The Luck of a Stray

I usually name the neighborhood stray cats after the feast day on which they first visit the garden, but Goretti came a few days late.

I was outside, enjoying the breeze after a stifling few days, wishing it would rain again.

This hasn’t been the best of summers. It’s far from the worst, as my longtime readers know. It’s peaceful. But it’s nearly four weeks since I’ve had a drive. Jimmy says the needed tester can be rented for thirty dollars or a bit more, which we’ll give him after we somehow manage to make rent on the fifteenth. I’m beginning to get a pain in my chest every time it comes around to the fifteenth. And then there’s the fact that my guts haven’t worked right since the sickness started in June. We’re trying a probiotic pill now. I trust it will make me well soon. For the moment, it’s just giving me terrible stomach pain to add to what my lower GI tract has been up to.

Still, it’s so peaceful.

The garden is doing so well. The sunflowers are towering, six feet and ten feet. The tomatoes are getting ripe. The pumpkin vine is sprawling all over the yard. I even managed to get a zucchini off the withering plants, and there look to be a few more.

I was fussing over the watermelon vine when a cat, just a bit bigger than a kitten, happened by. This cat was a witch’s familiar right out of a cartoon: short, glossy, jet-black hair without a hint of brown. A tail pointing straight up. Two pink satin triangles for ears, above two vibrant green orbs for eyes.

When Adrienne was a baby, I inherited a bit of money that lasted me all summer just a few days after a black cat crossed my path. Ever since then, black cats have been my lucky charm. I stood deliberately in the garden path as the young cat strode boldly at me. Maybe he’d help me make rent.

“Good afternoon,” I said politely. “May I call you Goretti?”

Goretti did not object. He plowed past me up the concrete steps to the porch, onto the cinder block wall, and then down again as quickly as he’d come. Next, he was on the light pole between the property line that separates my house from the haunted one. I’ve never seen a cat climb so high in a vertical line. He was five feet off the ground, meowing in a confused way as if he didn’t know how to get back down, but I didn’t dare help him for fear of the claws. And then he was down again, sprinting for the porch.

I watched him bounce from one end of the yard to the other: threading through the sunflower stalks, zigzagging among the tomato cages, popping out at the porch again and up onto the cinder block. Back again, whipping my back with that tail. Back up to the porch. Then he came down, and climbed the neighbors’ fence straight up, defying gravity. And then he meowed, helpless, because he didn’t know how to get down. Again, I hesitated to help him due to those curved white claws.

“Just go back the way you came,” I explained carefully.

As if in answer, he faced straight downward, and then gravity took over. I heard him scratching at every foothold on the other side of the gray pressure-treated wood. I saw him every few seconds, through the gaps between the slats. I saw him emerge through the broken place in the bottom of one fence slat; he bolted for the front of the house, and was gone.

I turned back to weed around that watermelon vine.

“A BLACK CAT!” shrieked a child’s voice.

I heard the familiar whirring of a rusted scooter. Jimmy’s boy conferred with one of his friends, loudly. The cat bounced back into the garden and hid under the lilac bush. Jimmy’s boy and the other child scooted after him in hot pursuit.

“We saw a BLACK CAT!”

“He’s around here somewhere. He’s not doing any harm.”

The other boy was one of the children who helped me go through my strawberries a month and a half ago. “Those strawberries were SO good,” he said, gesturing to the strawberry bed.

“We might have another crop in November. In the meanwhile, the tomatoes are almost ripe. Come see the pumpkin!”

The boys marveled at a pumpkin a little bigger than  a football.

“I grew that one by accident, out of a Jack-o-Lantern I put on the compost.”

Just then, Goretti made the mistake of emerging from under the bush. A moment later, Jimmy’s boy was holding him firmly to his chest, and Goretti did not look pleased.

“Oh, be very careful! He’ll scratch you! You could get an infection!”

They were already halfway around the house.

I continued picking at the crabgrass around that watermelon vine, worrying.

A moment later, the boys came back. They brought with them two teenage girls: one was Jimmy’s stepdaughter. The other was a stranger, and she was cuddling Goretti.

“I think this is my neighbor’s kitten!” said the girl. “He got out today.”

“That explains why he’s so much gentler than the usual stray cats,” I said.

The boys looked hungrily at the tall green spikes of my onion patch.

“I love onions!” hinted Jimmy’s boy’s little friend who had helped me polish off the strawberries.

“You can each take two home with you if you want to harvest them for me,” I said. “They should be about ready.”

While Jimmy’s boy and his friend did the work, the girls toured the garden, still snuggling the black cat.

“My father used to grow those great big goliath sunflowers!” said the girl excitedly, gesturing to the tallest plant.

“A mammoth gray stripe!” I said. “I got it from the Native seed bank. I’m going to save the seeds this year. They’re the best I’ve ever grown! I’m also growing this pumpkin from the Native seed bank, but that pumpkin is cheating. It’s just a jack-o-lantern that rotted on my compost and one of the seeds sprouted. I wish I had garlic. I want to plant some heirloom garlic to overwinter.”

“Garlic goes great around here,” said the girl with the cat. “My father planted it at his house in Weirton. He hasn’t been there in two years, but the garlic still grows because it reseeds itself. That’s the biggest rosemary bush I’ve ever seen!”

Jimmy’s boy and his friend dug out every onion they could find, and then went to play in Adrienne’s old sandbox, building a castle for the ants.

The girls and I chatted about garlic and rosemary and other garden plants as the cat curled itself luxuriously in her arms. She knew all about the plants that grow well in this part of the Ohio Valley. Cauliflower is the worst dud of all. Broccoli sometimes works. I said I usually grew corn, though the only stalks I had this year were volunteers from the compost and I didn’t even know if they’d be edible.

Finally, they all left.

I took my great big bundle of onions around the side of the house, where the man who brought water had hung his hose out on the other side of the fence, so that I could use it to water the plants any time I wanted.

I set the whole bunch in the kitchen– red, white and golden orbs, smooth as pearls, sharper and more fragrant than anything you can get at the market.

I wonder if the black cat will bring me luck.

Maybe he already has.