A Dickens of a Cat

It was early evening, late November, when I pulled into the driveway of our remote farmhouse. I gathered my things and opened the car door. An audible wind came from the southwest and blustered around the corner of the house. With it came a sound I didn’t want to hear—the cry of a small animal.

A stray cat? I hoped not. It was thirteen degrees out there, and snow was predicted.

I braced against the wind and rounded the corner of the house. As soon as the utility light at the back door flashed on, out of the blackness sprang the most gorgeous kitten I had ever seen. She was a solid smoky gray and so beautiful and so panicked that I’m embarrassed to say I actually burst into tears.

The kitten beat me to the door and expressed tremendous relief at seeing me. Of course, intense rubbing and purring kicked in, the ways of a cat in need. This kitten apparently had been around people enough to know to come to them for protection, and she was using everything in her power to get help. I put down my bags and bent down to pet her.

I felt a little sick to my stomach because I knew I could not bring her inside. My husband and I had a territorial tortoiseshell house cat who was not sociable to other animals. We feared she’d do harm to another feline, especially a small one. I also knew better than to expose strange cats to one another since so many feline diseases run rampant in the outdoors.

I unlocked the door to the house, and I had quite a time keeping her from going in. I told her I’d be right back, but of course she didn’t understand. I gently nudged her back with my toe and managed to get myself indoors where I opened a can of cat food and filled a dish of water.

When I opened the door again, I saw that the kitten had managed to tuck herself in between the storm door and the back door, and there she huddled on the threshold, trying to get warm. This broke my heart. I gently nudged her off the threshold and stepped back outside with her, talking in soothing tones. When I placed the dishes on the deck, she hunkered down to eat with gusto. Then I sneaked back indoors and watched her from the window.

The problem was that my husband, Mike, and I already had our house cat, BatGirl. We loved BatGirl very much, but she was an acquired taste—a husky, tough exterior housing a truly soulful creature. And BatGirl, also a stray, had fended for herself outside too long to get along with competition. She was an absolute sweetheart unless confronted by another creature. She backed my mother’s dog right into a corner. So we never considered bringing in another cat—we figured our cat would kill a newcomer. So we had decided ours would be a one-pet house. It was a while before we would learn that house cats killing one another would be highly unlikely.

C. S. Lewis and His “Stepcat”

After the death of his beloved wife, Joy, C. S. Lewis found unexpected comfort in her cats. He wrote: “Joy’s Siamese—my ‘stepcat’ as I call her—is the most terribly conversational animal I ever knew. She talks all the time and wants doors and windows to be opened for her 1,000 times an hour.... She adores me because I lift her up by her tail—an operation which I can’t imagine I should like if I were a cat, but she comes back for more and more, purring all the time.... How strange that God brings us into such intimate relations with creatures of whose real purpose and destiny we remain forever ignorant.”[3]

Through the window, I saw Mike pull in the driveway from work. I continued to watch the little gray kitten work her way through the can of cat food as Mike walked indoors and looked at me. “So what’s the story out there?”

I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I started crying again. “She’s a stray,” I blubbered. “We can’t leave her out there or she’ll freeze to death. And we can’t have her inside because BatGirl will kill her.”

Mike nodded and thought for a minute. “Listen, we never put anything back in that upstairs bedroom after we painted it.” It was true. Our old house was cavernous, and we didn’t use the upstairs, which was shut off from the main floor. “We have another litter box,” Mike continued. “Let’s put the kitten in the empty room until we can figure out what to do with her. At least she’ll be warm and safe, and BatGirl won’t be able to get to her.”

It was a good plan. “Okay,” I sniffed. I put Bat-Girl in the basement as Mike headed out the back door. When he brought in the kitten, her purr was so noisy it preceded her like an announcement. I’ve since learned that kittens have loud purrs so that Momma can hear them. Well, this human momma definitely heard her.

We wrapped her in my pink bath towel, and I held her on her back like a baby. The little thing purred and wiggled, and tears sprang up in my eyes again. I felt like an idiot crying over this kitten, but there it was.

“I don’t know if she’s bleeding from her nose or if it’s a scrape,” Mike observed, looking her over. Now that we had some light, we could see that she was a female, around five months old, short-haired but with a soft, thick coat. She was a solid gray—the shade of gray called blue in a cat—from her triangular head to her tapered paws, even her straight nose and velvety ears. She gazed back and forth at us, sea-green eyes peering out of that smoky coat like headlights in fog.

“Wow,” said Mike. “This cat could be in a calendar.” Indeed, she was perfectly and beautifully made. We oohed and aahed over her, and I started to calm down once I realized her sweet nature and exceptional beauty would guarantee her a home. Certainly someone would take her. In fact, since any stray out there was a drop-off, it was hard to imagine anyone giving up this lovely creature with what seemed to be a winning personality.

Eventually Mike took her from me. “I’ll get her bedded down,” he offered. “She’s probably exhausted.”

Never was there a happier feline than the blue kitten that night. We made her a bed in a box with an old sweater of mine to keep her warm, and Mike took her upstairs. We realized later that between the towel and the sweater, she learned to take comfort from my scent right away. Mike fixed a litter box for her, and she leaped right in, tossed sand around a bit, and had a private moment. She devoured another bowl of food, purring the entire time, then curled up in her new bed and watched Mike putter around her new room from under heavy eyelids. Her relief was palpable.

I stayed downstairs on the phone, trying to find her a home, but to no avail. We were going to have to house her for a while. Mike agreed to take care of her since I had such an emotional reaction to a kitten we were going to give away.

The next morning, when Mike went upstairs to feed the kitten, she had cleaned herself up. Now it was clear that her nose was only scraped. In a few days, we took her to our vet for a checkup and vaccinations. She purred through the entire appointment—even the shots. She certainly was a sweet kitten.

She stayed upstairs in her room for the next several days. At first she kept rather quiet up there, and we figured she was getting rested up from her harrowing time outdoors. We didn’t think she’d been outside long, but certainly she’d expended plenty of energy during that time trying to survive.

After a week had gone by, one night Mike put BatGirl in the basement and brought the kitten downstairs, thinking I might want to hold her. He was right. I placed her on her back and cradled her. She let me rub her downy belly and even gently separate and rub each of her toes. She always kept her claws in. At one point she stretched out her front paw and placed it on my cheek, keeping it there while she gazed into my face.

For the next few weeks, The Little One, as we began calling her, lived in her room. When Mike poured new litter into her box, she sat on his shoulder to watch. When he poured dry food into her dish, she dove under the bag and let the food pellets rain on her. When he rolled the trash can to the roadside in the moonlight or raked leaves in the front yard in daylight, she watched from a tall upstairs window. She pounced on any toy we gave her, especially rubber balls—she played and played with them in her otherwise empty room.

Cats. If you give them an inch, they’ll take a lap.

Robert Benson

As for me, I would lie in bed in the room below and listen to the small cat roll the ball back and forth on the pine floor planks early in the morning and late at night, then scamper after it. Though I refused to name a cat I was planning to give away, in my heart I came up with the name Lucy because of the ball—Lucille Ball.

Of course we knew we couldn’t keep The Little One. Besides the matter of BatGirl and her territoriality, Mike and I both drove long distances for our work—or for anything at all—and we were seldom home to deal with a kitten, especially one as curious and rambunctious as this one was turning out to be. BatGirl had been extremely low-maintenance as a youngster, and we were not prepared for the liveliness of this kitten.

So we continued to work at finding a home for The Little One. Over the next few weeks, three different families each gave a definite yes. Then at the last minute, for a variety of reasons, none could take her. This was frustrating, because I knew that if anyone would hold her just once, they’d walk away with her. I knew this because I’d fallen in love with her myself.

I gave in and began going upstairs every day, several times per day, to give the kitten some attention. She was getting pretty lonely and bored up there by herself. So every day I would place her on her back and hold her in my arms like a baby. I’d learned from some cat rescuers that it’s good to get kittens adjusted to being touched on their bellies, and The Little One grew to like it. She would literally gaze up at me and heave a sigh, the picture of contentment and peace while I held her. Sometimes she’d reach her paw up to my face, sometimes both her paws, to press against my chin, purring and looking into my eyes.

To say I was smitten would be an understatement. I adored this little cat. She also had a calming effect on me. I’m prone to anxiety, and I found myself relaxing whenever I held her. At such times I focused only on her. But I refused to speak her name out loud, and I redoubled my efforts to find her a good home before it became too hard to let her go.

I am a praying person. I pray about many things, but with so much misery in the world, should I beseech God on behalf of one blue kitten in winter? I decided, yes, the creatures of the world are here for reasons beyond my understanding. So as I held and played with The Little One, I did pray for her future.

After so many close calls for a home for her, I started to feel a little panicky. I began to ask in my prayers, “Who else can I call?” And one day after she’d been with us just over a month, I distinctly heard inside me, She’s yours.

It was a voice that had never failed me before. I quieted down inside and let the idea settle in. I held The Little One a bit more, then I put her in her box-bed and went downstairs.

I called my husband, and without my bringing up any of this, he said to me, “You know, some people here at the office are sure we can get the cats together if we take our time with them. Apparently there are ways to do it. So I was thinking, since we’ll both be home the week between Christmas and New Year, let’s keep The Little One and use that time to get her together with BatGirl.”

Besides feeling stunned that Mike and I would be so in sync about this, I realized that it made perfect sense. Maybe it could work. Maybe The Little One really was ours.

I went back upstairs, picked the kitten up, and for the first time whispered into her satiny ear, “Lucy....”

That night Mike and I called a pet behaviorist we knew to help us. We didn’t want things to get ugly with getting the cats together if it could be helped, and we were novices at this feline experience. We had tried a meeting of the two cats the day before, and that brief encounter consisted of BatGirl hissing and growling at Lucy, who stopped purring for the first time since we’d known her. In fact, Lucy actually frowned when BatGirl started her aggressive vocalizing; I don’t know any other way to describe Lucy’s expression. She remained quiet but seemed unafraid. Nevertheless, Mike and I were more than a little upset at BatGirl’s behavior.

We had high hopes for the talents of Jan, the pet behaviorist. She arrived on a sunny day. We drank coffee and chatted for a while, and then she said, “Well, let’s go meet the girls.”

Mike brought Lucy downstairs. As soon as Jan saw her, she smiled and said, “Ah, you’ve got a Russian Blue. That’s a sweet breed.” We had no idea. We all fussed over Lucy for a while. Then BatGirl roused herself from her nap and joined us in the hallway. Always sociable to strange humans, she first rubbed on Jan. Then she spied Lucy. BatGirl froze, then began to slink in Lucy’s direction, hissing and growling all the way. We stepped aside and watched as great big BatGirl tried to intimidate tiny Lucy. It was disturbing.

This had never occurred to me. “But BatGirl’s so much bigger than Lucy,” I said.

Jan shrugged. “BatGirl doesn’t know that. So she’s putting on a tough front. But she’s scared of the kitten, I assure you. And here’s the really good news,” she added. “Lucy’s not the least bit afraid of BatGirl. Check her out—she wants to play.”

It was true. BatGirl’s hissing and growling weren’t scaring Lucy in the least. She even swatted at Bat-Girl’s tail.

“I was concerned about these two at first since they’re both females,” said Jan, “but this kitten is a lover. She’ll handle BatGirl just fine.”

It took a week of strategic, supervised mixing of the two felines for brief periods, and then one day, Mike and I left the two alone together for the first time. When we returned a few hours later, we were met with quite a sight.

Mike walked in ahead of me and stopped at the back of an easy chair. As I wriggled out of my coat, he spoke to me quietly. “Come here and look.”

I joined Mike and looked over the top of the chair. There on the seat was Bat-Girl. She was spooned around tiny Lucy who was curled into a furry ball with her eyes squeezed shut. And BatGirl was grooming Lucy. Tenderly.

Mike and I grabbed hands and grinned stupidly at one another. BatGirl stopped her task and looked up at us. She had the gentlest expression on her face.

One always runs the risk of anthropomorphizing when trying to figure out what’s going on in the mind of an animal, even one you know well. But it seemed to both Mike and me right then that BatGirl was thanking us for this fellow creature to share those many hours of being alone. BatGirl held our eyes a moment. Then she turned back to the work of grooming Lucy.

The girls, as we began calling them, got along fine after that day. Lucy had quite a calming effect on both the household and BatGirl. When I read up on the characteristics of the Russian Blue, I could see why.

Russian Blues were bred by Russian monks many centuries ago, using Siamese cats and French Chartreux cats. The Blues are shy and gentle. They walk on tiptoe like ballet dancers. They dislike loud noises. One of the myths of Russia is that soldiers draped the Blues over their shoulders to ride into battle with them. But I feel this would be highly unlikely for such a shy cat who hates noise and discord. I’ve always felt this myth was a way to lie about why the monks were breeding these cats in the first place—to wear their fur.

Blues need peace and quiet in the house. We could see this in the way Lucy deferred to BatGirl sometimes. It looked to us like Lucy just didn’t want the hassle she was getting from our temperamental tortie. So she’d give in to keep the peace.

But the most striking evidence that we had a peacemaker in the house happened one day when Mike and I got into a shouting match about something. Mike and I both have expressive, strong personalities. We love and enjoy one another, but we’d unfortunately allowed ourselves to raise our voices at one another in our marriage more frequently than we should. On such occasions, the cats sometimes would simply leave the room.

One day, Mike and I were angry at one another. And we were both right. Just ask either of us! We followed each other from room to room, loudly making our points back and forth. Finally, in the kitchen, the accusations grew louder. We stood about four feet from one another volleying our stupid remarks... until we heard a steady staccato of meows. Loud meows. We stopped talking and looked down to see our shy blue cat marching back and forth between us, vocalizing loudly. She was loud enough that we heard her over ourselves. Back and forth, back and forth she went, meowing in a rhythm, as if to say, “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”

We looked at each other and felt embarrassed. Then slowly, we both began to laugh.

Mike reached over and hugged me. He looked down at Lucy and said, “It’s okay, Lucy.” She looked at each of us, gave a final meow, and then strolled out of the room.

From then on, when voices started to rise, Lucy would run into the room and look at us and meow. And we would always calm down.

We believe she was. We saved Lucy from the elements, and in her own way, she saved us right back. She calmed us down, got us to play, got us to relax.