Dewey's Nine Lives (30 page)

It’s hard for me to think about that day. I’m sorry, you probably think I’m weird, but it’s hard. I won’t talk about his death. I just can’t. Because I miss him. Even fifteen years later, I miss my Marshmallow. But there was so much joy in his life. So much joy. He was with me from ten years old to twenty-seven, and it was an awe-some journey. I wouldn’t be where I am today without it, so I count it as a blessing. Obviously. Even the bad parts were a blessing. I mean, how many people get seventeen years with an animal, you know? How many people ever get to experience that kind of love?

EIGHT

C
arol Ann Riggs surprised me. Her short note about Church Cat, a stray cat adopted by the Camden United Methodist Church in Camden, Alabama, had piqued my interest, but after the first ten minutes of our telephone conversation, I must admit, I was completely flummoxed. Not by the things she said, but by the way she said them. Ms. Carol Ann Riggs (as her friends call her) had an extraordinary Southern accent, the kind full of slow, honey-dripping pronunciations, the “sugahs” mixing with the “small-town law-yas” and singing in “the church qui-ah.”

I must admit, I liked it immensely. And I liked Carol Ann Riggs, too. She was born in the tiny town of Bragg, Alabama, where the nearest high school was a thirty-mile bus ride away. (Even today, Lowndes County has only two public high schools.) When she married Harris Riggs at nineteen and moved to his hometown of Camden, she thought she was moving to the big city. Camden, after all, had two stoplights, two restaurants, two banks, and almost fifteen hundred people. But it was a wonderfully friendly place, despite the “large” size. There wasn’t much money in Camden, but when someone died, not only did all the neighbors bring food, everyone in town attended the funeral. “Almost everybody was kin to everybody,” Carol Ann told me, and that included her husband Harris’s “people,” who for several generations had operated the town’s hardware store. Carol Ann wasn’t a librarian—she worked for that small town “law-ya” I mentioned earlier—but she was a longtime member of the local library board. And despite my misgivings about library boards, I liked that. In fact, I liked everything about her. Especially that accent.

“I know, I know,” her friend Kim Knox said. “It’s that Southern accent you hear on television, and you say to yourself,
That’s not real
.” Kim was born and raised across the border in Laurel, Mississippi, so she knows Southern accents. “But that’s a Camden accent. Lots of people in Camden talk that way. People think its old Southern aristocrat, but people in Camden aren’t like that. They’re very down to earth. Not any kind of attitude or anything.”

It’s the isolation, Kim figures, that keeps the citizens of Camden so charming. The town is the seat of Wilcox County, a sparsely populated area in the hardpan hill country of southwest Alabama. The county has only thirteen thousand residents, less even than Clay County, Iowa, and the median income is only sixteen thousand dollars, a third of the national median and six thousand dollars below the poverty line. People think of south Alabama as plantation country, with sprawling mansions and fields of cotton. But you don’t see large farms in Wilcox County. You see the occasional small family farm, essentially a sharecropper’s plot, sandwiched between thousands upon thousands of acres of tall straight southern pines.

“It’s a town in the middle of nowhere,” Kim Knox said. “It’s a picturesque gem.” When I heard that, I thought of Spencer, with its wide sidewalks and blocks of locally owned, pleasantly thread-worn shops. I pictured a town where the generations have their own tables at the local diner and a cup of coffee lasted two hours at least.

But Camden didn’t work like that, as photographs of their threadbare downtown showed. In Camden, the social life wasn’t centered on the commercial strip. There weren’t any movie theatres, fancy restaurants, or chain superstores. The center of social life in Camden, Alabama, was the churches. The four largest were located, one after another, on a stretch of Broad Street that was as immaculately maintained as the nearby shopping district was ragged. The biggest was the Baptist church. Across the street, next door to each other, were the two Presbyterian churches. Down the block toward the town’s main intersection and next to the Exxon gas station that marked the unofficial entrance to downtown was Camden United Methodist. None of the churches were huge—between them they probably had seven hundred members, or about half the town—but they offered meals, prayer meetings, youth activities, and adult and junior “qui-ahs.” And when something important came along, like the yearly Christmas pageant, they all worked together to put on a show.

It was Camden Methodist’s newest member and part-time secretary, Kim Knox, who first noticed the cat outside the old parsonage that served as the church’s administrative office. The cat was a little gray tabby, and when Kim walked out for a short break, the cat was crouched in the shadow of the nearby bushes. She had an adorable round face with soft eyes, and when Kim looked at her, the cat didn’t turn away but kept staring right toward her. Then she started talking. When Kim talked back—“well, hey, kitty cat”—the cat jumped onto the porch, causing Kim to, quite naturally, reach down and pet her. The cat rolled over for a belly rub. When Kim opened the door to return to her office, the cat hopped up and jogged inside.

Hmmm.

Now, Camden United Methodist was not a formal church. It could be formal about some things, like its doxology and its sanctuary, but in general it was a blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth congregation. The administrative offices were, to say the least, not pristine. The old parsonage was a one-story, cottage-style house from the early 1920s, with creaking floorboards and clattering windows, and the small space was overflowing with boxes and files. The pastor was from the laid-back school of liturgy, always sporting an open collar, an absent-minded smile, and a joke for his parishioners. Even Kim wasn’t the typical fussy church secretary. It seemed to her, after a bit of reflection, that a stray cat might fit right in.

But she wasn’t sure. The pastor’s office of a small-town church was a community gathering place. People were always dropping by, not just to talk about problems but to gossip and shoot the breeze. What if they didn’t feel comfortable with the sweet, moon-faced gray cat now lounging in their secretary’s chair? Was it really appropriate for the part-time secretary, who had been in town only a few months, to let a cat live in the church?

Meow
, the gray tabby said, right on cue.

Fortunately, the next person to enter the parsonage was Ms. Carol Ann Riggs. Carol Ann had been a member of Camden Methodist since moving to town in 1961. She was in the choir and on several committees and knew just about everybody, so she often dropped by to say hello and see if anything needed doing. Her daughters had gone to college and then moved away, so Carol Ann had, in a sense, taken to mothering the Camden Methodist congregation. She was also, as Kim discovered, a lifelong cat lover.

“Oh, you have to keep her,” Carol Ann said, when the little tabby sauntered over to sniff her hand and meow. “She’s just dah-lin.” She didn’t tell Kim that she was pretty sure she’d just adopted a prison cat. There were a gaggle of them that lived in the alley behind the jail, waiting for the prison cook to throw out the scraps. It wouldn’t have been any problem for this little kitten to stroll a block down Broad Street, then cross the street to the parsonage door.

Instead, Carol Ann simply said, “Kim, you’ve got to hold on to this little sugah.” And since Carol Ann had been a member of the church for decades, and since her husband’s family had been in Camden for generations, that was all the endorsement Kim needed.

The next time Carol Ann dropped by the parsonage—and she suddenly found more excuses to do that than ever—the little gray tabby was sitting in the middle of Kim’s chair. Kim was perched hazardously on the front edge.

“She tried to sit on my lap,” Kim told her, a little embarrassed, “but she hated how many times I got up and down. So she took the comfortable part of the seat.”

Meow
, the cat said, as if in agreement, before jumping down to let Carol Ann pet her. She slept most of the day, snuggled behind Kim on the chair, but every time someone came in, she meowed and ran to greet them.

“Well, hey, little girl,” most people would say, reaching down to pet her. “Aren’t you darling?”

And she was. The little cat was irresistible. Even Carol Ann, who had owned and loved animals all her life, had to admit this kitten was special. Maybe it was her round face, which was so soft and babyish. Or her sweet disposition. Her meow was so peaceful, and her approach so gentle, that you couldn’t help being drawn to her. She was spunky. She was friendly. But more than that, she was endearing. That’s the word: endearing. You couldn’t look at her sauntering across the floor toward you with her sweet eyes upturned without thinking,
aaawwww
.

Still, the kitten almost certainly elicited smirks from the more starched-collar members of the congregation. They never said anything, at least not to Kim, but nothing that happened around there, neither rude look nor sly remark, ever slipped past Carol Ann.

“They just didn’t like animals,” she explained. “I can put my finger on each one of them right now, and I know they didn’t have animals in their homes. They weren’t raised with them, you see, so they never understood them. They didn’t think it was appropriate for a church to have an animal.”

Any tension, though, was quickly defused by the church’s pastor. He was a young man leading his first congregation, but he was good with people and impossible not to like. He had been at Camden Methodist only a few weeks longer than Kim Knox, but if he had any nervousness about his recent promotion to head clergy, he dealt with it through an endless stream of good-natured banter and positive affirmation. He may not have been a cat person, and he may have wanted to please his new parishioners, but he wasn’t the kind of man to kick out the less fortunate, no matter how often they shredded the toilet paper in his office bathroom or how much hair they shed on his couch.

Really
, his laugh seemed to say whenever Church Cat came up,
what’s the harm?

And even the most reluctant among the congregation had to admit that the children, at least, loved having Church Cat around. The parsonage was across a wide lawn from the main church building, and the lawn served as an informal social area, where the adults hobnobbed after church service and the children ran around pushing, chasing, and staining their clothes. Every Sunday, the little gray cat sat on the edge of the lawn and watched them. She didn’t play. She definitely wasn’t a fan of being chased. But she loved it when the kids came over to pet her.

“Now move back, children,” Carol Ann would say, taking on the role of protector. “Give her some room, she’s getting nah-vous.” The children would take a step back, elbowing and jostling for position until one little girl, who must have been two, since she still toddled, couldn’t control her excitement and lunged forward with a squeal. It happened every Sunday, and Kim and Carol Ann couldn’t help but laugh. The girl meant to be loving, but there was something about her that terrified the poor gray tabby. As soon as the little girl started squealing, the cat turned and ran for the office, where she had a dozen little holes in which to hide.

“Where’s Church Cat?” the kids would scream, searching for her. “Where’s Church Cat?”

That’s how she got her name. Somehow, one Sunday, she went from That Cat at the Church to Church Cat. “I’m just going to give this little bit to Church Cat,” the ladies started saying at Fifth Sunday Potluck, sliding a bite of meat to the side of their plates.

One day, Kim’s husband was driving down Broad Street when he noticed an elderly lady sprawled on the ground outside the church office. He immediately pulled over and ran toward her. Halfway there, he recognized her as Carol Ann’s mother-in-law, who was in her late eighties. “Ms. Hattie,” he yelled, “are you all right?”

A second later, he noticed Church Cat beside her, getting a belly rub. “I was just lovin’ on her,” Ms. Hattie said, pushing herself to her feet with a smile. And just like that, the little gray tabby from the prison alley was adopted, not just by Kim Knox and Carol Ann Riggs, but by Camden United Methodist Church.

 

 

When winter arrived, whispering into south Alabama with a thick layer of frost just before Christmas, Carol Ann and Kim decided Church Cat could start staying indoors overnight. They purchased some litter and food, and Church Cat immediately took to the comforts of a warm, safe place to sleep. She was such an outgoing cat, though, that she got bored during the night. The young pastor was bemused by the sight, every morning, of Kim’s papers scattered all over the floor. Kim would hear him talking in his office and think,
I don’t remember anyone going in there
. Then she’d hear a meow and rush in to find Church Cat sitting on his desk. She’d apologize, but he’d just laugh, and then Church Cat would start purring in her arms. That’s the warmth and companionship a cat provides. When she arrived in the morning, Kim always started smiling when she saw Church Cat peeking through the blinds, ready for another day of greeting congregants . . . by sleeping 90 percent of it away on the seat of Kim’s chair.