The Cat Gods

We believe in cat-keeping. It seems to us that they trade certain pleasing ways of behaving for a place to stay where they are welcome and can lie down in peace. If I do not quite believe in the god of my fathers, which was the god of the backwoods, the flying skies and the golden streets that does not mean I do not believe in the cat gods.
I can imagine the cat gods. They are small gods, and cruel ones, Like most animals in thrall to humankind, some cats prosper and some suffer, In this country we kill more of them than we cosset, and if all their lives were captured in one heaving, squealing sack, there would be more pain than ease in that sack. Yet the cat gods practice a selective mercy, A few cats they shove in my way and in the way of my wife. It is our belief that when the cat gods place a cat in your way …you must accept it. If you believe in karma, then these cats lived unblemished lives once upon a time to find themselves now under our roof. We took in the white cat that looked over the fence, the black cat that stood hungry at the door, the gray cat who limped through our backyard. We found the little tabby cat abandoned on the sidewalk, and when he cried out as we approached him, his brother cried out from a bush nearby and we scooped him up as well
It was about four in the afternoon when the neighbor came knocking at the door. She had a hard thing to do, and she did it as well as she could.
“Are all your cats at home?” she asked. A question to which she knew the answer.
“No” I said.
She said there was a cat on the side of the road. She said it might be one of ours. (Of course she knew. She was doing as well as she could.) And so I walked down the hill with her and I saw something beside the road like rags or clothing or anything wadded up and thrown away because it was of no use anymore. I picked up the pace a bit for the thing, though certain, had to be settled.
Strangely, most cats do not bleed when a car kills them. Most of them lie dead as if asleep, and that is part of the pain because it seems like they might have been saved if they had been found in time. But this one had bled profusely from the mouth, though he was warm and supple and I believe had only just been struck. His blood still flowed when I picked him up and cradled him in my arms. I carried him home up the hill as he bled onto my shirt and through my shirt onto my undershirt and through my undershirt onto my skin.
I dug him a nice hole between the pine and the oak, and I wrapped him in my shirt and curled him at the bottom. Then I waited for my wife to return. He was more her cat than mine. She had taken him from the bush where he had cried out to his brother, and she had carried him home that first time when he came silent and watching up the hill.
When she arrived, I told her directly what had happened. And after a little while we went outside to the hole and she knelt beside it and put in her hand and pulled the shirt away. She touched his fur and then she got up and I shoveled in the dirt in no particular hurry. We made no marker. Springtime came and the grass rose. Again the cat gods provided. They always do. Then sometime later we moved away.
But that was so long ago now and this is only a memory. And these are only words. And he was only a cat.