by Katherine Yurchak
Muncy, Pennysylvania

Standing beside the kitchen window to catch a small breeze that summer day in 1991, I heard faint sounds coming from the direction of my husband’s toolshed out back. Did Nick decide to give work a try again? My spirits leapt for a moment, and then quickly plummeted when I stepped into the living room. Nick was sitting on the sofa, his whole demeanor listless and defeated. He had been like that since the stroke he had suffered about two years earlier. He did not even look up from his newspaper as I walked past and went outside to investigate. A doleful wail sent me hurrying to the shed. Goodness, that sounds like a baby crying for its mother! I thought, tugging at the door. It opened with a reluctant creak. I saw that my guess hadn’t been far off. On the floor by the workbench lay a tiny kitten struggling to separate itself from the lifeless bodies of its four siblings.
    I knelt and carefully picked up the kitten. What a wee puff of yellow fur she was—hardly filled the palm of my hand. I cradled the trembling creature close to me and carried her into the house.
    “Look what I found in the shed,” I said to my husband. “Something must have happened to her mother.” Nick didn’t say a word, but at least he didn’t look away when I sat down in the rocking chair with the tiny kitten. I asked him, “How are we going to keep this little thing alive?”
    “You should‘ve left the animal where you found it,” came Nick’s blunt reply. He shook his head and slowly dragged himself from the sofa. “I’m going to my doctor’s appointment,” he announced.
    I watched as Nick shuffled out of the room. I wished there were something that I could do to help him. The doctors had yet to find a way to ease the lingering effects of my husband’s stroke—the stiffness in his right shoulder and the pain that wracked his right arm. Every night I massaged his arm and pressed warm, wet towels on his shoulder, but the pain wouldn’t go away.
    Nor, it seemed, would the malaise that shadowed Nick’s soul, no matter how much I encouraged him. The stroke had abruptly ended the work that he loved. It was this blow I was beginning to fear he would never recover from.
    For 30 years my husband had been a self-employed electrician and master mechanic. People for miles around knew there wasn’t anything Nick couldn’t fix. Our phone was always ringing with folks asking for help with one broken-down thing or another. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” Nick would assure them, scanning his list of service calls to be made. He’d whistle when he left for work in the morning. And how I loved to listen for his whistling as he walked back to the house after putting his tools away in the shed at day’s end.
    The stroke had changed all that. Nick could no longer wield his tools for any length of time, and I’d had to tell callers, “Sorry, he’s not able to help you right now.” I’d tried to convince Nick his strength and his work would come back to him, but the weakness in his right side hadn’t improved. Eventually the phone had fallen silent. So, too, had Nick’s whistling. His tools lay gathering dust in the shed, abandoned, just like I knew Nick felt, even though he wasn’t the kind to talk about his feelings.
    Lord, it breaks my heart to see Nick closed in on himself like this, I prayed. I’ve done all I can. Can’t you please help him—us—get through this?
    “Mee-ew . . . mee-ew.” The kitten’s cries sounded weaker. I looked into her scrunched-up face and told her, “Well, at least I can do something to help you.” We’d never had pets, but I figured what this kitten needed couldn’t be all that different from what our grown son had needed when he was a baby.
    What could I use to get the kitten to nurse? Ah, the small plastic bottle I’d been saving for oiling my sewing machine. And something soft so she’d feel like she was at her mother’s breast. “It’s okay, lunch is coming,” I said to the kitten as I went out to Nick’s shed again. I grabbed a piece of rubber tubing and shut the door, trying not to look at the tools lying lonely on the workbench.
    Back in the house, I filled the bottle with warm milk and fitted the tubing on the spout. I wrapped the kitten in a scrap of flannel I dug out of my sewing basket, then held her close to me and settled in the rocking chair. “Here you are, little one,” I said, touching the bottle’s soft rubber tip to her quivering pink nose. Her instincts took over and soon she dozed off, her belly full of milk.
    Not an hour later she woke and hollered for more. “You sure know what you need, don’t you?” I said with a laugh.
    She was napping again when Nick came back from his appointment. I couldn’t believe the first words out of his mouth. “How’s the kitten?” he asked.
    “I think she just might make it.”
    “That’s good,” he said, “because the mother won’t be coming back.” He explained that on his way home, he’d seen a large yellow cat lying dead on the road.
    Just then the kitten spoke up again, loud and clear. “Mee-ow . . . mee-ow!”
    “Why don’t you feed her?” I said to Nick, handing him the tiny flannel-swaddled bundle before he could say no.
    He sat down in the rocker, and the kitten nestled into the crook of his right arm. As soon as he offered the bottle, she began guzzling frantically. “Since you seem so determined to stick around,” Nick said to her, “I suppose we’re going to have to give you a name.” He looked to me, chuckling. “What do you think?”
    What I thought was that I was so glad to hear my husband taking a bit of joy in life again that I wanted to put my hands together right there and give thanks to God. Not wanting to make a big deal out of it, though, I said simply, “She sure has a nice, strong holler. How about naming this kitten Holly?”
    The corners of my husband’s mouth crinkled up. “Hi, Holly,” he said, touching a finger to the kitten’s nose.
    After that, Nick was no longer at a loss as to what to do—not when there was a lively and curious kitten to keep up with. I don’t know who was following whom, really, because Holly, for her part, wouldn’t let my husband out of sight for long. She’d lie beside him while he napped in the afternoon. When we turned in at night, Holly would jump onto our bed, pad her way across Nick’s pillow and cuddle up right against his shoulder. That’s where we’d find her when we woke, her big amber eyes blinking good morning. Even after Holly graduated to eating cat food (plus her favorite tuna) out of a dish and no longer needed to be bottle-fed, she still liked to snuggle in the crook of Nick’s arm. I couldn’t help thinking all that carrying the kitten, ball of fluff though she was, was building up Nick’s strength.
    One nippy September evening a friend stopped by to collect donations for our town’s volunteer fire department. While I was rummaging for my purse, Holly slipped out the open door.
    “Holly! Holl-eee!” Nick and I called until our voices were hoarse. With flashlights, we searched every corner of the yard, praying all the while. What would Nick do without Holly?
    Shivering in the autumn night, I finally had to abandon the search. I sat alone in the kitchen, hoping against hope that Nick would burst in with Holly cradled in his arms. The door opened and I jumped up. But the look on Nick’s face made me slump back into my seat. “Better give up,” he muttered.
    I couldn’t bear to see defeat in his eyes again, not after he’d come so far. As I turned away, I saw the dish on the kitchen floor. Why hadn’t we thought of it? Quickly I spooned tuna from a can. Nick opened the door and I stood in the doorway. Tapping the spoon against the dish, I called, “Holly! Tuna, Holly!”
    Like lightning, a golden streak zipped through the door.
    Then, dinner devoured, Holly looked up at us, her amber gaze steady, as if nothing at all had happened.
    But I knew something had changed when I heard Nick say unabashedly, “Thank you, Lord, for bringing Holly back. And for sending this little creature to comfort us in the first place.” Who would ever have thought my stoic husband would be praying over a kitten?
    That surprise was nothing compared to what I witnessed the following spring. By that time Holly had become a full-grown cat with claws that were turning our upholstery to tatters. “We’re not going to have anywhere to sit if she keeps this up,” I complained to Nick one morning as I shooed Holly from the already-shredded corner of the sofa.
    “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,” he said. Before I could ask what he meant, he scooped up Holly went out.
    I watched them from the kitchen window. Nick strode purposefully—straight to the toolshed!
    For the first time since his stroke, I saw Nick slowly creak the shed door open. I held my breath as he stepped inside with the cat. Then the door swung shut behind them, and I could only wonder at what they were doing.
    I was almost done sewing a patch on the tattered sofa when I heard a faint whistling getting nearer and stronger. Could it be? I flung open the door.
    Nick stood there beaming, holding Holly in the crook of his right arm and a homemade cat tree in his left hand. It was just a few pieces of wood hammered together and covered with remnants of rugs, but to me, it was my husband’s greatest masterpiece.
    Nick returned to his toolshed with Holly the next day. And every day after that. Before long our neighbors noticed he was back at his workbench, and the calls started coming in again.
    Nine years later, at age 80, Nick still isn’t ready to retire. Nearly every day he’s out in the shed, putting his tools to good use—all under the watchful gaze of a certain marmalade-yellow cat, who has her own seat at the workbench, not far from where I found her. Or, rather, where I was led to her. After all, looking at how perfectly this orphaned kitten fit into our lives, I have to say there is nothing the good Lord can’t take care of once we ask him to put his hand to it.

The above article originally appeared in the August 2001 issue of Guideposts. To subscribe to Guideposts click here.

To read the next article featured in the DailyGuideposts.com 2006 Animals Newsletter, THE CAT WHO CAME BACK, click here.

E-mail to a friend