Dewey's Nine Lives

But on Palm Sunday, Church Cat was gone. The children came out to the lawn after the church service, dressed in their choir robes and waving palm fronds, but there was no cat to meet them. They stopped and looked around, bewildered. Then they started searching: in the bushes, in the Sunday school rooms, in the administrative offices, and even in the sanctuary. But they couldn’t find the cat.

“Did she have her baby?” the squealing girl squealed, almost falling down with excitement.

“Probably,” Carol Ann told her, “but we don’t know for sure.”

The next day, Kim went looking for her cat. That year, in addition to adopting a stray cat, Camden United Methodist Church had started a major building project. The primary church building would be expanded; the old parsonage would be hauled away; and a recently acquired abandoned motel next to the property would be torn down for a parking lot. Kim figured the old motel rooms, many with their doors already removed for demolition, afforded an ideal place for a cat to hole up with her kittens. She spent a few hours searching the dilapidated ruin and calling, before Church Cat finally answered. One of the rooms was full of old furniture and mattresses, and Church Cat was using it as a quiet nursery for her four Palm Sunday kittens.

For a week, Kim and Carol Ann took food down to the room, and Kim snuck down to check on her once every day, but for the most part, Church Cat had a week alone with her babies. The next Sunday, after church, the children found her. They were standing around the lawn, talking about Church Cat and her babies, when one of them spotted her slinking around the old motel. About six kids, all younger than six, followed her to the room where her kittens were mewling and stumbling all over one another. Carol Ann arrived quickly enough to make sure the children didn’t do anything but ogle and coo, but by the next day, Church Cat had left the motel.

There are times, as I well know, when it’s good to have a strong network of friends. When you are being unfairly maligned. When you face a personal challenge. When the board tries to throw your community’s beloved cat out of the library. Fortunately, Carol Ann had a strong social network in Camden, and one of her acquaintances lived across the street and a few doors down from the church. This young woman watched from her front porch as Church Cat carried her kittens, one by one by the scruff of the neck, across Broad Street and into the second-floor window of a beat-up old house.

The young woman called Carol Ann. Carol Ann called Kim Knox. Together, they decided they better move those kittens before the owner of the house came back. Nobody had lived in the house for years, but Carol Ann knew the owner was storing stuff inside. He was a fine man, but she wasn’t sure how he’d react if he discovered the kittens. With the entire underage congregation of Camden United Methodist Church eagerly anticipating the return of Church Cat, she didn’t want to take any chances.

“I don’t break the law as a rule,” Kim told me, “but there are times when you just have to.” So a few days later, Kim Knox found herself crawling through the first-floor window of an abandoned house, on a main street a mere block from downtown Camden, while Carol Ann waited outside, amazed that a fine, upstanding woman like herself was standing watch during a trespass.

There must have been a point, perhaps halfway through the window, as she stretched to find the floor hidden in the darkness, when Kim wondered what she was doing. She was a law-abiding citizen. She was a church secretary. She was wearing her nice work clothes, for goodness’ sake. And here she was, breaking and entering a dilapidated and possibly dangerous dwelling. She told herself, no doubt, that she was doing it for the children, who needed to know that Church Cat and her kittens were safe. Perhaps she told herself she was doing it for Church Cat, but she must have known a savvy prison tabby like Church Cat didn’t need help raising her family. She was really doing it, she must have realized as she stepped into the dusty darkness, for herself.

She went to the back door and let Carol Ann’s friend, the young neighbor, into the house, Carol Ann being convinced she was too advanced (in age) for such a perilous mission. “Church Cat,” Kim whispered when her companion was inside, trying to disturb nothing more than cobwebs and grime. “Where are you, Church Cat?” Old furniture was scattered in the downstairs rooms, between piles of boxes filled with junk. Even in full daylight, the arrangement seemed dangerous. It’s a tetanus nightmare, Kim thought as her feet crunched broken glass. The stairs were even less appealing, but eventually they climbed to the second floor and, in the back bedroom, heard Church Cat meowing. When Kim peaked around the corner, the little gray tabby came running to her friend, as sweet and endearing as always.