I suspect that this is a rare activity for an old party of 130. Reflexes and elasticity being not what they were, he sometimes miscalculates. Twice this past season he has misjudged the leap to the bar, scrabbled at it, slipped, fallen. The game ends there. The humiliated cat walks away.
When the game is successfully concluded, wild passion spent, he finds himself atop the bar. He can get down, but it is a jolt to old bones and muscles he would rather avoid if possible, and cons the people into lifting him down. Not long ago, in the middle of the night, I awoke and heard him, all alone in the dark house, being a Flying Red Horse. I cannot say why it seemed so touching.
In the fall of 1960 we depressed him by bringing a bird home. It was a male meadow lark which had been clipped by a car. Dorothy stopped and picked it up from the shoulder of the road. When we got it settled down, it showed no signs of being able to recover and fly away. When it walked, it walked in a small, tight circle, right through its water dish if it happened to be in the way. When it tried to fly it put one wing tip down and flapped in an equally small circle. We put it on the terrace and closed the doors so Roger could not get at it. It did not have sufficient co-ordination to eat, so Dorothy mixed up some suitable goo, and we fed it with an eye dropper. Roger could not understand why he was being denied the terrace, why we were keeping a bird, why he was not permitted to eat said bird. He would stare out at it and moan and drool visibly. He could taste it.
It began to co-ordinate a little better, but if it tried to hurry it ran in a circle, and if it tried to fly it tipped to one side. A young brain surgeon visiting on the Point said it had a brain clot which might or might not become reabsorbed. The trouble was food. They eat bugs. And it was that rare time of year in Florida when bugs are hard to find. We’d leave on the front-porch floodlight for hours and get perhaps two medium moths, enough to last a meadow lark one fraction of a second. I thought of fried grasshoppers and went over to The Beach Shop at Stickney Point Road and bought a can from George Connaly. They were a success. They had been caught and fried in Japan and shipped halfway around the world, and that meadow lark had to rekill each one, pick it up, slam it down onto the stone floor, peck at it, knock it around, chase it, and eat it.
The bird began to make longer flights and seemed to land where he intended to land. Finally we wedged the outside screen door open and herded him out. He stood on the little porch, stood on one foot and then the other, and then zoomed up over the punk trees and away. Roger, given access once more to the terrace, spent a long long time tiptoeing around, quivering, pointing like a bird dog, looking behind every leaf for that tasty bird.
Johnny came home, awaiting acceptance to a new term at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. We had all noticed a strange thing about Roger. He would be walking across the room, and all of a sudden he would stop and lie down on his belly and put a forearm across his eyes and stay there motionless, often for over an hour. When he got up again he would seem shaky, and he would avoid the light, very much like a human recovering from a blinding headache. It did not seem to affect his morale otherwise, but quite obviously the animal was in pain during those periods. The bad eye had been opaque for some time, and now it looked bulged to us. The intervals of pain were becoming more frequent.
It was Johnny who suggested we find out if it should come out. We took him over to Dr. Thomas, who examined him and said that the eye should certainly be removed; we could leave him right there, and he would do it. The bad eye had developed glaucoma and was badly distended. Though I certainly had every reason to feel confidence in the gentleman’s ability, I hemmed and hawed and asked him, clumsily, if he... ah... did very much of this sort of... uh... thing. He said, with both reassurance and a slight indignation, that he had taken a refresher course in animal ophthalmology just that past summer.
We got Roger the next day. The eye had been removed and the furry lids sewn together, implausibly, with bright green thread. He was a very groggy cat. The general anesthetic made his rear end slump to one side or the other when he tried to walk. If I had to describe his attitude with just one word, I would say he acted thoughtful. The doctor had confirmed the idea the cat had been in severe pain.
We had to take him back several times for treatment. I cannot imagine a treatment a cat would find any more unpleasant. Behind the sutured lids the empty socket fills with fluid. The doctor has to pick open a small vent between the stitches to let the serum escape, and press as much out as he can.
Roger’s response was as fantastic as anything I ever hope to see. He had always despised automobiles, always mourned with every breath he drew. By the time we took him back all effects of the anesthetic had worn off. He had demonstrated at home that he was not at all groggy. And that cat sat upright on the seat between us all the way over, ears forward in that catlook of eagerness, making not a sound of complaint. And he was visibly glad to arrive there, purring as he was carried in.
He hollered at the treatment, but he did not get frantic, and his struggles were brief and not overly violent. And he was amiable all the way home.
The next visit a few days later was exactly the same, except that he sat on the treatment table and needed only Johnny’s hand on his shoulders to restrain him. When Dr. Thomas hurt the eye, Roger would yipe and flinch back, seem to gather himself, and then crane forward again, tilting his head, presenting the wound to the surgeon.
There can be only the one plausible explanation that the cat made a rational adjustment to cause and effect. The eye had been giving him constant pain which at times became much worse. He was taken to a place. The pain stopped. So he associated the place with the cessation of pain.
As it healed, as suppuration ceased, the sealed lids sank back to form a little furry pocket. We were supposed to take him to have the stitches removed, but Roger with a hideous and savage delicacy, removed them with one rear toenail, doing himself no harm. We got to him to stop him just as he was removing the last one.
It did bother us to look at him. Then suddenly it bothered us no more. When people see him for the first time, I often surprise a little expression of queasiness, and I have to quell my indignation by remembering how we, too, found it disturbing at first. In his best days he had that turtlehead, the high rear end, the bowed front legs, the unwashed gray of all the feet. Now the tail is shorter, an ear is ragged, the eye is gone, the front legs more bowed, the high rear end narrower, the loose underbelly swinging as he walks. And we find him exceptionally beautiful. Dorothy tells him this frequently.