Stumpknocker, Florida: The Hullabaloo of Aught Two(Phil Penne) Even with all her cats, day-to-day life at Maudette Perkins’ place is usually pretty humdrum. But folks from Stumpknocker will point to the burned out shell of a pole barn as you go past her place and tell you that that was one of the exceptions – an event that will forever be remembered by the citizens of Stumpknocker as the “Hullabaloo of Aught Two”.

Back on the Sixteenth of June in 2002 Maudette woke to the sound of Piney, her prize rooster. Without her hearing aids in Maudette was normally deaf as a post, but Piney’s cock-a-doodle was loud enough to wake the dead. Piney was a feisty bird the cats of the house learned early on not to mess with. Any cat that paused too long around Piney, or seemed to take too much interest in him, would find themselves at the business end of Piney’s beak. They’d end up with tufts of hair torn out of their hides, terrified to the point of paralysis.

Maudette was downstairs in the kitchen cooking up a breakfast of three sunny-side-up eggs, eight strips of fatty hickory smoked bacon, two blueberry buttermilk hotcakes, a cup of grits, and a small skillet of home fries. Of all that food Maudette will only eat one pancake, one strip of bacon, a spoonful of grits and a bite of the home fries. The rest goes to her cats, which generally prefer home cooking to store-bought cat food. As soon as they hear Piney crowing every cat in the house gathers in the kitchen to hope for a share of the bounty. They’ll be on top of the icebox, peeking out from inside the sink and patrolling the counter tops – except for the largest of her cats, President Taft. He’s too big to make it to the counter top in one leap; he has to jump from the footstool Maudette uses to reach the top shelf of the cupboard, to the seat of a nearby chair, then jump up and teeter on the edge of the silverware drawer that’s never quite shut all the way, then finally to the counter top from there. Rather than burn all those calories, President Taft is content to just mill around Maudette’s feet. Once she sets everything down on the floor, all Hell breaks loose: Jimmy and Billy, the brothers, make a beeline for the bacon and lay claim to a strip, two if they manage; Dolley Madison would wait patiently for her little piece of blueberry pancake, which she’d drag underneath the kitchen table to eat in peace. All in all the place looks like a Chinese buffet when they put out a new pan of crab legs.

This whittling away of the breakfast continues until all that’s left is the home fries. None of the cats actually eat them, but Maudette fries them up in the grease from the bacon, so they all gather ‘round the bowl and licking at the potatoes until the bacon grease is gone. While all this is going on Maudette eats her bit of breakfast, along with a cup of coffee with cream, sugar, cream, a dash of nutmeg and cream. She’s not all that fond of coffee, but she really likes cream, sugar and nutmeg.

On this fateful day breakfast was finished, dishes were done and all went to their respective places of relaxation to take a brief nap and allow their food to digest. Maudette sat on the sofa working on her needlepoint with George and Martha, her two oldest cats, already sleeping on either side of her. Other presidential namesakes lounged around the living room grooming themselves, while every nook and cranny of the upstairs was occupied by more of the furry luminaries. The two key players in the mayhem that was about to unfold were Teddy Roosevelt, who was usually an outdoor cat, and JFK, who at the time this took place was still a kitten. Both cats were in the bedroom; Teddy was under the bed hunting dust bunnies, while JFK sat hunched on top of the dresser, scrutinizing the room like a hawk seeking its prey.

Teddy made the tragic mistake of leaving just the tip of his tail exposed from beneath the dust ruffle of the bed, twitching like a jerk bait. As JFK looked around the room his eyes found their target. He focused on the twitching tale and readied for the attack in the usual kitty way: He crouched down and stiffened, chin scraping the wood of the dresser, with a look in his eyes like a gunfighter; he gathered his hind legs underneath him, bringing his rump up into the air, then made fifty or sixty slight adjustments to his position before launching the attack.

A normal kitten assault would have consisted of leaping through the air, landing on the floor next to the other cat’s tail, giving it one or two swipes, then losing interest and sauntering off. Things were different this time; when JFK leaped one of his paws got caught in a doily on the dresser; he sailed through the air with the doily still attached and a cascade of face powders, lipsticks and knick-knacks behind him. He yowled all the way to the floor, shutting his mouth only when he stopped his descent. Unfortunately, he closed his mouth on Teddy’s tail, piercing the skin with his dagger-like kitten teeth and ripping out a dime-sized chunk of hair. The usually stalwart Teddy let out a screech and rocketed from underneath the bed enveloped in a cloud of dust bunnies. He continued running in a blind panic until he at last ran headlong into the aluminum TV tray that held Maudette’s sewing box. The box crashed to the ground, lid opening and the contents spilling onto the floor, including thirty some-odd spools of thread.

By this time the other cats were beginning to take notice, turning off their bones and compressing themselves into hidey -holes a third their size. The spools rolled across the floor, some going off in random directions, but the majority finding their way across the hallway, then dropping off the landing and clattering down the wood stairs. As the spools fell to successively lower steps the cats that occupied those steps escaped to yet lower steps, until a mass of cats and spools flowed down the steps like debris in a flooding river.

By the time the avalanche reached the first floor the house was in full pandemonium. There was screeching, meowing, hissing and some sounds unknown to even cat lovers. Maudette had her hearing aids out and was intent on her needlepoint, blissfully ignorant of the disruption around her. The cats headed instinctively for the screen door, their link the perceived freedom of the outdoors. Still being chased by the spools the cats didn’t so much as slow down. They crashed through the screen door, nearly taking it off the hinges. Once on the front porch, they didn’t take the time to use the steps; they ran helter-skelter, leaping off the sides, vaulting onto rails then catapulting from there… the only exception was George W. He made it down the steps then, assuming he was a safe distance from the mayhem, stopped to catch his breath and perform a quick grooming.

From a cat perspective that was the mother of all bad ideas. Unbeknownst to George W., Piney, who had been resting under the steps, strutted out from his hiding place just in time to see the encroacher. Before the hapless cat could react, Piney did the characteristic rooster hop / flap and landed square on the back of George W., who let out a horrified screech and took off, unconcerned with the direction, as long as it was opposite to that of the pain of Piney clamped to his back. He was caterwauling and running around in circles while the rooster hammered on his head with his beak and pecked notches out of the cat’s ears. Piney was squawking, flapping his wings for balance and looking for all the world like a rodeo cowboy trying to stay on his mount for the obligatory eight seconds.

The pair zig-zagged all over the yard until they made their way to the barn, where the commotion startled the two dairy cows, a sway-backed dapple mare well past her brood season and half a dozen milking goats still lazing about on the hay before heading to the pasture for their daily activities. The goats bounded out the back door of the barn with the mare sauntering behind. The cows bolted – as fast as cows are able to bolt – for the front door. On the way Eloise, the white cow with a blanket of black on her rump shaped like the state of Florida, slammed into a two by four that was supporting a bug zapper. The device came crashing to the ground, arcing and setting the hay on fire. The cows, in the meantime, continued the stampede, collapsing the unused outhouse and taking out the rails of the fence that was in their path.

Inside the house Maudette was finally rousted from her work. She slid her “up close” glasses further down her nose and peered over the tops, surveying the wreckage and following the trail of destruction outside, where she saw Jimmy Don Reynolds and Nate Peters arriving in a faded green six-by truck with a large tank in the back. There were magnetic signs on the doors proclaiming them to be the “Stumpknocker Volunteer Fire Brigade”, which were plastered over the words painted on the doors, “R & P Exterminators”. They made no attempt to rescue the barn which even this quickly was burnt nearly to the ground. Instead they sprayed the water in the tank on the smoldering grass around the barn in an effort to contain the blaze.

Having reached the end of her story, Mildred glanced at the kitty cat clock on the wall, one of those where the eyes go side to side as the clock keeps time. She excused herself, saying that they had to get ready for the evening coffee and pie crowd. I got up, went out to my car and just sat inside for a moment, smelling the clean air and replaying the video of the Hullabaloo of Aught Two in my head. As I cranked the engine I paused, stuck my head out the window and looked up at the milky sky, thinking how lucky I was to be in Stumpknocker, Florida, a place where you can still see the stars at night.

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