poem5

A cat story5

　

My great aunt Mona lived with her father my great grandfather Esau who my brother was named after, but we won’t go into that.

Instead we will go into the cat problem they had one year. They lived in our family home near the Canadian border. A great rambling place with big wrap-around porches and old trees spreading over the front, two of them are pine trees planted by my great grandfathers father during the civil war at the time of the Great bank Robbery as they called it back then, on main street in St. Albans. These pines rise nearly one hundred feet, and in them prowled the notorious Snoball.

Snoball was my great aunts cat. Black as rage, black as night, dark as the woods he inhabited at night. He was mean and ugly and brain damaged. The old folks though couldn’t see this. Hence the name. But unconsciously great aunt Mona felt something about her beloved Snoball was out of alignment. The cat would come in the middle of the day and climb the laundry room curtains, shredding them. The cat seemed odd, and had a mind of it’s own.

Old Esau believed believed the cat was stealing his Chesterfields. He kept them on the cupboard in the parlor, and they were disappearing.

“Of course they’re disappearing” said aunt Mona to her father, your smoking them”. My great grandfather was deaf in both ears as we liked to say and as he faced great aunt Mona in the narrow hallway’s dim light, between the house and the horse barn, she had to talk in loud polite syllables to him. She would pound her canes (she had two of them) and he, not getting the message, would be talking about the cigarettes the cat took. About why the sonofabitching cats would want his Chesterfields. Pounding his cane for emphasis. And Mona would become exasperated, losing some of her CHRISTIAN PATIENCE, she would say very slowly thumping both canes with each word…”Snoball. is. not. smoking. your. BLESSED. cigarettes”. Thus went most of the conversation between them. The canes did most of the communicating.

One day Snoball brought a little cat back to his place. He talks her into hoping up on the sideboard in the parlor, pushing the Chesterfields off the edge onto the floor where they always scatter. Down they leap putting cigarettes in their mouths, running to the kitchen where Snoball teaches the young cat to light the cigarette through the back of the wood stove.

Then out to the horse barn where the fun really begins. Within no time Snoball is daddy, then daddy again, then his offspring become daddies and mommies. Oh well.

There were eight kittens and then they grew, Great aunt Mona and my great grandfather Esau loved having the kittens in the house, rolling around, underfoot. It made the house seem more lived in, it took away some of the loneliness that lived in the corners. Old Esau didn’t even complain about his Chesterfields.

But then eight became thirteen in true Fibonacci fashion, and suddenly twenty one and last count one hundred and forty cats were passing back and forth between the house and the horse barn. Climbing in uncle Georges boat that was stored in the barn, climbing in the pine trees, harassing the squirrels, kneading bread on the parlor chairs.

The thing was, neither of the old folks noticed the population explosion. They liked it; old Esau loved feeding the cats milk and bread in a bowl. Great aunt Mona felt more alive than she had in ages, she loved to shake the cat hair out of the rugs, stomping them with a broom out on the clothesline on a spring day.

Unfortunately though, the neighbors having heard about how the two of them had suddenly gone a bit daft, what with cats running across the roads, and playing in the Highgate civil war cemetery that abutted Esau’s house. THAT being the “final straw” according to Henry Benoit during the town selectman’s meeting. Of course, everyone likes everyone in a small town out near the Canadian border. And Henry was all in favor of letting people do what they damned well pleased… but, it was voted seven to three, that someone would just have to go and do something about this cat problem over at Mona and Esau’s place.

Of course. Of course no one really wanted to do anything. After all it wasn’t their place, being cowardly, so they called me. I being family and all. I was nineteen at the time. And had my first car, a 1968 Dodge Dart. I thought my father would help. Of course he was rather useless when it came to making solid decisions, and so, he delegated it to yours truly.

　

I went to Highgate, to our ancestral home. I took away a few cats each trip up to visit. Ten or fifteen cats at a time were hardly missed. After a number of these trips, I had brought the population of (mostly black) cats to a tolerable feline level. Mona nor Esau never noticed much of a difference between 200 cats and ten cats. I stabilized things down to about four. Four cats that I could find. I brought those four to the vet and had them fixed. Fixed, and our cat problem was finally fixed.

Esau and Mona still had cats enough to feed and care for, and the select board seemed to be happy. Of course the select board were made up of farmers and two feed store owners as well as all those other farmers along the border . And so, well, I felt it poetically justified, of me to drive evenings, letting off black cats a few here and a few there, on farms across the northern tier of Vermont. Soon there was a strange unexplained wave of wild black cats popping up in barns across Vermont.

Oh well.

　

　

　

　

　

BatangChe

Reviews

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i remember this one too
brilliantly written and narrated