Dewey's Nine Lives

She looked at her husband. He rolled his eyes, then smiled and nodded. Church Cat’s little gray tabby kitten stayed. They named him Chi-Chi, and although he grew to be bigger and leaner than his mother, without her endearing baby face, he always reminded Kim of her office friend. He was never warm; in fact, he was quite aloof. “But that was just his personality,” Kim said. “He was a good, good cat. Just like his mama.”

A town is a series of changes, and to live in a town for long is to incorporate those changes into your life. When Carol Ann moved to Camden, the downtown hardware store run by her father-in-law was the hub of commercial life. They sold everything from shovels and biscuits to nails and dinner plates, but also made crop loans and bartered bales of cotton. For a while, they ran the area’s only ambulance service and served as the town’s funeral home, even employing an undertaker. When Harris went to college, he decided to pass on the hardware store in favor of the bank, but he quit that job two years later when MacMillan-Bloedel, a conglomerate out of Canada, opened a paper mill near town. By the time his father retired, Harris had earned an MBA and was an executive at the mill. The hardware store was sold and became a True Value franchise, selling standard nails and tools, and slowly became threadbare with the rest of downtown. But if you’ve lived in Camden long enough, and know where to look, you can still see MATTHEW’S HARDWARE written on the old brick wall.

By the time Church Cat arrived, there wasn’t much thought of reviving downtown. There wasn’t a Walmart for fifty miles, but most of the residents of Camden found a reason to make it out there at least once a month. “My mom couldn’t pass a Walmart,” Harris told me with a laugh. “Didn’t matter what part of the state we were in, or what we were doing, we had to stop.” Religion had always been a major part of life in Camden, and even with the downtown falling on hard times, more and more effort and expense went into the four big churches on Broad Street. By the 1990s, in true modern style, each started a series of major renovations, one after another.

The first thing to go at Camden Methodist was the comfortable old parsonage, with its eighty-year history and creaking floorboards, which was sold to a young couple. When the truck came to lift the building off its foundation and haul it away, there was quite a crowd on the church lawn, and a number of teary eyes, especially from the older generation. It was just a small wooden bungalow, simple and plain, but it was built immaculately, and built to last. It sits now in a neighborhood less than a mile from the church, once again filled with the laughter and tears of a young family growing up together.

The old motel, a long-derelict eyesore without a single redeeming feature, was torn down and paved over for a parking lot. The church left only the former restaurant, converting it to a youth center and temporary offices for the church administration. For almost a year, Church Cat and the children coexisted in that space, something that brought joy to both of them. The cat preferred Kim’s company, and especially the seat of her comfy office chair, but she also liked to wander out when the children were in the youth center and meow for attention. When the cooing and stroking became too much—the little girl still squealed at the sight of Church Cat, but now the cavernous former restaurant magnified the sound—Church Cat simply scampered away and hid in the kitchen.

In the year after giving birth to her kittens, in fact, Church Cat only got into trouble one time: at the Methodist Charge Meeting. Kim was out of town, and Carol Ann wasn’t sure what to do with Church Cat while she worked at the meeting. It was just after Easter, the perfect time of year in southern Alabama, when the evenings are still damp and cool enough to stamp down the day’s heat, so she decided to let Church Cat out for the night. Then she hurried off to greet participants in the Charge Meeting, a major event attended by the district superintendent and representatives from other local Methodist churches. Carol Ann, from her spot at the door, made sure Church Cat didn’t sneak into the sanctuary as the crowd arrived, but the little tabby must have slipped in with a latecomer because right in the middle of the assembly, she walked straight down the center aisle, meowing for attention.

Carol Ann was mortified. I wish I could write that like she said it—“MAWT-a-fied”—because no one can express social embarrassment like a proper Southern lady. But suffice it to say that Carol Ann was deeply worried about Church Cat barging into the sanctuary during the biggest meeting of the year.

Oh, that’s it, she thought, as she hustled Church Cat out the back door. That’s gonna be the end of Church Cat.