Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God (10 page)

A stickler for hygiene, the veterinary would order these corpses placed outside upon the refuse heap immediately, to await the attention of Bannock via the incinerator, a most modern electric one, complete with smoke arrestor. A high fence enclosed this area from the prying eyes of neighbors, and a lower one partitioned the grounds behind the little hospital from those of the dwelling next door, where Mrs. McKenzie waged her perpetual battle to wring a few herbs, flowers, and vegetables from the soil.

Mrs. McKenzie’s formal gardens were often the subject of some banter on the part of Mr. MacDhui and even the Reverend Peddie when he came to spend an evening with his friend, but both were also just men who praised her flowers and occasional radishes, onions, and carrots when there was a yield. Thus death and life were close neighbors in the back areas of the twin houses on Argyll Lane.

The rear of the hospital was, of course, strictly off limits for Mary Ruadh, but with due care and appreciation for the sacredness of Mrs. McKenzie’s horticultural ventures she had the run of the yard back of her own house and often played there.

There was yet an hour before lunch and Mrs. McKenzie was still at her ironing in the upstairs spare room devoted to her department of sewing, mending, frilling, etc., and so she did not hear Mary Ruadh when she returned empty-armed from the tragedy that had befallen her next door. Tears fell in a steady stream from the eyes of the child and she sobbed, not in paroxysms, but without end, as though to weep was now the normal state of being for her, as before it had been to laugh, gurgle, or smile, as though she would thus weep forever after.

For all her tears, there was a certain grim purposefulness in her movements, and as she entered the house she hushed her sobbing until it was no more than a whispered exhalation of the breath that expressed her misery.

Closing the door behind her softly, she hearkened for a moment to the doleful kirk-humming and ironing noises that proceeded from above and betokened what Mrs. McKenzie was safely about. Then she continued on through the dining room, into the kitchen where Thomasina’s untasted bowl of milk still remained on the floor, left there by the housekeeper in anticipation of her return from the doctor, cured and with an appetite.

Filled with the necessity and daring of her determination, Mary-of-the-red-hair stepped over it without so much as a glance and went out the back door, proceeding at once to the fence that divided the area from the one next door. It was higher than her head. She searched about until she found a wooden box or two and soon made a steps onto which she climbed, and looked over. There, atop the refuse heap, stretched out as limp as an old, discarded fur piece, lay the remains of Thomasina, the eyes closed, one lip partly withdrawn from the white teeth.

With a cunning never before in her life called upon, but which seemed to be there, ready-made for her need, Mary Ruadh appraised the rear windows of both houses. No figures appeared at any of them. Mrs. McKenzie’s ironing continued to occupy her, as the sound of the doleful melodies testified—she always sang hymns when she ironed, probably an association between the hot iron and the probable hell-fire to come—and if her father and Willie Bannock were about, they were still in the operating room, which was in the front part of the house.

Swiftly the little girl scrambled over the fence and, hanging by her hands, dropped onto the ground on the other side. Then she ran to the heap and took her dead from it, like the Scottish women of old who came forth after dusk when the battle was over and the clan corpses lay stark upon the battlefield, sought out and claimed their men, and silently lifting them in their arms, carried them away for burial to some secret grave that would not be found or desecrated.

Mary Ruadh draped Thomasina about her shoulders as she had so often done in life, quickly arranged another steps of boxes, kicking them away when she had done with them, and climbed back into Mrs. McKenzie’s garden, removing the evidence there too, with a care to spare the housekeeper’s show of asters, stock, and sweet William. There was a door in the rear wall of the garden and, clutching the still-warm body of the cat to her breast, she quickly let herself out through it, closing it quietly behind her before she began to run.

The lane was at the south end of the village, where the tide crept upon a pebbled shore and small sand runners and sea birds pecked, yet nearby, at no more than a hundred yards distance and swelling upward from the sea, there was a copse of pale gray ash, smooth-boled beech, and gnarled oak. It was for the shelter of these woods lying at the entrance to the grounds of the dark-stone manor house that Mary Ruadh ran as fast as her legs could carry her and her burden, as though if she did not reach it quickly, her grief would overtake her and catch her naked in the open where she could not hide.

At the foot of a giant oak, so ancient that its roots, like the veins on the hands of the very old, stood out from the ground to form ridges of moss-covered shelter for a small body, Mary Ruadh flung herself beside the limp remains of her friend, for on that day that had begun so ordinarily and usually, like any other day, she had lost all she had.

It was not only her cat, her dear companion and friend of whom she had been bereft, but also her father.

Now, however, she wept over the immediate, beating the earth with her feet and fists and burying her face again and again in the soft, still flank, crying aloud over and over the beloved name of Thomasina until her wailing filled the grove and reached the ears of Hughie Stirling and brought him over to where she lay, to discover the cause.

Hughie, the son of the laird who lived in the large manor house in the park on the slope a mile or so from the shore, was a boy of nine, attractive, with blue eyes of unusual clarity and color beneath dark brows and long lashes with curly, crisp dark hair, high brow and cheekbones, and square chin of the Campbells, to whom the Stirlings were related. A leader in the parish school, which he attended with youth of all degree and scale in and about Inveranoch, he was enjoying the lazy days of summer-holiday freedom.

Clad in shorts and white T shirt, Hughie went over and knelt by the side of the child and examined the still figure of the cat. “Hello, Mary Ruadh. I say, whatever has happened to Thomasina? Is she dead?”

Mary raised her tear-stained face to see her friend and protector kneeling above her. She poured out her heart to him. “She was sick and Daddy killed her,” she wailed. “She couldn’t stand up this morning and when I took her to Daddy to be cured he made Willie Bannock put her to sleep. She’s dead.”

The boy examined the cat more closely and gave the body a tentative prod. Even then, the sweetish scent of the chloroform still clung to it, and he wrinkled his nose. His quick mind saw and understood what might have happened. Raised among animals, dogs, cats, horses, livestock, and in an atmosphere where they were less sentimentally regarded, he knew how quickly a beast could be stricken with a sudden illness and an agony which made shooting a mercy. He said, “Maybe it was all for the best, Mary Ruadh. Maybe Thomasina was so sick your father couldn’t help it—”

The child turned upon him a look of mingled despair and sudden hatred, and Hughie, more sensitive than most, was at once aware of his error, yet helpless in the new onrush of tears and sobs, as, confronted with this last blow, the seeming disloyalty of her friend, she cried, “Daddy didn’t even try. He just went and had her killed,” and then added, “I hate you too—” In a paroxysm of grief she buried her face in the ground and dug into the moss with her small fingernails.

At a loss for what to do, Hughie first pronounced a valedictory over the departed: “She was a good cat,” he said, and then added, “Don’t cry so, Mary Ruadh, you’ll do yourself a hurt. Maybe Thomasina is in heaven already with wings and is having a lovely time chasing winged mice.”

The little girl glanced at him for a moment with slightly less hostility, but the tears and sobs that wracked her slender body continued. Hughie could not find it in him to care greatly about the cat, for his world was full of assorted cats who lived in the barns and stables or snoozed in the kitchen behind the stove and one was like another, but the awful grief afflicting Mary Ruadh touched and frightened him . . . He was near enough her age to understand the greater tragedy of her loss of trust in her father along with the companionship of her pet. Plainly there was nothing more to be done for Thomasina, but he was deeply concerned over Mary Ruadh. He had heard of people dying from a broken heart. Unless something were done to help her, his playmate, over whom he had exercised a kind of benevolent watch throughout the summer and who was strangely dear to him, might lie there until she wept herself to death over the corpse of her cat.

So much a man already was Hughie Stirling that in this crisis he remembered that where one could not console the next best thing was to distract. He said, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Mary Ruadh. We’ll give Thomasina the best and most wonderful funeral any cat ever had. Mary! Mary Ruadh! Do you hear me? We’ll give Thomasina a grand burial this very day. I know just the satin box at home that will do for the casket. We’ll put in the young heather for her to lie on, which is as soft as down—well, almost, anyway. Are you listening to me, Mary Ruadh?”

She was. The agony of sobs began to diminish and when she raised her head and tear-brightened eyes from the gray-green sward of old moss and roots, the anger and mistrust had gone from them. There was definite interest.

Hughie pressed the advantage thus won and at the same time began to fire his own vivid imagination, for even as he invented and improvised to divert the unhappy child, the idea began to sound most promising and might result in a “do” that would be talked about by his companions in Inveranoch for a long while to come.

“Look you, Mary Ruadh,” he cried, “we will have a procession through the town as long as when Lachlan Dougal was buried and you shall wear widow’s mournings and walk directly behind the casket, weeping.”

Mary Ruadh was now frankly interested in the proposal. She picked herself up and knelt facing Hughie, so that the body of Thomasina lay between them, unnoticed. “Will I wear a veil and a black shawl? Mrs. McKenzie has a black shawl.”

“Of course,” Hughie assented, delighted with the results he was achieving and more and more carried away with his idea, “I’m sure I can find you a veil of mother’s. We’ll have the funeral this very day in the afternoon. I’ll ask Geordie McNabb, and Iain will bring his brothers and sisters and others from the school.”

Mary Ruadh asked, “Can the dustman come?”

“Well, no,” Hughie replied, “he’d very likely be working—”

Then as the child’s face fell, he had another brilliant inspiration. “Do ye ken Jamie Braid, the son of Sergeant Braid, father’s piper? He’s been learning the pipes and already has unco’ skill. We’ll have
him.
Can ye no’ see Jamie in his kilts with his ain wee pipes (Hughie when he became excited was apt to drop somewhat into the local way of speech), wi’ the ribbons flying and his bonnet set saucily upon his knob, piping Macintosh’s Lament?”

Mary Ruadh was quite enchanted now. Her eyes were as round as half-crown pieces and tears no longer flowed from them.

Hughie continued: “Well, and I’ll wear my formal kilts with skean dhu and sporran and every one on the street will turn his head as we go by and say, ‘There goes the poor widow MacDhui, a-burying of her dearest Thomasina, God rest her soul, foully done to death—’ ”

“Really truly, Hughie?”

“Oh yes,” the boy promised, “and I’ll tell you something more.” He was now beginning to be intoxicated by his success, not only in distracting his unhappy friend, but at the same time organizing a splendid afternoon’s entertainment, far better than the somewhat tame picnic he originally projected. “We’ll make a headboard!”

“What is a headboard?”

“Well, it’s a kind of a thing like a gravestone when you are in a hurry. It tells about the person who is buried there.” Here his own blue eyes widened and he ran his fingers through his crisp, dark hair, seized by the throes of literary composition and quite forgetting his prior judgment rendered upon the assassination, namely that Mr. MacDhui probably had no alternative but to put the cat out of its misery. “We’ll print on it, ‘Here lies THOMASINA—
MURDERED
July 26,1957.’ ”

Mary Ruadh’s gaze was brimming with worship. The word “murdered” had the proper ring to it and filled her with a curious satisfaction. She looked down now upon the still form of Thomasina; gloomy retrospect enveloped her once more as the memory of the morning’s events returned and out of it she pronounced sentence: “I’m not going to speak to Daddy ever again.”

Hughie nodded absently. Mary’s family vendettas were her own affair and none of his concern as long as they did not impinge upon the grandiose funeral, the details of which any Highland chieftain or even modern local inhabitant of Inveranoch would have been proud.

He went on creating: “I’ll play the part of the minister and make the speech at the graveside—‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’ and then all about what a wonderful person the deceased was and how sorry everybody is that she has gone away to her heavenly reward. And after that we’ll cover over the casket with earth and lay our wreaths and flowers on the mound and we’ll come away from the grave to a merry tune skirled by Jamie Braid, after which we’ll have a feed of some kind, a real draidgie, and all be gay and cheerful again. Well, what do you say to that, Mary Ruadh?”

By way of reply she put her arms about Hughie’s neck, leaning over Thomasina to do so, and hugged him, for he had brought something interesting and exciting at least momentarily into her life; something was about to happen in which she would play a major role and she was quite enchanted with the program.

“Good lass!” Hughie said, produced a reasonably clean handkerchief, wiped the tear stains away from her face and held it for her to blow her nose. Then he brushed her pinafore where leaves and moss had clung to it, ran his fingers through her bright hair and, setting her then upon her feet, said, “There you are, then. I’ll be taking Thomasina home to prepare the casket; I’ll find Geordie McNabb and he’ll wake over her whilst I’m having lunch and getting everything ready. Jamie’s brother Ewan will go and tell the others. We’ll all meet here when the tower clock strikes three, and form up for the procession.”