***
Veterinarians are very caring and sometimes perform miracles, but their service lacks one important item. They do not come to your home and dose the resident royals with the prescribed medicine. Jerry left this task to me with an airy wave of his hand, saying, "It's simple. Just wrap the cat in a towel and pop the pill down his throat."
I had once had occasion to wrap a cat in a towel in order to shove medicine down his throat and all I achieved was one mad cat, one shredded towel and the medicine all over me instead of inside the cat. And, for the next six months, every time the cat saw me with a towel in my hand, he disappeared for hours.
After reading the instructions for the medicine, I grumbled to Ben, "I'll have to get up half an hour earlier every day to con those two into swallowing their pills."
"Jerry said all you have to do is wrap the cat . . ."
Snarling, I retreated to my studio. That night I took the instructions to bed to memorize because I had a pretty fair idea what life would be like in the morning.
As usual, the two steps prior to climbing out of bed were easy: waking up and getting my eyes open. George and Henry helped by meowing, nudging, and patting my face with their dear little paws. Putting on a dressing gown and finding my glasses I was able to manage all by myself.
In the kitchen, I washed out two cat dishes and opened a can of the strongest-tasting cat food available. By this time, the royals were 'catting' my heels and wanting to know what was taking me so long.
Then I had to organize the medicine.
George's, half a pink pill every day, required good hand-eye coordination and patience. I had to put the pill on a flat surface and split it in half with a razor blade. A simple operation, except that both cats were yelling at me to hurry up and my aim was off, resulting in a pill cut into one-third and two-thirds and spattered with blood from the slash in my finger. After that, I merely had to grind the pill with a small mortar and pestle and mix it into his food.
Henry had to have two medicines each day. One was a small white tablet, ground to dust and mixed with his food. No problem. The other was one fourth of a capsule of antibiotic. The antibiotic was a yellow powder contained in a capsule which supposedly melted away in the stomach.
This had to be pure fantasy on the part of the pill merchants. The only thing that would slice into it was an exceedingly sharp razor blade and even then it just bent itself out of shape until I got downright vicious, which resulted in a spray of yellow powder all over me and the kitchen counter.
Once the capsule was open, the powder had to be divided into four equal portions. No difficulty here – but where could I keep three tiny piles of yellow powder so they'd be easy to deal with in the mental fog of morning? After searching the house, the only suitable containers I could find were china egg cups.
By this time, the royals were ordering me to produce their breakfast and threatening to sell me back to the slave dealer if it didn't appear at once.
But I had still more medicine to deal with. Henry was supposed to have one millilitre of Vitamin B complex every 12 hours in order to give him more zest for life. I checked my metric conversion table. Fifteen millilitres equaled one-half ounce, or one tablespoon. Therefore one teaspoon would be seven and a half millilitres. Sounded like an eighth teaspoon was about right. One more lesson I'd been forced to learn: a millilitre was about two drops.
I wasn't convinced that Henry, who loved to play, needed Vitamin B. He chased the King all over the house in his eagerness to wrestle. It was only George's ability to leap on top of the piano that saved his tail and dignity from Henry's playful mauling. Every day Henry climbed forty feet up the Garry oak tree beyond the orchard and talked to the squirrels. I'd heard that he also visited our neighbors on either side and across the road and played with the resident animals. If Henry acquired more zest for life, nobody would have any peace.
However, Jerry had assured me that the stuff smelled like liver and cats adored it, so I mixed a couple of drops in Henry's food and gave George some as a treat. The cats took one sniff and tried to bury the food. I had to dump it out, wash the dishes, spoon out more food and grind up more pills. So much for the universal popularity of Vitamin B complex.
And so the days went. If I was lucky, the royals ate their food and medicine. Some mornings I wasn't lucky, which meant opening a different kind of cat food and starting all over again.
On the fifth morning, I said to Ben, "It would be a lot simpler to take the cats to the vet and let him dose them. All we'd have to do is put the cats in carriers and drive them into Mora Bay. Oh yes, and talk Jerry into opening his office at seven a.m. seven days a week."
"Holly, you're cracking up. Maybe you should see the doctor."
"He'd just prescribe pills and tell you to wrap me in a towel before you shoved them down my throat."
XX - The Imperial Bedchamber
Winter came, cold and bleak, in November. The wind blew in off the sea, rain poured down day after day, and the lab report on Henry came back saying that he had Feline Immunodeficiency Virus. Jerry told us that FIV was fatal and, like HIV in humans, there was no cure. Henry might live six months or six years; there was no way of telling.
"Those gum infections are a result of the FIV," Jerry said. "My guess is that he got it when he was a street cat and was attacked by an infected cat."
"What about George? Could he get it from Henry?"
"Only if George's mouth comes in direct contact with Henry's blood or saliva. For example, if George bit Henry and got Henry's blood in his mouth, or if Henry bit George and his saliva got into George's veins. They don't fight, do they?"
I was close to tears. So was Ben. "Henry's a Buddhist. He doesn't believe in violence."
"Well, I wouldn't worry then. And you never know; Henry could live for years. Just take good care of him."
Henry's gum infection cleared up quickly and he was back to his usual frisky self, climbing trees, batting at Nicky's tail, pestering George. I began to lean toward Buddhism myself. Henry was happy living one day at a time, one moment at a time, and he didn't worry. I thought how much better life would be if I could live that way, too. I sent off another short story and two poems I'd written about George and Henry. Why worry about rejections? Why worry about Henry, when I was doing all I could for him? But the latter was far easier said than done.
The days grew shorter and George and Henry became professional nap artists, especially on dark rainy days. Even Nicky, fed up with rain and Ben's boring occupations of stripping wallpaper in one of the upstairs bedrooms or sitting in his den poring over greenhouse plans, spent hours curled up in his blanket-covered chair.
The cats' first choice was a warm lap, but the owner of the lap had to sit still – no sneezing, coughing or other disturbing noises – nor did they approve of the lap disappearing to answer the telephone or calls of nature. They competed for the same lap, even when a second was available, and it took dedication to read a book and drink coffee with two cats jockeying for position.
It took dedication to have a nap myself. When I lay on my side, Henry balanced himself on my ribs and shoulder so he could tickle my face with his long whiskers and snore in my ear. George perched on my hip. If I moved even a little, they dug their claws in for balance.
The only way I could avoid having nap mates was to take my clothes off; neither cat liked lying on bare skin. But that was hardly a practical solution when I might be required to answer the door at any time in my role of Egg Lady. I wondered if the cats thought something was wrong when I wasn't wearing 'fur.' I suspect the answer was much simpler; bare skin didn't provide good purchase for their claws.
George had a broad choice of sleeping places by virtue of his ability to float from crag to crag on the Alps of our furniture. Clumsy Henry could jump only three feet; after that he clawed his way up paw over paw.
One day, however, Henry discovered he could jump from our bedroom armchair to Ben's chest of drawers. This was where Ben tossed loos
e change, keys, bits of paper, stray buttons and anything else he didn't know where to file. Henry's leaps scrunched the dresser scarf into ridges and knocked piles of stuff onto the floor. He'd curl up in the middle of the remaining debris and, when dreaming, kick more things overboard.
When George discovered his subordinate had beaten him to this 'in' place, he insinuated himself into Henry's place, forcing Henry to retreat to the low dresser next to the chest of drawers.
The Houseboy, noting Henry's forlorn expression, said, "Poor little guy. I'll give him a folded towel to lie on."
Henry curled up on the towel. An hour later, George had booted Henry off and was occupying its exact center.
Ben put another towel on the dresser. George promptly claimed that but Henry took over the original one. George paced, trying to figure out how to sleep on both towels at once. Failing, he declared a truce.
The dresser was 'in' for about six weeks. Every morning we straightened the scarves, picked debris off the floor and smoothed the towels. The royals slept peacefully.
When I dared to complain, St. Francis said, "They're people, too. They're entitled to sleep where they want."
Suddenly, the dresser was 'out.' Henry learned to gain Ben's desk by hopping up on his easy chair, then wriggling behind the drapes along the windowsill to step down onto the desk. He didn't seem to mind sleeping on a hard desk, even with George nudging him towards the edge.
Ben put a fat feather pillow on the desk next to the window. Both cats slept there, basking in the sun, if there was any, and occasionally raising their heads to watch birds and squirrels playing in the trees outside. The pillow was big enough for two cats and we hoped the rivalry would end.
Not so. The half of the pillow nearest the window became the prized spot. One afternoon George settled smugly into it while Henry stared at him. After a few moments, Henry stepped over George, sat on the edge of the desk and gazed out the window. His big, fluffy tail swept back and forth across George's face. The King put up with this for perhaps thirty seconds before he jumped down in disgust. Henry settled into the sunny end of the pillow with a smile on his face and a rumbling purr.
Next they competed for the top of my printer, which had room for only one cat, so the other slept beside it, awaiting his opportunity. When Henry moved to my keyboard, I complained about cat hair getting into my equipment.
"They're guarding your computer so nobody will steal it," Ben said. "You should be grateful to those cats for their loyalty and devotion."
I said something rude. Ben went to his workshop and made sturdy plywood covers for both printer and keyboard. I topped the covers with towels, but the royals lost interest and moved to my desk.
Although grateful to have the use of my keyboard again, I was still unhappy about cat hair drifting around. I also didn't like the strange sentences the cats wrote on the screen as they walked across the keyboard on their way out of the room. Neither of them could spell.
Bored with my studio, the cats moved to an armchair in the living room, where Henry became as adept at kicking George off as George was at kicking Henry off. That finally palled and the chair was occupied most of the day by two mounds of fur. Occasionally one would wake up, glare at the other, decide it was too much trouble to argue, and go back to sleep again.
On the coldest days, the cats slept on Nicky. Henry would snuggle between Nicky's paws and George would lie on the dog's back. Nicky seemed happy to share his chair with the royals – until one of them tried to knead him. Then he shook them off and climbed up on our bed to sleep.
When George wearied of sharing his bed with social inferiors, he did his Superman act. A favorite spot was under a small lamp on top of the television cabinet. He knew the Houseboy would turn on the lamp so he could bask in its heat. When he awoke and sat up, his head trapped under the small lamp shade, he looked as though he'd just come home from a wild party. Another favorite was the walk-in linen closet and he'd look up at the door knob and yell for someone to open the door. He perched on the towel shelf at eye level – mine, not his – and every time he leapt up, kicked piles of towels on the floor, which his slaves then had to replace.
The linen closet wasn't my favorite, however. I'd forget he was in there, wander in for a towel and jump when I saw malevolent green eyes glaring at me out of the dark. Ben, always tidy, would routinely shut the door on his way by without checking to see if George was occupying a shelf. Hours later we'd hear a faint yowling and, the first few times, opened front and back doors and even went outside to look for him before we realised he was in the closet.
When George escaped to high places, Henry often slept in a paper grocery bag, under a couch or among the shoes in a closet. When we wanted to be sure Henry was in the house, we had to crawl around on our hands and knees looking for him. It was astonishing what small, inaccessible places that cat could get into and even more astonishing how many such places there were in our house.
Ben's favorite armchair was also George's. As soon as Ben left it, George dove into the chair and feigned sleep. When Ben returned and picked him up, the King squeaked pathetically. If Ben remained hardhearted and sat in the chair, George sat on Ben. Both grumbled, but neither would move. At such times it was left to me to attend to the phone, the door, the television and mashing the potatoes for our supper. If Henry was sitting in my lap, nothing got done.