The Big Cat Nap

up, ready for a cat gossip.
    “This pink is so soft.” Miranda admired the color as she planted one of the bushes.
    “It gave me an idea for the house,” Harry said. “What if I planted roses all along the first fence between the barn and the pastures? I’d start with the deepest pink closest to the barn, and each successive rose would be a lighter shade until the very end, when it would be so pale, almost white.”
    Miranda and the others stopped for a moment.
    “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that,” said Alicia, who’d been all over the world. Now she was on her knees, putting in a yellow bush.
    “I figure if it doesn’t turn out as I like, I can always rearrange the bushes to a more conventional color scheme. I don’t know. Just sort of hit me.”
    “Great idea.” Susan thought maybe she’d try it at home, too, but she wanted to use white roses with slightly different colors deep down on the petal.
    “Where are we going to plant the pyracanthas?” BoomBoom asked.
    “Dee’s plan, which is in my truck if you want to see the drawings, is to have those on the building walls that Herb can see from his office window. There are a few already there. We have to train them with, uh, espalier. What do you call it?”
    “Fish wire and a trellis.” Alicia laughed, since this technique used heavy cord or wire to support the growing branches.
    “Right. I didn’t do so well in French,” Harry ruefully remembered.
    “Because you hated the teacher,” Susan laughed.
    “Every time Mademoiselle Suchet said”—BoomBoom imitated their high school teacher’s high-pitched voice—“
‘Ouvrez la porte
,
’
Harry would stand up and go open the door just to piss her off.”
    “Harry?” Miranda chided her. “How could you do that to poor old Mademoiselle Suchet? Poor woman could barely walk, bless her soul.”
    “Such a pill!” Harry wrinkled her nose. “I did learn enough to read a menu in a French restaurant.”
    As the humans and cats talked and laughed, Tucker, nose to the ground, followed the various human scents throughout the enclosed graveyard. She’d follow one or another, inevitably winding up at a grave with flowers against the headstone. The intrepid dog was surprised by how many people had been to the graveyard in just the last two days.
    Lifting her perfect corgi head, she said,
“Lots of traffic in here.”
    Elocution responded,
“The whole Petrus family comes once a week since Georgette Petrus passed.”
    “Had to be one hundred years old,”
Cazenovia giggled.
    “She looked one hundred,”
Lucy Fur chimed in.
    “Humans obey strict rules about their dead. Even if the person dies at sea, there are these rules and prayers and ceremony.”
Elocution knew these things because Herb had to provide funeral services—although not at sea, of course.
    Pewter saucily tossed her head.
“Wasteful. Think of all the animals that could eat those bodies. What good does all that protein do moldering in a coffin?”
    Mrs. Murphy thoughtfully said,
“That’s true if the bodies are relatively young, but old Georgette was so full of drugs. Any animal that ate her would probably die, too.”
    They giggled, then Lucy Fur added,
“Poppy reads a lot about other religions. He read this article aloud to us about Parsis in India. I think that’s what you call them. They put their dead up on stilts, kind of on a canvas or something, and vultures come and eat them. It’s part of their religion. Well, the vultures are dying from a rare bird disease, but not from the human bodies which they’ve eaten for centuries. Anyway, the Parsis won’t change their ritual, and without the vultures, all these rotten bodies are lying above people’s heads in the hot Indian sun. It’s crazy.”
    Pewter wrinkled her nose.
“Revolting.”
Her eyes brightened.
“Want to hear something really revolting?”
    “Can hardly wait,”
Tucker drily replied.
    “Years ago at Halloween, I found a severed head in a pumpkin. It hadn’t gone off yet, but the hair was full of pumpkin mush and the mouth spilled out pumpkin seeds.”
Pewter used the old expression “gone off” for the beginnings of decay.
    “I was there.”
Mrs. Murphy didn’t remember it quite as Pewter did, since Pewter made herself the center of attention.
    “I was there, too,”
Tucker piped up.
“The head was gross.”
    “I miss everything,”
Elocution whined.
    “You weren’t born yet,”
Cazenovia sniffed.
    Reverend Jones walked out from the