Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God (16 page)

Mary Ruadh looked back at him tentatively, unsure, but with this much of her attention he began: “She was so long”—holding his hands to illustrate—“so wide, and so high and her fur was the color of mixed ginger and honey biscuits in alternating stripes, but on her chest she had a pure white blaze in the shape of a triangle, something like this—” and he made one with his fingers.

Mary Ruadh shook her head decisively. “It was round—like this!”

The dominie nodded. “Now that I reflect and you remind me, it was round, and she had three white feet—”

“Four.”

“And a white spot at the very tip of her tail—”

“Yes, but a little one—”

“Very well, then,” Peddie continued. “Her head was most beautifully formed, and her ears were rather delicate and pointed and large for her head, but they stood up straight and made her look most alert and knowing.”

The child was watching him closely now, taking in every word, checking every point. Her expression had softened. Color had come back to her pale cheeks and her eyes were alive again.

“Now her nose. How well I seem to remember her nose; it was the color of the terra-cotta tile on the roof of the vestry and there was one little speck of black on it.”

“Two,” corrected Mary Ruadh, and held up two fingers with a triumphant and dimpled smile.

“Hm, yes, two,” admitted Mr. Peddie. “I seem to see the other now just a little to the south of the first one, but hardly to be noticed unless one looked most carefully. And now we come to her eyes. Do you remember her eyes, Mary Ruadh?”

She nodded excitedly but waited for him to go on with the description. He said, “Surely they were the most beautiful thing about Thomasina. They were like emeralds in a setting of gold. And her tongue was the most delectable pink, just the color of my polyantha roses when they first begin to bud in the spring. I remember once seeing her sitting opposite you at your tea table at a tea party, with a white napkin about her neck and with just the tip of her tongue showing. I said to myself, ‘Hullo! Thomasina has been eating my polyantha and one of the petals is still showing.’ ”

Mary Ruadh laughed so that Mrs. McKenzie, at a sound that had been too long absent from that house, stuck her head through the kitchen door to see. “But it wasn’t. It was her tongue all the time,” the little girl cried.

Peddie nodded. “Didn’t I feel the fool when I found it out. And I do remember what perfect manners she had, how she sat up like a real lady at the table, not a-lapping of her cambric tea until she was bidden, and when you offered her a biscuit she bumped it three times with her nose before accepting it.”

“She liked caraway cakes the best,” Mary Ruadh commented, and then asked, “Why did she bump them?”

“Well,” the minister replied reflectively, “you may have your choice. Either she was smelling of them first as a kind of precautionary measure, not a very polite thing to do at a company tea, or she was being most polite, and each bump meant, ‘For me? —Oh, but you are TOO kind!— Ah well, then, if you
really
insist . . .’ ”

“She was being polite,” Mary Ruadh decided, with a firm and knowing shake of her head.

“And I remember also how beautifully she moved, how lithe and graceful her long body was and how relaxed when you wore her around your neck sometimes, almost as though she were asleep.”

“Thomasina slept with me in my bed at night,” Mary Ruadh said. The glow had spread to her eyes now—

“And do you remember her little private call to you, what it sounded like? I heard it once when I passed your house and you were both without and she wished for your attention.”

Mary Ruadh thought deeply, a fist pressed under her small rounded chin, and then gave more than a passable imitation of the seldom heard love call of the late Thomasina: “Prrrrrrrrrow.”

“Yes,” Mr. Peddie agreed, “it was ‘Prrrrrrrrrow!’ exactly. And so you see, Mary Ruadh, Thomasina is not really dead at all. We have reassembled her, you and I, and here she is before us both again as large as life.”

The child fell silent again as she stared at him, her young brow furrowed beneath the lock of ginger hair that fell over it, not quite comprehending.

“She lives on,” the minister explained, “in your memory and mine. Don’t you see that as long as you and I are here to think of her and remember her as she was in all her beauty, she cannot ever die? You have but to close your eyes to see her. No one can ever take this memory from you, and sometimes when you are in bed asleep at night, she will come to you in your dreams, only ten times more beautiful and loving than she was before. Come, close your eyes and tell me; do you not see her now as we have described her?”

Mary Ruadh screwed up her eyes and her face with the effort. She said, “Yes.” Nevertheless when she opened them she looked into those of Mr. Peddie with a clear and direct gaze and said quite simply, “But I want her.”

The minister nodded and said, “Of course, and now that you have learned how, you have but to call her to your mind and she will come. When you are older, Mary Ruadh, you will know love of a different kind, and bereavement and grief and all that is a part of the difficult journey through life. And you will remember perhaps a little bit of what I have been trying to tell you today—that there is no wound of sorrow and mourning so great that loving memory cannot help to heal it. Do you think you understand this, Mary Ruadh?”

This time the child did not reply but only regarded him solemnly. Mr. Peddie then ventured to the crux of the matter. He said, “Thomasina lives in your father’s mind as in yours and mine. If you were to put your arms about his neck and give him an old-fashioned whisper that you loved him, you and he could remember Thomasina together just as you and I have done and that would make the memory picture even brighter, for he would perhaps remember things we have left out—”

The child gave this suggestion a moment’s grave consideration and then shook her head slowly and firmly in the negative. “I can’t,” she declared, “Daddy’s dead!”

Taken aback, it was now Mr. Peddie’s turn to stare at this strange child, for in spite of his knowledge and experience, he was shocked at the sudden and unexpected turn the conversation had taken. “But, Mary Ruadh! How can you say such a thing. Your father is not dead . . .”

“Yes, he is,” the little girl insisted gravely and unemotionally, and then added succinctly, “I killed him.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Peddie softly—for he was beginning to see which way the wind was blowing—“That was not very kind. How did you kill your daddy?”

Mary Ruadh reflected the precise details, savoring them again with a pleased and slightly malevolent expression on her face and gave them to the nonplused minister, who was beginning to suspect that in spite of being a father and a minister of the gospel, his understanding of child psychology left something to be desired.

“I put him on a long white table,” she narrated, “and poured something out of a bottle onto a rag and held it over his nose. Daddy wriggled awfully at first, but I sat on him and held the rag there until he didn’t wriggle anymore, but was dead. Then I put him out on the dust heap, but later I put him in a basket lined with silk and put on my mournings and we all went and buried him and Jamie Braid played the lament, but I was glad he was dead and did not cry at all.”

The Reverend Peddie tried once more. “Then who is this man who comes home in the evening and sits across the table from you with his heart breaking because you will not greet him, or speak to him, or kiss him good night?” he asked.

Mary Ruadh reflected on this question seriously for a moment before she replied, “I don’t know,” and then added with unequivocal finality, “I don’t like him.”

Angus Peddie, who in his youth had been a considerable sports enthusiast and player of games, knew when he was beaten and also how to accept defeat with grace. He sighed and arose from the stairs, retrieving his hat and umbrella. Then going to her, he said, “Perhaps we will talk about this further some other time, Mary Ruadh,” and gently kissed the pale cheek, nor did she try to avoid his doing so, and he took his leave.

But he noted and remembered that the paleness had returned to the face and the lackluster quality of the deep blue eyes and that when he had last looked back upon her she had looked not like a child but a little bowed old lady, and he made up his mind to suggest to Andrew MacDhui to have a word with Dr. Strathsay the next time he saw him, to suggest that he drop by, perhaps, and have a look at the child just in case there was something organic troubling her as well. Mr. Peddie was a well-read man and knew something of the severity of the traumas that could result from imagined as well as genuine catastrophies. A young lady of seven who on one and the same day had had her symbolic mother chloroformed practically before her eyes and thereafter had revenged herself by the mental murdering of her father, might understandably require the services of the family physician, if only to ascertain the extent of the damage done. The veterinary, however, was not in his office when the minister stopped by to tell him the results of his attempt and confess his failure, having gone out to a back-country call, and thus other matters intervened and in the end old Dr. Strathsay was not summoned until it was too late.

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A
ndrew MacDhui soon was left in no doubt that gossip about him and the affair of his daughter’s cat was all about Inveranoch and hurting his business with the locals. Now a hush would fall upon a knot of gabblers in front of the post office when he entered or left, or at the chemist’s; he was conscious of drawing looks askance and could hear the whispers when his back was turned.

Some of them reached to his ears and were to the effect that if he could not or would not cure his own child’s little pet, why then he could not be the doctor he was supposed to be and a pity to take one’s own dear little thing to him, only to have him recommend to put it away. And furthermore, if his own child would neither speak to him nor have any dealings with him in his own home, as everyone knew was the case, there must be something very black indeed about the man and even more than met the eye at first.

Irritation, anger, shame, and frustration had further caused a deterioration in the behavior of MacDhui toward his clients and patients and made him the more truculent, bullying, short-tempered, and argumentative. He spoke in even a louder, more rasping tone and seemed to be looking for veiled insults or allusions in the most innocent remarks, until even the summer visitors thought him a most peculiar and unpleasant man, but since there was no other veterinarian within miles, they had to bear with him when their dogs acquired summer mange or suffered a sting from an insect or a bite from some bad-tempered local animal.

But this was not the case with some of the townspeople who knew of the woman known as Daft or Mad Lori who lived by herself as a recluse up in the glen, talked with the Little Folk and the angels and had a way with winged and four-footed creatures that assuredly was not quite of this earth. Hence the silver Mercy Bell attached to the covin oak outside the little cottage rang more frequently now, as former clients of the animal doctor made the pilgrimage to the lair of the so-called Red Witch of Glen Ardrath.

And thus inevitably, through whispers of these pilgrimages, Daft Lori swam into the ken of Andrew MacDhui as either a rival or a nuisance who must be dealt with.

He had heard of her, of course, but merely as a kind of local character, boasted of by the town, like Rab McKechnie, who when sufficiently drunk could recite the poetry of Bobby Burns from memory by the hour and would take it into his head to do so outside the Queen’s Arms, his favorite pub, or old Mary who went about the streets picking up bits of paper and string. Lori had long been accepted as a kind of fixture and curiosity, about whom no one really bothered except to regale a visitor with the story of the witch woman who dwelled in a wild glen up the mountain side, who conversed with the spirit, understood the language of the animals, and frightened little boys and girls, who mortally feared to approach anywhere near to her cottage.

Occasionally such a visitor shopping in the grocer’s or chemist’s or dry-goods emporium might encounter a quiet young woman with red hair and wide-spaced greenish eyes, plain-seeming, but if one looked again, revealing a great sweetness of expression, without ever guessing or even surmising that this might be the Red Witch herself, Daft Lori McGregor down from the hills on one of her rare excursions into town to lay in needed supplies for herself and her four-footed companions and patients.

But Mr. MacDhui had never encountered her, for Inveranoch was a largish town and their paths were unlikely to cross. Nor had he ever felt any curiosity about her, since local wonders or freaks are never as interesting to those who live close to them.

But now it was whisper, whisper, whisper. A word dropped here, or there, snatches of gossip picked up by large-eared Willie Bannock, whose loyalty to his employer remained undimmed, snatches of sentences overheard. “Oh, aye, there’s nae doot she has a way wi’ the wee beasties. The touch o’ her hand to its head is enough to set an old dog a-dying to frisking like a pup,” or, “They say she’s a powerful one wi’ spells, and dangerous if crossed”—and again—“Ring her silver bell o’ maircy and she’ll nae turn a sick animal frae her door, nor will she have so murkle’s a farthing for her pains. The wild beasts of the forest feed frae her hauns . . .”

Mr. MacDhui thought of these things with waxing indignation as he drove his jeep on one of his back-country rounds of sanitary inspection, passing the gypsy encampment that still remained in the meadow at the foot of Glen Ardrath.

The smoke rose into the misty morning air from the horseshoe of wagons and caravans drawn up at one end of the field, brightly colored garments fluttered from wash lines, and a farrier was shoeing a horse, for MacDhui could hear the distant metallic beat of his hammer.

At one end of the encampment was a row of wagons that had been converted into cages for the containment of wild animals, but as yet there appeared to have been no attempt made to exhibit them.