Cat-Fish & Fish-Cat, Page 3

resumed her duties.

  The next morning her usual place remained empty, and she did not show at the first milking. Together we looked for her around the house, in the barn, the chicken coop—everywhere the other cats frequented. I suggested we try the dock several times, but Ben resisted, saying she didn't go down there in the mornings. His anxiety rose with the sun's passage, and finally, with great reluctance, he headed for the dock. "I'll be back in a while," he said, which translated meant, I want to go alone. I watched from the upper fence line.

  No sign of her on the dock, so he searched the field where she had preferred to hunt, and I could hear him calling as he walked through the shin high grass. "Kitty, Kitty...you here?" There was no answer and no trace. Out of ideas, he went out on the dock and sat by himself for a while, trying to think of what might have become of his new friend. The soft blurping noises the fish made when expecting to be fed drew his attention, and he sat cross-legged, watching the numerous catfish finning on the surface. I had just decided to leave when he got down on his stomach and dangled his arm down toward the water. It was something we both liked to do, to run a finger over the back of Cat-Fish with its red yarn-decorated dorsal fin. Even from a distance I could see him stiffen as his fingers touched something.

  It was a Sunday, and Ben spoke little for the rest of the day, resisting the well-meaning efforts of family members to draw other images for him to dwell on. He seldom dug so deep into his emotions, and the things he must have turned up while sitting in a chair and looking out over the ponds, both surprised and frightened him. "Nothing lives forever," he had told me many times, after every intended death of some farm animal, such as a yearling steer, a fat goose or numerous wiener pigs. A couple of dogs had grown tired and died on his watch, victims of too much living, and neither had evoked any obvious emotional angst. And Ben's prowess as a hunter and trapper was too well known for us to anticipate sentimentality.

  But I recognized the features of that emotion from personal experience. On that Sunday it sat in an old cane chair in the middle of the pasture, staring into the past like old people do. The mopish face of bruised sentiment attracted me, mainly because it was worn where I had never seen it before.

  Later that evening I watched in silence and shared grief as Ben used a needle and thread to sew the remains of Kitty into the little rug he'd made of her mother's skin. The sad, macabre little package complete, we went into the field together and chose a place close by the pond, dug a deep hole, and lowered the bundle into the ground. We didn't know what words would be appropriate, but after filling the hole and replacing the sod, Ben stood, his eyes moist, and his voice faltered momentarily before he regained control.

  "I pushed you too hard," he said in a whisper. "Should have let things be. You were a good little cat."

  Though Cat-Fish no longer received the meaty offerings it had become accustomed to, it remained in the pond for as long as I lived there. And every year after that, when a mother cat paraded out a new litter of kittens, I looked for one that had the distinct black, rust and white markings of a calico. Two more came our way before I left the farm for good, and they were nice cats, fun-loving, sweet little animals. Ben wanted nothing to do with them, and never again did he get emotionally attached to a pet, neither to them nor to any of our large menagerie of farm animals.

  Appropriately so, perhaps, for there was only one Fish-Cat, only one Cat-Fish, and only one Bendigo Joules.