Dewey's Nine Lives (32 page)

In the year after giving birth to her kittens, in fact, Church Cat only got into trouble one time: at the Methodist Charge Meeting. Kim was out of town, and Carol Ann wasn’t sure what to do with Church Cat while she worked at the meeting. It was just after Easter, the perfect time of year in southern Alabama, when the evenings are still damp and cool enough to stamp down the day’s heat, so she decided to let Church Cat out for the night. Then she hurried off to greet participants in the Charge Meeting, a major event attended by the district superintendent and representatives from other local Methodist churches. Carol Ann, from her spot at the door, made sure Church Cat didn’t sneak into the sanctuary as the crowd arrived, but the little tabby must have slipped in with a latecomer because right in the middle of the assembly, she walked straight down the center aisle, meowing for attention.

Carol Ann was mortified. I wish I could write that like she said it—“MAWT-a-fied”—because no one can express social embarrassment like a proper Southern lady. But suffice it to say that Carol Ann was deeply worried about Church Cat barging into the sanctuary during the biggest meeting of the year.

Oh, that’s it
, she thought, as she hustled Church Cat out the back door.
That’s gonna be the end of Church Cat
.

But instead of anger, she heard, behind her from the dais, the sound of laughter. Then the young pastor saying something, and then other people laughing, until Church Cat’s mawt-a-fyin’ faux pas became not a tragic error, but a funny story to be told again and again around the big lawn at Camden United Methodist Church.

Soon after, the young pastor left. Carol Ann and Kim and many of the other parishioners were sorry to see him go, but the Methodist church rotates pastors on a regular basis, and it was time (according to the national office) for a change. The building project was nearing completion, and without the young pastor, a few whispers and rumors started to filter through to Carol Ann. One person in particular made it clear to all and sundry that he did not want Church Cat inside any of the new buildings.

So Kim and Carol Ann decided to place a notice in the church bulletin: Church Cat was up for adoption. They expected a flood of responses, but after a week, nobody stepped forward. Some in the congregation, of course, had never wanted her around the church, much less their homes. The people who loved her—and there were many—didn’t feel it was their place to claim her. Everyone knew Carol Ann had recently lost her beloved cat Hogan and that she was hoping, in her polite Southern style, that no one would step forward for Church Cat. So they didn’t.

And that’s how in 2001, less than four years after she walked onto the porch of the parsonage and followed Kim Knox into the church offices, Church Cat’s time at Camden United Methodist Church came to an end. She went home to Carol Ann’s house, where she took, with a vengeance, to the lazy life of a spoiled and beloved house cat. Kim Knox visited often, and each time she did, her jaw dropped closer to the floor.

“I know, I know,” Carol Ann said. “I don’t feed her that much. I really don’t. I don’t know how she got so heavy.”

Soon after, the church christened their new buildings. They have, as far as I know, never been defiled by a single hair from a single cat.

Carol Ann states unequivocally that the building project was a good idea, even if it cost Church Cat her home. The church needed a nicer sanctuary, a larger kitchen for Wednesday prayer dinners and the Fifth Sunday Potlucks, and more classrooms for children’s Sunday school. The new buildings were for Camden, not just the church members, Carol Ann said. With them, for instance, they could expand their Lenten dinner to the whole town. “We needed new bathrooms, too,” Harris added. “There was a desperate need for bathrooms.”

Kim Knox agrees the upgrade was a good idea. And, she wanted everyone to know, the buildings are beautiful. Redbrick with white trim, they are immaculately maintained and large enough to accommodate further growth—if the congregation of Camden United Methodist Church, and the town of Camden in general, ever experiences a growth spurt. They are infinitely better than the horrible motel that was torn down. And they are without a doubt more practical and visually pleasing than the former buildings that stood in their place. They are everything a modern, forward-looking church should be.

But Kim Knox can’t help thinking something was lost, too. “It is a more structured environment,” she said of the new church. “It is less laid-back and relaxed.” The old parsonage, where she had worked with Church Cat, was drafty. The only way to heat it was with space heaters, so all winter it smelled of kerosene. The windows rattled. The doors creaked. But even on the coldest day, Kim felt, it had a warmth that came from its long history and worn-down wood, from the sound of a young pastor’s laughter echoing out of his office, from the feeling of a sleeping cat pressed against her back as she tried, sometimes in vain, to balance herself on the edge of her chair. And then there was the door creaking open, Church Cat stirring, a warm “Mornin’, Kim” followed by an even warmer “meow.”

Yes, the new church is beautiful. It is lovingly maintained. It is something that, rightfully, the citizens of Camden can be proud of. But it is just a building. It doesn’t have warmth or history. It can’t. Not yet, anyway. The new Camden United Methodist Church, to put it another way, is not the kind of place that could ever adopt a cat.

And that’s the conundrum of life, whether you eschew progress or embrace it full force: For everything that is gained, there is also something lost.

 

 

In some sense, there’s a very short distance to go until the end of this story. The only thing left to say, I suppose, is that Church Cat loved her life with Carol Ann, who spoiled her like the doting grandmother she is, but that her life in that home was tragically short. When Church Cat contracted an infection and died in the summer of 2005, at only eight years old, Carol Ann was so distraught, it took her several weeks to tell the congregation. She was the fattest cat you have ever seen, as both Kim and Carol Ann told me in separate conversations, but also the happiest, and Carol Ann and her husband, Harris, missed her terribly. They buried her in their family plot, alongside generations of ancestors that had lived and died in Wilcox County, Alabama.

The next year, Carol Ann and Harris Riggs moved away. Ms. Hattie, the woman who had lain on the ground to pet Church Cat, and the last of their living parents, had died, and they had long promised themselves that, when they no longer had family responsibility in Camden, they would move somewhere new. When their daughters were young, they had traveled extensively: to the Western United States, to Canada, to Australia. For their retirement, they moved two and a half hours away to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the University of Alabama, where they can watch plays and attend sporting events without having to drive ninety miles home after dark.

They say that’s the reason they left Camden, to experience more of life, but it’s clear there were other factors as well. Neither one of their daughters wanted to live in the area. They were married, to a lawyer and a federal emergency response director, respectively, and they were both studying for careers in medicine. There were no jobs for them in Wilcox County.

Meanwhile, the MacMillan-Bloedel paper mill where Harris had worked most of his life was sold first to Weyerhaeuser, then to International Paper. At its height, the mill had employed almost two thousand people from the area. Now Harris estimates it employs four hundred, although he isn’t sure. “You know these international companies,” he said. “When you retire, they take your name out of the computer, and you’re just gone.”
Just gone
. It seemed such a minor end to more than a hundred years of Riggs family history in Camden.

And so one story ends, but of course it is not the only story that can be told about Camden. The town is located in the heart of Civil Rights era unrest—forty miles north is Selma, site of the famous march, and thirty miles east is Lowndes County, known as “Bloody Lowndes” for its staunch refusal to register black voters. So there are at least two sets of circumstances in Camden, two histories, two views of the world. If you asked someone else about Camden, Alabama, especially a longtime black resident, you would no doubt hear a different story from the one you’ve read today.

But there are always other stories to tell. I haven’t set out to provide a history of a town but simply to tell the story of Church Cat, who stayed four cherished years at Camden United Methodist and died as she had always lived, with Ms. Carol Ann Riggs by her side. That seems simple enough, and I have tried my best to tell the story as Ms. Carol Ann told it to me. But even something as seemingly straightforward as the life of Church Cat, as I well know, is filled with personal meanings and interpretations.

Nothing made that more clear than my three conversations, spaced over a series of months, with Carol Ann’s good friend Kim Knox. Kim, you see, had a different view of Church Cat. A view not based on Church Cat’s actions but on the fact that she was terribly unhappy after her move to Camden, a town she had never even heard of until her husband got a job teaching school there. She loved the town and the people but, as the Bible says, it was a time of trial. Her mother died just after she moved, and without any friends in the area, she had no one to confide in. Even worse, after years of trying, she learned she would never be able to have a child.

This was not like Mary Nan Evans with her twenty-eight cats on Sanibel Island. Mary Nan told me, with no hesitation, that she never regretted not being able to have children. She is older than Kim, and therefore further from the disappointment, but I don’t think that was the reason for her lack of regret. Having children, it seemed, was never integral to Mary Nan’s life. It wasn’t something she ever needed to be happy.

Kim Knox was different. I could hear that clearly in her voice. Kim Knox desperately wanted children. She needed them, and it was a crushing blow when she found out she was unable to have them. She and her husband tried every fertility treatment short of in vitro fertilization, which they couldn’t afford. They researched adoption, but after more than a year of phone calls and meetings, they realized that even the cheaper alternatives were beyond their modest means. There was no single moment, Kim said, when the reality hit her. There were no breakdowns in the office; no sobs in the night; no dark mornings when Church Cat’s presence lifted her spirits just as her strength collapsed. There were tears with her husband, many thousands of them, but the emotional process was a gradual chipping away of her hopes, a slow and crushing collapse of all her dreams, not a sudden surrender, and Church Cat’s contribution was a constant affection, a daily warmth, more than one unforgettable act.

But that affection was important, more than Carol Ann or even I can understand. To Kim, Church Cat wasn’t just a cute cat. She was a source of comfort and strength. She was a friend Kim could put her maternal compassion and energy into when she had nowhere else to place it.

Be present. That’s the advice for helping people in pain. Be present
for them
, whatever they need. That, in a nutshell, was Church Cat.

And just as important, through that little cat, Kim built a local community of support. Through her, Kim became friends with Carol Ann Riggs and ultimately confided in her. With the help of the strewn papers and torn-up toilet paper, she developed the kind of warm, lighthearted relationship with the young pastor that allowed her to finally, in the quiet of the parsonage with only Church Cat as a witness, unburden her heart.

Does that change the story of Church Cat? Does it explain why a professional woman would spend her lunch break climbing through the window of an abandoned house? I don’t know. Kim’s husband, who was older, was on his second marriage and second career, as a schoolteacher. He had a son from a previous marriage, but the boy had been seriously ill his whole life. In 1999, as Church Cat was birthing her kittens in an old motel, the boy’s doctors recommended a transplant. Kim’s husband donated a kidney. He and Kim both understood that the time, physical recovery, and expense meant the end of their last faint hope of ever adopting a child of their own. But it was something they never hesitated to do. I cannot help but believe that when Kim Knox sat in that abandoned bedroom, softly encouraging Church Cat’s kittens to trust her, that she was taking a turn at motherhood. That she was being comforted by those soft little lives. That she was grieving, in her way, for what she could never have.

Then, in August 2002, Kim received a call from the young, now former pastor of Camden United Methodist Church. A woman had come to see him, the pastor told her. Her niece knew a young woman who could not afford to keep her baby. She was seven months’ pregnant, and she was searching for someone to adopt him.

Eight weeks later, in October 2002, Kim Knox drove five hours to meet the mother. She brought nothing but one change of clothes and a child’s car seat, still in the box. She refused to buy anything else. She was terrified, after all those years of struggle, that something would go wrong.

Two days later, she was in the delivery room when her adopted son, Noah, entered the world. The mother spoke no English, but she begged Kim in broken syllables and gestures to stay with her in the recovery room, to let her hold, for a moment, the newborn baby. They saw the mother again when the boy was eleven months old. They drove to Birmingham, a few hours from Camden, to meet her. The woman cried, smiled, thanked them in broken English, hugged her child, and then disappeared. Kim could feel her heartbreak, almost as strongly as she had felt her own. But where she went, or why, Kim has no idea.

“We were so thrilled when we met Noah,” Ms. Carol Ann said. “He was the cutest thing. The whole congregation absolutely loved him.”

In 2005, Kim and her husband moved back to Laurel, Mississippi, Kim’s hometown. They loved Camden, but they had no relatives in the area, and they wanted to raise their boy surrounded by family. They moved just two months before Hurricane Katrina. Although they were a hundred miles from the coast, they watched in horror from their aunt Lee’s house as trees shattered and toppled. They clutched their child and hoped that Church Cat’s son, Chi-Chi, who they had left in their nearby rental cottage, survived the storm.