ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
©Jo Dereske 2014Chapter 12
Morris the Cat Loses a Battle
Nearly every tree in the yard cupped a bird’s nest in its branches, tucked in tree crotches or amid masses of leaves, invisible but for the colorful entrance and exit of new parents. But an invader was marauding the nests. At the base of a pine tree we found a fresh robin's egg, its tiny perfect yellow yolk spilling out from the sky-blue shell into the grass. In the early evening as Kipling and I walked the trail near the orchard a swallow screeched and wheeled in the air, clearly distressed. On the next turn around the trail, we found a fresh speckled egg broken on the ground, its insides cleanly removed as if the shell had been licked clean.
I'd seen a pair of bluebirds, a growing rarity in the area, and I feared they'd beccome prey to whatever villain the birds were facing.
“Raccoons,” Mike said when we told I about the broken eggs. “Sonsabitches.” He frequently cursed, something I hadn’t heard him do when I was growing up. Susan assured us that it was common for Alzheimer patients to suddenly change behavior, to act in ways that family members found diametrically opposed to the person they’d known all their lives. “You’d be surprised what emerges from some formerly sweet old lady’s mouth,” she said, grinning.
Could Morris be the culprit, we wondered. He was wily, sleek, blindingly fast to pounce on small things in the grass. But to suck eggs? I’d never heard of an egg-sucking cat.
Kipling came upon Morris skulking low to the ground, tail twitching, intent on a fledgling Evening grosbeak three feet in front of him. Kipling scooped up the squirming, hissing cat and shut him on the back porch of the little house, giving the grosbeak time to escape, but the grosbeak, fully feathered in its exotic black, white and yellow, didn’t make its escape. It sat stupidly in the grass, easy prey to any predator, too young to fly, we realized.
We suspected that Morris – or some other animal – had frightened it from its nest before it had taken its first flight. We searched for a nest or a hovering mother, but no luck. “Something must have caught her,” Kipling said, “or she’d be swooping around overhead.”
The baby grosbeak was calm, unfrightened, not evincing any fear when Kipling picked it up and set it in a cardboard box he’d lined with grass. He let Morris out of the porch –the cat immediately set about searching for the bird – and set the cardboard box with the bird inside the porch, safe from any other bad guys.
The grosbeak was an exotic creature, with its startling plumage, thick body and large beak. Flocks of grosbeaks had visited the bird feeders over the winter but we hadn’t seen any since the snow melted, and never one so close.
Kipling carried a small plastic cup and stalked through the lawn for bugs and worms, which the grosbeak eagerly accepted, its mouth wide at Kipling’s approach, while Morris now hunkered suspiciously outside the porch door, casting broody eyes whenever he saw us.
For three days the grosbeak accepted this new turn of its life, perching on Kipling’s finger, riding his shoulder. He carried the bird to the patio to show Louise and Mike.
“Is it a parrot?” Louise, who’d always known grosbeaks, asked.
“Would you like to hold it?” Kipling asked Mike, holding his finger so the bird could jump to Mike’s.
“No no,” Mike shook his head. “Watch out for that cat,” he warned, and Louise tried to give Kipling five dollars to, “buy that bird a loaf of bread.”
On the fourth day, Kipling decided it was time for the grosbeak to join the World of Birds. He shut Morris onto the porch again and leaned Mike’s tallest wooden ladder against the barn.
“You could just release the bird from your hand,” I suggested. “That’s what rescue centers do.”
“This will be better,” he said, and carried two chairs out to the grassy area in front of the barn for Louise and Mike to sit and watch. I helped them out to the yard, hoping we weren’t about to witness a disaster: the grosbeak plummeting to the ground or a hawk swooping in and grabbing it. Louise was excited. “We’re the peanut gallery,” she said, holding her hands together, as if she were about to applaud.
With me steadying the ladder and the grosbeak on his shoulder, Kipling climbed as high as he dared. He steadied himself and freeing one hand from the ladder, transferred the bird to his finger.
The bird looked around with its bright eyes but appeared to have no interest in leaving Kipling’s finger. I couldn’t blame him: where else could he get breakfast in bed, plentiful food, and doting humans?
When Mike grew impatient and began to rise from his chair, Kipling called out to keep his attention, “Mike, watch this!” and when Mike looked up, Kipling nudged the grosbeak off his finger.
We oohed and aahed and clapped as the bird was forced to launch, flapping its wings in an unsteady swoop and falling halfway to the ground before catching on to this flight thing. It flapped with more strength and immediately disappeared into the woods beyond the orchard. For a few moments we watched and waited, expecting it to return and salute us. Job well done.
“That was pretty good,” Louise called to Kip. “Wasn’t it, Mikey?”
“Pretty good,” Mike agreed, already shuffling back to the house.
1930 Two weeks before Christmas and the sheriff caught Frank, Bill and me hunting without licenses. We had eleven rabbits with us. He was hiding by Thompson’s board fence and it was too late to run away. The sheriff told me to go home but Frank and Bill got twenty days in jail or $19.85 fine each. They took the jail. I feel so bad. A cold clear day.
At our Alzheimer’s group meeting, Milly related how she carefully arranged her mother’s refrigerator the same every day – a suggestion of Susan’s to assist her mother in finding items, but one day Milly accidentally placed leftover chicken on the shelf where the milk usually sat. Her mother couldn’t find the milk that had been placed one shelf above the chicken and was frantic, convinced she was out of milk.
“It was a major melt down,” Milly told us. “She cried all day.
”
“Try giving her what she’s confused about,” Susan suggested. “Let her put her hands on it. Sometimes touch reinforces what she’s seeing. If one sense is failing, another may be stronger.”
Evelyn’s husband had called her by his first wife’s name and she bristled with indignation and hurt, suspicious he wanted to return to his first marriage.
“Do you think she’d want him now?” Milly’s teenage daughter asked with a lift of her eyebrows.
“Probably not,” Evelyn conceded. “Half the time I don’t, either.”
But it was obvious to all of us how much Evelyn desperately longed for his former self, the same as we all wanted our loved ones to return to us.
Jack, the man whose father had Alzheimer’s and whose wife had stayed home to care for him the previous meeting, didn’t attend, but his wife Julie did. “I’d hoped if he came, he’d get a clue about what I’m going through,” she said, “but it didn’t make much of an impression. He thinks I’m exaggerating.”
“Does he spend time alone with his father?” Susan asked.
“Sometimes, but he lets a lot of things go that I don’t. He doesn’t help his father wash up or put him to bed at a reasonable hour.”
And we were off again, discussing just how important insisting that dementia patients adhere to certain standards was – or wasn’t. Susan discussed the trade-off between causing anxiety by forcing them to meet our need for control and a timetable, or relaxing our own standards so they’d feel less anxious. “Who can better handle the stress?” she asked.
After the meeting, Susan asked if Ray was working on Mike’s legal guardianship.
He was. The procedure had become complicated because before he married Louise, Mike had had another family. The details were a mystery to us and there’d been no communication in decades, but there were children and legally they had to agree to the guardianship of their father before the guardianship could move forward.
“I’ll call Ray,” Susan told me.
It wasn’t uncommon to receive two wrong numbers a day on our phone in the little house. The last holder of our phone number had been a rooming house in Scottville, seven miles away, which had then switched to an unlisted number. When we complained to the phone company, they offered to change our number for a fee, which would also mean notifying everyone of a new number. Instead, we stopped by the rooming house and requested their unlisted phone number to pass on to callers.
At first the landlord, a hefty man who greeted us at the door in green coveralls and an undershirt, refused to give it to us, “I have to take too damn many messages,” he complained. “I need a little peace around here.”
But Kipling was one of those people who, when he was denied, commiserated and agreed that yes, he’d made an outlandish request and he could certainly understand why he was being refused, yet he somehow ended up getting what he wanted. I left the office and waited beside our truck because I was not one of those kinds of people, and within five minutes Kipling exited the rooming house, the new telephone number on a slip of paper in his hand.
Wrong numbers were often accompanied by an explanation.
"Are you sure you're not the rooming house? I know Rod Beeman lives there and I need him to fix my carburetor."
"But I have to get ahold of Lucille. She's our fourth in bridge and the rest of the girls are ready to play. She's always late."
"I wanted to tell Marcia that the check's in the mail and I love her."
"But she doesn't live here," I explained.
"I'm calling from Texas."
"I'm sorry," I told him, hearing the desperation in his voice.
"How's the weather up there anyway?" he asked. Longing edged his question. I didn’t ask but I guessed he was originally from Michigan, not Texas.
Finally, I pulled out the local phone directory and found the phone number of a friend of Marcia's and he thanked me and hung up after saying quietly, “I hate being divorced.”
I provided the rooming house number to an elderly lady and a week later I heard her distinctive voice. "I think you gave me that number another time," she said when I repeated it.
Another man told me irritably. "Well, I don't know what I'm going to do now. This guy was going to buy my snowmobile."
We had an answering machine on our phone and one day when we played back the messages, a man’s voice apologized into the machine for having dialed the wrong number.
My favorite wrong number was a woman who said she was getting old and was homesick for Lithuanian food and needed a particular recipe. "You mean this isn't Ramas's?"
"No," I told her.
"Well, then who are you?"
When I said the name Dereske, she spent the next ten minutes telling me what a good cook my grandmother had been and how she herself had once danced with my Uncle Frank at a wedding. “Oh, he could whirl a girl,” she said wistfully. “I was so sorry when he was killed.” She related her journey from Lithuania with her parents when she was four years old. By the end of the conversation we were quite chummy and although she didn’t tell me her name she shared with me her mother’s recipe for kugelis, a favorite Lithuanian potato dish.
1930 Stella and I went to Ludington and brought things for Bill and Frank for Christmas in jail. The sheriff let us visit with them. The cell door wasn’t locked. But still it would make me crazy. A beautiful day. Every tree limb covered with dewy snow. I went to confession and midnight mass. I miss Bill. Merry Christmas, dear one.
A tangle of yowls, growls and high-pitched screams shocked us out of bed at two in the morning. It took a frantic minute to identify the drama of a cat fight, a brutal one. Abruptly, it ended in silence. Kipling stood at the door and called for Morris, then ventured into the darkness with a flashlight. Beyond a few disturbed peepers and the eerie hoo-hoo of an owl there was no sign of the yellow cat.
At daylight by the barn, Kipling discovered tufts of yellow and black fur in the dirt. One of the yellow tufts was attached to a fifty cent-sized piece of hide. “He’s hurt,” Kipling said, and searched the farm for hours without a trace of Morris.
As the sun set we discovered Morris lying on the mat outside our back door, one eye matted closed and his belly red with blood from a quarter-sized hole in his chest. His left rear leg was stiff and bloody, his ear was ripped half off. He made no protest while Kipling examined him, but I doubted he was able to. It was a minor miracle that he’d made it to the back door of the little house.
We phoned a veterinarian who’d practiced in the county for decades. It was after office hours but he’d answered his phone himself. When we explained our local connections and the situation, he said, “Bring him in.”
Morris lay limply in a towel-lined cardboard box between us during the five-mile drive. I kept feeling for his heartbeat, crooning nonsense to him as I would to an injured child.
The vet examined Morris and surmised that beside his obvious damage he likely had internal injuries. He gently suggested it might be kindest to put Morris down. Hearing that, Kipling gathered up Morris in his arms and carried him out of the vet’s office. “I can do better than that,” he said in parting.
For four days Morris languished on our back porch, burying himself deep inside a box of old towels, sleeping. Each morning and evening, he lay patiently while Kipling doctored his wounds in what would be a long, slow recovery. Once again, I was grateful for Aunt Louise’s faulty memory. When she asked, “Have you seen Morris today?” I’d truthfully answer, “I have; he was curled up sound asleep on a towel,” and she’d sigh in satisfaction.
After three nights of being awakened by the challenging yowls of the tom cat responsible for Morris’s injuries, Kipling considered it a declaration of war. He found an old wire trap two feet by four feet in the barn and baited it with meat scraps, then positioned it so any animal trying to enter the barn where Morris usually slept would have to walk straight into it.
The trap was successful the first night, but our captive: a big fat possum. Kipling opened the wire door and it ambled off in its clumsy gait, tail dragging behind him, seemingly undisturbed by having been trapped in a wire cage. The next morning it looked like the same contented possum in the trap. And the next morning, too.
“Either there’s a herd of identical possums around here or we have one very stupid possum,” Kipling commented as we watched it stroll toward the trees.
But the following morning, spitting and hissing filled the air before we rounded the corner of the barn, and we saw the trap wildly rocking. A growling long-haired black and white cat raced around the rectangular confines, banging head-first against the sides of the trap. Its fur was mangy, matted with knots and briars. Kipling used a pitchfork from the barn to open the trap door because each time he stepped within five feet of the cage, the cat attacked, slamming into the wire sides with its lips drawn back, well-polished teeth wickedly bared, and claws swiping. “I think he could eat through the wire,” I warned him.
The instant the trap door began to shakily rise, the cat flattened itself and pressed through the crack. It streaked away toward the deep ravine.
“I hope that taught him a lesson,” Kipling said, but he re-baited the trap with a piece of hot dog, “to reinforce the lesson.”
And there was the same cat in the trap the next morning, just as foul-tempered, just as quick to bound away.
On the fifth morning, we found the black and white cat glowering at us from the back corner of the trap. Morris, nearly healed, sat on a stump in the sunshine fifteen feet away, watching. The cat gave us a sullen meow of recognition and crouched, prepared to escape when the door was opened. He had the drill down, willing to trade a night in a trap in exchange for the tidbits Kipling used for bait.
“You’re on your own now, Morris,” Kipling told Morris, who unconcernedly sat on the stump and washed his face. “That’s the last trapping I’m doing in your name.”
1930 Christmas day. Just before we sat down to Christmas dinner, Johnny looked out the window and shouted. My Billy and Frank were walking up the road to the house through the beautiful snow! The sheriff let them out for Christmas but they have to go back tomorrow to finish their sentences. Oh, it was a good day!
Next Tuesday, Chapter 13: Mike's Search for Meaning