The Bell Tower Cat Staunton Refused to Evict

The ladder truck from Staunton Fire Company No. 1 pulled up to Trinity Lutheran on a Tuesday morning in May, and Harlan Boyce stood at the edge of the parking lot with his arms crossed, telling anyone who'd listen that he'd warned the vestry this would happen.

"Nineteen days," he said, like he was reading a verdict off a clipboard. "Nineteen days that animal's been up there, and now the church is paying the fire department's overtime rate to get it down. Three hundred and eighty dollars. For a stray."

I didn't say anything back. I just watched the ladder unfold, section by section, toward the narrow stone ledge below the bell tower window, where a tabby cat named Biscuit had been trapped since the third week of April.

I'm Nora Pruett. I taught fourth grade at Bessie Weller Elementary for thirty-one years, two blocks from Trinity Lutheran, and I'd been feeding the cats around this church since before Harlan Boyce ever walked through its doors. Biscuit showed up as a kitten behind the parish hall dumpster, maybe six years ago, and by the time he was grown he knew every member of the congregation by the sound of their car door. The Hensley children fed him crackers on their way to school. Old Mr. Dabney, who used his walker to get from the sidewalk to the sanctuary steps, kept a bowl of water out for him by the handicap ramp. Biscuit wasn't a problem. He was furniture with a heartbeat, the kind of thing a town doesn't notice it loves until it's gone.

Harlan became chair of the Buildings and Grounds Committee in March. He came from the insurance business, and he talked about the church the way he talked about a policy that needed tightening up. Loose gutters. Cracked pavement. Liability exposure. Three weeks into the job, a guest at the Pelham wedding reception had an allergic reaction in the fellowship hall — nothing serious, an inhaler handled it — and somehow by the next vestry meeting it had become Biscuit's fault, even though the cat had never once set a paw inside the building.

Harlan taped a notice to the bulletin board in the breezeway. STRAY ANIMAL TO BE REMOVED FOR SANITATION AND LIABILITY REASONS, printed in that same clipboard font he seemed to love. He called Augusta County Animal Control and had them set a humane trap by the sacristy door, baited with tuna. Biscuit was too smart for the tuna. What he wasn't smart enough to avoid was the open bell tower window, left unlatched after an organ tuner's visit, and the narrow ledge thirty-two feet above the courtyard where he ended up cornered with nowhere left to climb.

For nineteen days, that cat sat on a strip of stone eight inches wide, watching the courtyard, the sacristy door, the handicap ramp where his water bowl used to be. Every morning before first service, somebody craned their neck toward that window to see if he'd made it through the night. The Hensley kids brought binoculars. Mr. Dabney had his grandson take a picture on a phone and print it out, taped it inside his hymnal. The Staunton News Leader ran a photo on page three under the headline TOWER CAT HANGS ON. Donations started coming in — not much, a jar on the parish hall counter that filled up to around two hundred and ten dollars by the second week, money nobody had asked for, meant for a rescue nobody had figured out how to perform.

Harlan didn't think the cat would survive it. I think, if I'm honest, there were days he hoped it wouldn't, just so the problem would resolve itself without his name attached to it.

It didn't resolve itself. On the nineteenth day, Captain Russ Oakley from the fire company — whose own daughter had been in my class in 2009 — brought the ladder truck without charging the church a dime extra on top of the standard call fee, after his crew saw the News Leader photo pinned up in the station kitchen. He went up himself, in his gear, moving along the ledge an inch at a time with a cat carrier strapped to his chest. Biscuit didn't scratch him. Didn't bolt. He let Russ scoop him up against his chest like he'd been waiting the whole nineteen days for exactly that hand to reach for him.

The courtyard broke into applause before the ladder had even folded back down.

Harlan clapped too, for what it's worth. But two nights later, at the regular vestry meeting, he stood up in the fellowship hall under that one fluorescent tube that had been flickering since March, and he made his case again: relocate the cat permanently to a farm he knew out past Fort Defiance, keep the liability off church property for good.

I'd brought the signatures with me. Two hundred and fourteen names, collected over nine days on a legal pad I kept behind the counter at the parish hall — neighbors, parents, three of the firefighters, Mr. Dabney's whole Sunday school class. I set the pad on the table in front of the vestry and asked them to read it before they voted on anything.

They read it. Pastor Lindgren read the top page out loud, actually, the part where seven-year-old Caleb Hensley had written, in block letters his mother clearly helped him with, BISKIT LIVE HEER PLEEZE.

The vote was nine to three. Resolution 14-2024, recorded in the minutes: Biscuit the cat is recognized as a permanent resident of the Trinity Lutheran campus, under the care of designated volunteers, with any future removal decision requiring a full vestry vote rather than committee action alone.

That last clause was the one that mattered. It meant Harlan, on his own, could never tape up a notice like that again.

I did the rest myself, the Thursday after the vote. I took down his old eviction notice from the breezeway bulletin board — the tape had yellowed, the corners curled — and in its place I pinned a laminated copy of Resolution 14-2024, the one Pastor Lindgren had signed. Next to it I hung a small cedar feeding box that Mr. Dabney's grandson had built in shop class, carved with the word BISCUIT burned into the lid, and inside it I kept a folder: his rabies certificate from the vet on Churchville Avenue, a feeding schedule, and a list of names — mine, the Hensleys', three others — who'd signed on as his official volunteer caretakers.

Harlan came by that Sunday to drop off his committee keys. He was stepping down, he said, effective immediately, something about the insurance business needing more of his time. He stood in the breezeway reading the laminated resolution for a good while before he said anything.

"Three hundred and eighty dollars," he said finally, not looking at me. "For a cat."

"Two hundred and fourteen people didn't think so," I said.

He handed me the keys and left through the parking lot, past the cedar box, past Biscuit himself, who was curled on the warm concrete by the handicap ramp in a patch of May sun, not even bothering to lift his head as Harlan's car pulled away.