The Black Cat, or "Neighbors"

From the Archives

19: The Black Cat, or “The Neighbors”

This comes from the Richmond Dispatch, the predecessor to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a paper that I still read on a regular basis thanks to a complimentary subscription. An editor friend there found this story in their archives years ago and kindly added a copy of it to my own archives.

Only 982 tales to go.

Everybody says black cats are bad luck. But this isn’t true. I can tell you a story that proves they’re good luck. To start, when we were growing up in Virginia, we had a black cat named Usher.

We lived next door to a very sad boy named Eddie. He liked our cat, but we never played with him. Because of his parents.

Well, mostly his dad, who was really mean. Mr. Allan used to throw rotting apples at us if we took a good apple from a tree in his yard or if Usher got into his barn.

He was mean to Mrs. Allan and Eddie, too. He was a scary man. No wonder Eddie was sad.

But Usher didn’t care about Mr. Allan. One August day, he brought a dead mouse back from the Allans’ barn and left it on our floor. My mother said it was because he thought we were terrible hunters, so he was trying to teach us. (We actually preferred apples.)

Mr. Allan said it was Mrs. Allan’s fault for leaving the barn door open. But it wasn’t.

A few days later, Usher brought a dead bird back from the Allans’ barn. My mother said it was because he thought we were hungry, so he was trying to feed us. (We didn’t eat it—it would be worse than rotting apples.)

Mr. Allan said if Mrs. Allan couldn’t keep “that nasty cat” out of the barn, there would be trouble. And there was.

One day, Usher brought glasses back from the Allans’ barn. We didn’t show our mother because we knew what he was trying to tell us. And it wasn’t about rotting apples.

Something else was rotting. And Usher took us right to it.

Mrs. Allan caught us in her barn, but she wasn’t angry. In fact, she said it was good luck that Usher had found “her” glasses. She told us that she and Mr. Allan and Eddie were moving to Boston, and as a way to thank us, she said we could have all the apples we wanted after they were gone.