The Cat Collector

We arrived at the removal site early that morning. It was an old clapboard house that had once been bright yellow, the paint was peeling to reveal the graying wood beneath. The front window was dressed in tattered sheers and there were several cats lounging on the sill inside. I opened the door to my white ASPCA van, climbed out and greeted the rest of my team. Johnson and Lou climbed out of the second van as Michael and Miranda emerged from the third. We met on the front lawn, and began to don our protective suits.

“I hate gearing up like this,” said Michael. “I always feel like I am heading into a war zone with this stuff on.”

“Believe me; you will be thankful you have the suit, once we get inside. I was here on Tuesday to set this up and that house should be condemned,” I told him. “What’s worse is the guy still lives in there.”

Once we had our white plastic suits, gloves, goggles and breathing masks on we made our way to the front step, each carrying either a humane “live catch” trap or a pile of flat carrier boxes. The smell of ammonia emanated from the house. I rang the doorbell and we had only waited for a moment when the door opened and the owner, Frank Jackson, appeared. He was a slight man in his early forties who looked as though he had been dragged through life thus far. Frank’s thinning hair was a dirty grey, thick with grease and coated in dust. His scraggly beard grew in sparse patches across his jaw line and surrounded his mouth. His constant smoking drew attention to the cracks in his lips and to the particular manila shade of his teeth and his fingernails.

“Come in, come in.” He welcomed us, as if we were guests visiting for pleasure.

We crossed the threshold into the living room where dozens of cats were lounging on every inch of flat space available. Once they noticed we had invaded their territory there was a furious flurry of cats racing for the best hiding spots.

“Hi, Frank,” I said. “You do know we are here to collect your cats today, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he said. “I would have called you sooner, but things just kept piling up. You know how that is don’t you?” He shrugged his skinny shoulders and smiled apologetically. He bent down to pick up a large, sleek, smoky grey cat, who had been rubbing against his legs. “This is Misty,” he said introducing us to the cat. “She is my favorite. She looks like the stray kitten I gave my wife, Betty. We called the kitten Smoky, she was the start of it all, the one responsible for these little beasts. I never knew one cat could cause so much damage.” He put the cat down and it scooted across the living room floor, climbed the sheers and perched itself precariously on the curtain rod.

“Well, let’s get moving,” I told everyone, “The sooner we get started the sooner we are finished. Jackson, you and Lou start upstairs, Michael, Miranda you guys can start setting the traps up in here and I will hit the kitchen.” Our mission was to catch and transport the multitude of cats in Frank’s house to the shelter. There they would be examined by the veterinarians and we would rescue the ones we could and provide relief for the ones we couldn’t save.

The inside of the house was an utter disaster. The floors were covered in a muck of urine and feces, inches thick. The air was poisonous ammonia from the fermentation of urine. Every surface in the house was covered in a thick blanket of soft downy hair. Frank followed me into the kitchen where the ammonia was joined by the smell of rotting food. A sink full of dirty dishes contained a constant drip supplying what little water seemed to be available for the animals. There was dry cat food piled in the corner and a large black tom sat atop the pile, guarding it from the hungry hordes who dared approach.

“That’s Fat Albert, Frank said, pointing at the black cat. “Isn’t he beautiful?” I nodded. I was beginning to worry that Frank might be a problem once we actually began to take the animals away.

Frank walked over to Fat Albert and began talking to him and scratching him behind the ears. I opened a can of cat food and set the first trap of the day. While I waited for one of the cats to wander into the trap I heard a plaintive mewing from one of the cupboards.

Nestled in the corner of a cabinet with the door hanging from one hinge I found a litter of newborn kittens, a day or two old at the most. Their hairless, blind bodies were lying on a blanket of hair. There were eight in the nest, one piled on top of the next. I gently reached in and removed each kitten, placing them in one of the carrier boxes I had brought with me. There was no mother cat close and no way for me to tell which cat in the house was the rightful parent. I took the box full of babies and set them out on the lawn so they could be loaded into a van and taken to the shelter, perhaps to be saved, perhaps not.

Frank followed me out to the lawn. “What are you doing? Aren’t you going to find their mama first?” He seemed genuinely upset that these kittens were being taken and their mother was not with them.

“I can’t tell which cat in there is the mother; maybe we will find her later and reunite them at the shelter.” I told him.

Frank began to cry. “It’s not fair,” he said. “It’s just not fair to take babies away from their mother. That’s why there are so many of them you know, I just couldn’t bear to take Smokey’s babies away from her. They were the only company I had after my wife died.”

“Sorry to hear about that Frank, but there isn’t much I can do about it now. I have to get back to work.” I turned and left Frank standing on the front lawn, crying over the box of orphaned kittens.

We worked all morning, collecting the cats. Many were feral; they would rush around the room, frantically searching for the exit if approached by anyone. The best way to catch them was to set the “live catch” trap with a bit food. Once the cat entered the trap a door would drop down behind them and they were caught. The tricky part was removing them from the trap and putting them into the white collection boxes without being scratched. Lou excelled at removing the wild ones from the traps, so we just stayed out of his way whenever we heard the snap of another trap door shutting. Others, mostly the older cats, were tame and walked right up to us. Miranda began collecting these, treating them to little bits of cheese as they purred loudly in her arms and went complacently into the white boxes.

The carrier boxes piled up on the lawn until there was no longer room for any more. Miranda began loading the boxes into the back of a van. Frank, who had disappeared after his crying jag on the lawn, came out to help her. He made sure the box with the litter of kittens was one of the first in the van.

“My wife was run over by a van,” Frank said to me as he watched Miranda pull away. “She had just found out the in-vetro had worked. She called me at work all excited about the news, said she was walking to the convenience store for a newspaper. The next thing I know is the police are calling me to tell me she was dead.”

Frank turned to look at me, and then he looked at his house. “She would have been so disappointed in me for letting this happen.” Tears began streaming from his eyes again.

“Frank, why don’t you go pull yourself together? You can’t do anything more and I will let you know when we are finished,” I told him. His tears were grating on me. We were only halfway through a grueling day of gathering his collection of cats. The number of boxes on the front lawn alone was over a hundred and there were still more animals hiding in the house. The mass of lives affected by his inability to take the responsibility of getting one little kitten fixed infuriated me.

As the day wore on we continued our work removing the cats from the house. The tame older cats were now all outside and the others hid from us wherever they could fit, rafters, closets, furniture, they were everywhere. When we thought we had the situation under control one of us would walk into a room and be greeted by dozens of shining yellow eyes peeking out from the dark corners, watching our every move.

Finally about six that evening the last cat was loaded into its carrier. Michael tallied the animals and reported that we had removed over two hundred cats and kittens from the house. We were exhausted and still there was more to do. We had to load all the animals into the vans and take them to the shelter. We began to load the boxes into the vehicles when I saw Frank watching us from an upstairs window. I told the team they could take off as soon as all the vans were loaded, and then I went up to talk to Frank.

Frank was sitting in a small upstairs bedroom. I was shocked to when I entered it to find there was no evidence of the chaos of the rest of the house in this little room. It was decorated as a nursery. Against one wall was a crib with a mobile of Noah’s ark hung over the pastel checked sheets. The changing table was stocked with all the baby essentials, the top covered in photographs of Frank and his wife. In the corner lay a sleeping bag and a small pile of Frank’s possessions, reality intruding on the fantasy of what could have been.

Frank was sitting on a rocking chair, facing the window. He took a deep drag from his cigarette and as he slowly exhaled I saw the thick blue-grey smoke dancing through the air, shinning where the light from the window caressed it.

“It looks like a graveyard out there. All of those white boxes lined up, they look like tombstones.”

“Some of them might as well be,” I said. “You know some of them will have to be euthanized, don’t you?”

“I hoped you could save most of them,” he said. “They are good cats you know, I just couldn’t take care of them anymore.”

“From the looks of it you haven’t been able to take care of them for quite a while.”

“True, true,” he said. Frank paused a moment and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his flannel shirt. He lit another cigarette and stared off into the twilight sky, lost in a memory he didn’t want to share with me. “Well, it’s too late to change any of it now isn’t it?”

“Why?” I asked him, “Why did it have to come to this? If you had just taken the damn kitten down to the shelter and had the thing spayed none of this would be happening.”

“I couldn’t do that. Betty and I had tried so hard to get pregnant, when she found out the cat was expecting she was so excited. She died before that first litter was born and I didn’t have the heart to get rid of any of them. From that one litter I ended up with five more females and one male,” Frank said. He looked at me sheepishly and then averted his eyes once more. “You know what happened next, don’t you? That cat kept getting herself knocked up and then the kittens got old enough to have their own litters. Before I knew it I was surrounded.”

I watched his cigarette smoke dancing in the stale air, while I tried to imagine the depths of depression he must have gone through to let things get this out of control. I tried to think of Frank as the man in those pictures on the table, successful, happy, married, loved, but the image that kept coming back to me was this sad, broken man rocking as he watched his only companions being loaded up and taken away.

“Stormy died last summer,” Frank added. “I found her dead at the bottom of the stairs. I buried her underneath Mrs. Mantilla’s lilac bush, the same exact place I found her as a stray kitten. After that I just gave up, and let the cats take over the house, everywhere but this room. Now it just seems so empty.”

We watched as the last of the boxes were loaded into the back of my van. “I had better get going,” I said.

He nodded, “Yeah, its getting late.” He got up and escorted me through the now deserted house one last time. As we emerged from the house the sun was setting, bright orange and yellow across the darkening purple sky.

“Do you think I could keep just one?” He asked, a wisp of hope daring to enter his eyes. He was finally realizing when I left that night he would be truly alone.

“No, I’m sorry you can’t.”

He winced as I slammed the back door of the van shut on the cats and watched me climb into the driver side door. As I drove away, I could see him standing on the lawn watching me leave.




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