I was thinking about my old cat Harry today.
Yeah, it's 'day' for me already.
Anyhow, his full name was 'Eve Harrington Cat.' As in the Bette Davis movie "All About Eve," which is the story of an understudy who usurps an actress's leading role. Harry kind of snuck into our lives the same way. I think he was the last indoor cat my parents and I took in...well, Toughie moved indoors eventually, after a year or so of living on our porch. But Harry was the last one we took in specifically as an indoor cat. I think we already knew I was allergic, so taking him in was like having one last chocolate on Christmas Eve.
Harry was our second stray, but the first one who had lived on his own for a long period of time before finding us. Or that's what we assumed, based on the fact that he was our first and only cat who could really hunt.
And I mean really. Harry didn't fuck around. I once came downstairs in the middle of the night to...
Okay, this is why I had my husband install a jump. Be advised that I am now going to talk about formerly living animals whose livingness was terminated by Harry. If that bothers you, stay away.
If, on the other hand, you've owned a farmhouse for forty years, you *love* to hear about cats killing vermin, you're fascinated to see that such behavior could take place in town as well as on a 10-acre country spread, and in fact, you think Harry might actually *be* that stone-cold stalker who lived in your barn for a few years back in the early 80s before moving on...
follow me.
Okay, I once came downstairs in the middle of the night to see Harry rolling half a squirrel around our living room. Yep: half a squirrel. It was like someone had cut it down the middle. Squirrels are perfect cylinders, by the way. And I just saw red inside, no individual parts or anything.
I was a little confused by that, because it was bright red, yet it wasn't actively bleeding. Also, I was really not sure how Harry had managed to bisect the squirrel so cleanly. Shouldn't everything have been all ripped and torn? But maybe he'd *twisted* the squirrel apart. But how, without grabby thumbs, had he managed to...and then Not-A-Country-Girl got a clue.
Duh, he *ate* the squirrel into that condition. That was why it was so neat and clean. He didn't pull it apart, he *ate* it like it was a hot dog. A big gray hot dog. With fur. And now he was rolling it around in some sort of perverse triumph-over/communion-with dynamic in our living room. (Also, by this time, staring at me fearsomely lest I should try to interfere.)
The only sensible thing to do in such a situation is bow humbly to the victor in order to reassure his territorial instincts and his pride, then go upstairs because your dad (a fellow early-morning owl) will be waking up in just a few hours. And he used to live on a farm, so *he* can do whatever it is that ought to be done when a cat starts rolling things around the house.
I don't know what went on between Harry and my father that morning, but I do know that it was resolved some months later when Harry dragged into the house a giant dead male rat, deposited it right in front of my dad, and made a primal, literally bone-chilling cry that I have never forgotten.
Perhaps, when my dad took the squirrel away, Harry had felt that he was questioning his competence. Perhaps he'd felt that my dad was trying to humiliate him or force him to be dependent. (Cats very much know, by the way, who's who in the family. Although my mother was actually the primary wage-earner, my dad had the day-to-day mojo as a cat would perceive it--he brought home the coffee and the paper, he drove me and my mother where we had to go, and, most crucially from a cat's perspective, *he worked at night,* like a hunter.)
Well, the day Harry brought home the rat, he was showing my dad that he was every bit my dad's equal.
Some people might be annoyed, or grossed out, or think it was funny, but not my dad. Or me either. *We* certainly couldn't have killed that damn rat. Or even known it was there. On his own terms, Harry *had* proven himself to us. Not least because it wasn't just that one rat. For the past several weeks, Harry had been working on an entire nest--baby after baby, a telltale pinhole in each of their throats, had showed up on the back porch, and finally the mother.
But of course killing a female is nothing to boast about. So Harry had played it cool. But when he got the daddy rat, when he got the man, when he got the big bad...*that* one came in the *front* door, and it went right to my dad.
#
Whatever Harry was asking for with that deed, I hope he felt he got it. We certainly never forgot what he did, and cats can sense that kind of thing too. He did seem satisfied afterwards. (He moved on to hunting birds, the toughest game of all.)
I don't remember whether Harry died or ran away. I was in college by that time and not home very often.
He was the cat we had the longest, though he wasn't the one I felt the closest to. But I see now that he was the one that I, and we all, *were* closest to. He was the one who loved to stretch out against my stomach at night, feeding off my warmth while lending me his own. He used to play-bite my fingers, gnawing on them for what seemed like hours. And of course he provided for us. He took care of us like a man. It was a lot of work for him. But he did it; he did it for us.
"Eve Harrington" was the wrong name for him in the end. He wasn't a usurper at all.
Hey, Harry. I'm sorry that I never said goodbye.
