The Cat's Meow

rural life

We were moving from the small house that was like a share-croppers shack into the large farmhouse we had just bought.  We had spent a summer in the small place and even had a vegetable garden in the back yard.  Of course that was the year of the seven year locust’s so our garden was for naught.  For a while you couldn’t even walk outside to the car without covering your face.  Worst I had ever seen.  We were renting on a month to month while we searched for a house to buy.  We had just moved from the St. Louis area and it was our first experience with country living.

 

The small house was on a dirt road that ran about a mile toward town and behind the local school.  The other direction was a quarter mile to the paved road.  At night it wasn’t unusual to see a panther ghost across the road at the edge of your headlights.  Rumor had it that there was a family of black panthers, the cats not the activists, living in the woods between our town and the even smaller town up the blacktop thirteen miles.

 

We had been moving most of the day and Josh and I went back for the final load.  We had everything loaded and were just looking around the empty house and sweeping up when we heard the scream.  It was one of the cats right outside the house.  Jamie Lee Curtis and Janet Leigh screaming together couldn’t have created the terror we felt from that big cat’s scream.  I owned two weapons at that time.  A .22 pistol and a shotgun.  Both had already been moved to the new place.  All we had left for protection was two brooms and a dustpan.

 

We turned on the floodlights outback and on the corners of the house.  That was more to give us a false sense of security than anything else.  After ten minutes and no more screams, I eased out the front door and opened the passenger door to the truck.  I called to Josh and he ran out and jumped in the truck.  I am certain I left finger marks on the broom handle as I circled the front of the truck and got in the driver’s side.  We didn’t hang around, but drove the four miles to our new home.

 

The next day after unloading the rental truck and returning it, I drove back to the small house.  Before I turned in the key, I knew I needed to turn off the lights and lock the door, something we had been in too big a hurry to do the night before.  In broad daylight the terror I felt that last night seemed silly; until I walked along the back of the house under the windows.  There in the dirt, were paw prints that measured a good three and a half inches across.  They circled the house before disappearing through the decimated garden.  I’ll never know if they were made before we turned on the floodlights, or after, but Josh and I made several trips in the dark to the truck with boxes and chairs before we started sweeping up…just before the scream.

 

A couple of months later I was relating this story to one of the elders in our church, Artie Baugh.  He started laughing and told the tale of his son Tom, who lived on a farm between where our new house was and the old one.  Seems Tom was out checking on the cattle one night because they were lowing and he figured it was coyotes.  As he headed back to the house, he saw a big black cat stalking back and forth on his back porch.  Like me, Tom was unarmed except for the walking stick he had with him.  He grabbed a feed bucket and started banging on it with the stick while he yelled at the cat.  It looked at him for a short spell before slinking off in the dark.  Artie said with a crinkle around his eyes that Tom had to clean out his pants after that encounter.

 

I didn’t feel so bad after that.  Nothing like misery shared to make a man feel accepted into the community.