Born to Be Tame

I celebrate his birthday on the 30th of August, although he was probably born about a month before that.  Because, in a very real way, it was the 30th of August, 2006, that his life began.

That was the day he met me.

At that time, I was living in the group home that was my place of residence for much of the past decade.  As one of the highest-functioning residents in the facility, I had been given a private room in one of the Independent Living houses.  This house had a kitchen, so I usually prepared my own meals, but occasionally I would go over to the main kitchen for a snack or dessert.  That evening, the cook had prepared bread pudding; I was given several pieces, wrapped in a napkin, to take back to my room with me.

As I crossed the driveway separating the Independent Living houses from the rest of the facility, a flicker of motion caught my eye.  Out from under the dumpster at the end of the driveway scampered a pair of scraggly kittens.  They raced directly to me, rubbing up against my legs with a chorus of little mews.  Charmed, I stopped to pet them for a few minutes, then continued on my way home to enjoy my bread pudding.

The next evening, when I crossed the driveway on my way home after visiting a friend, only one kitten ran out from the shadows to greet me.  Nuzzling against my legs as if for dear life, he was obviously sickly, and I knew I couldn't leave him to his fate.  Scooping him up, I carried him back to my friend's room.  The kitten snuggled in my arms and purred faintly as we tried to decide what to do with him.  Since we weren't allowed to have pets in the group home, the best option seemed to be for me to take him home for the night, then call the Humane Society to pick him up in the morning.

He was a tiny thing - just the right size to fit in the palm of my hand.  I decided to call him Handful.  Handy, for short.

Upon closer inspection indoors, Handy turned out to be even sicklier than I had known him to be at first glance.  He was painfully scrawny, he had little appetite for the milk I procured from the kitchen to give him, and, worst of all, his eyes oozed with pus.  I sat down on my bed and held him, stroking him and cooing to him softly.  Although I gave him a chance to wander around a bit, explore this unfamiliar territory under my supervision, he wasn't particularly interested; after a bit of perfunctory poking about, he came back to snuggle up against me.  I cuddled him, running my fingers over his scruffy, matted fur.  Drifting off to sleep, he lay so still at times that I gently poked him awake just to be sure he was breathing.

I kissed the top of his head, stroked his tissue-thin ears, turned him over to caress his belly, and rubbed his paw between my fingers.  Despite his poor health, he was not too feeble to put up a protest when he didn't care for something, as I discovered when I made an empty box into a cozy bed for him and left him alone in it, only to watch him climb right back out to snuggle up to me again.  My physical ministrations, however, he received without a struggle.  His trust in me, his baby faith, was greater than the instinct of the wildborn animal to resist any form of constraint or external control.  I was very aware suddenly how little he was, and how helpless, and how easy it would be to hurt him badly if I wished.  There were people in this place who might choose to hurt him, I knew.  I was grateful that he had come to me.

When the pus that oozed from his eyes hardened into a dry, crusty scab, I held his head gently in my hand and peeled it away.  So much fresh pus flowed out from behind the crust that for a moment I feared I had been too rough and crushed his eyeball.  Finally, however, the last of the pus was wiped away, and I could see his eyes, a little pair of lackluster pearls.  For all their dullness, though, his eyes, and his whole face, shone when he gazed upon me with the pure light of complete and overwhelming adoration.

If I had still cherished any illusion that I would be calling the Humane Society in the morning, it vanished in that moment.  Handy was mine.  Not because of any great virtue on my part, or anything I had to offer, but because he had given himself to me.

I knew it wasn't going to be easy.  I would have to find some way to get him to the vet - soon.  I would have to get some proper food for him, fix him up with a litter box.  And it was easy to keep him concealed in my room for now, but he would grow quickly.  For now, his little mew was hardly more than a squeak.  When I had to leave the room, I could keep him safely contained in a large cardboard box with a laundry hamper turned upside-down over the top.  Soon, however, he would need more space than even the run of my bedroom would allow, and it would become impossible to keep him a secret.

I had tried finding a room to rent before.  It hadn't gone well.  Homeowners with an extra room always wanted to know my source of income.  When I told them I had a disability and lived on a government stipend, they always asked for details.  Legally, of course, I didn't have to tell them anything, but that would hardly have made me more appealing as a prospective tenant.  Instead, I was honest: clinical depression.  I might as well have told them that I was prone to uncontrolled homicidal rages.  Once the word "depression" passed my lips, the conversation was over.  Friendly openness became guarded reserve, every single time.  The prospect of finding someone willing to rent a room to a depressive with a cat was daunting, to say the least.  But I knew I would do what I had to, to keep Handy.  I didn't want to lie outright, but I could claim that I had a disorder of the nervous system.  If all else failed, maybe I could move in with my father, an emotionally abusive man whom I had repeatedly tried to put out of my life.  For my own part, I would rather have had my teeth pulled without anesthesia than live under his roof ever again, but if it was the only way I could manage to keep Handy, I would do it.

I spent as much time with Handy as I could.  Whenever I had to leave the room, I put him in his box, but as soon as I returned, he leapt up and began nudging his head against the laundry basket, mewing for my attention.  When I was in the room, we were in constant contact.  Handy's favorite place in the world was the juncture of my shoulder and neck.  When I slept, he slept too, his little body warm against my chin.  When I curled up in bed to read, he curled up on my chest to be stroked with one hand as I held the book with the other.  When I used my computer, I draped a towel over my shoulder to protect my clothes from his little "accidents," then let him nuzzle into my neck to his heart's content, his stiff little brush of a tail hanging down over my breast.  Sometimes we listened to music together, and there were songs I came to think of as "ours": "Two of Us," by the Beatles, and, most notably, "Because You Love Me" by Jo Dee Messina.  Often I would focus on him completely, savoring his warmth, his purr, the immensity of love and trust I could feel in that tiny, delicate body.

My friend came over once, and I let her hold him.  Although she was gentle and affectionate, Handy was unimpressed: like any baby, he wanted his own mommy, and he wiggled and squirmed in her arms until she handed him back to me.  For reasons I could not fathom, that orphaned kitten had made me the center of his world, and even as I was elevated in his eyes, I felt myself humbled.  He hadn't run out to greet everyone who crossed the driveway between the buildings.  Somehow, he had by his own criteria judged me to be Worthy.  Well, then, I was determined that Worthy I would be.

Handy seemed to grow healthier as the days passed, though I never saw him eat much.  For a while I offered him soy milk, which is what I happened to have in the kitchen; he didn't much like it, the poor little carnivore, so I got a carton of cow's milk from the main kitchen, which he seemed to like better, especially after I began warming it slightly in the microwave before giving it to him.  It was hard to tell, he was so little and scrawny, but I thought maybe he was growing just a tiny bit.  After the first couple of days, the infection in his eyes seemed to be clearing up; although they were still a bit filmy, his eyes were never so thick with pus that I had to peel the crust off.  Although I knew he would still have to be taken to the vet, it no longer seemed a matter of greatest urgency, particularly in the light of the practical obstacles (money and transportation) that stood in the way.  I made some telephone calls, found a low-cost veterinary clinic close by, and began to plan how I would get him there.  I made some more telephone calls, looking for a room to rent, but without any luck.  At least my father was willing to take us in, despite his lack of enthusiasm for my new companion.  Predictably, he cited that awful old verse by Ogden Nash: "The trouble with a kitten is / THAT / Eventually it becomes a / CAT."

I would have given anything to see Handy become a cat.

On the evening of September 7th, I wasn't in a very maternal mood.  After having hardly stepped out of my room for a week, I was eager for a change of scene.  When a friend the next city over invited me to visit, I very much wanted to go.  I couldn't leave Handy alone, though.  I decided to hide him in my backpack and take him onto the bus with me.  It was a pleasant visit, and Handy seemed unusually active and interested in his surroundings.  When my friend went into the grocery store and I waited outside, Handy seemed to want to leap down from my lap and explore.  I restrained him easily with a finger or two, but inwardly I rejoiced to see him looking so healthy and alert.  On the ride home, however, the bus driver noticed the little head poking out of my backpack and put us off the bus, too far from home for me to walk back.  An employee of the bus line finally gave me permission to take the bus home, but I was so tense and frustrated by then that I accidentally got on the bus going the wrong way.  None of this was Handy's fault, of course, but by the time I got home, I wasn't feeling very patient and nurturing.  I decided I needed a little time for myself, and that night I put Handy in his box to sleep, instead of letting him curl up on my shoulder.  It was a decision I will regret for the rest of my life.

The first thing I did when I woke the next morning was to reach into Handy's box.  I knew immediately that something was wrong.  As I lifted him up, his body was entirely limp.  The faintest of mews was the only reassurance I had that he was still with me.  Anguished, uncaring now if anyone happened to see I had a kitten in the house, I cradled him to my chest as I raced to the telephone to call my friend who lived on the other side, in the main part of the group home facility.  All I could do was moan, "Handy. . . ."  She came over right away.

We considered taking Handy on the bus again, to go to the vet, but we knew he wouldn't last that long.  We begged one of my housemates, who owned a car, to give us a ride, but she was preoccupied with matters of her own.  There seemed to be no help for my kitten, none at all.  The miracle that had slipped so unexpectedly into my life was being taken from me.  As we sought a solution, I continued to process the horror of this little creature I had come to love so deeply, lying so limp and still.  Every few minutes I would prod at him gently, needing to hear his weak, almost inaudible, mew.

"Truth," my friend said finally, "that kitten is holding on for you."  I knew it was true.  His love for me was the only thing still holding body and soul together.  He could feel the tension in my hands, my anguish and longing, and with everything he had, he was trying to make it right for me again.  Selfishly I wanted to hold him closer, squeeze him harder, keep him fighting, make him stay with me.  But truly I knew that he was beyond help.  I could let him take his final breath sensing that he had displeased me, or I could let him go in peace.

I carried him back to my room and sat down with him on the bed where we had spent a week sleeping and nuzzling and playing and cuddling, and spoke to him gently as I stroked him from head to tail.  "I know you can't stay with me, baby," I told him.  "I wish you could.  I wish we could be together forever.  But we can't.  Not now."

I told him he was going to a place where he would be healthy and strong.  "There'll be some new friends for you there," I told him.  "They'll smell me on you, and love you right away. . . ."  I told him about Robitaille, my first dog, with whom I had overcome my fear of animals.  I told him about Houdini, with whom I had shared, for a few brief months, a degree of affection and affinity that every dog-lover dreams of knowing, but few will ever experience.  I spoke of my mother's partner's cat, Buster, a friendly fellow right up until the end of his seventeen-year lifespan, and of the neighbor's sweet dog Hyena, who had been hit by a car the year before.  "And one day, baby, I'll see you again," I promised him.  "Not for a long time.  But someday. . . . I love you, Handy.  It's okay for you to go now, to be at peace."

I continued stroking my kitten as I reached over to the bedside table and picked up my favorite book, Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  I turned to the twenty-first chapter and began to read out loud.

It was then that the fox appeared.

"Hello," said the fox.

"Hello," the little prince replied politely.  "What are you?  You're very pretty. . . ."

"I am a fox," said the fox.

"Come play with me," the little prince invited him.  "I'm so sad. . . ."

"I can't play with you," said the fox.  "I am not tame."

"Oh! I'm sorry," said the little prince.  But, after some thought, he added, "What does 'tame' mean?"

"It's something too often forgotten," said the fox.  "To tame means - to form bonds. . . ."

"Form bonds?"

"Of course," said the fox.  "Right now, you're nothing more to me than a little boy just like a thousand other little boys.  And I don't need you.  You don't need me either.  To you, I'm just a fox like a thousand other foxes.  But, if you tame me, we will need each other.  You will be one-of-a-kind for me.  I will be one-of-a-kind for you. . . ."

The fox continued: "My life is dull.  I hunt chickens, men hunt me.  The chickens are all alike, and the men are all alike.  Naturally, I'm a little bored.  But if you tame me, it will be like the sun shining into my life.  I will know a sound of footsteps different from all the others.  The others will send me hiding underground.  Yours will call me out from my den, like music.  And look!  Do you see that wheat-field, there?  I don't eat bread.  Wheat is useless to me.  The field of wheat means nothing to me.  And that's sad!  But you have golden hair.  What a wonderful thing it will be, when you have tamed me!  The wheat, which is gold, will remind me of you.  And I shall love the sound of the wind blowing through the wheat. . . ."

The fox fell silent and watched the little prince for a long time.  "Please . . . tame me!" he said.

"I wish I could," said the little prince, "but I don't have much time.  I'm trying to find friends - and there are so many things I want to understand."

"You only truly understand the things you tame," said the fox.  "If you want a friend, tame me!"

"How do I do it?" said the little prince.

"You must be very patient," the fox replied.  "First of all you must sit down in the grass, just so, not too close to me.  I'll watch you out of the corner of my eye, but you don't say anything.  Language is the source of misunderstandings.  But every day, you can sit a little bit closer. . . . It's better if you come every day at the same time.  If you come, for example, at four in the afternoon, at three o'clock I will start to feel happy.  As the hour goes by, the happier and happier I'll be.  When four o'clock finally comes, I will be bursting at the seams with anticipation!  But if you come just any time, my heart will never know when to prepare itself. . . . Ritual is important."

So the little prince tamed the fox.  And when the time came for him to leave . . . "Oh!" said the fox.  "I'm going to cry."

"It's your fault," said the little prince.  "I didn't wish you any harm, but you wanted me to tame you. . . ."

"Of course," said the fox.

"But you're going to cry!" said the little prince.

"Of course," said the fox.

"Then you're no better off at all for it!"

"I'm better off," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat."

When I finished the chapter and set the book back down on the nightstand, I lifted Handy off my lap.  His body was as stiff now as it had been limp when I began.  My voice and my touch had soothed him to sleep for the last time.

I will always be grateful to my friend for how wonderful she was that sad day.  She took care of the arrangements that needed to be made to have Handy's body collected by the Humane Society for disposal.  While she was on the telephone, I sat alone in my bedroom with the dead kitten in my arms, listening to "Because You Love Me" on repeat.  I don't remember how long it was before my friend came back.  She told me it was time to let go, and I wrapped the body in my pillowcase and left it on my bed.  I followed her out to the living room, and she sat on the couch, and I lay with my head in her lap and cried.

It might have been five minutes, or it might have been an hour before the man from the Humane Society rang the doorbell.  My heart heavy, I returned to my bedroom to bring out the tiny white bundle that had been my dear companion.  As I opened the door, I found myself hoping irrationally that it was all a mistake, that the pillowcase would be lying crumpled on the bed and Handy would poke his head out of my blankets and scold me with his squeaky little mews for my long absence - as if there were anything in the world I could have confused with rigor mortis.  Of course, what I found inside the room was exactly what I had known I would find: the improvised shroud folded lovingly around the little body, unequivocally silent and still.

"His name was Handy," I told the man as I handed him the bundle.  He took it gently, with the dignity due a living creature that had been cherished and loved, and promised to keep the body wrapped in its pillowcase.  My friend held me as the man drove away.  I couldn't let myself think too hard about where they were going.

For the rest of the day, I saw him every time I closed my eyes: more vivid than life on the backs of my eyelids, every detail.  That evening, and into the night, I kept hearing little sounds in the yard, like the cry of a kitten.  Handy?  No.  No.  Handy was dead.

The days passed. I threw away the cardboard box where Handy spent his last night of life, but I kept the little bowl from which he had lapped milk. (It really wasn't mine to keep, it belonged to the group home kitchen, but I figured they could do without it more easily than I could.) I told my father Handy had died, and the first words out of his mouth were, "Well, that solves your housing problem, then." The friend I had taken Handy on the bus to visit wasn't much better. "That's too bad," she said, "but you should hear what happened to me," as she launched into yet another account of a massive, violent fight with her husband, something that happened every few days on a regular basis. It wasn't long before I realized in horror that I couldn't see Handy in my mind anymore. Not only did I not see him big as life with every blink, I couldn't even remember his exact coloring. In the week he had lived with me, I hadn't had any opportunity to get a picture of him.

Almost as bad as the grief was my guilt.  Had his death been my fault?  If I had let him sleep on my shoulder that last night . . . if I had found a way to get him to the vet sooner . . . if I had handed him over to the Humane Society in the first place, instead of trying to keep him for myself . . . Was I wrong to have given him soy milk?  Was he too weak to have spent several hours out of the house around strangers?  Was I wrong to have taken him in at all, instead of leaving him there by the dumpster where he might have been adopted by one of his own kind?  "You are responsible for everything you have tamed," the fox tells the little prince as they part ways.  Had I failed in my responsibility to this sweet, affectionate kitten who had placed his life and well-being entirely in my hands?

It was several weeks after his death that Handy came back to visit me one last time.  I was lying on my bed, the bed where I had slept with Handy on my shoulder, and thinking about how much he had loved me, and how badly I had let him down.  Then, nothing changed, really, but I felt Handy's presence in the room.  Whether it was a spirit or a memory-trace or something that bubbled up from my subconscious, I'll never know in this lifetime, but it was very real to me.  In my heart I knew the words that he would say to me, if he could speak.  My own lips gave them voice, as the tears fell softly down my cheek.

I was alone.  I had nothing.  I was surviving from day to day as best I could.  Some cats are happy like that, living by their teeth and claws and wits.  Not me.  The only goodness I had ever known was the gentle roughness of my mother's tongue, her large sleek warmth and the fluttering little warmths of my littermates' bodies against mine as we nudged ourselves into her to nurse.  Everything else was pain: the scorching heat of day under the metal dumpster where we made our home, the gnawing ache in my belly that began the day my mother didn't come back, the fear I felt at loud noises and sudden movements in my vicinity.  I was so little and helpless, you see.  And then I saw you.  And you picked me up and held me like I was something that mattered.  You took me home.

Because of you . . . I was a pet.  I had a name.  I belonged to someone.  There was a hand to peel the crusted pus carefully away from my eyes, and a face to look up into that would look back on me with love.  For one week . . . I was somebody's pet.  I had a shoulder I could curl up and sleep on, warm and safe, without fear.  I had the space under your chin, just the right size for me, where I could nuzzle up and be surrounded by you all over.  Because I loved you, you know.  For one week, I had everything I wanted: a home, a name, someone to care for me.  I wouldn't have traded that one week with you for a dozen years of life under the dumpster.  All I wanted was someone to tame me.  You were the realization of my fondest hopes.  You tamed me.  And when I died, it was in your arms.  Not alone in the dust, where the flickering out of the only light I had would matter only to the hungry scavengers biding their time.  I lay on your lap, so small and fragile, and let your voice carry me beyond my sufferings.  And when it was over, you wrapped me in a shroud and made sure I was treated with dignity, even in death.

I was a pet.  I had a name.  I belonged to someone - to you.  You loved me as best you could, and that was enough for me - more than enough - it was everything.

It was four years ago that he lived and died: Handful, my tame little prince.  I haven't stopped wondering what sort of cat he would have grown up to be.  And although time has long since stolen away nearly all my recollection of his physical features, I still can see his spirit plainly: scampering from the dark into the light, running towards me, unafraid to love, unashamed to need, unhesitant and beautiful in giving himself away.  I can hear his soft little mews floating to my ears over the night, their meaning unmistakably clear.

"Please . . . tame me!"