Dewey's Nine Lives

In some sense, there’s a very short distance to go until the end of this story. The only thing left to say, I suppose, is that Church Cat loved her life with Carol Ann, who spoiled her like the doting grandmother she is, but that her life in that home was tragically short. When Church Cat contracted an infection and died in the summer of 2005, at only eight years old, Carol Ann was so distraught, it took her several weeks to tell the congregation. She was the fattest cat you have ever seen, as both Kim and Carol Ann told me in separate conversations, but also the happiest, and Carol Ann and her husband, Harris, missed her terribly. They buried her in their family plot, alongside generations of ancestors that had lived and died in Wilcox County, Alabama.

The next year, Carol Ann and Harris Riggs moved away. Ms. Hattie, the woman who had lain on the ground to pet Church Cat, and the last of their living parents, had died, and they had long promised themselves that, when they no longer had family responsibility in Camden, they would move somewhere new. When their daughters were young, they had traveled extensively: to the Western United States, to Canada, to Australia. For their retirement, they moved two and a half hours away to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the University of Alabama, where they can watch plays and attend sporting events without having to drive ninety miles home after dark.

They say that’s the reason they left Camden, to experience more of life, but it’s clear there were other factors as well. Neither one of their daughters wanted to live in the area. They were married, to a lawyer and a federal emergency response director, respectively, and they were both studying for careers in medicine. There were no jobs for them in Wilcox County.

Meanwhile, the MacMillan-Bloedel paper mill where Harris had worked most of his life was sold first to Weyerhaeuser, then to International Paper. At its height, the mill had employed almost two thousand people from the area. Now Harris estimates it employs four hundred, although he isn’t sure. “You know these international companies,” he said. “When you retire, they take your name out of the computer, and you’re just gone.” Just gone. It seemed such a minor end to more than a hundred years of Riggs family history in Camden.

And so one story ends, but of course it is not the only story that can be told about Camden. The town is located in the heart of Civil Rights era unrest—forty miles north is Selma, site of the famous march, and thirty miles east is Lowndes County, known as “Bloody Lowndes” for its staunch refusal to register black voters. So there are at least two sets of circumstances in Camden, two histories, two views of the world. If you asked someone else about Camden, Alabama, especially a longtime black resident, you would no doubt hear a different story from the one you’ve read today.

But there are always other stories to tell. I haven’t set out to provide a history of a town but simply to tell the story of Church Cat, who stayed four cherished years at Camden United Methodist and died as she had always lived, with Ms. Carol Ann Riggs by her side. That seems simple enough, and I have tried my best to tell the story as Ms. Carol Ann told it to me. But even something as seemingly straightforward as the life of Church Cat, as I well know, is filled with personal meanings and interpretations.

Nothing made that more clear than my three conversations, spaced over a series of months, with Carol Ann’s good friend Kim Knox. Kim, you see, had a different view of Church Cat. A view not based on Church Cat’s actions but on the fact that she was terribly unhappy after her move to Camden, a town she had never even heard of until her husband got a job teaching school there. She loved the town and the people but, as the Bible says, it was a time of trial. Her mother died just after she moved, and without any friends in the area, she had no one to confide in. Even worse, after years of trying, she learned she would never be able to have a child.

This was not like Mary Nan Evans with her twenty-eight cats on Sanibel Island. Mary Nan told me, with no hesitation, that she never regretted not being able to have children. She is older than Kim, and therefore further from the disappointment, but I don’t think that was the reason for her lack of regret. Having children, it seemed, was never integral to Mary Nan’s life. It wasn’t something she ever needed to be happy.