I am just about to launch A Cat in Sancerre on Kickstarter, and I want my Substack community to get the first peek at the book. A Cat in Sancerre is a book about unexpected second chances in life and unexpectedly finding family. I wanted to write something that left me feeling hope, and I hope it brings that to you too.
Here is the link to the Kickstarter. It is not live yet, but it will be soon. If you’d like to help my project get traction, it helps to go to the page and click the button that says Notify Me.
I’ll make the project live this weekend, while it is still summer!
So here is the first ten pages…
A CAT IN SANCERRE
by Nelson Guda
Part I
From the Journal of Thérèse Rousseau Blanchet, 1992
History is a rugged and beautiful landscape. It nourishes and constrains us, builds our strengths, and imbues us with our weaknesses. All of us, even the stones under our feet, owe what we are—or are not—to the whims and grace, or neglect and terror, of the past.
I know this from these hills. When I bury my toes in the soil that is their skin, they talk to me and regale me with stories of the sweetness of the rain and the brutal endearment of the sun. The vines that hold tight to their shoulders… when I smell their leaves and taste their sap, they whisper in my ear of the lifting of birds, the gnawing of insects, the memories of stones, and the passing of armies long gone.
All of that… all that has come before us, is why we are who we are - whether we choose to accept it or not.
I accept it.
Chapter 1 • Battlemore
Connecticut—Spring 2020
Battlemore woke slowly to the sounds of birds gossiping in the woods and a light breeze blowing through its only open window. The house knew spring was arriving. It could feel the stirrings of the trees through the roots sent foraging around its foundations in search of water and nutrients. It could sense the loosening of the soil around its stones. But even without the trees and soil, the old house had already felt the change in the slow shifting of rhythmic expansions and contractions of its boards, tiles, stones, and pipes—a slow heartbeat that rose and fell with the passing of every year.
From its first days as a boarding school for revolutionary children, Battlemore had lived many lives through its people. Two hundred years of inhabitants leave a mark on a house. Love, happiness, mischief, heartache, despair, loneliness…they all find their way into the foundations, and Battlemore had felt them all. Generations of children had run up and down its stairs, scratched their names into its wood, and received punishment from adults. And the adults had come and gone and then disappeared, leaving Battlemore to sleep as it lay empty for an uncountable number of years. Later, a couple appeared and swept away the dust of years. They built a second cellar deep in the foundations to house men and women who were running from other men who claimed to own them. The couple raised a family and planted a circle of trees in front of the house to signal those seeking refuge.
Then the family left and Battlemore slept again, waking now and then to different owners with different dreams and different lives.
Now Battlemore had but one owner who sat alone, high in the third floor in a wound of his own making. He exuded an unease so deep and persistent that it sank all the way to the root of Battlemore—seeping into the centuries of emotions left there over the years. The house was accustomed to its inhabitants dimming over the cold, dark months as its stones contracted and froze to the earth. When winter’s grip broke as it was doing now, it remembered feeling their relief and happiness as the young trees in the forest behind it became exuberant, and the birds increasingly annoying.
But this man merely sat alone in the smallest room.
Silent.
Chapter 2 • Sinclair
Brooks Redgrave chose not to think about history. He’d lived most of his life actively not thinking about it, because it was easier. Less painful. It had always served him well. He had managed to stay a step ahead of those parts of his past that he chose not to think about, and he’d done it for so long that it had become habit.
In the army it had been easy. He pushed himself into a physical routine that drew limits on needless recollection and self-examination. Later, as a photographer, he took assignments that kept him moving, traveling, and focused. He liked the uncertainty of the work because it kept him too busy to reminisce.
But history doesn’t go away. It waits. Patiently. And while it is waiting, it continues to gather stories until the day when one is ready to converse with it.
Some people make peace with their history early in their lives. Others fall into an incestuous relationship with it, one that consumes them and holds them back. There are people, however, who manage to put off the difficult conversation with history until their deathbed, which was exactly what Brooks had hoped to do. He had mostly succeeded. But when the COVID pandemic ground the world to a halt, history found him cornered in the old school that was Battlemore, and he was unable to look away.
“Brooks!”
He barely heard the yell from his little third-floor room. When it finally entered his brain and tripped his attention, he wondered how many times it had already happened.
Brooks walked to the one tiny window of the small room tucked away at the end of a narrow hall. He had to slide open the window to look down to the ground below, where he saw his neighbor, Sinclair, standing in the compacted winter leaves behind the ancient house.
Sinclair looked up as Brooks pulled the window open. “Are you coming down? Or do I have to break a window and come in?”
“Hold on.”
Brooks pulled the window closed, crossed the room in three steps, and carefully locked the small door behind him. He jogged down the narrow staircase of the old boarding school two steps at a time, remembering to duck his head at just the right turn in the stairs.
Sinclair was waiting outside the kitchen door when Brooks got to the first floor. The older Lebanese man, dressed in bespoke sweatpants with a matching dark gray face mask, took two steps back when the door opened.
“Jesus, Sinclair. You look like a rioter in Gucci.”
Sinclair removed his mask and tucked it in a pocket as a huge orange cat darted around him and into the house.
“Good to see that you’re still alive, Brooks,” he said without much concern in his voice. “Diane was concerned that you might have passed away without even saying goodbye.”
Sinclair was an enigma. Born in Lebanon to parents who fled their homeland after a neighborhood bombing, he was raised in Paris and educated at British boarding schools. This varied background gave him a strange mix of proper British manners tinged with French passion and a highly volatile Lebanese temper. After school, Sinclair moved to the U.S. and made a fortune in the early days of the internet. It wasn’t long before he came to despise corporate culture, however, and moved on to collecting art and what he called collecting people—his passion for finding unlikely friends like Brooks.
“Yeah,” Brooks said curtly, “still alive.” He could feel Sinclair’s temper under his cool demeanor and looked away from him at his cat, Gusto, pushing against his legs.
“I guessed that you were still alive since Gusto hasn’t been bothering us. But when he showed up on our doorstep begging for food this morning, Diane insisted that I come check on you. What the hell is wrong with you, Brooks? No phone calls, no emails? Do you know I knocked on your door three times before I hammered on it with this?” Sinclair showed Brooks the piece of wood before dropping it, and then paused to take a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his hands off.
Brooks wasn’t sure how many days had passed since he’d last been outside. In fact, the last time he’d gone out, there had been snow on the ground. Now, the air felt sullen and humid, heavy with leaf litter and worms. The kind of smell that the wind carried before a storm. He watched Sinclair without saying anything as the older man meticulously cleaned his hands. The act of removing the dirt seemed to calm him down a bit.
“I would have given up and gone back, despite Diane’s entreaties, if I hadn’t also gotten a call from your lovely Mia.”
Brooks winced and wished he hadn’t, as he saw a flash of amusement make the corners of Sinclair’s mouth twitch.
“She’s not my Mia anymore. We broke up.”
“Ah, yes. So you said,” Sinclair intoned with a raise of his eyebrow. “Well, I’ve been charged with delivering a message to you regardless of your so-called relationship status. Would you like to hear it?”
A message from Mia was pretty much the last thing that Brooks wanted to hear. He looked back in the kitchen where Gusto had jumped onto the counter to wait for food.
“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice,” Sinclair interjected into the pause. “Mia was very clear about that. So let’s see…” He took a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it with more theatricality than Brooks thought necessary. “I quote…” Sinclair cleared his throat as if preparing to deliver a speech. “What the fuck, Brooks? Are you dead?”
He turned the paper over, examined the other side, and then looked up at Brooks and smiled mirthlessly.
“That about sums it up,” he said, folding the sheet neatly. “Although she did also say that you should check your mail. As in postal mail. She used quite a selection of choice words to describe the fact that she’d resorted to writing to you on paper. Alas, I didn’t transcribe them for you.”
Brooks sighed and looked past Sinclair to the trees on the hill. The bare branches at the top were moving slightly, as if blown upon by a giant.
“I hate to say it, but I have to take her side, Brooks,” Sinclair said, tucking the folded paper back in his pocket. “I’ll admit that I’m relieved that you aren’t dead or dying. But since that’s the case, it just seems like you are being an ass. How do you think we might have felt if you were actually sick?”
“I know, I know, Sinclair. It’s just…” Brooks cut himself short, not knowing what to say. The world had ground to a halt with the pandemic, and he didn’t have anything to complain about. “You’re right.”
“Good. Glad we got that straightened out.” Sinclair paused a moment, looking as if he had expected to get more argument out of Brooks. He glanced up at the trees. “We’re not done with this, but I have to get back and let Diane know that you’re alive before it starts raining.”
“Thanks, Sinclair,” Brooks said. “I appreciate you looking in on me.”
“Before I go, I’m beginning to seriously wonder why I ever told you about this house. I thought I would enjoy having you as a neighbor and that the house might help you get away from the city you seem to dislike so much. Instead, I think I killed your career, and now you’re well on the way to becoming a pain-in-the-ass neighbor—exactly what I didn’t want.”
“Sorry,” Brooks interrupted again. He didn’t want to talk about New York, the art world, or anything related to it. “I know I should have checked in with you. I turned off all my devices, and… Anyway, are you and Diane doing okay?”
“We’re fine, thank you. We’ve actually been enjoying staying home for a while. You know how much we normally travel—it’s been nice to just enjoy being in our house.”
Both men looked up as another gust of wind sent leaves swirling off the hill behind the house. “I need to go, but as I said, we’re not done talking.”
Sinclair turned and started walking up the hill, but then stopped and looked back.
“Check your mailbox.”
“Right,” Brooks said, and then watched as Sinclair climbed the trail up the short slope and continued over the hill. He closed the door and walked to the counter where Gusto was sitting and looking at him reproachfully. The cat gave a hoarse mew that sounded almost like a quack.
“I know you’re hungry. Just hold on a minute.”
Brooks walked through the kitchen to the front of the house where a large entrance hall opened onto a gravel drive. As soon as he opened the door, Gusto darted around his feet and charged out in front of him. The rough gravel drive curved downhill from the front steps toward the rural Connecticut road that snaked past Battlemore. The massive orange cat trotted down the drive and stopped a few feet short of the road where he began sniffing the mailbox post intently.
“Any calling cards?” Brooks asked. Gusto was so dog-like that Brooks wouldn’t have been surprised to see him lift a leg and pee on the post. Instead, the cat dug some leaves away from the ground and did his business there while Brooks extracted a massive stack of mail and one small box from the old-fashioned mailbox.
Why are businesses still sending this stuff out? he wondered, looking through all the junk.
Gusto was covering up his spot when Brooks started walking back to the house.
“Come on, big guy,” he called.
Halfway back to the front door, Brooks stopped. Mixed in with the junk mail was an envelope addressed to him in cursive handwriting he knew all too well—Mia. He turned it over and found a note scrawled in large capital letters on the back.
DON’T YOU DARE THROW THIS AWAY WITHOUT READING IT!
Brooks sighed and looked at the front door, where Gusto was already waiting for him impatiently.
“Right,” he said to himself, and walked back toward the house as the wind toyed with the leaves around his feet.
Chapter 3 • Mia
Brooks walked back to the kitchen and set the mail on the oak table at the end of the room. The table under the kitchen window was the first thing he’d made when he moved into Battlemore. After that he’d renovated the entire kitchen—a massive galley built for feeding a small school.
Brooks looked at the letter from Mia as Gusto meowed.
“Yeah, yeah. I know you’re hungry. You’re gonna have to wait.”
He turned around to the commercial stove that took up a large stretch of one wall, and lit a flame under an old water kettle. While Gusto was walking around his feet, he opened a small bag of green tea, measured out a little into the palm of his hand, and poured it into a small pot. He spent the next few minutes sorting through the junk mail until a thin stream of steam began to rise from the kettle. When the tea was ready, he sat down at the table and cradled the cup between his hands.
Brooks had been using the same handmade ceramic cup every day since he moved into Battlemore. It was a small Japanese-style piece from a potter in the Berkshires. The rim of the cup was tilted slightly, and the warm gray glaze spilled irregularly over the edge on one side. The tea and the cup were reminders of a Japanese journalist who he’d traveled with for nearly six months.
Brooks took a sip of tea and regarded the envelope from Mia for a full minute. While he was staring at it, Gusto jumped up on the table and looked at him expectantly. Finally, he tore it open and started reading.
Brooks,
What the fuck??
Seriously, are you dead or what? Actually, I know you’re not dead, because I called Sinclair, and he said that as far as he knew you weren’t. Of course, by the time you get this letter, who knows.
When was the last time you opened your computer or your phone? Why the fuck are you making me communicate like the dark ages? Yes, I know we’re not dating anymore, but as far as I can recall we were still friends a couple months ago. And maybe it surprises you, but I actually do care about whether you are alive or dead. So which is it? If you are alive, send me a damn clue.
Anyway, you may have noticed from the postmark that I made it to Paris. We’re locked down like everyone else. While I’m glad I’m not in New York right now, being stuck in a little apartment in a city where I can barely order coffee in is not my idea of fun.
Until I hear from you – fuck you (interpret that however you’d like).
Mia
PS: Call me now so we can talk about your son
Oh crap, Brooks thought, closing his eyes. Mia is pregnant.