The cat, uneasy enough at level transit, became agitated when we went sliding and scrambling down the steep slope to creek level. At that time in that culture it was pronounced crick. Wash was pronounced warsh. Forty years later I sometimes hear myself revert.
As we reached the creek the cat made some convulsive efforts to escape. Ralph had hold of it firmly, but it hooked him. When he shifted his grasp, it bit him. It bit him on the thumb. He roared and yelled son-of-a-bitch and hurled the cat into the center of a natural pool. The creek entering and leaving the pool was only about three feet across and quite shallow. The pool was an irregular oval perhaps thirty feet across and forty feet long, three or four feet deep in the middle, with a gently sloping shore all the way around it. The tall trees that grew down in the viaduct were leafed out still, the leaves just beginning to change. The afternoon was sunny and cool. There was a city around us, but we were out of sight, as completely as we would have been in a virgin wilderness.
The cat disappeared in the middle and popped up at once, swimming strongly. Ralph raced around to the place where it was planning to emerge. The cat wanted no more association with people. It turned around and headed back across the pool. At Ralph’s command I ran and headed it off. At first it required agility because the cat was making good time, but it was expending energy at a dangerous rate and was soon swimming so slowly we could almost saunter to the estimated landing point. “Going to drown him,” Ralph announced.
Immediately I lost my stomach for the game. It had been just a game, a curious form of tag. I would like to say that I made violent objection, that I put forward good arguments in favor of mercy, even that I made an attempt to rescue the cat. But this was Ralph, a big boy, a whonker, an arm number, a celebrity in my small culture. Protest was as unthinkable as was going away and leaving him there. I backed off a little way and watched with a sickly fascination.
By then the cat’s anxiety to avoid Ralph was less than its need to reach land. Looking half-asleep, moving quite slowly, it would swim right to Ralph’s feet. He wore what was then called hightops, those tough shoes which came to just below the knee, were laced with rawhide, and came with a buckhorn pocketknife which fit into a little snap-fastener pocket on the outside of the right calf. I seemed to have a hundred reasons for feeling inadequate those days. One was that my feet were too tender for those shoes. When wet they stiffened, and one attempt had given me such horrible blisters upon blisters in the futile attempt to swagger rather than limp in them that my mother said never again.
He did not kick the cat. When it came crawling onto the shale, he would gently work the toe of his hightop under its belly, get it in balance, then project it out into the center of the pool. It returned many many times. The cat made no sound. Ralph made no sound. I merely stood and watched. What seemed most curious to me was the way that the cat, with the entire shore line to choose from, came right toward Ralph every time. Possibly in that extremity of its exhaustion, it thought that half-seen figure was help rather than death. It was eerie to see and to remember later, the way it returned to him. Finally, when slung back, it made some aimless motions and then was quite still, turning slowly in the movement of the current through the pond. This was my look at death, the soaked black fur, the scrawny, irreversible stillness.
“Guess we taught that son-of-a-bitch not to bite,” Ralph said.
Indeed we did. He wanted to leave it there. I said I thought burial would be nice. My conscience was beginning to require something. He was patronizingly tolerant. We threw stones to wash it close enough to reach with a branch. He dragged it by the tail to soft ground. I began digging with a stick. Ralph lost interest and wandered off. I hastened the ceremony, prodding the cat into the hole before it was deep enough, then covering it with a hasty layer of dirt, leaves and small stones. I hastened after Ralph and caught up with him when he was halfway up the steep slope. I walked along the alley with him.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked him.
He stopped and gave me a look of total contempt. “Look. You wanna follow me around all day? Stop following me, kid.”
I went home through Brindle’s yard. I do not remember weeping about that cat. I remember that night in bed feeling soiled, sick, and unworthy. The heroes in my books would never have permitted it. All I could do was wish I had left the house five minutes earlier or later, and then I would never have met him with the cat. I could remember too vividly the early chances I had to let the cat escape. I could have fallen down on purpose. But I couldn’t kid myself. That cat knew there were two of us. I knew there were two of us.
I do not know whether it left any mark at all on Ralph. It left a mark on me which has lasted forty years. Not that I am innocent of subsequent crimes of omission. We accumulate remorses the way sea creatures build their shells, so that at last the carapace is an armor, protecting the tender parts from the minor wound. But that was the first time I had faulted my own image through silence, and that was the first time I had realized that death is not a saccharine sleep, but the horrid silence of forever, a black smear of fur in green water.
Now there was a kitten in the house, and a faint uneasinenss in me because I had forfeited an obligation to the entire race of Cat.
(There is another cat somewhere in memory, a country kitten which I think my sister Dorrie had for a time. I see it only as a cat half-grown, absurdly clad in doll clothes, sidling apprehensively away from the game, looking back with patient, depressed anxiety, stumbling over skirts and sleeves.)
Kittens are fine. And, like very small children, anonymous. They use the big muscles, are endlessly curious, play the games of run and pounce and pretend, are either violently active or deeply asleep. When healthy and unafraid, they are enchanting, batting the victim spool about with a comedy ferocity, climbing into a lap for the drugged, trusting sleep.
As I accepted the underfoot reality of kitten, I had no intimation that one day, in a curious symbolism, in perhaps an act of cancellation or a reprieve, I would have to kill another black cat, and, in killing him in a manner more grotesque than any invented scene, rid myself of the last guilt about the drowning.
I have no idea why we named the kitten Roger. Perhaps it was out of a mutual impatience with precious names for kittens. Or terribly clever names. Or lit’ry allusions. Or folksy names. Roger seemed a name with an acceptable dignity. He had been weaned on scraps from meat eventually served on the best tables in town. His mother had personal dignity. At the time we knew two Rogers, one a banker and one an attorney, and though he was not named after either of them, perhaps their status conditioned our choice of name.
Roger had inherited George’s tendency to a multiplicity of toes. Twenty-six, to be precise — six apiece in front, seven in back. He was tiger, black markings on gray, with white feet, a white bib, belly, and muzzle, a nose that started pink and remained pink except for one small brown spot near one nostril. This nose later provided a reliable color-clue to the state of his health. When he is the sickest, it fades to a pink so pale it is almost white.
Tiger markings on house cats are curiously consistent throughout history. And the same markings occur all over the world. The most ancient drawings show this same racial camouflage, the striped alternations of dark and light that, at dawn or dusk, can make the animal almost invisible in a grassy field. The black guard hairs make a line down the spine. The faint dark pattern wrinkles the forehead, stripes the cheeks in a way which seems to make the eyes more expressive, and rings the tail and legs.