The House Guests

Eight

The cats had their first full summer at Piseco in 1950, and they were busy the entire time. In Florida they were more indolent. At Piseco there seemed to be a flavor of industrious self-importance about them. They would hurry in and eat and hurry out. They were working at the trade of being cats. Those summers, from 1950 through 1957, were the summers of their prime, when they were both at their heaviest, their pelts the glossiest, their agility and condition at peak. They ate hugely and with minimum selectivity and ran it all off. Always, at Piseco, their rich coats had an incomparable smell, a sweet, fresh, airy odor related in some way to washing which has been dried in the fragrance of a spring wind.

Their transient life kept their automatic control mechanism for the density of the coats in perpetual confusion. Before we left Florida, they would begin to shed winter coats, but the coolness at the lake would slow this process. Toward fall they would begin to grow a winter coat apparently planned for an Adirondack winter. They would come down then into the really suffocating heat and humidity of Florida in September, and, after a shocked pause, they would shed with such profusion our environment seemed adrift with cat hair which adhered to everything within range — furniture, clothing, and moist people.

We have one charming picture of the two of them that summer at the rented camp. Nephew John Gilbert Prentiss, Sam’s younger, was about six years old, and, trolling along the lake shore with his father, he personally caught and boated a fine small-mouth bass a little over three pounds. I took his picture on the narrow front porch of the camp. John Prentiss wears a red shirt and a wide, proud grin. He holds up his big bass. One cat is on the railing beside him, looking at the bass with pleasurable anticipation, and the other winds around the boy’s ankles, just the banner of the upright tail visible in the photograph.

Just before the school year started we drove on down to Clearwater Beach, to the house on Bruce, sent for the cats, and settled in. We fixed a window for them in a living-room corner which opened onto the carport. They made their thorough inspection of the area, inside and out, noting the food corner in the kitchen, selecting temporary sleeping places. Cats have the habit of sleeping in one place for a month or so, then changing to another place. When there are two of them, after a little while there are several cat-places where claims have been staked at one time or another.

This is as good a moment as any to describe one of the formal courtesies cats extend to each other. Reading about it in the cat book James and Pamela Mason wrote some years ago made us more aware of it. If a cat is on some comfortable elevation, such as a has-sock, and the other cat wishes to join him, the other cat leaps up and asks permission by giving a lick at the face of the resting cat. Permission is expressed by a return of the lick, and the new arrival thereupon settles down. If the response is a sulky snarl or even a hiss, the visiting cat will leap down again and find some other place. This joint sharing of any restricted area was always more of a trial to Roger than to Geoff. Geoff pushed. He could push even when apparently asleep, exerting a continuous pressure. He filled up each inch he gained thereby, and kept right on pushing. He used this device on people as well as on brother cat. Many times we have seen Roger grant Geoff permission to join him only to find, twenty minutes later, that Geoff had worked him so near the edge his only choice was to jump down and walk indignantly away.

Cats have a habit of leaping up into the laps of those visitors least likely to enjoy providing comfort for a cat. Their nervous, habitual reaction is to stroke the cat. The cat interprets this as permission to settle down and does so immediately, then seems baffled to be set back down on the floor. If the cat is not touched he will quite often hesitate for a few moments and then jump back down of his own accord.

During the second or third evening of their residence at that house, both cats suddenly came catapulting back into the living room through their window from the night outside. Their tails were huge, spine hair ruffed up, and they ran in a half crouch. Never, before or since, have we ever seen them so frankly terrified. At Piseco they had sometimes come home in an unseemly haste after encountering some sort of goblin, but they seemed to make a pretense at indifference. This time they scuttled close to the people and whirled and stared back toward their window. The sound came out of the night, a great tomcat cry, savage, threatening, and of exceptional volume. Our cats flattened. The tom circled the house for some time, making chilling and explicit threats of murderous intent. We knew it was the big black one we had failed to trap.

Toms will kill male neuters who stray into their territory. They will also, on rare occasion, rape them. One night in Brookview, New York, Heathcliffe cat came home in hideous shape, dragging himself along. He had been mercilessly chawed and had so little use and control of his back legs, they thought he could have been clipped by a car and had his spine damaged. They took him to a vet, who, after examination, said Heath had been raped by a tom and had perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of recovery. He was a very sick and helpless cat for weeks and finally began to recover and eventually became entirely well.

We knew the black tom was a mortal danger to our two, so we closed their window, fixed a cat box for them, ignored their night pleas to be let out. We left the window open in the evenings while we were still up. They had responded so respectfully to the tom, we believed they would not wander far and would come racing back in at the first sign of danger. But we also suspected that if the house was dark and we were abed, the tom might very well come through their window to kill them in the house.

Two evenings later, just before Johnny’s bedtime, the cats came dashing in through their window in panic, and the big black tom followed them right into the house, right into the living room where we all were. He was enormous and so intent on murder he did not even seem to notice us. I saw the chance to rid ourselves of the problem and circled quickly and slammed the cat window down. Only then did the tom realize he was trapped, and he ignored our cats completely. He raced swiftly around the room, a big, black, shadowy menace, looking for some way out. Our pair stood against the wall in awed silence, staring at the frightful intruder. Finding no way out, he raced down the long hallway which bisected the one-story house, and I saw him disappear into the darkness of our bedroom through the open door. I followed him, reached in and turned on the room lights, backed out, and closed the door. We were all awed, but Roger and Geoffrey most of all. They were both shaped like Halloween drawings, made not a sound, and moved very slowly, picking each foot up to an unaccustomed height and setting it down again with the care they might use if they were on a ledge a thousand feet in the air.

Dorothy, Johnny, and I had a conference, and we decided I had better kill it. It seemed the only practical solution, and I believe we arrived at it because I thought I had the means to do it with a minimum of fuss, mess, and difficulty. There was no legitimate firearm in the house. But I had a pellet gun, an air pistol with a built-in lever and plunger which, when pumped enough times, could build up a considerable force, enough to imbed the pellet into a board. Suspecting that it might stun him rather than kill him, I selected an additional weapon, a miniature baseball bat given Johnny by Frank O’Rourke, the writer, when we had lived on Acacia Street. If the pellet only stunned the cat, I would administer the coup de grâce with the bat.

Thus equipped for safari, with the other four members of the pride waiting anxiously in the hallway, I entered the bedroom and closed the door behind me. We had twin beds. I squatted and spotted the tom crouched under the further bed, staring toward me. I had loaded the pistol and pumped it up to its recommended maximum. It was quite accurate at short range. I knelt and aimed carefully under one bed and over to where the cat lay under the other. Its eyes glinted in the reflected lights of the bedroom. I felt slightly ridiculous, and had no relish for the job. The tom was an extraordinarily handsome animal, and quite the biggest cat of the house-cat breed I ever saw.

I aimed right between his eyes and about a half inch above them and fired. The cat gave a great twitch, a yowl of pain, rage, and warning, and with no slackening of agility moved further away. I reloaded, pumped, fired again with exactly the same result. I was merely torturing the poor, damned beast. I tried four or five more shots, getting as close as I could. I no longer felt ridiculous. I felt sick and helpless and disgusted with the idiocy of my brilliant idea. I decided I had better run him down with the bat. About ten seconds later he showed me how poor an idea that was. He came leaping from floor level, up through the narrow space between the twin beds, leaping right at my face, going for my eyes. I fell back and away and took a futile swipe at him, and he was back under a bed before the bat finished the swing. When he had hung for a moment in the brighter light in mid-air I had seen the old scars, the ragged edges of the ears, and a wet and matted place on his forehead above his eyes, a dark shine of blood in the black fur. Dorothy was calling questions to me through the closed door. I took out my frustration on her by roaring at her to leave me alone. She heard the squall of the cat at each impact and had heard me thudding around when he had jumped at me.

Once again I was back in the viaduct long ago. But that cat had been dying, and this one would not die. I tried two more shots and then suddenly saw after the leap and yowl that followed the second one that there was just one reflecting gleam of eye in the cat-blackness. My stomach turned over, and I went out into the hall closing the door behind me. “This goddam toy pistol,” I said. “This lousy feeble stupid excuse for a...”

I must have looked just as miserable as I felt. Dorothy said, “If it isn’t strong enough, maybe you’d better just open the screen in there and he’ll go out.”

I was tempted. I’d spent a long time in there. Maybe he’d heal, off in the brush. They wouldn’t be honorable scars of combat. I’d been like some stupid bird, trying to peck him to death. And I was not going to tell her in front of my small son that Lieutenant Colonel MacDonald had managed to blind the cat in one eye, in a battle plan of remarkable stupidity. If he did recover, he’d be back. He had that look.

Then I admitted to myself how it had to be done, and I told her I’d hurt him too much to turn him loose, and I went back in. When I went in, he did a strange thing. He jumped into the air on the far side of the twin beds, not at me, but just up into the air, as high as my face and ten feet away from me, claws extended and white fangs showing, cursing me as he jumped.

It took me two shots to get the other eye. With that gone, he turned as utterly meek as the cat in the pond. In a low crouch he went to the wall and began a slow circuit of the room, staying close to the baseboard, making a thin keening sound of fright, searching some way out of this sudden total darkness. I moved to intercept him and swung the bat and struck him heavily on the broad tomcat skull. He dropped at once, quivered, and was still. His face was a terrible blankness of wet black fur. I went to the door, weak with reaction, opened it, and said, “Well, I guess I finally...”

Whereupon the tomcat made a horrid wailing sound and his long tail began to twitch. I ran back and hit him again.

He looked no smaller in death. Dorothy brought me a big, sturdy grocery bag. I grasped the end of his tail, using a paper towel to hold him with, and, holding the upright bag open with my left hand, I found I did not have an arm span long enough to raise him high enough to get him into the bag. Dorothy had to come and hold the bag open so I could lift him in. I did not weigh him. I was not interested in him as a trophy. He had to be over twenty pounds. I carried the bag out and put it in the trunk of the car and then came in to do something about the bedroom. The rug was almost wall to wall. The room had a strong pungency of tomcat, plus the other scents of death. His excrement had splattered the rug. Roger and Geoffrey tiptoed about in that room for all the world like spinster tourists inspecting a disaster area. Dorothy got Johnny to bed. We shooed the cats out, shifted furniture, rolled the rug up, and carried it out to the carport. Leaving Dorothy to the distasteful chore of scrubbing the area where he had died, I drove to the causeway which goes from the beach to the mainland, parked near the first bridge and walked out onto it with the heavy paper bag. It occurred to me that if any local law came cruising by they might think, from the shape and weight of my burden and from my furtive manner, that I was disposing of a human head.

After two cars went by, I dropped the bag into the bay, into the Gulf. I leaned on the railing for a little while. It was a hot night. It seemed strange to me that there should be such a residue of emotional exhaustion. It did not seem, to use the only expression I can think of, quite manly. Yet I had been through a war and had acquired a fairly precise knowledge of my strengths and limitations and had learned I could manage as well as the next man.

Yet, somehow, even today that grotesque slaying of the black tom is more vivid in my mind than much of the clattering, grunting, deadly inefficiency of men trying to slay each other. Perhaps war is such a profound implausibility, it provides its own insulation against reality. Those fearless eyes in black fur under the bed had been a reality which was perhaps in some telling resonance with the drowning of the other cat so long ago. And perhaps a writer is curiously vulnerable to these subterranean relationships.

After the rug came back from the cleaners, apparently pristine, it was a long time before Roger and Geoffrey ceased tiptoeing in there to sniff at traces far too faint for the deadened senses of people.

This account makes rog and Geoff sound far too girlish and timid. The three dog incidents while we lived in that house will bring them back into proper focus.

The first one made me laugh until I hurt. A chesty and self-important little dog lived directly across the street. I cannot recall him bothering Rog very much, but during our first few weeks there, whenever he spied Geoff out in the open, he would come barreling over at top speed, in full voice, and chase Geoff into the carport and up to his window ledge. Geoff would come in, all haired up, twice his normal size, his aplomb considerably shaken. He was not used to having dogs chase him, but somehow the one across the street had gotten the initial jump on him and kept pursuing the advantage with great enthusiasm.

Fortunately both Dorothy and I were in the living room the day Geoff decided how to handle it. Or, possibly, the decision was made because we had been there to witness his flight. At any rate we heard the frantic barking coming closer, and Geoff came in the window. He sat on the table inside the window and glowered out at the dog still barking in the carport. He stayed very swollen. Quite suddenly, and with the air of a man spitting on his hands before tackling a hard job, he went back out that window at full speed. For an astonished second the dog stared at the alarming apparition bearing down at him. He took one slashing slap across the chops, spun, and went kiyi-kiyi home, Geoff a step behind him. Geoff stopped at the edge of the street and sat and washed. From then on there was no nonsense from that dog. Sometimes, from a safe distance, he would bark, but he did not put much feeling or expression into it.

Later that season I heard some kind of commotion out at the side of the house, and then a sustained wailing sound of heartbreak. Dorothy heard it too and we went out to investigate. There were young Australian pine trees there, planted in a row several feet apart. The grass had grown high under the trees, and the limbs sagged low. The trunks were about two inches thick. Roger sat washing about six feet from the tree, and Geoff was at about the same distance on the other side of the tree. Both of them looked entirely smug. The mournful complaints still came from the base of one tree. Peering under there, we saw a ruff of orange hair nestled down in between the grass and the tree trunk. Dorothy grabbed one cat and I grabbed the other and, to their displeasure, fed them in through their window and pulled it down from the outside so as to remove them from whatever the action was.

We went back to the tree, and I parted the grass and stared at what, from the color and the sound, I thought might be a Pekingese. The sad song stopped, and slowly and timorously, a full-grown collie unwound itself and stood up. It had been wrapped entirely around the tree trunk and had flattened itself into an incredibly small space. It was a young dog, though full-grown. It stared around, saw that the enemy was not in sight, then with tail tucked under, in total silence, it sped away through a neighbor yard and out of sight. We never saw it again. When we opened the window the cats came out and looked for it and seemed surly about the interference.

That same season, in the following spring, the cats put on a display of thoughtful co-operation which surprised and enchanted us. Though we saw much the same thing happen many times later on, this was the first time we had witnessed it. It was a hot day. Our neighbors had visitors. The visitors arrived with one of those little, unidentifiable dogs which have a shrill yapping bark and which bark constantly, apparently just for the joy of it.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and the constant shrill yapping got on our nerves before it finally began to bother the dozing cats. At last they went out together. There was a gap in the thick, high hedge dividing the property. Roger went strolling casually through the gap in the hedge, came to an abrupt and horrified stop, and arched his back as though to say, My God, a Dog! Thereupon he whirled and ran for his life back through the gap and along the side of the house. The little dog chased him in furious glee. Roger led him past where Geoff was crouched in wait behind a bush. When Geoff sprang upon the small dog, Roger whirled and joined the fun. Between them they did not so much chase the dog back through the gap as bowl him along. The dog screamed. They sat on our side of the gap, washed for a little bit, and came back into the house and stretched out again. In the hot, lazy afternoon the little dog’s whimpers died away, and there was a pleasant silence, a restful silence.

Before we went north for the summer in 1951, we decided to move further down the coast, down to the Sarasota area, where perhaps we could live on the water. Clearwater was beginning to show the commercial results of the enormous population pressure in the Tampa area, and waterfront was already at a premium which had taken it out of our reach. We knew by then Dick Glendinning, the writer, in Sarasota, and Sally. Dick helped us find a rental for the following season, on Casey Key opposite Nokomis. We rented a frame cottage on four hundred feet of gulf-to-bay land owned by Randy Hagerman, one of the owners of the Plaza Restaurant in Sarasota, stowed possessions there, and headed north.