Dewey's Nine Lives

EIGHT

Church Cat

“Words cannot express how much the book Dewey meant to me. . . . We adopted a stray cat at our church many years ago: ‘Church Cat’! She was pregnant and when her babies came, members adopted them. Then a collection of funds got her to the vet to be spayed. She lived in the church until we had major renovations and I took her home.”

Carol Ann Riggs surprised me. Her short note about Church Cat, a stray cat adopted by the Camden United Methodist Church in Camden, Alabama, had piqued my interest, but after the first ten minutes of our telephone conversation, I must admit, I was completely flummoxed. Not by the things she said, but by the way she said them. Ms. Carol Ann Riggs (as her friends call her) had an extraordinary Southern accent, the kind full of slow, honey-dripping pronunciations, the “sugahs” mixing with the “small-town law-yas” and singing in “the church qui-ah.”

I must admit, I liked it immensely. And I liked Carol Ann Riggs, too. She was born in the tiny town of Bragg, Alabama, where the nearest high school was a thirty-mile bus ride away. (Even today, Lowndes County has only two public high schools.) When she married Harris Riggs at nineteen and moved to his hometown of Camden, she thought she was moving to the big city. Camden, after all, had two stoplights, two restaurants, two banks, and almost fifteen hundred people. But it was a wonderfully friendly place, despite the “large” size. There wasn’t much money in Camden, but when someone died, not only did all the neighbors bring food, everyone in town attended the funeral. “Almost everybody was kin to everybody,” Carol Ann told me, and that included her husband Harris’s “people,” who for several generations had operated the town’s hardware store. Carol Ann wasn’t a librarian—she worked for that small town “law-ya” I mentioned earlier—but she was a longtime member of the local library board. And despite my misgivings about library boards, I liked that. In fact, I liked everything about her. Especially that accent.

“I know, I know,” her friend Kim Knox said. “It’s that Southern accent you hear on television, and you say to yourself, That’s not real.” Kim was born and raised across the border in Laurel, Mississippi, so she knows Southern accents. “But that’s a Camden accent. Lots of people in Camden talk that way. People think its old Southern aristocrat, but people in Camden aren’t like that. They’re very down to earth. Not any kind of attitude or anything.”

It’s the isolation, Kim figures, that keeps the citizens of Camden so charming. The town is the seat of Wilcox County, a sparsely populated area in the hardpan hill country of southwest Alabama. The county has only thirteen thousand residents, less even than Clay County, Iowa, and the median income is only sixteen thousand dollars, a third of the national median and six thousand dollars below the poverty line. People think of south Alabama as plantation country, with sprawling mansions and fields of cotton. But you don’t see large farms in Wilcox County. You see the occasional small family farm, essentially a sharecropper’s plot, sandwiched between thousands upon thousands of acres of tall straight southern pines.

“It’s a town in the middle of nowhere,” Kim Knox said. “It’s a picturesque gem.” When I heard that, I thought of Spencer, with its wide sidewalks and blocks of locally owned, pleasantly thread-worn shops. I pictured a town where the generations have their own tables at the local diner and a cup of coffee lasted two hours at least.

But Camden didn’t work like that, as photographs of their threadbare downtown showed. In Camden, the social life wasn’t centered on the commercial strip. There weren’t any movie theatres, fancy restaurants, or chain superstores. The center of social life in Camden, Alabama, was the churches. The four largest were located, one after another, on a stretch of Broad Street that was as immaculately maintained as the nearby shopping district was ragged. The biggest was the Baptist church. Across the street, next door to each other, were the two Presbyterian churches. Down the block toward the town’s main intersection and next to the Exxon gas station that marked the unofficial entrance to downtown was Camden United Methodist. None of the churches were huge—between them they probably had seven hundred members, or about half the town—but they offered meals, prayer meetings, youth activities, and adult and junior “qui-ahs.” And when something important came along, like the yearly Christmas pageant, they all worked together to put on a show.

It was Camden Methodist’s newest member and part-time secretary, Kim Knox, who first noticed the cat outside the old parsonage that served as the church’s administrative office. The cat was a little gray tabby, and when Kim walked out for a short break, the cat was crouched in the shadow of the nearby bushes. She had an adorable round face with soft eyes, and when Kim looked at her, the cat didn’t turn away but kept staring right toward her. Then she started talking. When Kim talked back—“well, hey, kitty cat”—the cat jumped onto the porch, causing Kim to, quite naturally, reach down and pet her. The cat rolled over for a belly rub. When Kim opened the door to return to her office, the cat hopped up and jogged inside.

Hmmm.

Now, Camden United Methodist was not a formal church. It could be formal about some things, like its doxology and its sanctuary, but in general it was a blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth congregation. The administrative offices were, to say the least, not pristine. The old parsonage was a one-story, cottage-style house from the early 1920s, with creaking floorboards and clattering windows, and the small space was overflowing with boxes and files. The pastor was from the laid-back school of liturgy, always sporting an open collar, an absent-minded smile, and a joke for his parishioners. Even Kim wasn’t the typical fussy church secretary. It seemed to her, after a bit of reflection, that a stray cat might fit right in.

But she wasn’t sure. The pastor’s office of a small-town church was a community gathering place. People were always dropping by, not just to talk about problems but to gossip and shoot the breeze. What if they didn’t feel comfortable with the sweet, moon-faced gray cat now lounging in their secretary’s chair? Was it really appropriate for the part-time secretary, who had been in town only a few months, to let a cat live in the church?

Meow, the gray tabby said, right on cue.

Fortunately, the next person to enter the parsonage was Ms. Carol Ann Riggs. Carol Ann had been a member of Camden Methodist since moving to town in 1961. She was in the choir and on several committees and knew just about everybody, so she often dropped by to say hello and see if anything needed doing. Her daughters had gone to college and then moved away, so Carol Ann had, in a sense, taken to mothering the Camden Methodist congregation. She was also, as Kim discovered, a lifelong cat lover.

“Oh, you have to keep her,” Carol Ann said, when the little tabby sauntered over to sniff her hand and meow. “She’s just dah-lin.” She didn’t tell Kim that she was pretty sure she’d just adopted a prison cat. There were a gaggle of them that lived in the alley behind the jail, waiting for the prison cook to throw out the scraps. It wouldn’t have been any problem for this little kitten to stroll a block down Broad Street, then cross the street to the parsonage door.

Instead, Carol Ann simply said, “Kim, you’ve got to hold on to this little sugah.” And since Carol Ann had been a member of the church for decades, and since her husband’s family had been in Camden for generations, that was all the endorsement Kim needed.

The next time Carol Ann dropped by the parsonage—and she suddenly found more excuses to do that than ever—the little gray tabby was sitting in the middle of Kim’s chair. Kim was perched hazardously on the front edge.

“She tried to sit on my lap,” Kim told her, a little embarrassed, “but she hated how many times I got up and down. So she took the comfortable part of the seat.”

Meow, the cat said, as if in agreement, before jumping down to let Carol Ann pet her. She slept most of the day, snuggled behind Kim on the chair, but every time someone came in, she meowed and ran to greet them.

“Well, hey, little girl,” most people would say, reaching down to pet her. “Aren’t you darling?”

And she was. The little cat was irresistible. Even Carol Ann, who had owned and loved animals all her life, had to admit this kitten was special. Maybe it was her round face, which was so soft and babyish. Or her sweet disposition. Her meow was so peaceful, and her approach so gentle, that you couldn’t help being drawn to her. She was spunky. She was friendly. But more than that, she was endearing. That’s the word: endearing. You couldn’t look at her sauntering across the floor toward you with her sweet eyes upturned without thinking, aaawwww.

Still, the kitten almost certainly elicited smirks from the more starched-collar members of the congregation. They never said anything, at least not to Kim, but nothing that happened around there, neither rude look nor sly remark, ever slipped past Carol Ann.

“They just didn’t like animals,” she explained. “I can put my finger on each one of them right now, and I know they didn’t have animals in their homes. They weren’t raised with them, you see, so they never understood them. They didn’t think it was appropriate for a church to have an animal.”

Any tension, though, was quickly defused by the church’s pastor. He was a young man leading his first congregation, but he was good with people and impossible not to like. He had been at Camden Methodist only a few weeks longer than Kim Knox, but if he had any nervousness about his recent promotion to head clergy, he dealt with it through an endless stream of good-natured banter and positive affirmation. He may not have been a cat person, and he may have wanted to please his new parishioners, but he wasn’t the kind of man to kick out the less fortunate, no matter how often they shredded the toilet paper in his office bathroom or how much hair they shed on his couch.

Really, his laugh seemed to say whenever Church Cat came up, what’s the harm?

And even the most reluctant among the congregation had to admit that the children, at least, loved having Church Cat around. The parsonage was across a wide lawn from the main church building, and the lawn served as an informal social area, where the adults hobnobbed after church service and the children ran around pushing, chasing, and staining their clothes. Every Sunday, the little gray cat sat on the edge of the lawn and watched them. She didn’t play. She definitely wasn’t a fan of being chased. But she loved it when the kids came over to pet her.

“Now move back, children,” Carol Ann would say, taking on the role of protector. “Give her some room, she’s getting nah-vous.” The children would take a step back, elbowing and jostling for position until one little girl, who must have been two, since she still toddled, couldn’t control her excitement and lunged forward with a squeal. It happened every Sunday, and Kim and Carol Ann couldn’t help but laugh. The girl meant to be loving, but there was something about her that terrified the poor gray tabby. As soon as the little girl started squealing, the cat turned and ran for the office, where she had a dozen little holes in which to hide.

“Where’s Church Cat?” the kids would scream, searching for her. “Where’s Church Cat?”

That’s how she got her name. Somehow, one Sunday, she went from That Cat at the Church to Church Cat. “I’m just going to give this little bit to Church Cat,” the ladies started saying at Fifth Sunday Potluck, sliding a bite of meat to the side of their plates.

One day, Kim’s husband was driving down Broad Street when he noticed an elderly lady sprawled on the ground outside the church office. He immediately pulled over and ran toward her. Halfway there, he recognized her as Carol Ann’s mother-in-law, who was in her late eighties. “Ms. Hattie,” he yelled, “are you all right?”

A second later, he noticed Church Cat beside her, getting a belly rub. “I was just lovin’ on her,” Ms. Hattie said, pushing herself to her feet with a smile. And just like that, the little gray tabby from the prison alley was adopted, not just by Kim Knox and Carol Ann Riggs, but by Camden United Methodist Church.

When winter arrived, whispering into south Alabama with a thick layer of frost just before Christmas, Carol Ann and Kim decided Church Cat could start staying indoors overnight. They purchased some litter and food, and Church Cat immediately took to the comforts of a warm, safe place to sleep. She was such an outgoing cat, though, that she got bored during the night. The young pastor was bemused by the sight, every morning, of Kim’s papers scattered all over the floor. Kim would hear him talking in his office and think, I don’t remember anyone going in there. Then she’d hear a meow and rush in to find Church Cat sitting on his desk. She’d apologize, but he’d just laugh, and then Church Cat would start purring in her arms. That’s the warmth and companionship a cat provides. When she arrived in the morning, Kim always started smiling when she saw Church Cat peeking through the blinds, ready for another day of greeting congregants . . . by sleeping 90 percent of it away on the seat of Kim’s chair.

Keeping Church Cat indoors at night meant other accommodations, too. Carol Ann and Kim were primary caregivers, but if they were away, someone had to feed her and change her litter. When the office was closed for a few days, someone had to let her outside or she’d go wild with cabin fever. And, as always, someone had to watch to make sure she didn’t sneak into the sanctuary, which had never been officially designated a cat-free zone but seemed the exact excuse for the cat haters—and there were always some, as Carol Ann knew—to start talking about disrespecting holy ground. Even asking for help with Church Cat’s care made Carol Ann nervous, like she was pushing too far. But she didn’t need to worry. Church Cat had plenty of fans, and there were more than enough enthusiastic volunteers.

With basic care out of the way, Carol Ann and Kim moved to step two: spaying and vaccination. And that led to the first big surprise of the great Camden Methodist cat experiment. Church Cat was pregnant.

By March, word had spread through the church: A single mother was in their midst. Church Cat, for her part, wasn’t hiding it. When she walked, her belly was swinging like a church bell. No doubt there were questions from young kids around the family table that spring, but for the most part, the congregation was excited. If possible, the children followed Church Cat even more than usual. And Church Cat, despite her condition, was accommodating. The day before Palm Sunday, Carol Ann drove by and saw her sprinting happily around the church lawn.

But on Palm Sunday, Church Cat was gone. The children came out to the lawn after the church service, dressed in their choir robes and waving palm fronds, but there was no cat to meet them. They stopped and looked around, bewildered. Then they started searching: in the bushes, in the Sunday school rooms, in the administrative offices, and even in the sanctuary. But they couldn’t find the cat.

“Did she have her baby?” the squealing girl squealed, almost falling down with excitement.

“Probably,” Carol Ann told her, “but we don’t know for sure.”

The next day, Kim went looking for her cat. That year, in addition to adopting a stray cat, Camden United Methodist Church had started a major building project. The primary church building would be expanded; the old parsonage would be hauled away; and a recently acquired abandoned motel next to the property would be torn down for a parking lot. Kim figured the old motel rooms, many with their doors already removed for demolition, afforded an ideal place for a cat to hole up with her kittens. She spent a few hours searching the dilapidated ruin and calling, before Church Cat finally answered. One of the rooms was full of old furniture and mattresses, and Church Cat was using it as a quiet nursery for her four Palm Sunday kittens.

For a week, Kim and Carol Ann took food down to the room, and Kim snuck down to check on her once every day, but for the most part, Church Cat had a week alone with her babies. The next Sunday, after church, the children found her. They were standing around the lawn, talking about Church Cat and her babies, when one of them spotted her slinking around the old motel. About six kids, all younger than six, followed her to the room where her kittens were mewling and stumbling all over one another. Carol Ann arrived quickly enough to make sure the children didn’t do anything but ogle and coo, but by the next day, Church Cat had left the motel.

There are times, as I well know, when it’s good to have a strong network of friends. When you are being unfairly maligned. When you face a personal challenge. When the board tries to throw your community’s beloved cat out of the library. Fortunately, Carol Ann had a strong social network in Camden, and one of her acquaintances lived across the street and a few doors down from the church. This young woman watched from her front porch as Church Cat carried her kittens, one by one by the scruff of the neck, across Broad Street and into the second-floor window of a beat-up old house.

The young woman called Carol Ann. Carol Ann called Kim Knox. Together, they decided they better move those kittens before the owner of the house came back. Nobody had lived in the house for years, but Carol Ann knew the owner was storing stuff inside. He was a fine man, but she wasn’t sure how he’d react if he discovered the kittens. With the entire underage congregation of Camden United Methodist Church eagerly anticipating the return of Church Cat, she didn’t want to take any chances.

“I don’t break the law as a rule,” Kim told me, “but there are times when you just have to.” So a few days later, Kim Knox found herself crawling through the first-floor window of an abandoned house, on a main street a mere block from downtown Camden, while Carol Ann waited outside, amazed that a fine, upstanding woman like herself was standing watch during a trespass.

There must have been a point, perhaps halfway through the window, as she stretched to find the floor hidden in the darkness, when Kim wondered what she was doing. She was a law-abiding citizen. She was a church secretary. She was wearing her nice work clothes, for goodness’ sake. And here she was, breaking and entering a dilapidated and possibly dangerous dwelling. She told herself, no doubt, that she was doing it for the children, who needed to know that Church Cat and her kittens were safe. Perhaps she told herself she was doing it for Church Cat, but she must have known a savvy prison tabby like Church Cat didn’t need help raising her family. She was really doing it, she must have realized as she stepped into the dusty darkness, for herself.

She went to the back door and let Carol Ann’s friend, the young neighbor, into the house, Carol Ann being convinced she was too advanced (in age) for such a perilous mission. “Church Cat,” Kim whispered when her companion was inside, trying to disturb nothing more than cobwebs and grime. “Where are you, Church Cat?” Old furniture was scattered in the downstairs rooms, between piles of boxes filled with junk. Even in full daylight, the arrangement seemed dangerous. It’s a tetanus nightmare, Kim thought as her feet crunched broken glass. The stairs were even less appealing, but eventually they climbed to the second floor and, in the back bedroom, heard Church Cat meowing. When Kim peaked around the corner, the little gray tabby came running to her friend, as sweet and endearing as always.

Like a good mother, Church Cat had found the most comfortable place in downtown Camden for her brood of kittens, a stack of mattresses and box springs piled in a corner. Modern box springs are hollow, but one of these box springs was the old-fashioned sort stuffed full of cotton. Church Cat had hollowed out the stuffing to create a nest. Inside was her smorgasbord of kittens: a solid white one, a solid black one, a calico, and a gray tabby just like his mother.

Kim and the neighbor found a safe place in the middle of the floor and sat down. They waited, whispering occasional encouragement, hoping the kittens would come to them. The mattress was a perfect place to raise a family, but they wanted the kittens to know and trust them, in case they needed to move them out quickly. The first day, Church Cat was the only one who ventured into the center of the room. As always, she was talkative, sweet and eager for attention. Kim stroked her, feeling that good cat warm, and then, after half an hour, she descended the stairs, locked the back door behind her friend, and climbed back out the window.

She came in through the window again the next day, and every day for the next two weeks. There was something compulsive about her desire to check on the cats, something that must have said more about her needs than theirs. But what did that matter? After a few days, the kittens loved her company, too. Like their mother, they came to sniff her hand and be stroked, to accept her as part of their world. All but the gray tabby, who hissed and snarled and then dove back into the cotton-filled box spring whenever Kim made a move in his direction. He was the only male in the litter; perhaps that made him more cautious than the others. Or perhaps, despite looking just like his mother, he was the only cat that hadn’t inherited her endearing personality.

During the second week, a rumor reached Carol Ann that the owner of the house was coming back. He was going to fix the place up and sell it. So, for the last time, Kim Knox climbed through the window of the old house to see the kittens. Carol Ann handed her several cat carriers, then went around the back to wait. Kim took the carriers to the upstairs bedroom and, as always, sat on the floor to coax the kittens out. The first one was easy: She came right up. The next two were wiser. They ran around the room a bit, but with the help of the young neighbor, Kim was able to wrangle them into the carriers.

That left only the gray tabby male. Instead of running, he burrowed into the box spring and spat and hissed every time Kim tried to reach him. Each time she failed, he turned and dug himself deeper into the cotton ticking. He dug himself so deep that, eventually, they had to take the whole stack of mattresses apart to reach him. Then they piled them back up, exactly as they had been before. Finally, after almost an hour, Kim handed the cat carriers out the back door to Carol Ann, then locked the door, straightened anything that had been knocked askew and climbed, for the last time, out the first-floor window of the abandoned house. She dropped to the ground, wiped the dust off her nice blouse and skirt, checked both ways to make sure no one was watching, then walked casually across the street to help Carol Ann throw the cat carriers into the back of her car.

Since the kittens were too young to be weaned, Carol Ann had decided not to bring them back to the church. Carol Ann had a cat at home, so the ladies took the kittens to Kim’s house, where Church Cat nourished and raised them in the spare bedroom. A few weeks later, when they were weaned, the amused pastor allowed Kim and Carol Ann to put a notice in the church bulletin that the kittens were available for adoption. They also asked for help paying for Church Cat’s spaying, which started a flood of donations, not just for the procedure but for her food and litter as well. After the notice, Kim and Carol Ann never had to pay for Church Cat’s expenses again.

The three female kittens, all cute and social like their mother, were adopted quickly. But the fourth kitten, the male tabby, would never come out when potential owners came by. Instead, he hid under the bed, hissing and spitting. If Kim surprised him, he would rear onto his back legs, puff out his fur, hiss viciously in her direction, then take off running the other way.

After the third kitten was adopted, Carol Ann took Church Cat back to Camden United Methodist. Kim and her husband sat on their porch, tired but happy, wondering what to do with the un-adoptable male. After half an hour, Kim decided she better check on him, since he was now alone in the bedroom. This time, when she opened the door, the kitten came running to her, meowing and meowing, like he just realized he’d been left behind.

“Well,” she said, “you’ve certainly changed your tune.”

She looked at her husband. He rolled his eyes, then smiled and nodded. Church Cat’s little gray tabby kitten stayed. They named him Chi-Chi, and although he grew to be bigger and leaner than his mother, without her endearing baby face, he always reminded Kim of her office friend. He was never warm; in fact, he was quite aloof. “But that was just his personality,” Kim said. “He was a good, good cat. Just like his mama.”

A town is a series of changes, and to live in a town for long is to incorporate those changes into your life. When Carol Ann moved to Camden, the downtown hardware store run by her father-in-law was the hub of commercial life. They sold everything from shovels and biscuits to nails and dinner plates, but also made crop loans and bartered bales of cotton. For a while, they ran the area’s only ambulance service and served as the town’s funeral home, even employing an undertaker. When Harris went to college, he decided to pass on the hardware store in favor of the bank, but he quit that job two years later when MacMillan-Bloedel, a conglomerate out of Canada, opened a paper mill near town. By the time his father retired, Harris had earned an MBA and was an executive at the mill. The hardware store was sold and became a True Value franchise, selling standard nails and tools, and slowly became threadbare with the rest of downtown. But if you’ve lived in Camden long enough, and know where to look, you can still see MATTHEW’S HARDWARE written on the old brick wall.

By the time Church Cat arrived, there wasn’t much thought of reviving downtown. There wasn’t a Walmart for fifty miles, but most of the residents of Camden found a reason to make it out there at least once a month. “My mom couldn’t pass a Walmart,” Harris told me with a laugh. “Didn’t matter what part of the state we were in, or what we were doing, we had to stop.” Religion had always been a major part of life in Camden, and even with the downtown falling on hard times, more and more effort and expense went into the four big churches on Broad Street. By the 1990s, in true modern style, each started a series of major renovations, one after another.

The first thing to go at Camden Methodist was the comfortable old parsonage, with its eighty-year history and creaking floorboards, which was sold to a young couple. When the truck came to lift the building off its foundation and haul it away, there was quite a crowd on the church lawn, and a number of teary eyes, especially from the older generation. It was just a small wooden bungalow, simple and plain, but it was built immaculately, and built to last. It sits now in a neighborhood less than a mile from the church, once again filled with the laughter and tears of a young family growing up together.

The old motel, a long-derelict eyesore without a single redeeming feature, was torn down and paved over for a parking lot. The church left only the former restaurant, converting it to a youth center and temporary offices for the church administration. For almost a year, Church Cat and the children coexisted in that space, something that brought joy to both of them. The cat preferred Kim’s company, and especially the seat of her comfy office chair, but she also liked to wander out when the children were in the youth center and meow for attention. When the cooing and stroking became too much—the little girl still squealed at the sight of Church Cat, but now the cavernous former restaurant magnified the sound—Church Cat simply scampered away and hid in the kitchen.

In the year after giving birth to her kittens, in fact, Church Cat only got into trouble one time: at the Methodist Charge Meeting. Kim was out of town, and Carol Ann wasn’t sure what to do with Church Cat while she worked at the meeting. It was just after Easter, the perfect time of year in southern Alabama, when the evenings are still damp and cool enough to stamp down the day’s heat, so she decided to let Church Cat out for the night. Then she hurried off to greet participants in the Charge Meeting, a major event attended by the district superintendent and representatives from other local Methodist churches. Carol Ann, from her spot at the door, made sure Church Cat didn’t sneak into the sanctuary as the crowd arrived, but the little tabby must have slipped in with a latecomer because right in the middle of the assembly, she walked straight down the center aisle, meowing for attention.

Carol Ann was mortified. I wish I could write that like she said it—“MAWT-a-fied”—because no one can express social embarrassment like a proper Southern lady. But suffice it to say that Carol Ann was deeply worried about Church Cat barging into the sanctuary during the biggest meeting of the year.

Oh, that’s it, she thought, as she hustled Church Cat out the back door. That’s gonna be the end of Church Cat.

But instead of anger, she heard, behind her from the dais, the sound of laughter. Then the young pastor saying something, and then other people laughing, until Church Cat’s mawt-a-fyin’ faux pas became not a tragic error, but a funny story to be told again and again around the big lawn at Camden United Methodist Church.

Soon after, the young pastor left. Carol Ann and Kim and many of the other parishioners were sorry to see him go, but the Methodist church rotates pastors on a regular basis, and it was time (according to the national office) for a change. The building project was nearing completion, and without the young pastor, a few whispers and rumors started to filter through to Carol Ann. One person in particular made it clear to all and sundry that he did not want Church Cat inside any of the new buildings.

So Kim and Carol Ann decided to place a notice in the church bulletin: Church Cat was up for adoption. They expected a flood of responses, but after a week, nobody stepped forward. Some in the congregation, of course, had never wanted her around the church, much less their homes. The people who loved her—and there were many—didn’t feel it was their place to claim her. Everyone knew Carol Ann had recently lost her beloved cat Hogan and that she was hoping, in her polite Southern style, that no one would step forward for Church Cat. So they didn’t.

And that’s how in 2001, less than four years after she walked onto the porch of the parsonage and followed Kim Knox into the church offices, Church Cat’s time at Camden United Methodist Church came to an end. She went home to Carol Ann’s house, where she took, with a vengeance, to the lazy life of a spoiled and beloved house cat. Kim Knox visited often, and each time she did, her jaw dropped closer to the floor.

“I know, I know,” Carol Ann said. “I don’t feed her that much. I really don’t. I don’t know how she got so heavy.”

Soon after, the church christened their new buildings. They have, as far as I know, never been defiled by a single hair from a single cat.

Carol Ann states unequivocally that the building project was a good idea, even if it cost Church Cat her home. The church needed a nicer sanctuary, a larger kitchen for Wednesday prayer dinners and the Fifth Sunday Potlucks, and more classrooms for children’s Sunday school. The new buildings were for Camden, not just the church members, Carol Ann said. With them, for instance, they could expand their Lenten dinner to the whole town. “We needed new bathrooms, too,” Harris added. “There was a desperate need for bathrooms.”

Kim Knox agrees the upgrade was a good idea. And, she wanted everyone to know, the buildings are beautiful. Redbrick with white trim, they are immaculately maintained and large enough to accommodate further growth—if the congregation of Camden United Methodist Church, and the town of Camden in general, ever experiences a growth spurt. They are infinitely better than the horrible motel that was torn down. And they are without a doubt more practical and visually pleasing than the former buildings that stood in their place. They are everything a modern, forward-looking church should be.

But Kim Knox can’t help thinking something was lost, too. “It is a more structured environment,” she said of the new church. “It is less laid-back and relaxed.” The old parsonage, where she had worked with Church Cat, was drafty. The only way to heat it was with space heaters, so all winter it smelled of kerosene. The windows rattled. The doors creaked. But even on the coldest day, Kim felt, it had a warmth that came from its long history and worn-down wood, from the sound of a young pastor’s laughter echoing out of his office, from the feeling of a sleeping cat pressed against her back as she tried, sometimes in vain, to balance herself on the edge of her chair. And then there was the door creaking open, Church Cat stirring, a warm “Mornin’, Kim” followed by an even warmer “meow.”

Yes, the new church is beautiful. It is lovingly maintained. It is something that, rightfully, the citizens of Camden can be proud of. But it is just a building. It doesn’t have warmth or history. It can’t. Not yet, anyway. The new Camden United Methodist Church, to put it another way, is not the kind of place that could ever adopt a cat.

And that’s the conundrum of life, whether you eschew progress or embrace it full force: For everything that is gained, there is also something lost.

In some sense, there’s a very short distance to go until the end of this story. The only thing left to say, I suppose, is that Church Cat loved her life with Carol Ann, who spoiled her like the doting grandmother she is, but that her life in that home was tragically short. When Church Cat contracted an infection and died in the summer of 2005, at only eight years old, Carol Ann was so distraught, it took her several weeks to tell the congregation. She was the fattest cat you have ever seen, as both Kim and Carol Ann told me in separate conversations, but also the happiest, and Carol Ann and her husband, Harris, missed her terribly. They buried her in their family plot, alongside generations of ancestors that had lived and died in Wilcox County, Alabama.

The next year, Carol Ann and Harris Riggs moved away. Ms. Hattie, the woman who had lain on the ground to pet Church Cat, and the last of their living parents, had died, and they had long promised themselves that, when they no longer had family responsibility in Camden, they would move somewhere new. When their daughters were young, they had traveled extensively: to the Western United States, to Canada, to Australia. For their retirement, they moved two and a half hours away to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the University of Alabama, where they can watch plays and attend sporting events without having to drive ninety miles home after dark.

They say that’s the reason they left Camden, to experience more of life, but it’s clear there were other factors as well. Neither one of their daughters wanted to live in the area. They were married, to a lawyer and a federal emergency response director, respectively, and they were both studying for careers in medicine. There were no jobs for them in Wilcox County.

Meanwhile, the MacMillan-Bloedel paper mill where Harris had worked most of his life was sold first to Weyerhaeuser, then to International Paper. At its height, the mill had employed almost two thousand people from the area. Now Harris estimates it employs four hundred, although he isn’t sure. “You know these international companies,” he said. “When you retire, they take your name out of the computer, and you’re just gone.” Just gone. It seemed such a minor end to more than a hundred years of Riggs family history in Camden.

And so one story ends, but of course it is not the only story that can be told about Camden. The town is located in the heart of Civil Rights era unrest—forty miles north is Selma, site of the famous march, and thirty miles east is Lowndes County, known as “Bloody Lowndes” for its staunch refusal to register black voters. So there are at least two sets of circumstances in Camden, two histories, two views of the world. If you asked someone else about Camden, Alabama, especially a longtime black resident, you would no doubt hear a different story from the one you’ve read today.

But there are always other stories to tell. I haven’t set out to provide a history of a town but simply to tell the story of Church Cat, who stayed four cherished years at Camden United Methodist and died as she had always lived, with Ms. Carol Ann Riggs by her side. That seems simple enough, and I have tried my best to tell the story as Ms. Carol Ann told it to me. But even something as seemingly straightforward as the life of Church Cat, as I well know, is filled with personal meanings and interpretations.

Nothing made that more clear than my three conversations, spaced over a series of months, with Carol Ann’s good friend Kim Knox. Kim, you see, had a different view of Church Cat. A view not based on Church Cat’s actions but on the fact that she was terribly unhappy after her move to Camden, a town she had never even heard of until her husband got a job teaching school there. She loved the town and the people but, as the Bible says, it was a time of trial. Her mother died just after she moved, and without any friends in the area, she had no one to confide in. Even worse, after years of trying, she learned she would never be able to have a child.

This was not like Mary Nan Evans with her twenty-eight cats on Sanibel Island. Mary Nan told me, with no hesitation, that she never regretted not being able to have children. She is older than Kim, and therefore further from the disappointment, but I don’t think that was the reason for her lack of regret. Having children, it seemed, was never integral to Mary Nan’s life. It wasn’t something she ever needed to be happy.

Kim Knox was different. I could hear that clearly in her voice. Kim Knox desperately wanted children. She needed them, and it was a crushing blow when she found out she was unable to have them. She and her husband tried every fertility treatment short of in vitro fertilization, which they couldn’t afford. They researched adoption, but after more than a year of phone calls and meetings, they realized that even the cheaper alternatives were beyond their modest means. There was no single moment, Kim said, when the reality hit her. There were no breakdowns in the office; no sobs in the night; no dark mornings when Church Cat’s presence lifted her spirits just as her strength collapsed. There were tears with her husband, many thousands of them, but the emotional process was a gradual chipping away of her hopes, a slow and crushing collapse of all her dreams, not a sudden surrender, and Church Cat’s contribution was a constant affection, a daily warmth, more than one unforgettable act.

But that affection was important, more than Carol Ann or even I can understand. To Kim, Church Cat wasn’t just a cute cat. She was a source of comfort and strength. She was a friend Kim could put her maternal compassion and energy into when she had nowhere else to place it.

Be present. That’s the advice for helping people in pain. Be present for them, whatever they need. That, in a nutshell, was Church Cat.

And just as important, through that little cat, Kim built a local community of support. Through her, Kim became friends with Carol Ann Riggs and ultimately confided in her. With the help of the strewn papers and torn-up toilet paper, she developed the kind of warm, lighthearted relationship with the young pastor that allowed her to finally, in the quiet of the parsonage with only Church Cat as a witness, unburden her heart.

Does that change the story of Church Cat? Does it explain why a professional woman would spend her lunch break climbing through the window of an abandoned house? I don’t know. Kim’s husband, who was older, was on his second marriage and second career, as a schoolteacher. He had a son from a previous marriage, but the boy had been seriously ill his whole life. In 1999, as Church Cat was birthing her kittens in an old motel, the boy’s doctors recommended a transplant. Kim’s husband donated a kidney. He and Kim both understood that the time, physical recovery, and expense meant the end of their last faint hope of ever adopting a child of their own. But it was something they never hesitated to do. I cannot help but believe that when Kim Knox sat in that abandoned bedroom, softly encouraging Church Cat’s kittens to trust her, that she was taking a turn at motherhood. That she was being comforted by those soft little lives. That she was grieving, in her way, for what she could never have.

Then, in August 2002, Kim received a call from the young, now former pastor of Camden United Methodist Church. A woman had come to see him, the pastor told her. Her niece knew a young woman who could not afford to keep her baby. She was seven months’ pregnant, and she was searching for someone to adopt him.

Eight weeks later, in October 2002, Kim Knox drove five hours to meet the mother. She brought nothing but one change of clothes and a child’s car seat, still in the box. She refused to buy anything else. She was terrified, after all those years of struggle, that something would go wrong.

Two days later, she was in the delivery room when her adopted son, Noah, entered the world. The mother spoke no English, but she begged Kim in broken syllables and gestures to stay with her in the recovery room, to let her hold, for a moment, the newborn baby. They saw the mother again when the boy was eleven months old. They drove to Birmingham, a few hours from Camden, to meet her. The woman cried, smiled, thanked them in broken English, hugged her child, and then disappeared. Kim could feel her heartbreak, almost as strongly as she had felt her own. But where she went, or why, Kim has no idea.

“We were so thrilled when we met Noah,” Ms. Carol Ann said. “He was the cutest thing. The whole congregation absolutely loved him.”

In 2005, Kim and her husband moved back to Laurel, Mississippi, Kim’s hometown. They loved Camden, but they had no relatives in the area, and they wanted to raise their boy surrounded by family. They moved just two months before Hurricane Katrina. Although they were a hundred miles from the coast, they watched in horror from their aunt Lee’s house as trees shattered and toppled. They clutched their child and hoped that Church Cat’s son, Chi-Chi, who they had left in their nearby rental cottage, survived the storm.

He did, but that is yet another story. Suffice it to say, for this story, that Church Cat wasn’t just a pretty face, that her love gave Kim Knox, and perhaps others in Camden, a calming presence in times of need. And that Kim Knox, with the help of a gentle cat and a kindly pastor, survived her time of trials and saw her dreams of motherhood come true. And that Church Cat’s son, Chi-Chi, although never a friendly cat like his mother, loved his little brother Noah with a ferocity that surprised even Kim, who will forever appreciate the warmth and intelligence of cats.