Status Update: Serena Hangs Tough

It's hard to tell whether my grandmother cat Serena is shaking off the effects of poison or just dying hard, but she's still hanging in there. She knows what's going on. 

Her daughter Pastel died. There were ups and downs, but mostly downs, for a few days before Pastel wanted to go out and lie in the sun in the Late January Thaw That Turned Into the Early February Thaw. Then Pastel wanted to walk down to the branch creek for water. She had crossed the road, moving slowly and taking it easily, and then--you could tell by the way her eyes had dilated, looking up into the sun--everything went black. I found her minutes after she died and wasn't sure whether she might wake up from a healing coma, so I brought her home, but she was gone. 

Serena and Silver observed Pastel. Silver and Drudge and the visiting nuisance I call Trumpkin kept a vigil over her body that night. Then the cats reached a mutual decision that since I have one warm room and Trumpkin's humans have another warm room, Trumpkin could petnap Silver again. While occupying the warm room and being ill Serena liked having my undivided attention, or at least sharing it with things like sleep and writing, rather than Silver. So Silver went home with Trumpkin. 

I had learned something about Silver I'd never known before. As an outdoor cat she never overate, but when kept indoors she will overeat--from boredom. She'd been overeating at Trumpkin's house. It had not done her good; she came home fat and wheezy, but when kept indoors she prowled around showing boredom, wanting to overeat or else damage my property. She's not good at being an indoor cat. Trumpkin's Humans will need to spend a lot of time entertaining her, with good active games and not a lot of food, and if they're trying to work from home they'll probably find keeping her to be a nuisance. But, considering the probability that Crayola and who knows how many other neighborhood cats may have been poisoned, until the danger passes they may keep Silver indoors if they like, and I'd recommend keeping poor lonely Trumpkin indoors too.

We need, of course, to get the Bad Neighbor out of the neighborhood. I'd like to hope it can be done without violence. If enough people present a united front and deliver the message that anyone who cares about him needs to keep HIM confined (and sterilized, and doped up if he doesn't seem to like being kept inside and closely supervised), it's probably possible to prevent the sociopath escalating to more direct attacks on human beings--though he has already used legal methods of poisoning that have killed human beings including his own immediate family. 

This web site does not publish identity or contact information for living private persons, but since I think a sociopath is not so much living as undead, here we go. The Neighborhood Blight in my neighborhood is Larry Ricky Calhoun. That is his real name--not short for any more formal names that were "traditional" in the 1950s. I've never heard him called Larry, only Ricky or Wrymouth. He used to display photos of himself on Facebook but, after gaining weight and losing hair, has pulled them down. He still has the crooked mouth, a lifelong birth defect. Strangers have been known to describe it as a cute lopsided grin; my brother's phrase when we were kids used to be "crafty and calculating," and some would go so far as to call it evil. Well he does evil. Anyway he's about 5'10", wears #8 men's shoes, used to have dark hair but if he has any hair left now it's white. He used to live out below Bray, among relatives who shared the old family property, but after they all died and he inherited their land he apparently found the place sad and lonely, and moved closer to Gate City, on a back road called Trotter Lane, on what older people may remember as Oscar "Junior" Peters' land. He lives in a trailer house that has a land phone, 276-452-4042. Even on dirty back roads he likes to drive big shiny-new pickup trucks, and try to tell people to ditch their roads down to bedrock because it's not his problem if the rocks destroy their trucks--only if mud or dust get on his. As you'd expect from a cat-killing sociopath, he may seem pleasant enough in public, but basically he is scum.

This web site does not advocate violence, or property destruction, especially if animals might be harmed, and on Trotter Lane a fire would harm a lot of cute little wild animals. This web site would, however, display photos of Wrymouth's trucks covered in any sort of rotten, sticky, slimy garbage anyone might happen to find in a deep freezer after a long power outage, or similar, in the interest of encouraging him to repentance. This web site has no real hope that Wrymouth Calhoun is capable of sincere repentance but we do hope he can be persuaded in that direction, in the same way we hope Serena-cat can survive. 

Other nonviolent ways to encourage an evildoer to repent include things like nobody speaking to him, even if he speaks first, or waiting on him in any place of business, or buying anything he sells. (He has been known to sell food in open-air markets. Here I stand to testify, I once bought a bag of fresh corn on the cob from him, shared it with friends and relatives, and we were all sick.) Things like people going to a different church if he starts going to one. Things like people warning anyone seen still talking to him, out loud, in public, "Why would you want to talk to a cat poisoner?!" Things like, if anyone who cares about Wrymouth as still alive, their urging him to sign over all his real estate to the people he has harmed as evidence of repentance, then take a very long bus ride away from here and try to find a nice, safe place with bars on all the windows where he can spend the rest of his worthless life praying for forgiveness. 

God's forgiveness, I mean. I do not believe that anyone who remembers the very mysterious diseases that killed our beekeeper and his bees, which were not caused by any virus, bacteria, or fungus known to medical or veterinary science, because they were caused by deliberate chemical poisoning, will ever want to look at Wrymouth again. 

But this was supposed to be a post about Serena, who is still, as she's always been, a source of delight. She's not well. She's still likely not to survive this incident, but she's still sassy and sweet and more intelligent than some people want to believe a cat can be.

Serena never, ever, wanted to snuggle up on anyone's lap before this winter. As a kitten she took many naps beside or against me, but on waking she always wanted a good fast game. She might chomp on me in a friendly puppy-like way, or just bound away, waving her tail and looking back--"Chase me!" As an adult cat she could be a nuisance when I was doing anything outdoors, running out into the road in hopes that I'd chase her back toward home. (She didn't want to go away from home and would come back, disappointed, if not chased.)

But during the Big Freeze this winter, she started making a display to her daughters--"I'm still the Queen Cat around here! I get to occupy the human's lap, day or night, and you don't." It started while they were all active and healthy. 

Little we guessed that short occupations of my lap, before she went out to hunt or eat or check her territory, would turn into days spent coughing and sneezing on my lap.

She seemed to be shaking off the effects of whatever she'd eaten, and gaining some weight while taking all her meals indoors, up to last week. Then she started smelling streppy. Amoxicillin might have helped, or might have killed her, if I'd had any, but I did not. Charcoal, which I have, had cleaned up Pastel's breath after she collapsed on my lap smelling like a sack of bacteria. Serena, who has had charcoal for food poisoning before and recommended it to her kittens, didn't want any. Her temperature rose. She even made a puddle, not on my lap but on a blanket folded up a few feet away. Then she stayed on the site, concealing the damage. She went into defensive mode when I moved her away. She didn't want me to find out.

"Oh, Serena," I wailed, finding the wet spot. Old female cats and humans probably do get away with a few minor episodes of incontinence because, most of the time, most of our urine doesn't have a strong odor, but this was not the case last night. "I'm so sorry that happened, you poor dear cat..."

Serena really snarled, making an uglier sound and display than I've seen her use with unwelcome visiting cats. She hated pity. 

"But if you're going to become a bedwetter you can't sleep here any more," I said, and brought in a cage, lined it with newspapers, and shoved Serena inside.

I slept in the office, as I often do in winter, after hand-washing the blanket in one of those wonderful enzyme formulas and drying it in front of the hot-air fan. Serena woke me a few times, rearranging the newspapers, making a big display. "See, I still wake up and get up and bury my own bodywastes! I am still a competent cat!" I prayed earnestly that she might either recover or die overnight.

In the morning I set out some food for Drudge. Serena was on her feet, bright-eyed, with a bit of a cough but a dry, slightly warm nose. She ate some breakfast, too. I left them to it for fifteen minutes. A little snow had started to stick to the ground before being replaced by a cold steady rain, the sort of rain that tends to freeze into black ice at sundown.

After fifteen minutes I went out and called. There was no sign of Serena. I went around the house, calling and searching, in the rain. "You can sit on the cot," I said, returning to the porch, "on newspapers, not on my blankets."

Serena popped up from behind a storage bin. "Deal!" she nonverbally said.

Needless to say, she sat on newspapers for about fifteen seconds before she was back on my lap, curled up in a circle, making her almost inaudible purr. She purrs audibly only when nursing kittens, but she does purr. Usually I have to touch her to know when she's purring. (Yes, I can still hear most cats purr.) 

Enzyme formulas aren't cheap but it's worth the price if Serena's last days are as pleasant as they can be...especially if her last days are still ten years away.