farm life

The skinny cat haunts me. I leave a can of tuna fish for my new kitten- the one that adopted us- came calling at night in hunger till I relented and left her some milk. The skinny cat is older. She is sleek and calculating. Appearing on the table trying to get at some black beans in a jar. Her sleekness is not fashionable, it does not wear well on her, hip bones jutting.  The grey of her coat with faint stripes and the green of her eyes would otherwise be appealing if she did not seem as though she would eat your face off if you turned away for a second too long. She is at my car door when I leave, sniffing at the rank milk I spilled in the backseat a month ago. Her hardness hardens me, and I act as though I’ll kick her, certain if I play nice she will jump into my arms and eat my baby’s nose.

My kitten is both weary of and eager for my touch. Is it her smallness? What allows me to love her? Her mother and litter mates abandoned her weeks ago. I have not seen another cat in the area all season. I wondered at her existence, where did she come from? Where had her mother come from to land under the old granary and give birth to a multitude of little beings?

At the ole lady’s house next door I discover she has a small nest of pink bodied kittens, abandoned by their mother. Did their mother starve before returning? Did she know she could not nurse them- so left them all rather than wither with them? Was she a heartless little thing, leaving them to their own without a second thought?

My neighbor took to feeding them, even though she says she had about twenty feral cats hanging around last month. Is my kitten’s family right next door? Living in the brush behind the yellow house? Did she stop too soon at my trailer, as she followed her family across the fields and corrals?

The starving cat with green eyes haunts me. My willingness to kick her starving stomach haunts me. She disappeared into the sage and rabbit brush. What did I have to fear from her? What would she have taken that I could not spare? If I dole out a sliver of compassion for her will it consume me, ruin me, here in a country with lots of wild things fighting to survive. Why do I cater to a kitten so openly, yet so strongly defend against its starving brethren? At some point my city girl silliness has to adjust to the realities. Dinner sizzles in the skillet, it is goat- it is Sally- whose daughter Plank has an eternal place in our herd despite her runtiness and inability to birth. I can not stomach butchering her after orphaning her last spring.

The grandkids from next door descend for three days. We knew their coming by an old mattress that’d been drug from a trash heap into the barn on top of our things. The kids needed it for god only knows what. They came around milking time to check on a bucket of baby birds they left in the barn. The swallows’ nest fell in front of them- scattering three young birds- but don’t worry they know how to flutter.

The mattress was a landing pad for the kids to throw the birds up so the birds could learn to fly. There were only two birds though, the third had not been found and still was under the debris somewhere. I encourage them to put the nest up high in a bowl with the babies, hoping against hope the mom might still take them.

The weekend passes with the children climbing to the top of the hay stack- about 20 feet high- an appropriate altitude for flight lessons. The babies tossed in the air fluttering down into the goat pen where 194 hooves wait to stomp them. Another child scaled the fence to retrieve the babies- a reasonable excuse to enter the forbidden goat pen. The terrorized birds were alive for the second day.

My days filled with the fear my dog would snap at the squeals of delight and eat one of the grand children- slinging their body parts across the yard with the deer skulls, hides, and dead rock chuck.

The little boy greeted me on the last day with a present- a wriggling live trout about 6 inches long- for my kitten to snack on. The kitten heard them coming and did not show herself. The kids and crowds pulled out that night- quiet and a dead fish on the kitten’s dish all that were left behind.