We currently have no cat. We have not had a cat in several years, which is unusual for us as we always had cats before. I could blog about our goldfish, and perhaps will. Tomorrow, while others post pics of their current cats I’m going to perhaps post fish pics, having already written today about our American Bobtail, Malcolm, which means I must also write about Tuesday and Stevie as they constituted the “gang in our lives for many years.
The first member of what became the gang was Stevie, our Velcro cat, gray, a raging lunatic, all teeth and claws from the first evening we got her when I looked up in the dark, from my bed, saw she had transformed from sweet kitten to bizarro lunacy staring at my face and I said,, oh no, she’s going to attack my face, she had that kind of obsessive love thing going in her eyes, and my husband replied no she won’t and instead she did, out came the teeth and claws and into my face they went. We had gotten her from a pet store (where she’d just been sent from a veterinarian’s office where someone had just dropped her off) and she was totally freaking crazy like something was quite wrong with her but since we’d taken responsibility we thought we should take responsibility for her forever. At first we hoped she’d grow out of it. She’d sometimes have seizures. It took about a year and a half but eventually she stopped ripping us to shreds and made the move from velcro to crazy glue. She had to be attached and slobbering like we were the best catnip in the world. She was still nuts and maniacally territorial. An open drawer was not to be passed up and when an unsuspecting hand reached within you still exited screaming with half your flesh in her claws, but attack mode no longer constituted 100 percent of her existence. People tried to like her but she was a tough cat to love. We’d had a gray cat before her that had died of feline leukemia before anyone, at least in Augusta (where we were at the time) had any experience with it, and that one of course had been the best cat of all time, that watched cat cartoons and met me at the corner every day when I was walking home from work. By the time we got Stevie we’d made the switch to keeping our cats exclusively inside, and Stevie was crazed and we lived with her for seventeen long years and because of this my husband swears we will never again have a gray cat.
Despite this he purchased a rose bush to mark her burial spot.
We had a beautiful Irish Setter when we got Stevie and the Irish Setter, Nessa, we one day took to the vet and told them things weren’t right and they said things were, and we took her back and said she’s sick and they said she was fine, then two weeks later she was back in and she was no longer just fine she instead was invaded with an unusual type of cancer and she had surgery and that was that. I was grief-stricken and had to have another dog soon, not a replacement because there are no replacements, but I needed another dog and we said “mutt” as Nessa, a purebred, had also turned out to have crippling hip dysplasia. We got a roly-poly half Australian Blue Tick and half English Setter whose legs were so short in proportion to its barrel body it could barely stand, and was ugly as Nessa had been gorgeous, but the sweet mom (the Blue Tick) had come over and settled her huge, barrel-chested body in my lap while we were looking at the pup and that sold me. The owner said she was sorry, the dog imagined itself a lap dog, she tried to heft it from my lap and out the room but I said hey that’s wonderful, we’re taking the blue, brown and white mottled puppy. We were told she’d had all her shots. There had been a couple others before the Irish Setter who had come with assurances of , “All shots” and within two weeks I’d have a case of distemper and a couple weeks of lotsa vet care trying to keep the animal alive and then I’d have a dead dog and lots of vet bills. Nessa had been fine and I trusted this would also be healthy pup. We took her home and on the way named her Tuesday, though we meant to name her for Wednesday of the Adams family, but since this accident happened we decided she was named for Tuesday Welch. We got a call two days later that a sibling pup had Parvo and rushed Tuesday to the vet and she was pumped full of saline fluid and promptly became very ill. I took off from work and lay beside her all day and night listening to her lungs and wishing her alive because I couldn’t stand losing another dog so soon after Nessa. She survived because of that quick soaking in saline.
Tuesday, who spent the first year gently nipping at our heels in attempts to herd us, was not quite a year old when we got a call that someone had a half-lynx and did we want it. A little black bobtail whose mother had been given away as she was killing all the birds in the yard. It was probably only about six weeks old, a little too young to be separated from its mother who’d already been given away. But we were used to raising cats from when they were young. Two of the best cats we’d ever had (they are almost all “the best cats” aren’t they) we had raised from when they were three days old as their mother had run off and so they were given to us. We’d had a dog then who had assisted us in the rearing (we fed and cuddled, it licked them all over) and this time Tuesday stepped in.
I’d called around first making sure that this would be a good cat to have indoors with other animals and was told by everyone who’d had one that bobtails are great. We now know that the cat was what is called an American Bobtail, originating from a domestic feral cat that occurs with a bobtail naturally in the wild. The first of the “breed” is sometimes said to have been found on an Indian Reservation in the southwest during the 1960s but I also read they occur spontaneously everywhere in the wild and are odd in that they so resemble each other in appearance and temperament. A totally exceptional animal known for a distinctly wild appearance, intelligence and friendly disposition.
Malcolm had long and extremely powerful back legs, shiny slick black fur that gleamed water repellant, little nub of a tail, tufted ears, almond eyes, blunt face, huge (eventually) weighing in well over twenty pounds when he was at his prime and every bit of it compact robust muscle. He had big, had claws three times the size of a regular cat. And was the gentlest most intelligent cat we ever had. Which he had better have been, considering the claws.
Whenever he met someone new, they’d pick him up, he’d gently grab one of their hands, wrap his claws softly but purposefully around the hand in display of those claws, then would retract them and purr and butt heads.
He only a couple of times scratched us, never anyone else, and the couple of times we were scratched were accidents where he was aiming to affectionately leap on one of us and miscalculated on the leap.
Malcolm sat the first three days in my lap then jumped to the floor and lay down beside Tuesday who licked him all over. Tuesday, Great Earth Mother Dog That Adored All Small Things, who we’d not yet had fixed, promptly produced milk and became his mom.
Malcolm turned off and on light switches. We would leave and return to find all the doors in the apartment opened. Big 1906 heavy wood doors. He would jump up and grab the doorknob and slam his body into the door as he twisted the knob and thus open it. Or he would jump up and tug the doorknob as he pulled it and open the door in.
He would leap from one end of the room to another. Scare you because he’d be standing way over on the other side of the room and you’d see those haunches twitch and you’d know oh god he’s going to try for it and the next second he was settled neatly on your shoulders. Whew. As mentioned above, he did miss a couple of times when very young which meant a couple scars and a cat that looked shame-faced humiliated as you screeched in pain.
Because Tuesday liked to sit out on the back stoop Malcolmwould sometimes open the back door and back screen door and let her out. We would find them both on the stoop watching the sun go down. We told friends as they entered to lock the back door behind them as the cat could get out but some would forget (we had a lot of friends coming and going those years) and then they’d go in the kitchen later and see the cat opening the back door, letting itself and Tuesday out and would say, “Wow, you were right. The cat can open the door!”
But of course.
Malcolm was a trickster. There were shelves just above head in the kitchen and he would follow me as I walked around, would be up on the shelves and pushing off objects right in front of me, in my path, for me to catch them. It was his game. Which was annoying when I was busy but other times was entertaining.
Malcolm wasn’t scared of water. He’d open the door, letting himself into the bathroom while you were bathing, you’d look and see those haunch muscles twitch and then he’d be sitting on your shoulder and chest, reaching down a paw and dabbing at the bath, fascinated by the ripples.
Malcolm would open the refrigerator door when we were out and would feed Tuesday. Tuesday would eat anything. Malcolm wouldn’t. He only ate what he needed. Tuesday would have eaten a masonite table if she could have, a dog with boundless appetite and no desire to exercise. Instead, Malcolm fed her bread, marshmallows, hot garlic chicken from the refrigerator. And for some reason only did it on Christmas Eve. Which will sound freaky but it’s true. The first time we thought it was the hot garlic chicken that had motivated him, but we got the chicken year round and he didn’t open the refrigerator until the next Christmas Eve. This happened three years in a row and we’ve no idea what the trigger was. The fourth year we tied the refrigerator door shut on Christmas Eve and that ended the refrigerator forays.
Yes, yes, I know Australian Blue Ticks are said to need and desire lots of exercise but it was as much as I could do to get the dog to walk. She wasn’t going to trot or run. She was an excellent dog on and off a leash. She just wasn’t going to hustle. An anomaly. I have since learned that Australian Blue Ticks have a vulnerability to thyroid problems and and hip dysplasia (which she was finally diagnosed as having, on top of arthritis). A lot of the things we experienced with her sound a lot like the thyroid may have been culapble rather than just the heat allergy she was said to have which lasted every year from June to November and which was fairly crippling in itself even though we had an air conditioning unit. She was lethargic and hefty. I don’t remember the vets ever mentioning anything about her thyroid and that could have been a problem. Or maybe not. Maybe she was just this way. No diet or vitamins aided and we tried anything suggested to us by anyone and their third cousin three times removed. No treatment that the vets prescribed aided.
Tuesday and Malcolm got into stuff though usually in non-disastrous ways. We knew when we came home when exceptional impishness had happened. Usually they’d all come running to the back door as we stood with keys ready to open. Yeah, I know they say dogs can’t remember from one moment to the next what they’ve done, but when we’d come home and they’d been up to no good, Tuesday would be body blocking the back door (which had a window), lying against it so we couldn’t open it, and Malcolm would be lying next to her, facing away from us, refusing to acknowledge our presence. We’d push on the door, Tuesday would grunt, we’d push some more, Tuesday would grunt some more, finally we’d shove her out of the way and she’d just lie there staring at the wall like we didn’t exist, willing us to go away and not see what havoc she and Malcolm had wrecked.
Tuesday was the Master of Gravity. She had one huge barrel chest. Australian Blue Ticks, I later read, are the one dog known to stare down a bull. That’s what they’re bred to do. That was Tuesday. They’re also not supposed to be good family animals, more an individual owner animal. But Tuesday loved everyone. And people adored Tuesday. People who hadn’t seen her for years would ask how Tuesday was doing.
Everyone always asked about Malcolm. No one ever forgot him.
Tuesday loved babies. She came across a baby bird once on the ground and whined herself sick about it, licking it, looking for some way to mother it, she didn’t want to leave its side. No, she was not going to eat it. This was just the way Tuesday was, and was so much that way everyone called her the Universal or World Mother. We did too, but we more often called her the Master of Gravity because if she decided she wasn’t going to move she would plant those legs and you couldn’t begin to budge her unless you really really really gave her a good talking to about how she was indeed going to move and she’d finally grunt, roll her eyes, take a step.
She was not a quiet dog. If she didn’t like something she would lie on the wood floor and beat that tail on it like it was a fifty pound anvil. Flap. Grunt. Flap. Louder grunt. Flap. Much louder grunt. Usually over food or wanting to be petted though she wasn’t going to go to the bother to come over and ask. And Malcolm always lying by her side when he wasn’t stretched out in one of our laps or hunting mischief.
Everyone loved Malcolm and Tuesday.
Malcolm would play a game with every new dog that someone brought in the house. As soon as he was alone with the visitor he would corner it. He did this to a half-wolf. He did this to every dog. We’d hear whimpering and go in to find the dog in the corner and Malcolm sitting on the opposite side of the room like he was up to nothing, staring at the wall, and the dog whining refusing to move. As soon as we entered the gig was up, the game was over, Malcolm would stand and stretch and jump and rub against your leg as he strutted out and from then on he’d be sort-of buds with the visitor, now that it knew its place.
Malcolm acted like this was entirely innocent on his part.
Malcolm, looking for attention, would come up and head butt your calves with such force he’d nearly push you down. Purring all the while. A loud motor purr you could hear two rooms away. But a squeaky meow. This big cat would open its mouth to meow and out would come this teeny little squeak, also characteristic of the feral bobtail.
Malcolm helped keep Stevie about as reasonably sane as she would ever be. She was ferocious and never gave that up though she had become a cat that liked her head to be buried in one of our armpits. An exterminator once stepped on Tuesday’s tail and Tuesday squeaked and Stevie went running and cornered the exterminator in the hall before I could reach her and lock her up. The half-wolf visitor and Tuesday were one evening lying side by side and they bumped each other, squeaked in surprise, and Stevie came running and backed the half-wolf into the kitchen before I could grab her and lock her up. Once she had it in her mind to get you, that was it, I would have to retire her to a side room. She was an attack cat. Territorial. If she looked out the window and saw another cat a half block away she’d go haywire wanting to claw it to bits. Once she slipped out the door between our legs and went straight after a cat that had been lazing on a car in view of her for several months. She bounced up onto the car, came down on the unsuspecting cat with all claws raking, and though we snatched her quickly enough no damage was done the neighbor’s cat didn’t go back outside for months.
After we’d had Tuesday twelve years I turned up pregnant, quite unexpectedly and wonderfully so. After Son was born, Tuesday would look at him like he was the best thing in the world that had ever happened. When he started crawling she was beside herself with careful delight. When he started playing with her she was dopey with love. She had arthritis and hip dysplasia and had an increasingly tough time just moving around, and she’d never been happier. All she wanted to do was lie in the doorway of the room where I was with Son, Malcolm alongside her, and beam beautiful beatific thoughts. She’d stare, smile, come in and sniff, lick, beam her eyes at him and up at me, smiling, smiling, go back to the door where Malcolm was and lie back down. The last couple of months during which Son was old enough to play with her, she smiled back and forth between me and him and wagged that tail every waking moment.
It was the evening before we were getting ready to go on the road for a long tour. We were going to be gone several months and had prepared for people to take care of Tuesday and Malcolm and Stevie. My husband had been out on the road a lot but I’d not been out on the road in a while. Husband had to be on the road and we weren’t going to sit at home and have him miss several months of Son growing up. We’d been buying extra things to prepare for taking a child on the road, a lot of packing going on. We had taken all the animals to the vet and all had clean bills of health. Preparations pretty much done, late afternoon, I lay down and took a nap with my son. I dreamt there was an ocean and in the ocean were tubular glass pipes and they made the most beautiful harmonies though not melodic, each an individual voice. Then one stopped harmonizing. Went wrong. Made an odd sound. Stopped working. I tried to investigate, to get it to work again, but it wasn’t happening. I was then in a house shed above the ocean and a leg broke out from under the shed and it started to go down. Then I was in a small boat riding down a stream and was passing the different civilizations in the world, all ghost civilizations, stretching way way back into history’s dawn. Genetic precursors of different nations camped with their animals along the river. It was a farewell ride. A death ride for someone else on the boat.
I woke up and heard a faint, dry rasping sound in the hall. I knew immediately, before going to look, Tuesday was dying. She’d had a stroke. She died that night. The next day I was sitting with a neighbor in the bedroom and we heard a crack and the house shook and my neighbor leaped screaming as she thought it was an earthquake. Instead it was half a huge tree that had been destined to fall onto the bedroom where we were but hit another smaller tree along the way and was deflected, scraped the bedroom roof and then crashed into the room behind, huge trunk and branches spearing the roof.
Workmen arrived. So did the bus to take us off on tour. There was no time to mourn Tuesday’s death. But I didn’t mourn. It wasn’t like Nessa twelve years earlier. We had said good-bye. She’d had a long time being a happy dog.
Malcolm mourned Tuesday for months then became our son’s fast friend. Followed him everywhere. After several more years he started getting slow. At fourteen he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Now, after all these years, we were informed his heart was also congenitally wrong, too small for his large frame, the reason for the failure, and there was likely nothing to be done. He went quickly.
Stevie, we knew, wouldn’t last much longer. She mourned. She never got over it. She was about seventeen. We got up one morning to find her dead. No warning. Just gone.
Each of the deaths was rough on our son. We thought we’d take a break afterwards. We still had Sachi, a cat we’d gotten a few years before our son was born (another story), but she didn’t like children, she wanted more than anything else to be around no children and so we gave her away.
Now we have no dogs, no cats. After the team of Tuesday and Malcolm and Stevie we’ve just not been able to commit to another dog or cat relationship. Not yet. Plus, the apartment we now live in is small and what we used to put into vet bills now goes into our son’s needs. He’ll want a cat or dog someday I’m sure, but right now we’re making do with goldfish. He asked for a couple of Comets last year and we got him Dorothy and Dylan. They grew like crazy and demanded a much larger tank. Dorothy turned up egg bound last summer and died and thus now we have Dylan and Dorothy 2 (a fantail) and Nero (a calico fantail) and Kerry (another smaller comet type). They know us. They wave hello every time we wander by, wanting us to feed them. They live to eat and to flaunt their tails.
We enjoy the fish but for us it’s a different thing when a fish “crosses over” than when goes a cat or dog. Son was still last year struggling to cope with Malcolm’s death. When Dorothy 1 died, despite his thinking she was a marvelous, beautiful fish, despite his having named her after Sesame Street’s Elmo’s goldfish, he was content to look at her out of the tank, suggest different ways of reviving, then settle on a decent tupperware burial in the garbage bin (I know, yes, hideous of us, but we live in an urban apartment).
It took some time getting used to a pet that never closes its eyes–not when it sleeps, not when it dies.
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