Christmas Cats: A Literary Companion

Willie Morris

It was Christmas in Dixie, still months before our wedding. My future stepson Graham was then in high school and had a girlfriend named Savannah. Savannah was cruising along old Highway 51 north of Jackson one afternoon when she sighted a little starving, abandoned kitten in a ditch. She got out and put her in the car and took her home. When Graham saw the kitten, he suggested Savannah let him give it to his mother for a Christmas surprise. She liked the idea. Neither of them checked this out with me, I can tell you.

Graham and his mother dwelled at the time in a house on Northside Drive in Jackson in a neighborhood built up right after World War II, so that all the side streets were named after war sites. This house was at the intersection of Northside and Normandy, a homey domicile with rambling rooms and a big fireplace and a good back porch and lawn. The three of us had decorated a tall fresh Mississippi cedar with old family angels and Santas and reindeer and lights, which twinkled from the pungent branches.

It was late on Christmas Eve. We were sitting in the room near the tree, with a substantial number of presents around it. Nat King Cole's "I'll Be Home for Christmas" was on the stereo, or maybe it was Bing Crosby's "O Come All Ye Faithful." Suddenly, as if on cue, there was an odd rustling from the rear of the tree. And then tentatively stepping out over the packages into view was a tiny pure-white kitten with a red Yuletide ribbon around its neck.

"How did he get in here? " I heard myself exclaiming.

"It's a she," Graham said. "It's for you, Mom."

The kitten looked a little intimidated, which was precisely the way I felt in that moment. Although Savannah and Graham had fed and bathed her, she was a scrawny thing. But when my future spouse saw her, her features became flushed and joyous. Never had I seen such a happy female. She immediately swept the creature into her arms and embraced her. Then the kitten jumped onto the floor, ran back under the tree, and immediately shimmied up the main trunk. Christmas balls and angels crashed to the floor. Cedar trees are very dense, especially those strung with lights and ornaments. There was no way to coax her down; she would only climb farther up the tree. She was obviously going to come down when she was good and damned ready. "Just don't pay any attention to her and she'll come down sooner or later," JoAnne instructed. So we didn't, and that is precisely what she did.

It was a critical moment in my life, and by God I knew it. I left the room with the cat still in the tree and went outside to get some air. Only a couple of days before I had seen on TV a movie about one of my boyhood World War II heroes, Admiral "Bull" Halsey, who when asked about his fluctuating strategies during the Battle of Guadalcanal replied, "It's not so much that you change your mind as that you go in a different direction." Well, it was Christmas, after all. I promised myself to at least give it a civilized try. I took a deep breath and went back inside.

On Christmas morning the little kitten was lapping milk from a bowl on the floor. She turned and looked at me, and I looked back at her. It was the genesis of a most unfamiliar relationship. Of course I did not know it then, but she would someday be the mother of Spit McGee.

The Gat Woman said she would allow me to name the kitten. I knew this was a craven bribe, but I named her Rivers Applewhite after the little girl I grew up with and wrote about, the one that Old Skip and I were both in love with. Perhaps the name itself would help me tolerate the unwarranted Christmas cat.

So now we had a Rivers Applewhite. She was an enigma to me. She was, as I have reported, absolutely white, with singular dark brown eyes. She was also very resilient and temperamental, and in her early days in that house kept testing me, as if I were unworthy of her. I tried not to pay her much mind, but she kept doing exasperating things that I was unable to ignore. She would perch silently on the rafters of the den, for example, then without warning leap down at me and land next to me on the sofa, thus scaring me witless. Mostly she would just sit and stare at me with her cantankerous, knowing eyes. What did she know? I certainly had no idea. She was exceedingly fast, and sometimes out of whatever motive she mindlessly sprinted through the dwelling with the velocity of a Jackie Joyner-Kersee. She was always hiding. The house was not of San Simeon propor-tions, but her hiding places were multifold and uncanny: under the kitchen sink, all the chairs and sofas and beds, in my shoes, and once even in the fireplace when it was not in use—what that did to a white cat is easy to imagine—and on the wall-length bookshelves. One day, after being missing for a couple of hours, we discovered her wedged between The Brothers Karamazov and Down and Out in Paris and London. As part of the Cat Woman's later confessional, she said: "Since she was a Christmas surprise, I didn't have an opportunity to think about how you'd react to her. And I'll bet neither did you. And how could I disappoint Graham and Savannah? I simply had to figure out a way to work her into our relationship and hope you'd go along with it. I never considered that you wouldn't."

Rivers obviously was drawn to my fiancee but mainly treated me on the scale of a ratty indentured servant just off steerage from eighteenth-century Liverpool. To put it mildly, I did not trust her very much, even on those winter nights she spent drowsily in front of the fireplace, tame as could be.

The first real test came a week or so after Christmas and was a trying one. We had enlisted my other future stepson, Gibson, to help me move out of my bungalow at Ole Miss and to bring all my possessions back to Jackson. The Cat Woman insisted we take Rivers Applewhite with us. She did not like it one bit. It was a three-hour drive to Oxford, and she whined and screamed and walked every inch of the car and on the car seats and under the car seats and on our necks. Once between Coffeeville and Water Valley she jumped onto my head and almost caused me to lose control of my clanking Dodge. "That cat is driving me crazy!" I shouted. I suggested we stop at a pharmacy and get her a high-powered sedative, something that would knock her out cold, or for that matter forever. But somehow she finally settled down and we made it to our destination.

Once we arrived at my old place on Faculty Row, she was completely at home. Against all odds she immediately began to conduct herself with an unexpected decency. She took a place on the back of my big sofa and spent the next few days gazing out the window at the happenings on the street outside. The spirit of my noble departed Labrador, Pete, pervaded the house: the corners where he slumbered, his own personal woolen carpet in front of the fireplace, the spot in the dining room where he reclined as I wrote my stories. At any moment I expected him to come in the back door and leap up at me and lick my nose, then explore his familiar territory until against all reasonable justice he discovered a cat on his old premises. That might have sent him back to his grave. I was consumed with guilt when I used Pete's old food platter to put down cat food. It is always melancholy to move away forever from a place where you have dwelled for a very long time, for the past accumulates on you in fading mementos, documents and letters and photographs, reminders of the mortal days, and it is particularly trying to gather up these haunting artifacts of temporality with a cat looking at you. What have I gotten rny self into, Pete ?

I had to concede that Rivers was very smart. She could figure things out by herself. She soon determined that I did not have a clue about how to deal with her. I guess I just treated her as if she were a dog in cat's clothing, giving her sturdy slaps of affection, from which she would promptly run away. When I dumped whole cans of cat food onto her dish she would take a bite or two and contemptuously walk off. I saved huge hunks of meat and bones from my plate and put them down for her, and some sliced bologna—had not my dog Skip liked bologna?—and she ignored them all. She would not come when I called her or clapped my hands vigorously to get her attention or beat on the sofa for her to sit beside me. When I picked her up, she would not stay with me. Why could she not at least show even the most modest indications that she was happy to see me and to greet me when I was gone for several days? This puzzled and angered me. "Gats ain't dogs," I would shout accusingly at the Cat Woman.

This cat seemed basically a maverick, a loner, as I had always judged cats to be. There was a haughtiness to her, a demeanor of aristocracy that contradicted her incontrovertible Highway 51 ancestry. As she began to grow up, I also had to admit that she was pretty. She was an immaculate self-groomer and would spend interminable moments licking her paws and fur and tail. She was strange. Sometimes to see her reaction I would call out her name. Most of the time she would sit there disregarding me, but every now and again she would turn and acknowledge my call with lazy, dreamy eyes—ennui eyes: What do you want?

Nonetheless, as I watched Rivers grow into a graceful, elegant young cat, I began to suspect she was more deep and subtle than I had supposed. I read at the Cat Woman's urging the exotic fairy tale "The White Cat," which the Mississippi artist Walter Anderson had interpreted in splendid block prints and which my friend Ellen Douglas had retold in her book The Magic Carpet and Other Tales. Despite her detached ways, Rivers could have been the magical cat princess whom the king's youngest son fell in love with.

She had the instincts of the huntress, as I had indeed been forewarned about cats, and warily stalked our backyard on stealthy paws seeking things out. Sometimes she sharpened her claws on the bark of trees. I watched from afar as she scooted up these trees to their remotest branches, as if she were practicing what to do if something came after her. No one was teaching her these things; she just did them. The first time she came in the house with a lizard in her mouth, I was tempted to contact the lizard department of the humane society. This was a vicinity of squirrels, and she chased them incessantly with no success.

Since she was being well fed, she was fattening up and growing. One night something unforeseen happened. I was sitting in a chair reading a book when she suddenly leapt into my lap and began purring. She extended her paws and kneaded them on my legs. She began licking my fingers, surprising me not only by the intimacy of her action but by the sharp-razor feel of her tiny tongue. Did she think I was her mother? Or was she flirting with me? This was a new experience, a cat sitting in my lap and purring at me. Was something happening to me? We lived in a neighborhood with yards and trees, where cats could be indoors and outdoors. I began to worry that on her explorations outside the house she might get run over. I discovered myself standing on the back porch waiting for her to return.

Beyond a certain age a kitten grows up quickly. The following April, we noticed that her stomach was beginning to bulge. Surely she was not pregnant; she was still just a kitten, only five or six months old. I could hardly believe it: she was indeed with child. She would be a child mother, or at best a teenaged mother. "White trash!" I yelled at her.

Her conduct and demeanor now affected me, however. She became more affectionate toward me. There was a vulnerability to her, a warmth that I had never thought possible with cats. Could this have been an old, atavistic association with time itself? One afternoon I gazed at her for the longest moments as she rested on an ironing board on the back porch in the bedappled sunshine. Her tiny leonine eyes were aglow: she was expecting something. Occasionally she would awaken and gently lick her burgeoning belly. At other times I observed her as she searched the house for more secretive places to sleep.

The days went by. We were now well into May, in the flowering of the great Deep Southern springtime.

We knew Rivers's childbirth was imminent but did not know precisely when it would be. I found myself a litde worried about this forthcoming event. This bizarre little cat had somehow, despite my reluctance, become at least an oblique part of my life, and I started quizzing JoAnne about the mechanics of cat-birthing. The Cat Woman did not seem to give it a thought. Most of her life, she reminded me, she had had at least one mother cat who had kittens every year and that when the time came the cat always went off by herself somewhere—usually to a closet, sometimes under a bed or in an outside storage room—and had the kittens. The Cat Woman never knew precisely when to expect this and never did much in the way of preparation. This seemed a fairly cavalier attitude to me. All the dogs of my life had been males, so I had had no experience with dog births, either. With her previous cats JoAnne used to just put some old towels or sheets or T-shirts in a httle flat box in a small area in the back of a closet and show it to the expectant mother. If the cat liked the spot she would use that as her birthing bed, but if this did not suit her she would find her own space and make her own bed. She tried to explain that Rivers Applewhite would know instinctively what to do, but I was not convinced. "She's too young," I said, "not even a teenager yet." So we made places in every closet and dark nook and under every bed. The Mayo Clinic could not have done better.

As the delivery date approached David Rae was visiting from Minneapolis and we had a dinner party for him and some of his Jackson friends. Everyone was petting Rivers and predicting when she would deliver. The group left around midnight. Shortly after that, catastrophic things began to transpire.

This would become one of the memorable happenings of my life. I was sitting at the dining room table while JoAnne cleared the dishes. Suddenly Rivers began moaning and crying and running inanely from room to room. We tried to calm her down, but she refused to be pacified. One moment she would hide under a bed, the next in one of the closets. Every five minutes or so she would repeat the routine. This went on time and again. I was already a nervous wreck. How had I gotten into this? JoAnne decided something was badly wrong and telephoned the all-night emergency animal clinic. As I trailed Rivers in her frenetic scrambles, I could hear JoAnne describing what was going on and asking if a cat ever needed a cesarean or if she might not instinctively know how to give birth. The emergency vet said both were possible but to give her more time before we brought her in.

Soon after the phone call, Rivers started her dervish again. But this time as I followed her dashing from the bedroom closet into the dining room she did something that nothing whatever in my entire existence had remotely prepared me for. She flung from her insides onto the floor a slimy gray thing with no head or eyes or nose or ears or tail! "Oh, my God!" JoAnne shouted. "She's had a deformed baby! Or maybe it's premature?" Rivers lurched nearby as I squeamishly hovered over the formless blob, which resembled nothing if not the pulsating pods in the old movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Once again JoAnne phoned the emergency vet and described the situation. He calmly suggested that perhaps the amniotic sac was still in place on the newly born kitten. He proceeded to give her exact directions on what to do. With the telephone cord pulled out to its fullest length, she began relaying the instructions to me.

Indulge me, reader, to interject here that when I was growing up, people expected me to be a medical doctor—that was what all bright Southern boys were supposed to aspire to then, but I would not for a nonce so much as think of it, and for one very sound reason: I hated the sight of blood. And here I was at 2, A.M. in a house in Jackson, Mississippi, expected to deliver a cat. "I don't know nothin' about birthin' cats," I heard myself saying. But there was scant choice.

"Get some paper towels," the vet's orders were repeated to me. "Rub the thing up and down and over and over." I proceeded to do so. After a minute or more of this, beneath the oozing blood I began to see ears and a nose and a head—a little cat, a little white cat.

"Continue rubbing! This is what the mother should be doing by licking the kitten!" So I rubbed and rubbed.

"Rub it hard on the back to help it breathe! Pat! Pat!" This went on endlessly. "Live, kid, live!" I yelled. And, by God, it began breathing deeply and making faint noises and moving its mouth.

Somehow all of this seemed to calm Rivers Applewhite, and she sedately retreated into the bedroom closet again and gave birth to another one—a yellow one. She did everything right this time. I took the little white one in my arms and gently put it in there with her. Then she delivered another white one and a little black-and-white one all by herself.

I would give the first little white one, whose life I had saved, the name Spit McGee.

The name derived from a character in a children's book I once wrote. Spit was a mischievous and resourceful boy who could spit farther than anyone else in the whole town. This is how I described him in that book:

Spit lived in the swamps, and he was a hunter and fisherman. Foxie Topkins might bring an apple to school for the teacher, but not Spit. If he brought her anything it would be a catfish, or a dead squirrel for frying. Rivers Applewhite would often be the recipient of the most beautiful wild swamp flowers, which Spit brought into town in the spring. One day during recess Spit reached into his pockets and pulled out a dead grubworm, a live boll weevil, a wad of chewed-up bubble gum, four leaves of poison ivy which he said he was not allergic to, two shotgun shells, a small turtle, a rusty fish hook, the feather from a wild turkey, a minnow, the shrunken head of a chipmunk, and a slice of bacon.

And with his namesake begins a new chapter in this vainglorious writer's life.

Without wishing to sound histrionic, the birth of Spit and his three siblings evoked for me a reserve of continuity, of the generations, of life passing on life, of the cycles. By the second day it was obvious that Rivers, so poignantly and recently a kitten herself, was making a good little mother, her maternal instincts as strong as those of the backyard huntress.

Although the kittens' eyes would remain closed for ten days or so, when they were only hours old they were active and curious. The white female kitten we named Savannah, after my stepson's girlfriend who had rescued Rivers from the ditch on Highway 51- She looked bigger and healthier than Spit. We named the yellow one Peewee after a childhood chum of mine, and the black-and-white one Jimmy Garter for regional reasons. Any good mother loves and fears for her young, and I noted how Rivers would take the kittens with her mouth around the backs of their necks and hide them somewhere from time to time, as if she felt incipient dangers lurking for them. Once she had them settled somewhere, she was almost like a generic time clock. She would nurse them and watch over them, and about every two and a half hours as they slept together in a furry mass she would emerge to eat, relax, lie outside in the sunshine—then soon metronomically return to them again.

Then we discovered that Rivers and the kittens had fleas. This turned out to be a wicked flea year in Jackson, which happens every now and then, and the kittens had more than their share. JoAnne called the vet for information about what to do. Just powder them with another kind of flea powder, the vet advised, and gave a brand name. So we began bringing the kittens out one by one and lavishing them with flea powder. Each time we did this, Rivers would move the kittens to another hiding place. After three or four of these moves, she located a spot we could not find. For days we would see her sneak through a cabinet in the basement, but search as we did we could not locate the sequestered kittens. She began spending more time away from them, and we became anguished. Friends came and helped us look, but the kittens had vanished.

Finally, we found her hiding place under the house. I crawled under there and looked at them. Only one of the kittens was alive—one of the white ones. I surmised it was Savannah, since little Spit had been so tiny to begin with. But she was alive just barely, only a wisp of life lingering, as if she would expire at any moment. I put her in my arms and we took her to the car to rush her to the animal emergency clinic.

JoAnne drove the three miles to the clinic. To allow the stricken kitten to breathe better, I held her up on the dashboard. She was only slightly bigger than the palm of my hand. She hardly could move there. But she extended her paws toward me, as if she desperately wanted to live, bobbing her head lightly back and forth. At the destination JoAnne was too distraught to leave the car. I took the kitten inside.

The animal nurse on duty examined the patient and declared her technically dead. Nothing could be done, she said. But then the veterinarian came in, whose name was Dr, Majure. He looked over the woebegone little creature more closely. "There's hope, " he said. "We've got a cat who gives blood transfusions to sick kittens." They called him Clinic Gat and he had already saved several kittens. He was two years old, weighed sixteen pounds, and had Type B blood, he said, the preferred type for cat transfusions.

"Your kitten's dying of anemia. Leave him here overnight. We'll fetch Clinic Cat. There's a chance we can save him. I can't promise. Come back in the morning."

I was about to leave, but tarried at the door. "Did I hear you say him? My cat?"

"Sure. He's a male."

In the car I told JoAnne about the projected transfusion, then: "But it's not Savannah. It's Spit McGee."

I spent a restless night, consumed with worry for the dying Spit. With trepidation I returned the next day. The vet brought him out to me. "He's going to be okay. The little fellow didn't want to die." The transformation from the previous night was miraculous. His eyes were bright and he moved about vigorously in the arms of the vet. "This is going to be a good cat, this boy," he surmised. "This is going to be a bad cat. See what I've noticed? He's got one blue eye and one golden eye. That's a good sign. And look who's here." A huge, furry cat with Siamese eyes and eclectic orange colors strolled into the room. I knew who this was without asking. "Thank you, Clinic Cat," I said.