Chapter 21 And Then a Howl
And Then a Howl
Margaret climbs into bed after having soaked her feet in Epsom salts and completed her nightly chores: her face washed, her teeth brushed, stove burners checked twice, lights turned off. She reaches for her data book.
She sets the book on her bedside table and is about to turn out the lights when it comes to her that she has another thing to record. It has to do with the visit by the white van.
On her way to work this morning she’d seen no abandoned appliance, stained mattress or tossed trash bags by the side of her driveway. Lost campers, she’d decided.
The truth, however, arrived forty-five minutes ago as she was putting away her mystery book.
A sandpapery yowl had erupted near the cottage’s front door.
Margaret frowned. Critters regularly visited her home—raccoon, possum, skunk and coyote—but none of them made a sound like that.
She waited. When the howl came again, she went to the front door, flipped on the porch light and looked out the window. A creature looked back at her.
It was small, covered in matted gray-and-black striped fur. One pointy ear appeared to have been bitten half off and its left eye was sealed shut. Burrs dotted its belly and long tail. You could see its ribs.
A tomcat.
The feline let out another raspy howl and Margaret opened the door. The animal looked even more ragged up close and, yet, there seemed to be a haughty toughness about him. An “I’m walkin’ here” vibe.
“Where did you come from?” Margaret asked, although she did not expect an answer.
The cat, however, seemed to understand. He went over to the porch’s edge and stared into the darkness.
The van, Margaret thought.
She knew people dumped unwanted animals—dogs in the country, goldfish in the pond at the park, turtles at the beach—all the time.
It seemed so cruel to expect a domesticated creature to fend for itself in the wild and, yet, Margaret was not about to encourage the animal. She does not want or need a cat.
“I’m not going to feed you, you know,” she told the animal.
The feline turned and came back to sit in front of Margaret. He let out another yowl.
“I’m not going to let you in either,” Margaret assured him.
The cat’s tail twitched into a question mark. His one eye seemed to challenge her.
Margaret pondered its tattered toughness, its persistence in the face of rejection.
“Well, all right,” she said and closed the door.
When she set the small saucer of chicken broth and the folded blanket on the porch, the cat sniffed at the makeshift bed and the broth as if determining their worth, then began to lap up the liquid.
“If you’re still here tomorrow, I’m taking you to the shelter,” Margaret promised, although the odds of anyone adopting this creature were close to zero.
“I’ll leave the light on. The coyotes won’t bother you,” she said.
Now she writes, March 21, 9:30 p.m. Tomcat arrives on porch. Tossed from van?
She sets the notebook aside again and switches off the lamp, thinking that if the scarred little beast is still here in the morning, she will need to find a cat carrier to transport it to the shelter and that only a heartless person would dump such a bedraggled animal in the woods to starve to death or be eaten by a coyote. It looks old but how can she be sure?
In some cultures, old age is respected. Here, in the US, however, the more years you have survived, the more useless you are viewed, and then you find yourself discarded into one of those assisted-living villages where you’re expected to play shuffleboard and be thrilled to eat a dinner of oversalted meatloaf and canned peas.
Or worse, they store you in a nursing home to rot slowly like a potato in a dark drawer.
She will stay in her cottage for as long as she is able.
The tomcat is not gone in the morning. Instead, when Margaret opens her door, she sees he is joined on the porch by the carcass of a good-sized gopher.
The cat sits nearby, looking proud but in a nonchalant way, as if to say, “I brought this for you. It was nothing.”
“You’re quite the hunter, aren’t you?” Margaret says. “But that doesn’t mean you can stay. I’m a busy woman who doesn’t need a companion, four-legged or two.”
The cat strolls down the porch steps and sits at the edge of the garden as if inspecting its domain and arguing her point.
“Don’t get too comfortable, Tom,” Margaret says. Still, she sets out a bowl of water and a handful of leftover chicken-thigh chunks for it.
Did she just give the cat a name?
Now she gives one last glance toward the feline as she climbs into her truck. Today is Saturday, chore day: garden-store visiting, library browsing, grocery shopping, laundry washing and hanging to dry, floor polishing, household repair, boot maintenance.
The cat has come down from the porch and is padding past the rosemary and thyme toward the woods, its tail held high. She adds: “pick up cat carrier at animal shelter” to her mental chore list.
When she arrives home at three twenty p.m., however, the cat is gone.
She puts away her groceries, starts a load of wash and goes onto the porch. A light afternoon breeze makes the lavender stems tremble. Her gaze roams the garden, then the woods on either side of the house. There is no sign of the feline.
Why does she feel such a pinch of loneliness over a cat she didn’t even want?
A woodpecker hammers a tree nearby as a warbling vireo adds its song. At least the birds will be safe without the tattered hunter around.
She goes inside, fishes a clean rag and a container of Murphy Oil from under the sink, gets down on her knees and starts to clean.