Cherished Read Free Page A

sixteen-year-old cat is curled on a blanket out there. He has an awkward cast on one of his hind legs. I broke the cat’s leg three days ago when I accidentally backed over him in my car. The cat is deaf, or nearly so. He was sleeping under the car and must not have heard it crank. I felt the little bump of the wheel going over his leg and then saw him limp away, dragging one useless leg.
    James Merrill says, “You hardly ever need to state your feelings. The point is to feel and keep the eyes open. Then what you feel is expressed, is mimed back at you by the scene.”
    After the first day in the cast, the cat — his name is General Sterling Price, after a cat in a John Wayne movie — did not move off his blanket. I have to put his food on a little paper plate and place it near his head. He eats what he can reach without getting up and then pulls the plate closer with one paw. Once I came out and he was asleep with his head in the plate.
    Charles Wright says, “What you have to say — though ultimately all-important — in most cases will not be news. How you say it just might be.”
    On the day I broke the cat’s leg, my fourteen-year-old son said, “This cat has been with us for all my life.” Though he said it in a surprised tone, as if he’d just realized that fact, I thought, thanks, that’s something I really needed to hear.
    Before the accident, The General — for some reason we always referred to him with the article — was looking elderly. He had lost weight and was finicky about what he ate. Like I said, he had mostly lost his hearing, and his eyesight wasn’t great. A little dog in our neighborhood would sometimes escape from his fence and come to bark at The General. The General would be asleep in his favorite spot and the dog would come up behind and let go a tremendous chorus of soprano barking. The General would continue to sleep peacefully.
    â€œAll you need is one emotion and four walls for a shortstory,” says Willa Cather.
    The General doesn’t like it in the garage. He’s an outdoor cat. The first day he was in the garage, he would drag himself toward the door when I opened it to get the car out. In his youth, he was a real fighter, a night prowler. I know for a fact that he once tangled with a raccoon and held his own. He would slink in mornings with patches of fur missing or a gash in his shoulder. His ears are ragged as old battle flags.
    Even as a kitten, The General was the bold sort. One Saturday afternoon when we had had him for only about two weeks, I was lying in a hammock in our backyard. The General, just a little orange rag of a thing, was chasing down grasshoppers. I think I dozed for a bit. Then I heard The General’s plaintive meowing. At first, I couldn’t locate him. Then I saw him perched on a limb of the pine that held up one end of the hammock. He was twenty, thirty feet off the ground.
    I didn’t have a ladder that long. The trunk of the tree was limbless nearly up to where The General was stranded. He was starting to panic, and so was I. I dashed into the house and grabbed a pillow from our bed. I got back just in time to see the kitten hanging by his forepaws on the limb. His claws lost their grip, and I caught him in the pillow, a Hail Mary for sure. He seemed unfazed and went back to stalking grasshoppers.
    Just now I had to clean up a place in the garage where he crawled off the blanket and urinated.
    â€œIt begins with a character usually,” William Faulkner says. “Once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil [orpillow] trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”
    When my son was an infant, The General, when we weren’t looking, got into his crib and peed on his head. I think the cat was feeling ignored, and probably territorial with this new animal. Though neutered, The General always