Cats In Clover

  ***

  Ben now felt sorry for the deer because they couldn't get into the vegetable garden and began feeding them as well as the raccoons. Nicky was happy to be working again, herding the deer in a tight group while they munched. When they finished, he frantically tried to round them up as they wandered away. It usually took them an hour or so to shake him off and disappear into the trees. Nicky would come home, tongue lolling out, and sit at Ben's feet, waiting for praise.

  "How many more animals are you going to adopt?" I asked.

  "I haven't adopted them. It's just that they're hungry and there's nothing for them to eat right now."

  The deer had survived before Ben came along and I was sure they'd go on surviving without him, but I handed over all the vegetable scraps and bought huge sacks of carrots at the feed store whenever I drove into Mora Bay. Ben gave me frequent updates on what the deer liked and didn't like.

  "They won't eat onion," he said. "Bread is okay if there's nothing else but they really love pumpkin. Next year I'll have to plant more than a couple of rows. If I could get a greenhouse going, I'd have lettuce and celery for them all year long."

  "Keep enough for us," I said, not wanting to remind him that we wouldn't be on the farm next year. I carried the salad bowl to the dining room table, only to discover that George and Henry were lying in the middle of it again.

  This was the most recent 'in' place and I felt George had gone too far. One afternoon I'd removed him from the table nine times in fifteen minutes, my admonitions progressing from a gentle, "Sweetie, this table is not for cats," to a screaming, red-faced, "Get off there, you miserable flea-bitten wretch; I said NO!"

  But George could out-stubborn me without even trying. Defeated, we now removed place mats and spread sleeping towels on the table for the cats as soon as dinner was over.

  "If I had as much determination as that cat, I could rule the world," I said to Ben, as I put the salad on the sideboard.

  Both cats squawked as I lifted them off the table. They hovered as we removed the towels, wiped off cat hair, laid the table and put our food down. They hovered as we ate, only slightly distracted by little treats of chicken off our plates. The minute we took the empty plates out to the kitchen, they reclaimed the territory. This battle for supremacy had made the dining room table an 'in' place far longer than usual.

  That evening I was hosting the weekly bridge game. I ignored the outraged complaints as I removed the royals again, laid a new cloth and put out the cards, score pads, ashtrays and pencils. Onto the sideboard went a plate of cookies, napkins, and glasses ready for drinks. George and Henry, sensing I meant business, sought temporary roosts.

  The game proceeded without incident for a couple of hours. Then Henry decided I'd been allowed to have my own way long enough. While I was in the kitchen getting fresh drinks, he jumped from my chair onto the table. I returned just as he stretched out on the dummy hand.

  "Kindly remove that cat or I'll trump him," Frank said, favoring Henry with a benevolent smile.

  I removed Henry and rearranged the cards. He tried twice again to sabotage the game before Jerry lifted Henry onto his knees. "He can sleep on my lap for a while." Jerry rubbed Henry's head.

  George made one minor attempt to reclaim the table by leaping up onto the three inches of space between the plate of cookies and the edge of the sideboard. He teetered precariously and I didn't know whether to rescue him or the cookies. I chose the cookies, figuring that if George fell off backwards, he could roll over in mid-air and land on his feet. The cookies were helpless.

  It wasn't until Jerry, Cindy and Frank left, much later than George thought they should have, that he tried again. As I was putting beer mugs on the kitchen counter, I heard a loud crash. I rushed into the dining room to find that George had leapt onto the table and skidded across it, sliding the cloth half off. Scattered on the carpet were two decks of cards, five pencils, four score pads, two empty glasses, three expiring ice cubes and, upside down, a dish of peanuts and the ashtray.

  George studied the mess with considerable interest, then looked at me. Now how did that happen?

  I removed him, straightened the cloth and laid out his towel. I picked up the debris. I refrained from screaming only because Ben was asleep.

  George chose the next 'in' place by clawing a bath towel off the bar onto the heat register below and curling up on it. Henry bedded down on the toilet seat, which was covered with thick, soft material. Soon George joined him. It was a fine location for them, but inconvenient for us.

  When I stumbled half asleep to the bathroom in the dark, it was disconcerting to find I couldn't lift the toilet seat. By the time I realized it was weighed down by 25 pounds of cat, they were awake and protesting. I dumped them on the floor and they retaliated by scrambling back up onto my warm bare knees. We considered tramping upstairs to use the other bathroom.

  "It hardly seems worth the trouble," I said. "George is determined to sleep on whatever we want to use."

  "He just likes to be close to us," St. Francis replied.

  Soon the bathroom was 'out.' I was not comforted. The cats regularly recycled their sleeping places and a few weeks later the bathroom would be 'in' again, just as the bedroom dresser was now regaining its popularity.

  Henry started it. He leapt onto my dresser, skidded on the dresser scarf, smacked into the wall and ricocheted onto my jewelry case. Since he hadn't quite knocked it off the dresser, he sat on it, excess parts of him sagging over the edges. It was too small to sleep on so he left, scrambling the dresser scarf into a complete mess and knocking my antique doll to the floor. Having achieved an appropriately lived-in look for the bedroom, he curled up on the bed and went happily to sleep.

  Later I found George asleep in the laundry sink.

  "Good thing there wasn't a wash going through," I told him. "You'd have been soaked when the washer drained."

  Perhaps he did occasionally listen to what I said, because next day he was curled up in the newspaper recycling box. I put a towel on top of the papers and he was happy there for some time.

  "It's as good a spot as any," Ben said. "If he gets recycled along with the newspapers, at least he's got eight more lives to go."

  XXI - Winter Games

  The first snowfall came a week before Christmas. It wasn't the usual wet, heavy, slippery snow that snarls traffic and frays tempers, but a light dusting that kept us nervously watching out the window for the real thing. Nicky thought it was wonderful stuff to play with. He raced around, barking at the flakes falling on his nose, and pawed at the inch or so that had accumulated on the ground.

  George, however, regarded snow as a cold, wet insult to Royal feet and shook each paw after picking it up. His progress across the back yard was slow, his expression grumpy. Henry, well-padded with thick fur, flopped down and looked at the other two as though they were crazy.

  "Did I ever tell you about my Aunt Ruth's cat, Sheba?" I asked Ben when he rose to pour a second breakfast coffee.

  He looked resigned. "All right, it's a snowy morning and I have nothing better to do. Go ahead."

  "I spent a couple of weeks over Christmas with Ruth one year and every day I took Sheba outside to play. She liked to tunnel in deep snow and pop up every few feet. She probably thought she was surprising me, but I could see the snow collapsing behind her as she burrowed."

  Ben poured the coffee. "I wouldn't have thought Siamese liked snow. Then what happened?"

  "Nothing."

  "That wasn't a story. That wasn't even an anecdote." Ben removed Henry from the editorial page for the third time that morning.

  "I have a real Sheba story."

  Henry walked in front of Ben, affectionately brushing the Houseboy's chin with his big frothy tail, and flopped on the newspaper again. Ben cuddled him. "Poor old Henry. You can lie on the editorial if you want." He looked at me. "So tell me the story."

  Aunt Ruth used to let Sheba out in the morning and watch her from the kitchen window.
When Sheba finished tormenting the dog, she'd climb onto the tool shed roof. Soon half a dozen cats would join her. After planning the day's hunt and gossiping about the difficulty of getting good slaves, they'd disappear. Ruth didn't know where they went or what they did until a neighbor spoke to her later.

  "Is this the first cat you've owned?" she asked, pointing at the lean and elegant Sheba.

  "About the twentieth, I believe," Aunt Ruth said, puzzled. "Why do you ask?"

  "Oh, just wondering."

  A few days later, another neighbor stopped my aunt in the street. "That dear little cat of yours is very thin," she said. "Had you noticed?"

  It turned out that Sheba visited several houses on the street every day, begging for food in a weak little voice and gulping whatever she was given. The neighbors were sure Aunt Ruth had been starving her.

  Ben put down his coffee mug. "Siamese cats always look like they're starving." Since being enslaved by George, he'd read every cat book in the Mora Bay library and was now ordering them from other libraries.

  That night we were wakened by a distinctly feline wailing outside. In dressing gowns and slippers, we opened every door and looked out. The pitiful meowing continued, but no matter how hard we peered into the drifting snow flakes, we couldn't see a cat anywhere.

  "Let's find out if George and Henry are in the house," said Ben. "It could be one of the neighbors' cats."

  We looked into, under, on top of, behind and beside everything in the house. Henry snored on the couch and Nicky slept in his chair, but there was no George. We went into the snowstorm and stood on the kitchen deck, calling.

  "Meow!" came the forlorn cry. But where was he?

  "Meow!" I could have sworn that one had come from above and behind me.

  It had. George was on the roof.

  I stretched my arms up toward the eaves. "Come on, George. I can catch you."

  He teetered on the edge, meowing, but refused to jump.

  I bent over. "Jump on my back, George." I'd have claw marks for weeks, but I was willing to pay any price to get back to my warm bed.

  George had no intention of trusting his precious body to an unreliable slave. He moaned some more and disappeared over the top of the roof. We brushed snow off ourselves and ran through the house and out the front door, calling.

  He decided he couldn't climb down the veranda roof, either, and continued his heartrending cries.

  "His feet must be freezing," Ben said. "I wonder how long he's been stranded up there."

  I remembered there were two gnarled oak trees beside the house on the north side. It seemed obvious that he'd climbed onto the roof from one of those and Ben agreed.

  "Well, if he went up that way, he can come down that way," I said, suddenly suspecting that George was teasing us. "I'm going back inside."

  The Houseboy was shocked. "We can't just leave him! He's probably forgotten how he got up there. He might slip and fall, with all this snow."

  I couldn't convince Ben that George would come down on his own if we quit playing his silly game. He got the rickety old step-ladder from the workshop and set it up on the cedar deck.

  "You go up," he said. "You're lighter than me."

  I climbed as high as I dared, nervous of damaging my own precious body. George came to the eaves and nuzzled my hand. I grabbed him and tried to swing him up and out, away from the roof, so I could hand him to Ben, but George got a death grip on the metal lip of the eaves and refused to let go. The ladder quaked under my freezing cold feet.

  "George, cooperate! I'm rescuing you from death by exposure."

  Desperation and brute strength finally did the trick. I handed George to Ben and crawled down the ladder.

  Inside the house, George let out a triumphant yowl, which woke Nicky and Henry, and raced up and down the hall a few times. His shivering servants made themselves cocoa and took their frozen feet back to bed.

  A couple of days later, when the snow had melted, I happened to look out the bathroom window just as George skittered up the oak tree outside. He balanced himself in the Y of two tiny branches and leapt across three feet of empty space to the roof.

  After a moment he began meowing. Piteously.

  I poured a cup of coffee and leaned on the bathroom window sill, prepared to wait and watch for as long as it took George to decide to come down again.

  Sure enough, he got tired of crying wolf and came to the edge of the roof. He floated effortlessly through the air to the Y of the branch, walked daintily down a larger branch to the main trunk, then saw me. He raced down the tree head first, around the corner of the house and in through the cat door, doing a gloating Siamese yell.

  Needless to say, he never again asked to be rescued from the roof. Cats know that a practical joke is only funny if the victims don't catch on.

  Ben and I noticed, as we were hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree, that George's sense of humor extended only to his own jokes. He was not amused when Henry, lying in wait behind a door, pounced on him when he walked by. The King squawked, wriggled out from under Henry's big paws and leapt to safety on the bookcase. Henry tried to coax him down with bird-like trills but the King refused to damage his dignity by joining in Henry's frivolity.

  "Come to think of it," Ben said, "it's hard to imagine George as a baby. He's so dignified and self-important now that he must have been one solemn little kitten."

  "He's a lot more playful than when we first got him."

  "Only when it's his idea." George would sometimes condescend to bat the crumpled tea bag envelopes he'd trained us to throw for him, but he did it with an air of doing us a big favor. "But you're right. I guess he's finally sure he owns us and the farm."

  "He wouldn't have let Henry stay otherwise."

  George also liked chasing string when he was in the mood, but if Henry joined the act there was chaos. They each demanded exclusive possession and ended up chasing each other instead. I tried dragging two pieces of string around but they zeroed in on the same one or stalked off, unable to deal with the stress of deciding which string was the Royal one. They sometimes stared at me as though puzzled that I would pretend one string was as good as another.

  Ben finished arranging the Christmas lights and I draped the last handful of icicles on the branches. We stood back to admire our handiwork.

  "This calls for a drink," Ben said. "We may as well start the celebrating early."

  "Crush some catnip for His Magnificence, too."

  Ben laughed. "Good idea. He hasn't been drunk and disorderly since he ate it in the garden last summer."

  Catnip was the only thing that got George off his high horse. After three nibbles, his eyes crossed and his muscles lost coordination. Four nibbles and he'd roll over on his back, expression blissful, legs flopping in every direction. Sobriety brought, not remorse, but an exaggerated hauteur which denied the episode had ever happened. Life for Henry was already enough fun; he never bothered with catnip.

  Ben brought our drinks and we sat down to admire the lights sparkling in the fir tree. Not for long, however. George, having chewed his catnip, chose to fly around the room on top of the furniture. After a small figurine on a side table hit the floor when he skidded out of control, I removed the breakables from his path.

  "How long do you think it'll take him to sober up?" Ben asked.

  I didn't get a chance to answer. George streaked across the couch, knocking the book out of my hands. By the time I bent down to pick it up, he was on his next lap around the room and used my back as a launching pad to the top of the piano.

  "Somebody should arrest that cat for reckless driving," I said, removing myself from George's orbit and rubbing the claw indentations in my back.

  "Or for contravening the federal laws on low-flying aircraft." Ben tried to catch George on his next fly-by and missed. "Why don't you play hide-and-seek with him? He's in the mood to be silly."

  The hide-and-seek game had begun a few weeks earlier. I'd wait until George was asleep, the
n hide behind the bedroom door and call him. When he walked past the edge of the door, looking for me, I'd pop my head out and say "Boo!" George would start, flatten his ears and stalk away, tail lashing. He never fell for it twice in an evening, but I 'got' him, on average, once a week.

  "It won't work unless he's asleep. How about another brandy? I've got time for one more chapter of this murder mystery before supper." Henry cuddled into my lap and purred his approval.

  "Good idea. Where's George gone?"

  "Probably to sleep it off. He wants to be in good shape for supper since you've made chicken for him."

  Half an hour later I was roused from my mystery by George summoning me imperiously from the kitchen. "I wonder what he wants. He knows it isn't time to eat yet."

  "My fault," Ben said. "I forgot to give him his treats at noon. He's hungry."

  I lifted Henry from my lap, dropped the book and rose. "I'm coming, George. And we'll give the Houseboy ten lashes with a wet noodle."

  As I stepped through the doorway into the dark kitchen, George jumped at me and bellowed. I yelped and jerked back in surprise. He smiled with immense satisfaction and strolled into the living room with a triumphant waggle of his behind.

  "Serves you right," Ben said, as I settled down with my book again.

  I'd read perhaps two words when the sound of a tree ornament hitting the floor made me look up. George was standing on his hind feet and reaching into the branches for another one.

  "George! No!"

  He ignored me, but Henry jumped off my lap and went over to see what the King was doing. He began pulling coloured balls off the branches, too.

  "Listen, you two!"

  "Oh, just ignore them," Ben said. "They'll get bored after a while."

  It didn't look as though boredom would set in any time soon. Once they'd taken all the ornaments off the bottom branches they spent the next half hour batting them to the far corners of the house. When I couldn't stand it any longer, I distracted the two deconstruction experts with dishes of chicken and rehung the ornaments.

  After supper George and Henry learned how to reach the higher branches. Henry stood on the end of the couch and snagged coloured balls from there; George was balanced precariously on top of the piano, swiping at ornaments with one paw. The tree was half denuded.

  I gathered up the ornaments and hid them in a box. "I'll put them back in the morning," I said. "Maybe by that time the cats will have forgotten this game."

  At eight, Cal Peterson wandered in to have a pre-Christmas drink with us. "How come you only decorated part of the tree?"

  George and Henry, looking as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths, sat solemn and dignified in front of the tree, pretending they weren't a bit interested in it.

  When I explained that the cats had taken down most of the ornaments, Cal shook his head. "They couldn't reach the top of the tree," he said. "If you've run out of things to put on it, I've got some I can loan you."