Still In The Garden

“STILL IN THE GARDEN”

By Noel Laflin

3-03-02

          I was the second person to inherit the old cat.

         My call to Ruby, one warm October day, was meant to be one of pleasantries as well as an offer of assistance with her upcoming relocation.  Ruby was finally giving up the old house in Long Beach and determined that it was time to move into a retirement community.  My father had done much of the legwork, by way of careful research, and recommended Bixby Towers as his choice, if it were he that sought such a place.  Ruby had been relying on the judgment of both my mother and father for more than twenty years.  She agreed with his choice and arrangements were made.  An apartment in the Towers was selected and the old house Ruby had inherited from her sister, Opal, was put on the market and sold very quickly.  Ruby may have been old and operating off of one feeble lung only, but she was fast on the move with her packing, sorting, tossing and giving away of things.  When I happened to call, it seems that one of the things she was in desperate need of giving away was Targa, Opal’s old cat.  The cat had come with the home, after the sister’s passing.

           “I just don’t know what I am going to do with Targa,”
Ruby gasped.  Sixty years of cigarettes and one lung removal later, on top of severe emphysema, lent a wheeze  to every sentence she spoke.  “They won’t let me take Targa to the new place,” she cried.  “There is a ‘no pet’ rule,” she panted, “although I hear fish are allowed.  Just not big ones, I suppose,” she reasoned, laboring for air. I am not sure what got into me at that moment, but as I paused to let her catch her breath, I thought, 'why not?'

    “Ruby, I’ll take Targa for you.  I will give her a good home in the garden.  You know how pleasant it is there; she can nap in  the warm sun to her heart’s content.  Zane won’t mind, I’m sure.”  The youngster, Zane, my gray tomcat was always on the prowl anyway and probably wouldn’t even notice the old, brown, long haired feline that would soon share his space. At least, I hoped        he wouldn’t mind. Zane would be three on Halloween.  Targa’s  age was uncertain.  She was at least twelve years old, most likely older.  She was in her golden cat years, that was for sure.

Ruby began to cry and wheeze simultaneously. “Oh, that would be so wonderful,” she sniffed.  “Targa is all I have left of Opal, the last of my family, I guess.  Thank you.” 

This former neighbor and friend of two decades had literally watched me grow from boy to teen to adult and had been most kind to me during all of that time.  She still referred to me as her ‘gardener’, as I had kept her lawns trimmed, back in the old neighborhood in Anaheim, for ten years or more.  She had always paid me most handsomely.  She never forgot a birthday or graduation of any sort either.

But over the years, as she battled alcoholism, loneliness, loss of husbands and health, as well as the last of her kin, she somehow became a member of our family. We, in return, viewed Ruby like any eccentric aunt or older cousin.  She was family, short and sweet, which pretty much-described Ruby’s physical description, too.  Well, she was at least short.  Once she beat the bottle, she also became sweet. 

She no longer showed up on New Year’s Eve, for example, wearing nothing more than a raincoat, as she did during one memorable changing of the year celebration.

“I’m naked as a jaybird,” she slurred, flashing my mother in the kitchen. She had also forgotten to put in her teeth.  Or perhaps she had left them out intentionally as the new set of dentures were not fitting as well as the old ones that her dog, Fluffy, had gotten hold of one Saturday afternoon and chewed into unrecognizable pieces. Despite all this, mom somehow bundled her up before she had a chance to scare the rest of the guests and got her back home, next door, and into bed.

      In pre-sober days she was liable to stumble over to our house at any given time, drunk as a skunk, railing on about one injustice or another.  Or, perhaps she would tell us for the two-hundredth time how she had met one of the husbands (Frank, as I recall) and remind us of what a looker she was back in the bad old days of Chicago.  And a looker, she was.  I have a small black and white photo of her standing in a doorway, somewhere in Chicago, most likely, taken during the late thirties or early forties, and looking quite stunning.

         But, as the years went on and she lost her youth, as well as husbands, that little woman found solace only in her highballs. Ruby could go through a fifth of bourbon every night.  My dad and I knew, as we carried her trash out to the curb each week and heard the clinking of bottles rattling about in the dinged up metal trashcans.  But come early the next morning, there was Ruby, made up and dressed quite eloquently, driving off to her secretarial job, looking none the worse for wear.  I really don’t know how she did it. 

Over time, the bottom fell out, however, and Ruby was hospitalized after a bad seizure.  It was my dad who found her and got help.  She went through terrible withdrawals while bedridden, seeing snakes and all.  She eventually emerged from the ordeal, sober.  She remained that way for the rest of her days.  Again, I don’t really know how she did that as rapidly and as gracefully as she did.  She was one resilient woman, all four foot, eleven inches of her.

Many of those old remembrances, along with dozens of others, fast-forwarded themselves through my head as I drove home with Targa.  It was late October.  Ruby would be moving into her new apartment the first week in November    She had said her goodbyes to the cat, cried one last time and then sent me packing with at least fifty cans of cat food.

       It was while I was unloading all of the cat food that I lost Targa.  The drive back to my place had been uneventful.  I had also gotten the cat into the house without trouble.  But somewhere along the way, apparently, I left the front door open, while going back for more food still in the truck and in so doing forgot about the cat.  By the time I figured it out, she was not to be found.  Perhaps she had made a dash for daylight.  Damn, what was I going to tell Ruby?

I searched the place high and low, checked the garage, as well as both back and front yard.  Still no cat.  If Ruby called, I decided that I would just have to lie and tell her that all was well, that the cat was in the garden, doing just fine, resting peacefully.  I would stall for time, hoping I would find her.  I even combed the neighborhood by flashlight that night, to no avail.  I went to bed dreading the worst. 

The next morning, October thirty-first, I stumbled out of bed and headed for the bathroom.  I sleepily reached into the shower and turned on the water, full blast, warming it up.  

“YEOWWWWW,” screamed, Targa, water hitting her dead on.  It was one pissed and startled cat, which went flying out of the shower, leaping over my head and darting into the darkness of the bedroom.

“Happy Halloween, to you too, you little hairball!  Great trick!” I yelled, feeling my heart wanting to tear out of my chest. “Jesus, you scared me, cat!”

       I’d checked everywhere but the shower, the night before, apparently.   After pulling one slightly wet feline out from under the bed, I let her out into the garden, where she eventually calmed down and dried off.  Now I could make the call to Ruby and tell her just how well Targa had adjusted, without lying, too much.  She was still in the garden, after all, when I did make that call later in the day. 

“Yes, she’s doing fine, Ruby, exploring the garden, doing fine in the garden.” 

Within time, this old cat and I grew on one another.  Even Zane gave the old lady the dignity she deserved.  Maybe it was the sharing of canned food that won him over.  Up until then he’d only experienced the dry stuff.  Whatever it was, Targa became a fixture in the garden, sitting atop a Koi pond, dreamily watching the fish swim round and round, or finding a warm patch of sun up on the fence and sleeping the day away.

At every family gathering Ruby would ask the inevitable: “And how’s Targa?”

To which I always answered: “Fine, Ruby, just fine.  Targa’s still in the garden.  Sleeping peacefully, no doubt, as we speak. I always returned from the gatherings with more cans of cat food.

The next two years were rough on both Ruby and her former cat.  Both were growing a little weaker each day, slowing down considerably.  Even Ruby’s asking about the cat began to slacken off, as her own health deteriorated.  But my ready answer to her, when now occasionally asked, was pretty much the same each time: “Targa’s fine, Ruby, still in the garden, resting easy.”  Ruby would be satisfied and more cat food would find its way to my house eventually.

So it happened one early September morning, nearly two years after acquiring Targa that I was brought out of a sound sleep, by the sound of a strange gasp or cry.  To this day, it is hard to explain the noise I heard, but it was similar to a muffled, “Oomph!” The night had been warm and the sliding door to my bedroom was wide open.  I heard that expulsion of air quite distinctly, over the splash of water falling in the ponds, coming from the garden. 

Groggily I went out to investigate, flashlight in hand.  The scanning beam caught Targa, lying on the ground, gasping for breath.  It appeared that she had jumped from the top of the old wooden fence to the garden floor, as was her custom, and had the wind knocked out of her old frail body, upon the hard fall.  I bent down to stroke her and noticed that she was not responding to my touch.  I grew concerned and gently lifted the old gal and set her on my lap.  She wheezed, laboring for breath. It was not unlike the sound Ruby frequently made when exhausted by words or extended movement.  The similarities were uncanny. 

As I stroked her head, scratched behind the ears and gently tried to reassure Targa that all would be well, she suddenly breathed her last and went limp across my knee.  The cat was dead.  This last jump and consequent hard landing had done in her old heart, I guess.  Her bony body was now quite still as I continued to scratch behind the ears, weeping as I spoke to her. Warm tears baptized the soft pelt.

It was four in the morning. The air was still, warm and dark. A thirty-six year old man sat cross-legged in his garden, cradling a dead cat and carrying on like a heart-broken child.  He remained in that position until the first rays of light broke over the horizon.  As night gave way to day, he stiffly rose and carried his light burden into the house.  Moments later he emerged, now wearing tennis shoes and an old sweat shirt while carefully cradling something loosely wrapped in an old faded sheet.  He set his parcel down and located a shove.  He began to dig a hole, not far from where he’d sat before.  The hole grew deeper, as dirt and rocks were separated and piled beside it.  Eventually satisfied with its depth, he picked up the shrouded small bundle and gently placed it at the bottom of the hole he’d dug.  After a last touch to the sheet, and a few whispered words, he began to slowly refill the hole with dirt.  A large stone was found and placed atop the packed down earth.  Smaller rocks were placed around the rough, gray centerpiece, in tribute.  Rose petals were sprinkled about.   Finished, the man slowly went into the house and called in sick to work.  He had not felt this tired or this sad in quite some time.  He just needed the day alone.  The man unplugged the phone, shut off his pager, and then crawled back into the rumpled bed he’d jumped out of some hours earlier and cried himself to sleep.  “All this, over a cat,” he thought, drifting off. “ Jesus.” 

Fourteen months later Ruby had a fall of her own and died the next day. She was eighty years old.  My father and mother made all of the arrangements for her burial and estate settlement, as were expected of them.  

I had never told Ruby about Targa’s  passing.  Interestingly enough, she never asked how the cat was doing during all that time. I was prepared but never had to use the standby reassurance line of mine.  Maybe, Ruby just knew instinctively that Targa was still, in the garden.

             

          

     

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