by Paul Gallico
And so we settled down to wait and I slipped in and out of consciousness, or was it sleep, or was it death? I could not tell, but each time I found that I was still on Mary Ruadh’s lap, the lavender scent of her clothes stronger even than the medicine smell, I purred a little.
Have I grumbled a good deal about my lot, about being dragged and carried hither and thither like an old rag doll by Mary Ruadh? Have I done a lot of complaining over being slave to a child and an unwelcome guest in the house of a man who could not seem to bear the sight of me, and whom I disliked cordially? Well, now that the time had come when I might have to leave them, I did not wish to do so.
For to die is to go away from all the people and things that you like; it is a journey from light into darkness, from excitements and play and tastes and smells, voices and affection and the here, into the quiet, endless sleep.
No more to sit in the warm yellow sunlight and wash down one’s back with smooth, rhythmic, satisfying strokes, never again to stalk through the jungle of meadows of high sweet grass and field flowers, to flash into the air after a grasshopper, butterfly, or buzz-bug, no longer to crouch patiently at the mousehole, whiskers forward, eyes eager, body tensed and waiting, ready to wriggle the back quarters and spring; no more the sweet comfort of the drowse by the fire while outside the rain drums on the slate roof, or the white, wet snow falls silently; not ever again to enjoy that sheltered half sleep through which one hears the reassuring movements of the humans in the house, the sighs, the rustle of newspapers, the click of needles, the sound of human voices. An end forever to the satisfying bowl of warm milk, or the dish of porridge or haddock leavings, the comfort of the leg and ankle against which to rub, the stroking hand, the gentle fingers that understood and scratched where it most itched; not any more to steal the forbidden catnaps in the chests of drawers, to lie on the soft fragrant clothes and smell the sweet lavender.
To die is to depart, to go away from these things forever and become one with the generations that have preceded us since the beginning of time, a whispered memory in the bones and whiskers of the generations to come.
I could admit it now; my world was too beautiful to leave. Life is not easily laid down. Many of our kind have known hard and cruel times, living in cities and towns, starving, cold, wet, beaten, kicked, and set upon, fighting daily for their miserable existence. Yet how, even in those circumstances, we cling to life when even death might seem preferable to the misery and friendlessness of those chilled and lonely lairs, never having known the warmth of a fire, the hearth of a home, or a human hand to fondle us.
How much more, then, did I not wish to go away, to become but one more link in the long, dark chain of another’s memory.
Was I still alive, or already dead? It seemed that there was a great noise and hubbub and to-do; I heard the howl of an animal and thought that Anubis, the great jackal, had come to escort me on the final journey. But I was awake and saw the room crowded with people shouting and gesturing, and I thought once that I glimpsed the blue of Constable MacQuarrie’s uniform, and the big red bush of Mr. MacDhui as he waved his arms and shouted.
A wave of reassurance swept over me. I thought to myself, Aha! Word has got about now that I am ill, and the whole town, including the constable, has collected to plead with old Red Bristles to make me well for the sake of Mary Ruadh and all the others who have loved and admired me.
And I thought too, Why, Mr. MacDhui cannot AFFORD to let me die. I am too important. I am necessary to the happiness of the daughter he says he loves so much and over whom he makes such a fuss. Oh, you are safe, all right, Thomasina. No one is going to let anything happen to you.
I could see that; I was swimming into darkness again, but I didn’t mind, for I was satisfied. The excitement apparently occasioned by my illness was no more than my just due for the manner in which I always comported myself.
It was sometime later—how much I do not know—that I came awake again in Mary Ruadh’s lap, but it was a different kind of awake. I no longer swam in and out of dreams. All was now clear-cut and steady. It was as though my ailment had either worked its greatest harm and was relenting, or, having prepared to kill me, gave me a moment’s truce before the end.
Whichever, I now heard, saw, and felt more sharply than ever that I could remember.
It began with the angry voice of Mr. MacDhui, roaring from the door through the empty room to where Mary Ruadh still sat, but now quite alone, with me clutched to her breast.
“Mary Ruadh! What are you doing here still? Did I not tell you to leave at once and never come back here again? Have I not forbidden you ever to set foot here? Must I remind you about your mo—”
Mary Ruadh was not frightened at all. She interrupted him firmly. “Daddy! Thomasina is Sick! Mrs. McKenzie said you would cure her.”
“Blast Mrs. McKenzie! Why doesn’t the woman mind her own business and do as she is told? Besides, I ordered each and every one to return tomorrow. I have no time for anything now. Be a good girl and go home.”
His white coat was smeared with blood like a butcher’s; he wore rubber gloves and had a small knife in his fingers. The expression of his face was most wild and fearful and his beard and hair were matted with sweat. He was a sight to inspire terror in anyone, but Mary Ruadh was not at all impressed. She said, “I won’t go home. Thomasina is very sick, Daddy. She can’t stand up or eat or anything. Please, Daddy, make her well.”
Mr. MacDhui fell into talking to her as with an adult, as he so often did with her. “I beg of you again to go home, Mary Ruadh. I am in the midst of a most important operation to save the life of an animal who serves as the eyes to a man who is blind. Which is more important, the eyes of a blind man or that wretched cat?”
“Thomasina,” Mary Ruadh replied firmly and properly to this ridiculous question, and Mr. MacDhui for a moment was so exasperated that he could not even speak. But then, strangely, he seemed to calm for a moment and he stared down at his daughter quite differently, as though perhaps he might be seeing us both for the very first time.
“Very well, then, bring the beast in; I can spare you a few moments while the dog is resting. But take your face away from her until I find out what it is that ails her. Do you think that I want to lose you too?”
We went through into an office. The door was open into another room where there was a bright light and a white table with something on it. Mr. MacDhui said, “No, no, Mary Ruadh—you cannot come in here. Give me the cat and wait there.”
He took me from her. Mary Ruadh gave me a last pat and said, “There, now, Thomasina. Don’t you worry. Daddy is going to give you some medicine to make you all better again. I’ll give you a whisper: next to Daddy I love you best in all the world.”
Mr. MacDhui took me inside and closed the door. There was a big dog on the white table in the middle of the room. He was bloody. His mouth was open and his tongue hanging out. I saw his eyes and felt sorry for him even though he was a dog. Willie Bannock was there, his apron like a butcher’s too. He was giving the dog a damp sponge at which to suck. Nearby was a can and a rag from which came a sweetish, sickish smell. I felt frightened and wished that Mary Ruadh were there.
There was another and smaller table at one side. Mr. MacDhui placed me there on my side. Willie Bannock said, “Och, the wean’s wee puss. She was grieving ower it sair—”
“She gave me no peace until I would bring it in. Well, now that it is here—”
But first he went over and gave a long look down at the dog, who rolled up his eyes at him and looked back. Then he came over and touched me. Do you know, his hands were not brutal and cruel at all as I had expected, but kind and gentle. They felt all over my body and pushed deep into my belly and back, where they found a fearful pain that made me cry out. Then he pulled back my lips from my teeth and held my eyes open while he looked into them. He gazed at me for another moment, shrugged, and said something to Willie Bannock that I did not understand but which sounded like “meningeal inf
ection.” Then he added, “We had best destroy her—” I understood that last, you may be sure, and went cold with fright and lay there shivering and twitching under his hand.
“Och!” said Willie Bannock, “the wean wull take it gey hard. Micht it not be some hurt the puss has suffered? If ye would let me—”
“Be still,” Mr. MacDhui ordered. “Have we not enough on our plate at the moment? The animal will be better off dead. Mary Ruadh will get over it, or have another—” He went to the door leading to his office, opened it, and stood blocking it so that I could not see Mary Ruadh. But I heard him say, “I am afraid your cat is very sick, Mary Ruadh.”
“I know that, Daddy,” she replied. “Mrs. McKenzie said so. That is why you must give her some medicine to make her well again.”
He said, “I am not sure that I can, Mary. I think perhaps the best thing would be if we were to put her away. Even if she recovers from this attack she may always drag her hind legs. I think you will have to say good-by to Thomasina, Mary Ruadh.”
Can you imagine me lying there hearing this?
Mary Ruadh did not understand. “But I don’t want to say good-by to Thomasina, Daddy. You must give her some medicine right away and then I will take her home and put her to bed and nurse her.”
The dog on the table in the center of the room gave a cough and a moan. Mr. MacDhui turned his head to look at it for a moment. Then he said to his daughter, “That you cannot. Try to understand, child. When people fall ill, sometimes they get well, and—sometimes they die. With animals it is different. It is kinder to put them out of their misery and this is what we will do with Thomasina. We will put her to sleep.”
Mary Ruadh understood at last and threw herself at her father, trying to get past him to me. “No, no, Daddy! You mustn’t put Thomasina to sleep. You must cure her. Mrs. McKenzie SAID you would cure her. I won’t let you put her to sleep. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”
I heard Willie Bannock say, “The dog’s breathing easier, sir.”
“Ach!” cried Mr. MacDhui angrily, holding her back. “Do not be a naughty girl and stupid besides. Cannot you see that the cat is already half dead and will like as not die anyway and that I have enough on my hands at the moment without bothering with such—”
Mary Ruadh began to scream. Mr. MacDhui’s neck turned as red as his hair with choler as he struggled with her and bellowed, “Mary Ruadh! Go home at once—”
Willie Bannock said, “Sir, if ye would gie me leave tae look after the wee puss, maybe I micht—”
Mr. MacDhui turned on him. “I’ll thank you to mind your own business and do as you are told. Take that chloroform can and put that damned cat out of its misery and there’s an end to it and we’ll get on with the dog . . .”
An end to it! My end! The end of me, ME! The finish to my life, my thoughts and hungers and desires and pleasures, my existence!
I could hear Mary Ruadh struggling to reach me and was helpless to assist. Oh, had I been able I should have jumped upon Mr. MacDhui’s back and bitten his neck in two.
“Sir—” said Willie Bannock.
“Get on with it as soon as I have the door closed,” Mr. MacDhui ordered.
“Daddy, don’t, please—oh, please, please!” sobbed Mary Ruadh. It was a most terrible scene.
Willie Bannock called out to her, “Dinna ye greet so, Mary Ruadh, for ye’re bursting ma ain hert. The wee puss will no suffer a bit and that’s the promise o’ Willie Bannock.”
“There now, that’s right.” Mr. MacDhui tried to comfort her. “Willie will put her to sleep as gently as can be and it will be all over in a moment. Come, now—”
There was a queer kind of silence, as though the child was no longer struggling, or even crying. Then I heard her say in a strange way I had never heard her speak before, “Daddy—Daddy—if you put Thomasina to sleep, I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live—”
“Very well, then,” Mr. MacDhui shouted, “I will not bide defiance. Go home!” and slipping quickly inside the room, he closed the door and locked it.
Then I heard the pounding of Mary Ruadh’s fists upon the panel of the door, and her frantic screams.
“Daddy—Daddy—please don’t kill Thomasina! Oh, please don’t! Thomasina—Thomasina—”
Mr. MacDhui jerked his beard at Willie Bannock—“Get on with it then, Willie”—and began to peer down at the dog again. Then he picked up some kind of instrument, and I knew that Mary Ruadh and I had gone out of his mind.
Willie Bannock came over to me, uncorking the canister, poured out some of the sweetish-smelling liquid onto a cloth and held it over my nose, and I, too, no longer cared about Mary Ruadh or what would happen to her, or anything but me, me, ME, for I was going to die and I did not wish to, I wanted to live, to live, to LIVE, even if I were to be sick, crippled, an outcast, I wanted to live—
I couldn’t breathe; I was choking, my senses began to swim. I heard Mr. MacDhui shout, “Come, come, man, don’t be all day about it. I need you over here—” Mary Ruadh’s fists were still pounding on the door from without—I heard one last despairing cry, “Thomasinaaaaaaa!”
And then it grew darker and darker and quiet, and all quiet and all dark, and I, Thomasina, was no more.
7
At the rear of the animal clinic and hospital of Veterinarian Andrew MacDhui of Inveranoch-by-Loch-Fyne was an incinerator and a refuse heap. Toward evening it was the duty of Willie Bannock to dispose of the contents of this refuse heap consisting of waste from the hospital as well as the corpses of defunct animals that had either perished in the course of illness or were done away with at the advice of Mr. MacDhui.
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.
