by Bob Tarte
IN A COUPLE of weeks she had trained me to regard her as a delicate glass ornament to be admired from a distance and seldom handled. Mine was the heart of glass when I had to cart her off to the vet for spaying. But just as Dr. Post had told me, spaying was an operation that no cat needed to have more than once. Surgery had revealed that Frannie didn’t require a hysterectomy after all because she no longer had a hyster to ectomize.
I brought home an unhappy and bedraggled white- and-black kitty from the vet. Based on how long it had taken other cats of ours to recover from spaying, I had expected her to remain stretched out on her pillow with her nose buried in a magazine while eating bonbons for a couple of days. But once she had shaken free of the anesthesia by the next morning, she began petitioning to go outdoors.
“You are supposed to stay quiet,” I told her. “You got cut open. You’ve got stitches.” So intent was she on escaping to the yard that she rubbed her face against my ankle, bolting only when I leaned down to pet her. “Nope,” I said in response to her whine.
If she wasn’t under, on top of, or behind a piece of furniture seeking shelter from the storm of human activity—a mere trickle in my case—she stationed herself in front of some closed door desperate to go through it.
She intended to make sure I understood that all doors led to the one and only door that she actually wanted open. To keep me from ignoring this desire, she would choose a moment when I was reading to hop up on the headboard and threaten to knock Linda’s angel figurines into the unreachable purgatory place behind the bed. A glance in her direction would slingshot her to the front door and activate the begging mechanism.
AT LEAST FRANNIE was phobic rather than aggressive, unlike the zombie hens who had decided to pick on our small female Muscovy duck, Juanita. Less than half the size of a typical barnyard white Pekin duck, Juanita dwarfed the bigger birds in her enthusiasm for treats. Should any of them waddle between her and the scrap of kale she coveted, she had only to stretch her neck in a gesture of menace to send the interloper scuttling off.
This was how the classic pecking order worked in our barn. Personality as much as physical strength determined a bird’s ranking within the flock, but the zombie chickens wouldn’t follow the rules. Devoid of either grace or cuteness, they punished Juanita for cornering the market on both. They launched themselves at her in gangs of four or five, driving her from the food and then continuing to harass her with claws outstretched in harpy mode. One morning, when Linda opened up the barn, she found the little duck huddled beneath an ancient wardrobe.
“I don’t know what made me finally think of Sjana,” Linda said when I straggled home from work. “The Lord must have put her in my mind. I’d never really talked to her before except once when I called to ask her if she took in baby birds.” Sjana, a wildlife rehabber who lived nearby, agreed to help Linda box up the zombie hens. Wielding a trout net, Linda scooped up the chickens and stuffed them in pet carriers, while Sjana braved the fowl with her bare hands.
“Who caught Teddy?” I asked, picturing prolific bloodletting.
“There was nothing to it. I swished him in the net and put him in one of the carriers.”
Linda’s friend Carol had agreed to take the chickens. She was used to dealing with large beasts with cloven hooves, so the zombie hens wouldn’t bother her a whit.
Thanks to my Catholic school upbringing, I tended to see the hand of invisible forces stirring the pot of the most commonplace soup. Thus I associated the arrival of the zombie hens with our run of bad luck with Frannie. Linda’s removal of the hens had exorcised the evil. Suddenly, instead of begging to go out, Frannie seemed to have lost the urge to dash out into the snow. She started acting calmer, spending whole minutes in the middle of the living room. And she was looking better, too. The antibiotics had gradually triumphed, and the dark streak on her muzzle was fading, though she only let me examine it from a distance. I was looking for my binoculars in hopes of getting a closer view when Carol phoned Linda.
“You’ll never guess where your chickens spent the night,” she said. “They flew over the fence and roosted in the garage. We had to round them up and put them back into their pen.”
“Maybe they were homesick and they’re working their way back to our place,” Linda said.
“Don’t even think that,” I said. Considering how much trouble Frannie had caused us, I felt as if the chickens had already come home to roost. Now I was waiting for the bluebird of happiness.
AND IT DID seem as if Frannie was changing her restless ways. But as another bout of bad weather hit, she raced out onto the porch whining to go out. She raised and lowered one hind leg, spun around, then raised and lowered the other leg. I had never witnessed this odd pistonic activity before and it unnerved me. “You can’t be that desperate,” I said, and she cried more shrilly in response. “It’s nasty out there. You won’t like it.” I cracked open the door to let a blast of cold air hit her face. “See.” I opened it a little more, demonstrating that she had my permission to make the sensible decision to stay inside. Moving so slowly that I never doubted she would choose warmth and comfort over icy air and a hard snowpack, she glided past me and out.
I followed as if I had intended on taking a stately stroll, anyway, and merely wanted a word with her, but she didn’t let me get close enough to make a grab. She darted around to the back of the house, concealing herself under the pine for a while, then she switched to her old spot beside the pump house. At least, I thought, she was sticking close to the house.
But by dinnertime she had completely disappeared. I called and called and called for her, pushing through the wiry remains of last year’s weeds as I scrabbled on top of a thick glazing of snow all the way to the river, around to the barn, and back. I drove up and down the street a mile in each direction hoping that I wouldn’t find a white-and-black body on the shoulder. I shouted for her some more from the driveway. Linda and I hollered into the darkness at bedtime, but we only succeeded in frightening a deer.
I tossed, turned, and gyrated all night, worried about her and fearful that she was gone for good. The next morning, I trundled down to the basement cloaked in pajamas and a desolate mood. I opened the door to call for her, but before her name reached my throat she materialized in front of me with a wild look in her eye that stopped me in my tracks. The look wasn’t guilty or apologetic. It wasn’t haughty or triumphant, either. And it definitely wasn’t the look of a pampered house cat. I stared at her, trying to make out what was there. Metallic yellow eyes like a snake’s opening into some unknowable self stared back at me.
Those eyes said, Here I am. This is me. This is how I am. Now let me inside.
Chapter 8
The War Between the Cats
Having made her point about independence, and also having realized that a cardboard box makes a comfier bed than a patch of ice, Frannie stayed indoors during the final weeks of winter. And what icky weeks they were.
One early morning after a particularly hearty snowfall, I was pulling the covers off our birdcages when something crashed into the window. I zipped outdoors with a flashlight and discovered a screech owl huddled in our spruce tree. This had happened once before. Holes here and there in the snow suggested an explanation. Instead of skittering around in the open with bull’s-eyes on their backs, the local mice were safely making their rounds via tunnels in the snow. With rodents off the menu, the owl must have decided that a pet parakeet or dove would do.
The mice didn’t like the winter weather any better than the owl. As the snow piled up over the next several days, the mice piled inside our house. I realized that the situation was worse than usual when Linda told me that she’d heard squeaks coming from the plant stand in the dining room.
“They must be coming from inside the walls,” I said.
“No, they’re coming from the plant stand.”
I didn’t hear a thing, and Linda’s excavation of her pencil plant, Christmas cactus, aloe vera, and Moses-in-the-Bulrus
hes failed to uncover evidence of a hidden mouse civilization.
The next day she said, “I’m definitely hearing baby mice.” She pressed her nose against our boom box that sat in front of Moses. “Pew. They’ve got a nest in there.”
I refused to believe it until I turned the boom box around and sniffed a small round opening that supposedly enhanced bass response. One whiff of eau de rodent convinced me to retire the boom box to the barn.
“That cost me ninety-eight dollars,” I said. “Now I need to buy a new one.”
“You need to get a live trap, too.”
AS SPRING SPUTTERED in and the house mouse population continued to increase, Frannie began lobbying for a dash into the woods not only for the mud that she could track across our carpet but also to get away from Agnes. Instead of helping us with the vermin invasion, our black cat was doing everything she could to keep Frannie from settling in.
Agnes had never shown the slightest interest in the front porch. But suddenly, racing down the basement stairs to score a spoonful of Tastes-Like-Meat was passé. Now, the greatest epicurean delight resided in the bowl of kibbles in front of Frannie’s box.
Agnes would wait until I let Frannie inside to spend time actively avoiding us. That was Agnes’ cue to saunter out to the porch and loudly crunch on Frannie’s food. She never chomped down more than two or three bites on any visit, boldly daring Frannie to do anything about it. When she tired of this, she would sit on the back of the couch and then fling herself at Frannie when The Little Kitty came out from behind the entertainment center. As a startled Frannie raced back to the porch, Agnes found herself scooped up in my arms and plunked down on the dark side of the closed basement door.
“Are you going to put up with that?” I asked Frannie. For the moment, the answer was yes.
Agnes wasn’t the only porch invader under our roof. We had decided to clear the pet closet of nonpet items like a heap of dirty laundry dating back to the reign of the first George Bush and a window fan that neither Linda nor I had remembered buying. Moving these to the basement created space for Lucy’s litter box, and finally we had an unobstructed path from the front door to the dining room.
Starting fresh with a brand new utility tub, I cut a U-shaped opening into the corner this time, instead of the front. The innovation was a success. Lucy walked in on the diagonal, and as she turned to assume her favorite toilet posture, the tub wall directly behind her was at an above-the-tail height. Accidents decreased, but unfortunately so did usage. She disliked the size, shape, diagonal entrance, and closeted location of the new box and switched over to Frannie’s litter box instead.
This was the extent of Lucy’s forays across the battle lines. She and Moobie were noncombatants in the developing war between Agnes and Frannie. As long as Moobie could steal 99 percent of my office chair upstairs and flatten herself against my calf at nap time, she was satisfied to pretend that Frannie didn’t exist.
THE DAY THE war escalated didn’t start out so differently from any other day.
“Oh, don’t eat that,” Linda cried as I shoveled the second forkful of French toast into my mouth. I paused midchew as she sprang up and scraped the contents of her plate into the trash can under the sink. “Doesn’t that taste funny to you?”
“I thought it was just me.” I figured that the unusual flavor was due to the just-woke-up patina on my tongue. “What did you make it with?”
“I used a loaf of the whole wheat bread from the basement.”
“Not the duck bread!” Sjana had brought us two garbage bags bulging with outdated hamburger buns, bagels, dinner rolls, and other bread scored from a convenience store seconds before they went to the Dumpster. I had crammed as much of it as possible into our basement refrigerator. For the rest, it was a race between our barnyard critters and the onset of mold for possession. I hadn’t realized that I was part of the competition, too.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “It didn’t smell stale. I’ll make you an egg.”
“I don’t have time. I’m already running late.” A metallic clinking from beneath the sink told me that I would be running even later.
“Oh, no. Another mouse.” She fished out the live trap behind the trash can and handed it to me. “Can you stop somewhere and let him go?”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just let him have some French toast?”
“That reminds me,” Linda said. “I’ve got to make sure that I didn’t put that bread back with the other bread for the ducks.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t feed them stale bread. It wouldn’t be good for them.”
I wondered how much spoiled food I ate over the course of a week without knowing it, while our ducks, geese, hens, rabbits, and parrots got the fresher stuff. I also wondered why our mouse population kept growing even though the weather was getting warmer and we had four cats in the house.
I RECEIVED A partial answer when we shook off the winter cobwebs and took an afternoon walk. There was a warm breeze under a cloudless sky. It was a big day for Agnes, since it gave her the opportunity to be an outdoor cat again, and a big day for me because I had survived the French toast. Our black cat trotted along at our heels as we headed toward the river, but Frannie seemed reluctant to follow too closely for fear of getting attacked. She accompanied us at a distance as far as the neighbor’s driveway before plunking herself down and turning into a white-and-black lump on the gravel.
Our walk to the river didn’t take very long, because the river had come forward to meet us. Rapid snowmelt and two days of heavy rain had turned the high ground at the riverbank into a chain of small islands. Ponds filled the low spots in our woods, and I could hear the slam of tiny suitcases as grumbling mice abandoned their holes and headed for our basement.
At the water’s edge we found a juice bottle, a chunk of a plastic foam cooler, a grocery bag, and a pressure-treated post, all washed up by the river. I dragged the post behind me, somewhat envisioning it doing something somewhere in one of our pens somehow.
A muskrat motoring through the cloudy water dove when he saw us. “He’s probably looking for the secret passageway,” I told Linda.
“What secret passageway?”
“The one that the mice take into our basement. He heard about the free food.”
“And the lazy cats.”
Right on cue, Agnes bounded ahead of us to strike a pose, sharpening her nonexistent front claws on the trunk of a fallen tree. Frannie shot past her, kicking up fallen leaves as she joined us on the path. They trotted along together, Agnes slightly ahead of Frannie, planting false hopes in my mind that they might become friends after all.
“Those two sure look alike,” said Linda. “I’ll bet you a horse they’re related.” Sure enough, both cats had the same build and small, heart-shaped faces. “They’re standoffish in the house but friendly outdoors, and both of them are tomboys. And they follow us on walks like little dogs.” Their mincing gaits were so identical that as Frannie pulled up directly alongside Agnes, they reminded me of a pair of huskies harnessed to a sled.
I dropped the waterlogged post before we returned to our neighbor’s driveway. I imagined making a weeklong project of dragging it back to our yard a few feet every day. I was about to remark to Linda how nicely the cats were behaving when Agnes darted snarling toward the upstart. But Frannie wasn’t the shy cat that she played indoors. She answered the attack with a whack to the face of her possible great-great-great-maiden-aunt. Triumphantly Frannie bolted ahead of Agnes and waited for us with shining eyes alongside the barn. Agnes fell behind me. The two cats were wary as we straggled through the basement door. The great outdoors didn’t seem quite big enough for both of them at once.
AND THE OUTDOORS was shrinking fast as our woods continued to flood. Deer and turkeys sloshed to the hill behind our fence to eat mountains of scratch feed, while mice began flowing into our hundred-year-old house through every crack and chink. When they couldn’t find an opening, we could hear them m
aking their own at night. Bedtime was their favorite time for a snack of peanut butter on an outdated bread crust. Linda had just put on her nightgown when the trap beneath the sink clinked shut with enough of a jolt that we could hear it three rooms away with the door closed. “Remind me why we can’t leave them in the trap overnight,” I asked as she threw on her coat.
“Because they die of thirst overnight. And that defeats the purpose of a live trap.” Zipping up her boots, she asked rather forlornly, “What do you think the temperature is out there?”
“It can’t be any colder than thirty-four.” I plumped the pillow behind my head. “Boy, this bed feels warm!”
She grumbled all the way out to the car, and I thought I could still hear her muttering as she drove away. Chauffeuring a mouse to its new lot in life was a fairly recent innovation. It dated back to last fall when I had trapped a mouse with a telltale nick in his ear and walked him a quarter mile down the street to the McDonald’s 2 SMILES AHEAD billboard, figuring this to be an insurmountable distance from our house. The next afternoon we caught the same mouse again.
I dozed off thinking about the balmy weather that would soon blow into the state, sweeping in scads of migratory birds for me to misidentify. Next month, Bill Holm and I were headed to Nayanquing Point to search for the yellow-headed blackbird. Common as mice in some Midwestern states, they were as scarce as cat-chasing-mice in Michigan except for a small breeding colony on Saginaw Bay. I was itching to see one. Just as a flock of the boldly colored birds landed on my outstretched arms and began to lift me up off the grass, Linda slammed the front door and I tumbled back to earth.
“Where did you put the mouse?” I asked as she thudded back into bed.
“Up to the turnaround just before Cumberland.”
I tried floating back to the yellow-headed blackbirds, when a metallic clink nudged me out of my reverie. I knew that Linda had heard it, too, because she had stopped thrashing around.
