I ALWAYS STRONGLY disapproved of castrating male cats or spraying female ones — I believed that such operations diminished strength, invaded individuality, and were an insult to any being's right to procreate — until I started to take care of a house and three neutered cats in Summerland in Southern California. It was a lovely house on the dry, steep hillside.
Soon I began to have an understanding of my three eunuchs.
My wife spent most of her time in bed. She was ill and had an addiction for alcohol and books and soft fireside lights.
I fed the three cats: Braggi, a big, soft, sloppy male, red of hair and eye; Fanusi, a small beige female with the habits of a flapper; and the Grand Duchess, white with black spots, snaky and strong, who looked like some creature who should be riding point (though on what steed I don't know) before a troop of western cavalry.
Braggi was a lover. He would come over and just suddenly flop on my shoes — a great big gesture of affection.
Fanusi was a neurotic, despite her basic flapper behavior. Even while wooing you, she was nervous and apt to run off.
The Grand Duchess never lost her cool, though she was the smallest — yet hardiest — of the three.
The thing that most startled me about them, after about a week, was that they were all killers. They would bring in dead mice, rats even, birds and gophers, not eating them, but tossing them at my feet. I expected they were devoted exponents of blood sports. In fact, I noticed that the Grand Duchess had a regular hunting trail she took each day, waiting for a few minutes at each kill spot.
I wondered how they got enough to eat, since they apparently didn’t eat their kills — merely displayed them to me, while their mistress, who owned the house, when strictly giving them into my trust, assured me that they each took only two teaspoons of canned cat food a day. A statement I immediately wondered about.
Soon I found the solution, through my wife, who understands people better than I do. Each of the three had a regular route to four sympathetic houses in the near neighborhood, where they got good victuals off the human tables.
Then I became more aware of the quite large garden on the downhill side of the house my wife and I were taking care of — along with the three desexed hunting cats. (Heck — desexed!) They even indulged often in sex play with each other — neutering isn’t nearly such a disaster to sexual activity as many people think. Those three felines enjoyed each other.
I got still more interested in the garden downside of the house, from which the cries of the cats would sometimes come in the evenings like the soft coughs of lions.
The garden was a jungle. No, worse than a jungle. More like chaos.
So I started in on the worst stuff first. This happened to be a weed that had black spikes looking like early bamboo phonograph needles, but with tiny black burrs on the ends of them. They stuck on my socks and trousers very determinedly. But I kept getting rid of them, through the help of my wife.
Then I tackled a weed with small, brown, circular burrs. They weren’t so troublesome to deal with. The back garden began to look like something I could conquer.
I started to cut out all sorts of dead wood. There were bushes that bore red berries in the center of the garden. When I’d sawed all of their gray, dry, dead underwood away, I discovered a simple cement fountain underneath.
I imagine the mistress and master of the house we were tending — along with their three cats — could hardly have known about the fountain, since for five years they had merely ground-hosed the garden from above a half hour every afternoon, their only attention to that area. I never did find out how that fountain worked.
My wife had a mild heart attack about that time, but we found her a doctor who did her good, and both she and I kept up our lonely ways of life, she in her bedroom, I at my typewriter in my study, and always for a strenuous, sweaty hour or three in the back garden.
I cleaned the lower surface out — now that the nastiest weeds were taken care of — first with a machete, then with a hand mower.
Then I began to get at the trees and the high border vegetation. This meant much more dead wood — too much for our garbage cans. I would load up my car with big corrugated cardboard boxes filled with my dead gray vegetable refuse and take it to the city dump, a huge dark valley behind the sea hills, but circled always with screaming sea birds. It gave me a strange feeling to do this, as if I were burying my wife — or one or all of the three cats she and I were tending.
At about this time Braggi started visiting me in the downhill garden while I worked. He would watch me closely, and when I sat down on the crude fountain edge to rest and wipe my face, he would topple against my ankles in affection. I would stroke him.
My wife read her books and drank her highballs in our bedroom. When she looked down at me from the wide window, it was companionably, affectionately, and concernedly. I would wave at her.
I was fascinated by the things my afternoon cuttings were uncovering. Working at the dead gray underbranches of two tall avocado trees, I discovered a complete hemispherical “pleasure dome”, as in the poem by Coleridge, a dome walled overhead with huge green leaves and large green dropping fruit. My wife and I had a tremendous salad that night.
During later days, we gave away a number of these lovely, grainy-skinned fruits to briefly visiting friends.
At about this time the two “altered” female cats — the neurotic Fanusi and the stately Grand Duchess — began to look in on me and Braggi from a distance occassionally as I worked in the garden.
Then I attacked the fifteen-foot hedge of the whole garden — all green and vigorous with clumps of small yellow strange berries. I was amazed at my discoveries as I cut down this fierce stuff — three small evergreens growing sidewise in their attempt to get out of their huge green prison and reach the sun; two lovely branches of enormous, softly yellow roses just in bloom; and a small orange tree with tiny fruit.
That night my wife and I had a beautiful centerpiece at our dining table and lovely screwdrivers. I had a great feeling of triumph at having conquered the garden.
But later that night it was horrible. I awakened from a light sleep, and slipping out of the king-size bed very quietly, so as not to awaken my wife, I put on a dressing gown and stole down to the back garden.
Everything I had cut down was growing at a supernatural velocity, though I don't know what god or goddess had the power at that point.
For a moment I stood astounded — long enough to note Braggi, Fanusi, and the Grand Duchess watching me from the hillside, silhouetted by the moonlight.
It seemed clear that all the vegetation — grasses, weeds, shrubs, vines, and trees — was determined to encircle and strangle to death me and my wife and the house.
I realized I had not a green thumb, to give life, but a gray thumb, to give death, though this left me with the paradox that in trying to bring the garden to life — to free it — I had infuriated it against me.
I rushed uphill and upstairs. My wife roused instantly. I grabbed a bottle for her. Without packing, we raced out to our car past threatening growing hedges and weeds which stung our legs. We jumped into the auto and started it, opening the back door and yelling, “Fanusi! Grand Duchess! Braggi! Pile in!”
To my relief and utter amazement they did — Fanusi almost in fits, Braggi loving as usual (in fact, snuggling up to my wife), the Duchess staring back over her white biackspotted shoulder in a proud way at the vegetation which appeared to be pursuing us.
Days later I sent some letters.
Three months afterward I heard from the couple who owned the house.
The chief points were that they were grateful to us for taking on their three cats — which had been a bother to them for a long time — but no offer to redeem their pets. And why had I left the back garden in such a rank state after promising to clear it? And yet taken away all the ripe avocados?
In view of which my plea for a little extra care-taking fee was ridiculous.
My wife and I looked at each other, while Braggi, Fanusi, and the Grand Duchess looked up at us from their appointed places before the flickering, red, streaming, mysterious fireplace, and smiled their Cheshire smiles.