Creek Running North

Some nights he would meet us in the driveway. He recognized the sound of the 1981 Civic’s engine as it groaned over the curb, and he’d come out through the old drier vent I had uncapped for him. I’d roll down the driver’s window and he’d hop in, ramming my chin with his forehead.

He was dusky orange with darker orange stripes. He would knead my lap through the seat belt as I kissed the M between his eyes.

That yard had an old persimmon tree, two trunks and a hundred feet tall, its lowest branches thirty feet off the ground. No one save the possums ate the persimmons. They ripened on the tree before they fell, bursting onto the clay soil, pale ghosts among the dandelions and Korean onions. Zoom had a corner of the yard, a tangle of kudzu and poison ivy. The mice were there, and in the old shed I’d cleared of the previous tenant’s carpet. He would sit for hours staring at the baseboard.

I dug a patch of soil for daylilies. Zoom was entranced. Four feet by ten, and soil musty a shovel’s depth down. He did some digging of his own. I clucked at him and he slunk away, slaloming through the rose of Sharon stems. And then returned and purring. I knelt and kissed his M.

He was a good cat and did not howl when we took him to the vet. He was patient with the subcutaneous fluids; he suffered my fumbling with catheters. When Elissa called me at work and said it was time, he waited until I got home. All he wanted was a comfortable dark corner in the closet, and yet when he realized Elissa would never let go of him, he gave her what she wanted.

Between our house and the nursery I worked in there was a small bridge over the Potomac. Trees lined both banks. The river was in flood as I crossed that day. Whitecaps caught the winter sun, already falling to the horizon. I burst from shade into a light that singed my ragged eyes, and then was swallowed up again across the flood.

Twenty-one years ago tonight I looked hard at Zoom, kissed his M, put him in a cardboard box and shut the lid. I drove his body to the vet. Coming back along Columbia Pike I watched the moon come up out of the Chesapeake. It was a brilliant dusky orange with darker orange patches. It was two days short of full.