imaginations.
Father isn’t really religious as much as he is superstitious, always making certain to throw a dash of salt over his back before seasoning his food, or knocking on wood whenever anyone discusses our good fortune. My sister had been relentlessly badgering my father about getting a cat and every time the conversation ended with an emphatic “there’s no chance that I’m going to let you have a cat living under the same roof with us.” When my sister began feeding the stray cat that loitered outside our door every night our father was livid. The cat was as black as a chalk board with bright yellow eyes, just dripping with occult legend and myth. When my sister insisted that she would just stop feeding the cat if it bothered our father so much our father went into a panic, telling her that the last thing we wanted to do was spurn the hellish animal and bring about our own misfortune.
Father tried to show some of the families on our block what a good cat it was that he had hanging out in his yard and offered that they could have him or her (none of us ever studied the cat’s undercarriage to discover his or her gender – just seems like a very personal yet unnecessary intrusion) for free but he was unable to psychologize the neighbors. Then he tried luring the cat away by carrying food several blocks from the house while the cat followed him. Once he was a good distance from our home he dropped the food and sprinted back to the house. An hour later the cat was always back in our yard. Obviously father wasn’t able to psychologize the cat either.
Whenever our father ventured out of our home the cat took up at his heels and followed him. When father was inside the house the cat sat outside and with some strange uncanny ability to know where our father was the cat would stare right toward where he was sitting, as if there were no wall separating them, directly at father. If our father sat in the living room for example we could draw back the blinds and there the cat would be, outside the window looking straight at him. This was the case with every room in the house from bathroom to bedroom. It was eerie. The cat was fixated on father. At first it scared our father something terrible but after awhile father surprised us by growing comfortable with the ever-pursuing feline, even allowing him or her to jump into our car and ride shotgun when father went on short errands. He put an old milk crate on the passenger seat so that the cat could peer out the window as they drove through the neighborhood. When he bought himself a pair of sunglasses for driving he bought a tiny cat-sized version for his new sidekick. The two were quite a sight coming down the road.
Our fortune certainly hadn’t turned bad with the arrival of the cat like father had first feared. If anything, it got better, so good in fact that our father received a large enough raise at work so that he and the cat could ride in luxury, a brand new midnight blue Chrysler convertible with all the amenities.
When we asked father whether the cat could now live in the house with us he told us that we shouldn’t press our luck, that we should just keep things the way they were, that this cat was an outdoor cat and that we didn’t actually own him or her, he or she simply lived among us, like a neighbor that was no longer trespassing on our property but now welcome in our yard. I think that he just felt bound by his own rule that he had set in stone.
Father turned thirty three and we celebrated with a beauty of a vanilla cake that mama had baked and topped with fresh strawberries. My sister and I had combined our allowances and bought father a gift which we presented to him at dinner. He unwrapped the bottle of Irish Mate aftershave and after thanking us repeatedly, displayed it in the center of the table like a trophy he’d just won. Mama admired the large spray nozzle on top of the bottle that was shaped like a four leaf clover, pointing out to our father that it certainly meant good luck. We were so proud of ourselves.
Everything was going tremendously for our family and the cat that hung out in our yard until our father had the altercation with The Bird Lady. She lived kittycorner from our house in a three tier Victorian monster wrapped with multiple decks on every level that held bird feeder after bird feeder after bird feeder. Many of the people in our small town had heard the rumors that The Bird Lady was a witch. Some of the folks even called her The Bird Witch but mama explained that the more polite families called her The Bird Lady. The Bird Lady stood out on her balcony nearly every day and spoke to the hundreds of birds that were drawn to the elaborate feeders, her long floral silks fluttering in the breeze weightlessly much like the feathers of her friends. The silks covered from neck to foot of her ancient looking body, a body we couldn’t determine the ancestry of, her face an eclectic blend storied with traits from every corner of the globe. As she leaned in and filled the feeders, if we remained perfectly quiet, we could always hear her clucking her tongue and whistling as if she spoke bird language.
Father always takes great pride in his appearance, every detail from his polished shoes to his tasteful ties. It’s not often that you catch him dressed in anything other than a dress shirt and tie but he does remove his sport coat while in the house. He even does lawn care in his long sleeves, always long sleeves, and tie, forcing himself not to perspire by sheer willpower. That pride in appearance also extended to the new car that he kept in immaculate condition and that’s where we ran into trouble. Our father, having no garage, was forced to park this amazing marvel of motion on the street. On only the third day that he had owned the car my sister and I followed him as he walked out of the house. He greeted the cat, and then we all saw that the gleam that my father and the cat had worked so hard to polish into the automobile’s finish was splattered with a white mound of bird dropping, center hood.
He angrily snatched a handkerchief from his pocket, spat on it, and scrubbed the fecal deposit carefully, so as not to scratch the finish. Me, my sister, and the cat, watched nervously, scared that our father might lose his temper and yell. The Bird Woman was also watching him from her highest deck as she filled the feeders. I doubt that he even meant it to slip out but he looked up at her while he cleaned the car and muttered to the cat, “That’s the problem, all of these birds! She just keeps feeding them! Of course they’re going to shit on everything. Pardon my language, kids,” he said, turning to us momentarily. We’d never heard him swear before and it shocked both of us. He turned back to the cat and started scrubbing again. “What should we have expected, eh, cat?”
The Bird Woman stopped what she was doing and dropped the bag of seed. She came to the area of the deck nearest our father. We didn’t even know if she could hear or not, let alone speak English. No one had ever heard her utter a word. But her hearing and her understanding of English were exceptional, as she had heard every word father had said. The cat looked at our father and meowed sympathetically.
Father looked up at The Bird Woman again and tried to explain his comment as she studied him, her big black eyes blinking occasionally.
“Do you really have to feed so many birds? Seriously? They shh-pooped on my car.” He threw his hands up and waited for an answer before angrily dropping them to his hips.
But she didn’t answer his question. She just grabbed the flesh below one eye and tugged it down so that the already enormous eye looked even bigger than it actually was and then with her free hand she extended her finger and drew little circles around our father in the air. The cat quickly backed away from where our father stood. We followed the cat.
Father said, “oh shi-ooot!” because he really wanted to swear again. That was the type of thing that we usually hear come out of his mouth when he wants to cuss. He substitutes various common words for cuss words when a stressful occasion gets the best of him or he hits his head on something, which he does often. He looked down at the cat who was now proudly holding one of The Bird Woman’s birds in his or her teeth. None of us even saw him or her snatch it.
“Fun time! Oh fun time! Son of a baby! Come on, kids!” our father said as he looked back over his shoulder at The Bird Woman and hurried back toward our house, doing that walk where you’re actually running but your feet stay close to the ground and your knees don’t bend m
uch. The cat ran alongside him with the bird dangling from his or her jaws. We also had to run to keep up with them.
“You really really didn’t help matters, cat,” he said to his sidekick. “Go put that thing back in her yard.”
The cat paused and studied father before deciding to keep the bird.
Father slowed only for a second to discard the filthy bird-dropping stained handkerchief in the curbside trashcan before we watched him open the door to go into the house, but mama had other ideas.
Mama had come up from the basement where she had been busy with the laundry and met him before he could cross the threshold. She was shaking her head.
“No. You did not have to say something to her.”
“But-”
“It doesn’t make you less of a man.”
“The car-”
“Soiled. Only soiled.”
“Well, is there-”
“There’s not much.”
“Are you going to be-”
“Do I look fine with it?”
“Do you expect-”
“Yes. I expect you to apologize.”
“I’m-”
“You will if you ever want to sleep in your own bed again.”
“But the cat-”
“I’ll talk to