Kitty Cornered: How Frannie and Five Other Incorrigible Cats Seized Control of Our House and Made It Their Home

by Bob Tarte

  “Oh, no,” she moaned.

  “You didn’t reset the trap.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I’ll dump him in the yard, and you can catch him again tomorrow.”

  But she had already grabbed her keys and put on her coat.

  THE NEXT MORNING, we barely recognized our woods. The individual puddles and ponds had held a meeting during the night and passed a motion to join together in a swiftly moving current. The river was about three hundred feet closer to our door than usual. The flooding itself wasn’t unexpected. Each spring the low part of our woods turned into an aquatic playground for mallards, wood ducks, and Canada geese. But every five years or so melting snow and buckets of rain convinced the river to leap its banks. While the rushing water remained down the hill and behind the fence, the diminution in territory intensified the War Between the Cats.

  I was listening to the shrimpy speakers on my headboard shelf trying to learn four warbler songs that all sounded like “pleased, pleased, pleased, to meet-cha.” But all I could hear was snarling as Agnes ambushed Frannie beneath the so-called coffee table. “Okay, you two. Time to spread out.” I shooed Agnes down the basement stairs and out the back door. After giving her five minutes to lose herself in the weeds, I propped the porch door open with the water jug and watched Frannie scamper out.

  With our acreage reduced by flooding to a mere decimal point, their quick collision was inevitable. Agnes’ trademarked shriek blotted out the olive-sided flycatcher on my CD. I should have skipped ahead to the catbird.

  “What’s Agnes doing up there?” Linda asked, pointing out the window.

  “She must be chasing a squirrel or something.”

  “She doesn’t usually climb the pine tree. She doesn’t have front claws.” She directed my attention toward Frannie, who was skulking around at the base of the tree. “That’s why.”

  “She’s not afraid of Frannie,” I said. “She’d chase Frannie up a tree. There must be another reason, but she does seem to be stuck.” Spotting my face in the window, Agnes meowed, and I answered her summons.

  Standing on my tippy-toes I could just barely touch the bottom of the pine bough under her feet. By cooing her name and acting elated over our chance meeting, I coaxed her down the branch, snagged her leg, and pulled her from her perch as she bleated miserably. As I plopped her down on the cement floor just inside the basement, she whirled around, hurled herself across the grass at Frannie, and chased her around the tree. When they reappeared, Agnes was the one who was being chased. She tore into the basement and didn’t slow down until she had rocketed up two flights of steps to take refuge in the upstairs bedroom.

  “That was very, very naughty,” I told Frannie, who pranced in front of the pine and rubbed up against everything in sight.

  THERE WERE DEFINITE pluses to having the river so close. A pair of hooded merganser ducks had taken up temporary residence. I enjoyed watching the male raise and lower his crest as I raised and lowered my spoon at breakfast. I also liked wading down my neighbor’s driveway until the water tickled the tops of my boots and the current nearly knocked me over.

  There were negatives, too. The last time the river had flooded like this, it had brought a mink to our barn to kill three of our hens. So I wasn’t taking any chances. I herded our ducks and hens into a room of the barn that we had mink-proofed by reinforcing it with chicken wire. I left the lights burning all night, and I tuned a portable radio to a twenty-four hour talk station to suggest a human presence, though one of a low intelligence. “If you owe money on your credit card, then you shouldn’t have a credit card,” the talk show host insisted.

  The first three nights, I expended a year’s worth of arm waving and racing around to chase the hens and ducks into the mink-proof room. After that, they filed in as if they had slept there all their lives. Their enthusiasm nearly convinced me to join them in the straw. Then Linda made a discovery that gave me second and third thoughts about wandering between the house and the barn after dark.

  “You won’t believe what I saw,” she said, huffing and puffing after having hurried back from an afternoon wade through the high ground. “Down by Don’s house. I thought it was a crow’s nest up in a tree. Then I looked at it through binoculars and saw this giant paw. I thought maybe a hawk or eagle had killed some animal and taken part of it up to its nest. Then I saw that what I thought were sticks was actually fur—and I was looking at a bear.”

  I shook my head. “It had to be a raccoon. Bears don’t come this far south.”

  “I’ve never seen a raccoon that big.”

  “Show me.” I was certain that she had misinterpreted the size of some much smaller and completely mundane object, like a squirrel’s nest or a speck of dirt on her glasses.

  “We shouldn’t go back there with a bear.”

  “I need to see it,” I insisted, marshalling the courage of a man who knew there was no bear. We slogged toward the river proper. The flooding had receded enough that we were able to pick our way to the west side of our neighbor’s house by keeping to the high spots. Linda led me up onto a finger of land, which we walked along as far as the second knuckle. At first I thought that the lumpy mass in a tree was indeed a squirrel’s nest. But when I raised my binoculars, I saw that huge paw. This was a disaster. The ducks and hens were safe in our porous yet solid barn, but our geese occupied a pen that a bear could tear open like a bag of pork rinds.

  Later that day I ran into Sjana at the store up the street, and she assured me that black bears were mainly vegetarians, and that he’d probably be gone by the morning. “It’s just some little honey bear that the river displaced, and he’s on the move.” Still I felt uneasy when I braved our bear-infested environs after dark to check on the ducks and hens. Knowing that Ursus americanus was prowling around below Ursa Major made the darkness seem especially threatening.

  I remembered that two weeks earlier Linda had dreamed about glancing out the dining room window and seeing a bear in the backyard. She ran out to protect our geese as they cropped the grass, unconcerned. When the bear started toward Linda, she woke up. I had pooh-poohed her nightmare at the time, but now it proved that, even when sound asleep, Linda knew more than I did.

  SPEAKING OF BAD DREAMS, Agnes must have thought she was having a recurring one. I was staring out the window at the unusual spectacle of three bluebirds on our hanging suet feeder when I noticed a familiar bouncing bough across the yard. A triumphant Frannie had treed Agnes again. This time I didn’t need to extract her from the pine. She scrambled down on her own and, just before running into the basement, hesitated on the deck to haughtily lick her rump, indicating her low opinion of Frannie.

  Inside the house, Agnes remained the undisputed alpha cat. She would conceal herself in the living room, revealing her hidey-hole with a drawn out growl whenever Frannie ambled in. The noise was irritating enough to the people who were trying to enjoy some creaky old sitcom. But worse was when a heretofore undetected Agnes exploded from concealment with a fusillade of snarls and shrieks that scared the male human of the house far more the female stray, causing him to drop his bowl of ice cream.

  Still, I was optimistic. “It’s like when we introduce a new duck to the barn,” I told Linda as I raced Moobie to clean spumoni off the rug. “The top duck will bully the new one for a while, then the new duck finds his place in the pecking order, and they all get along just fine.”

  Linda gave me a “you must be dreaming” look. “Agnes doesn’t want to get along. She wants Frannie out of here.”

  “It won’t stay this way forever. Frannie will learn to fit in.”

  I was right about things changing but wrong about the nature of the change. While Agnes had previously assumed a natural authority, she seemed to be waging a defensive battle as she undertook her guerrilla campaign. Her attitude toward Moobie and Lucy softened. She couldn’t enlist them as allies, but she did the next best thing by crossing them off her enemies list. Thus, I witnessed the unpr
ecedented sight of Agnes drinking from the hallway water bowl mere inches away from mortal foe Lucy, whose face was submerged in the food dish. When Lucy came up for air and glared at her, Agnes hissed, but the reaction was as perfunctory and meaningless as telling her to have a nice day.

  Agnes may have mellowed, but the invading mice had suddenly become more assertive. Linda’s habit of ejecting them out of the car window rather than shaking them out of the trap a good distance away had finally caught up with her.

  “Well, that was nice,” she said. “I was on my way to the bank, and when I stopped at the traffic light at Bowes Road, a mouse was looking at me through the windshield.”

  I tried to picture this, but couldn’t. All I could come up with was a man-size mouse driving a pickup truck in the other lane. “How could a mouse stare at you through the windshield? Where was he?”

  “He was sitting in that groove in back of the hood by the windshield wipers. He sat there staring at me through the glass while I waited at the light. He was very accusing in the way he looked at me. And before the light turned green, there was a second mouse on the right side—and he was staring in at me, too! I suppose they were trying to tell me that the engine was too hot.”

  I struggled to decide which was stranger—the event that my wife had just described or her interpretation of the event. Frannie glanced up at me with a glimmer of amusement. “I’m glad you’re getting a new car,” I said. “Maybe we can get rid of half of our mouse population when you sell your Escort.” Then I caught Frannie’s eye again. “Especially since certain individuals aren’t doing anything to pay their rent.”

  AFTER NINE DAYS the river had finally gotten that whole flooding business out of its system. That was the first night that I hadn’t locked the ducks and hens in the back of the barn and made them listen to talk radio shows about the benefits of investing in gold.

  We were watching The Beverly Hillbillies, waiting for guest stars Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs to perform their song “Pearl, Pearl, Pearl.” Just as Lester picked up his guitar and commenced to pickin’, Agnes cannonballed out from under the rocking chair at Frannie. But instead of fleeing back to her cardboard box on the porch, Frannie discovered a whole new second story of life when she charged Agnes and chased her upstairs.

  Alas, Frannie’s entry into this higher realm was brief. Agnes installed herself as the fighting duchess of the upstairs and in the days that followed successfully repelled further incursions. Gone was her truce with the other two cats, though her fanged threats had no impact on Moobie. Completely ignoring Agnes, Moobie trudged up the carpeted steps every morning and ensconced herself on my office chair.

  I felt bad about the situation. Dark, dour Agnes only lit up when she was outdoors. I hated to see her deprived of fresh air except for sniffs through a window screen, and she couldn’t harass a chipmunk now unless it hopped up onto my keyboard to send an e-mail. But she was much safer upstairs than she would ever be outdoors with a busy road in front of the house and a bear in back. I wouldn’t have continued to let Frannie out if being cooped up didn’t make her so despondent.

  Outdoors, Frannie let her triumph over Agnes go to her head. One Friday afternoon, Linda’s driver Gwen dropped her off from her twice-a-week visit to the chiropractor. As Linda was gathering up her pillows, purse, and backrest from Gwen’s backseat, Frannie trotted up to the car that was idling in front of our mailbox and whacked the rear tire with her paw to show it who was boss.

  A week later, my accountant, Mike, drove up in his thousand-foot-long motor home/mobile office, unwound a yellow extension cord that was as thick as a fire hose, and dimmed the lights of everyone on our power grid as he plugged it into our porch. Balanced in a doll-size swivel chair on the passenger’s side, I recited figures to Mike for my belated tax return as he sat across the aisle in front of a PC, a laptop, a printer, a copier, an electric stapler, and several small appliances. “Well, now, there’s a cat in here,” he said blandly, peering at me over his half-glasses. I swiveled in time to see Frannie scamper down the aisle, exit, and streak across the lawn.

  “Want a cat?” I asked as I shut the door to keep her out.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Then you’d better check all the rooms in here before you leave.”

  Though the floodwaters had receded, our mice had pledged their loyalty to their home turf. When Linda started up her new car, a boxy Scion XB that we referred to as the bread truck, she was nearly blinded by a flare of “check engine” lights. “Maybe a slice of rye bread got stuck in the alternator,” I suggested.

  “Whatever’s wrong, it’s under warranty,” she said—or so we assumed. The service manager informed me that an O2 sensor devoured by mice wasn’t covered and would cost us five hundred dollars to replace. Checking the Web, I discovered that damage to vehicles by rodents was a widespread problem and that the manufacturers of automotive electrical components apparently colluded with them. The O2 sensors were being coated in a tasty soy-based material instead of plastic. After helping themselves to the scratch feed, sunflower seed, and duck pellets that abounded in our yard, the mice had enjoyed this exotic change of pace.

  Either that, or they were getting their revenge against the person who had trapped them. I was glad that Linda had left the bear alone.

  IT SEEMED LIKE any other Sunday morning when I opened the porch door for the winner of the War Between the Cats, held it and held it while she hesitated, and then watched her skitter down the front steps.

  “How about you earn your keep for once?” I called. When she turned and looked back at me with flattened ears, I explained. “Keep the mice from our cars.” My “check engine” light had come on shortly after Linda’s, and I was starting to worry.

  Normally I never let Frannie out until after lunch. But ecstatically singing birds, shockingly bright sunshine, and a silver mist across the grass made me want to bolt outside barefoot, and I was sure that Frannie felt the same way. Before she disappeared behind the monster pine, she slowed down and shot me another glance as if inviting me to follow. I felt an odd apprehension as Lucy oozed past me in the manner of a sluggish liquid rather than a surging force. I fought the urge to call Frannie back just because this wasn’t the way we usually did things. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference if I had kept her inside for another few hours—but for weeks I blamed myself for what happened next.

  Lucy didn’t venture the twenty feet out into the yard that it would have taken to guard the vehicles. She stuck close to the house, as if she were magnetically attached, rubbing up against the foundation while she rounded the corner and flopping down in Linda’s iris bed for a nap. Even though she was no better at responding when we called her to come back in than Frannie was, we never had to search far for her.

  She meowed at the side door around dinnertime, afraid of missing out on her evening teaspoonful of canned cat food. I had an especially greasy chunk of chicken dark meat for Frannie. She should have been able to smell it from the woods as I stepped out the back door with her treat plate in hand. “Chicken, Frannie,” I said quietly, almost superfluously. Her pattern was to rocket up to the door, stopping only when she got within a foot of stepping inside and pretending to be gripped by indecision until I set down the plate. But I called and called and called, and she didn’t show.

  “She’d better not have run away,” I told Linda as it started to get dark. My biggest concern about Frannie was that she would tire of mundane domestic life and hit the trail again.

  “She’d better not think that she can stay out all night.”

  “She’s been way too independent lately,” I said. “She does anything she wants.”

  I marched down the neighbor’s driveway, shouting her name with increasing anger that didn’t exactly invite a response. From the riverbank, I heard the back door slam and Linda hollering for her. We met back inside without the cat, but as I sat down on the couch to grouse about that ungrateful Frannie, Linda went out again and came in qui
ckly.

  “I found her,” she said. “She’s lying out in the weeds in front of the barn. Something’s wrong with her. She can’t stand up, and she’s got a big gash in her leg.”

  Chapter 9

  Out of the Weeds

  The pet owners in the waiting room at the emergency clinic had the stricken look of refugees. Their faces were pulled low with an expression of hopelessness that I hadn’t seen since the last time I had gotten my driver’s license renewed. A tube television tuned to CNN Headline News had been bolted to the wall to prevent us from slipping it into our pockets. It let us measure the length of our stay by the number of times we watched the story of a man in China who refused to move out of his apartment as a construction crew demolished the building around him. It was exactly how I felt as an injured Frannie lay motionless in a pet carrier next to me.

  The check-in had proceeded smoothly. I explained how Linda had carried Frannie onto the porch, how she had cried and collapsed when we’d tried to stand her on her feet, and how she had been pretty much out of it ever since. After producing a credit card and the deed to our house, I was told that the emergency vet would see me right away. That meant I could expect to be here all night, I deduced from the pacing figures with cell phones in the parking lot.

  To my surprise, within twenty minutes—which was a mere eye blink by waiting-room standards—a vet assistant whooshed through a swinging door and called Frannie’s name.

  My only previous experience with an emergency animal clinic had been abysmal. A loud, oafish DVM had handled our sick bunny roughly, which had led me to conclude that late-shift vets were the dregs of the profession who couldn’t hack it during prime time. Dr. Fitzroy was bright, young, and inspired such calming confidence, that when she suggested Frannie needed an X-ray to make sure that her spinal cord wasn’t damaged, I didn’t immediately consider shuffling off and hanging myself. That could wait until later.