At Point Crisp we found we had some very unpleasant-looking rats living in the tops of the cabbage palms. Geoff grabbed one and brought it in and let it go in the hall, and it ran into Johnny’s room and up the draperies and sat on the top of the drapery fixture, squeaking. Geoff looked at it for a moment, then went out to see what might be in his dish. He seemed to be saying, “There’s a rat for you. Have fun.”
We grabbed him and shoved him into Johnny’s room and closed the door. He began an immediate complaint to be let out. He had no further interest in the rat. Nor could we interest Roger in it.
Johnny and I armed ourselves with a broom and the dubious pellet gun and went into the bedroom. We looked and looked and we could not find the rat. Yet there was no way it could have escaped. So we began a rat hunt. When you hunt a rat you do not stick your hand behind books and feel around for him. Finally we had looked everywhere except the bed, and when we began to take that apart, a rat-sized hump began to move back and forth erratically under the blanket. I raised the broom to give it a mighty swat, but Johnny yelled no and asked me what I thought his bed would be like if I hit it. So we prodded it out, and it ran over to a chair beside the white plaster wall. It paused for a moment near a chair leg, and I shot it, expecting no result at all. The pellet hit it in the throat. It sprayed an astonishing amount of blood halfway up the wall, ran in circles spraying at random, then collapsed and died in a little red puddle.
Geoff released another one in the kitchen another year, a young one. It hid in the back of the underside of the deepfreeze behind the coils and compressor. With a flashlight I could see it back there, but I couldn’t get it out. When we thought it had left, we found it had moved into comfortable quarters under the dishwasher. There was a hole in the base of the dishwasher some three inches square. The cat-food corner was handy. So was the counter top. The rat would come out at night and haul astonishing quantities of food away, back into his nest. When I finally trapped him, using a huge rattrap with raw bacon lashed to the trigger, he had grown so huge the trap was just a damned inconvenience that sent him clattering around the kitchen in the middle of the night, unable to fit himself back through his hole. I got up and killed him with a fireplace poker, Geoff purring approval.
One day on Point Crisp a big, elderly fox squirrel fell off a telephone pole. Our neighbors, Dot Rhoades and her daughter, Judy Currier, asked our help. Johnny brought him home in a box. The squirrel seemed very feeble, and his muzzle was so white it looked to me as if he was expiring of age rather than illness. For a time it looked as though he might recover, and then he died, and before burying him I snipped off his magnificent tail and put it on a high place to dry. When it was ready, Roger was absolutely mad about it. By that time, Geoff, aside from the occasional solitary game, usually of his own devising, was not very impressed with playthings. He would play for a short, busy time with anything stuffed with catnip, and then, with the precision he had learned on Adirondack mice, he would open it up and eat the contents.
But the squirrel tail fanned old memories in Roger. Long ago he had been given one by Johnny. Dorothy had discovered that if cat toys were taken away from them and put away, the enthusiasm was renewed when they were produced again.
She is a light sleeper. She woke up in the middle of the night in Clearwater to the sound of a drawer being opened stealthily. And then another. With remarkably poor judgment, she did not awaken me, but instead sprang out of bed, went quietly to the doorway of the nearby living room, and snapped the lights on. Roger, blinking in the sudden light, sat on top of a breakfront desk. Several of the small drawers were open. The drawer pulls were of that type formed of a length of wood with a groove on the underside. As she watched him, Roger turned his paw over, hooked the underside of the drawer and pulled it open. He dipped his head in, picked up the squirrel tail, and jumped down off the desk. He had smelled it in there, but it had taken him a little time to find the right drawer.
At Point Crisp he was delighted to be presented with a new one. He savaged it for hours.
There was a year Geoff nearly died, the year we thought he had. Quite suddenly he began to act peculiarly. We took him to a very good veterinarian, Dr. Ezekiel Thomas, located a few minutes away on the South Tamiami Trail. Dr. Thomas told us he was one very sick cat, running a high fever. He gave him a shot, decided he would be better off at home, and gave us pills to give him.
We should have closed the cat window. He went out and he didn’t come back. Johnny was away at school Dorothy was just out of the hospital. We hunted for him into the night, calling him, then slept poorly and began the hunt the next morning.
In the afternoon I spotted him under our guesthouse. It is of post-and-beam construction, elevated on four-foot piers. He was under there in the shade, panting. I called him, and there was no response. I should have gone under there immediately, but instead I went part way back to the main house, calling to Dorothy that I had found him. When I turned back it was just in time to see him moving slowly into the heavy brush beyond the guesthouse. I ran after him, but he had disappeared completely. A heavy mangrove jungle three hundred feet long and a hundred and fifty feet wide is an impossible locale for any detailed search. We did the best we could. After three more nights and days, after the grisly watch for buzzards over the mangroves, we were very depressed people, wondering how in the world we would write Johnny to tell him Geoff was gone for good.
During the evening, on the fourth night, we heard a faint, frail mew. Geoff came slowly through the cat window. I cannot guess how he managed to leap to the outside shelves because he was so weak that he had difficulty walking. He was down to six skeletal pounds. He drank a little warm milk, ate a very small morsel of warm hamburger, and went exhaustedly to sleep in a comforting carton beside Dorothy’s bed. When Dr. Thomas examined him again he said that the cat had somehow gotten over the worst of it and would most certainly recover.
We should have guessed that he would go off by himself when mortally ill. In that sense he was a more primitive animal than Roger. Roger, even when slightly ill, makes outrageous demands for attention, suffers visibly with thespian art, and wants to stay as close to people as he can get.
The one thing that made us so happy he came back was that cat’s special capacity for love. No one ever got up in the night to go to the bathroom in our house without having Geoff stir himself and come lumping in to sit in the darkness and lean against a leg, a small, warm furnace of purrs. He was not demanding food or amusement or a chance to move to the people-bed. He would merely come in and say hello, and then stump on back to wherever he was sleeping at the time.
After his illness he slept a great deal and ate hugely. His strength and energy came back quickly. Dorothy took advantage of a curious craving that cat had. There had been a previous time when Johnny, recovering from an illness, was supposed to take brewer’s-yeast tablets, eight of them with each meal. When Dorothy set the table, she would put the eight tablets by his plate. Certain confusions began to arise. He would say she hadn’t put them there. She would swear she had and accuse him of taking them and forgetting he had. One day Geoff was caught in the act of reaching a stealthy paw onto the table and hooking the tablets off and gobbling them. We ran a test. He adored them. We would put a dozen on the kitchen floor, and Geoff would vacuum them up, chomping each one before swallowing it. Roger, interested in what Geoff was eating so greedily, snuffed at a tablet and then backed off and tilted his head and looked at the brother cat as if he suspected Geoff of some kind of insanity.
During his recuperation, I think Dorothy gave that cat enough brewer’s yeast to keep Gussie Busch going for months.
After he had learned the delights of the stolen tablets and had been given some of his own, you had to be careful not to shake any kind of pill bottle or candy jar or Geoff would spring up from sleep and trot to the kitchen, looking pleased and expectant.
Also, he was the only cat I have ever seen who liked apricot juice.
• • T
WELVE • •
To dwell only upon incidents is, in a sense, misleading, because these incidents do not show how these house guests, even after maturity, continued to change in interesting ways.
For years Dorothy and Roger carried on a most curious and stubborn conflict. Things have to be done to cats. Drops for itching ears. Powder for flea time. Nails on many-toed feet tend to sometimes grow back upon themselves and start digging into the pad. Matted hair must be brushed. When cats have colds, their eyes need wiping.
Geoffrey was a stoic about these attentions. He endured them, and they were over quickly, and he bore no ill will. Roger was determined that no one was going to touch him without getting clawed ragged, and Dorothy was just as determined that he would learn to accept these necessary attentions. He would lie on his back and snarl and yowl at her, digging and biting every chance he got. I kept telling her that the cat might really hurt her some time. She was always dabbing medicine on the little nicks and gashes he gave her. For years it was stalemate. She wouldn’t quit trying, and he wouldn’t quit trying to make the whole thing impossible.
Then, over quite a comparatively short period, he mellowed. He became tractable. He became, in fact, so ingratiatingly gooey and sloppy that he began to be known as Gladys. Though still showing the wistful urge to let someone have it, he endured unwelcome and sometimes quite unpleasant attentions. It became standard practice, when they were ended, for him to go right to his dish and wait for something special, a reward for exemplary behavior. I can account for the change which occurred only by attributing it to the eventual, reluctant exercise of reason. No matter how venomous the objection, the unpleasantness, such as the removal of a tick, would be accomplished. He did not become “tamed” in the sense of being broken to obedience. He made the rational decision to accept, and this carried over to the ministrations of veterinarians also.
At Point Crisp he showed at one point an unmistakable capacity for logical thought. When we made the addition to the main house, we removed the garage, put in a double carport, and put my work area on top of the carport as the only second-story portion of the house. The sliding glass windows above my desk area open onto a shallow screened porch. From the farthest corner of this screened porch, one can look down at an acute angle directly into the window over the kitchen sink.
It was and still is Roger’s habit to come up the stairs and pay me a visit on the average of about once every two or three days. Though he has never had Geoff’s affinity for boxes, he has had an exploratory interest in cupboards. I have dozens of them in my work area, at floor level. He comes up and picks a cupboard, tugs tentatively at it with his claws, turns, and makes a small yow of polite request. Sometimes there is no vocalization at all, just the movement of the mouth. I get up and open it a few inches. He likes to pull them open the rest of the way. He goes in and explores. He isn’t after game. He just wants to check and see what it’s like in there. He doesn’t settle down. He prowls around and leaves.
One day he wanted to go out on the screened porch. He had been out there before. On the day in question I let him out. As it was a warm day Dorothy had the kitchen window open, and she happened to be at the sink. When movement caught her eye, she called up to him. I watched him. He stopped and stared down at her, six feet away. He tilted his head and stared at her. She continued to talk to him.
Abruptly and purposefully he turned around and came back into my office, walked diagonally across to the stairs, went down the stairs to Dorothy’s studio, walked back through the service area to the kitchen door and stood there and stared at her.
Nothing unusual here. However, that cat with the two of us observing him, repeated that trek seven times, without side trips, interruptions, or any lagging of attention and curiosity. Obviously the spatial relationships baffled him. Down there was the familiar food corner, the accustomed voice and greeting. There could not be a duplication. Yet how could he come so far yet remain so close? Seven times he stood on the porch and stared down at her. Seven times he went to the kitchen doorway and checked. It was not a game of hide and seek. He was doing no prancing. He was involved in solemn thought. At last he seemed satisfied, and when I next spotted him about fifteen minutes later he was sitting out in the sun in the driveway, either by accident or intent, in the precise place where he could most readily see both the upstairs porch corner and the downstairs kitchen window.
There was one interesting change of habit and attitude which seemed to be a result of the mellowing of Old Turtlehead. When he decided once and for all that no harm was intended him, he went overboard in expanding the number of people he would trust. It was as though, discovering his own capacity for good will, he could now assume everyone felt the same.
Previously they had both been prone at times to pay visits. When we had people in the guesthouse, they would spend as much time there as at the main house. They both quite obviously enjoyed the excitements and confusions of parties we gave. Geoff in particular was the party cat, showing off shamelessly, and very deft at singling out those guests who would most willingly share the hors d’oeuvres. In his younger years I would do a party trick with him to demonstrate his trust and his amiability. I would take his hind legs in one hand, adjusting the grip carefully so as to avoid hurting his legs. Then I would lift him by the back legs and hold him at arm’s length. He would hang there, apparently quite content, front legs extended, even purring at times. Trying the same thing with Roger would have been like trying to juggle a few nests of hornets.
Incidentally, one of Geoff’s homely pleasures was to lie on his back in the shell driveway, wriggling, feet in the air and have somebody grasp his feet, front paws in one hand, rear ones in the other, and rub him back and forth on the shells, like a furry iron on a gritty ironing board. Roger’s response to this was to try to get his teeth into the nearest wrist, not in anger but in too vigorous a response to what he thought an invitation to roughhouse.
Also, both of them seemed to feel that we employed people for the express purpose of amusing the cats. For several years we had a yard man they were especially fond of. Mac was a black man with a miraculously green thumb and an extraordinary sense of design and proportion. He had such an affinity for growing things, that when he worked around the place he actually talked to the plants. And when he was at our house, the cats were in the middle of everything he did. Later it turned out that his habit of keeping his cigarettes in his hip pocket was a fatal one. During an argument he was shot through the heart when he reached for them.
He was replaced by Arnett Baker, the husband of Rianner Baker, who has been our part-time cleaning woman from the first year we lived there. The cats knew that dusters, dustcloths, and dry mops were game things. It took Rianner some time to get used to one of Roger’s habits. He still does it, though rarely. He is stretched out on the floor in apparent indifference. If you walk within range, he reaches out and hooks you by one leg. If you are wearing pants, he uses the claws. Bare legs get a quick little tug when he hooks his arm around the ankle.
This would startle Rianner almost as much as the unexpected bite. Housework was punctuated by little gasps and yelps. Until she got used to him, I think he managed to upset her considerably. She was immediately fond of Geoffrey cat and intrigued and impressed by his responsiveness, which seemed like courtesy. Geoff was never too busy to say hello. If you walked by him twenty times in an hour, you would invariably get a greeting, a little noise which I can spell out as Yop. And whenever you opened a door for him to let him in, as he walked by you he would say his version of thank you, a strange little mumbled sound he uttered on no other occasions. A little Mermph, spoken with rising inflection.
I might interject here, about this business of opening doors, as the cats grew more elderly they would use their window when the people were unavailable. But it was an extra effort, and when there was the opportunity of doorman service, they used it.
Rianner, in time, became very amused by Roger and eventually fond of him. But he
still complicates her chores. He is especially intrigued by mop water. He likes to trot behind in it while the floor is being mopped. He enjoys lying down on a damp, freshly mopped floor or, even better, a floor freshly waxed. He gets very excited over the odor of Clorox. Geoff was indifferent to it. But to Roger that odor seems to have some kind of sexy import. Perhaps it does bear some faint chemical relationship to the odor of tomcat. But he makes a ridiculous spectacle of himself weaving around and around a bucket of Clorox water, smirking and bumping his head against it.
Having mellowed, Roger became an inveterate caller. Alone, he would visit every house on the small peninsula, thumping the screen doors, walking happily in and making a short tour of inspection, tail high. If food was offered he would accept a little graciously, but that was apparently not his objective. There are just six houses. His last stop would be the house of Bruff and Beth Olin, the house on the point nearest the mainland part of the key. There, in addition to the house, he would go out onto the dock and hop aboard their cabin cruiser and check that over. Tour finished, he would come back down the road.
One year, right after the house next to Olins’ had been rented, the woman there saw Beth in her yard and came over to tell her what had happened the previous afternoon, late. She said that a poor mother cat, obviously expecting kittens any moment, had come to the back door and asked to be let in. Once in, the cat had searched all over the house, obviously looking for a place to have the kittens. The woman had called the vet and had been told to fix a box for the cat. The woman had torn up one of her dresses to make a soft nest. The mother cat seemed to appreciate the box, purring and all, but then she began to ask to get out of the house. They had kept taking her back and putting her in the box, but finally she grew so insistent, they let her out and she hadn’t been seen since, and the woman was very worried about her.
The House Guests Page 13