Last year, Benji was hit by a car. He was Alma’s last cat of the dozen that graced her long life. I heard the thud as I sat sewing at the bay window. When I looked up, Benji lay crumpled on the street and no car in sight. Some asshole hit him and drove off. I threw down my sewing and ran into the street, grabbing my shawl on the way. He was still alive, making a peculiar huffing noise, blood trickling from his jaw that looked all crooked.
Oh no, this will destroy Alma. I scooped his light body up from the pavement and cradled him in the shawl. When I knocked at Alma’s door, it took a while for her to open it. Her eyesight wasn’t the best, so at first, I think she thought I was bringing her a loaf of my sourdough, wrapped in a kitchen towel. But soon she realized what was in my arms and began to cry.
Alma, we’ll can take him to Peter right away. Our healer Peter lives in a cottage just around the corner. Get in my sidecar, I told her, and I’ll hand Benji to you. Her crying had evolved into low keening. I dropped her purple cape over her shoulders, and she slipped on her sandals. I opened the door of the sidecar attached to my bike, and she slid into the seat, creakily, and held her arms open as if to take a baby. Benji was her baby—a cat she’d coddled and loved since he was a feral kitten, discovered in the old shed behind my cottage with three litter mates. We figured the mother had been killed by a car or racoon. The kittens were starving. We found homes for them, all but one. Alma had been without a cat for almost a year then, and when she saw little squirming Benji, she said she had to have him. Or he had to have her.
She fed him with an eyedropper for weeks and carried him close to her warm, wrinkled breast in a sling she asked me to sew for her. I made the sling with indigo cloth I had left over after making Peter’s shirt. Alma was a sight to behold, walking slowly to the corner store with her shopping cart, the sling around her front, a tiny feline face peeping from the folds of blue cloth.
Oh Benji, Benji. Out of my peripheral vision, I could see Alma bent deep over his little body as I pumped the bike, swooshing down the road and around the corner. It took us only a minute to get to Peter’s. We knocked on the door, no answer, so I figured he was in the garden. We trod the narrow path beside the cottage. His back was to us as he sat on his haunches, examining a potato he had just dug from the soil. I looked fondly at the blue indigo cloth straining across the breadth of his back, a breadth of skin and warm muscle I had run my hands over just last night. My knees trembled with desire as I approached him with Benji now in my arms, Alma hobbling behind me.
An hour later, we sat in Peter’s front room on low velvet couches, drinking jasmine tea. Alma was holding a lifeless Benji in her lap. Peter had determined the injuries too severe to save him, so he’d administered a lethal drug in a long needle while Alma stroked the fur, matted with blood. Now, Benji looked so peaceful, curled up in my red wool shawl, Alma’s hand under his little skull.
Neither love nor money will persuade me to ever get another cat, Alma said, her voice soft and sad. She’d stretched her stick-thin legs out before her. Alma liked to wear sandals most of the year, except when it snowed, liked her feet to feel the air, and today I could see her thick greenish toenails and large bunions up close. She was terribly old.
Peter heaved a great sigh. Benji was a fine cat, he said. We had all loved Benji’s antics. He’d dance like Baryshnikov, trying to swat the clouds of gnats that floated above the garden beds in summer. His meow was a sweet question mark, meaow? And if you were lucky enough to hold him in your lap, you were blessed with a vibrational purr that set your thighs buzzing. A deep warmth and contentment emanated from his slight, stripey body. We all loved Benji.
Peter sighed again, shaking his head at the loss. We came to Peter with our sick and injured pets and even, sometimes, with our own ailments. His stinging nettle tonic has reduced my hay fever. His black cohosh tea has helped women all over our neighbourhood with menopause. Peter is not just a skilled herbalist. His magic hands can make me come just by stroking my breasts.
Several weeks after Benji died, a sunny June Saturday, I was at a yard sale with Alma. On summer weekends, Alma and I did the yard sale circuit together on my bike. I pedaled, and she rode sidecar. She has a thing for small dishes, tiny saucers and bowls, sized for fairies. I like to collect children’s books. I don’t have children, and I never will have. I’m fifty this year, but nonetheless I’m charmed by simple stories and illustrations. I would rather read three or four children’s books to myself at bedtime than a novel filled with crime, sex, mystery, and drama.
A book caught my eye, titled Part-time Dog. I opened the cover to the copyright page to check the publication year, 1965. I always do that first because I prefer old books. They provide the most comfort. I bought it, along with several others, two dollars for the lot. Alma found a gold rimmed bowl decorated with an image of two goldfish. Later, we had dinner at my place—a big salad and thick slices of my sourdough. After dinner I gave Alma a framed photograph of Benji dancing in the garden that I’d taken the year before. I’d caught him with both paws in the air, his golden eyes glittering with excitement. One small foot was off the ground as he leapt. The sun played over his orange and brown stripes, and the patch of white on his face made him look almost human. When Alma saw it, tears rolled down her wrinkly face. I moved next to her on the couch and put my arm around her. Not for the first time, Alma said that neither love nor money would persuade her to get another cat. Benji was the best and the last.
That night after Alma left, Peter slipped in my back door, and we made love silently. Through the open window, we heard whoo-hoo from the owl in the tall pine. I felt us smile in unison. What if this life was an illusion? What if I were a character in a children’s story about a happy seamstress and her herbalist? After Peter left, I lay in my narrow bed with the stack of new-to-me children’s books on the bedside table. Part-time Dog was on top, so I started with that.
Brownie is a small stray dog who shows up in the neighbourhood. He starts walking with the children to school, accompanies Mrs. Butterworth to the bank and watches Mrs. Tweedy rake the leaves in her yard. But he has no home, nowhere to go at night, so he sleeps under someone’s porch. Three women in the neighbourhood decide to adopt Brownie. It would be too much work for one of them to have him all the time. So, one gives him breakfast and keeps him in the morning, one has him in the afternoon and gives him his dinner, and another has Brownie every night, where he sleeps in his warm bed, safe and sound. I liked the book so much, I read it again, then fell asleep, dreaming of a little brown dog curled up at my feet.
In September, Peter noticed a white cat in his garden, sleeping on a warm stone, and he scratched her chin and stroked her, gave her some salmon he was cooking for lunch, and then asked around the neighbourhood. Nobody knew anything about her. She was a short-haired female with one blue eye and one golden, and he named her Nia. Peter worried he’d be taking her from her family, but still, nobody claimed her.
She claimed us, wandering back and forth from my cottage to Peter’s. When Peter gardened, she stayed close to his side, and when I sewed, she spread out on the table next to me, her purr matching the vibration of the sewing machine. And though Alma said she’d not have another cat for love nor money, there were many nights when Nia wandered into her cottage and curled up on her bed.
Christmas was simple and good. Alma, Peter, and Nia came to my cottage. We had a stew made with pumpkin from the garden and my sourdough bread. For dessert, Peter brought an apple cranberry pie he’d baked. We walked Alma home, then we went to Peter’s cottage because his bed is bigger than mine. I stayed all night. When I got up, Nia was nowhere to be found. After we drank our coffee, Peter went and called for the cat, but she didn’t come running, her white tail twitching and her little bell tinkling, as she usually did. Frost painted the windows white, and a crust of ice capped the blue bowl of water we kept outside for her. We went to my cottage next, but Nia wasn’t there. At Alma’s, we knocked at the door. No answer, so Peter opened it gingerly, and we called through. Silence. We walked to the back, to Alma’s bedroom, where she lay peacefully, her long white hair flowing out around her across the dark pillowcase, eyes closed in her wrinkled brown face. We knew her life was over. Nia lay at Alma’s feet, purring deep and low.
Later when we cleaned Alma’s cottage and found a copy of her last will and testament, we discovered she’d left the cottage to both of us. When Peter asked me to marry him in the spring, I said yes, you make me happy. But there’s one condition. Let’s keep things as they are.
We sleep sometimes at my place, sometimes at Peter’s, and other times at Alma’s. We kept things the same. The blue sling that kept Benji close to Alma’s chest hangs on the hook near the door, the framed photograph of him on the living room wall. The tiny dishes, neatly arranged, are displayed the way Alma liked them, on open shelves in the kitchen. Nia wanders from one cottage to the other to the other. She knows that food, water, and love are everywhere.
Note: Part-time Dog is a book I read to my children by Jane Thayer, pictures by Seymour Fleishman
At the time, I thought the big change the Tower signified was the crumbling of ego. I was being called to surrender to the slow incremental losses of old age. But the Tower signifies sudden change, and today I believe it foretold the capital c Change the pandemic has brought: change that shakes the very foundations of our lives, change that brings our beliefs and systems under scrutiny and asks us what is most important in life.
Like walking on pink snow, I thought, as my feet padded over a bed of petals under a cluster of Kwanzan Flowering Cherry trees. Here in Victoria, we get more pink snow than white; from February until May these blossoms drift in eddies from their fruit tree homes and fall gently to the ground. And then I remembered an old book from my childhood, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. Sally and her brother were clearing snow outside when the Cat in the Hat ambled by. Even though they remembered the havoc he created in the first book (The Cat in the Hat), they unwisely let him in the house to get out of the cold, where he ate cake in the bathtub, leaving a pink ring. When he tried to clean the bathtub ring, he made things worse: he transferred the pink stain to the mother’s white dress, the father’s shoes, the rug, and the bed. The big Cat asked for help from little cats A, B, and C (who live under his tall hat), but they spread the stain further, onto the white snow outside. You may have read this book, which culminates in “Voom,” an amazing magical cleaning agent under the hat of microscopic cat Z that wiped the snow pure white. But only after all the other 25 alphabet cats plus their leader had transformed the snow into a bubblegum-pink blanket across the yard.
Madeline Ruth Walker 