The Black Cat

One of my father’s favorite stories is The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe. I remember him reading an excerpt aloud to my youngest sister and I on the deck one warm fall day. Like Vincent Price at a backyard barbeque, he read slowly and dramatically, but the content was a little too heavy for my kindergarten brain to process. I probably just listened, slow-blinking and confused, while my baby sister stared, open-mouthed, from her high-chair, clutching a homemade teething bar in her fist. Fortunately, the details went straight over my young head at the time, but apparently, The Black Cat is about a man’s descent into a homicidal rage that compels him to brutally murder not only the cat, but his wife while he’s at it. I suppose it goes without saying we didn’t really ascribe to age-restrictions regarding literature or cinema in my family--which is probably why I thought “PG” meant “Pretty Good” and “R” meant “Really Good” until one of my friends wasn’t allowed to watch something we owned on VHS.

Our first two cats were black-and-white females we named Oreo and Peppermint. Following a brief feline Rumspringa of sorts, they both returned knocked up by some feral cat they encountered in the woods. To what would’ve been my absolute horror as a mom, Oreo and Peppermint gave birth inside our house to three kittens each, one set in the attic, amid the cozy cushion of pink insulation and the other in a bedroom closet. By the grace of God, all the kittens survived, both the perils of home-birth and the bone-crushing adoration of my sisters and me.

The runt of Peppermint’s litter was jet black, scrawny, and skittish with darting eyes like a cartoon criminal. My dad wasn’t fond of cats and had no desire to weigh in on whatever adorable names we choose for the other kittens, but the black one, he declared, would be “Edgar” after the notorious author of his favorite short story. We obliged with a shrug...but ultimately, updated the name to “Edgareen” when we later discovered “Edgar” was a girl.

It was obvious early on that Edgareen’s brothers, Squeaky and Sneakers, never liked her, and she was too skinny and suspicious to be cuddly with humans. She avoided people and fellow cats from the beginning, but still ended up in mixed martial arts matches with her brothers that never ended well for her. After being released into the Big Outdoors like all of our other cats, she caught on pretty quickly that ground-level was not a safe place for her. She needed to establish a hideout far removed from her feline relatives and our two giant labrador retrievers that chased her like small ponies on stampede, thinking she was playing with them.

One night around 8 or 9 PM, I was watching TV in my bedroom when I was startled by a strange plucking sound coming from the window, like someone playing a homemade guitar or removing staples from the lid of a metal trash can. I crept cautiously toward the window to investigate, but the glass appeared opaque in the darkness. I went back to what I was doing… then I heard it again! I turned back to the window and again, saw nothing, until suddenly, a dark form pounced on the window screen, its two wild green eyes and four sets of tiny claws clearly visible in the otherwise vague outline of whatever creature it was.

After I peeing myself a little and enduring a mild episode of cardiac arrest...I recognized the window monster for what it was: Edgareen, splayed against my window screen like a Looney Tunes character splattered on a windshield. She’d apparently shimmied up a tree next to our house and scurried across a branch to the roof. She was now sharpening her claws on the screen and moaning like a cow in childbirth. I enlisted a parent to help me open the window and grab her, which was no small task. She squirmed in my hands like a catfish on a boat deck as I ran through the house with her at arm’s length and let her back outside. But like a toddler forcibly removed from an electrical socket, Edgareen b-lined right back up to the roof as soon as her feet hit the ground.

Once or twice, out of curiosity perhaps, other cats found their way up to the roof and tried to make a power play for Edgareen’s territory. Roof-top skirmishes would then ensue, that sounded through the ceiling like Santa’s reindeer might if they’d snorted a few lines of cocaine before landing. More than once, a battle royale of this type ended with Edgareen actually falling off the roof and somehow living to accept the next rematch. Eventually, the other cats lost interest in challenging Edgareen’s right to the roof and just let her have it. By this point, her tail no longer had the natural flexibility of a willow switch like other cats, looking instead like a rigid lightning rod with an unnatural bend near the tip. Nevertheless, the roof was now hers. We all just grew accustomed to her habit of clinging to our window screens at night, like a Walmart greeter going from car to car tapping on windows in the parking lot, rather than just waiting to say hi as shoppers passed through the sliding glass doors.

Near the foot of the very long gravel drive from our house, was a small rental property that changed hands several times while I was growing up. One set of tenants had a dog that was basically Frankenweenie come to life. With legs the length of human thumbs, a thick, round, elongated trunk, and the head of something mean, like a Rottweiler or Doberman, it looked like it had been hastily composed from the spare parts of two incompatible breeds through the brutal assault of one large aggressive canine on a much meeker, smaller one.

Those deceptively stubby legs were remarkably agile, however, and one day propelled Frankenweenie’s swollen kielbasa body all the way up the hill to our house. There, he encountered a rare sighting of Edgareen at ground-level, having ventured down for dinner perhaps. As was her recurring fate with larger, nicer dogs, a chase ensued, but this time, Edgareen just wasn’t quick enough. Luckily, we never saw what exactly happened, but Edgareen didn’t make it.

The first pet we ever lost was Edgareen’s cousin Gem, who wandered down to the highway and got hit by a car. It was a gut-wrenching, traumatic scene, and I cried all the way to school, hopeless, dry-heaving sobs so excessive my older sister stopped crying herself to tell me to shut the hell up. Later, Edgareen’s brother Sneakers snuck into the house and got stuck playing in the defunct air vents that connected radiators we no longer used. We didn’t even realize he was missing until it began to smell like an episode of CSI in our living room. We barely shed a tear for him after the fact.

So by the time Edgareen met her unfortunate fate, we’d been oddly desensitized to the loss of our outdoor pets. It was grisly, no doubt, but less traumatic somehow than it should’ve been. Maybe because it seemed gruesomely appropriate. Of course that would happen to Edgareen. Of course. To a cat who lived on the roof her whole life and only came down for once a day for 30 seconds of generic Fancy Feast.

Of our eight outdoor cats, Edgareen’s cousin Mischief survived the longest. He was close to fifteen years old when he died and absolutely enormous, with claws like miniature pic axes he could have scaled the north face of Mount Everest with. In his waning years, had he been capable of being interviewed documentary-style like a famous actor in winter of his life, I imagine Mischief would have reflected wistfully about his ill-fated cousin Edgareen. He would’ve taken a long drag off a cat-sized cigarette dangling from one of his dog-sized paws and shaken his grapefruit-sized head with its later-life tumor that was the diameter of a golf ball. “Poor bastard,” I imagine him saying. “Shoulda seen it coming, ya know? Damn. Shoulda seen it coming…”

About a month ago, Ray and I were watching TV and heard a large cicada-type insect ramming itself into the screen of our sliding glass door. Naturally, I sent Ray to investigate because sending my husband to look into things that might make me shit my pants is a prized benefit of our marriage. When he called me over to behold a winged creature the size of a date floundering on its back, still stunned from colliding kamikaze-style with the door, I was a little disappointed. I’d half-expected to see a skittish old friend, clinging to the screen, plucking out the dissonant, mournful tune characteristic of doomed domesticated animals—and apparently, off-brand cicadas.