CHAPTER 6

CHESTER’S STORY: A BARN ON SHERWOOD

Having finally attained the maturity and skills to render a full account of the events surrounding my entrance into the universe, I can now tell the story of my birth, the births of my siblings, and our fate at the hands of our captors.

Because of the humans’ interference, my mother wisely chose to deliver her litter in the middle of the night. I was born first, the most beautiful of the lot, my mother assured me, though I heard her say the same thing to each of my subsequent siblings. I had to take her word for it since my eyes were still closed.

Inconvenient bit of biology, that. Fortunately, my blindness made my other senses preternaturally acute and I quickly assessed my surroundings. My nose led me to a source of nourishment.

“Hey, you, new kid, that’s our milk you’re stealing!”

“Yeah, get away from our mother and go back to your own!”

These were the unkind and uncouth cries that greeted me from the other youthful feline denizens of our lair, the offspring of my mother’s companion and my sometimes nanny, a tortoiseshell queen named Git. Though lacking our careful breeding, Git nonetheless proved herself to be a noble creature of the highest order. Fortunately for me, Git’s kittens had been born only the day before and were also blind and of precarious balance, so their feeble swats at my poor unsuspecting newborn self did no harm except to them as they fell back on their own tails with the effort of swinging their paws.

“Now where did I put that kitten?” I heard my mother’s melodious voice inquire. “I hope I didn’t sit on him while I was birthing this one. Git, have you seen—”

“He’s right here, Chessie. Causing trouble.” Larger paws and a nudge from an adult muzzle herded me back toward my own mother, who nudged me toward an appropriate dispenser of sustenance.

“Ah, not my fault, Git. He gets that from his father’s line. Space Jockey is a notorious brawler.”

“Aren’t they all?”

My sister was already at an adjoining milk outlet and we applied ourselves to nursing with great zeal while two more siblings were born, washed, and deposited beside us. Then things began to go badly.

I noticed this because I was sleeping on top of Mother when she began heaving and panting to a degree that I have since felt only during take-offs, landings, and meteor showers. My brother did not survive. Neither my other siblings nor I found this terribly distressing as it meant more available food for us, but Mother was vexed, rather ashamed, she complained to Git, since she had never before lost a kitten, and, by the time she finally succeeded in pushing it out, she was hurt and bleeding to an apparently irregular extent.

“Where is that boy now that he might come in handy?” Git asked, dumping her own brood unceremoniously, as I divined from their indignant minuscule mewings, and trying to help my mother clean her injuries.

“Kibble! I want my Kibble!” Mother cried. “She would know how to help me. We’ve done this together many times and I never lost a kitten. Oh, Kibble, where are you?”

Her cries, strong at first, quickly grew softer as she lost more blood. The tang of it was strong and it made the straw sticky beneath our paws.

Git’s louder complaints were joined by the sound of her claws rending some resistant substance followed by the thud of her body against the same. “The dirty rats locked my entrance!” she cried. “How are we supposed to provide for these young’uns if we can’t hunt? Let me owwt!”

I did not understand the full implications of the situation, nor did any of the other kittens, poor blind stumbling little things that we were. But we could hear that Git was distressed and sense that Mother was in mortal pain, so we added our feeble squeaking voices to those of the older cats.

In between my verbal complaints, I licked my mother as she had licked me to clean and dry me. Although I had not the words to articulate it, I knew that she was on the verge of leaving us, that help must be sought, if only to remove the barrier Git found so irksome. Mother trembled beneath me, and her heartbeat—our steady and strong companion as we awaited birth—had become too quick to give proper emphasis to each thud. Were we all to end before we had made a proper beginning?

“Boy!” Git called over and over again, and suddenly I saw as clearly as if my eyes had opened a strange-looking biped with blue hind legs and chest, dirty white hind paws, furless arms, and spidery looking forepaws with wormlike things on the ends of its pads. A large round head bore the only fur on the boy’s entire body, and he seemed to have no ears. His eyes were also closed when I first saw him, but when I gave an inner exclamation of surprise, they opened. They were the first eyes I saw, although mine remained closed. They were large, a lighter shade of the same color as his legs and chest. Their initial expression was one I would come to recognize as startled. It quickly shifted so that his whiskerless face with its flattened, split muzzle reflected the fear I felt rising from my mother and through me. I smelled his fear but I also smelled his wonderful boy smell, tangy and warm mixed with wood and dirt and a bit of what I later identified as onion.

I had at the time no idea how I conjured this apparition, but was as gratified as I felt after nursing when a short time later there were rustling steps outside, a rattle, a snick, and a rush of clean air, along with a beam of light I saw even through the membranes covering my eyes. “Chessie! You’re having your babies. What’s the matter, girl?”

The boy’s large warm presence loomed over us and one of the wormlike things descended to stroke my mother between the ears and then me, from my ears to my tail. The sensation was not unpleasant. The boy stroked each of my siblings in turn, then Git’s kittens. Git had taken advantage of the opening to leave the enclosure, but I heard her return and the sound of her fur brushing the boy’s hind leg and paw, which were cramped awkwardly beneath him.

Then the boy said, “What’s that? Looks like you lost one of your babies and—shite oh dear, kitty, you’re bleedin’ like a stuck pig.”

He rose so quickly that Git fell sideways and, without closing the opening, he thudded away, yelling, “Dad! Hey, Dad!”

My memory gives me no account of what happened next. Although I now possess the maturity and faculties I mentioned previously, at the time I was newborn, with closed eyes, had been through a great deal during my first few moments of life, and I needed my rest.

I can say only that my mother and I survived, as did the three siblings that were born after me. That made it even. Four of us and four of the others, Git’s get. The boy announced that he would call me Chester. Mother said I was the spitting image of her illustrious forebear Tuxedo Thomas. I am largely black, with a white chest and paws. My younger sisters were Silvesta, a silver tabby whose stripes twined into butterfly shapes on her sides, and Buttercup, gold and white with deeper orangish stripes along her legs and decorating her tail. My brother Sol, when he was little, was pale peach and cream-striped and insufferable. No matter which outlet on which mother I chose, Sol was right there to argue with me about it.

The kittens born to Git were our seniors by a day, according to her. They were all males. The boy called them Virgil, Wyatt, Bat, and Doc, after dead humans whose exploits he had read in stories. Apparently Bat was the one whose name came first, since he batted at the boy’s finger when the boy tried to pet him. The other names came by association.

We got to know Git’s get quite well, as they were essentially also our littermates and shared our meals. While Mother recovered, Git often gathered us to her to nurse and give Mother rest.

Then came the time when their eyes began to open while we were still in the dark. It seemed wrong somehow that we, who Mother and Git agreed were quite special and of celestial lineage, should be blundering around blindly while Git’s kits pounced us, rolled us over, and generally behaved in an exceptionally aggressive and aggravating manner, punctuating their attacks with squeaky growls.

“You had better stop that,” I told Wyatt, who had landed on me while I was suckling. “The boy and the man are coming, and they don’t want to see any of us damaged. We are valuable.”

“You are whupped, that’s what. I don’t hear the boy’s steps or the man’s so don’t try to get out of it that way. No one can save you now from the paws of doom!”

Then he heard the footsteps too.

“How’d you hear them before me?”

“I saw them,” I told him. “I see the boy.”

“Hah! You can’t. Your eyes are closed.”

“I have my ways,” I told him mysteriously. It was not hard to be mysterious since I didn’t understand it myself. However, ever since my cries for help had summoned the boy to my mother’s side, I had retained the ability to see him through my closed eyes and to compel him to do my will. This would have given me a great sense of power except that most of the time I had no idea what my will was concerning the boy. My urgent needs, as I understood them, were met by Mother and Git. If my littermates had similar powers and visions, they didn’t mention it. Perhaps it did not occur to them that such abilities were not a normal part of a cat’s equipment, but I tend to think that theirs took longer to develop than my own, as I was the only one to know in advance when the boy was coming. When the man came to tag us, I tried to hide under Mother, but to no avail. I was scooped up and my neck stung for a reason I did not understand. I cried lustily at the cruelty and injustice of it all. Afterward, Mother gave my poor neck a weak lick, but I forgot about my injury almost before her tongue was back in her mouth.

That particular day stands out in my memory, however, because, as the boy scooped me up and put me on his shoulder, where I huddled under the fringe of hair curling down his neck—the part of him that seemed most like Mother—I slowly realized that I could see not only him but the man as well, and that I was looking down at my beautiful mother, at Git, and my littermates. The light was not good and colors were not strong but my new eyes were very sharp and I could see everyone and everything around me. I began mewing excitedly, and the boy plucked me from his neck and turned me to face him so that his huge blue eyes looked into my new ones.

“Pop, look, Chester opened his eyes!”

“Excellent! That means the rest of the litter will soon. Not too much longer and we will be wealthy, son.”

“But not Chester, right, Pop? We don’t have to sell them all. You said I could keep one and I want to keep him. That’s okay, right?”

The man sighed as Mother sometimes does when we are exploring her too actively. “I’m sorry, son. I meant it when I said that you could keep one when I brought the Duchess home, but with her only having the four kits instead of seven or eight, like we thought, our profits were cut in half. So how about picking out one of Git’s babies instead? You can have any one you want.”

“No, Pop. Chester is the one who likes me.”

“Cats like whoever feeds them, Jubal. And he’s likely to get a better life than you do once we get him a good berth. Now you look after them while I’m gone and don’t let on to your mama, you hear? I have a little job to do on the station for the next few days.”

“You know I’ll take care of them, Pop.”

To the best of his ability, he did too, and the tragic events that followed were not really his fault. He was simply doing what we wanted.

During the time the man was gone, we kittens began to grow hungry for something besides milk. This became apparent the day Virgil, while nursing, bit Git and got himself slapped tail over nose into the hay pile.

Then she shook all of the others off and stretched her forepaws out in front of her and her hind end toward the ceiling and whipped her tail back and forth a few times before announcing, “Time for you young’uns to learn to hunt.”

I’d like to say that this happened at once and we all became the superb predators we were always destined to be, but first we had to learn to eat solid food. The boy helped. He brought us table scraps of cooked meat. The others growled and fought over it, but I realized immediately that the meat lacked something in juiciness and savor—that indefinable quality that I was hungry for without even realizing what I was missing. I looked up at him and mewed. He picked me up and asked, “What’s the matter, Chester? Don’t you like rabbit?”

Git rose and went to the door—that was what the opening was—and scratched.

“Okay, girl,” the boy told her. He pulled something out of a pouch in a fold of his blue hind leg, reached down, and buckled the long tail-shaped strip around Git’s neck. “You can go hunting now if you want.”

Git streaked through the door. “Freedom!” I heard her cry as she disappeared.

The man returned and entered our room. “Hmm,” he said. He took something from his coat, very small, and aimed it at us. Several times light blossomed around his hands and the colors of our coats, the hay, the boy’s clothes and skin, all became bright and distinct.

Mother blinked placidly.

“What’s that?” I asked her.

“I think it’s a camera, my boy. So the man can show our images to others. Come here. You’ve a tuft of fur sticking up on the back of your head. Let me fix it for you.”

The weeks passed quickly, though back then I had no idea what a week was.

I slept. I nursed. As my legs grew stronger, I practiced pouncing and running. So did the others. Our play was the work of kittens, which is a far more serious thing than it looks.

I don’t know what the others dreamed of, but in my dreams I often did what the boy did. We fed chickens, rode horses, washed dishes, ate things that for reasons unfathomable to me seemed to appeal to him and his mother. We also read books, and this was extremely exciting, the stories we shared leaving lasting impressions on my thirsty young mind.

Yes, our strange connection let me participate in many of the boy’s activities and learn his feelings and thoughts on more matters than actually interested me.

Of more interest were Git’s expeditions, after which she would bring in strange edible creatures for us to tear apart with our ferocious claws and needle-sharp teeth. We were fierce, voracious, and merciless.

But of course the early prey was dead.

When we got live food and started to attack it, Git growled us away, smacked it dumb and bit the back of its neck, severing the spine in her strong jaws. “This critter was a living thing,” she said. “It had a mama, like you, and maybe young’uns like you too. Its death helps you kids to keep on being living things your own selves. Treat it decent. Put it out of its misery. It’s an ill-brought-up cat that tortures its food to death. Quick and clean, just the way you’d want to go if it was your time to be something else’s supper.”

I was to remember that admonition ruefully the day Git took us hunting outside for the first time. She had taken her own kits the day before, one at a time, and Sol, Silvesta, Buttercup, and I lurked at the edges of her portal, waiting for her to bring them back, desperate to see what had happened. Wyatt and his brothers were cocky enough already, lording over us their day’s lead in life. What would they have to brag of now?

When Git herded each through the door carrying parts of prey proudly in their jaws, I was overcome with jealousy. I tried to snatch Bat’s rat rump from him but the others abandoned theirs to jump on me and thump me soundly. When they turned back, they saw that Silvesta and Buttercup had cornered two of their mangled prizes and were daintily gobbling the bits. When the boys squalled, my sisters gave them withering looks from their bright round eyes and continued dining.

“The female of the species is more deadly than the male,” I said. It was something the boy had read in one of his books, and my brethren looked startled to hear me say it but they didn’t disagree. My sisters might smell better than we did but they were the same size and didn’t mess about when it came to hunting. Mother and Git both favored them, actually, reminding them that someday they would have kittens to feed and teach too.

Wyatt and his brothers abandoned the pilfered prizes and began fighting over the remaining piece and thumping on Bat, trying to get his away from him.

But the next day was our turn. Git hauled me up by my scruff and I hung there, twitchy with anticipation while she took me into an outer world I had seen only through the boy’s eyes before then.

Everything smelled stronger, moved faster, and looked much bigger when I saw it with my own eyes.

Git set me down just inside the barn door. Outside it was bright and vast—there was more world out there than I could have imagined on my own. I oriented myself quickly, though, since I had been here before in the boy’s mind. The chickens wandered the yard. The house was over to the left. I couldn’t see the fields where the horses roamed but the waving of the grass in the wind fascinated me.

I took a couple of steps forward when Git returned with Sol.

“Stay put, both of you,” she said, “while I fetch your sisters.”

She taught us how to hunt through the barn that day, but only Buttercup caught anything.

“Mrrrr,” Git said. “Seems I’ve done too good a job. It was hard finding enough for the boys yesterday. Fine, then. You’re not likely to have a nice barn to hunt in all your days. Before I found this place, I hunted the meadows and fields on the way. There’s lots to be had but there’s farther for the critters to run. I’ll show you the way today but don’t be fussed if you don’t catch anything. It takes practice to run a meal down. We’re fixing to go farther than you’ve gone before. I have to carry you in and out of the cat door for my collar to work for you too, but you need to run on your own paws now. Understood?”

At first we kept up fairly well, running, leaping, tumbling after her. The blades of grass looked as tall from my own height as trees did to the boy. The wildflowers, purple-belled ones and frothy white, bobbed seductively enough that Sol temporarily forgot he was actually a voracious carnivore and attacked the plant. A bee flew out and would have stung him if he hadn’t jumped back in a hurry.

Deeper and deeper into the meadow we went, until Silvesta said, “I can’t see the barn anymore.”

Git, whose fine fluffy tail had been our beacon through the bush, turned back on us. “Good. Now then, I’m going to flush something your way. Before you go back to your mama, I want you all to catch enough to eat that you won’t be troublin’ her for milk. It’s high time you wean.”

She disappeared into the grass, but in a moment there was a thrashing and a small sparkly thing hopped toward us. These bugs were my favorite treat, and as eldest and the first one of us with open eyes, I figured the first kill out here at least belonged to me. Following Git’s instructions, I vanquished it far more easily than I would have believed possible and proceeded to eat it with pride while Sol skittered after a lizard that slid through the grass toward us.

Buttercup, full of her barn catch, had lagged behind us. It was Silvesta, waiting with waggling hindquarters for her turn, who heard Buttercup squeak.

Git heard it too. Although we had not seen her for some time, suddenly she bounded over us, snarling.

There was an answering snarl and then nothing.

A bite of my prey was still in my teeth. I looked up, surrounded by the waving grass and the blue sky up above. But with my inner eyes I saw the boy come out of the barn with the feed bucket in his hands. As if he saw me too, he dropped the bucket and began running.

Somewhere he picked up a stick. “Leave them be, you mangy mongrel!” he yelled, waving the stick.

But I knew even before the canine sprinted past us, our protectress dangling from his jaws as prey had so often dangled from hers, that the boy had come too late. Where our second mother’s strength, energy, and alert attention had crackled through the air, there was only stillness. The emptiness filled up with the boy’s panting breath and the smell of the dog trailing behind it. Then came the first yowl of Silvesta’s life as she stood over our sister’s mangled body.

Git’s sacrifice had not been swift enough to save Buttercup.

The boy picked both of my sisters up. Buttercup was so small, he slipped her body into his chest pocket, and blood seeped through the fabric. Silvesta continued to cry, and the boy searched through the grass until he saw the cowering Sol and lifted him too. I, who was closest to him, was the last to be lifted up, but I knew even in the midst of terror and bewilderment that it was because the boy knew exactly where I was, and that I knew he was near.

Mother washed us all when the boy took us back but she couldn’t wash the life back into Buttercup, though the boy showed her the body, now oddly so much tinier than ours. Finally, Mother gave up and began washing Silvesta, and the boy took the body away again.

Wyatt and his brothers could not grasp it at first that their mother was gone. They searched the straw, they sniffed at us, who still bore her scent on our skin, and they prodded our mother looking for theirs. Wyatt understood first and stood by his mother’s cat door and mewed a pitiful, lonely keen, more mournful for being so squeaky and small.

Sol and I just stared at him and the others. They had always been bigger than we were, had bullied us, but now they were lost. I sidled up to Wyatt, bumping my weight against him, trying to purr consolingly. He hissed at me.

He and the others hid separately, forlornly, until Mother rose shakily and one by one rounded them up and brought them to nurse, then called us to join in.

We all fell asleep before we finished eating, but when we awakened and had fed again, Mother shook us off, rising onto her haunches, her forepaws planted like columns beneath her feathery chest.

“My children—and you are all my children now—the time has come to teach you one of our most time-honored and useful rituals—bathing. A clean cat is a healthy cat, a respectable cat, and furthermore, a serene, deliberate, and decisive cat. Cleansing one’s fur refreshes the mind as well as the body.”

Washing hardly seemed as important as hunting, especially at a time like this, when we were all stricken by the sudden loss of Git and Buttercup. But Mom’s voice continued, demanding our attention. Perhaps she was trying to distract us from recalling the deaths.

“This skill is necessary for every cat ever born on the ground or among the stars,” she began. “But for we of the long fur, the plumed tails and full manes, the tufted ears and fur fringed pads, it is absolutely essential. Without proper grooming, our fur quickly mats into great clumps that hang from us like disgusting growths, that pinch and pull and catch on things when we are stalking, skulking, or attempting to slink. If you are fortunate enough, as I have been, to have a Kibble to care for you, she can assist you with the more difficult bits, but daily, hourly, and momentary maintenance are your responsibility, your duty, and your pride.

“Everybody, lick one of your forepaws.”

“Why, missus?” Doc asked. “It’ll just get dirty again.”

“Just do it,” Mother said firmly.

Doc looked down at his paw as if he had never seen it before and gave it a quick lick, as if expecting it to grab his tongue and strangle him.

I did the same, giving mine as long a swipe as my little pink tongue could manage. Silvesta and Sol followed suit.

“Now, this paw will be your tool to clean those parts of you that you are unable to reach by direct licking. Pass it over your face, thusly,” she said, and demonstrated. She swiped it down over her ears and nose, licked it again and passed it over her long elegant whiskers, both the uppers and the lowers on the same side as her paw. Then she switched paws. I hoped my whiskers would be so magnificent when I was big.

Virgil got his paw stuck behind his ear when he tried. Bat would only dab at the areas in question. If I do say so myself, I did a splendid job on my first try.

Silvesta took a trial lick then began crying again. She missed Buttercup even more bitterly than the rest of us did. It was painful to listen to, and it interrupted the lesson. Mother cuffed her ears, swiping a paw across their tips to get her attention, then licking one tufted tip to take the sting out of the reprimand.

“Pay attention, my darling. You will have kits of your own to teach one day.”

Silvesta trembled with grief, for this was the sort of thing Git used to tell her and Buttercup with every lesson, but she moistened her paw and washed her face.

When Mother had demonstrated the procedure for washing each bit of ourselves—and some bits were far more awkward than others—she said, “There is a language to the bath understood by other creatures as well as cats. Even humans are somewhat attuned to the meanings of the various postures. Washing is a built-in diversion, a time-out, you might say. In the annals of feline-based literature my Kibble used to read aloud to me, a wise cat named Jennie instructs a newcomer: ‘When in doubt, wash.’ Sage advice I pass along to you with these elaborations on the language of public bathing. When conveying confusion or when you are in need of clarification, wash your face. To express nonchalance or self-assurance, wash your shoulder. To indicate that you are considering a situation, lightly groom one of your front paws. And a fine time to groom that critical area under your tail is when you wish to demonstrate your indifference to the insignificant events around you, or to demonstate contempt for an idea or individual. Grooming one’s abdomen indicates trust and should only be done in the presence of those you actually do trust. A full bath, with or without the assistance of a fellow feline, ideally should be undertaken only in privacy or in the company of one’s Kibble.”

“Or the boy,” I said. “The boy’s all right, isn’t he, Mother?” My siblings and now foster siblings murmured agreement. The boy had just saved us.

She gave a short, noncommittal purr but I thought I saw a cloud cross her great gold-green eyes.

Mother had vowed that she would continue Git’s work in teaching us to hunt, but alas, she never had the chance.

Inside that little dark room, we could only hunt each other, but even my reckless foster sibs realized that killing was out of the question.

We had only a few more days to nurse, to feed on the kibble and soft food the boy brought us, and to practice washing and pouncing before the man returned.

The boy sadly informed him of the deaths of Git and Buttercup. He frowned, shook his head, and patted the boy’s shoulders.

But all he could say was,“They’ve grown, I’m going to have to take a whole new set of pics.”

He took one of all of us nursing, then had the boy hold up each of us while he pointed the little flashy thing at us.

The boy held me close to his chest and I felt his heart thudding through it. “Don’t worry, Chester. You and me are a team. Pop said I could have a kitten and I choose you, whether he likes it or not.”

I pressed my ear to his heart and purred as loudly as I could. Of course the boy would stay with me. Why would I know everything he did and most of what he thought if he wasn’t mine? He was my Kibble in the way that Mother’s Kibble was hers, except Mother didn’t know where hers was and some tiny part of me always knew where the boy was.

Nobody could fathom the mind of the man, though. He was trickier than the canine that had killed Buttercup and Git.