Elm Gate House
By Daniel Fitzpatrick
Thomas Lowell was aware of the cat, dimly, peripherally, without taking his eyes from the elm trees across the meadow, for what must have been a minute before it leapt up into his lap and pushed its forepaws against his chest and arched its back. Even then he did not look at it but ran a hand along its back as he watched the breeze that sent smooth luxurious ripples through the outer branches of the elm trees the way a cold wind scales the face of a pond in places on bright February days. The spine beneath his hand was heavier, crueler, than Shimp’s and it was not Shimp there when finally he looked down into the wide, lionish face fixed on his, yellow-eyed, pressing his chest one paw at a time and leaving reddish prints on the white shirt buttoned down neatly over Thomas Lowell’s trim body.
Who are you now? Thomas Lowell asked the cat, slowly taking it under the forelegs and lifting it away from him. It was too big, too long, to lift entirely as he sat, and its hind paws pressed like a toddler’s feet against his thighs, flexing like a toddler’s, too, and its forepaws, which were white, went on kneading the air as they’d kneaded his chest. The white fur was stained a dull red. The cat made no sound, and Thomas Lowell asked again who it was. Then he stood up and the cat let its hind paws slide down the grey thighs of his slacks and he set the creature on the ground.
He had been imagining the sound of the wind in the elms and now he realized that he was actually hearing it along with the piercings of the white-crowned sparrows and that there was a faint current of air stirring in the room, strengthening as he stepped into the dining room and strengthening further as the cat followed him through the dining room into the sunroom which was on the wrong side of the house. The door was open and the whole depth of the hardwood forest to the north was frisking in the wind that must have been rushing over the top of the world and flowing into the forest as into the place it had been made for except that now it was too much, too much for itself and the forest and rushed on into the meadow beyond and on over the rest of the world.
Thomas Lowell wondered when there has been so much light in the forest and wondered then where his wife was. He almost called out, quietly, Charlotte, but even as he turned his head he was arrested again by the light that fell nowhere in particular but shifted every moment, sliding off of leaves and boughs as the wind worked in between each acorn and leaf. The light was everywhere and nowhere and he wondered for a moment what the difference was between everywhere and nowhere and then he wondered again, a little afraid now, where Charlotte might be and he did call her name once, twice, and again, and only the wind replied.
The cat had been weaving between his legs, running its high shoulders against his knees on the in-turns and holding its tail out in a long curve behind it, and now it walked through the door, walking in the manner of a man as only a cat can across the low deck of cedar planks beaded and gleaming with the rain that had fallen in the night and into the trim wet grass of the lawn which was itself really a few yards’ concession from the forest which leaned in over the grass and in the dark and the cold was menacing and which now in the flood of light shimmered like the portal to a long gone time. Thomas Lowell was afraid. Yet he stepped down after the cat across the lawn and into the light.
The cat walked on, not looking back but assured that Thomas Lowell was following. It can probably hear my steps. Probably even feel them, he thought as he turned back and saw again the elm he had watched from his green baize chair in the living room. The wind was running through it like a comb through hair, and he heard the rush of it in the boughs above him and thought for a while of staying just there where he was or of walking back inside and sitting in his chair again. He turned back and the curve of the cat’s tail slipped out of view and he hurried after it. And again he was afraid.
It occurred to him it was strange that he had thought of Shimp. Why strange, though? Shimp was their cat.
Do you know Shimp? he called to the tail. He knew the head would not turn and that the shoulders would go on rising and falling inexorably beneath the black fur and so addressed himself to the curved tail swinging unconcernedly left then right. Thomas Lowell put a hand to his chest and then, seeing the dull red marks of the cat’s feet, brushed the hand against the seat of his pants. No, I guess you wouldn’t know Shimp, he said. He couldn’t remember why, but surely this cat would not know Shimp.
We call him Shimp because of my son. You know the first time we saw him was at a place down by the river they were serving boiled shrimp. And Chase—that’s my boy—was about a year and a half and I kept peeling shrimp and breaking them up and setting them in front of him in the high chair on my left, and his mother, my wife, Charlotte, was on my right. We were sitting at this sort of bar on the patio looking at the river and I couldn’t believe how fast Chase was eating these shrimp. But I was talking to Charlotte, telling her about the shrimp in Key Largo at the place we used to go when it rained real hard and there was a big four-sided bar on the deck outside with a high high roof made to look like grass but big, very big and spacious, near the harbor. And then about the shrimp in Tampa at Pass-a-Grille and the pitiful shrimp you can get frozen everywhere in the world and the little cocktail shrimp we got from the grocery store downstairs from the apartment in Paris near the canal full of green water where the Métro came up from underground for a minute. And every time I’d look back at Chase the shrimp were gone. So finally I said, son, what are you doing with these shrimp, and he looked up at me—he still had a big round baby face and those narrow baby teeth trying to figure out where to go in his mouth and he said, Shimp! Shimp! That’s right, I said, shrimp. And he said Shimp and took another piece from me and threw it on the ground and there was this kitten waiting for it. So we asked around and nobody knew who he was and we took him home and named him Shimp.
The cat had gone on walking and now the woods cleared a little and the roar of the wind returned in full, cresting the treetops and pouring down into the hollow. In the center were two elm trunks, blasted in their youth and petrified, and between them was a massive iron gate, lying flat in the grass that grew thick around its bars the way skin grows thick around wounds so that he wondered dimly how he knew it was a gate.
My wife wanted this here, he told the cat, which leapt at the black surface of the left-hand tree and perched on a knot and peered left and right over the grass. She said a gate means home and a gate without a fence means you’re welcome.
Thomas Lowell knew he wasn’t making sense but that what he said had once made sense. Something had made it make sense.
That’s why the house is Elm Gate, he said. Elm Gate House. That’s what we called it.
He knew he had seen Shimp sitting where the cat was now but that it had been different, that something else had been beside Shimp and there had been something between the two trees and what could that have been.
The cat was looking down through the scars of grass and Thomas Lowell looked, too, at the grass in the wind and the terrible fixity of the gate in the grass and he looked up at the cat again and stepped toward it and said, Come on, Shimp, come on down now. I’ll help you down. Time to go home. I’ll help you, come here. The cat was poised as if to leap, the shoulders high beneath the bright black fur, the tail swishing left and right as Thomas Lowell raised his hands toward it, pleading, Please come down, Shimp. Chase’ll help you, and I’ll help you both. Please please come down. The cat did not look down at him as he stood there, arms raised like a priest’s, with the wind pressing the white shirt fouled with the cat’s red prints flush with the skin of his chest. Even in his pleading he felt the shirt against his nipples and was sickly miserable and afraid and then he drew back, sobbing, holding his head in his hands as he squatted and tucked his head down to his knees and the cat sailed through the wind into the grass. He could hear the slither of its passage through the grass and the sound grew louder as the wind and his sobs increased and then the cat was there insinuating itself in the slight hollow of his chest and thighs. Thomas Lowell unfolded himself, lifting his head, setting his knees in the yellow grass as the cat stretched upward like a child and pressed his shirt again. The body of a badger lay in the grass.
Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of two novels, two poetry collections, and a verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He lives in New Orleans, where he edits a journal called Joie de Vivre.