The Gray Cat

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On her knees beside her garden bed, Lisa crumbled soil in her fingers and covered tiny black poppy seeds with it. She imagined the shape of the first leaves that would break through the soil. What a wonder that anything so small could grow into large brilliant red-orange, paper-fragile blooms in a few weeks.

A bird's distress cry made her look up. She stood and walked closer to the sound. On the other side of the backyard fence beside a lilac bush, a gray cat crouched, watching a baby robin just old enough to be out of the nest. The robin was badly wounded and shrilling its pain, but the cat did not finish killing it. Lisa thought the cat was almost smiling as it watched the little bird suffer.

Hateful cat! Lisa picked up her garden spade, thinking to come up behind the cat and kill it with the spade. But as Lisa imagined bringing the spade down on the cat's head hard enough to kill it instantly and then having to hit the bird to end its suffering, she felt woozy. As she hesitated, life went out of the bird and there was silence.

Lisa stood leaning on the spade to think. The cat was a stray. Someone had dumped it here last fall when it was half-grown. No one adopted it, so she knew it had to feed itself on what it could catch. It was not wrong to kill to eat, but Lisa felt horror at the cruel way it watched the baby bird die.

Lisa put the spade and hoe away, decided to wait until evening to water, and went into the house. Her mother was not yet home from work, but her father was typing on the computer as Lisa entered the study. He glanced at his watch. "I'm glad you're home, Sweetheart. I didn't know where you were."

"I went straight out to plant my poppy seeds."

"Oh. How was school? Was the movie any good?"

Lisa had mentioned at breakfast the movie she was going to see in class. "It was about Harriet Tubman," she said glumly.

"You didn't like it? I thought you would."

"She was a slave."

"But she ran away. And she helped lots of others get away."

"I know. They called her Moses." Lisa knew her father was waiting for her to explain her bad feeling.

"Dad, how could people turn other people into machines to work for them? How could anybody buy a person like buying a car?"

Her father looked closely at Lisa's face, then got up from his desk chair and led her to the easy chair by the window and pulled her to his lap. "Lisa, it's hard to understand cruelty. Humans can't be good and kind without God's help. That's why we want to help everyone become Christian and receive the blessing of a loving heart."

Lisa's head began to spin. She'd asked her teacher if all the Christians were helping the slaves escape to freedom. The teacher had been embarrassed, but had admitted that most of the slaveholders were Christian.
Lisa's mother joined them in time to hear Lisa report this fact. "Honey, we're only human; we can't understand the plan God has for each of His creatures. Maybe what seems evil to us up close is really for a good purpose in the over-all plan."

Lisa looked at her, feeling worse than ever. That cat making a baby bird die slowly in pain couldn't be good. Not even if you were watching it from the sky. So much hurt and terror could never be made all right even if the bird was in Heaven now.

And it wasn't just the bird. What about Harriet Tubman and the other slaves? During the movie, Lisa had imagined she was Harriet Tubman, that she could feel what it was like to be owned by someone. This could never be all right!

Lisa began to cry, her brain whirling inside her until she was hysterical. "The world is mean! I hate it! It's ugly! God is ugly and mean! God made cats, didn't He? God made slave-holders, didn't He? God made them mean!"

Her parents looked shocked and hurt. Lisa ran to her room, buried her face in the pillow and cried until sleep overtook her. When she awoke, the daylight at her window was almost gone.

A tray with her supper on it was beside the bed. Lisa drank the milk and ate the canned pears, but didn't touch the rest.

She slipped out the back door, got a watering can, filled it at the outside spigot and began to water the row of poppy seeds. The back screen door slapped shut. Lisa saw Christine coming toward her and felt annoyed.

"What ya doin'?" Christine asked.

"What's it look like?"

"Did you plant something?"

"No, I'm just giving night crawlers their daily bath." That was a good one, Lisa thought. She felt superior.
When the can was empty, Lisa put it away, Christine at her heels. "Turn the yard light on," she ordered and Christine obeyed, pleased to be included. Lisa led the way to the side gate by the lilac bush, opened it and they went through. Lisa pointed out the baby robin there in the grass where it lay with its legs thrust into the air, braced by its short tail. Its head, wings, and chest had been eaten.

"Lisa!" Christine caught her breath and stared at the tiny legs.

"See that?" Lisa said, "that wild gray cat did it. The cat is the bird's god. The people's god is going to do that to you tonight!"

Christine, shaken, searched her sister's face a moment, then ran crying into the house. Lisa felt a hard satisfaction inside. Then a shock hit her with the force of the electric rabbit fence. She sat down by the lilac bush and stared at what was left of the helpless little bird. She could not think. Inside was a terrible strain, like trying to open a large jar of applesauce when the lid was vacuum-sealed. It gave way then, and she began to sob.

"Lisa," an old woman's voice said on the other side of the lilac. Lisa was startled. "I'm sorry, I've been sitting in my lawn chair here, but I don't suppose you saw me. I'm Mrs. Coop, c-o-o-p, as in chicken coop. Come on around the bush here and let me see you."

Lisa did not want to obey. Mrs. Coop had scolded her last fall for running across her yard. After that Lisa stayed out of her way. She must have heard what Lisa said to Christine. Well, all right then, she would go over and let the old woman scold her about being nasty to little kids. She wouldn't listen, though. And she wouldn't say she was sorry, either.

Mrs. Coop appeared to be a wide bluish mass in the light from her porch, which just reached across the grass to her. She raised a heavy arm to take hold of Lisa's hand, her own hand soft and almost squishy. She seemed very old and not strong at all.

"You're hurting inside."

Lisa was not steeled for this. Tears spilled down her cheeks again.

"What's hurting you, Lisa?"

Lisa took the tissue Mrs. Coop offered her. She tried to explain about the poppy seeds and the cat and Harriet Tubman and what her parents had said about God. Her throat was tight and her nose ran as freely as her eyes, so it was lucky that Mrs. Coop had a pocketful of tissues.

She stopped then, waiting for her sobs to quiet so she could breathe more easily.

"That's not all," Mrs. Coop said. "There's more, and the last part hurts the most."

"I did what the cat did. I hurt Christine on purpose just to be mean." The spinning began in her head again, moving off in wider and wider circles in the darkness. There was a prickling sensation in her lips and cheeks the way it feels when Novocain wears off after the dentist fills a cavity.

Mrs. Coop nodded in the dim light. "There actually is a reason for a cat's instinct not to kill its prey at once. If a mama cat takes a wounded bird or rodent to her kittens to play with, it helps them learn how to hunt. But it's still a mean thing to do to the wounded thing." Lisa hung her head, feeling rotten.

"You saw that meanness in the cat and meanness in the slave-holders-Christian or not-and meanness in yourself. And there is meanness in me." Mrs. Coop still held Lisa's hand, but now she was looking beyond her. "Does that make it all right because cruelty is everywhere?"

"No," Lisa said.

"No," Mrs. Coop agreed. "And it doesn't help me or you to pretend that bad is a part of good. But people play that game with themselves. What they see hurts their eyes. They put on shades so they won't see so well, and their eyes feel better."

"They feel better when they believe lies?"

"Who knows for sure what is a lie?"

"Mean is mean."

"Yes. See what you see. Go on seeing." Mrs. Coop let go of Lisa's hand and hauled herself out of the wooden slats of her lawn chair. She took a short step or two toward her porch.

Then she turned back to point toward Lisa's row of poppy seeds. "See those brilliant poppies too, when they bloom. And look." She pointed at a nearly full moon just rising over the trees at the far side of her yard.

"That doesn't make up for the hurt bird."

"We can't always keep bad things from happening. But we can choose not to add to the ugliness. Or if we do something mean, we can try to make it right again. Don't just look at the evil. See the kindness in people, too. Every day each one of us can add to the beauty and kindness." Mrs. Coop set herself in motion again, then paused to watch the golden moon clear the trees. "Today you planted poppies. And tomorrow you'll think of something to help Christine feel loved. That much more beauty and goodness in the world. Think about that!"

Lisa watched Mrs. Coop haul herself up the steps and disappear inside. She left the porch light on for Lisa to see her way home by.