He called for my mother, she held him in her arms, and he died. He had a long, comfortable life, and while that is always a good thing to achieve, here is why it is particularly nice for this cat:
The boy with the pellet gun
The boy with the pellet gun
Twenty years ago, on the island of Molokai, there was a stray black cat in a small community of housing up in the mountains near the Kalaupapa overlook. Imagine tall ironwood trees, misty pastures of horses, and dirty trucks with beer coolers parked in front of every cozy plantation home. One of these houses was decorated with rows of deer skulls and antlers, and a teenager with a pellet gun hung out on the steps. The smaller kids used to walk up the hill to the bus stop by my house every morning to avoid waiting near the boy and his friends. I rode the school bus with headphones on so I wouldn't have to listen to them bragging about shooting things.
One of the things they shot was the stray cat. She showed up at our house with dozens of bb pellets embedded under her skin, and both eyes shot blind. We named her Helen. She could still hear well, and she could smell well, and she would reward us for feeding her with a nice dead rat on the porch every now and then. Then one day, instead of dead rats she showed up with live kittens, because Helen had been pregnant when the boys shot her. She raised them under our porch, and when they were old enough to find homes for, we kept the sweetest one of the litter to keep her company, and that was Hercules.
Then one day, the hunting dogs got loose, and they killed Helen in front of our house. We buried her in the rose bushes.
One of my best friends was infatuated with the pellet gun boy. Her father taught hunting and fishing, and he came by on weekends for lessons. I hated the way she giggled and tossed her hair when he walked by in the high school cafeteria, and the way he would stare through her with a blank expression and then ignore her. "Oh my God, he looked at me!" We didn't discourage her, because we thought she might only cling tighter to the romantic rebellious image she had of him, so we just hoped it would pass before the boy became interested in screwing with her.
One morning I got a phone call from her. "He's dead. He died. I was there." Her father had taken them out at night with a group of spear fishermen in a brightly lit boat, and she had paddled after him optimistically, imagining kisses in the dark water. He dove with his spear gun and she treaded water, waiting. When he took too long to come back up, she guessed he had resurfaced behind her somewhere, but she put on her snorkel and looked around with a light, and finally she found his body drifting with the water, back and forth deep down over the rocks. It took her three dives to reach him and pull him up, touching him with her fingers a few times before kicking up for air. She told me she pulled him up, and she screamed and screamed for a long time. Imagine a small, cute, round-cheeked Japanese girl treading water in the ocean in the darkness with a dead boy's hair against her face, trying to keep her head above water with his dead weight in her arms, screaming and screaming for a quarter of an hour before help came to pull them from the water. She never got over it. He was cemented in her brain as the love of her life. I told her how awful it all was, and did not tell her how glad I was he had died before murdering someone. The yearbook committee devoted an entire page to him, and the best picture they could find of him was a dead-eyed stare at the camera holding a severed deer's head.
- - -
So the boy shot the cat, and his dogs killed the cat, and the boy died. Hercules the kitten lived a long, good life, fed on fancy feast and table snitches. He was a kind individual, and adopted stuffed animals to groom and cuddle before my mom found another kitten for him to mother. He had stinky breath and he was skinny with too-long claws that always stuck out like a dog's. I drove to my mother's house and collected her up with his little curled body and drove them back to my house, where we buried him in our yard and the kids cried their eyes out. We will put a little grave marker there for him, and plant night-blooming jasmine, so he can rest under flowers like Helen.
I'll go dig up some old pictures in the basement this week, and post them here as I find them.
One of the things they shot was the stray cat. She showed up at our house with dozens of bb pellets embedded under her skin, and both eyes shot blind. We named her Helen. She could still hear well, and she could smell well, and she would reward us for feeding her with a nice dead rat on the porch every now and then. Then one day, instead of dead rats she showed up with live kittens, because Helen had been pregnant when the boys shot her. She raised them under our porch, and when they were old enough to find homes for, we kept the sweetest one of the litter to keep her company, and that was Hercules.
Then one day, the hunting dogs got loose, and they killed Helen in front of our house. We buried her in the rose bushes.
One of my best friends was infatuated with the pellet gun boy. Her father taught hunting and fishing, and he came by on weekends for lessons. I hated the way she giggled and tossed her hair when he walked by in the high school cafeteria, and the way he would stare through her with a blank expression and then ignore her. "Oh my God, he looked at me!" We didn't discourage her, because we thought she might only cling tighter to the romantic rebellious image she had of him, so we just hoped it would pass before the boy became interested in screwing with her.
One morning I got a phone call from her. "He's dead. He died. I was there." Her father had taken them out at night with a group of spear fishermen in a brightly lit boat, and she had paddled after him optimistically, imagining kisses in the dark water. He dove with his spear gun and she treaded water, waiting. When he took too long to come back up, she guessed he had resurfaced behind her somewhere, but she put on her snorkel and looked around with a light, and finally she found his body drifting with the water, back and forth deep down over the rocks. It took her three dives to reach him and pull him up, touching him with her fingers a few times before kicking up for air. She told me she pulled him up, and she screamed and screamed for a long time. Imagine a small, cute, round-cheeked Japanese girl treading water in the ocean in the darkness with a dead boy's hair against her face, trying to keep her head above water with his dead weight in her arms, screaming and screaming for a quarter of an hour before help came to pull them from the water. She never got over it. He was cemented in her brain as the love of her life. I told her how awful it all was, and did not tell her how glad I was he had died before murdering someone. The yearbook committee devoted an entire page to him, and the best picture they could find of him was a dead-eyed stare at the camera holding a severed deer's head.
- - -
So the boy shot the cat, and his dogs killed the cat, and the boy died. Hercules the kitten lived a long, good life, fed on fancy feast and table snitches. He was a kind individual, and adopted stuffed animals to groom and cuddle before my mom found another kitten for him to mother. He had stinky breath and he was skinny with too-long claws that always stuck out like a dog's. I drove to my mother's house and collected her up with his little curled body and drove them back to my house, where we buried him in our yard and the kids cried their eyes out. We will put a little grave marker there for him, and plant night-blooming jasmine, so he can rest under flowers like Helen.
I'll go dig up some old pictures in the basement this week, and post them here as I find them.
Ah, so sorry you had to say goodbye to your little old man. This is wonderfully written, Holly. Look forward to the pics of the skinny guy with bad breath who had the excellent luck of falling in with you lot.
ReplyDeleteLook at him -- his attention weighs more than his body! Lovely little rag & bone with the alert green eyes... I like your description of him as a kind individual. We said goodbye to our old man in the summer. He weighed only six pounds at the end, and I was shocked at the size of the absence when he slipped away -- such a fierce, determined small personality, so suddenly and completely gone. I still look for him underfoot.
ReplyDeleteOh, these familiars of ours. I get seriously pissed at people who get annoyed by grieving pet owners. A soul is a soul is a soul, and losing one you love is fucking awful. I'm grateful that we've lost the old cats naturally, and not violently, so the kids can be sad without being horror-struck. We've had good talks about the passage of life and the importance of remembrance rituals and about making room in the world for the newbies. We weren't in a hurry to replace the old men, but the Humane Society is running a $12 adoption special through the holidays, and the kids became fixed on the idea of rescuing a kitten on Christmas, so my mother took them down yesterday and they picked up a bat-eared stripey little cat named Stella. Expect an inundation of frolicking kitten pictures soon.
ReplyDelete