Hidden among the tombstones behind Violet and the few others present, the three cats waited. The morning was hot, overcast, and muggy. The service was short. Lilly’s minister did not seem inclined to go on at much length about the life or virtues of Cage Jones. The selections he read from the Bible were blandly generic. Violet spoke no words of cleansing or of memory on Cage’s behalf. Cage Jones’s funeral was a glum affair. In the arrangements Lilly had made for it before she vanished, she seemed concerned only about doing the minimum civil duty and being done with her brother. The cats, curled up in the shadow of a nearby granite monument, looked sadly at one another. To possess human life, and to have so squandered it that one departed accompanied only by hatred or indifference-that was, in their eager feline minds, indeed a terrible waste. They felt no grief for Cage Jones; they felt only disgust. What each of them wondered about, and grieved over, was the emptiness and waste.
They watched Wilma and Charlie turn away and leave the cemetery with Max and Dallas, watched Violet leave alone. When the handful of people was gone, they waited patiently until the backhoe had arrived and the grave was unceremoniously covered with earth, and then sod laid over it.
Then, alone, Joe Grey approached the grave.
And now, smiling with a sad but perverse sense of humor, the tomcat dug a hole in the center of Cage Jones’s grave, dug it in the soft dirt, as any cat would dig, but carefully between the squares of sod. He dug it deep. He dropped the leather thong, which he had carried all the way to the cemetery secure between his teeth, dangling the heavy gold devil-dropped it deep into the hole and buried it, covered it well, as any cat would do.
And he turned away, smiling, leaving Cage Jones alone with his only remaining treasure.
About the Author
SHIRLEY ROUSSEAU MURPHY has received seven national Cat Writers’ Association Awards for best novel of the year, two Cat Writers’ President’s Awards, the “World’s Best Cat Litter-ary Award” in 2006 for the Joe Grey Books, and five Council of Authors and Journalists Awards for previous books. She and her husband live in Carmel, California, where they serve as full-time household help for two demanding feline ladies.
www.joegrey.com
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