Sisypuss: Memoirs of a Vagabond Cat by Patricia Halloff

Author:Patricia Halloff
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Blueberry Books
Published: 2008-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

12

Well, Cyn may’ve been a heartless bitch, but she had it right about the smoking. Elizabeth’s cough got worse and worse. By spring it kept her up most of the night. Hearing her hack away for hours worried all of us, but knowing what happened to Mama, Bob and I worried the most.

She looked terrible. Like Mama she became ever thinner than she’d been, and as sleeplessness took its toll, the splotches under her eyes grew ever darker. She became increasingly nervous, jumping a mile high whenever Sean screamed or the phone rang or the doorbell buzzed. She told Manya to forget about the doorbell and just come in. She began turning off the phone after Cyn’s nightly call because, she told Manya, “It makes me too nervous and it’s never good news. I need a break from the horror stories they call to tell me. Let ‘em tell me during the day. For Christ’s sake, I’m seventy-five years old, I need a little peace. I—.” But the coughing and gasping for breath, worse than I’d ever heard it, interrupted, scaring us cats into a huddle, causing Sean to whimper and pace. While poor Manya bit her lips and hugged Elizabeth’s heaving shoulders until the attack at long last ended.

Soon afterwards, just as my first and worst summer on earth entered the dog days, Sean died. Jolted from sleep by hollow wails unlike his familiar screams, we cats ran to the doggie bed he used when too sick to let us snuggle against him. Rolling on his back, panting and drooling, he howled those chilling wails the likes of which I hope never to hear again. “Sean, Sean,” we cried in voices not our own, voices drowned out anyway by his agonized howls. Then Elizabeth was there, kneeling, laying hands on his scarred chest which jumped and lurched as if whatever was in there had gone haywire, whimpering, “No no no!” Don’t die don’t die don’t die, sweet Sean.” Over and over: “Don’t die don’t die don’t die.”

But he did. And quivering like a rabbit, terrified, I found myself looking at his body so suddenly, queerly still and so suddenly, queerly silent that I realized this was death—this was what it was to die. And Elizabeth, her head on his now quiet chest, was sobbing, “Oh those bastards what they did to you. Oh those bastards may they burn in hell.”

Ashes to ashes and all that. Sure, we all go to dust, but does knowing that—at least in our culture where you’re planted like a lab specimen in agar agar—lessen grief when a dog you loved like the Mama you loved dies? One of the unsung animal sacrifices made for “the betterment of mankind,” Sean. Yeah, right. A dog in a losing battle with fear and pain that never complained. “The luck of the Irish,” he’d say sardonically on his worst days. “Almighty Dog loves the Irish.”

Sometimes at night I’d look down from Elizabeth’s lap to where he lay at

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