At Piseco we received this letter from Mrs. Buchanan:
Aug. 4, 1960
Dear Mrs. and Mrs. MacDonald,
I wish I didn’t have to write this letter. I should have done it last night but I was so weary and I couldn’t find words to say that we lost Geoffrey. He was gone when I went over at midnight to give him his Terramycin. We got it from a vet here in Bradenton and for a while it sure looked like he was going to make it. He was starting to eat again since my first letter. We had him on Terramycin every six hours and he was eating raw beef ground twice and chicken livers. His elimination had improved and we had separated him from Roger just putting him in the next cage but we put them together after he started eating again and Geoffrey could walk around.
On the first of Aug. I couldn’t get him to touch anything except the chicken liver and then that came up also his medicine but then at 6 P.M. he retained his medicine but was so weak and he couldn’t eat anything and acted like he didn’t know me or anybody. At midnight when I went to check him he was gone.
After he was gone he wasn’t flat like he should have been but his stomach was large and hard like there was a growth or sponge under the skin. He never seemed to be in any pain and wanted to be petted and loved up to the night before he died when he acted like he didn’t know me.
Dr. Thomas called today and said that he didn’t think anything could have been done for him, but to please tell you that he had called.
It has been so very hot here and when he was eating I didn’t want to do anything to upset him again like carrying him all the way to Dr. Thomas in the heat and he just went so quick when he did stop again I didn’t have a chance.
Roger is doing fine— His eye seems to hurt him some and keeps watering so we got some medicine for that now. He doesn’t seem to miss Geoffrey so much it will be when he gets home again that he will be looking for him. I wish I didn’t have to write this letter. We didn’t have much chance but we tried everything we knew.
We put Geoffrey in a wooden box and marked the grave so if you would like to take him back to Siesta Key when you come south again we can try to move the box. (He is under an orange tree on a little hill.) He was a gentleman always so sweet and gentle and always so patient. When he was feeling good he still never cried at feeding time or scratched at his door like so many other cats do. He would always wait his turn and since he always had a choice of two or more things he ate what he liked best usually kidney and left the rest until later. He was so sweet it just doesn’t seem possible he is gone.
I hope you can read this — some of it as I read it over again doesn’t make much sense.
Sincerely yours
Dr. Thomas sent us a nice note also.
Certainly one weeps for a cat, as for any good thing spanning so many good years of a family. Especially vivid and sad to me is what happened about the third evening after we heard about him. I wandered out into the kitchen. Dorothy was fixing dinner. What happened needs a certain amount of background. In Dorothy’s childhood her family was close and physically demonstrative. In the Scots household of my youth, I was on a handshake basis with my father at tender years. Physical habits condition the human animal. The buddy-boy male who drapes a hearty arm across my shoulders gives me the squirms. And though I have tried very hard to loosen up, and think sometimes I have achieved a fair imitation, Dorothy can detect in response to the casual affection of pat or squeeze, a woodenness consonant with a dour heritage.
Johnny was in the Greek islands that summer. Old Rog, despite mellowness, would set up a patient agitation to be put down whenever he was picked up, the change being that he would try to fumble free rather than rip his way clear.
I went into the kitchen, and Dorothy sniffed, and I knew it was about Geoff again. I tried for a comforting word, and she turned with wet eyes and edge-of-sobs expression and said with a tremulous dismay, “Now I’ll have nothing left to hug.”
As I did not want the Buchanans to think we blamed them in any way, I wrote them this letter:
8 August 1960
Dear Mrs. Buchanan,
We got your letter about Geoff in this afternoon’s mail, and we have been grieved and depressed ever since, and will be for some time to come. He was a significant part of our household for over fourteen years, and we will miss him very much.
We know you did everything and more than anyone could expect, and we truly appreciate it all, as well as the concern, detail and understanding in your letter. As long as it had to happen we do wish he could have been at home with us when it did, but otherwise we’re glad it happened there, where he was known and appreciated.
We do not yet know what we will wish to do, if anything, about moving him. We shall leave that up to our son. We are sending him your letter. In the very limited sense that one can “own” a cat, Geoff belonged to Johnny, and Roger is mine. We know you feel badly that this should have happened. We have been telling each other that he had a very long and successful career and died with his awareness of being treated with love and respect intact.
We shall, of course, wonder how Rog adjusts to this emptiness in his familiar environment, and we would very much appreciate it if you could drop us a note a little later and tell us how he is acting.
Sincerely
We do not know what killed him. Elderly cats seem subject to malignancies of the liver. We do have one ironic suspicion. Some years earlier we had decided the Florida routine of the regular visit from the spray man who goes about the house fizzing his bug juice into the corners and cracks is not only overly costly but moderately ineffectual. And so we had arranged to have the house sprayed with deadlier chemicals while we were gone in the summer.
We remember that when we came back from Piseco in the autumn of ’59 the job seemed most effective. It had had a good chance to air out, but there was enough residual effect to fell newcomers in their tracks.
Both cats frequently slept on the floor. Geoff did the washing for the two of them. It is just possible that by early 1960 Geoff had licked enough poison off the two of them to sicken him. And, of course, each time he began to feel a little better, he would go back to the washing chore and ingest more of it. It is only a guess.
Fourteen
When we picked Roger up at Buckelwood and took him home in the fall of 1960, we expected him to search for Geoff once back in familiar surroundings. But, of course, he’d had a cage to himself at Buckelwood after Geoff died. Always, except in case of illness, we requested that they be kept in the same cell.
Roger was delighted to be home. And he seemed equally delighted to be the only cat. All food, service, and sleeping places were his alone. He seemed to understand there was no other cat there and no point in looking for one. But once in a while, not oftener than once a week, we would hear him, usually out in the screened cage, making that ah-rowr? ah-rowr? which was forever the call to game-time.
Deprived of the customary rough-and-tumble he perfected the substitute which he had begun to devise during the previous spring when Geoff would not play. Perhaps because of the malformed feet, Roger makes an astonishing amount of noise on a hardwood floor when he runs. It is a ba-rumm, ba-rumm, ba-rumm sound, exactly like the hoof rhythm of a galloping horse. Thus the name of the game became the Flying Red Horse, a dead giveaway as to the age of certain parties who used to hear it on a radio commercial long ago. It would usually begin out in the screened terrace and still does. It is a morning game, most probably when the people are on the second cup of coffee. Having the doors open to the living room and to the studio in warm weather enhances the game. First there is the arched back, the tail slightly puffed, a feisty little sidelong scamper, as though he is avoiding some opponent visible only to him. Then there are some yammerings, and he breaks into his gallop. Some days it takes up the stairs to my work area and back down again, but always through the studio and kitchen, around and around, hoofs drumming, ears laid back. There is always at least one reckless transit under the couch, this accomplished by stretching out on the back and using the claws to dig into the underside of the low couch and pull himself along at a good pace. It always ends with his scrambling recklessly up onto the long bar, using chair back and stools to get there, running the length of the bar, then, panting, mouth open, looking terribly fierce, he reaches his claws as high as he can on the four-by-four post at the end of the bar.