Willie Morris - My Cat, Spit McGee

Books by Willie Morris

North Toward Home

Yazoo: Integration in a Deep Southern Town

Good Old Boy

The Last of the Southern Girls

James Jones: A Friendship

Terrains of the Heart

The Courting of Marcus Dupree

Always Stand in Against the Curve

Homecomings

Good Old Boy and the Witch of Yazoo

Faulkners Mississippi

After All, Its Only a Game

New York Days

A Prayer for the Opening of the Little League Season

My Dog Skip

The Ghosts of Medgar Evers

My Cat

Spit McGee

To my friend Bailey Browne,
eleven years old and a girl, very pretty and a little shy,
who personally asked me to write a book about my
having hated cats forever and then having grown to care
for them, especially Spit McGee

And to every person who ever loved a cat

My Cat

Spit McGee

1

Always a Dog Man

As I write these opening words, I pause to gaze out the windows of my upstairs workroom onto the broad lawn and to the creek beyond, which we call Purple Crane. I sight Spit McGee there, more likely than not communing with his companion, the big noisy bullfrog who has resided in these waters ever since we moved into this house five years ago.

Spits clean white fur glistens in the autumn sun. In the brightest of sunshine he can be almost invisible in his whiteness, but I know his silhouette. He strides closer to the creek. He has a jaunty walk for a large cat; if human he would be either a catcher or a third baseman. Sometimes he senses when I am looking down at him, because there is something like that between us, and he will turn and stare up at my window in recognition, but on this day he is concentrating on the bullfrog.

He is eight years old now, contented, I believe, and in good health. In all those years he has been with me. It was I, in fact, who actually delivered him at birth, and I have saved his life four times. In the ancient Oriental dictum, if you save a fellow creatures life just once, it is your responsibility to watch over him forever.

My wife says Spit is my factotum. I will admit to serving as his valet, butler, and menial, daily and in perpetuity, and in recompense I think he consents to being my constant and abiding comrade. When we first came together, he and I had monumental arguments, disagreements, spats if you want to call them that. We were different. To this day we have these intermittent contretemps, but they seem part of a larger whole now. We know our foibles and try to forgive each other, for neither of us is perfect. Why on earth, out of all the countless billions of cats in the world, am I ineluctably drawn to this one? There are times, I confess, I feel an odd writers inkling that Spit McGee is the reincarnation of my dog Skip, the beloved companion of my long-ago boyhood, whom I once wrote a book about, and about whom a movie was made; that Spit had been dispatched in the spirit of Old Skip by the Almighty to make sure I am doing okay.

But that is a very long story, and I must first digress to a most candid and pristine account of what I for the longest time thought about cats.

I had always been a dog man, as was just about everyone else I ever knew. When I was growing up we did not pay much attention to cats, and we certainly did not like them. In fact, I could not stand them.

Dogs were essential to our very existence. They were distinctive presences in the small Mississippi town where I was raised. We knew them all and called them by name. I got to know all about dogstheir various moods, how they acted when they were hungry or sick, what they were trying to tell you when they made strange, human noises in their throats. My father had big bird dogs when I was very littlenamed Tony, Sam, and Jimboand my most precious moments were when they licked me on the nose, ears, and face. So when Skip came to me in the third grade, I was ready for him.

What is the mysterious chemistry that links a human being and a dog? I only know that the friendship between Skip and me, and later a black Labrador named Pete and me, was God-given, and solidified by shared experience and fidelity and a fragility of the heart. (How could there be such a compact with cats?) It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs, Jim Harrison, one of my favorite authors, has written. The simplicity of this law of proportion came to me early in life, growing up as I did so remotely that dogs were my closest childhood friends. My enduring memories of Old Skip reside in my deepest being. Those readers of My Dog Skip may recall that I was an only child and he was an only dog, and that he was less my dog than my brother.

Boys and dogs have been allies since caveman days. We were inseparable. Older people in the town still talk about him. He could drive a car with a little help. He could play football and climb trees. He held the world record for fox terriers in the 100-yard dash. He could read my mind and had an inexplicable divination of where I might be at any given moment: the same attributions that my unlikely future Spit McGee would likewise have. We even fell in love with the same girl. He was such a part of the town that photographs of him were featured in the school yearbook. He could get into anywhere on his own if the whim was upon himmy schoolroom when class was in session, picture shows, baseball games, funerals. We were together at birthdays, Christmases, and New Years Eves. We admired the same friends and suffered the same fools. And when he died at age thirteen while I was far away in college, my parents buried him in my old baseball jacket under the elm tree in our backyard. Years later my mother donated his tombstone to the local historical museum in Yazoo City, and if any of the readers of this book wish to see it, it is to this day on honored display.