An Unmatchable Cat
I was sick that winter. It was inconvenient because my big room was due to be whitewashed. I was put in the little room at the end of the house. The house, nearly but not quite on the top of the hill, always seemed as if it might slide off into the corn fields below. This tiny room had a door, always open, and windows, always open, in spite of the windy cold of a July whose skies were an unending light clear blue. The sky, full of sunshine; the fields, sunlit.

But cold, very cold. The cat, a bluish grey Persian, arrived purring on my bed, and settled down to share my sickness, my food, my pillow, my sleep. When I woke in the mornings my face turned to half-frozen sheets; the outside of the fur blanket on the bed was cold; the smell of fresh whitewash from next door was cold and clean; the wind lifting and laying the dust outside the door was cold-but in the curve of my arm, a light purring warmth, the cat, my friend.

At the back of the house a wooden tub was set into the earth, outside the bathroom, to catch the bathwater. No pipes carrying water to taps on that farm; water was fetched by ox-drawn cart when it was needed, from the well about two miles away. Through the months of the dry season the only water for the garden was the dirty bathwater. The cat fell into this tub when it was full of hot water.

She screamed, was pulled out into a cold wind, washed in permanganate, for the tub was filthy, and held leaves and dust as well as soapy water, was dried and put into my bed to warm. But she grew burning hot with fever. She had pneumonia. We gave her what medicine we had in the house, but that was before antibiotics, and so she died. For a week she lay in my arm purring, purring,in a rough, trembling little voice that became weaker, then was silent;

licked my hand, opened huge green eyes when I called her name and begged her to live; closed them, died, and was thrown into the deep old well-over a hundred feet deep it was-which had gone dry, because the underground water streams had changed their course one year.
That was it. Never again. And for years I matched cats in friends' houses, cats in shops, cats on farms, cats in the street, cats on walls, cats in memory, with that gentle, blue-grey purring creature which for me was the cat, the Cat, never to be replaced.

And besides, for some years my life did not include extras, unnecessaries, ornaments. Cats had no place in an existence spent always moving from place to place, room to room. A cat needs a place as much as it needs a person to make its own.
And so it was not until twenty-five years later my life had room for a cat.