The reluctant cat mother

By Claudia JohnsonPulaski Citizen column

I used to say that everything I knew about cats I learned by reading T.S. Eliot poems and Lillian Jackson Braun mysteries. Not anymore.
Not since two kittens arrived on my deck late in the summer of 1999. I first shooed them away, reasoning that I could not afford to own a pet. Not to worry. Pretty soon I found out what they mean by “you own a dog, you feed a cat.”
Being a country girl from Campbellsville, I grew up believing in two basic truths about pets: they belong outside and they eat leftovers. Of course, we had dogs, usually coon/bird/rabbit dogs, and they did regularly eat dog food. But they consumed overcooked green beans and leftover Jello salad with equal gusto, like any good southern creature should.
So, I started putting out the table scraps and bought some generic cat food, rationalizing that any natural predator of rodents was worth the investment. Plus, they were cute.
Thus, I coexist in this yard with the black cat and the calico cat, who have remained nameless since I fully accepted Eliot’s explanation that no matter what a person calls a cat, only the cat knows its true name and keeps it a secret.
These cats and I have come to an understanding. I don’t try to touch them and they stand on the deck rail peeping through the window and meowing loudly until I feed them. Hey, it works for me.
Yet, I must admit that when a neighbor once referred to them as her cats, it stung. Seems she had been feeding them too. Some of the times when I assumed they were out hunting for mice all night, they were sleeping on her porch. It’s a good thing I never began to think of these felines as belonging to me, right? A person could get her feelings seriously hurt.
Anyway, it was this meowing on the deck rail habit that caused my daughter to notice something odd about the cats’ feet.
“They’ve got six toes,” Sasha observed. “Didn’t you notice?”
Apparently some kind of cat expert, she knew that the average domestic cat has five toes on the front and four in back.
Well, now that she mentioned it, I guess they did look like they were wearing mittens on their front feet with that giant thumb extending off to the side.
“This isn’t normal?” I wondered, but I didn’t say anything...just headed for the Internet, where I found out that this condition is called polydacty, Latin for "many toes."
Polydacty is controlled by a dominant gene, meaning that all a cat has to do is have one polydact parent to be polydact itself. Like mine, most polydact cats only have an extra toe or two on the front feet, but my black cat’s back feet are also somewhat uniquely formed.
“These are special cats,” my friend, George, declared when he met them. “They are Hemingway cats.”
Some people think it's the name of a breed, but it isn't. "Hemingway cat" is just one of the many nicknames for polydact cats. Ernest Hemingway, writer and famous cat lover, made his home on the small island of Key West, sharing the island with nearly 50 cats, including a polydact cat given to him by a ship captain. Almost half of the 60 or so cats who still live in and around his home, now a museum, are polydacts, some being descendants of the original, who have their own web page www.hemingwayhome.com.
“Why have I never heard of this?” I mused. Thus far, my feline information had come from literature, but I associated Hemingway with raging bulls and big fish, not cats.
However, it was Hemingway who coined the phrase, "One cat just leads to another."
Which explains why I now have, as my son has calculated, 80 tiny toes just waiting to grasp the deck rail and negotiate for food. True polydacts, some of these babies have mitts like their calico mama, while some have six perfectly formed toes.
Could this have been the image Carl Sandburg had in mind when he wrote that “the fog comes in on little cat feet”? Maybe.
But no literary allusion could have prepared me, the accidental kitten proprietress, for the muddy, sticky balls of fur and toenails these babies were after last Friday’s afternoon squall, which sent a deluge of mud and grease out into the kitty haven under the deck steps and grill.
The calico mama was eyeing her offspring with a look that said, “Get a grip; I’m not licking that stuff off you.”
They got a grip, all right, as only digitally enhanced cats who are about to be immersed in sudsy water can latch on. Of course, they were wet and chilly after I won that little battle, so they had to be brought inside to warm up. And once they warmed up, they begin exploration of the house, including this annoying space between the cabinet and dishwasher where Midnight (ok, so they have temporary names) hid and fell asleep.
I thought she was dead, so I heralded a neighbor who works part time at the funeral home to retrieve the body. He scraped his arm trying to reach her and began bleeding. Then Sasha had to play on the sympathies of a rescue squad neighbor, who brought a drill and dismantled the dishwasher.
I would thank him publicly for saving Midnight’s life and returning her to her brother and three sisters, but for some reason, probably extreme humility, he declined recognition, practically begging me to omit his name from any news of the rescue.
When I put the kittens back in the yard, the mama cat completely ignored them, refusing to feed or even look their direction. When it got dark, I could hear their mewing all the way into the house.
I’m a mother. I had to feed these babies. I’m glad they like evaporated milk. I’m also glad my daughter knows how to perform the Heimlich maneuver on three ounces of cat fur.
Sorry. I didn’t know they couldn’t eat real food yet. They seemed like they were enjoying it until they started doing the Mama Cass thing.
Now they face a danger even worse than my ignorance - the coyotes who have been lurking around the yard in recent evenings. Lest my little polydactyls become appetizers for wild canine, they are sleeping in a big box in the dining room, but it won’t be long until they can get out.
And you know I’m a country girl, so I can’t let these kittens live in this house. We don’t produce that many table scraps, either. I don’t have mice, so I can’t even justify their care and feeding as rodent protection.
What I’m trying to say is, these kitties need a home. Call me.
(Post Script: I gave them all away within 48 hours).