Meanwhile, the MacMillan-Bloedel paper mill where Harris had worked most of his life was sold first to Weyerhaeuser, then to International Paper. At its height, the mill had employed almost two thousand people from the area. Now Harris estimates it employs four hundred, although he isn’t sure. “You know these international companies,” he said. “When you retire, they take your name out of the computer, and you’re just gone.” Just gone. It seemed such a minor end to more than a hundred years of Riggs family history in Camden.
And so one story ends, but of course it is not the only story that can be told about Camden. The town is located in the heart of Civil Rights era unrest—forty miles north is Selma, site of the famous march, and thirty miles east is Lowndes County, known as “Bloody Lowndes” for its staunch refusal to register black voters. So there are at least two sets of circumstances in Camden, two histories, two views of the world. If you asked someone else about Camden, Alabama, especially a longtime black resident, you would no doubt hear a different story from the one you’ve read today.
But there are always other stories to tell. I haven’t set out to provide a history of a town but simply to tell the story of Church Cat, who stayed four cherished years at Camden United Methodist and died as she had always lived, with Ms. Carol Ann Riggs by her side. That seems simple enough, and I have tried my best to tell the story as Ms. Carol Ann told it to me. But even something as seemingly straightforward as the life of Church Cat, as I well know, is filled with personal meanings and interpretations.
Nothing made that more clear than my three conversations, spaced over a series of months, with Carol Ann’s good friend Kim Knox. Kim, you see, had a different view of Church Cat. A view not based on Church Cat’s actions but on the fact that she was terribly unhappy after her move to Camden, a town she had never even heard of until her husband got a job teaching school there. She loved the town and the people but, as the Bible says, it was a time of trial. Her mother died just after she moved, and without any friends in the area, she had no one to confide in. Even worse, after years of trying, she learned she would never be able to have a child.
This was not like Mary Nan Evans with her twenty-eight cats on Sanibel Island. Mary Nan told me, with no hesitation, that she never regretted not being able to have children. She is older than Kim, and therefore further from the disappointment, but I don’t think that was the reason for her lack of regret. Having children, it seemed, was never integral to Mary Nan’s life. It wasn’t something she ever needed to be happy.
Kim Knox was different. I could hear that clearly in her voice. Kim Knox desperately wanted children. She needed them, and it was a crushing blow when she found out she was unable to have them. She and her husband tried every fertility treatment short of in vitro fertilization, which they couldn’t afford. They researched adoption, but after more than a year of phone calls and meetings, they realized that even the cheaper alternatives were beyond their modest means. There was no single moment, Kim said, when the reality hit her. There were no breakdowns in the office; no sobs in the night; no dark mornings when Church Cat’s presence lifted her spirits just as her strength collapsed. There were tears with her husband, many thousands of them, but the emotional process was a gradual chipping away of her hopes, a slow and crushing collapse of all her dreams, not a sudden surrender, and Church Cat’s contribution was a constant affection, a daily warmth, more than one unforgettable act.
But that affection was important, more than Carol Ann or even I can understand. To Kim, Church Cat wasn’t just a cute cat. She was a source of comfort and strength. She was a friend Kim could put her maternal compassion and energy into when she had nowhere else to place it.
Be present. That’s the advice for helping people in pain. Be present for them, whatever they need. That, in a nutshell, was Church Cat.
And just as important, through that little cat, Kim built a local community of support. Through her, Kim became friends with Carol Ann Riggs and ultimately confided in her. With the help of the strewn papers and torn-up toilet paper, she developed the kind of warm, lighthearted relationship with the young pastor that allowed her to finally, in the quiet of the parsonage with only Church Cat as a witness, unburden her heart.
Does that change the story of Church Cat? Does it explain why a professional woman would spend her lunch break climbing through the window of an abandoned house? I don’t know. Kim’s husband, who was older, was on his second marriage and second career, as a schoolteacher. He had a son from a previous marriage, but the boy had been seriously ill his whole life. In 1999, as Church Cat was birthing her kittens in an old motel, the boy’s doctors recommended a transplant. Kim’s husband donated a kidney. He and Kim both understood that the time, physical recovery, and expense meant the end of their last faint hope of ever adopting a child of their own. But it was something they never hesitated to do. I cannot help but believe that when Kim Knox sat in that abandoned bedroom, softly encouraging Church Cat’s kittens to trust her, that she was taking a turn at motherhood. That she was being comforted by those soft little lives. That she was grieving, in her way, for what she could never have.
Then, in August 2002, Kim received a call from the young, now former pastor of Camden United Methodist Church. A woman had come to see him, the pastor told her. Her niece knew a young woman who could not afford to keep her baby. She was seven months’ pregnant, and she was searching for someone to adopt him.
Eight weeks later, in October 2002, Kim Knox drove five hours to meet the mother. She brought nothing but one change of clothes and a child’s car seat, still in the box. She refused to buy anything else. She was terrified, after all those years of struggle, that something would go wrong.
Two days later, she was in the delivery room when her adopted son, Noah, entered the world. The mother spoke no English, but she begged Kim in broken syllables and gestures to stay with her in the recovery room, to let her hold, for a moment, the newborn baby. They saw the mother again when the boy was eleven months old. They drove to Birmingham, a few hours from Camden, to meet her. The woman cried, smiled, thanked them in broken English, hugged her child, and then disappeared. Kim could feel her heartbreak, almost as strongly as she had felt her own. But where she went, or why, Kim has no idea.
“We were so thrilled when we met Noah,” Ms. Carol Ann said. “He was the cutest thing. The whole congregation absolutely loved him.”
In 2005, Kim and her husband moved back to Laurel, Mississippi, Kim’s hometown. They loved Camden, but they had no relatives in the area, and they wanted to raise their boy surrounded by family. They moved just two months before Hurricane Katrina. Although they were a hundred miles from the coast, they watched in horror from their aunt Lee’s house as trees shattered and toppled. They clutched their child and hoped that Church Cat’s son, Chi-Chi, who they had left in their nearby rental cottage, survived the storm.
He did, but that is yet another story. Suffice it to say, for this story, that Church Cat wasn’t just a pretty face, that her love gave Kim Knox, and perhaps others in Camden, a calming presence in times of need. And that Kim Knox, with the help of a gentle cat and a kindly pastor, survived her time of trials and saw her dreams of motherhood come true. And that Church Cat’s son, Chi-Chi, although never a friendly cat like his mother, loved his little brother Noah with a ferocity that surprised even Kim, who will forever appreciate the warmth and intelligence of cats.
NINE
Dewey and Rusty