This story concerns the most beloved and in some ways most remarkable pet of my childhood. It begins the summer before the pet was actually born. I was sitting with a kitten and calling it all sorts of affectionate and nonsensical names. After I had said "Coda" (CAW-dah) several times, Ma turned around and said "Coda means cat in German". To a childish mind this seemed like an appropriately upscale name to give a special cat.
Next spring, when maggie's mothercat produced her annual crop of kittens, I picked one out and brought it home when it was barely weaned. Like most new pets it was stressed, but it did drink milk and eat other things. Naturally, it got handled a lot, and even taken to bed.
Its name, of course was Coda, childish spelling and all. Years later, I was surprised to discover that this word was actually in the dictionary, with the meaning of "An addemdum or tail to a musical composition". Many years later still, when looking through an album, I learned that Rosemary claimed that the cat's name was Napoleon and had written that name on all the pictures of the animal. None of the other kids ever called it that.
But Coda's first few days weren't so picturesque. About a week after getting her, I lay down on my bed in the front porch to read and put the kitten on the bed near me. After a while there was a stink, so I put it on the floor. But the stink persisted, so I investigated.
In the next instant I was up and yelling, "Ma, Coda did a chunk on my bed!" Immediately there was a tremendous whoop of laughter from Betty. Ma and the kids rushed in, also laughing. After a bit, Betty said to me, "Coda did a couple of little weiners on your bed." ma, of course, got the job of cleaning up.
When Coda was a year old, I began to look for kittens, but there were none. I insisted that she was a mothercat, despite the skepticism of parents and siblings. The children were forbidden to look under a cat's tail to determine its sex, and much as I loved Coda, I wasn't going to touch her in that area. I did, however, examine her belly carefuly and claimed that I had found teats. this did nothing to convince the others, who of course, were teasing me by pretending to be doubtful. Coda did eventually have one kitten, but under tragic circumstances.
Like many children, I could be cruel even to a cherished pet. One day when I was rougher than Cod's liking, she gave me a good scratch on the face. This happened just before Easter, so I went around saying that the Easter bunny had scratched me.
With the hindsight of adulthood, I understand that Coda occasionally needed a vacation from me, but to a child it felt like desertion. She would sometimes disappear for several days. When she returned, it was often with a mouse as a peace-offering. On one particular occasion, I was sleeping with my sisters. Coda came up on the bed in the middle of the night with a mouse. When I was not too thrilled with this present, she put it down on Rosemary's pillow and began to eat it herself. When Rosemary woke up some time later, I said "Coda ate a mouse on your pilow." To my disappointment, she just turned the pillow over and went back to sleep.
We never did figure out where Coda went or where she hid, but there were plenty of places in the old house, Including a root cellar that a cat could get into easily. In the back porch there was a large built-in cabinet with a big drawer where the kids liked to keep things. One day I reached way in the back, and some claws tried to grab my fingers. I jumped up scared. Betty, the ever-resourceful oldest sibling, looked and began to laugh. She said: "Coda is standing on a board back there." We pulled out the drawer completely, but of course by that time Coda had decamped.
At this time, my interest in science was awakening. I had dug up a strawberry plant and put it in a pot in the front porch, hoping to see it put forth berries and runners. One night, when I was sleeping in the porch and Coda was with me, she did not come up on the bed. I looked all over, but could not find her. The next day, everyone was pputting out theories as to where she might have been. Finally Betty said: "I know where Coda slept last night." "where?" "On top of your strawberry plant." "How do you know?" "Because it's all smashed down." And so it was.
Sometime later, Coda was absent for a few days, but I was sleeping in the front porch. When she returned early in the morning, while Dad was getting up, he put her in the front porch and she went up on the bed and washed my face. I never woke up. The next morning the same thing happened. This time I was awake, but didn't move. The cat washed my entire face and then laid down to sleep. It gave me some second thoughts about who was whose pet.
Coda would often catch mice in that old house. One time Dick looked under his bed on a winter morning and began to roar with laughter. He pulled out a mouuse by the tail and showed it to me. It was all dried up, so it must have been there for a while.
Another time, the kids were going up to bed. I was holding Coda. A big mouse hopped out into the hall, and amid all the exclamations, Ann said "Put Coda down!" I did, and both of them raced down the stairs. A short time later I came down out of curiosity. I could hear some scrabblings, but I never did learn what happened.
During those years, it was a familiar sight to see this tall skinny kid standing in the kitchen with this big cat on his shoulders. She would jump on the counter, then jump onto my back and run quickly up to my shoulder. She never used her claws.
This was during the time when I was attending the residential school on and off because of my hearing loss. One fall, when I was away, Coda finally did have a single kitten. Ma wrote that it was all white, so I asked that it be named Silver. Subsequent letters were vague, except that one said that the kitten was being fed with a bottle. When I returned home for Christmas, I found that Coda had died from eating a "poison rat". The kitten soon died as well. This was during the winter, and the ground was frozen. so the bodies were burned in the coal-fired furnace. Thus, there were no graves, as there were for some other pets.
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Webminister, I@godtouches.org.
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