Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God (20 page)

Lori’s thanks caught him unprepared. She took one of his hands in both hers and bent her head over it. MacDhui felt the moisture of a teardrop and then the soft touch of her lips. The sadness welled up in him a hundred times intensified. He said gruffly, “I have done the best I could under the circumstances. The important thing is to keep the beast quiet. Tomorrow I will come and put a plaster cast on the shoulder and paw and then it will be safe. Have you some place to keep it?”

Lori replied, “Aye. Come.”

She raised up the badger in her arms with infinite care and led Mr. MacDhui through a door opening to the other part of the building divided into stalls and a few cages partitioned off.

Here was indeed a small hospital, but if the animal doctor expected to find any of his ex-patients quartered here, he was mistaken; they were all wild creatures. He saw a fawn with a broken leg that had been well set and splinted, a red squirrel with one eye out, and a rolled-up ball of a hedgehog that seemed to have no visible wound. He encountered hares that had been victims of weasel bites, a fox cub that had become separated from its mother, and a family of field mice in a box.

A burden seemed momentarily lifted from MacDhui. He had a sudden humorous intuition. “I think the hedgehog is m-a-l-i-n-g-e-r-i-n-g,” he spelled out.

He was rewarded. Lori’s wonderful ruefully tender smile warmed him. “Shhhh. Of course,” she replied, “but I let him. It makes him so happy.”

“And this is your treatment?”

Beneath the eye of the huge man Lori was momentarily troubled. She replied, “I keep them warm and try to make them comfortable. I let them rest and give them food and drink”—her voice fell to a whisper—“and love—”

Mr. MacDhui smiled. The prescription was the old stand-by that he and other veterinarians had used for years—with the exception of the last, which he was sure in his case was supplied by Willie Bannock. MacDhui would have added only, “—and let nature take its course.” He asked of Lori then, “Well, and when people bring their pets to you?”

“They have their own to care for them. It is the wild and lost, the lonely and hurt things of the forest that need me.”

Mr. MacDhui suddenly remembered something. “And Farmer Kinkairlie’s cow?”

Lori seemed neither surprised nor put out that the veterinary should be in possession of this piece of intelligence. The touch of mischief returned to her mouth. She said, “I sent her back with the message to be kinder to her and she would then yield milk again.”

MacDhui threw back his head and roared with laughter. He had a vision of the expression on the face of Farmer Kinkairlie when this message reached him.

They went out. When they came back to the cottage Lori said, “Will ye no’ come in for a moment?”

Curiosity led MacDhui to follow her inside, his eyes roving swiftly over the simple furnishings and the great loom that he could see through the door in another room. His attention was momentarily caught by a glass bowl that stood on a table. It contained some rocks, a miniature wooden ladder, water, and a small green frog. Something stirred in MacDhui’s memory and he pressed his face close to the bowl, his gaze directed at the legs of the frog. The strong white teeth of the man showed through the red bristle of his beard in a delighted grin. Sure enough, there it was, the little lump and swelling indicating there had once been a fracture which had healed.

“He too?” he asked.

“Aye,” Lori replied. “I found him one morning on my doorstep in a box. He had a broken leg.”

MacDhui said, “I can describe the delivering angel. He was aged eight, with a bullet head, freckles, a runny nose, and was dressed in a scout uniform.”

Lori looked troubled. “I didna see it,” she said, “I only heard the bell—”

MacDhui wished he had not made the joke.

Lori said, “I have no’ much siller to pay—”

“There is no need, Lori. I have been repaid.”

On a sudden impulse she darted past him and ran into the room where she did her weaving. She returned carrying a scarf of natural-colored wool of incredible softness and lightness.

“Will ye take this?” she pleaded. “It—it will keep ye warm—when the winds blow.”

“Yes, thank you, Lori. I will.” He wondered whether she knew how moved he was. At the door he repeated, “Thank you, Lori. I shall be glad of this—when the winds blow. I will come tomorrow or the next day and fix a proper cast.”

He turned and went out, leaving her standing in the middle of the room, watching him go. But he had the curious last-minute impression that she no longer saw him, that the gentle eyes seemed to be turned inward, an expression of pain and sorrow was etched momentarily on her lips. He went down the path of the glen remembering the name by which she was known—Daft Lori.

Mr. MacDhui climbed into his parked jeep, placing the wool scarf beside him. On an impulse he picked it up and settled it about his neck. It was as soft and warm as a caress. The almost insupportable feeling of sadness returned to fill him once more, nor could he shake it off as he drove away in the direction of home.

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D
riving toward Inveranoch and all that awaited him there and which now took on the aspect of another world situated almost in another universe from the one where he had dwelt the last hours since he had come to the glen, Andrew MacDhui pondered Lori and Lori’s God.

Was it a part of the God-madness that afflicted those whose religious devotion crossed the line of sanity to fail to question the cruelty and capriciousness of a God who would first condemn one of His creatures to the steel trap, there to be worried half to death by a savage dog, before relenting and guiding it to the home of the one human being in the vicinity capable of helping it?

Was it a gigantic Jovian puppet game, when the badger’s case had proved too much for her, to arrange with dramatic timing the fortuitous arrival of an Edinburgh-trained veterinary to perform the necessary surgery at just the right moment, and God’s little joke that said surgeon had gone there for the purpose of giving an interfering and meddling half-wit a piece of his mind? Lori in her simplicity had seen none of this. She had said only that he had been sent in answer to her prayer.

For a moment MacDhui entertained the notion to have at his friend Angus Peddie about this and then put it out of his head for an odd reason. He was genuinely and wholeheartedly fond of the little man. He enjoyed arguing with him, but he loved him sufficiently not to wish to triumph over him and leave him embarrassed and demolished.

Besides, he had a suspicion that when he found himself in sore straits Peddie simply retired behind the theologian’s wall by holding that the ways of God were mysterious, that His all-over designs and purposes were not to be discerned in immediate events, and above all that He was unanswerable to man. If He chose to let a dozen million Chinese starve, or the Russians slaughter the patriots of a neighbor nation, or He put a wild thing of the forest to torture, it was for a purpose to be revealed later, or perhaps, God being God, never revealed at all. He reflected that there seemed to be an uncomfortable affinity between the long and often unpleasant arm of coincidence, God, and Moloch.

And yet there was—Lori.

She was touched—of that he had no doubt. Her way of living and her behavior were abnormal, and yet he knew that if there was one over-all characteristic, one key, one clue to her being, it was compassion. And here his thoughts turned again to that God whom, in her mild and sweet aberration, she served in such a strange and faithful manner. Was compassion the link between them?

Supposing God had made man, not in His own image, but in some reflection of His own love and spirit, and turned him loose on earth to work out his own destiny. Must not His heart, must not any great, creative, all-embracing heart be wrung with compassion for what His children had turned out to be? And perhaps bitterness too. For if earth was a cosmic test tube of the universe, a dead star on which the spores of life had been scattered to see how they would flourish, then it was already one of God’s colossal failures. Yet, too, He must be riven with pity for the fate of the wicked and miserable victims of the experiment.

Were the faithful like Peddie and the half mad like Lori all that He could look upon as salvage? Surely there was no place in any theological catalogue for one of His more signal fiascos, Mr. Veterinary MacDhui. Well, as he was, so was he. At the outskirts of Inveranoch he pulled himself erect to show the town the old, well-known figure of bristle and defiance, shoulders back, chin out—

Yet now that he was there he did not drive at once to the houses in the lane, but cut around behind the street to the track that ran through the lush green strip of woods leading toward Stirling Manor. Here he parked and got out and sat beneath the branches of a beech tree and where he could see the salt-blue of the loch shining through, for he was not yet done with thinking.

But now that he had found a peaceful place and a peaceful moment, his thoughts, as so often happened, refused to be marshaled or submit to order. Instead they provided him with an uncomfortable kaleidoscope, flashes of past and present, presentiments of the future in jumbled array.

He produced his pipe from his pocket, packed and lit it. A lesser egotist might have suspected that the man who had returned from Glen Ardrath was no longer the same one who had driven up there, and in some ways would never be again. But he was not used to solving his difficulties, his turmoils and confusions, through sober reflection. Introspection was something new to him and he did not know how to begin. And as yet he could not foresee the fearful and apparently insoluble dilemma that was to face him, or the trials that were in store for him, the dogs that would bait and worry him before he could snap the chains of the trap that held him fast and drag his remains in search of succor.

From above his head came a familiar chittering and scolding and a red squirrel slanted down the tree trunk beside him in fits and starts with nervous pauses. But he was hungry, familiar with humans, and had been hand fed before. When he reached the ground he sat up prettily on his bushy tail, his black paws folded over the white blaze on his dark red breast.

Mr. MacDhui reached into his left-hand jacket pocket, where he was wont to carry tidbits to distract or win the confidence of nervous animals, and fished up a piece of carrot. The squirrel came close, accepted it with tentative daintiness, whisked off, a red streak, some five paces, and sat up nibbling it.

Mr. MacDhui puffed on his pipe and said, “Contented now, aren’t you?” It was easier to watch and talk to the squirrel than to think. “Do not eat too quickly,” he admonished, “or you will have indigestion, which may lead to worms or some other form of parasite to which you little chaps seem to be prone, and that wouldn’t be very comfortable.”

The squirrel turned the carrot over rapidly two or three times in its paws and munched on, but sat so that he could keep a wary eye upon this talking man.

“If I may introduce myself,” Mr. MacDhui suggested, “my name is Andrew MacDhui, a veterinary surgeon by profession. That should interest you, since it is a doctor who treats animals belonging to people when they are ill. I am not very much liked hereabouts. Furthermore I do not believe in God or a higher power. And I have a daughter, a child of mine own flesh and blood, who will not speak to me because when her cat contracted a form of meningitic paralysis I had it killed to save its suffering.”

The squirrel ceased munching for a moment and looked up, masticating what it had in its cheek pouches, the carrot nearly finished.

“Ah, but did I indeed, you ask?” commented Mr. MacDhui, “and the exception is well taken. It is a query I have put to myself often enough in the past days. Could I have saved the beast or did I destroy it because I was jealous of Mary Ruadh? Did I even diagnose its ailment correctly? Mary Ruadh is my daughter’s name. She is called Ruadh because her hair is a shade between your coat and mine. She carried the wretched animal about with her wherever she went and slept with it at night. I would see her bury her face in its flank and hug it to her like a living doll and perhaps I could not bide that. The child is motherless, you know, and I have tried to be both to her. Now she cries and longs for her dead cat, but to me, her father, she will not speak.”

The squirrel finished the carrot and got down on all fours, whisking its tail. The voice of the man was making him nervous and he was of a mind to move off.

“Wait,” pleaded Mr.MacDhui. “Do not leave me yet. It is good to have someone to talk to. Look here; I will bribe you to stay a little longer.” He produced another carrot and made clucking noises. “And we won’t speak of my troubles any longer, but yours.”

The squirrel reflected, accepted the carrot, and this time, soothed by familiarity coupled with generosity, sat up quite close by.

“What do you do when you are ill?” Mr. MacDhui asked, for it struck him that, strangely, he had never thought of this before. “To whom do you go? Is there a wise old squirrel who tells you what herbs or roots to eat, or does your instinct tell you? Or do you just crawl away under a bush and die, with no one to know or care? Angus Peddie, my neighbor and a minister, says of his God that not a sparrow falleth but that He is concerned. But what arrangements has He made? Strange, but I have never come upon a dead squirrel or hedgehog or deer. What happens to you? Are you all eaten by the birds or the carnivores? Where are your graveyards?”

MacDhui continued to catechize: “Do you have friends? Are you ever lonely? And what about your young? Do you understand and feel for them? Do they touch your heart so that when you look at them sometimes you think you cannot bear the grief caused by the gulf between you and the fact that you cannot communicate with them, that their little minds have already gone out from you? Do you, too, love them and lose them so quickly?”

And he asked finally, “Do you live out a whole life of your own, with love and happiness, or worry and heartbreak? Or is there nothing but food and flight, nesting, mating, and dying, and are you more fortunate to be born a little forest animal without a soul than I, a human being, with all my wonderful intelligence? Who is to answer me that?”