To Hear the Shepherd’s Voice

I woke up anxious as ever.

The day might come when I don’t immediately panic and pray to God not to hurt me when I open my eyes. But I don’t expect that day any time soon. Morning is when I rocket back into consciousness and panic that I’m going to hell. Jesus, please be patient. I’m doing my best. Please don’t hurt me. 

With the morning petitions finished, I stumbled down to get my coffee.

Charlie the cat’s breakfast was still on the porch.

This isn’t like her. She shows up at seven in the morning, near the time Adrienne leaves for school, and meows until she gets a can of Friskies in gravy and a handful of dry food. Sometimes, she comes back at ten o’clock, closer to when I get up, to see if she can con another breakfast out of me. Sometimes, when we put out her dinner, she doesn’t come for it until close to night, but she doesn’t ever skip breakfast.

Michael was at home on his day off. He said he hadn’t seen Charlie all morning.

The anxiety rose in my throat once again.

She was never my cat to begin with. I didn’t want a cat; she just came. But I’ve gotten so used to her. I went out and looked all around the garden, saying “Here kitty kitty,” but the cat did not appear. This, also, didn’t make any sense. Charlie rockets onto the porch when I open the door, and always follows me around to the garden. She likes to hide under the lilac bush or stalk ghosts in the neighbor’s yard while I’m tending the garden, and then she comes to sit with me when I rest on the back steps. This time, she was nowhere to be found.

Rain began pelting the ground just then. I went inside, reluctantly, hoping she was hiding from the downpour.  When I left to pick Adrienne up from school, she didn’t come out and meow at me to be back soon. She’s deeply offended whenever I get in the car, and always happy to greet me when I come back.

When Adrienne got in, I asked if Charlie had been there when she put out that can of food. No, she hadn’t.

That meant that nobody had seen the cat since ten o’clock the night before.

“Maybe she went back to the Dodgers’ house,” I said. But I knew she hadn’t. She hides when the children come over, because they frighten her and she likes my place better.

We drove past a stray dog, a great big short-haired bully breed. Lots of people around here have them. They make wonderful pets when they’re trained properly and kept on the leash, but somebody always lets theirs wander the block unattended. I thought of the time a neighbor’s dog had slipped out of her collar and scampered onto our property. Charlie arched her back and spit at her, thinking she was defending Adrienne. That was just an excited poodle, not a real guard dog who might take offense.

At home, the food was still untouched. Adrienne looked under the porch and around the basement, but the cat was nowhere to be found.

I went up and down the block, calling her name. It was too muddy for the children to be outside playing. Jimmy’s boy was inside his own house, and Charlie wasn’t in his yard. The Dodgers where in their house, and there was no sign of any cat.

I went back around my house, between my yard and the haunted one. I even stepped across the boundary line, to see if she’d somehow gotten trapped near the groundhog hole under the porch. But she wasn’t there.

Finally, I was back at my own house, near the cedar bushes.

“Charlie?” I called one more time.

“Meow!”

She’s only been part of the family for a few months, but I would know that “meow” anywhere, just as she knows her new name.

“Charlie, where are you? Are you hurt?”

“Meow!”

I got on my hands and knees in the mud.  Had she gotten into the groundhog trap? No, the trap was empty. Was she under the porch after all? No, she was not. Wherever she was, she was invisible.

“Charlie? I need you to keep talking to me, all right? Keep talking so I can find you.”

“Meow? Meow!”

“That’s right, keep talking! Are you hurt?”

“Meow.”

Adrienne was coming out the door just as I happened to look up. A gray and white shadow moved, somewhere in the mess of the cedar bushes and maple saplings that grow up past the second story. We asked the landlord’s handyman to remove them twice before they knock down the porch, but he hasn’t been back.

“Charlie? Are you on the porch roof?”

“Meow!”

“Come down here!”

She hesitated, so I went and got the dish of cat food. “Here kitty kitty! Charlie, come down!”

The cat “came down,” in the most ungraceful way I’ve ever seen a cat come down. There was one leonine bound, and then a crash as she broke the sapling branch and went tumbling under the cedar bushes.

A moment later she was out of the bushes and scurrying up to me, an ungodly muddy mess. Attached to that loose floppy indoor cat collar the Dodgers gave her, was a gordian knot of chicken wire as big as she was. She’d gotten her collar tangled on a sharp metal wire, and in struggling to free herself, she’d pulled the fencing out. Terrified at the sensation of something behind her, she’d fled to our yard and somehow climbed up onto the roof to get help at my window, but the wire had prevented her from climbing back down. She’d been up there all day, in the rain and thunder and lightning with no food or shelter. It was only my insistence that got her to dare climbing back, where the wires had gotten in the way again.

“Oh Charlie!” I soothed, sitting down so she could jump into my lap. “Oh Charlie barley pudding and pie.”

Charlie rubbed against my shirt, smearing mud everywhere, licking me as if she were a dog, while Adrienne untangled the wire and got her free.

We went out that night for a breakaway collar and a bag of treats.

She came out to greet the car as she always does, happy to see me, a bit offended that I disappeared. Adrienne cut off the old red collar and snapped on the new, deep green one, while I fed her a salmon flavored meat stick from the pet shop.

I thought of that poem in a book of children’s poetry I had growing up– the one that ends “I was so happy I could have grown a tail, and wagged it.” 

I thought of the Gospels.

 Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?  And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders  and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’   I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I will lay down my life for the sheep.  I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd.

I wasn’t afraid just then.

I couldn’t possibly be afraid at that moment. I could hear the Shepherd’s Voice, and the voice wasn’t angry.

Any God who could make a day like this, must be a very good God.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.