Page 37 of The Botanist's Assistant
Margaret pondered its tattered toughness, its persistence in the face of rejection.
“Well, all right,” she said and closed the door.
When she set the small saucer of chicken broth and the folded blanket on the porch, the cat sniffed at the makeshift bed and the broth as if determining their worth, then began to lap up the liquid.
“If you’re still here tomorrow, I’m taking you to the shelter,” Margaret promised, although the odds of anyone adopting this creature were close to zero.
“I’ll leave the light on. The coyotes won’t bother you,” she said.
Now she writes,March 21, 9:30 p.m. Tomcat arrives on porch. Tossed from van?
She sets the notebook aside again and switches off the lamp, thinking that if the scarred little beast is still here in the morning, she will need to find a cat carrier to transport it to the shelter and that only a heartless person would dump such a bedraggled animal in the woods to starve to death or be eaten by a coyote. It looks old but how can she be sure?
In some cultures, old age is respected. Here, in the US, however, the more years you have survived, the more useless you are viewed, and then you find yourself discarded into one of those assisted-living villages where you’re expected to play shuffleboard and be thrilled to eat a dinner of oversalted meatloaf and canned peas. Or worse, they store you in anursing home to rot slowly like a potato in a dark drawer. She will stay in her cottage for as long as she is able.
The tomcat is not gone in the morning. Instead, when Margaret opens her door, she sees he is joined on the porch by the carcass of a good-sized gopher.
The cat sits nearby, looking proud but in a nonchalant way, as if to say, “I brought this for you. It was nothing.”
“You’re quite the hunter, aren’t you?” Margaret says. “But that doesn’t mean you can stay. I’m a busy woman who doesn’t need a companion, four-legged or two.”
The cat strolls down the porch steps and sits at the edge of the garden as if inspecting its domain and arguing her point.
“Don’t get too comfortable, Tom,” Margaret says. Still, she sets out a bowl of water and a handful of leftover chicken-thigh chunks for it.
Did she just give the cat a name?
Now she gives one last glance toward the feline as she climbs into her truck. Today is Saturday, chore day: garden-store visiting, library browsing, grocery shopping, laundry washing and hanging to dry, floor polishing, household repair, boot maintenance.
The cat has come down from the porch and is padding past the rosemary and thyme toward the woods, its tail held high. She adds: “pick up cat carrier at animal shelter” to her mental chore list.
When she arrives home at three twenty p.m., however, the cat is gone.
She puts away her groceries, starts a load of wash and goes onto the porch. A light afternoon breeze makes the lavenderstems tremble. Her gaze roams the garden, then the woods on either side of the house. There is no sign of the feline.
Why does she feel such a pinch of loneliness over a cat she didn’t even want?
A woodpecker hammers a tree nearby as a warbling vireo adds its song. At least the birds will be safe without the tattered hunter around.
She goes inside, fishes a clean rag and a container of Murphy Oil from under the sink, gets down on her knees and starts to clean.
22
The Young and the Small
Sunday had been a productiveday in her garden. She’d fertilized her perennials and let loose a container of ladybugs into the roses. She’d planted six-packs of yellow daisies, red petunias and orange calendula around the garden for patches of spring color. There’d been no sign of the cat, although another gopher had made its presence known in her garden. She hoped the little hunter had found a new home and not become a meal for coyotes.
How precarious life was.
Now it’s Monday and she tells herself to stop looking for what wasn’t there and removes the saucer and blanket from the porch. There is, again, a little pinch of loss when she sees that the small bowl of chicken chunks she put out appeared untouched (she told herself she didn’t want the cat yowling for food if he came back in the middle of the night but it was only half the truth).
It’s her own fault for giving the animal a name.
“Good luck out there, cat,” she says to the morning air, although there is no animal there to hear her goodwillmessage. She makes herself feel a little better by recalling the cost of cat food, which she’d happened to see at the market. Fancy Feast, indeed!
She heads off for work with her lunch but minus her thermos. She and the custodian-journalist have a coffee date.
Meeting, she amends.
