Romeo, the male long haired tabby cat we'd brought home from the dump, was never openly demonstrative like Colette was, but I had built a rapport with him. It wasn't that he was wild; he just wasn't an attention hog. He did have one very interesting habit, though: he enjoyed perching his large body on top of the screen door. You could open and close the door, and he'd remain up there, balancing on the narrow edge. Obviously, our screen door didn't close all the way. I thought it was a pretty interesting thing for him to do and found it amusing. He just sat there all day, a fat furry lump on top of the door.

It was my job to take care of all the the cats, and usually the dogs and chickens as well. If we ate any meat, such as poultry, I'd trim the carcass of every digestible portion, right down to cutting off the spongy ends of the long bones, and simmer these in a coffee can on the wood stove with some water. This gravy would then be poured over the cheap dog food, which was what both the cats and the dogs ate. Hamburger grease, leftover milk, anything like that was saved for the cats and dogs. The chickens got any vegetable scraps, fruit peels, and so on. Sometimes the cats would jump down into the chicken pen and gnaw on old carrot tops and other unlikely items; once I was absentminded and dumped the scraps for the cats into the chicken pens. One of the hens promptly picked up a chicken leg bone and began running around with it in her beak! Happy liked to eat apples when we picked them for free. I don't know if our animals were particularly hungry or if they were just opportunists.

Penny, Raphah's goat, didn't like being away from him. He didn't always tie her out, because he liked to ride around on her back. This sounds cruel, and maybe it was, but Penny was a really large goat, and Raphah was very small for his age. At 11 or 12 years old, he was still tiny. He worked very hard and could lift a surprising amount of weight; he was strong, but you would never guess it from looking at him, or his age, either. Anyway, when he went inside, she missed him, and would run up to the front door and stand up against it, with her googly goat eyes and her pendulous ears flapping as she looked for him through the glass. It was really funny that she stood there almost like a human. One day though, she jumped up too enthusiastically and broke the glass out of the front door. Then it wasn't funny anymore. We had to replace the glass with a piece of old plywood, and the house grew even darker inside without the light from the front door.

Dad didn't like Romeo sitting up on the edge of the screen door. He would sometimes slam the door to try to knock the cat off. Sometimes that worked, but Romeo's sense of balance was pretty amazing. Dad began to say that the cat was like a gargoyle, perched up there like that. He had a point. Romeo was as calm and impassive and unmoving as a gargoyle, and his elevated position added to the resemblance. It wasn't much of a stretch from there for Dad to conclude that the cat was evil, that it was a demon or that it had a demon. One day I came outside to find Dad and Raphah running around the house chasing something. Dad had a gun. He was trying to shoot Romeo. I went back inside and out the back door where I usually met the cats to feed them on the roof of the firewood lean to. Maybe I could save him if they didn't see me. It wasn't long before he came tearing around the corner and met me eye to eye, terrified and with a look of panic and betrayal on his face, holding up a wounded, bleeding paw. They had shot him and more or less missed, only wounding him. They came tearing around the corner too, and he fled and ran under the house. They got down on their bellies and tried to pursue him, but it was dark under there and they couldn't see anything. That night, Mom didn't sleep very well. All night long, she heard Romeo crying under the house, under her bedroom. She felt bad about it, thought Dad was making a mistake. Of course, he wouldn't listen. He had meant to kill an animal, and it got away wounded, a typical slippery maneuver for any demon. Later he and Raphah caught it and took him back to the dump, and Raphah shot the cat himself, in the head. He had been so excited an eager to kill it, but when he came back, he looked sickened. He said that when he shot it, its eyes popped out of its head. All I could think of was the expression on the cat's face when he ran into me, a look that said, "How could you? How could you betray me?". It wasn't my fault at all, but I felt guilty and troubled by it. Maybe if I hadn't worked on making him friendly, he wouldn't have sat up on the door like that and he'd still be OK.