Soon afterwards, just as my first and worst summer on earth entered the dog days, Sean died. Jolted from sleep by hollow wails unlike his familiar screams, we cats ran to the doggie bed he used when too sick to let us snuggle against him. Rolling on his back, panting and drooling, he howled those chilling wails the likes of which I hope never to hear again. “Sean, Sean,” we cried in voices not our own, voices drowned out anyway by his agonized howls. Then Elizabeth was there, kneeling, laying hands on his scarred chest which jumped and lurched as if whatever was in there had gone haywire, whimpering, “No no no!” Don’t die don’t die don’t die, sweet Sean.” Over and over: “Don’t die don’t die don’t die.”
But he did. And quivering like a rabbit, terrified, I found myself looking at his body so suddenly, queerly still and so suddenly, queerly silent that I realized this was death—this was what it was to die. And Elizabeth, her head on his now quiet chest, was sobbing, “Oh those bastards what they did to you. Oh those bastards may they burn in hell.”
Ashes to ashes and all that. Sure, we all go to dust, but does knowing that—at least in our culture where you’re planted like a lab specimen in agar agar—lessen grief when a dog you loved like the Mama you loved dies? One of the unsung animal sacrifices made for “the betterment of mankind,” Sean. Yeah, right. A dog in a losing battle with fear and pain that never complained. “The luck of the Irish,” he’d say sardonically on his worst days. “Almighty Dog loves the Irish.”
Sometimes at night I’d look down from Elizabeth’s lap to where he lay at her feet to find him looking up at us cats snuggled against her with longing and regret that he was too big to be there too—but never with resentment. “Almighty Dog love yehs,” he’d say when asleep against his trembling body we’d be awakened by his screams and purr our assurances he was OK, alright, it’d just been a bad dream. We’d tell him cat jokes till he calmed down enough to tell a few jokes of his own with Irish brogue and cockney accent, mainly about Irish setters and English setters going into bars. I wish I remembered some of them now—I could use a laugh.
Elizabeth and Manya buried him in the back yard under a beautiful dogwood tree so that every spring he’d be a part of its new leaves and white flowers. It took them a long time on a sweltering afternoon under a cloudless sky bleached by a blazing sun to dig down through parched ground down deep down through heavy black sandy soil for a grave deep enough and large enough to hold him. Blinded by the sun flashing into our tearing eyes, we watched from inside, mewing our grief over the loss of a dear friend. When they’d finished, Elizabeth said something over the grave. Then they were hugging each other and crying.
Later they came inside and toasted Sean with water glasses of wine. They drank and wept and cursed the vivisectionists until long after the sun went down and it was time for Elizabeth to feed us and her strays. Repeating in my head throughout that whole rotten afternoon: Almighty Dog love yeh, Sean; Almighty Dog, take all your pain away.
More and more Elizabeth’s cough rattled with phlegm. With every wracked and lengthened attack the fingers of foreboding clutching our hearts tightened. Most of the time she was breathless. The blotches under her eyes deepened to purple, she smoked more, ate less. Her hands shook all the time. “I miss that dog. I’ve seen too many animals die,” she told Manya in a voice more breathy than husky. “I’m getting old, kiddo. Hard to bounce back when you’re old.” She rested longer and felt so poorly the bright autumn morning Bob and I were to be neutered that she had to ask Manya to take us to the vet. No big deal. Thanks to chronic seizures and the flare-ups of dormant infections, we’d visited him often, we were used to him, the animal and disinfectant smell of the office, and we knew Manya would be back for us. So, for us the surgery was a mere blip in our routine.
And later that day when we returned, though she hugged and kissed us and gave us special fishy treats, she was still in her robe hacking away, so that more and more the inner shakes I’d had about Mama rose from the pit of my stomach to cast a shadow on the happiness of being home. As did the alarm on Manya’s expressive face and the frustration in her voice when she blurted out that the damned cigarettes were killing Elizabeth, she had to quit smoking. Crankily signaling for silence, “You’re starting in on me again?” Elizabeth croaked. “OK, so I’ll cut down. What the hell and why not if it gets you off my back? Thanks for taking them. I’m going to lie down. See you tomorrow.”
But she didn’t keep her word. Like cats, she had her own ideas about everything. Like cats, she was capricious. And day-by-day she went downhill just like Mama had before they took her away. She faded like the leaves drifting slowly but surely down to cover Sean’s grave. Manya began coming nights to intercept her before she left to feed the homeless. “Give me that cart, Liz! I told you! I’m doing this from now on.” “You need exercise? So be my guest,” Elizabeth growled, pushing the shopping cart over to her. “Yeah, Liz. I need exercise. WILL YOU PUT THAT DAMNED BUTT OUT!”
And then came the black day there was no Elizabeth in the kitchen to give us breakfast. Her bedroom door was shut. We couldn’t get in to wake her up. “Elizabeth!” we called. “Elizabeth!” Bubby and FDR began to cry. “What’s wrong, Bob? Why doesn’t she answer?” I asked, my voice broken because in my heart, in all our hearts, we knew why. When it comes to death cats know. The same awful presence which had been there when Sean died was on the other side of that closed door: that darkness, that pall, that ominousness which had turned out to be death—the one thing that’s inevitable, unyielding, the one thing nothing can change. In the livingroom the phone ringing ringing ringing, but there was no one to answer. I wanted to wail, I wanted to rush around the room going nowhere, I wanted to run under the sofa and stay there.
“Jesus Christ, Ma,” Cyn hollered. “Why the hell didn’t you answer your damned phone? You stopped answering your phone during the day now? Where the hell are you? What now?” Her foot shoved us away from the bedroom door where we’d stayed, mewing, calling, Elizabeth, Elizabeth as if by calling her name we could bring her back to us. We ran under the sofa, FDR dragging himself behind us, while she banged on the bedroom door, kicked it, wrestled with the doorknob. “Ma? Ma? Are you in there? Is anything the matter?”
She ran out and came back with a neighbor carrying a crowbar. Then: “Oh my God, Ma! Oh my God! She’s dead, my mother’s dead! Go! You can go now! Please go!” she screamed at the neighbor. “Oh my God, oh my God!” While not daring to get in her way we huddled where we were, afraid to move, devastated by the hollow, horrid feeling of abandonment and loss, mewing inconsolably. “Shut up, shut up, shut up, you damned things! You’re the ones who killed her!” she spat out, tears running down her cheeks, mucous running from her nose, frantically turning the pages of the phone book, frenziedly dialing a number. In disjointed words she told someone her mother had died and gave our address. Then she went into the bedroom. Wild gulping sobs joined our heartsick mews.
And there she stayed and we stayed until Manya burst in. “Me, Liz. Me and the two spays. You in the kitchen?” Then because upon hearing her, I’d stuck my head out: “Hey, Rocky, what’re you hiding out for? C’mon over and meet the girls. “STOP! Don’t put those goddamned things down!” shrieked Cyn storming from the bedroom. “Get the hell out of here! Out! Now!” Her smoldering red eyes damned Manya to hell. “Thanks to you,” she screamed, “she’s dead! Ma’s dead, thanks to you and all you lunatics and your goddamned animals!” Manya turned white. “What? What?” she stammered. “Liz dead? She’s dead?” “STOP! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? DIDN’T I TELL YOU NOT TO PUT THOSE GODDAMNED THINGS ON THE RUG?” Then Cyn began sobbing again, began pushing, pushing her backwards to the door. “Get out of here! Take those damned things and drown them!” Manya started crying. A carrying case in each hand, eyes overflowing, trying to stand her ground but powerless against Cyn’s fury, she backed up, bawling, “No! I want to see her! You let me go in there, Cynthia! Let me see her!”
But Cyn only pushed harder, shriek
ing Manya should go to hell, that Manya helped kill her mother with this animal craziness, alienated her mother from her own daughter, that because of so-called friends like Manya her mother had lived in a filthy dump choking to death on fur and stinking litterboxes, a dump that stank to the high heaven of animals and the slop she cooked for them, the stink of animal! animal! animal! in there was enough to choke a horse. “How could she breathe in here? How could anyone breathe in here? Get out! She’s dead! You can’t drive her crazy anymore!”
And Manya, in tears, finding herself at the door, gave up. “OK, OK, Cynthia. I’m going, I’m going. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Halfway out, she bent over and talked to us under the sofa. “Don’t worry, guys. I’ll be back for you later.” And with my own ears I heard her, gulping and sobbing, tell Cyn, who should only burn in hell, the same thing: she’d be back for us later, that Cyn should hide the key in Elizabeth’s hiding place so she’d be able to get in. “And Cynthia,” she asked, trying to swallow her sobs, “will you please, please let me know when the—” But shrieking, “LIKE HELL I WILL! DROP DEAD! DROP DEAD! DROP DEAD!” Cyn slammed the door in her face. And that was the last time I saw Manya.
Oh, how I despised that Cynthia! Wild with grief and seething with hatred, I’d wanted to tear her apart for attacking a person I loved second only to Elizabeth—a person, moreover, who’d loved Elizabeth the way she deserved to be loved, the way her own daughter should’ve loved her; a person we cats desperately needed to comfort us on that terrible day—not to mention save us from a crazy animal hater who meant us no good. Today with insight gained by age and the advance of the Grim Reaper I can tell myself her maliciousness and the terrible thing she did to us then was because she believed we helped kill her mother. But, so what? “To know all is to forgive all,” Booley might aphorize reading this. Bullshit, Booley: Nonapplicable. I still consign her to the bowels of hell. Cats don’t know from pardons.
After they took our beloved Elizabeth away, Cyn moved the sofa and tried to grab us, but naturally we ran from her. Terrified, we ran behind chairs, under tables, anywhere out of her reach as blubbering, wailing, cursing, she chased us around the room until she cornered us one by one, jammed us scratching and hissing into carriers and threw us in the back of her car.
Incoherent, babbling wildly about animals killing her mother, ruining her mother’s life, alienating her from her own daughter, she drove fast while we yowled our fear and heartache. Even before she screeched to a stop after what seemed like an endless time, my quivering gut had told me there was more calamity to come. And sure enough, we looked on horror-stricken at her unlatching Bubby’s carrier and tossing it to the edge of swampy woods. “DIE!” she screamed. Miles later Bob and I met the same fate. “”DIE! DIE!” What she did with FDR I never knew. I can only hope even a bitch like that wouldn’t have dumped a paralyzed cat, I can only hope she took him to a shelter where they disposed of him according to custom and law.
Hope springs eternal, Fairbanks. Hope to the end.
13
A day between seasons in a month bridging autumn and winter. Under the stinging sign of Scorpio wind whines. Withered mummies of leaves which not long ago had drifted down russet and gold now scurry across dried weeds and junk. Preview bleakness. Winter and fog approach on cold cat feet. Like the day she dumped us.
Feverish and shivering, I go back in time and see Bob and me in our carrier dumped on the shoulder of a highway at the edge of the woods, shattered by the death of Elizabeth, on our own for the first time in our short lives. “DIE!” And she speeds away, cars roaring behind her, so that we run from our open carrier away from noise and danger. But where are we? What is this place? Not the orderly forests we’d seen on Elizabeth’s TV: we’ve got no reference point for the jungle of swamp maples, oaks, Loblolly pines tangled in cat brier bending so low in the wind we’re afraid they’ll break and fall on top of us. I feel again the wind shaking straggly branches of swamp trees and undergrowth in its teeth, in my ears hear its whistle as it bends the spindly trees and brush to its will, blows roughshod over bracken and brush, amputated limbs. I see sickly vegetation, dying trees whose roots’re drowning in groundwater. I look up at the white blur of a setting sun in a dusky sky where clouds run like frightened sheep before the wind. My paws sink in a wet hollow of rotting leaves. We’re scared out of our wits.
Bubby! We had to find Bubby! Helter-skelter we ran back to where we thought she’d been thrown out. My mind was a hodgepodge of entangled thoughts about Elizabeth, Manya, Cynthia, Bubby, and FDR. Panting, sniffing for her scent, searching for someone who had to be even more frightened than we, we ran like scared rabbits as much toward our goal as away from the horror of Elizabeth’s death and the terror of our abandonment. “Bubby! Bubby, are you out there?” we yelled into the whining wind, running pell-mell, propelled by panic.
Night. The sky sank into blackness, the wind picked up more strength, roared loud as the planes from the local Air Force base Booley’s always cursing, trees groaned and creaked, branches snapped into our eyes, stabbed our cold-stiff muzzles. Though our noses told us she wasn’t there, “Bubby! Bubby! Where are you?” we kept calling. Lost in the pitch-dark alien landscape, we scrambled over tree stumps and hummocks, ducked under vines and fallen branches, our stubby whiskers of no help in guiding us through dense underbrush. Our pads used to wood and carpets were cut and split, hurt more and more with every step; and with every step we became more and more disoriented in that unchanging wasteland of trees parasitized by lichen, decapitated by lightning or wind or rot, twisted and tilted at crazy angles in their search for light. “Bubby! Bubby! Can you hear me?” We hollered above the wind and yelps of distant dog packs. Twigs cracking under the paws of raccoons and foxes and possums we didn’t knew existed till that night made us spin around, hearts hammering, dreading what we might see on one hand, on the other hoping to see her. But, no. Time and again, no.
Eventually we had to rest. Beat, heartsick, chilled to the bone, we collapsed against a hummock snaky with thick roots and prickly pine needles and jerked into sleep only to be jolted awake by the chilling cry of a nocturnal. “What? Cat Almighty, what was that?” Too rattled and tired to care what I was saying, I blurted out we’d never find Bubby, everything was against us, it was a fucking world, if Cat Almighty existed he was a sadist and I hated him; I told Bob I couldn’t live in those godforsaken woods and that anyway I didn’t want to live without Elizabeth. “Put a sock in it, Fairbanks! Buck up! When the going gets tough, we get going!” was the answer despite the fact that he looked more upset than I’d ever seen him. Then he started grooming me. He cleaned my ears, he nibbled a bramble out of my paw. “Stiff upper lip, Bro. Together, we’ll make it. Compared to Able’s these woods’re a bowl of giblets. Think how we felt when they took Mama away, but it got easier, right? And so’ll this, Bro. We gotta be patient, hang in, time’ll pass.”
As always, on the mark.
Memories of Elizabeth today elicit a kind of sweet sadness free of that day’s wild despair; but then—oh, then—lacking Bob’s centeredness and ability to clear away emotions clouding common sense, to me the world was black as the moonless sky under which, giving up on sleep, we again began our futile search. To me, wasted and heartsick, not a cat to coast on an even keel but one to go full steam ahead or sink to the depths, bad luck seemed relentless as the wind.
The next day an emerging sun splashed yellows and reds over the horizon. The wind had died down somewhat but still blew too cold for comfort as onward we plodded on sore paws nosing the ground for Bubby but catching only the sour scent of swamp growth. “Bubby! Bubby! Are you out here?” When the sun reached the point at which Elizabeth gave us breakfast and hunger and thirst set in, there were no bowls of water and stew set out. To drink was brackish water trapped in moldering leaves. To eat, a few slimy stringbeans we found in ripped garbage bag near the edge of the woods, wolfed down and promptly vomited up. “No big deal. Rome wasn’t built in a day,” I said p
artly to redeem myself after last night’s outburst and partly to snap myself out of the morass of misery in which I’d sunk. “The ferals lived wild. So can we.” But that morning Bob was the disheartened one. “They knew how to hunt, Fairbanks. We’ve got no survival skills.” “So we can learn, can’t we? Can’t we? Bubby! Bubby! It’s Rocky and Fred! Are you there?” “Maybe in time,” sighed Bob. “But in time to survive? That, Fairbanks, is the overwhelming question.”
Bubby was never found. After another night of desperate searching and draining sleeplessness we gave up on hope of finding her. “Maybe she stayed on the side of the road and someone found her,” I said. “Maybe even Manya found her. Maybe that’s what we should’ve done.” “Dream on, Fairbanks. You saw them speeding along. Who’s gonna see a cat let alone stop for it? Who’d even care? Enough with the ray of sunshine crap.” Well, he was probably right, but then there’s always the long shot, whatever the odds— right? Which is why, cold and hungry and heavyhearted though we were, we decided that on the outside chance Cyn’d tossed him after she’d dumped us it was worth a try to backtrack and to look for FDR. So, sustained only by catnaps and what moisture we could lick off rotting leaves, famished, barely able to put one sore cold paw in front of the other, we sniffed and searched throughout another night and day before, sick at heart, we gave up on him too, hoping against hope that even a bitch like Cyn wouldn’t’ve left a totally helpless cat on the shoulder of a roaring highway.
Sisypuss: Memoirs of a Vagabond Cat Page 9