Snowball

Illustration by Steve Cavallo

I would have been preaching at that time on Christmas Eve, preaching some variation of my usual holiday sermon. But a huge blizzard had blown in, canceling my service for that night, and for Christmas day also. Instead, I was sitting in front of a toasty fire, drinking a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows, and watching the news, waiting for a weather update.

The anchorman did a story about a warehouse burning down earlier in the day. I was relieved to discover that no one had been hurt, although a number of stray cats had been seen fleeing into the driving snow. The weather update came on and the weatherman joked about “cold kitties” being out there for the next few days, but that the worst of the blizzard should blow through by Christmas night.

Rudolph’s nose would have to glow extra bright for Santa to make it through that storm.

I could hear the wind beating the shutters against the sides of the church, whistling through the bell tower; the sound echoed throughout the sanctuary. The apartment my dear wife and I had shared for so long (the Lord took her three summers past) was built into the back of the church and the walls separating it from the church proper were thin, and some strange quirk in the architecture led to sounds being made in the church getting amplified by the time they propagated to my living room.

It was lucky for one little fire survivor that this was the case, or I never would have heard him.

I had nearly finished my chocolate and had shut off the TV so I could simply sit and stare into the flames when I heard a scratching at the sanctuary door and the hint of a weak “meow. ”

I thought of the cats from the warehouse fire immediately, and I got up and proceeded to the double doors that led directly into the back of the church.

It was quite a walk from my living room—my church is a big, rambling, old country affair, but I’m not so old as to have required more than half a minute to open the door.

A gust of wind blew through the opening, and with it rolled in a snowball, I thought. Then it stood up and “meowed” most vigorously, and I realized I was in the presence of a perfectly white kitten. I picked him up and he didn’t protest, and cuddled up against my sweater. “I’m going to call you ‘Snowball,’ I think,” I told him, and when I set him down in front of the fire he lay so close to the blaze that I feared he might melt.

I went to the kitchen briefly to get my guest a saucer of milk, and while there I prepared myself another hot chocolate. I warmed the milk first in the microwave. When I put it in front of Snowball he gulped it down most thankfully.

Settling back into my chair, I thanked the Lord for company that night. I had been lonely, I realized, now that I had a new friend to share the evening with. Christmas time is tough on those who have lost a mate, and my children are far flung—daughter is working at the new Moon base, I’m proud to say, and son is somewhere in the Australian Outback searching for a lost city.

Snowball finished lapping up his milk, then he turned to me and fairly bounded right onto my lap. “Well, you’re certainly not a shy fellow,” I quipped. He seemed mighty interested in my cup of chocolate, so I allowed him to peer over the brim. He fished out one of the marshmallows and had it in his mouth faster than I could say “Jack Robinson.”

Taking the hint, I led him into the kitchen and warmed up a dish of leftovers for him, making sure I added a few marshmallows as a side dish.

We returned to the fire and when Snowball finished eating, he returned to my lap and promptly fell asleep. I allowed him the pleasure for an hour then carefully placed him on a pillow at the foot of my bed and retired for the evening myself.

I awoke to a room with drab winter light coming in from the windows, and momentarily feared that I’d overslept. It was Christmas morning and I had a church service to…

But then I recalled the blizzard and that I had deliberately not set my alarm for six, and so took my time easing my creaky old body out of bed. At seventy I was old enough to retire from the ministry, but with my wife gone, there really wasn’t anything else for me to do.

I also recalled the arrival of Snowball, but a careful look around failed to turn him up. I called, “Snowball! Snowball!” but I had only named him last night, and he would not have known I was calling for him.

I didn’t worry about it. Mine is a large church building with a thousand hiding places for one so small as Snowball, and no doubt he would come around again when he was hungry.

Out the window, though the blizzard had subsided considerably, the wind still piled snow across the church parking lot and the street. I had no doubt that I would not be driving anywhere for several days.

I was wondering what I was going to do with myself, alone this Christmas morn, when I heard a noise.

The church is old, and it creaks more than I do, and it has a small but vigorous rat population in the basement, so hearing odd sounds is not uncommon. But I had lived there a good many years, and I knew my building s little quirks, and this noise was different.

It was a long series of delicate, padded thumps, like something light and springy was bouncing around. Of course, it must be Snowball, I suddenly realized.

Since the sound was coming from upstairs, I slowly walked up the steps to the balcony, careful to continue listening to the thumps so that I could better zero in on the origin of the sounds when I reached the second floor.

The sounds continued, then were joined by a single, louder thump. Silence followed briefly, then the sounds returned, but by then I had narrowed my search to the few rooms within the bell tower.

The first door I came to was the custodian closet. I opened it simply to be thorough and an ancient dust mop fell out sending up a plume that caused me to sneeze.

By the time I reached the second room the thumping had ceased. Nevertheless, I entered the room and enjoyed the memories that came flooding back, for this room had once been my Sunday school, and the old desks were still arranged in neat rows. My congregation only had a few children now, and the class was conducted on the main floor, but I remembered days when I had to teach two sections of Sunday school, and both times all the desks were filled.

I backed out of the room finally, still not having found Snowball, and was just about to open the last room when I felt a gentle bumping against my legs.

“Snowball! So there you are,” I said. He was covered with dust and looked almost gray. I noticed that the dust was wet. I hoped the roof wasn’t leaking again—that melted snow hadn’t formed a pool somewhere above the ceiling.

The sounds had stopped with the reappearance of Snowball, so I returned downstairs with him scampering along behind.

Christmas night went much the way the previous evening had, although I did receive a delightful call of precisely three minutes duration from my Moon-dwelling daughter. We wished each other well and a Merry Christmas before her time ran out.

At half past eight, Snowball, who had been asleep beside the fire, awoke, stretched, seemed to glance at the clock, then ran to me and playfully attacked my slipper. I laughed and pushed him gently away, but he was persistent and in a show of surprising strength for a kitten, pulled my slipper from my foot and made off with it. He stopped and waited for me to pursue. I obliged.

Snowball proved to be a worthy opponent in this game. He would lure me to him, then duck under the chair and emerge from the back, trot along the wall, then taunt me from the hassock. I have earlier said that Snowball was a kitten, and indeed, he was the size of a kitten. But there was none of the tentativeness of kitten play about him; none of the awkwardness of fluffy feline youth. I wondered if perhaps he were really some kind of midget adult.

Snowball got the best of me. I had been running about the room oblivious of my age for several minutes when I suddenly had to stop and sit down. I caught my breath and was about to resume the game when I heard the noise again.

Now Snowball was right in front of me, so it could not have been him making the noise earlier in the day after all. I excused myself from him and once again made the trek upstairs, this time going straight to the third room. The noise stopped when I opened the door.

It was dark in there. I snapped on the light and looked amongst the dozens of boxes and old pews and Bibles with missing covers—the flotsam and jetsam of old churches. Despite my certainty that the noise had originated in this room, I could find nothing amiss, except for the hole in the ceiling that led, if one were tiny enough to pass through it, into the boarded-up top room of the bell tower.

I closed the door and walked around the corner to the narrow staircase to the upper room, at the top of which was a boarded-up door. I was of half a mind to retrieve my tools and open up the door right then when I thought I smelled smoke. The smoke alarm went off and I raced downstairs, thoughts of an investigation dropped for this more pressing matter.

Back in the living room I found that the throw rug from in front of my chair was half in the fireplace, and that flames had progressed it far enough for smoke to have escaped the chimney and gone wafting through the room. The easiest thing to do was simply to throw the remainder of the rug into the fire, which I did, and then I turned to find Snowball calmly licking his paws.

No doubt the kitty had dragged the rug up to the fireplace to sleep upon. Somehow the end had fallen into the fire. This had probably used up one of Snowball’s nine lives.

I got the key to the smoke alarm from the cupboard and shut off the keening whine, then called the fire department to report that I had things under control. This turned out to be fortunate for them since they had barrelled out of the station in their truck, only to have it slide across the street and lodge itself in a snow bank.

I brought Snowball an old pillow that my wife had used as a pew pad and he slept in front of the fire that night.

I woke up in pain. Oh, it was nothing serious—just the aftereffects of my tussle with Snowball the previous night. When I’d gone to bed I had fully intended to investigate the upper room that morning, but now my body would protest even going up the stairs, and rebel completely if I tried to do any real labor.

Besides, it had probably just been the rats.

I’ve said before that my church is an old one—it goes back over a hundred years. Early in its existence it gained a colony of rats and became part of an ecosystem involving rodents, the local farmer’s fields, and itself. Usually the rats are not much of a problem, confining themselves to the lower sections of the church and to hollows just outside the foundations. Only during harsh winters do they tend to congregate in the warmth down below to the extent that they become a nuisance.

Although they apparently had discovered some new passageway up into the bell tower, I decided to go into the basement to see if they’d again reached problem population. Over the years I’d developed a nice operational definition (a term I learned in a psychology class) for too many rats. ” If I could go into the boiler room and spot two rats within the first two minutes, then I knew their population was too high. In ordinary times, one could wait over an hour without even hearing a rat walk by.

Snowball had awakened with me, so I asked if he’d like to join me, and he followed along. I retrieved my flashlight from the broom closet and set off down the stairs. Most of the basement is given over to abandoned meeting rooms and a kitchen with cobwebs in the cupboards, but the boiler room was fairly close to the bottom of the stairs, and we arrived at the door swiftly.

The door was unlocked so we went right inside, then stood quietly, listening. Snowball purred and bumped my legs, but he didn’t seem interested in exploring the boiler area. I couldn’t hear anything in the first couple of minutes, so I snapped on the light. No sign of rats here. I took the flashlight and poked into various nooks and crannies, but to no avail—there wasn’t a rat in sight.

Now that was odd in itself—not to see any rats even when I went to look for them with a flashlight. I decided to take the stepladder from the corner and climb up to look in the crawl space. There were always rats up there. Always.

Despite the protestations of my stiff and sore body, I climbed the ladder and peered over the edge into the crawl space. It was dark in there so I shone the flashlight into the gloom. Nothing. No beady eyes looking back. Nothing scurrying away into the shadows. Not a rat anywhere.

There were, however, bones. Little bones. Pointy bones. Most looked to still have meat on them. I reached in and grabbed one of the nearer bones and looked it over. It was a leg bone, but the foot was still attached. The foot had yet to dry out, had yet to begin decaying and stinking.

Something had killed off all the rats in the past couple of days. I looked at Snowball. The rats I’d had in the past were his size or better, and Snowball was as unmarked as a kitten could be.

“This is most curious,” I told him. “You aren’t keeping secrets from me, are you Snowball?” I asked, but he wasn’t talking.

I heard the sound again the next two days, always just after dusk. But these times it lasted for only a minute each time, and was gone before I could even decide to go upstairs to try again to find out its cause.

But it was in the dead of night on that second day that I finally discovered the origin of the noise, and Snowball’s secret.

I awoke in the dark, fished my spectacles off the nightstand, and saw from the clock that it was two in the morning. I also noticed that Snowball was not sleeping at my feet, though these past few mornings I had always left him there at night and found him there in the morning.

Despite the hour, this was one of those late night awakenings where I had really come fully awake, and decided I might as well use the bathroom and perhaps read for a while until I grew sleepy again.

It suddenly occurred to me—and looking back on the event it was as if the Lord whispered to me—that now would be a good time to search for the cause of the perplexing sound.

I did use the bathroom, then took my flashlight and my tools and crept slowly up the stairs. Though I felt silly doing it, I even avoided the creaky boards, just in case some spirit, human or otherwise, might be listening. The brief trip to the narrow staircase was also done silently, but I knew there was no way I could do the same going up those stairs.

I set the flashlight upright on its tail end for illumination, then fairly charged up those stairs, screwdriver and hammer in hand. With a few swift strokes and a little prying the locking boards fell off and I flung open the door.

It was pitch dark in there, but I heard scurrying and swift scampering, hisses and meows. I recalled there was a light switch just inside the room, and with a quick prayer that the bulb was still working and that time or rats hadn’t damaged the wires, I flipped it on.

It worked. Light flooded the room. The secret was revealed.

The room was full of kittens. Or runt cats, maybe, just like Snowball. They were all clustered in the corners except for a few that dove down through the hole to the storage room below. They were of a multiplicity of colors; black, white, orange, striped. But none were larger than a several-month-old kitten.

And they were all looking at me.

Then my Snowball separated himself from the others and came before me. He sat down and stared at me, and uttered a plaintive meow. He got up again and bumped my leg with his head. I picked him up. He purred loudly. “Just what am I going to do about this, Snowball?” I asked him.

He purred some more, and then I heard them all purring, a soft, resonant hum that soothed and brought contentment.

“Enough already,” I said. “I can’t think of doing anything with you until the snow is cleared out anyway.” They purred even louder. I tried to count the cats, but I was beyond three dozen and getting confused about which I’d already counted when I gave up. There were more than fifty but less than a hundred.

I closed the door to the room and carried Snowball downstairs with me. “My, my, little friend. So that was the secret you were keeping. Well, you and your friends did a mighty good job of hiding. It was just a fluke that I caught you tonight.”

I carried Snowball into the kitchen with me, then put him down next to his litter box (which I’d fashioned from a shallow desk drawer and unused potting soil the night of his arrival).

Then it hit me. At the risk of sounding indelicate, I suddenly realized that the room with all the kittens in it didn’t stink. I had noticed no cat feces nor smelled the pungent aroma of stale urine which one should have expected.

Hmmm. This was even a bigger mystery.

Even with Snowball at the foot of my bed, I failed to sleep anymore that night.

The next day I came to a decision. Snowball was not on the bed, but he was sitting in the chair next to the nightstand, staring at me, almost as if he was taking my measure. So even though it was silly, I told him what I’d sorted out.

“Snowball, it’s clear to me that you and those other kitties are no ordinary cats. I don’t know where you came from or what you’re about, but you don’t seem to be causing any trouble, and you all seem smart enough to go outside to take care of your, er, personal hygiene requirements. I can’t feed you all, but you don’t seem to need me for that anyhow. So you and the other cats can stay in the church unless or until you become a problem, OK? Lord knows, and I mean that literally, what your purpose is here, but you’ve got free rent until you do something to make me change my mind. ”

Silly? Of course. But Snowball understood and then he left me for a time, perhaps to run off to tell the others of my decision. Who could say?

The next few days went by without a problem, although it continued to snow and another blizzard was about to blow through. From time to time I’d see one of the other cats going about, but they always seemed to be busy.

On the day of December 30 I saw a news report concerning the disappearance of dogs, both pets and strays, since the start of the bad weather. I had a pretty good idea now of who was behind that.

And on New Year’s Eve the stranger arrived.

The morning of New Year’s Eve had been a pretty one, with a bright sunrise bejeweling the frosty countryside. But by late afternoon the clouds had built up again and the wind had come ahowling, and a blizzard was again upon us as the last of the daylight began to fade.

I was out looking into the teeth of the wind when I heard the gunshot.

I’d been on the porch with Snowball because we were both concerned about Frisky. Frisky seemed to be Snowball’s special friend. But she had not returned after going outside that afternoon, and I wondered if she’d gotten caught in the storm.

But immediately following the gunshot, I saw the little tiger-striped Frisky come racing across the yard, as best she could in the deep snow, and she shot into the house as if propelled from the gun itself.

Now what was someone doing out there hunting in the storm?

“Hello!” I hollered into the wind and the waning light. “Hello!”

“Where’s that (blankity-blank) vermin?” came the reply, but even that short sentence consisted of huffing and puffing, and hinted at near derangement. “Where are you?” he called again, only this time I felt that the yell was aimed at me.

“At the church!”

“What church? Where am I? I can’t see!”

“I’ll have to get him,” I turned to say to Snowball, but he had returned inside. Though I had been suitably outfitted to stand on the porch in the cold, I required more gear to go out to retrieve the stranger. I hunted down my boots and put on my heavy coat, then wisely took the roll of twine from the broom closet and tied one end to the porch rail.

It was hard going as I slowly unrolled the twine and walked out into the storm. After only a few yards, I too could no longer see the church, and my hopes of finding the stranger were nil. Unless…

“Fire your weapon into the sky! I can’t find you!”

A sharp report went off no more than ten feet to my left, and in moments I found the stranger. He was lying on his back, his teeth chattering uncontrollably. I fairly lifted him off the ground, immodestly congratulating myself on my strength, and helped him back to the church and into my living room.

The gun I left out in the cold.

I had a roaring fire going and a large mug of hot chocolate in the stranger’s hand before I tried to ask him any questions. Strangely, all of the cats, even Snowball, had seemed to go into hiding, for I had seen not one since the stranger had arrived.

“I’m Reverend Dawson. What is your name?” I asked. “And what were you hunting in such a frightful storm?”

“My name is Jeff,” he said. “And I was hunting the most frightening animal that men have ever faced. An animal that I created. I have to kill them.” He was talking to me and yet not talking to me, as if this were some mantra he had told himself over and over again.

“Something you created? Would you care to elaborate?”

He told me an amazing story.

He had been a bioengineer, and he had been trying to create a species of cat that would remain small and cute like a kitten for years. In this he had been successful, except that he’d forgotten that mammals go through a stage of exceptional learning ability when they are young, and his kittens were permanently locked into that stage until they finally grew up near the end of their days, bred, and died.

“The first was named ‘Puff.’ Brilliant cat. Had a run-in with a vicious neighborhood dog that had even once attacked my daughter. I’d never been able to kill the dog myself. He built a trap out in the woods with a carving knife from the kitchen and a clever snare. But he used my daughter to bait the trap, lured her out into the woods when he knew the dog was out there.”

That had been some years ago, I discovered. Since then Puff had bred with other cats, and now they had multiplied to Lord only knew what numbers.

Despite the nature of the story, I didn’t tell him about Snowball and the others.

“And you have been hunting these cats ever since?”

“Yes. I found a whole slew of them holed up in a warehouse not far from here. I burned the place to the ground. But somehow they escaped—I was only able to find a few bodies. ”

So that explained the advent of Snowball. They’d been fleeing a warehouse fire set by this man.

The phone rang. I excused myself and went to answer in the kitchen. It was my son, calling from Australia to wish his father a happy new year. We talked briefly, but joyfully, and I wished him luck in his quest. Then I wondered about my visitor. What was his family doing tonight? Where was this daughter he had been so eager to protect, at this moment?

And then I noticed that the silverware drawer was ajar. I opened it fully. All of the knives were gone.

I hurried back out of the kitchen. Fortunately, Jeff was all right. I resettled myself but I kept an eye out for the cats. “So where is your family tonight, Jeff?”

“Home. At least I think so. My wife divorced me a few years ago.”

“Your daughter?”

“My wife got custody. I try to see her when I can.” He slumped noticeably into the chair.

I thought about Snowball, and how he had behaved around me, and how he had been watching out for the other cats when he’d led them here.

I thought about the missing knives.

“Jeff, why do you think Puff killed that dog? Couldn’t he have just run away? You said you never saw Puff again after he killed the dog anyway.”

“He hated that dog. He would have done anything to kill it.”

“You tried to kill the dog, too.”

“It attacked my daughter! I loved… love my daughter.” He seemed on the verge of tears.

“Maybe that was Puff’s motive, too.”

And then he did cry, for his lost life, the lost years, and his lost family. I let him get it out of his system. I noticed Snowball standing by the kitchen door, watching.

Presently, Jeff said, “I’m afraid of them, Reverend. They’re smarter than us, I think. They’re learning too much. I’m afraid they could take the world away from us.”

“How many of the cats do you think there are now?” I asked.

“I calculated it once. Could be thousands by now.”

“And you think you can get them all?”

“I have to,” he said desperately. “I created them!”

“So you did,” I said. “From what you say I’m not convinced they are the danger that you claim. But there are now more than you can ever hope to rein in yourself. That’s the Lord trying to tell you that they’re no longer your responsibility. They’re His. Like it or not, Jeff, they have their own destiny now.”

“No,” he said. “No.”

“Go home to your wife and daughter. It’s New Year’s Eve. Why are you with me and not with them?”

“No,” he said again, weakly. “No.” But soon out of distress and exhaustion, he fell asleep.

I put another blanket around him and decided to sit up the rest of the night, maintaining a vigil lest Snowball seek to do him harm. My little friend had left the kitchen by that time. But though the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak, and I fell asleep.

I awoke with a start, sunshine was pouring through the window. Jeff was gone, but he’d left a note with a thank you, both for the treatment and the conversation.

And all of the knives were back in the drawer.

It’s been a year now since the stranger was here. I sometimes wonder about him and his lonely battle against the cats. He hasn’t come back this way since then. Maybe he did go home. It’s just as well because I’ve had no reason to regret my decision nor my deception in not telling him about Snowball and the others.

By the following spring, an odd thing happened to Snowball, Frisky, and those others that I had always thought of as the “leaders”—they grew up. By summer I had a dozen adult cats running around the church, but they continued to act as they always had, and they continued to lead the others.

They also started to procreate.

By the fall the back rooms and hallways of my church were filled with adult cats, adult kittens, and genuine kittens. Of these last, I’ve grown particularly fond of those sired by Snowball with the help of Frisky, and even now as I write this memoir they are playing amongst my things, except for one who has taken up position atop my computer monitor, and looks liked he’ll sleep there until the second coming.

It is once again New Year’s Eve and I have spent the entire evening composing this story. I had not seen the need to do so before today, but this morning something happened to put me in the mind to record the details. I do not know what the future will bring for this new race of cats, but in a small way I, too, am now partly responsible for their eventual destiny.

You see, after breakfast I went upstairs to the tower room because I recalled there was a trouble light stored away up there and I had need of it. I opened the door to the storage room and stopped.

Upon each of the desks, still in neat rows, sat attentively one of the new kittens. Snowball and Frisky were at the front of the room. I saw that the trouble light was already in use because it was lit and carefully positioned near Snowball. Snowball himself had a willow switch in his mouth, at the end of which was a marshmallow, and he was dangling it over the lamp as if roasting it in a fire.

When I’d opened the door, every kitten head in the room turned toward me. Frisky seemed amused. Snowball seemed annoyed. I muttered an “excuse me” and swiftly closed the door.

I used to teach Sunday school in that room, two sections.

I know a class in session when I see one.

Editor’s Note: This story is a sequel to “Puff” (Mid-December 1993) and “Fluffy” (June 1996).