At the same time I couldn’t help being aware of the discrepancies between us. On the one side these fundamentally harmless little semi-fishes who were not to blame for the fear they were held in by the Arnewi. On the other side, a millionaire several times over, six feet four in height, weighing two hundred and thirty pounds, socially prominent, and a combat officer holding the Purple Heart and other decorations. But I wasn’t responsible for this, was I? However, it remains to be recorded that I was once more fatally embroiled with animals, according to the prophecy of Daniel which I had never been able to shake off—“They shall drive you from among men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field.” Not counting the pigs, to whom I related myself legitimately as a breeder, there was an involvement with an animal very recently which weighed heavily on my mind and conscience. On the eve of my assault on the frogs it was this creature, a cat, I was thinking of, and I had better tell why.
I have told about the building remodeled by Lily on our property. She rented it to a mathematics teacher and his wife. The house had no insulation and the tenants complained and I evicted them. It was over them and their cat that Lily and I were having our row when Miss Lenox dropped dead. This cat was a young male with brown and gray smoky fur.
Twice these tenants came over to the house to discuss the heating. Pretending to know nothing about it, I followed the matter with interest, spying on them from upstairs when they arrived. I listened to their voices in the parlor and knew Lily was trying to conciliate them. I was lurking in the second-floor hall in my red bathrobe and the Wellingtons from the barnyard. Subsequently when Lily tried to discuss it with me I said to her, “It’s your headache. I never wanted strangers around anyway.” I believed that she had brought them on the place to make friends of them and I was opposed. “What bothers them? Is it the pigs?” “No,” Lily said, “they haven’t said a word against the pigs.” “Hah! I have seen their faces when the mash was cooking,” I said, “and I can’t understand why you have to have a second house fixed up when you won’t even take care of the first.”
The second and last time they came much more determined to make their complaint, and I watched from the bedroom, brushing my hair with a pair of brushes; I saw the smoky torn cat following them, bounding through the broken stalks of the frozen vegetable garden. Broccoli looks spectacular when the frost hits it. The conference began below, and I couldn’t stand it any more and started to stamp my feet on the floor above the parlor. Finally I yelled down the stairs, “Get the hell out of here, and move off my property!”
The tenant said, “We will, but we want our deposit and you ought to foot the moving bill too.”
“Good,” I said, “you come up and collect the money from me,” and I pounded in the stairwell with my Wellingtons and yelled, “Get out!”
And so they did, but the point is they abandoned their cat, and I didn’t want a cat going wild on my place. Cats gone wild are bad business, and this was a very powerful animal. I had watched him hunting and playing with a chipmunk. For five years once we had suffered with such a cat who lived in an old woodchuck burrow near the pond. He fought all the barn toms and gave them septic scratches and tore out their eyes. I tried to kill him with poisoned fish and smoke bombs and spent whole days in the woods on my knees near his burrow, waiting to get him. Therefore I said to Lily, “If this animal goes wild like the other one, you’ll regret it.”
“The people are coming back for him,” she said.
“I don’t believe it for a minute. They’ve dumped him. And you don’t know what wild cats can be like. Why, I’d rather have a lynx around the place.”
We had a hired man named Hannock, and I went to the barn and said to him, “Where’s the torn those damned civilians left behind?” It was then late in the fall and he was storing apples, tossing aside windfalls for what pigs there were left. Hannock was very much opposed to the pigs, which had ruined the grass and the garden.
“He’s no trouble, Mr. Henderson. He’s a good little cat,” said Hannock.
“Did they pay you to take care of him?” I said, and he was afraid to say yes and lied to me. In actuality they had given him two bottles of whisky and a case of dried milk (Starlac).
He said, “Naw, they didn’t, but I will. He ain’t no trouble to me.”
“There’s going to be no animal abandoned on my property,” I said, and I went over the farm calling, “Minnie-Minnie.” Finally the cat came into my hands and didn’t fight when I lifted him by the scruff and carried him to a room in the attic and locked him in. I sent a registered letter special delivery to the owners and gave them until four o’clock next day to come for him. Otherwise, I threatened, I’d have him put away.
I showed Lily the receipt of the registered letter and told her the cat was in my possession. She tried to prevail on me and even got all dressed at dinner time, with powder on her face. At the table I could feel her tremble and knew she was about to reason with me. “What’s the matter? You’re not eating,” I said, for she normally eats a great deal and I have had restaurant people tell me they never saw a woman who could put away the food like that. Two plank steaks and six bottles of beer are not too much for her when she’s in condition. As a matter of fact, I am very proud of Lily’s capacity.
“You’re not eating, either,” was Lilys answer.
“That’s because I’ve got something on my mind. I’m extremely sore,” I said. “I’m in a state.”
“Baby, don’t be like that,” she said.
But the emotion, whatever it was, filled me so that my very flesh disagreed with the bones. I felt terrible.
I didn’t tell Lily what I was planning to do, but at 3:59 next day, no answer having come from the ex-tenants, I went upstairs to carry out my threat. I carried a shopping bag from Grusan’s market and in it was the pistol. There was plenty of light in the small wallpapered attic room. I said to the torn cat, “They’ve cast you away, kitty.” He flattened himself to the wall, arched and bristling. I tried to aim at him from above and finally had to sit on the floor, sighting between the legs of a bridge table which was there. In this small space, I didn’t want to fire more than a single shot. From reading about Pancho Villa I had picked up the Mexican method of marksmanship, which is to aim with the forefinger on the barrel and press the trigger with the middle finger, because the forefinger is the most accurate pointer at our disposal. Thus I got the center of his head under my (somewhat twisted) forefinger, and fired, but my will was not truly bent on his death, and I missed. That is the only explanation for missing at a distance of eight feet. I opened the door and he bolted. On the staircase, with her beautiful neck stretched forth and her face white with fear, was Lily. To her a pistol fired in a house meant only one thing-it recalled the death of her father. The shock of the shot was still upon me, the empty shopping bag hung by my side.
“What did you do?” said Lily.
“I tried to do what I said I would. Hell!”
The phone began to ring and I went past her to answer it. It was the tenant’s wife, and I said, “What did you wait so long for? Now it’s almost too late.”
She burst into tears and I myself felt very bad. And I yelled, “Come and take your bloody damned cat away. You city people don’t care about animals. Why, you can’t just abandon a cat.”
The confusing thing is that I always have some real basic motivation, and how I go so wrong, I can never understand.
And so, on the brink of the cistern, the problem of how to eliminate the frogs touched off this other memory. “But this is different,” I thought. “Here it is clear, and besides, it will show what I meant by going after that cat.” So I hoped, for my heart was wrung by the memory, and I felt tremendous sorrow. It had been a very close thing-almost a deadly sin.