Keeping Church Cat indoors at night meant other accommodations, too. Carol Ann and Kim were primary caregivers, but if they were away, someone had to feed her and change her litter. When the office was closed for a few days, someone had to let her outside or she’d go wild with cabin fever. And, as always, someone had to watch to make sure she didn’t sneak into the sanctuary, which had never been officially designated a cat-free zone but seemed the exact excuse for the cat haters—and there were always some, as Carol Ann knew—to start talking about disrespecting holy ground. Even asking for help with Church Cat’s care made Carol Ann nervous, like she was pushing too far. But she didn’t need to worry. Church Cat had plenty of fans, and there were more than enough enthusiastic volunteers.
With basic care out of the way, Carol Ann and Kim moved to step two: spaying and vaccination. And that led to the first big surprise of the great Camden Methodist cat experiment. Church Cat was pregnant.
By March, word had spread through the church: A single mother was in their midst. Church Cat, for her part, wasn’t hiding it. When she walked, her belly was swinging like a church bell. No doubt there were questions from young kids around the family table that spring, but for the most part, the congregation was excited. If possible, the children followed Church Cat even more than usual. And Church Cat, despite her condition, was accommodating. The day before Palm Sunday, Carol Ann drove by and saw her sprinting happily around the church lawn.
But on Palm Sunday, Church Cat was gone. The children came out to the lawn after the church service, dressed in their choir robes and waving palm fronds, but there was no cat to meet them. They stopped and looked around, bewildered. Then they started searching: in the bushes, in the Sunday school rooms, in the administrative offices, and even in the sanctuary. But they couldn’t find the cat.
“Did she have her baby?” the squealing girl squealed, almost falling down with excitement.
“Probably,” Carol Ann told her, “but we don’t know for sure.”
The next day, Kim went looking for her cat. That year, in addition to adopting a stray cat, Camden United Methodist Church had started a major building project. The primary church building would be expanded; the old parsonage would be hauled away; and a recently acquired abandoned motel next to the property would be torn down for a parking lot. Kim figured the old motel rooms, many with their doors already removed for demolition, afforded an ideal place for a cat to hole up with her kittens. She spent a few hours searching the dilapidated ruin and calling, before Church Cat finally answered. One of the rooms was full of old furniture and mattresses, and Church Cat was using it as a quiet nursery for her four Palm Sunday kittens.
For a week, Kim and Carol Ann took food down to the room, and Kim snuck down to check on her once every day, but for the most part, Church Cat had a week alone with her babies. The next Sunday, after church, the children found her. They were standing around the lawn, talking about Church Cat and her babies, when one of them spotted her slinking around the old motel. About six kids, all younger than six, followed her to the room where her kittens were mewling and stumbling all over one another. Carol Ann arrived quickly enough to make sure the children didn’t do anything but ogle and coo, but by the next day, Church Cat had left the motel.
There are times, as I well know, when it’s good to have a strong network of friends. When you are being unfairly maligned. When you face a personal challenge. When the board tries to throw your community’s beloved cat out of the library. Fortunately, Carol Ann had a strong social network in Camden, and one of her acquaintances lived across the street and a few doors down from the church. This young woman watched from her front porch as Church Cat carried her kittens, one by one by the scruff of the neck, across Broad Street and into the second-floor window of a beat-up old house.
The young woman called Carol Ann. Carol Ann called Kim Knox. Together, they decided they better move those kittens before the owner of the house came back. Nobody had lived in the house for years, but Carol Ann knew the owner was storing stuff inside. He was a fine man, but she wasn’t sure how he’d react if he discovered the kittens. With the entire underage congregation of Camden United Methodist Church eagerly anticipating the return of Church Cat, she didn’t want to take any chances.
“I don’t break the law as a rule,” Kim told me, “but there are times when you just have to.” So a few days later, Kim Knox found herself crawling through the first-floor window of an abandoned house, on a main street a mere block from downtown Camden, while Carol Ann waited outside, amazed that a fine, upstanding woman like herself was standing watch during a trespass.
There must have been a point, perhaps halfway through the window, as she stretched to find the floor hidden in the darkness, when Kim wondered what she was doing. She was a law-abiding citizen. She was a church secretary. She was wearing her nice work clothes, for goodness’ sake. And here she was, breaking and entering a dilapidated and possibly dangerous dwelling. She told herself, no doubt, that she was doing it for the children, who needed to know that Church Cat and her kittens were safe. Perhaps she told herself she was doing it for Church Cat, but she must have known a savvy prison tabby like Church Cat didn’t need help raising her family. She was really doing it, she must have realized as she stepped into the dusty darkness, for herself.
She went to the back door and let Carol Ann’s friend, the young neighbor, into the house, Carol Ann being convinced she was too advanced (in age) for such a perilous mission. “Church Cat
,
” Kim whispered when her companion was inside, trying to disturb nothing more than cobwebs and grime. “Where are you, Church Cat?” Old furniture was scattered in the downstairs rooms, between piles of boxes filled with junk. Even in full daylight, the arrangement seemed dangerous.
It’s a tetanus nightmare
, Kim thought as her feet crunched broken glass. The stairs were even less appealing, but eventually they climbed to the second floor and, in the back bedroom, heard Church Cat meowing. When Kim peaked around the corner, the little gray tabby came running to her friend, as sweet and endearing as always.
Like a good mother, Church Cat had found the most comfortable place in downtown Camden for her brood of kittens, a stack of mattresses and box springs piled in a corner. Modern box springs are hollow, but one of these box springs was the old-fashioned sort stuffed full of cotton. Church Cat had hollowed out the stuffing to create a nest. Inside was her smorgasbord of kittens: a solid white one, a solid black one, a calico, and a gray tabby just like his mother.
Kim and the neighbor found a safe place in the middle of the floor and sat down. They waited, whispering occasional encouragement, hoping the kittens would come to them. The mattress was a perfect place to raise a family, but they wanted the kittens to know and trust them, in case they needed to move them out quickly. The first day, Church Cat was the only one who ventured into the center of the room. As always, she was talkative, sweet and eager for attention. Kim stroked her, feeling that good cat warm, and then, after half an hour, she descended the stairs, locked the back door behind her friend, and climbed back out the window.
She came in through the window again the next day, and every day for the next two weeks. There was something compulsive about her desire to check on the cats, something that must have said more about her needs than theirs. But what did that matter? After a few days, the kittens loved her company, too. Like their mother, they came to sniff her hand and be stroked, to accept her as part of their world. All but the gray tabby, who hissed and snarled and then dove back into the cotton-filled box spring whenever Kim made a move in his direction. He was the only male in the litter; perhaps that made him more cautious than the others. Or perhaps, despite looking just like his mother, he was the only cat that hadn’t inherited her endearing personality.
During the second week, a rumor reached Carol Ann that the owner of the house was coming back. He was going to fix the place up and sell it. So, for the last time, Kim Knox climbed through the window of the old house to see the kittens. Carol Ann handed her several cat carriers, then went around the back to wait. Kim took the carriers to the upstairs bedroom and, as always, sat on the floor to coax the kittens out. The first one was easy: She came right up. The next two were wiser. They ran around the room a bit, but with the help of the young neighbor, Kim was able to wrangle them into the carriers.
That left only the gray tabby male. Instead of running, he burrowed into the box spring and spat and hissed every time Kim tried to reach him. Each time she failed, he turned and dug himself deeper into the cotton ticking. He dug himself so deep that, eventually, they had to take the whole stack of mattresses apart to reach him. Then they piled them back up, exactly as they had been before. Finally, after almost an hour, Kim handed the cat carriers out the back door to Carol Ann, then locked the door, straightened anything that had been knocked askew and climbed, for the last time, out the first-floor window of the abandoned house. She dropped to the ground, wiped the dust off her nice blouse and skirt, checked both ways to make sure no one was watching, then walked casually across the street to help Carol Ann throw the cat carriers into the back of her car.
Since the kittens were too young to be weaned, Carol Ann had decided not to bring them back to the church. Carol Ann had a cat at home, so the ladies took the kittens to Kim’s house, where Church Cat nourished and raised them in the spare bedroom. A few weeks later, when they were weaned, the amused pastor allowed Kim and Carol Ann to put a notice in the church bulletin that the kittens were available for adoption. They also asked for help paying for Church Cat’s spaying, which started a flood of donations, not just for the procedure but for her food and litter as well. After the notice, Kim and Carol Ann never had to pay for Church Cat’s expenses again.
The three female kittens, all cute and social like their mother, were adopted quickly. But the fourth kitten, the male tabby, would never come out when potential owners came by. Instead, he hid under the bed, hissing and spitting. If Kim surprised him, he would rear onto his back legs, puff out his fur, hiss viciously in her direction, then take off running the other way.
After the third kitten was adopted, Carol Ann took Church Cat back to Camden United Methodist. Kim and her husband sat on their porch, tired but happy, wondering what to do with the un-adoptable male. After half an hour, Kim decided she better check on him, since he was now alone in the bedroom. This time, when she opened the door, the kitten came running to her, meowing and meowing, like he just realized he’d been left behind.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve certainly changed your tune.”
She looked at her husband. He rolled his eyes, then smiled and nodded. Church Cat’s little gray tabby kitten stayed. They named him Chi-Chi, and although he grew to be bigger and leaner than his mother, without her endearing baby face, he always reminded Kim of her office friend. He was never warm; in fact, he was quite aloof. “But that was just his personality,” Kim said. “He was a good, good cat. Just like his mama.”
A town is a series of changes, and to live in a town for long is to incorporate those changes into your life. When Carol Ann moved to Camden, the downtown hardware store run by her father-in-law was the hub of commercial life. They sold everything from shovels and biscuits to nails and dinner plates, but also made crop loans and bartered bales of cotton. For a while, they ran the area’s only ambulance service and served as the town’s funeral home, even employing an undertaker. When Harris went to college, he decided to pass on the hardware store in favor of the bank, but he quit that job two years later when MacMillan-Bloedel, a conglomerate out of Canada, opened a paper mill near town. By the time his father retired, Harris had earned an MBA and was an executive at the mill. The hardware store was sold and became a True Value franchise, selling standard nails and tools, and slowly became threadbare with the rest of downtown. But if you’ve lived in Camden long enough, and know where to look, you can still see MATTHEW’S HARDWARE written on the old brick wall.
By the time Church Cat arrived, there wasn’t much thought of reviving downtown. There wasn’t a Walmart for fifty miles, but most of the residents of Camden found a reason to make it out there at least once a month. “My mom couldn’t pass a Walmart,” Harris told me with a laugh. “Didn’t matter what part of the state we were in, or what we were doing, we had to stop.” Religion had always been a major part of life in Camden, and even with the downtown falling on hard times, more and more effort and expense went into the four big churches on Broad Street. By the 1990s, in true modern style, each started a series of major renovations, one after another.
The first thing to go at Camden Methodist was the comfortable old parsonage, with its eighty-year history and creaking floorboards, which was sold to a young couple. When the truck came to lift the building off its foundation and haul it away, there was quite a crowd on the church lawn, and a number of teary eyes, especially from the older generation. It was just a small wooden bungalow, simple and plain, but it was built immaculately, and built to last. It sits now in a neighborhood less than a mile from the church, once again filled with the laughter and tears of a young family growing up together.
The old motel, a long-derelict eyesore without a single redeeming feature, was torn down and paved over for a parking lot. The church left only the former restaurant, converting it to a youth center and temporary offices for the church administration. For almost a year, Church Cat and the children coexisted in that space, something that brought joy to both of them. The cat preferred Kim’s company, and especially the seat of her comfy office chair, but she also liked to wander out when the children were in the youth center and meow for attention. When the cooing and stroking became too much—the little girl still squealed at the sight of Church Cat, but now the cavernous former restaurant magnified the sound—Church Cat simply scampered away and hid in the kitchen.