The Gat Woman said she would allow me to name the kitten. I knew this was a craven bribe, but I named her Rivers Applewhite after the little girl I grew up with and wrote about, the one that Old Skip and I were both in love with. Perhaps the name itself would help me tolerate the unwarranted Christmas cat.
So now we had a Rivers Applewhite. She was an enigma to me. She was, as I have reported, absolutely white, with singular dark brown eyes. She was also very resilient and temperamental, and in her early days in that house kept testing me, as if I were unworthy of her. I tried not to pay her much mind, but she kept doing exasperating things that I was unable to ignore. She would perch silently on the rafters of the den, for example, then without warning leap down at me and land next to me on the sofa, thus scaring me witless. Mostly she would just sit and stare at me with her cantankerous, knowing eyes. What did she know? I certainly had no idea. She was exceedingly fast, and sometimes out of whatever motive she mindlessly sprinted through the dwelling with the velocity of a Jackie Joyner-Kersee. She was always hiding. The house was not of San Simeon propor-tions, but her hiding places were multifold and uncanny: under the kitchen sink, all the chairs and sofas and beds, in my shoes, and once even in the fireplace when it was not in use—what that did to a white cat is easy to imagine—and on the wall-length bookshelves. One day, after being missing for a couple of hours, we discovered her wedged between The Brothers Karamazov and Down and Out in Paris and London. As part of the Cat Woman's later confessional, she said: "Since she was a Christmas surprise, I didn't have an opportunity to think about how you'd react to her. And I'll bet neither did you. And how could I disappoint Graham and Savannah? I simply had to figure out a way to work her into our relationship and hope you'd go along with it. I never considered that you wouldn't."
Rivers obviously was drawn to my fiancee but mainly treated me on the scale of a ratty indentured servant just off steerage from eighteenth-century Liverpool. To put it mildly, I did not trust her very much, even on those winter nights she spent drowsily in front of the fireplace, tame as could be.
The first real test came a week or so after Christmas and was a trying one. We had enlisted my other future stepson, Gibson, to help me move out of my bungalow at Ole Miss and to bring all my possessions back to Jackson. The Cat Woman insisted we take Rivers Applewhite with us. She did not like it one bit. It was a three-hour drive to Oxford, and she whined and screamed and walked every inch of the car and on the car seats and under the car seats and on our necks. Once between Coffeeville and Water Valley she jumped onto my head and almost caused me to lose control of my clanking Dodge. "That cat is driving me crazy!" I shouted. I suggested we stop at a pharmacy and get her a high-powered sedative, something that would knock her out cold, or for that matter forever. But somehow she finally settled down and we made it to our destination.
Once we arrived at my old place on Faculty Row, she was completely at home. Against all odds she immediately began to conduct herself with an unexpected decency. She took a place on the back of my big sofa and spent the next few days gazing out the window at the happenings on the street outside. The spirit of my noble departed Labrador, Pete, pervaded the house: the corners where he slumbered, his own personal woolen carpet in front of the fireplace, the spot in the dining room where he reclined as I wrote my stories. At any moment I expected him to come in the back door and leap up at me and lick my nose, then explore his familiar territory until against all reasonable justice he discovered a cat on his old premises. That might have sent him back to his grave. I was consumed with guilt when I used Pete's old food platter to put down cat food. It is always melancholy to move away forever from a place where you have dwelled for a very long time, for the past accumulates on you in fading mementos, documents and letters and photographs, reminders of the mortal days, and it is particularly trying to gather up these haunting artifacts of temporality with a cat looking at you. What have I gotten rny self into, Pete ?
I had to concede that Rivers was very smart. She could figure things out by herself. She soon determined that I did not have a clue about how to deal with her. I guess I just treated her as if she were a dog in cat's clothing, giving her sturdy slaps of affection, from which she would promptly run away. When I dumped whole cans of cat food onto her dish she would take a bite or two and contemptuously walk off. I saved huge hunks of meat and bones from my plate and put them down for her, and some sliced bologna—had not my dog Skip liked bologna?—and she ignored them all. She would not come when I called her or clapped my hands vigorously to get her attention or beat on the sofa for her to sit beside me. When I picked her up, she would not stay with me. Why could she not at least show even the most modest indications that she was happy to see me and to greet me when I was gone for several days? This puzzled and angered me. "Gats ain't dogs," I would shout accusingly at the Cat Woman.
This cat seemed basically a maverick, a loner, as I had always judged cats to be. There was a haughtiness to her, a demeanor of aristocracy that contradicted her incontrovertible Highway 51 ancestry. As she began to grow up, I also had to admit that she was pretty. She was an immaculate self-groomer and would spend interminable moments licking her paws and fur and tail. She was strange. Sometimes to see her reaction I would call out her name. Most of the time she would sit there disregarding me, but every now and again she would turn and acknowledge my call with lazy, dreamy eyes—ennui eyes: What do you want?
Nonetheless, as I watched Rivers grow into a graceful, elegant young cat, I began to suspect she was more deep and subtle than I had supposed. I read at the Cat Woman's urging the exotic fairy tale "The White Cat," which the Mississippi artist Walter Anderson had interpreted in splendid block prints and which my friend Ellen Douglas had retold in her book The Magic Carpet and Other Tales. Despite her detached ways, Rivers could have been the magical cat princess whom the king's youngest son fell in love with.
She had the instincts of the huntress, as I had indeed been forewarned about cats, and warily stalked our backyard on stealthy paws seeking things out. Sometimes she sharpened her claws on the bark of trees. I watched from afar as she scooted up these trees to their remotest branches, as if she were practicing what to do if something came after her. No one was teaching her these things; she just did them. The first time she came in the house with a lizard in her mouth, I was tempted to contact the lizard department of the humane society. This was a vicinity of squirrels, and she chased them incessantly with no success.
Since she was being well fed, she was fattening up and growing. One night something unforeseen happened. I was sitting in a chair reading a book when she suddenly leapt into my lap and began purring. She extended her paws and kneaded them on my legs. She began licking my fingers, surprising me not only by the intimacy of her action but by the sharp-razor feel of her tiny tongue. Did she think I was her mother? Or was she flirting with me? This was a new experience, a cat sitting in my lap and purring at me. Was something happening to me? We lived in a neighborhood with yards and trees, where cats could be indoors and outdoors. I began to worry that on her explorations outside the house she might get run over. I discovered myself standing on the back porch waiting for her to return.
Beyond a certain age a kitten grows up quickly. The following April, we noticed that her stomach was beginning to bulge. Surely she was not pregnant; she was still just a kitten, only five or six months old. I could hardly believe it: she was indeed with child. She would be a child mother, or at best a teenaged mother. "White trash!" I yelled at her.