The Barn Cat

I feel the decaying wood creak and crumble beneath my feet. Despite this, the floor is surprisingly stable. Although long abandoned to the summer storms of Kansas, which blew through broken doors to toss about unfurling hay bales at their mercy, the foundational beams are as strong as the day my father built them. He once prided himself on spotless wooden floors, on a tidy barn free somehow from flies and cobwebs. Now, old grass and mud storm swept from the grounds outside have molded like clay into the cracks between the dusty wood planks, as if they had always belonged there.

The hand built structure stands alone along the grassy acres, a solemn shrine to my own personal tragedy. A fire took the main house, its punishing blaze spread across the cornfields and wheat fields, devouring all into its flames, leaving a burnt carcass of what was once a thriving farm. The barn had been built on the creek bed, clung to the far edge of the property. In this, it was spared the fiery fate of the rest of the land.

I don't know why I came back here.

Outside of the barn, about six steps away from the unhinged doors, seven stones sit in a tidy pile. It's impressive, after all these years, that those stones have remained, steadfast and loyal to the creature they memorialize. They're smaller than I remember. Smooth little pebbles, probably picked up from the bottom of the drought dried creek bed. It's crazy to think about how much of my life has been altered by seven little stones.

It began in the summer of 1979. The rainstorms had been particularly severe that spring, resulting in a troublesome nest of mice setting up camp in the barn. They drove my father to the brink of his already frail sanity. Every morning he'd enter the barn to find the little rodents had robbed the chickens of their feed and contaminated the horse stable with their excrement.

The way he always told the story, he came upon the creature by pure serendipity. he had been ambling between bars in town, halfway through his usual stupor, when he saw a feral cat tiptoeing carefully between two alleyway dumpsters. She was focused, her unusually bright yellow eyes trained on a crippled rat about a half foot before her. Ever so gracefully, she pounced onto her weakened prey. My father sat in that alleyway half sober, entranced as he watched the cat batting the rat's half dead body between her paws as if playing some innocent game.

My father saw the answers to his prayers that night

He enticed the emaciated animal into his truck with the promising allure of canned tuna. He brought her out to the edge of our property, where the old barn stood, and set her loose. As he had hoped, the warm interior of the barn house kept her from escaping into the vast woods that lined our acres. In the brisk night fall, the restless cat would tirelessly hunt down the rats that scurried freely under the blanket of darkness. In trade, she received warm milk, food and shelter. So it was, that a street wise stray became our loyal barn cat, guarding the old barn from unpleasant and unwanted guests.

When the dawn broke, and the rooster began its daily croaking, the barn cat was nowhere to be seen. She hid herself away amongst the large rolled hay bales in the barn's loft. She was a nighttime predator. The only proof of her existence were two glowing yellow eyes shifting against the lantern lit blackness of the dusk.

My brother was terrified of the cat. Before her arrival, the barn house had been our merciful escape. In its seclusion we found a place free from our father's sour temper and our mother's constant fussing. We had the space there to fantasize and play. One day, we would be pirates, the next war pilots, or whatever our young hearts desired. After our father returned with the cat, my brother stopped coming to the barn house. He resented her for robbing him of his refuge away from the house, but he didn't have the confidence to do anything about it. He'd make up sudden excuses as to why he didn't want to play. It gets too hot during the day. At night it was always too cold. He disappeared further into himself, consumed with his gothic drawings and it felt like he began to fall away from me.

It was a lonely summer without my brother to play with, so I set a plan in motion. I brought him into the barn, kicking and screaming. He cried, begging to go, swearing the cat would scratch him. "Stay put." I commanded. hoping the three years of age I had on him would convince him to obey me. He did as I asked, though tears began to well in the corner of his dark grey eyes.

A man on a mission, I grabbed a reaper off the wall. "Follow me." I commanded once more, and though his face held confusion and fear, the younger brother obliged. I climbed the latter up to the loft, where I knew the cat hid away in the sun soaked hours. I began to wildly swing the reaper around, trying to startle her out of her slumber.

"Don't! You'll make it mad!" my brother cried. His eyes shed tears of wild fear. In fact, he was right. I could hear a sharp hissing and suddenly the cat launched from her nest amongst some softened hay. She was territorial at first, fighting for control of her space. She charged toward me, baring her teeth, but I did not relent my swinging. Soon my wild movements had forced the cat into a claustrophobic corner of the loft. Her hissing turned into a whine, and fear gripped her strange yellow eyes. She knew in that moment that she was trapped.

At first I felt victorious, that my brother had seen first hand--this cat was no monster. She was as fearful for her life as he had been. When I saw the cat's face, however I began to feel a pit form in my stomach. I analyzed the dark sickness in my motivations, and as I stared at this helpless creature before me, I felt a deep swell of regret.

I quickly dropped the reaper, feeling my point had been made. I was surprised when my brother picked it back up from the ground, returning it's sharp point toward the cat's quaking form. The reflection within his eyes was something new and foreign to me. In the past, his eyes often found their way to the floor, unwilling to meet anyone's gaze. He'd often look listlessly beyond the blood orange horizon as if he was seeing a bleak future that had already long been determined.

In this moment, however, his eyes shone bright with wonderment. There was a gleeful smile in his gaze that had been lost long ago. I'd almost find it endearing, if the source of that glee was not laced with the malice he was enacting.

There in that moment, standing above the small cat, as our father had so often stood above him, my brother tasted his first feeling of power.

And even in the gruesome reality of that scene, he liked it.

I thought nothing of it, then. After all, my plan had worked. My brother no longer held a fear of the barn, and we returned to our fantasies, fanciful and free in our isolated youth.

Eight weeks later, when the thick heat of July gave way to the stark breeze of late August, my father found the cat's body twisted up against the fence outside of the barn. The poor creature had been trampled to death, at least that was my father's assumption. "Probably just caught Betsy's hoof." he casually shrugged, referring to our only horse. He didn't think too much beyond that assumption. He buried the cat right where he found her, and moved about his life unchanged.

"Shouldn't it have some kind of grave?" my brother asked, which surprised me, because I thought he hated the damn thing. But ultimately I agreed that we should mark the spot. It seemed so cold to let the creature dissolve beneath the ground without a second thought from anyone. When I returned the next day, my brother had already found seven similarly shaped stones and laid them neatly upon the freshly turned dirt. "So we'll always remember." he said with a smile.

I found my thoughts consumed by the fate of the feral barn cat. I thought about how odd it was that we found her outside of the barn, if she had indeed been trampled by the horse. After all, Betsy was always kept secure in the stable, and our father would beat us with a wooden paddle if we ever even thought about taking her out.

So how did the beige fur of the cat end up matted with dried blood, tangled by a fence post?

My curiosity irritated my father. As far as he was concerned, the cat had served her purpose and he had no interest in dwelling in her passing. But I found it odd.

My brother spent a great deal of time visiting the self-made gravesite. He'd sit out there for hours with his sketch pad, disappearing into himself. It confused me how he could feel so much emotion toward an animal he always swore he hated.

Suddenly I was holding pieces of a puzzle that refused to fit together.

Eventually my curiosity waned. I got bored of the mystery or some other obsession crossed my mind, but over time the barn cat became just another hazy memory in the ever fading sequence of childhood. My days continued as normal. My brother became even further withdrawn, hardly leaving his room at all. My father drank his days away in an attempt to hold the failing farm together. And my mother worried for us all, as she was always best at.

Six years and seven days from the death of the barn cat, our farmhouse caught fire. No one saw what happened. One moment everything was as it had always been, and the next everything was gone. I had been away at school when I received the tragic news. I returned home to face was I had lost.

The farm was gone, decimated. The house, an ash of charred remains. The cornfields and wheat fields scorched like hellfire had swept through them. It was a desolate and disturbing sight to behold.

The rescue workers found the burned remains of my parents. They were found together, and I hoped that they were able to give each other comfort in their final moments. I waited with bated breath, anticipating the news that my brother's body had been found.

The breath never came.

At first I was relieved. By some stroke of luck, my brother managed to be somewhere else, and maybe I didn't have to be completely alone. But the more I thought about it, the less it made sense. I had driven over a hundred miles to be here when this happened. If he was just staying somewhere in town, he should've been there.

The post-mortem report on my parents was explosive. The coroner concluded that my father had been dead before he was burned. His body was so badly damaged that the cause of death was inconclusive. But because my father's body protected my mother's, enough of her skull remained to conclude that she had been bludgeoned to death.

And in an instant all of those disparate puzzle pieces from six years before began to fit perfectly into place.

My brother had killed the barn cat. And then he killed our parents. The police went on a manhunt to find him, but he had disappeared into the wind as easily as he always vanished into himself.

The case went cold, and I was forced to face the reality of what my life had been. I tried to turn the events over in my head, to examine them as if I was a third party with no emotional stakes in the story.

It took four years before my brother was finally caught. They found him on the old property, now a swampy wetland, sitting in front of a pile of seven stones. I don't understand why he chose to come back. Why then, after all that time. Why return to the scene of the crime? And then I thought about the cat's gravesite, how insistent my brother was of its creation, and I finally understood. He needed to relive it.

And I guess he didn't care that I'd have to relive it too.

Yesterday my brother was finally put to death after thirteen years on death row. I keep attempting to sort my feelings on the matter, to organize them into little boxes. If I keep the sadness I feel for my parents separate from the sadness I feel for my brother, then both can exist inside of me.

I don't know why, despite myself, I feel the weight of loss now that he's gone. I say this, but it's a lie. I do know why. Because it's my fault.

If I had never brought him to the barn that day, if I had never cornered that barn cat, perhaps he wouldn't have done the things he did. What if that was the definitive moment, the lightbulb, the switch in his mind that created the monster?

I'll never truly know, and it will never be resolved. And this is perhaps the greatest tragedy in all of it.