Gone Galt

April is the cruelest month.

Last April, we lost the first of our quintet when our cat Ajax died. Last night, our oldest cat John Galt died. He was my wife’s cat before he was our cat, and he brought us together, sort of.

That’s what I tell my wife, anyway. When we first started exchanging emails based on some Usenet postings, she mentioned she had a pet named John Galt. “What is John Galt?” I asked, playing upon the question from Atlas Shrugged. “The question is ‘Who is John Galt?'” she responded. “I know who John Galt is,” I responded, “I want to know what your John Galt is.” It weren’t no fool Objectivist newsgroup, either, so we could get on famously. A young lady with a cat named John Galt? It was destiny, and he was the marker.

John Galt was the year-old kitten sharing her apartment with her and her roommate. The first time I came to visit, I guess I lingered a bit at the front door, and he took the opportunity to dart out onto her front sidewalk. Maybe she found this to be a good vetting of the stranger who came from Lemay to Columbia to see her.

Eventually, we combined households: she with her then-two cats, and me with my black cat, who decided Galt was her lifelong nemesis. She hissed at him every day between then and the day before yesterday. But Galt was easygoing and didn’t particularly care, although he did stay away from her.

He got on with the others, though, including Ajax.

He was a bit of a chunk, though, as he grew older. I called him Johnny Boom Boom and Johnny Swingbelly and other things. Four years ago, our vet discovered a heart murmur in him, so we lived with the dread that any shock might do him in. We were very glad he survived the move from Old Trees to Nogglestead.

Two years ago, in the dark time of the inappropriate urination troubles, Galt got into the habit of marking his turf by peeing by the windows and the doors so none of the animals he could see would dare to come in. So, like with Ajax, we put him in our back yard. Galt enjoyed his time out; when we’d go check the gardens, he would run after us with a lightness we hadn’t seen since he was a kitten.

But when Ajax died, we brought Galt back into the house and discovered on his subsequent trip to the vet that his weight loss was not due to a healthier lifestyle and more exercise outdoors; he had hyperthyroidism. We tried to give him pills, we tried to give him a liquid medicine that required gloves, but he didn’t take any of them easily.

He got thinner gradually, but he remained active and pretty happy. I saw him wandering with half a lizard in his mouth once in a while. He also managed to corral a black rock snake in our basement one Friday evening. He enjoyed eating, for all the good it did him, and liked to hop up and read my paper with me in the evenings.

The boys loved him, too, as a year in the wilderness had seen him face predators and dangers far beyond that of mere children, he was not afraid of loud little boys. Alone of our surviving cats, he let them pet him and sometimes even hopped up beside them when they were sitting on the sofa.

Over the last week, he slowed in his walking and wandering throughout the house, and last night he laid down in the living room and did not move much. Although he was still alive, he wasn’t really Galt, and he wasn’t going to get better. Around 10pm we gathered him to take him to the emergency veterinary hospital, but he didn’t make it that far.

Our house is lonelier today since he’s taken his place out beneath the Osage Orange tree with Ajax.