When I put the brimming cake tins, which smelled disagreeably of horse meat and pulverized fish, down on the bare cement, the cat bodies clustered around them like the petals of a fur flower. Yet the older cats managed, in the skirmish, to make way for the kittens among them. The calico kittens had mottled, wide-browed faces like pansies. The black-and-whites suggested Rorschach tests, or maps of a simpler planet than ours. My mother used to name the cats that came to the porch, and would say of one, “Isabel is a rather lackadaisical mother,” or of a wary, beat-up piebald tom, “Jeffrey has a limp today. His boots must pinch.”

The cats that stayed in the barn didn’t earn names. When I opened the top half of a stall door, light glinted from eyes in the straw as if from bits of pale glass, and a violent slither sent several cats squirming under the partition into the next stall. The pan I set down would be empty, though, an hour later. The barn cats paid for their shyness with relatively dismal lives; they were prone to the diseases of the inbred, and a probe of the straw, left over from the days when cows bedded here, would turn up a dried cat corpse—a matted pelt as stiff as a piece of leather, the dead animal’s head fixed in an eyeless snarl.

Toward the end, my mother had been too frail to make it down to feed the barn cats, so my pan was only half consumed the first night. The barn cats that had not perished or fled had become porch cats. “What are we going to do?” I asked the prowling animals as I returned from the barn in the early-September dusk. “I can’t give up my whole civilized life just to keep feeding you ingrates.”

Moving here when I was a boy had indeed felt like the loss of civilization. No phone, no electricity, no plumbing: a terrible regress. Amish workmen came and hammered snug a bright cedar-shingle roof and rather nicely built in the living room what none of the house’s previous inmates had needed—a bookcase. In time plumbers came and rendered the privy obsolete, and the electric company marched its tall creosoted poles down through the old orchard. Television entered the house, and instead of listening to weather reports and corn prices and country music on the Alton radio station we were watching the Philadelphia news, first in black-and-white and then in color. But I could never shake my impression that the farm was a trap, set backward in time, from which my clear duty was to escape.

I asked my neighbor to the south, Dwight Potteiger, “What shall I do about all the cats?”