Barn Cats
[Published in Trajectory, 2010, and winner of its First Place Prize]
They appear in the loft during this bitter blow of snow and cold. The long male sticks his head down between the planks and sighs a plaintive Gregorian meow. He watches my movements. The smaller one, perhaps his sister, echoes in urgent soprano as I break the ice in the cows’ water trough.
Later, rubbing the numbness from my fingers in the back room of the farmhouse, I tell Sharon about them. “The male’s a good-looking cat,” I say. “Gray, long haired. The smaller one’s black and orange and muddy brown. Cute in a crazy sort of way.”
“They’ll keep the mice down in the barn, Dan,” Sharon says. She looks tired. Her hair is not brushed back, not fixed in its usual tidy knot.
“Can we keep them, Daddy?” Becky asks. I love the excitement in her eyes.
Our farm is in the Indiana knobs, where the earth rises up from the Ohio Valley just north and west of Louisville. The rolling land, buried now by snow resting in graceful, artistic drifts, is a mix of small farms and wooded ridges, pastures, caves, and crooked creeks. When I’m not teaching at the public high school across the river, some twenty miles away, I’m exploring this land that’s still new to me.
This is our first farm, an experiment we’ve agreed upon to dispel a few of the distractions of urban life. Of the land itself, several acres are in woods: cedar and oak, maple and beech, some native dogwood. Barbed-wire fences subdivide the rest into three pastures. A spring of great reputation flows from a rocky little cave back on the hill overlooking the house. Twenty-five acres in all, not counting the sky with its hawks and turkey vultures that hitch-hike on the wind, easy, unencumbered. Twenty-five acres of deer and rabbit, quail and squirrel and fox that have no need to notice our fences.
These days, Sharon doesn’t walk the farm, does not seem interested in the rise and fall of the knolls or in any of the small outbuildings nestled here in the flats of the land close to the house. When we moved here in late spring, she enjoyed strolling, looking about, climbing into the loft of the barn. But something has changed for her, and though I’ve wondered at the long silences between us, have asked through the summer and into the fall if everything is all right, she simply nods. I wonder if something is changing for me as well.
The barn that Sharon used to call her favorite place is now my favorite. It’s a Mansard-roof affair painted red with creamy white trim. Mrs. Brown, a Hereford due to freshen soon, and Patches, a fifteen-month-old heifer, are the full-time residents. If Becky comes with me for the afternoon feeding, I hoist her to my shoulders, the snow higher than her knees, and we pamper the cows with grain as an addition to their daily allotment of hay. Becky giggles as she watches the cows’ long tongues curling out to lap the feed.
Sharon doesn’t want to slaughter Patches in the spring. “How would you explain it to Becky?” she keeps asking when I bring up the topic. “You’ve turned Patches into a pet.”
"Why did we buy that huge freezer?” I respond. In a way, of course, Sharon is right. But this venture into cattle is business, not play. I’m stuck, with no idea how to resolve the problem.
The barn cats reappear regularly after our first meeting. On one cold morning they come sidling up, sniffing the feeding boards of fresh grain I’ve poured out for the cows inside the barn. Mrs. Brown swishes her head at the cats and watches with huge, unblinking eyes. The cats wait, tentative, each with a paw bent and raised an inch above the feeding board. When they glance at me, Mrs. Brown moves in. The male hisses and smacks the big Hereford in the nose. I laugh at the startled look on the cow’s face. The bark of my laughter, stark and brittle, sounds unfamiliar to me, even more so, I suppose, in the cold gloom of the barn.
When I tell Sharon about the encounter, I’m hoping she will smile. ”Those cats didn’t hurt her, did they?” she says. “You didn’t let them hurt her?”
A shock of impatience floods through me and I wonder, again, if this rural experiment is going to work. “Mrs. Brown weighs a thousand pounds,” I say. “How is a cat going to hurt her?”
Thinking about it later in the day, I realize there was nothing she could have said to my question. I wonder if I need to apologize.
Next morning I gather up the table scraps from breakfast. If Sharon notices, she decides to say nothing about it. When I enter the barn, the cats approach, hesitant, but the aroma of sausage seems to excite them and they begin a chorus of impatient meows. They devour the leftovers, including crusts of toast, in gulps. Their hunger is prodigious. In comparison, our house cat, Dante, eats in dainty bites, relishing each morsel as if he’s a gourmand.
In the days that follow, the cats accept me as their provider. On the mornings I trudge up to them without their breakfast, they fuss with me and act as if they’re hurt. Using my legs for rubbing posts becomes a game with them. When I pause in the steel-blue bitterness of the barn to stroke them, they push their warmth back to me, purring, butting their heads into the palm of my hand. I brush my fingers across their backs.
As the heavy snows continue, so too do the closings. Days begin to feel confused, compressed. Is it Tuesday or Wednesday? I’ve not been to work since the twenty-first day of December, the beginning of the holiday break. Each night I watch the news, hoping for a thaw. Now that the holiday is drawing to a close, I’m ready to return to work.
But January becomes colder. It seems to daze even the hardiest inhabitants of the knobs. Our home, a patchwork quilt pieced together by many hands over its ninety years, also suffers. On the fourth day of the arctic siege, our water pipes freeze. The furnace, which has been issuing visceral moans and wheezes for a week, slows and dies against this morning’s twelve below. Outside, the wind screams through the limbs of the big maple in the backyard. Hoarfrost coats every branch and blade of grass.
The furnace contractors can get to us in two days, not before. They are sorry. Do we have a secondary source of heat? A wood stove? Very good.
Now, seven days into January, the furnace repaired but a bitterness still gripping the land, I feel an impulse to invite the barn cats in. During a quiet time just before dusk, I coax them from the barn to the wood-stove warmth of the back room. Our house cat rises from his favorite spot next to the stove and produces a deep-gutted growl that speaks of betrayal. He hisses, but the barn cats—Sugar and Spice by now to Becky—ignore the challenge and concentrate on the food I’ve dished out. Dante slinks through the doorway into the kitchen and disappears.
When the barn cats finish their meals, they explore the room. I love how they curl around the furniture and rub their backs against the legs of the table beside the sofa. They browse in a leisurely, almost intimate fashion, as if they’ve lived here for months. Fondly bumping heads, they come together and settle side by side in a corner. Sugar rests her head in the soft of Spice’s neck. They close their eyes in phases, the way cats do.
After a few minutes Sharon appears in the doorway and notices the cats curled in the corner. Watching them sleep, she seems to soften. I want to speak to her, to say something about the cats, but I suddenly feel shy. Just as I muster up the courage, she turns to me. There’s a message in her eyes, so I wait.
“I want them out,” she says.
I try to read her face, something I’ve never been able to do very well. She gives little away, a trait I once found fascinating, something that created a challenge for me while we were dating. It was fun, then, a game to win or lose. “How about ten more minutes?” I say. “Let them thaw out a little.”
“I want them out, Dan. Now.” Arms folded across her chest, she stares at me for a moment. “This is my house too, isn’t it?” she says, but it’s not a question. She returns to her sewing in the kitchen.
I try to make some sense of it. Is she angry because the barn cats have frightened Dante away from his favorite spot? Does she think I’ve thrown over our house cat, a great, affectionate, long-haired mongrel I adore, spoiled though he is, in favor of the barn cats? Is this the residue from an earlier, unresolved incident?
The cats awaken when I pick Sugar up. I place her on the icy step and shut the door. Spice, though, avoids my grasp, sliding behind the sofa. When I pull the sofa away from the wall and manage to grab a leg, he mews angrily and jerks away. I feel wary, almost fearful.
Becky is watching from the kitchen. “Daddy, don’t hurt him,” she says.
“I’m not going to, honey,” I assure her.
But I’m impatient now. I open a closet door and find an empty burlap sack, which I manage to throw over Spice. Struggling in my hands beneath the coarse material, he surprises me with his sinewy strength. At the door I unfold the burlap and the cat strikes out, raking a claw down the inside of my wrist. Tiny beads of blood rise up in a thin trail, and I pitch him, burlap and all, into the frigid dusk before either of us quite knows what is happening. The sack hits the ice of the drive and slides eight or ten feet. Spice bolts from the material and races for the safety of the barn. I have wanted to give them something, these cats, but I’m left empty for the effort.
When I enter the kitchen to wash my small wound, I glimpse Sharon’s frown. “There wasn’t any need to manhandle the poor creature,” she says as I pass. I pause, reach out and touch her arm. It is my apology, but she pulls away, giving me a curious glance.
I sink into the sofa in the back room, confounded by how my wife can skewer me with her one-liners and return to her tasks without a momentary emotional glitch. As she works in obvious calm, I simmer like the kettle water atop our wood stove. But still, as I watch, I notice a prettiness about her, I admire how she’s guiding Becky’s fingers through a series of cross-stitches on the piece they’ve selected, something from the Snow White story. I try to guess what is important in her world, try to figure out how we have arrived at this place, why we no longer talk, why we rarely reach for one another, but I can’t begin to analyze any of it.
I switch the radio on low and reach for a novel. When I next look up, the kitchen light is off; all is quiet except for the whisper of the radio. The Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” stings me with its bluesy lyrics. “Oh, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch.” This is a tune we loved, Sharon and I. Even now I can hear her humming the melody into my ear as we danced to it in the early days.
As I slide into an unquiet sleep, I realize I need to talk to Becky about the cats.
Though I search for the barn cats later the next morning, they’re nowhere to be found. Five inches of new snow rests like cotton over the icy crust of the earth, adding a cold and breathless beauty to the land. The wind slices through my jeans, the boot-cut bottoms snapping like flags. Tiny frozen crystals swirl about my face. The glare from the sun bouncing off the snow hurts my eyes, causing me to squint and tear up. In the barn, frost coats the heads of the cows, separating and stiffening each tiny hair into white bristles, and I marvel at the misty puffs from their nostrils. Outside, the cardinals and juncos peck at the suet I’ve hung from several low branches of the maple. A car eases down the road, its engine muffled by a deep white duvet of snow.
The barn cats reappear that early evening. They’re poking their heads out the high open door of the loft, framed in the day’s last purple swirls from the western sky, squatting on a bale of hay, forlorn, meowing to a half moon hanging crooked just above the horizon, their shallow wails barely reaching down to the house before being lost in the treetops beyond. I call to them from the back door, but I’m sure they can’t hear me in the blow of the wind. Their hunger, however, I can see in the leanness of their silhouettes. Though I think about making the trip to the barn with scraps from supper, the thermometer points to zero and the snow rises to the bottom of my knees. I do not go.
I haven’t seen the barn cats since that night. January is halfway finished and the sun has returned to encourage the thaw that’s settling on the hills. I’ve returned to work in the city, where the schools have reopened. My classes keep me busy, and the demands of the farm are constant. But the ice of this cold spell has ripped open a place inside me, so that now I feel something seeping from that rip. And though the bedroom is again the room where I sleep and dream, Sharon and I do not touch.
* * *
One late afternoon the following month, the balm of spring somewhere not so distant in the air, I pull myself up the rough-sawed wooden steps to the loft of the barn. I think of the chores ahead: tuning the ancient John Deere; tilling the garden spot beside the garage; finding someone to cut and bale my hay on shares. While counting the remaining bales in the loft, I discover a nest of loosened hay in a leeward corner with the imprints of the barn cats. So this is where they made their makeshift beds. They endured the fury of the cold so well. But at some point, perhaps on that very night I decided against trudging through the snow with a meal for them, they must have thought they no longer mattered to me.
I crouch down next to their nest and place a hand where I know they slept, imagining I might find their warmth. But of course no warmth remains.
I crouch down next to their nest and place a hand where I know they slept, imagining I might find their warmth. But of course no warmth remains.