The Mewling Cat

Haunted Encounters
Personal Stories of Departed Pets

THE MEWLING CAT

by Joan Upton Hall

     It’s been 13 years since I caused the kitten’s death, yet home from college for the holidays, I hear it again—those mewling cries from the chinaberry tree outside my upstairs bedroom window. I’d almost forgotten the way cold, winter nights bring back its misery. And those feeble cries pierce through the moaning wind that rattles the windows of our vintage house.
     Are my brothers in the next room deaf not to hear it?
     The cries whisk me back to the time I was seven years old.
     It was summer, and my older brothers and sister were sleeping late, but I had just finished breakfast with Mama and Daddy. I followed Daddy outside, and we bent down beside the box on the porch where Mama Cat was feeding her litter of week-old kittens.
     I was worried about the sickly one everybody else called “the runt.” I called him “Tiny Tim.” He’d never been as strong as the others, and while they grew by the day, he seemed to shrink.
“Hungry little rascals, aren’t they?”Daddy grinned at the tumble of chubby babies and a very proud mother.
     I knelt to look for Tim. He lay motionless in the corner of the box. I reached for him, but Daddy’s hand got there first and gently scooped up the feeble creature. Tim lifted a wobbly head and mewed, then laid his head back down on Daddy’s open palm.
     “I can’t believe he’s still alive,” Daddy said.
     “Oh, Tim! You’ve gotta eat.” I took the kitten and gently tried to show him a place to join the others, but he made no attempt and got shoved aside.
     “Don’t get so attached, honey,” Daddy said. “He can’t possibly make it.”
     “Yes, he will! He’s just sleepy.” I picked him up and cradled him under my chin, partly to keep my chin from quivering. His little body already felt cold, his nose was as dry as sandpaper, and he didn’t have the sweet clean scent of the other kittens.
     “I’m sorry.” Daddy ruffled my hair and headed for his workshop.
     Heading for the treehouse my brothers had built in the chinaberry tree, I made a plan. I’d take Tim up there and cuddle him until he felt better. Later when the other kittens were asleep and wouldn’t push him away, I’d try to get Mama Cat to coax Tim to nurse. If only I could get him warm and fed, he’d be well.
     But how could I climb and hold Tiny Tim? The first handhold up the tree was too high for me. Even standing on a wooden box, I had to lay Tim in the fork of the tree trunk until I could pull myself up there with both hands.
     I secured a foot hold just beside him so I could lift him onto the platform of the treehouse. I reached down to pick him up and my heart stopped. He was slipping into a crack so small I’d never even noticed it.
     I screamed, and both my parents came running. My hands wouldn’t fit into the opening to pull the kitten out. Daddy went after a pair of tongs, but by the time he got back Tim was too far down in the hollow to reach.
     Horrified and helpless, we watched the tiny scrap of gray fur sink lower and lower. Finally we could barely see him with a flashlight. He mewed once and then no more.
     I begged Daddy to cut the tree down, but he said that would probably kill Tim if he wasn’t already dead.
     “This is his grave now,” Mama said. “It’s as good as the ground.”
I knew they were right, but all I could do was whimper,“I didn’t mean to,” over and over.
     “We know that.” Daddy hugged me.
     Mama told Daddy, “Jim, Sister and the boys will never let her hear the end of this. Do we need to tell them?”
     “Mama’s right, Joan.” Daddy said. “This is our secret.”
     “But, but they’ll know Tim’s gone.”
     “Nobody expected him to live this long. We’ll just say he died.”
     Mama took me in the house and washed my face, but by then my stomach hurt so bad I had to go back to bed.
     I was grateful Sister and the boys wouldn’t know the awful thing I did. If only I didn’t have to admit it to myself—and wonder what it must be like in that hole. For a while, whenever it rained, I’d lay an old raincoat over the crack. Otherwise, I stayed away from the tree I’d always loved to climb before.
     Finally I became used to the idea—until I started waking up at night to Tim’s mewing.
     One night I was so sure I heard him, I hoped maybe he was crawling out and needed my help. I opened my window and tried to climb out on the closest limb, but it was too small to hold me up. After that, I got scared thinking if Tim did escape that tree, he wouldn’t be the sweet little kitten he’d once been. What would he be? And wouldn’t he be angry?
     Nobody else ever said anything about hearing the sound, and when I whispered the news to Mama and Daddy, they told me it was just a nightmare.
     On bitter cold nights he sounded most pitiful, and I was wide awake when I heard it. One freezing night the bare branches of the chinaberry clacked together like scolding tongues. And the drafty old house seemed to whisper, “Cat killer. Cat killer.”
     Shaking with sobs, I slid out from under the comforter and padded downstairs to Mama’s and Daddy’s bedroom. No time to turn on lights, I stumbled through the brittle-cold darkness on linoleum that felt like ice to my bare feet.
     “What...?” Mama lifted her head from her pillow in the dark and drew me under the covers against her warm body. “Why, you’re shivering like a leaf!”
     I didn’t tell her the shivering started way before the cold struck me.
     “Nightmare?” Daddy mumbled from the other side of the bed.
     “It’s Tiny Tim again...and he’s so cold...and lonesome.”
     Mama hugged me tighter. “Oh, honey, it’s only the wind. Hear the way it whistles around the corners?”
     “No! I know what Tim sounds like...and...well, I don’t hear it now, but it was in the chinaberry tree just like before.”
     Daddy raised himself on one elbow and reached across Mama to pat my back. “Joan, Joan, think what you’re saying. It’s been months since it happened. Even a healthy kitten couldn’t have lived that long without food and water. Tim was dying when he fell in.”
     “Could, could he be a...ghost?”
     Mama and Daddy both assured me there was no such thing, and I knew they never lied to me, but still...

As I grew up I never heard the mewling sounds when the weather was nice even with my window open, and the occurrences no longer sent me into a panic. Going off to college has given me confidence in logic. But why is the sound coming back to haunt me again?
     It’s sleeting now, and ice pellets tap on the window panes like cat claws. I fight off the urge to run downstairs to Mama’s and Daddy’s room. Instead I bundle my thick, terrycloth robe around me, step into my fuzzy house shoes, and go down to the kitchen for a glass of warm milk.
     At the foot of the stairs, I hear the back door click shut. A whif of outside air moves my hair. Silence—but I can feel a presence.
     Rooted to the spot, I croak, “Who’s there?”
     My brother Ernest calls from the kitchen, “It’s just me,” and switches on the light.
Weak-kneed with relief, I join him, trying my best to act natural. “Care to join me for some warm milk? You must be having trouble sleeping too.”
     He yawns and stretches. “Not me. All I need is to get back in bed and hope the sheets are still warm. B-r-r, I wish the folks would get central heating.”
     “Don’t we all, but if you’re sleeping so soundly, why are you up and going outside?”“Just had to have a look.” He started back toward his room. “Could have sworn I heard a kitten crying out there. Crazy, huh?”

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30 Wildwood Drive #21; Georgetown, TX 78633

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