Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

Afterword

Of Collars and Katzenklaviers

“Come gather around, cats and kits from all Las Vegas clowders.”

I stand on an elevated rock to survey an impressive convocation of cats making a black and white, red and orange, and yellow and gray patchwork on the beige desert landscape west of Las Vegas. The sight resembles a giant calico cat reclining.

My audience is scattered, having to avoid settling their posteriors down on a member of the dominant desert species in this location, all varieties of thorny cactus. Still, we share certain spiked defensive attributes of our own, both the animal and the vegetable.

I have lowered my voice an octave and raised my high notes a trifle to reach the crowd of Vegas cat packs or gangs or clowders, to be technical.

“First,” I say, “I must credit my faithful researcher and Internet magician, Miss Temple Barr, for whose nuptials some of you ‘gangsters’ turned into ‘songsters’.”

Shrieks and howls rise from each group as I call out their clowder colors.

“From the West side, the Jet-Blacks.

“From the East, the Koi-fighters.

“From the North, the White Blizzard.

“From the South, the Kudzu Nation.”

“We came together, my friends, to plot a daring foray and provide a discordant distraction to foil armed robbers at a wedding. We were successful, but we must also think back to a horrible time in our breeds’ past.

“A cat may look at a queen, people say.

“They were speaking of human queens, like Queen Elizabeth of England, queens who sit upright on a throne and wear heavy glittering headdresses and remind me of Bast the cat goddess from ancient Egypt in her temple statue. Both human Queen Elizabeths have lived long and prospered in separate centuries.

“And then there is the fact that cat fancy breeders today call Mama cats “queens”. How right they are.”

Shaken paws and encouraging yowls.

“And that the veterinarians’ device to keep a cat or dog from licking wounds and stitches is called an ‘Elizabethan collar’ from the stiff lace collars in Queen Elizabeth the First’s sixteenth-century court.

“And there is the collar I wore to play the part of a human Ring Bearer at the ceremony where so many of you performed.”

Now the growls and mewls are discontented. No cat likes a collar of any kind.

“Thankfully, it is employed more often with dogs (who would lick a cactus if they could), rather than our superior breed.”

A huge vibrating purr shakes the sands under me.

I gauge my audience’s mood and move on quickly. (Full disclosure: I have, on occasion, for commercial and publicity purposes, donned some odd bits of human attire.) “Now that we have had a history and wearing apparel lessons,” I tell my eager audience, “I will proceed to a less glorious, but no less cruel fashion long gone (thank Bast!). All of you know and have heard at your fathers’ and great-aunts’ whiskers, of that fiendish invention…The Katzenklavier.”

Angry growls make low thunder throughout the gathered hordes.

“Some may think I refer to the dreaded days of the witch hunts, during which cats of my color were burned along with our cherished human companions. For five hundred years, my friends!”

A hundred tigers seem to roar back at me.

“That is right. Our people—a loving, peace-loving population—was demonized and almost destroyed for being the color of ‘evil’ and the mythical ‘Devil’ humans hate and fear, black like me.”

I raise a mitt with the shivs curled into my pads.

The answering roar makes me flatten my ears to my skull.

“Torture,” howls the multitude.

Whew. Rabble-rousing is hard work.

“Now to these humans, who were so handy at torturing their own. Sometime in the 1500s they tired of their own limited antics and looked for entertainment toward tormenting their fellow creatures.

“I will not go into all the hideous sins of those days, some of which persist today, as this is a family audience, and I hear many kits squalling among you.

“A popular diversion, especially for bored royalty and, apparently, Germans, was playing the klavier. The word meant ‘keyboard’ in German, and it resembled the piano we see everywhere in Las Vegas on billboards and signs and on stage.”

Heads nod in the dark, their reflective irises winking gold and green. A pervasive Hmmm indicates their rapt attention.

“So someone put cats selected for the tone of their mews into boxes with their heads and tails sticking out. Then they attached the boxes to a piano keyboard so that when a key was hit, a sharp spike speared the appropriate cat’s tail to produce a full-bodied meow.”

“And that is not all. Three hundred years later, in 1803, the German who invented the word ‘Psychiatry’ (could have used one, I think), prescribed that chronic daydreamers—who probably would be described as ‘catatonic’ today—should hear a fugue played on a cat organ “so that the ill person cannot miss the expression on their faces, and the play of these animals—must bring Lot’s wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness.’”

The patchwork in the moonlight shivers like one moving mass as yowls and screams and shrieks of sympathy and rage ascended to the small cold stars in the night sky.

When rage had exhausted itself, a mass sigh seemed to drift over the desert floor before every cat assembled went silent.

“Now,” I say, “you saw that I reassembled this heinous ‘cat organ’. Only here and now you were not confined or injured, but brave volunteers willing to surprise and bring down evil men.”

I take a breath. Not all these feral cats have had the experience of seeing a piano keyboard or understanding the sequence of the centuries. Not many had begun life as a library cat as I had when very young and impressionable. But cats do not survive as ferals without being curious and clever and they certainly can channel each other’s emotions.

“In conclusion,” I say, “I salute your unique and amazing voices of varying range and timbre, and how you scared the evil humans out of their skins and into very long jail sentences. And for moving as quietly as church mice to arrive and depart and, especially, for not snacking on church mice on the job.

“Go forth as proudly as a pride of lions, and the appetizers are on me.”