Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God (7 page)

MacDhui, looking with a mind’s eye turned resentful, could see himself in this healer’s role as he had since he had been a boy, a doctor whose mere presence in the sickroom was enough to banish sickness and bar the angel of death. Since it had been denied him, he denied in turn the warmth and love which is so much a part of the cure of any ailing animal.

They were immured in scrupulously clean cages in which paper or straw might be changed by Willie a dozen times a day, properly diagnosed, drugged, bandaged, fed, watered and thereafter ignored by him. Pausing before each cage, he regarded each inmate as a specimen and a problem from whose exhibition of symptoms or reaction to treatment there was further knowledge or experience to be gained. But as fellow creatures, prisoners like himself aboard the same revolving ball of rock, dirt, and water, brothers and sisters in one great family of the living, he did not consider them at all.

They seemed to feel this as he went by and remained quiescent, regarding him with sad or morose eyes, or giving vent to minor-keyed complaints, whines, mews, snuffles—

They went through the aisle of cages, with Mr. MacDhui appraising and ordering dosage and treatments as always, to Willie’s intense admiration, for Willie was mortally in awe of this great, red, pagan deity who could cure wee beasties. Nor were there any to be “put away,” which came as a great relief to the attendant, for one of his duties was to play the part of executioner when MacDhui decided that an animal was better off dead than alive, a decision from which it appeared nothing could turn him once it had been made.

It was a job Willie hated, but he never presumed to question the orders of his chief, and with gentleness, chloroform bottle, and rag, got the unhappy business over with as quickly as possible and put the remains on the heap out back of the house, where he would not have to see them until the day’s end when the incinerator was fired and all waste matter from the hospital burned, including small corpses.

“Try a larger dose of the Number 4 formula on Mrs. Sanderson’s dog and I’ll have another look at it when I get back. I don’t expect I shall be late. If that confounded parrot keeps up its abominable noise, you have my permission to wring its neck.”

He took his bag, into which Willie, who knew every ailment at each farm and what was required almost before MacDhui told him, had packed syringes, plungers, clysters, sprays, disinfectants, vaccines, dressings, sutures and needles, gauzes and plasters, as well as various stock items against emergencies, went out, climbed into his jeep, and drove off.

Willie waited until he saw him reach the end of Argyll and turn the corner into the High Street before, with almost unseemly haste, he hurried back to the animal hospital, where he was received with a perfect pandemonium of enthusiastic barks, whines, howls, shrieks, squawks, mews, and general animal hurrah for a loved human.

Willie, who just about came up to Mr. MacDhui’s shoulder in height, was seventy, and fifty of those years he had devoted to the love and care of animals. MacDhui had inherited him from the man from whom he had bought the practice. Spry and alert, he had a friar’s atoll of white hair about his skull and melting brown eyes that gave away his character and kindness of heart.

This was The Hour. Dogs stood up frantically on their hind legs inside their cages, pawing and shouting at him, birds shrieked, cats stiffened their tails and rubbed their flanks against the cage doors in anticipation, even the dogs too sick for greater demonstrations managed at least a waving and a thumping of their flags.

“Now, now—” Willie said, surveying the pandemonium with the most intense satisfaction. “One at a time now, one at a time!” He stopped first at the cage of a fat dachshund, who went hysterical in his arms when he took him out, screaming, wriggling, licking his face, singing a passionate obbligato over the general chorus of enthusiasm. “There, there, now, Hansi—dinna excite yersel’ so, or ’twill appear on your chart, no less, and the doctor will read that I’ve had ye oot for a spell. Ye’ll be going awa’ tomorrow or the next day—”

Thus he went from cage to cage, bestowing love, the secret medicine which surely effected as many cures as the doctor’s drugs, or helped them along. Cats and dogs that were well enough he had out for a hug, or a bit of play, the sick had their ears and bellies rubbed, the parrot his head scratched, the lot of them, pampered, petted and spoiled until each had had its turn and been calmed down, when the regular routine of care and medication went forward.

The morning was misty and the smell of sea salt mingled with coal and peat smoke was in the air from the breakfast fires as Mr. MacDhui drove through the streets of gray-stone or whitewashed houses, tall, narrow and slate roofed, down to the quay where the waters of the loch were gray too, and a blue fishing boat with a stumpy mast and the forward well loaded with lobster pots, floats, and gear chuffed out of the harbor.

He breathed the smell of mingled sea and land, wild sea and rugged woodland and man and habitation smells, with no particular enjoyment, nor did he look to the flight of gulls or the curl of the tide lapping the shore; the beauty of the blue boat on the gray mirror of the loch in the pearly morning mist, already shot through with the light of the mounting sun, was lost upon him. He turned the jeep northward onto the Cairndow road, crossing the river Ardrath by the old saddleback bridge and, when he reached Creemore, took the left fork up into the hills.

When he had climbed somewhat, he could see the gypsy encampment lying at the foot of a fold in the valley to the south and noted from the smoke and the number of wagons that it was a large one. He recalled what Mary Ruadh had told him of it as seen through the eyes of Geordie McNabb, and the run-in that Constable MacQuarrie had had with them, but he shrugged the whole matter off as none of his business. If the police chose to let them remain there, that was their affair. There would no doubt be the usual neglect of their horses and livestock among these people, who in some instances even in this day and age continued to live themselves like animals, but as long as the police were satisfied he did not care. This the curious paradox of the animal doctor who did not love animals.

But he would have denied vehemently and truculently, and had, in just such an argument with Mr. Peddie, that he was a cold or loveless man, and with much outjutting of his beard had cited his affection for his daughter Mary Ruadh as the keystone of his life. He admitted to loving little or nothing else but her.

The minister, with whom he liked to tussle philosophically just because he was so unpredictable, and whose range was from the erudite through the theological to the poetic, had surprised him by indulging in flights of the latter in his reply.

He had maintained that in his opinion one could not love a woman without likewise loving the night and the stars that made even more of a mystery of her presence, or the soft air and sun that warmed and made fragrant her hair; that you could not love a little girl without loving, too, the field flowers, limp and wilted, with which she returned from a foray into the meadow, clutched in a damp hand. And he had said that, too, you would have to feel love for the mongrel she adored or the cat that she carried and even for the stuff of the frocks that clung to her body. He said that if you loved the wild sea lashed in storm, then you could not help loving the mountains too, which, with their swelling hills and jagged and snow-topped peaks swirled by the wind like sea froth, imitated the waves and presented to one’s gaze the miracle of an ocean petrified in mid-storm. He declared that you could not love the bright, hot, lazy summer days without loving also the rains that came to cool them; that one could not love the flight of birds without loving, too, the flash of the trout or salmon in the dark pool, that one could not love man, any or all of him, without loving the beasts of the field and the forests, or the beasts without loving the trees and the grasses, the shrubs and the heather and the flowers of meadow and garden.

And here, dropping the rhetorical style into which he had drifted, and truth to tell, held MacDhui rather speechless with astonishment, he slyly descended to a more ordinary and matter-of-fact routine of speech and said that it was difficult to understand how a man could love all or any of these without loving God as well, from any point of view, philosophically, practically, theologically, or just plain logically. The result, of course, had been the usual scornful and indignant snort from MacDhui, who declared that Peddie was better and at least more plausible as poet.

Mr. MacDhui turned in at the wagon track leading to the Birnie farm and, parking the jeep, entered the stone stalls of the stables with an expression of deep disgust upon his face. The stench was overpowering. Fergus Birnie, a wizened farmer, was almost as dirty as his cowsheds. He greeted the veterinarian sourly at the entrance and complained, “ ’Tis the lask come back again. The medicine ye gied me was gey unchancy. Ye swyked me wi’ it, Mr. MacDhui, and I’ll thank ye for the shillings back I laid oot for it.”

MacDhui minced no words. With his red beard thrust into the farmer’s face as near as he could bear the smell of him, he bellowed, “Ye are a filthy dog, Birnie. Yer cattle are in diarrhea again because ye live dirtier than any swine wallowing out yonder in their ane glaur. I’ve warned ye often enough, Fergus Birnie. Noo I’m taking awa’ yer license for the herd and the selling of yer milk until ye change yer ways.”

He went outside and removed a small metal plate from the door of the barn and put it in his pocket, while Birnie stood there regarding him blankly. “I’ll be back here within the hour,” the veterinarian said. “Call your misbegotten sons over here and wash down these stables and sheds—and yourselves along with it. And wash those cattle until they are clean enough to buss. If there’s so much as a smitch of dirt about here when I return, I’ll charge ye to Constable MacQuarrie for endangering the public health and it’s to jail ye’ll all go.”

He drove on to the Maistock farm back in the hills, a well-run place, where he complimented Jock Maistock for giving him an early warning of symptoms of the dreaded blackleg in one of his long-horned, fringe-browed Ayrshire cattle. He ordered the suspected animal slaughtered at once, vaccinated the remainder of the herd against the disease, and placed a temporary quarantine on them until time should reveal the extent of the immunity obtained.

He called in at the McPherson chicken farm and calmed the fears of the widow McPherson that she was in for an outbreak of the gapes, a disease of fowls caused by worms in the windpipe. The laboratory report had been negative and the suspected chicks were suffering from a harmless respiratory attack and were already perking up in their isolation pen. MacDhui certified them for release.

He called in at the farm of a wealthy experimental cattle farmer who was trying out a herd in the hills, and gave the cattle the tuberculin test, visited several other small farms and crofters’ cottages for minor complaints, and on his way back looked in again on Fergus Birnie’s stalls.

Fear of loss of bread and butter had worked upon the farmer, and stables and cattle were in passable condition, clean enough at least for the vet to get on with the treatment. He inoculated each animal, promised to restore the license when the disease had abated, provided the standard of cleanliness was maintained. With a final threat to drop in any day unannounced to check up on them, he climbed into his jeep and headed down the twisting, winding track to the main road back to the valley and Inveranoch.

Yet he dawdled with his driving, hunched about the wheel, dwarfing it with his great bulk, since he was in no hurry to get back. For of all there was to and about his work and profession, this was the part he liked the best, poking about in the rugged hill country above the loch, visiting the farms, and practicing a medicine that was almost human medicine in that it was designed to aid in the protection of human beings, and where the beasts he was called upon to treat were doughty breadwinners and servants of man, from the clever, bright-eyed sheep dogs to the black-faced sheep they herded and the stalwart hardy breeds of Highland cattle.

Here, too, he was received almost with the same respect as Dr. Strathsay, who came out likewise to the back country to deliver their children, set their fractures, or treat occasional illnesses. To the crofter who lived by his sheep, pigs, fowl, or cattle, Mr. MacDhui was a man of importance. A person could well recover from a sneeze or feverish cough, a hand or foot cut with ax or scythe, but a dead animal that could not even be sold for meat was money out of pocket, and an infection which might condemn an entire herd to slaughter was a catastrophe. To them Mr. MacDhui was a man of value and in most quarters he was treated with deference.

Thus it was with reluctance that the animal doctor found himself again in Inveranoch, where his office waiting room would no doubt be filled once more with both locals as well as visitors from as far off as Liverpool, Birmingham, and London, with their useless and pampered pets.

It was a quarter past eleven when he drove the jeep around to the back and, entering the premises from the rear, turned his bag over to Willie Bannock along with a quick account of the morning’s doings back in the hills, washed his hands, still talking and giving his assistant no chance to speak, and donning a fresh white coat, made his usual entrance, beard outthrust, into the doorway of the waiting room.

He noted that, as usual, every bench and chair was occupied, the locals in their sober clothes, coveralls or work aprons, the city dwellers more flamboyantly clad, including a lady in a most grand and fashionable hat holding a chocolate-covered Pomeranian with rheumy eyes. And, as always, the sight inspired the same choler and truculent impatience it seemed to bring on every day at this hour. He hated them and he hated his work.

Yet he looked them over and looked again and this time became aware of a startling presence among the group of waiting clients. Seated quietly and most upright on the edge of the last chair at the far end of the room, the very last in line, was his daughter, Mary Ruadh.