And Then There Were Two

RIP Scruffy

It all began back in the fall of aught-five. The most pathetic looking black cat showed up at the back door, meowing for food. Skinny and scruffy, she was matted badly and had both fresh and scabbed-over wounds – so we named her Scruffy, because we always named the cats that visited the catnip that grew untamed in the back yard. We fed her when she’d show up throughout the fall and into the winter and spring of 2006. One day in the early summer, Tom came home, sad to report he had seen her along the side of the main street near the house, having been hit by a car. That was the end of our scruffy little Scruffy.

Little did we know.

Some days later a neighbor groused to us that "that darned black cat of yours" was killing birds in his back yard. Again. We, of course, objected, knowing that C was a lover not a fighter, and would never have been able to catch a bird anyway, at 24 pounds and counting. He was much more into the snakes that he could trap in concrete crevices and that didn’t require defying gravity. If you know what I mean. (He was lazy and fat, is what I mean.)

To prove C’s innocence we volunteered our Have-a-Heart trap. Imagine our surprise when he came to us a day or two later, victorious and scolding, and showed us a black cat who definitely wasn’t C but was our dearly departed friend, Scruffy.

We brought him into the house and locked him in the office until we could get him to the vet. “There’s no way you were feeding this cat last winter,” the vet said, “He’s no more than twelve weeks old.” And energetic. He did not handle his first visit to the vet well, but Dr. Zanotti, undaunted, pulled  on his falconer’s gloves to complete the exam. After that first appointment Scruffy's  medical record sported the Red Dot of Shame, an indictment I valiantly, and repeatedly exhorted them to remove, finally succeeding sometime in the last couple of years. The last time we were there I noticed some lingering adhesive residue, but finally! They appreciated this sweet guy as much as we did. He won them over.

Once we realized this was not the cat we had been feeding we tried to rename him Java, in line with Tom’s history of nerdy cat names: C, Ada, Pixel, and Alpha. But Scruffy just kind of stuck, even if it didn't exactly suit him, and Scruffy he stayed, despite the sleekest, gleaming black coat. And paws like frying pans. With the Guinness World Record Holder having 28 claws, we were pretty proud of Scruffy’s total of 27. His paws were heart-shaped, as if he had two glued onto each wrist.

Terribly shy, Scruffy lived under the futon in the office for at least a couple of weeks. 96 was the first human to pick him up, however briefly, after which he made a beeline (catline?) for the cellar, where he lived for a few weeks. We never saw him, although he ate the food we left for him, and we resigned ourselves to owning a cellar cat. At least he’d never wander again.

He slowly adjusted to life as a Gentile, and joined us, occasionally at first, but when it got cold in the cellar he eventually succumbed to our charms (or maybe it was the treats) and could just as often be found sitting in a human lap or grooming one of his adoptive siblings. He and Pixel became besties and spent most of every day grooming or napping on each other.

Sometimes we
called him "Woody"

But the hormones, ayy.. Who knew horndogs came in a cat model? The other cats were much better at reading the signals and knew when to stay away, but not me. It got so bad I slept for a while in a hoodie. He’d jump up the bed with his characteristic “mewp”  when he landed, and I could feel the plop-plop-plop of those frying pan feet pad across the pillow. I could feel him watching me, kneading thoughtfully while he wondered to himself, “Which hairs shall I defile tonight?” Then, he would defile them.

Scruffy used up most of his nine lives (many of them humping my head), and lived life fast and hard, beginning with being a feral kitten whose mother just never came home one day. When he was about 5 he was hit by a car on the same street as our original Scruffy. That impact sent him straight into the path of a second car whose driver stopped and found our neighbor, who came and found us. That’s a bunch of lives right there.

Then there was The Blockage.  Because we had already been through it with C (RIP) , I recognized the out-of-the-blue, blood-curdling, “I’m in pain” meow for what it was, and brought him to straight to the emergency room just in time, resulting in another  week-long hospital stay before some more coneofshame days at home.

Just before Christmas of 2018 we could tell he was sick, and normally I’d’ve proudly buried my head in the sand and ignored, but I was about to leave on vacation and didn’t want 96 to have to deal with something even worse in my absence, so we brought him to our by now good friends at the vet ER, where he was so sick with we didn’t know what yet that they literally couldn’t get a pulse or blood pressure on the poor guy. But he was still purring. The tiny purr never stopped. Knowing he was in good hands and honestly not knowing what else to do, I went on my planned vacation, only to learn, through my daily phone updates from the hospital, that his intestine had ruptured, requiring a surgery and then a biopsy, which revealed cancer. Every time they called me I’d see the caller ID, take a deep breath, and answer the phone, all the while expecting them to tell me he was gone. But he rallied, with the help of a visit from Hannah, and continued outpatient chemo through the spring, but by April Scruffy made it clear that he had had enough and was ready for his trip over the Rainbow Bridge. We were heartbroken to say goodbye but more than that we were ready for him to be out of pain.

Scruffy was a heck of a cat.