The old adage that “Cats Have Nine Lives” was brought out in this tale told to me by Anne Wheeley, formerly of Urbanna.
Sometime in the 1940s, the Town of Urbanna lost its plumber, so Doc Thomas F. Marshall Sr. at the urgency of town council went out recruiting for a town plumber. Doc went to the Eastern Shore of Virginia and found a young plumber by the name of Harold Taylor, known to most in town as “Plumber” Taylor. He offered him some incentives to move to town and he came.
When Plumber and his wife Agnes moved to Urbanna they had a house built on Kent Street and Harold opened a plumbing business on Cross Street. The family’s children, included Frances, Gloria, Jean, Donnie and Johnny Davis Taylor.
Sometime in the early 1960s, the family’s cat appeared to have died. The girls in the family were devastated that the cat had passed. The boys were unfazed by the death. Anne Wheeley lived in an upstairs apartment in a building next door to the plumbing business. She witnessed the burial of the cat and the events that followed.
When the cat passed, Agnes placed the dead cat in a shoebox and tied a red ribbon around it to keep the box closed and told the boys to take the cat over behind the plumbing business building and bury it deep so no animals would dig it up.
Anne watched the process from her upstairs window. Donnie and Johnny Davis took the box with the dead cat and dug a hole no deeper than a few inches in the ground and in a matter of minutes were on their way.
A few days later, Anne saw a cat roaming that looked like Agnes’ cat but she thought no more about it as she knew the cat had died. About a week later, she had some sewing to take to Agnes, who was an expert seamstress. When she arrived at the Taylor house, there was Agnes on the front porch swing and sitting by her side was that cat.
Anne asked about the cat and Agnes said, “Damnest thing I’ve ever seen. The boys said they buried her deep in the ground but somehow she resurrected. She must have been in a coma, or something, woke up in the shoe box and dug her way out because she was at the backdoor about a week later screaming for food.”
Anne said to me when she told me the story, “It was a good thing those boys did not bury that cat deep in the ground.”
Cats do have nine lives!
It happened here in Rivah Country!
