When I got back from my excursion to the shrine of St. Vera, I tried to settle myself down to an afternoon of laborious composition. After a few minutes I heard some scuffling in the neighbor’s yard, and having no particular focus for my thoughts yet, I looked out my window. I saw two dogs trotting through the yard, undoubtedly after some animal or other. The cries of a cat a few minutes later indicated the prey. And then a few minutes later, I heard a woman’s voice cry, “Oh my God, they got him.”
I got up and saw, in the yard of my neighbor on the other side, an older woman holding her heart and trembling. I proceeded outside, and found that she was staring at the two dogs, now behind a bush. Another older woman showed up, gave a whistle, and angrily shouted, “Come here! Come here!” which successfully summoned the dogs. The dogs seemed happy and contented, now perfectly ready to be obedient, thought it was obvious that these two ladies had been following them unsuccessfully for some time. In the place they had vacated was a cat, on its back with intestines ripped open, and its body suffering the final spasms of death.
The first woman was quivering and looked like she might faint. “Oh my God, my cat, they got my cat,” she was saying. After a few moments of discussion of the situation, she looked at the cat again, and said, “No it’s Florence’s cat they got, my God, that’s Florence’s cat.” Later she looked again and determined it was not Florence’s cat, but a cat she didn’t know. “Thank God for that,” she said. “Florence just lost her mother last week, and this would be just terrible.”
It turns out this woman was asked to watch the dogs for awhile, but had not latched the door properly, and the dogs pushed the door open and escaped. They had found an interesting pursuit, and she had been calling them and tracking them in vain. Their owner had joined in, but both of them were too late. The dogs had done what they wanted to do. Curiously, they showed no interest in the cat as food; to kill was enough.
The cat was a fluffy, pretty Maine Coon cat, well fed and groomed and obviously a pet. It did not have a collar, though. And now it was sitting in a neighbor’s yard. In fact, it might be this same neighbor’s cat. It was the ladies’ responsibility, but on the other hand, that was not exactly a fact they wanted to bandy about. So…
“I think we should bury him,” the first one said.
This was covering the tracks, but this did, indeed, seem like the right thing to do. The body would only stink more as time went on, and we weren’t going to put it on a dolly and walk around the neighborhood “Is this your cat Muffy? Yeah, my dogs just ripped his guts apart. Sorry! Just thought you’d want the body!” So I volunteered a resting-place for Muffy in my yard, and one of the women went off to get a shovel. The massive oak in the yard’s root-system proved a problem, however, so instead we dug the hole in the yard where Muffy had met black death.
I hardly expected to spend the afternoon digging a shallow grave with a couple of strangers in the backyard of a person none of us knew. But we dug the grave, about two feet deep and a bit broader (which sounds shallow, but nothing is harder than digging a deep hole), and I put on gloves, grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck, and thanked God the intestines did not come pouring out the bottom. I laid him in the hole, and we shoveled in a great deal of the heavy clay I had in my own backyard, a dense, terrible stuff which would help encase the body. We heaped up an ample barrow for Muffy, trodding it dense and hard, and then coated the whole site with oak-leaves, a fitting dressing for the dead and something which completely concealed the disturbance of the ground.
“Thank God you were there!” one woman said. “I would not have been able to grab hold of that cat.”
“Do you want a glass of wine?” the other asked.
“Sure,” I replied. The first woman got her husband, and we went to the dog owner’s house, and shared a bottle of wine and discussed Muffy’s life and untimely demise, and the present continuance of our own. The women were both teachers. And they told me all about the local judge, and the woman down the block, and this, and that, and we gossiped away until the bottle was drained, and I headed back home, maybe to get a word or two closer to the goal. But as I sat down I got a call from a friend saying that he was wrapping things up at work and wanted to see the parades tonight. “I can be there in ten minutes,” he said. “It’s Knights of Babylon, Muses, and Chaos tonight.” Babylon is the krewe that inspired the great 1940s headline in the Times-Picayune (I would purchase an image of this newspaper if I could), “JOYOUS THRONGS HAIL KING OF BABYLON,” perhaps the greatest full-mast headline in American newspaper history, and one that could only occur in New Orleans. And Muses is one of the most highly esteemed parades… so I just had to go… Ten minutes later I was in his car, riding to Magazine Street. More on the parades later, which were excellent.
