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The Legend
of the Hemingway Cat By Claudia Richards Even pirates don't like to live with rats. So it happened, that fearsome G.W. Shrub - resident of an undisclosed island in the lower Keys - spared the lives of two fearless kittens. They were clinging to the highest rigging of a merchant ship he had spotted drifting in the nearby Bermuda Triangle. The thankful critters cleared all his ships of rats. Their six-toed paws allowed them to climb faster then any rat could possible scramble.Unfortunately, their appetite became so ravenous, they soon had depleted the island of anything edible: snatching fish out of the water, even batting coconuts out of the trees with their large paws. G.W. Shrub had no choice but to stuff them in a sack as they lay digesting one night. Then he threw them over the railing of his arch rivals', Captain Crooke's proudest fishing vessel. Captain Crooke woke up from his hangover around noon to discover, that two fluffy fur balls with enormous feet had emptied the holds of his vessel. They were licking their six toes clean, purring contentedly high up in the rigging, well out of reach of the infuriated man of the sea. Hew quickly docked at Mallory Square to drown his sorrows at Sloppy Joe's Bar down the Street. There he met a bearded man who was glumly staring into his beer - wife trouble, from the looks of it. "Pauline threw me out" the man sobbed. "The stench of fish guts from my daily fishing trips is contaminating our marriage. Guts are piling up on Whitehead Street, and the trash man is refusing to pick them up. "If this goes on, I'll kill myself." "I have just the remedy for you, my friend" Capt. Crooke beamed. He ran back to the dock, scooped the two cats (who were sunning their bellies) into a bag and sold it to Papa for a case of Scotch and a Cuban cigar. "Don't open it before nightfall" he hastily added and scampered off to set sail - cat free and relieved. Papa did just so, and in no time his marriage and Whitehead Street were free of fishy odors. Unfortunately the cats had multiplied and as Papa fished to exhaustion, he could never fill their ravenous appetite. Soon the Hemingways slinked out of Key West in the middle of the night, leaving the caretakers no choice but to charge unsuspecting tourists $10 a piece to ogle over the hundreds of six-toed cats, lounging on the tropical grounds of the Hemingway House. At night, large trucks drive up Whitehead Street to disgorge cat food - hundreds of dollars worth, over the brick wall. And so goes the legend of the Hemingway Cat. |
