WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, THERE'S A FIRE-TRUCK
A rumor
making the rounds in Traveler’s Joy* is discouraging, if true. I’ve been told that the town’s government was
bilked out of $25,000, maybe more, when the money was paid to a
contractor to start building a fire-truck museum for the town. This dream of a museum is held by the mayor,
mostly, and is reportedly not shared by a majority of the town’s residents
(especially considering that Traveler’s Joy only possesses one fire-truck at this time).
Even before the money was rumored to have vanished, people
questioned why those funds weren’t being spent on code enforcement, or trash
collection, or infrastructure repair, or a scholarship fund at the high school,
or the subsidizing of dog and cat spay/neutering clinics in town to cut down on
the staggering number of unwanted pets that roam our streets. (I’ll admit it –
that last one is my idea).
Now that the
contractor has disappeared with the cash and is not responding to phone calls
or letters, and now that the Town Council has been informed that no functioning
business exists at the address he provided, the funds probably won’t even be
spent on the antique fire-truck.
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| Traveler's Joy suffers from lack of code & ordinance enforcement |
This contractor apparently
earned the admiration of Traveler’s Joy administrators for the flipping jobs he
performed on two old homes on Granite Street*. The first was generally known as
Dr.Tarleton’s* house, after the family practitioner who lived there years ago
and tended to patients in his clinic on the first floor. After he passed away it changed hands a few
times, ending up as a tenant house (sharing the fate of so many houses left to absentee
heirs after the original owners die – see my earlier posting, “The Tenant House”). Residents who were in the house in
its heyday describe it as an elegantly proportioned Southern bungalow in a modified Low Country style. A decorative railing graced the porch, with
more wrought iron wrapping around the second floor balcony. Even with the ravages imposed by the shifting
tribe of people who inhabited the house in recent years, one couldn’t help but admire
the remnants of the doctor’s garden out front, where a very old Japanese maple
graced the path to the front door, and where mature gardenias, philadelphus, camellias and peonies brightened the shade under the
massive willow oaks.
The last members of the tribe moved out during the recession’s peak, leaving their trash spilling into Granite Street and one bewildered, pregnant cat crouched on the porch. The bank notice tacked to the front door announced that the mortgage was in default and declared the home property of ABC Savings & Loan, etc. It did not address ownership of the cat. On my walks down the street I tried to approach her, but she was too skittish for company.
The last members of the tribe moved out during the recession’s peak, leaving their trash spilling into Granite Street and one bewildered, pregnant cat crouched on the porch. The bank notice tacked to the front door announced that the mortgage was in default and declared the home property of ABC Savings & Loan, etc. It did not address ownership of the cat. On my walks down the street I tried to approach her, but she was too skittish for company.
Months later,
a convention of panel trucks on the lawn signaled that the bank had found a
buyer. Whoever this person was, he was
clearly not a horticulturist. That’s
because the enormous Acer palmatum, an
arboretum-quality specimen the likes of which landscapers typically pay two to
three thousand dollars for the privilege of salvaging intact, was chopped down to
allow access by construction vehicles. A
front-loader made quick work of the gardenias and the peonies.
Then, just
as suddenly as it began, the remodeling halted.
I assume that the house changed hands yet again, because a new set of
trucks appeared one day and a new boss-man seemed to be in charge, someone who
drove a flashy Town Car with custom rims.
This gentleman set his crews to work in earnest, and a ‘For Sale’ sign
appeared in the spongy spot where the Japanese maple had once stood.
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| Granite Street |
I wasn’t in
town the day the Open House was held, but several people told me about the
transformation of the interior. The
contractor hadn’t aimed to remodel the house in keeping with its architectural
style or period. Instead, he had made the
house merely inhabitable, installing drywall, new flooring, and working
appliances. This bare-bones level of
improvement must have appealed, because in due time the house sold.
I only discovered
that fact because one cool spring day I parked beside the abandoned house next
door, a hideous pile of cinderblock painted the yellow-brown hue of infant
poop, to leave dry kibble for the two kittens born to the abandoned cat from
Dr.Tarleton’s house. These timorous felines
– one solid black and the other a zany, patchwork-patterned calico -- had taken
shelter under the Poop House but were clearly starving to death now that their
mother had moved on. By this time I had
burned up the telephone lines trying to find a state or county resource that
would help me trap, neuter, and adopt out the feral kittens. If such organizations had ever existed in
South Carolina, they had lost their funding with the double hits of the
recession and Gov. Haley’s ruthless hatchet-chops to state funding for social
services and animal welfare, so when I got an answer, it was always ‘no.’ I also knew from experience that I couldn’t effectively
trap the cats and bring them to my house with any hope of keeping them
there. Feral cats, once moved, light out
for home, and with ‘home’ only four blocks down the road from me, distance
would be no deterrent to them. My only
recourse was to call back to the Tomahawk County animal shelter and get a trap
delivered. Once I trapped the cats, I
would have to summon the dog-catcher to pick them up one-by-one and take them
to the shelter, where their odds of being adopted were so negligible as to
approach impossibility. So I postponed
the inevitable, giving them a minimal amount of food and watching for signs of
pregnancy in either cat. Eventually, the
littermates were joined by a scarred, pinkish tomcat who seemed grateful for
the company. I called this cat ‘Gramps’ -- his swollen glands and testicles suggested he had already used up eight
lives on his journeys, and was eking out his ninth life as long as he could.
On this particular
spring day, I only got one foot out of the car before a stranger was
yelling in my face. This young man had
been tipped off by a neighbor that I was feeding the cats and had been waiting
to confront me; he warned me to get off his street and not come back. He turned out to be the new owner of Dr. Tarleton’s
house. He was not interested in the
plight of homeless animals, not even if the two young ones were the legacy of his
home’s previous owners, and he was clearly so territorial after just a couple days
of ownership that he saw no distinction between my feeding the cats
out of sight on the lot next door or on his own front doormat. He promised to solve the problem by killing
them, if I couldn’t come up with a better solution.
###
I set about
obtaining a trap from Animal Control and placed it under the big cedar
in the Poop House’s yard. The next
morning on my way to work I stopped on Granite Street and found Sissy, the calico,
bleating inside the trap. Gramps was nestled
beside her protectively. (Ever
pragmatic, he might also have been waiting hopefully for his own chance at the
shreds of tuna fish still clinging to the bait can.) I called the shelter for pick-up. However, when I drove past the house again at
the end of the day, no one had retrieved the cat.
It was a very hot day, with Sissy clearly stressed from fear and
dehydration. The homeowner’s threats
were ringing in my ears, but her suffering affected me more. Knowing it was probably a pointless exercise,
I lifted the howling, trapped calico into the back of my SUV and raced home with
her. When I opened the wire cage in the
shade of my backyard, she exploded out of it like she’d been shot from a
cannon, tearing for the shelter of my neighbor’s shrubbery on the other side of
Kent Street. I estimated that it would
take her two days to find her way back to the Poop House, but considering how
stressed she was (and Sissy was not the brightest one in that bunch, which is
precisely why she was so easily trapped), it was three days before she joined
Blackie and Gramps in the long grass beside the empty house. I was happy to see her alive, but I despaired
for all three of them.
That
pessimism deepened when I stumbled on a Tomahawk County real estate website a
few days later. I was looking up the
details of another property in Traveler’s Joy when I clicked on the listing for
the Poop House, which had been for sale for years. Judging from the quality of the photo, the
local agent must have been in a prodigious hurry the day he snapped it, as if
he were shooting with one hand while steering past at thirty miles an hour with the other. The snapshot
depicted the mustard-colored façade of the house with the dark spire of the
cedar slicing vertically across it. In the foreground, the blurred images of
two small cats had been captured in the act of rushing reflexively towards the
sound of a slowing car. The agent had signaled
dinner.
Not long
after that, trucks were parked in front of the Poop House, as was the Town Car
with flashy rims. It looked like the Tarleton
house contractor had settled on his next quick-profit project in Traveler’s
Joy.
Sissy
disappeared first, followed by Blackie two days later. I had a chance to say good-bye to Gramps the
following afternoon. He was sitting in a
pool of sunlight on the last day I fed him, as contented as a king. The next day, no cats came out to eat. It was the same the next day. I searched all over the yard, and even up to
the brush pile in the back, but I never found their bodies.
###
Before
starting work inside the house, the contractor toppled the giant cedar. Once felled, it covered half the front lawn
and jutted into the street. Apparently,
most of the people who buy property in Traveler’s Joy want to start with a
clean slate, no baggage. Take the trees,
please. Take the nineteenth century
craftsmanship. And by all means, get rid
of the homeless cats. If we want any of those, we’ll make our own.
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| Tree down |
###
I’m sorry
about the town’s financial loss, if the story of the contractor is true. (That’s a portion of our 2012 taxes down the
toilet, after all.) But such a mishap
makes me hopeful in another way. Maybe when people in Traveler's Joy think on the Folly of the Fire-truck, they'll consider more critically what the pressing needs are in this town, and what kind of effort ought to be directed at those needs.
Maybe, in future, they’ll give some thought to what has value.