Calpurnius

Last night I may have heard a ghost.

I was enjoying cool breezes and Taco Bell at the Wolf Creek picnic area at Crab Orchard Lake when I heard what I thought was the mewling of a kitten. I couldn’t quite convince myself that it was a kitten, however, although I have seen a cat there before. Two years ago someone abandoned a kitten at that very area. It was, in fact, this same time of year. People fed it for weeks. I like to think someone adopted it before the weather became cold. I like to think that.

However, that cat wasn’t in my mind as I sat there last night. I wasn’t even sure the sound I heard was a kitten. You hear a lot of sounds there at Wolf Creek. The gulls gathering for the winter. The herons. Crow mocking me for wanting to take its picture. People fishing along the banks. The fish themselves jumping at bugs skimming the water.

You hear all that and you hear nothing because you’re outside and the lake is calming and the sky is mostly open to the horizon.

It’s a place where you can think if you practice not being disturbed.

There was mewling.

“Kitty?” I said to the tangled brush.

Nothing.

I was fooling myself, amusing myself on a Friday night.

So I sat and finished my meal and I read a couple Clark Ashton Smith short stories on my phone. I read on my phone these days. Kindle for Android. I never imagined myself giving up paper, but I never understood how convenient electronic books could be. The only paper I may ever use in pocket again could be that in my Moleskine.

I read. I listened to the wind. I thought.

Then it was time to leave, and I heard the mewling again in the brush near my car. More on the wind than the sound itself. As if the wind were carrying the sound to me from far away as it did the voices of the fishermen and women on the far side of the bank. I still was not fully thinking of the noise as a cat. Then I saw something which caused me to freeze in my tracks.

It was a tuna can which had been licked clean. That one thing suddenly made the prospect of a cat completely real.

“Kitty?” I said.

“Did you hear it too?” a woman with a fishing pole said from near the benches, a half dozen paces aside.

“I think so,” I said.

“I heard it,” she said. “I haven’t seen it, but I heard it.”

“Too scared to come out,” her boyfriend said.

I nodded. Strays are like that. When people abandon them to the wild, they must lose all trust of people. No longer home. Out in the wild. Forced to fend with the wild things which have never known home. Forced without food. Without water. Could you trust something that did that to you?

I looked at the can. We — the folks that had voluntarily took care of the other abandoned cat — had brought cans of tuna too. I looked at the brush, watching for glinting cat’s eyes looking back at me.

“Kitty?”

Nothing.

I drove home, and the early evening faded into bedtime, and then into the next day again.

Saturday. The bright blue days of late August and early September. I remember 9/11 being one of those days. The sky with that incredible blue and clarity that come from being born of those first few longer, cooler evenings. Saturday was a day like that. I took to the road with my camera, but I knew my tour would wind down at Wolf Creek on Crab Orchard. And this time I was coming with bait,

I stopped at a grocery store in Carterville and bought two cans of Friskies and a little bowl for water. I drove to Wolf Creek on Crab Orchard. I set the canned food and drink bowl three feet from the edge of the brush line. Then I went back to a picnic table and waited.

Frankly, I expected a little stray to pounce from the brush as soon as the gentle breeze took the scent of the food to it.

Nothing.

“Kitty?”

Nothing.

I waited. The day had grown hotter, being closer to August than September. But I waited through the sun and heat. Half an hour. The full hour. An hour and a half. Just watching the bait — my phone had gone nearly dead from my voyueristic ramblings at the CoOp earlier in the day and was in the car charging, my electronic books with it. I liked the idea of waiting out the heat. I told myself I was building patience, though I was up and down taking pictures of this dragonfly or that moth.

As I was up and down, I could not help but notice the scent of death in the air. But just in one spot. About two paces northwest of the trash can and three west of the rocks which keep cars from driving from the parking lot onto the point itself. I thought it had to be from the trashcan. Surely someone had thrown fish in there and they were stinking of the heat. But standing next to the trashcan, I smelled nothing. It was only over here. Just a little further. See! Right there.

I could smell death there and no where else, no matter how many times or which way I crossed the area.

It was as peculiar as the mewling which had only come upon the wind.

Speaking of, I heard no mewling at all on Saturday. Smelling death and hearing nothing, I could not help but wonder if a coyote, a fox, or perhaps even a bobcat had found the little kitten.

Then something else occured to me.

Maybe there hadn’t been a kitten yesterday, but a kitten from years ago. Perhaps the little black cat from the past had strayed into the present in what now must be some ethereal form.

A ghost.

I like to think that ghosts, if they exist, are the remnants of strong past events trapped in the quantum foam of reality. Echos calling to us from the past. In this case, mewling and scents.

The mewling of a little cat which had been lured from the brush over there, across the dry brown grass, over the gravel path, to here. Here where it smelled of death. Oh what had happened here when no one was looking? What made that sick scent linger?

The picnic area felt a little too lonely then. I looked at the sky, clouds rolling in, the sun beginning to set. It was time to be heading home, before dark came quick. Yes, before dark.

I left the can of food and the bowl of water. I’ll go back tomorrow to see if they’re still there. In the morning.