Tucky (with audio)

Read by Pat and Becky Stone

II’m writing this from my office while looking out from the twelfth floor at billowing snow. I’m dreading going home. Not the journey … but what I have to do when I get there.

Anyone who has been to our house in the past ten years would remember Tucky. He was the black-and-white outside cat—actually, he wasn’t our cat at all. Officially, he belonged to some neighbors down the hill, but he liked our kitty kibbles better than their kitty kibbles. And we shamelessly bribed him, because he was a great vole catcher. We called him “Dead Skunk In The Middle Of The Road”, because he slept in the middle of the driveway. If he wasn’t already there as you started up the drive, he would still get there and park himself slap bang in the middle of it. And then the next three minutes were spent persuading him that you had the right-of-way to drive to the parking by the house.

Tucky had his problems—he was scared and almost feral when he first came up the hill, and he cringed away any time I raised a hand, especially if I was holding something. It took months before he let us touch him. But over the years, he came to trust us, and then to love us. We already loved him. He would never allow himself to be held more than thirty seconds—but he was always quite willing to sit in a lap. This raised problems of its own, since the cat’s front claws were built like the business end of a threshing combine and made dough, even through your jeans, until you bled. But he was in heaven, purring deep and loud as a Mack truck.

Tucky was our Construction Superintendent. Whatever you were doing in the garden, he was with you, either underfoot or lying on top of what you had just planted. I’m the main gardener at our house, and any time I did anything—moving boulders for the rock garden, for example—he was there, usually on the stone I was attempting to move.

My friend Dan, an artist on the side, has a small studio to paint in. Whenever Tucky saw Dan in his studio, he curled up on the outside of the glass door and kept guard—sun or rain. Tucky was also the one up on the porch waiting for food in the morning when you left, and in the evening when you got home. After you finally got your car up to the house, he would greet you as you got out, then he would wait off to the side and get between your legs going up the steps, every blessed time. He also informed any and all visitors that he WAS our INSIDE cat, locked out by terrible accident, and would you please let him in?

Last week he got his wish. He didn’t come up to the kitchen door for a day or two. We went out to look—and found him, thin, curled up on a nest of leaves, and walking oddly when he got up. We brought him into the first-floor bathroom and took him to the vet the next day. Diagnosis: hyperthyroidism. Antibiotics and thyroid medication were prescribed. For the next week, he would eat (not kibbles, but canned tuna would do the trick) but drank little at first—and then not at all.

Today, both hind legs would not work. Dan took him to the vet this morning for the last time. He’s waiting until I get home through this snowstorm, and then we will go out together in the snow and dig a hole in the frozen ground.

Not all the stones in a garden are for the plants. ❖