Louisiana Cat

By Merle Harton, Jr.

After twenty years of marriage my wife decided to go to work full-time. I didn't make enough money for our lifestyle in our gated community, so she would leave the house through the front door in the morning and return the same way in the evening. At her new job she met a woman who was moving with her second husband to Baton Rouge for their new life there, but they couldn't take their cat Gus and they wanted to know if we would take him. He was a big cat, she said, but a really loving, fun cat. He was at the vet's office, waiting; if no one would take him, she said, he'd have to go to the Humane Society and we all know what happens there.

So I went to the vet's to see Gus and he was the biggest American short-hair cat I'd ever seen. He was friendly, almost totally orange, but a little shy and stayed toward the back of what was really a dog cage until the friend, Beverly, reached in and took Gus out. He was a handsome cat with inquisitive hazel eyes and enormous paws; he was neutered as a kitten and his front claws had been removed then, too. He wasn't sure what to make of me at first, and that was because he didn't get along with Beverly's new husband. Gus hated him, she said, and the new husband hated Gus. Once he left his briefcase open in the morning and before he left for work Gus jumped in it and peed all over his papers. That's why Gus wasn't going with them to Baton Rouge. He loved to stay on their screened porch and sit on a chair and look out, and whenever he wanted to play, he'd grab a toy in his mouth and walk on two legs towards you. There was a spark of intelligence in those cat eyes and he had personality, and I said we'd be happy to take care of Gus and we took the big orange cat home with us.

When he first got to the house, he stayed out of sight for about two days straight. I'm still not sure where he was—he was, after all, a really big cat—but he'd sneak out for food two or three times and to use the litter box. After that, he pretty much made himself very visible. My four children all loved him, although they couldn't handle his one big habit—in fact, I think I was probably the only one who could. If he liked you, he would get on the nearest countertop and jump onto your shoulders and stretch himself around your neck. He weighed about 25 pounds, so he was a lot to carry around, and he would stay like that until you pushed him off. The kids couldn't do that for more than a minute or so. He didn't give any warning that he was going to do the jump, so a few people were almost knocked over by this. I didn't mind it and I could carry the weight, so Gus spent a lot of time on my shoulders. He made friends with the family very quickly and once in a while he would come around the corner with a toy in his mouth, walking on his hind legs. He wouldn't walk too far like that, but perhaps he did it as often as he did because we always made a big deal about it, cheering and clapping to see this happy sight, and more so because as big as he was, he looked just like a toddler making his first steps.

We wouldn't let Gus outside. He wasn't with us long enough and he wasn't at all an outside cat, so we had to stay vigilant about keeping him in the house. That was hard to do, with four children and their friends coming in and out of the house, but we were able to manage it for about four months. We didn't have a screened porch, so Gus struggled to find a way to look out on the world. I had a series of three tall windows in my study, so he made himself at home on the library table there and watched the world in the back yard from his new perch, until he made up his mind that he needed to see parts of the world that weren't visible from the table in my study.

One day we noticed that we hadn't seen Gus for several hours. We looked throughout the house for him and concluded that he had slipped out of the house. Two days later a friend called me to say that there were remains of an orange cat by the highway outside our subdivision. I made the children stay behind as I took a walk in that direction; I found him in the grass near the entrance to the neighborhood. He had been dead for at least a day; he was hit by a car, probably. I walked back to the house and then drove the car around with a shovel and a plastic bag. He was rotten and stinking in the hot Louisiana sun and the trunk of the car smelled like dead flesh for a week. I buried him in an out-of-the-way spot in the woods behind the house.

A year later my wife said she wanted a divorce and I knew then that Gus had loved me much more than my spouse.

The New Quaker (Fiction): "Louisiana Cat"
Copyright © 2004 Merle Harton, Jr.  All rights reserved
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