The recent death of my 18½-year-old sleek black cat Neville — a girl cat with a boy’s name — made me think of poor Walter, another sleek and almost entirely black cat I have cared for (and about) in my life.
1977 was the year I moved out of the rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side I had shared with a professional classical violinist, stayed for a while in a Long Island home owned and run by hippies (more or less), and then moved into a tiny rented 1½-story cottage in Locust Valley, NY, with my friends Jane, something of a hippie herself, and Dorothy, a medical student.
I adopted two kittens — a brother/sister pair. Suzzi was pure white, except for a small black smudge on her chest; Walter was all black except for a white frying-pan shape on his chest.
They were outdoor cats from the beginning — although Suzzi pretty much stayed around the cottage, lying in the sparsely planted garden, basking in the pools of hot summer sun that marked that July and gathering clouds of gray dust in her white coat. It was Walter who roamed.
His roaming eventually took him back and forth across the busy road at the bottom of the ridge Davis Street sits on. One evening, he did not come home for dinner. The next morning I found him lying at the side of the road. He showed no signs of trauma, but was quite dead. I cradled him on our way across the road and up the hill to the cottage, where I laid him out under the misshapen crabapple tree that shaded the northern edge of the garden Jane had begun soon after we moved in.
Jane’s garden played second fiddle to our landlord’s prolific sun-drenched garden next door. He would appear soon after sunrise each morning with a bucket full of water dangling from each arm and would float through his garden.
Small and lanky, Jan (pronounced “Yon”) gardened barefoot, leaving soft prints in the earth. He would pour water from a bucket at the base of his plants: marigolds to keep the squirrels at bay, towering sunflowers the blue jays would eventually strip of their seeds, melons, cucumbers, various lettuces, bushy string beans and beefy tomatoes. He avoided watering or weeding when the sun was too strong, so the early morning was his most active time.
I brought the lifeless Walter home on one of those early mornings.
I chose a bare corner of Jane’s garden and dug until the hole was the right depth and shape for Walter’s body. The work stained my T-shirt with sweat so I took it off and tossed it over the back of a folding chair I had set nearby. I covered him back up with the coarse parched earth, put away the shovel, grabbed a cold can of Budweiser, and dropped onto the chair with my drenched T-shirt. I toasted Walter with that beer and several more as the sun moved across the sky, figuring he wouldn’t mind that I had taken a day off from work to honor him in that way.
Words of War 