Still Walters Run Deep

"for you have seen some unbelievable things..."
Crossbones Style - Cat Power

I am quite fond of cats.

My present tribe consists of Maude, a big, fat hoochie mamma cat, born a poor black stray under the house next door, and Hank (aka Henry II of Jungletouch), a designer puss with a trace of African Serval and a ton of ‘tude.

They were preceded by Harold, a magnificent creature who came to me as a kitten from the household of the late, great Frank Zappa. Harold should have been named Henry, but wasn’t, and therein lays the tale.

My father’s mother’s people were the Walters, but until I was nearly grown I thought their last name was Waters, because that’s the way they pronounced it. And they still do, as does everyone in Wilkinson County, Georgia, one of the great mysteries of the old south.

Daddy’s maternal uncle, Lee Walters, up and married my mother’s older sister, Mintora, who died shortly after giving birth to my first cousin and first-cousin-once-removed, Little Mint. Sometime later, Uncle Lee married his first wife’s (and my mother’s) first cousin, Mary Lee, making Little Mint also my step-first-cousin-once-removed. (Take your time.)

The Walters were considered peculiar, the universal mispronunciation of their surname not withstanding. (As you can see, even they got confused.) They generally married late, if at all, were not as super double Christy religious as most of their contemporaries, and were given to the accumulation of vast quantities of land, acquired by whatever means necessary and seemingly without the encumbrance of conscience. Although they didn’t necessarily like each other all that well, as witnessed by their numerous and storied internal feuds, they kept to themselves, even in death, having their own cemetery exclusively for the burial of their kith and kin, a practice in and of itself not uncommon in the rural south of the day.

As was customary, family members gathered at the cemetery once a year, usually in the summer when it was good and hot, and brought their rakes and hoes, lawnmowers and bush hogs, picnic baskets and coolers, for “clean-up day,” when they polished and pruned and prettied up the final resting places of their ancestors, loved ones, and, in the case of a few unmarked graves no one had a clue about, possibly even a charity case or two, though the Walters were not known for such. It was a ritual that continued well into my teens, although nobody had been buried there since 1959, except for Henry the cat.

I may have been present for the denouement of Henry’s not quite final resting place, but I can’t say I remember it, having been either too young or too stoned to take cognition of one of the family’s defining debacles. (In truth, if forced to go at all I usually spent the day in the cab of Daddy’s pick up, parked in the shade, listening to my transistor radio. God, I wish they'd had cell phones back then.) Consequently I didn’t learn of Henry’s unfortunate interment until years later, when during a trip to the homeland I visited Uncle Lee’s “baby” sister, my great aunt, Cora Walters Billue, a formidable woman, even in old age, (tall, overbearing and, quite frankly a bit scary), and then cousin-cousin-cousin Little Mint and her stepmother Mary Lee, who was by then a widow and living with her.

Mary Lee, who had been well ensconced in spinsterhood when Lee tapped her as his bride, ostensibly because he needed a mother for his motherless only child, was, as ever, tart and testy, and, as some alleged, quite possibly a little “touched.”

When I mentioned my visit with Aunt Cora, Mary Lee began to sputter like a wet Roman candle on the Fourth of July in hell. “Does she still look like a wrinkled up old prune?” she spat, looking like nothing if not a raisin in a crimson fright wig herself.

“Just how old is Cora now anyway?” It was not so much a request for information as a suggestion that she was tired of waiting for her to die.

I said Cora mentioned she’d be 92 come October.

“No such thing,” Mary Lee snorted, “Cora ain’t but ten years older than me, and I’m fixin’ to be 80. She always was a braggart.” (On checking the numbers, it turns out Mary Lee was right, about their ages anyway.)

“I ain’t had no use for Cora Billue for more than 20 years. Me and Lee had this white Persian cat named Henry. Had him for 18 years and he was just like another youngun’ to us. When he died, we made him a little casket, and and buried him in our plot in the Walters Family Cemetery. Next time we went to Dublin, we went by the monument company and ordered a little headstone, like you’d get for a baby’s grave, with ‘Our Beloved Pet, Henry,’ carved on it. When it came in, we took it up there and put it on his grave.”

“Come clean up day, Cora comes up to me and she says, ‘I didn’t know you had a baby who died.’”

I said, “I didn’t.”

“Well, whose baby is that then?”

I told her, “that ain’t no baby, that’s our cat, Henry. Can’t you read?”

“Cora damn near had a fit. Cussed me a blue streak for buryin’ a cat with her people. I told her they was our people too, but that didn’t make no never mind to her. Next time me and Lee was up to the cemetery, that tombstone was gone and there wasn’t nothing but a big hole in the ground where we’d buried poor Henry.”

When I got home to California, I called Daddy’s sister, the reigning family matriarch, and mentioned that I’d seen both Aunt Cora and Mary Lee. I asked if she was aware of any bad blood between them.

She was. “Oh, my God, they’re not still carrying on about that cat are they?”

It was a story with legs, but not one with a happy ending. While Aunt Cora hadn’t dug up the cat and stolen the tombstone herself, word was she’d put one of her boys, Lanier, up to it and that he’d even kept the grave marker as a souvenir. “Used it to prop up firewood in his camp house down at Bear Camp Lake,” according to those who claimed to have seen it. As for Henry? “Probably ended up thrown out in the woods somewhere.”

To make the saga even more delicious, some family members had actually taken sides in the squabble. The leading consensus was that Mary Lee had in fact engineered the burial of Henry the cat next to Lee’s first wife (the aforementioned Mintora) so there’d be no space for Lee to be buried beside her. Thereby assuring that when his time came he would have to be buried next to Mary Lee in her family's plot at Northview Cemetery in Dublin. (Which is how it turned out, eventually.)

A few months later when I got a kitten I thought to honor the exhumed family feline icon with a namesake. Unfortunately “Henry” slipped right through the sieve of my brain and “Harold” slipped out. I was none the wiser until I next saw Little Mint and she set me straight. By then, however, Harold was firmly Harold, and it suited him very well. Mint also filled me in on the back story.

I had initially figured, his having been eighteen and all, that Henry the Persian had wandered gentle into that great litter box in kitty heaven. But, no, tragically Henry was decapitated and partially devoured by old man Joe Lavender's German Shepherd, Robert, a vile and villainous beast who'd been trying to catch him for years. Finally did. I hear tell Mary Lee caused quite a scene the Sunday morning she found Henry's broken body in old man’s Lavender’s front yard. Called him of his house and "preached him a sermon, he won't likely ever forget." Apparently there was also some loose talk about a gun and doing some killing, but Uncle Lee and Little Mints' husband pulled Mary Lee off the lawn and dragged her home before things got too out of hand.

I wasn't there, but I know witnesses who swear it happened just that way.