Pepper

I buried my cat, Pepper, under a granite block, we had taken from the village dump. In the fall I planted bulbs that would cover the grave sometime in late spring. They were flowers I did not expect to see, as I planned to move out of my parents house and start an adventure, or a journey of my own. Strangely my cat was one of the many strings that needed to be cut before I could leave. Stranger still that it was death that freed me from my obligation.

I do not really remember my friends name. It was when I was a child, of six or seven. It was spring, and chilly. I remember the house, when I pass it I always think of the room, cut off from the rest of the house by a baby gate. Inside that room, hiding under chairs and a large sofa, was two small black and white kittens. My parents were going to let me have one of those small furry bodies. I had already dreamed of petting soft fur.

Originally, I had wanted the orange kitten my friend had told me about, but for some reason or another it had been given to someone else. I was still a little sour about not getting the orange tom cat, but the excitement of getting a kitten over shadowed everything. The only problem was catching one.

Kittens, I have learned, have an ability to be except artists. They climb and hide. The most recent kitten I have been around liked to hide inside a olive green velvet rocking arm chair. He would curl up somewhere in the folds of the backing and only come out for food. Retrieving the kitten I wanted back when I was younger was almost as difficult. An Adult climbed over the baby gate and the kittens scurried under and away. I remember the excitement as I watched and pointed out the one I wanted. I'm not sure if Pepper was the one I had originally pointed out or the easier one to catch.

Salt and Pepper was his full name, but it was soon shorted to Pepper. He was a tux cat, and in his prim a very handsome, almost haughty one. I remember very distinctly him sitting straight back, front paws straight, tail curled around and head held high. Even as he grew older, and took on more of a grumpy old Englishman, how he sat drew attention.

In fact, for a long time I thought of Pepper as a kind of English gentleman, who smoked a pipe and thought of others as foolish (saying such things as Nincompoop and balderdash). But he was also rather haughtily like the French. No matter how I saw him, he was always well dressed and thought of himself rather highly. As all cats, I'm sure he felt most humans were staff not owners. But he would come when you called his name; yet always before he got to you he would stop, turn around and sit, as if to say 'I wanted to come", or "you called? I had no idea, I just happened to be coming this way."

Pepper was also the reason for many laughs. When he was still a kitten, he was terrified of going outside (latter we would wish that we had kept him inside). My sister and I would force the poor kitten into a little halter, and drag the cat outside for 'walks'. The poor cat was terrified of being outside in the great world. My dad called him a scardicat. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but at some point Pepper decided that he loved the out doors and that he was a hunter. No longer was he terrified. He would even bring us lovely presents, a dead mouse or better yet an almost dead mouse.

In winter Pepper would still demand to go outside. He would slowly walk through the fresh snow, shacking off each paw before planting it down to shack off the next paw. My family would laugh at him and his, step shake, step shake, step shake. Yet despite his dislike for the wet, he would often risk the snow or rain to hunt. Amazingly all of his hunting he did without his front claws, which had been removed to protect the furniture. He even caught birds, which the only evidence would be a pile of feathers.

The best tale that we have of the cat was his chasing of dogs. My family has always had both cats and dogs. Amazingly there had always been a strange short of peace between the two. We never thought that Pepper might react differently around strange dogs. One summer, when the oldest of my two brothers was still a baby, the whole family was outside doing chores. Pepper, and Shadow, our dog at the time, were outside with us. My brother was in his playpen, and the rest of us were working in the gardens weeding. Two strange dogs, from down in the valley, came wondering through our yard. Shadow rushed to meet them and make friends, but the dogs were more interested in the baby. Thats when Pepper decided to show himself. This of course got the other two dogs extremely excited. What happened next was a kind of story that only gets larger in the telling.

Pepper puffed himself up and attached the nearest dog hissing and boxing the poor dog's ears. the dogs decided this was some kind of monster and Pepper happily chased them off the property. The dogs did not return. When Pepper reached the edge of the hedgerow, he stopped and stalked, triumphantly back toward us all, while we laughed and cheered. Pepper got in a couple of fights after that, mostly with other cats and without good results. In fact there was one night, when it was storming, my mother let the cat in with out really looking at him. He crawled down to my bed. I woke with a mangle of blood and wet fur curled on my bed. Poor Pepper really had had been beaten up. I almost lost him than, but he pulled through.

That was perhaps one of my greatest fears. I did not want to loose my friend. A friend. This cat had put up with me dragging him around the back yard, picking him up, pulling him under the covers of my bed so that he would sleep with me (when he was older he would ask to go under the covers) 1 years of my life contained a cat who was black and white, with a nose half pink, half black. He would find me when I was crying and curl up next to me purring. He would come running when you were cutting cheese or serving ice cream, to get his part.

I buried my cat on the hill above my parents house and the suggestion of my brother, who reminded me that it was Peppers favorite place to hunt. We laid him out in a large shoe box, curled as if sleeping. A peaceful, old Englishman, in a tux, finally at rest. I cried. I buried my cat and wept for the lose of a friend.