It was during the time that our family suffered a series of misfortunes too numerous and dismal to mention that we and our mother found ourselves homeless and living out of our car.

As chance would have it, a farmer in our district who had recently built himself a vanilla-coloured brick monstrosity, and was feeling uncharacteristically generous, offered us rent-free a derelict outbuilding on his property to live in.

This was not only a farming district, it was coastal, and the old house, which had no doors or windows with glass intact, was beside the ocean. The tide came up close to its timber walls, a prime reason it had been abandoned as a residence years ago.

We could not drive our car down the rutted and heavily treed track that led to the house. We left the car ten minutes from the house and, loaded up with our belongings, we set off on foot through spotted gums, the air fragrant with tea-tree blossom and the salty ocean.

It was here that we met the cat.

This story appeared in Quadrant‘s December 2017 edition.
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She stood in the doorway, large and black all over. She had no idea that she was a cat. She did not move to let us by. She stood her ground. Her shoulders filled the doorway. She looked us over. One large, four small, she seemed to calculate. Moments passed, we held our breath, and then the cat lost interest and walked regally away into the bush.

The cat did not accept any food from us, though we offered her milk and in our monthly buying trip to town we bought cat food. She declined all our offers.

She slept inside the house, always on our beds. Over the next year we were given two other cats, but she showed no inclination to befriend them. She did, however, like dogs. All our friends had dogs and they always brought them along on visits. She greeted them, sat amongst them, and overpowered them. It was obvious they thought her one of their species, a superior dog.

We stopped being curious about what she ate. She never brought home a catch and the old house was free of rats and mice. Since our mother was concentrating on feeding us, she was anxious to get her garden going and pleased that the cat needed only a bowl of fresh water from the tank.

At first we called the cat Colette, blinded by her theatrical feline presence. She never answered to this name and ceased all eye contact when we tried to make it stick.

Finally, we called her Mrs Black.

She became famous in the district. They even talked about her in town. Mrs Black sightings were a major topic of conversation. She was the cat belonging to that odd writer woman who lived with her four children in the old house with no electricity right on the ocean.

Mrs Black. She wandered widely and had other homes that she would stay in for days at a time. If she was walking near a homestead and someone called out, “Hey, Mrs Black!” she would stride into the house and stay a while.

Once she was away for a couple of weeks. We missed her badly. When she came back she walked through our house—still with no doors—and settled herself in the back bedroom where my mother slept. That night she had kittens. Eight of them fought for space at her belly and for the first time she accepted the milk we collected each day from our farmer neighbour.

When the kittens were a few days old she started disappearing again, often during the night. In the morning she would be cleaning herself in the sun until every square inch of her black coat shimmered. Our mother would whisper as if to a lover, “What an exquisite, beautiful cat you are, Mrs Black.”

The cat would arch her head against our mother and they would both stay a while, locked together, eyes closed in the morning sun.

One morning at dawn, down the track, now made wider by constant use, came a group of farmers on horseback, a few of their sons on motorbikes at the rear.

“We want Mrs Black!”

Our mother recognised a posse. “She’s not here,” she told them. “What’s the matter?”

“She’s killing our chooks and now she’s started on the sheep.”

They all had guns. They came into the house, saw the kittens, and waited for Mrs Black’s return. My mother started the fire and made them endless cups of tea. We did not have enough cups so the men passed the cups between them. We children were excited by their fervour.

“Mrs Black’s a killer,” they told us with authority. The sensitive ones tried to break it to us gently that they were here to shoot her.

Mrs Black did not return. The men rode off; they had other chores to get on with, they told each other.

After the sun had gone down, Mrs Black came home. We children saw her go to our mother’s room, stepping lightly over the timber floorboards. Our mother removed the tiny bell she had fixed around Mrs Black’s neck.

Next day at dawn the men returned. Mrs Black and the kittens were gone. The men were angry. They were fed up, they said, with the cat and us. They shook their fists at our mother then they turned their horses around and went home.

Mrs Black did not return.

Our house was comfortable now. We children were doing correspondence lessons from the education department every day. Our mother wrote a story that won a major newspaper short story contest; the prize bought us new doors for the house. The garden was full of tomatoes and lettuces and herbs that we watered from the tank.

“We made it,” said our mother every now and then in the middle of everything.

One day, after we had been to town to buy supplies for the next month, we returned as happy as we’d ever been. But as we came upon our house we got the shock of our lives. Men with a bulldozer were knocking the house down.

“It’s not your house,” reminded the farmer who had given us the house rent-free. He stood there and allowed us to load our car with our life. “You can get a caravan in the caravan park real cheap.”

We piled our belongings onto the roof rack and filled our washing basket with food from the garden before the bulldozer wiped it out.

Our bad times didn’t last. Our mother bought some land in the mountains in the middle of the state forest. There we lived in a house we built ourselves from river rock. Our garden was filled with fruit trees and sunflowers, asparagus and strawberries, and we were richer than anyone had a right to be.

We were about seventy-five miles from our old home that had been bulldozed, but even so everyone in this new district knew our story.

One day our mother was on her knees in the marjoram, freeing it from the grasses that were strangling it; the sun was warming her back.

She felt a slight pressure against her hip and, thinking it was one of us children, she turned sleepily with a smile. She whispered and her voice was lost in the mountain air.

“Oh, what an exquisite, beautiful cat you are, Mrs Black.”

Lin van Hek is a Melbourne writer and artist

3 thoughts on “Mrs Black

  • Bwana Neusi says:

    Years ago, we inherited an old ginger tom cat, who use to wait until our cat had eaten most of his meal, then like a wraith the old Tom would slide past the bole emptying its content on the run. the three girls got used to “Old Ginger” and after several weeks combed the neighbourhood asking if any one owned him. It appeared that his original owners had moved months previously taking the cat with them, but he had returned to his old neighbourhood. And so Old Ginger took ownership of our family.
    He became very possessive and when Mum returned from shops, the first thing to do was pick up the cat and make a fuss of him. Failure to do so would have him literally walk up her front using his claws for traction. On another occasion he found the three young girls together in the bath and decided that they were in danger in all that water. He then proceeded to try and hook them out of the bath.

    We moved house to location some distance away and we were concerned that he would try to return to the old address, so we kept him inside for three days. But he refused to use the dirt box and his bladder head swollen to the size of a golf ball. What to do? I cradled Old Ginger in my arms and walked around the back garden talking to him and trying to get him used to his new home. Then I looked down to see a tiny stream of his urine streaming out, so I quickly walked him around the fence line marking his territory for him. “Fait accompli” – he had his own new territory which he now jealously guarded. On one occasion a german shepherd wandered into the front garden, and when Old Ginger saw the dog, he raced out and tore of after the poor dog who took off.

    We never really own cats do we?

  • vic of gero says:

    Cats are cool. Dogs are wonderful and loyal creatures but cats live their lives on their terms. I have two cats, a kitten now grown up but a lot of fun and her mother who I didn’t want but took on after her owner, my mother-in-law died.
    Mummy Cat as I call her is a winner. Very affectionate and perhaps because she was a stray to start with, has no desire to be outside other than for calls of nature and maybe to catch some sun now and then. If I’m in my bed, she is too, if I am at my desk, as I am now, she is comfortably curled on the printer. She rarely meows, unlike her vocal daughter but when she does she really wants something.
    She is just an ordinary moggie, a grey tabby to be precise, who like all my cats has made one trip to the vet to be desexed and will not make another but moggies, I suppose because of their wider genetic base, tend to be sturdy and resilient. The usually thrive until old age catches them and then they pass on or disappear as cats do.
    She walks with a sailor’s gait and may have once been skittled by a car and despite her happy nature, usually wears a worried look. She had four kittens, two males and two females and they too are grey tabby cats. My daughter has one of the males who is a lighter shade and very handsome. The daughter I have also has a striking appearance and a long face as though some Siamese is in her genes. The other two are homed with a friend, the other female who looks very much like my girl and the other male, a ‘fraidy cat boofhead and the only one who is not handsome.
    I have rarely been without a cat in my life. My home seems incomplete without one or two.

  • SB says:

    We’ve somehow ended up with 7 — all rescues. They bring so much joy into our lives, mainly because they are not high-maintenance. They’re there when we have time for them, but when we’re busy a stern ‘Daddy’s busy’ sends them on their way. You just have to watch out that they don’t claim ownership of you by peeing on your laptop.

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