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Scooter's Story
It was raining when he buried her.
I was out in the yard, wandering from dry spot to dry spot,
under the deck to under the truck, to under the tree, back to the deck. I was trying to avoid the other cat, Sasha,
whose naïve attitude and blind affection
assure that one of the humans will ALWAYS pick her up and let her sleep in
their lap. Not me. I’m Mr. Independent. I know the game. They feed me (from the same bowl as that
Siamese bimbo), and I allow them to scratch under my chin or pet my head. Whatever. Point is, I was out in the yard
when the Master walked by carrying his shovel and a Wal-Mart bag, heavy with
something small inside.
The shovel.
Around here, it’s a thing of legend… a fairy tale almost, or
a kind of boogey man. Whenever a new
animal comes in to our family, the shovel is one of the first topics of
discussion. Maggie, the golden
retriever, lives in fear of the day when the Master will have to use it for
her. She was just a puppy when she first
saw it, digging a hole for the beagle that died from being too old.
The Master had tears in his eyes as he drove the shovel into the dirt,
but the “chuff” sound it made sounded more like “you too” to Maggie’s
ears.
The shovel has been around since forever, digging holes for
hamsters and rabbits and chickens and even Bella the goat’s sister, Lucky. She was not so lucky. I remember when the Master came inside after
gouging the earth for a long time on that gray day, and he said to his wife,
“That’s it. We’re never getting another
animal bigger than the hole I want to dig for it when it dies.”
This day, he was digging another hole. A small one.
I settled down in the gravel of the driveway under the truck and watched
him heave the soil, in great black lumps.
When he was satisfied that the hole was deep enough, he carefully placed
the bag inside. As I watched, I saw a tiny gray tail push up against the
translucent white bag. So this was the
last one, then.
This was Number Eight. The Survivor. The calico cat next
door had birthed a litter of kittens 7 weeks ago, and one by one in that first
week, they all died. All but Stormy, the
gray kitten. She will make it, they said.
She is strong, they said. Look
how she plays! Haha, she is quite a
climber, isn’t she?
I started washing my front paws as shovelful by shovelful he
undug the hole.
I wonder how long it will be before there are no places to
bury us? This spot, the one with the
kitten, was near the little apple tree.
My eyes wandered around the yard, and I noted all the places that had
little animals sleeping a couple of feet below the grass or weeds or trees or
shrubs above. Sam and Charlie, brothers,
were buried in the front yard. Those two
cats lived for a long time, or so the story goes. They were way before my time. The other cats, Petey and Alex, were in the
back yard. Chubbers the hamster is under a brick, which is tangled up in the
roots of the tall sycamore tree that the Master parks his truck under. Sara the
beagle, she’s buried near the shed, cruelly close to Maggie’s pen. No wonder she freaks out about the shovel,
she has to look at that grave all day long, every day. Lucky the goat occupies a spot on the
boundary of the back yard and the woods beyond.
There is a great big fluffy rabbit buried at the base of the Curly
Willow tree. Yoyo, also before my time, is buried somewhere but no one can seem
to remember where. The other animals
seem to remember stories about him being carried away to the vet and never
returning, but I think the Master would have brought him back to help fill up
another hole somewhere here in the yard.
He loved that cat. Stormy’s
siblings, all 7 of them, were in tiny holes scattered around the property. The
first hole was hard for the Master to dig.
He was very sad. The next one… a
little easier. By the time he got to the
seventh hole, days later, he seemed almost dead to the horrible thing he was
doing. But the eighth hole, that was
hard for him. His daughter, the one who
I allow sometimes to pet me as I sleep on her bed, was attached to Stormy. That was going to be her cat.
The last scoop of dirt fell on top of the hole, and the
Master whacked it flat with the shovel before stomping on it to level it
out. I wonder what was going through his
mind as the damp dirt gave way to his shoe.
His face was a mask, but I admit that human faces are always hard for me
to read. More telling than his face was the way he let the shovel drag behind
him as he took it back to the shed, leaving a faint trail in the wet grass.
I wonder if he ever gets tired of digging all those holes.
Sasha came bumbling by, and I took a swipe at her but it was
half-hearted. She turned around for a
second like she wanted to play, then noticed for the first time the fresh pile
of dirt nearby.
“Another one?” she asked.
I nodded.
