Disappeared

As I write this, a tan Persian mix is pacing outside my office door, meowing plaintively for her daughter. This has been going on almost continuously since we got home a couple days ago.

It all started maybe three weeks before, when I walked into the main house and found Peg looking at adoption cats online on her phone. She held up the phone so I could see the sad eyed fluffball on her screen.

"Isn't she the cutest thing you've ever seen? Just look at those eyes."

"Yep. Cute. Are we getting a cat?"

"I'm just looking."

P then called and tried to adopt the cat on her phone screen when I wasn't looking, but alas it had already found a home.

Soon thereafter she found another pair, this time a mother-daughter family that P was told had lived with an elderly lady who died, then were adopted by a college student who couldn't afford to keep them.

I am convinced that these adopt-a-cat provenance stories are the equivalent of the stripper who's just working her way through dental school. Of course. They're all college students. And their cats were once the lovable companions of some nice old spinster.

The next day P was on her way to Gainesville in a driving rainstorm to retrieve the cats. When she arrived here with the two of them in a cat carrier, she commented on how amazingly calm and good-natured they were on the drive back through thunder and lightning. They peered through the bars of the carrier door at me, then returned to rubbing on each other.

The truck ride was in fact the last time they would behave in an acceptable manner. The first couple days we let them stay in our bedroom, where they hid all day then came out after we went to bed to scurry back and forth across the room, frolic in the cat box throwing litter and excrement in a fan of yuck across the floor, and sing ribald cat songs to each other until it was time for us to wake up and they returned to their hiding place until the next lights out.

After two days of this we decided they would become porch cats, and we carried them out by the scruffs of their necks to their new home on the big wraparound porch that covers three sides of the house. The mother cat let us know what she thought of her change in venue by jumping onto P's white patio chair cushion and unleashing a torrent of amber cat pee all over it. At least the cushion was Sunbrella.

The nocturnal madness continued outside as we considered names for these beasts. P wanted something from Greek mythology, but I couldn't find an appropriate night demon in that tradition. Being a little more pedestrian, I suggested a movie reference--Gizmo and Stripe, from Gremlins. Cute during the day, but watch out after they've been fed at night.

Night after night they galloped back-and-forth on the wood floor of the porch, making as much noise as a team of Clydesdales. They climbed the screens sometimes seven or eight feet up in the air. They found our bedroom window, and sang to us from one to five a.m. They ate all of our little lizards, or at least the tasty parts, leaving the carnage for P to clean up. During the day they hid, and would never let anyone touch them, preferring to rub on each other.

Despite their utter loathsomeness, P talked to them in baby talk I never knew was part of her repertoire.

"Hey there sweet girls."

"You're such a sweet little cat."

Etcetera. It was baffling.

Then one night Stripe, the mother, snuck into the house to play hide-and-seek. We turned in for the evening exhausted, and maybe a half hour later she started serenading us with the song of her people. Loudly. Incessantly.

We wandered the house in our skivvies trying to follow the moans, and when we finally saw the feline outline under the guest room bed the game transitioned to chase, all over the house and up the drapes. I finally found her hiding behind the kitchen table, and grabbed and tossed her out the door, taking a nasty scratch in the process.

The next day P managed to get them out the door of the screen porch to begin their new life as barn cats. Instead, they just ran under the house, which annoyed the fowl who'd made that into their summer clubhouse. We continued to be serenaded at night, but at least it was a little less loud and emphatic.

Then we left for five days of work and travel last week. When we returned, only Stripe greeted us. I searched the barn, and we both wandered the property looking for a cat or the remains of one. Gizmo had disappeared into thin air. Stripe has been inconsolable ever since.

We aren't in agreement as to what may have happened. Both are hopeful she just wandered off and is on an adventure somewhere, and may come back one day. At the same time, we've seen the fox on the property, and hear the coyotes howling at night. Neither of us wants to accept the most likely explanation, that Gizmo joined the two guineas who left us nothing but a little mound of feathers after spending the night outside.

One can see here on the farm the origins of the night predator stories that haunt the human imagination. There really are things out there in the blackness that would eat you if they could. And our parents created tales of monsters to keep us safe. When I was a child in north Georgia, our house backed up to miles of woods. We would disappear into the forest early in the day, and sometimes not emerge again until near sunset. But never after sunset--my father made sure we were aware of Mr. Sticks, the lurking forest giant made of pine trees who would swoop up children in his bark-covered arms if they were foolish enough to be in the woods when he went hunting after dark. Maybe we should have created a Mr. Sticks story for these two antisocial cats, to scare them into being wary of the real canine threats that roam the farm at night.

The wailing has stopped now, and it looks like Stripe has hopped through the hole in the screen to go find a more appreciative audience. No sound now but light rain and the faint diesel roar from Peg on the tractor. I look out the windows every now and then, hoping to see Gizmo trotting across the lawn from her big adventure, and knowing that's probably not in the cards.

And so it goes.