Her conduct and demeanor now affected me, however. She became more affectionate toward me. There was a vulnerability to her, a warmth that I had never thought possible with cats. Could this have been an old, atavistic association with time itself? One afternoon I gazed at her for the longest moments as she rested on an ironing board on the back porch in the bedappled sunshine. Her tiny leonine eyes were aglow: she was expecting something. Occasionally she would awaken and gently lick her burgeoning belly. At other times I observed her as she searched the house for more secretive places to sleep.
The days went by. We were now well into May, in the flowering of the great Deep Southern springtime.
We knew Rivers's childbirth was imminent but did not know precisely when it would be. I found myself a litde worried about this forthcoming event. This bizarre little cat had somehow, despite my reluctance, become at least an oblique part of my life, and I started quizzing JoAnne about the mechanics of cat-birthing. The Cat Woman did not seem to give it a thought. Most of her life, she reminded me, she had had at least one mother cat who had kittens every year and that when the time came the cat always went off by herself somewhere—usually to a closet, sometimes under a bed or in an outside storage room—and had the kittens. The Cat Woman never knew precisely when to expect this and never did much in the way of preparation. This seemed a fairly cavalier attitude to me. All the dogs of my life had been males, so I had had no experience with dog births, either. With her previous cats JoAnne used to just put some old towels or sheets or T-shirts in a httle flat box in a small area in the back of a closet and show it to the expectant mother. If the cat liked the spot she would use that as her birthing bed, but if this did not suit her she would find her own space and make her own bed. She tried to explain that Rivers Applewhite would know instinctively what to do, but I was not convinced. "She's too young," I said, "not even a teenager yet." So we made places in every closet and dark nook and under every bed. The Mayo Clinic could not have done better.
As the delivery date approached David Rae was visiting from Minneapolis and we had a dinner party for him and some of his Jackson friends. Everyone was petting Rivers and predicting when she would deliver. The group left around midnight. Shortly after that, catastrophic things began to transpire.
This would become one of the memorable happenings of my life. I was sitting at the dining room table while JoAnne cleared the dishes. Suddenly Rivers began moaning and crying and running inanely from room to room. We tried to calm her down, but she refused to be pacified. One moment she would hide under a bed, the next in one of the closets. Every five minutes or so she would repeat the routine. This went on time and again. I was already a nervous wreck. How had I gotten into this? JoAnne decided something was badly wrong and telephoned the all-night emergency animal clinic. As I trailed Rivers in her frenetic scrambles, I could hear JoAnne describing what was going on and asking if a cat ever needed a cesarean or if she might not instinctively know how to give birth. The emergency vet said both were possible but to give her more time before we brought her in.
Soon after the phone call, Rivers started her dervish again. But this time as I followed her dashing from the bedroom closet into the dining room she did something that nothing whatever in my entire existence had remotely prepared me for. She flung from her insides onto the floor a slimy gray thing with no head or eyes or nose or ears or tail! "Oh, my God!" JoAnne shouted. "She's had a deformed baby! Or maybe it's premature?" Rivers lurched nearby as I squeamishly hovered over the formless blob, which resembled nothing if not the pulsating pods in the old movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Once again JoAnne phoned the emergency vet and described the situation. He calmly suggested that perhaps the amniotic sac was still in place on the newly born kitten. He proceeded to give her exact directions on what to do. With the telephone cord pulled out to its fullest length, she began relaying the instructions to me.
Indulge me, reader, to interject here that when I was growing up, people expected me to be a medical doctor—that was what all bright Southern boys were supposed to aspire to then, but I would not for a nonce so much as think of it, and for one very sound reason: I hated the sight of blood. And here I was at 2, A.M. in a house in Jackson, Mississippi, expected to deliver a cat. "I don't know nothin' about birthin' cats," I heard myself saying. But there was scant choice.
"Get some paper towels," the vet's orders were repeated to me. "Rub the thing up and down and over and over." I proceeded to do so. After a minute or more of this, beneath the oozing blood I began to see ears and a nose and a head—a little cat, a little white cat.
"Continue rubbing! This is what the mother should be doing by licking the kitten!" So I rubbed and rubbed.
"Rub it hard on the back to help it breathe! Pat! Pat!" This went on endlessly. "Live, kid, live!" I yelled. And, by God, it began breathing deeply and making faint noises and moving its mouth.
Somehow all of this seemed to calm Rivers Applewhite, and she sedately retreated into the bedroom closet again and gave birth to another one—a yellow one. She did everything right this time. I took the little white one in my arms and gently put it in there with her. Then she delivered another white one and a little black-and-white one all by herself.
I would give the first little white one, whose life I had saved, the name Spit McGee.
The name derived from a character in a children's book I once wrote. Spit was a mischievous and resourceful boy who could spit farther than anyone else in the whole town. This is how I described him in that book:
Spit lived in the swamps, and he was a hunter and fisherman. Foxie Topkins might bring an apple to school for the teacher, but not Spit. If he brought her anything it would be a catfish, or a dead squirrel for frying. Rivers Applewhite would often be the recipient of the most beautiful wild swamp flowers, which Spit brought into town in the spring. One day during recess Spit reached into his pockets and pulled out a dead grubworm, a live boll weevil, a wad of chewed-up bubble gum, four leaves of poison ivy which he said he was not allergic to, two shotgun shells, a small turtle, a rusty fish hook, the feather from a wild turkey, a minnow, the shrunken head of a chipmunk, and a slice of bacon.
And with his namesake begins a new chapter in this vainglorious writer's life.
Without wishing to sound histrionic, the birth of Spit and his three siblings evoked for me a reserve of continuity, of the generations, of life passing on life, of the cycles. By the second day it was obvious that Rivers, so poignantly and recently a kitten herself, was making a good little mother, her maternal instincts as strong as those of the backyard huntress.
Although the kittens' eyes would remain closed for ten days or so, when they were only hours old they were active and curious. The white female kitten we named Savannah, after my stepson's girlfriend who had rescued Rivers from the ditch on Highway 51- She looked bigger and healthier than Spit. We named the yellow one Peewee after a childhood chum of mine, and the black-and-white one Jimmy Garter for regional reasons. Any good mother loves and fears for her young, and I noted how Rivers would take the kittens with her mouth around the backs of their necks and hide them somewhere from time to time, as if she felt incipient dangers lurking for them. Once she had them settled somewhere, she was almost like a generic time clock. She would nurse them and watch over them, and about every two and a half hours as they slept together in a furry mass she would emerge to eat, relax, lie outside in the sunshine—then soon metronomically return to them again.