Critters of Mossy Creek Read online

  “No. Are you crazy? I’m the mother of a toddler and a small business owner who just doubled the size of her business loan. I don’t have time for such things.”

  Josie snorted. “You’re a healthy, thirty-six-year-old, flesh-and-blood woman. It’s been three years since your husband died. Even Confederate widows put away their ‘widow’s weeds’ after a year.”

  I stopped and thoughtfully regarded what I could see of the front door through the thick, dust-covered plastic. “Dan?”

  Josie moved in for the kill. “Why not? He’s a Scorpio, true, and they can be a tad moody, but he’s got enough Ox to overcome that. And I’ve never known Dan to be moody, have you?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Ssshhhh!” Josie grabbed my arm. “What was that?”

  “What was wh—” Then the skittering sound registered. “Oh no. Not—”

  “Mice,” she breathed. “The construction must’ve stirred them up.”

  I ran to the door at the back that hid the stairs up to my apartment and screamed up them for my cat. “Emma! You have a job to do!”

  WMOS Radio

  “The Voice of the Creek”

  Good morning, Mossy Creek! This is Bert Lyman, as always, of WMOS-FM and its sister station WMOS-TV, local cable access channel 22, bringing you breaking news of greater Mossy Creek on this fine day in early springtime.

  Spring means love is in the air, and love is for critters as well as for human beings, and so . . . that means new puppies! And new kittens! And new hamsters! And new parakeets! And new you-name-it!

  So get yourselves down to Bigelow, where our own Mayor Ida Hamilton Walker is helping to dedicate the new Bigelow County Humane Society this morning and take home a new something-or-other that’s messy and furry and has fangs, even if it looks too much like your mother-in-law.

  Excuse me while I turn to my wife, Honey Lyman, and tell her I’m just kidding about her mom.

  "Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this."

  —Anonymous

  Peggy and the Curmudgeonly Cats

  Peggy

  My daughter, Marilee, was against it, although she started me thinking in the first place.

  She and her husband Claude and my granddaughter Josie live down in the big-little city of Bigelow, seat of Bigelow County. I live up in Mossy Creek in a turn-of-the-century mock Tudor on a lot the size of three football fields. My husband Ben and I bought it when we both retired. He wanted the land to garden. I wanted the inside of the house for books.

  After he died on me—I have never forgiven him for that, by the way—I was forced into gardening. I’ve grown fond of it and even fonder of my friends in the Mossy Creek Garden Club, but I needed a new challenge. Gardening was never really my thing, but I couldn’t remain locked in the house reading murder mysteries until I mummified.

  Marilee is afraid that’s what will happen. She says the yard is too much for me. It is, but I have help. The house is too big for me. It is, but not for my books. I am not even seventy yet, and here she wants to shove me off into a condo in Bigelow, where she can keep tabs on me.

  I don’t think so. I’d rather be mummified, especially now that my original cat, Dashiell, has become four cats with the adoption of Sherlock, Marple and Watson. I don’t think they’d take to mummification, however much the ancient Egyptians extolled the virtues of spending eternity with their felines.

  Those condo places have rules about animals, and since I much prefer my four cats to most of the human beings I know, that is not acceptable.

  Besides, this house is paid for. Even if I could sell it in this market, I’d have to spend a fortune to live somewhere else, and with condo fees, I’d never be free of monthly payments.

  Again, I don’t think so.

  I’ve told Marilee all that, but she continues to fidget. “Those condo units are quite spacious,” she said.

  “The complex only takes people over fifty-five.”

  “Are you saying you don’t qualify?”

  “I’m saying I intend to stay here until somebody carries me out to the funeral home.”

  “What if you break a hip?”

  The way she fixates on my aging joints, she seems to think I have as many hips as a brown recluse spider.

  “What if a burglar breaks in and kills you? Or worse?” she added.

  “That would be the fate worse than death, I assume.”

  “This is not a joke!”

  “I’m not laughing. But I’m not moving, either. Those condo people—they’re a way-station on the way to a nursing home—will only allow me to have a single cat. That’s like saying you have to pick one of your children and put the others into a sweat shop. Unacceptable.”

  I think Claude, her husband, puts her up to it. He’s a Bigelowan. Need I say more? They are born messers-around in other people’s lives. Bigelowans have been trying to control Mossy Creekites for more than a century.

  This spring I put my mind to how I could forestall interference from my family, and after some consideration and a great deal of planning with my financial advisers, I came up with a plan. I did not discuss it with Marilee and Claude.

  Claude is a master of what I call ‘the civil service No.’ No matter what you ask him, his instant reply is ‘No.’ He never even hears the question. He may be talked around to grudging agreement, but it’s hard slogging. Marilee isn’t as bad, but she gets worse the longer she lives with him. I am attempting to keep all the negativity from slopping over into Josie’s character. So far I have been successful, but she’s barely five and spends more time with her parents than with me, so I am not sanguine.

  Back to my plan. Built on a steep slope front to back, my living space is only one story with an attic, but because of the slope, there is a gigantic double garage and a concrete, walkout, floored cellar beneath the house, that Ben intended to turn into a shop for his garden. He never got around to it. It’s dry and looks out onto the back yard.

  The basement was built with a small toilet, electricity and gas lines. I had no idea why anyone would want a toilet in the basement, until Ben told me that in the early days of the twentieth century, when the house was built, the separate toilet would have been used by servants and gardeners. My family never could afford servants, so I’d never run into anything like that. Amazing. Separation of classes (and probably races) even in normal bodily functions. Maybe we have made a tad of progress. Like many proud, small-D democratic Appalachian mountain towns, Mossy Creek has never been a place where a few people lord it over the rest.

  I decided to turn the cellar into a garden apartment with French doors looking out on the yard and a patio under my deck. I might rent it to some nice elderly widow. We could check on one another to monitor our descents into decrepitude and dementia, plus I’d have some extra income in the meantime.

  Mossy Creek has only a few apartments, largely because the population isn’t that mobile. Still, a college student might move in and commute to the community college down in Bigelow. Bigelow rents are much higher, and the drive isn’t bad except during ice and snowstorms, when anyone in his right mind stays home anyway.

  I called my friend Louise, who endured the tortures of the lowest circle of hell redoing the Queen Anne she inherited from her aunt. I took her to lunch at Mama’s All You Can Eat Café to pick her brain and came away with a dizzying list of permits, contractors, architects and suppliers of everything from concrete to upward-flushing toilets.

  Louise terrified me, but she did tell me that, in the end, her renovation was worth it. She also agreed to act as my unpaid consultant.

  I decided against hiring an architect. I knew what I wanted. I didn’t need some fancy young man to turn my cellar into Rubik’s Cube. I wanted an all-around small contractor. I had two choices, Dan McNeil, who might be the obvious choice, but there was a new game in town—young Arturo Sanchez. Since he’d been adopted by Opal Suggs, along with his two sisters, Arturo had become Mo
ssy Creek’s second go-to fix-it guy.

  Dan McNeil may be the contractor of choice by dyed-in-the-wool Creekites, but since I’m new relatively new here, I thought outside the box and decided on Arturo. I liked the fact that he worked alone, although he occasionally called on his sisters for help when he needed them. They’re both very young, but they seem to be able to do anything he needs help doing.

  Another reason I chose Arturo was because I hoped to keep even the slightest hint of what I was considering from leaving the city limits of Mossy Creek and sneaking down to Bigelow and thus into Marilee’s ears. Dan McNeil is not known for his closed mouth.

  Did it work? You don’t know Mossy Creek.

  Two days after I talked to Arturo, I got a call from Marilee. “Have you lost your mind, Mother? That old house must be falling down around your ears. I warned you . . .”

  “Knock it off,” I said. “The house is not falling down around my ears, my mind is still largely intact despite your assaults on it, and everything is going splendidly, thank you.”

  She actually does mean well, but mothers and daughters have this dynamic going that no one else can understand. At some point the daughters want to become the mothers and treat us like the daughters. That may happen to me some day, but I’ll have to be running around the neighborhood naked and thinking I’m living in 1810 with Napoleon before I relinquish control to Marilee.

  After I told her what I planned, she said she’d have Claude call to talk me out of it.

  “You cannot have some stranger living in the basement of your house, Mother Caldwell,” Claude said. He has always called me Mother Caldwell. I loathe it. I’ve told him a million times to call me just plain Peggy. ‘Mother Caldwell’ sounds either like liver capsules or the head of a cloistered order of nuns who’s bucking for sainthood. I am neither.

  “You will spend a fortune. These things always go over budget. Don’t you watch This Old House?

  “Indeed I do, although I would never let Norm Abrams within a country mile of my house. The man could find carpenter beetles in the Metropolitan Gallery of Art.” Come to think of it, there probably are carpenter beetles there, but that’s not the point. If I have beetles, I intend to live with them. Let my heirs deal with them.

  Claude tried with mounting exasperation to change my mind. In the end we agreed to disagree. I think he sees every dime I spend as one less that Marilee will inherit.

  The morning Arturo’s truck drove down my driveway for the first time, all four cats flew into the cabinet under my sink in the master bath. They are not used to strangers, particularly male strangers with heavy boots.

  Louise discovered that because I did not intend to change the footprint of my house, but only to upgrade existing areas, I didn’t need permits. She said that was probably the only good news I was likely to hear until the job was finished, but she can be a downer, so I ignored her.

  With few exceptions, the work would take place completely downstairs and away from my daily living areas of the house, except when utility and telephone connections had to be made, but Arturo planned to check in with me every day to report progress.

  Piece of cake.

  As if.

  ooo

  Dashiell, Cat Extraordinaire

  Peggy calls me Dashiell after some mystery writer person who drank himself to death before I was born. Hardly a recommendation. I must intervene to tell the real story of our home’s invasion.

  I can no longer levitate from the floor to the top of the library shelves without thrusting off the back of the wing chair. I still, however, maintain order, decorum, quiet and command in my household and intend to do so until I depart for my next incarnation.

  My adopted family—acquired through no fault of my own, by the way—demands constant supervision. The logistics of our lives, such as food, water, cushions and a clean litter box, are maintained by our staff human, Peggy, of whom I am inordinately fond, or as fond as any master can be of an admirable servant. She also provides mental stimulation, not that the others have enough intellect to appreciate the books she reads. I have read over her shoulder since I discovered at six months that I could understand the scratchings on the paper when she read aloud to me.

  The three kittens—Sherlock, Marple and Watson—that came to live with us after the lamentable affair of the misplanted catnip, are now adults in body, if not necessarily in mind.

  I consider myself pleasantly portly. Sherlock, however, is monumental. One suspects his mother had an unfortunate liaison with one of the bobcats that occasionally traverse our property. What he provides in avoirdupois, however, he lacks in mental acumen. He must be coached to cough up a hairball.

  One makes allowances for his lack of brains because of his inherent gentleness. Peggy’s granddaughter lugs him about like a handbag. I would never permit such liberties.

  Watson is much smaller and a born sycophant. He lacks any dignity when either petting or food is on offer. It is a mistake to allow “them” to think we can be seduced by a tummy rub. They get ideas well above their station in life. Unfortunately, he is devoted to bright toys.

  Marple, the only queen among our quartet, is nearly as intelligent as I, sleekly beautiful, extremely vain and holds grudges. Once Peggy’s friend Carlyle, a man we generally admired as he always brought us treats, accidentally trod on Marple’s tail, then left his shoes in Peggy’s bedroom. I will not put words to what Marple did in his shoes. I was disgusted with her, but she was unrepentant.

  We live exclusively inside Peggy’s admirably comfortable house. Since my one foray outside, I have come to agree with her strictures. Constant dangers lurk outside for felines.

  Inside, however, one expects to be completely safe, peaceful and content—cosseted, in fact.

  Even mild discomfort is intolerable. Under ordinary circumstances, I complain to Peggy (whom we call Staff), who then cleans the litter box, replenishes the kibble, fills the water dish, plumps up the cushions, and does whatever other small service I might require, with admirable dispatch.

  This time, however, Peggy was, please forgive the modern idiom, totally clueless. There are times when none of “them” can understand what we tell them, no matter how many times we repeat ourselves. Exasperating. I put up with the disruptions as long as I could. If Peggy could not fix the problem, it was up to us.

  The young man who arrived much too early one morning and made too much noise seemed pleasant enough, but one doesn’t like to take chances, so I shooed my brood into the bathroom cabinet. If he were merely temporary, I couldn’t be bothered to discover whether he liked cats.

  Unfortunately, it seemed he not only planned to return, but to take up semi-permanent residence downstairs, where we are never allowed, since it is reached only by going outside. Not only that, but he intended to make a great deal of noise. I informed Staff I was not pleased. She stroked me and gave each of us a treat, but did not offer to send the noisy one away. Each morning he returned to sit at the kitchen table with Staff, pore over sheaves of papers, then repair downstairs to make more noise.

  I deduced that she was creating a new nest downstairs to be occupied either by this noisy one or by a human who was not a member of our family. We learned to put up with Staff’s friend, Carlyle, until he moved away, and with her family, of whom Josie is the only acceptable member, but to introduce a perfect stranger into our lives?

  I assembled my troops to discuss a plan of attack.

  ooo

  Peggy

  My big old cat Dashiell is as fat as a barbecue hog and has been known to slip off the top of the hutch in the dining room and crash into the silver service. He never hurts his body, but his pride demands that he act as though he had intended to crash. Then he grumps about for the rest of the afternoon. I’m afraid he’ll break a leg or a hip. He already hates going to the vet. He’d never forgive me for coating parts of him in plaster of Paris.

  He’s been spending too much time lately scaling his own private Everests. I think the oth
er cats are fraying his nerves. They are much younger, and with the exception of Sherlock, commonly referred to as Lard Ass, more active. They want to chase things and play fight. Much above Dashiell’s dignity. He takes it just so long, then he holds down whichever of them—Watson or Marple—has bitten his tail and washes their faces for them. That, in cats, is a sign of dominance.

  I hope he maintains his pre-eminence. So far I think the only one of them with the power to hold Dashiell down is Sherlock, who would never consider demanding dominance. A. A. Milne called Pooh “A bear of very little brain.” Substitute “cat” for “bear,” and you have Sherlock.

  That’s one of the reasons the present situation is worrying. All cats are inherent thieves, just like magpies. If they can pick it up in their teeth or bat it with their paws and if it appeals to them esthetically, a cat will hide demitasse spoons under the Kirghiz rug or bury your great aunt Sophie’s silver filigree pin under his canned salmon. Dashiell did that one time. Took me hours to clean it once I found it, and I’ve never been able to wear it since. I swear it still smells faintly of fish.

  The first thing to disappear was my great-grandmother’s antique cloisonné snuffbox, that she swore came over with the first settlers. The cats didn’t steal it, surely, after this long. It has sat on the piecrust table in the living room as long as I’ve lived in the house, and they’ve never bothered it.

  The second item was my antique gold thimble, inherited from my other great-grandmother. Again, not the cats. It has sat in my sewing box forever. They never bother my sewing.

  Cats are not assessors of real value. They’re as likely to cherish a plastic ring off the top of the milk bottle as they are the Hope Diamond. If they hide a ‘precious,’ they tuck it under the sofa cushions or behind the television. I checked the likely hiding places with no success.