the other girls’ bunk-bed pillows in her cabin.

  Although of small stature, Katie had a huge smile for everyone. She had brown hair and green-gold eyes. She cried sometimes when she talked about her real cat, Samantha. A sleek white cat with four large tan spots, Samantha was a traditional domestic harlequin cat that had been Katie’s companion throughout her childhood.

  Katie loved her cabin mates and loved camp. She almost never cried at camp, except when she talked about Samantha.

  Her parents had placed Samantha’s ashes inside the porcelain cat and sealed the bottom with green felt. The first year she brought her cat’s ashes to camp, Katie wanted to show Samantha where she’d been in the summers when she wasn’t at home. She carried the porcelain cat to the camp teepee, the totem pole, the archery range, the lake. And she brought it to the stables so the ceramic cat, with Samantha inside, could say hello to her favorite white horse, Henry Lee. She also set it in her lap at every campfire so her cat could hear the stories and listen to the camp songs.

  Katie brought the ceramic cat to camp every year after that. At one campfire each camp session, she stood and showed her porcelain cat to the other girls. She told them who was inside, and that Samantha, her deceased harlequin cat, loved being at girls’ camp at much as she herself did.