Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God (13 page)

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A
ll in all, it had been a bad day for Veterinary Andrew MacDhui and he returned home to supper late and in ill-humor after awaiting the arrival at the blind man’s home for Dr. Strathsay, the older of Inveranoch’s two locum tenens, and also in company with the Reverend Peddie, giving police testimony on the discovery of the body of Tammas Moffat.

The death caused no surprise. Tammas was eighty-six. It was Dr. Strathsay’s preliminary guess that the old heart had failed from strain and shock, which the autopsy would later confirm, but MacDhui could not find interest in such details. The man was dead and there was an end to it; he need not have died, for MacDhui had brought his Seeing Eye dog back from the brink, performing, as he had indicated, a miracle of modern canine surgery. Tammas had passed on without ever knowing this. MacDhui was not pleased with fate, or circumstances, or luck, or whichever it was that appeared to doom him to play just the opposite role to that of his youthful ambition, to be a healer and doctor to humanity.

He was still preoccupied as he swung open the low wooden gate leading to his house and marched up the narrow flagstone walk, and halfway there he paused uncomfortably as though he had forgotten something, looking about him, then searching his pockets and thereafter his mind, but for the life of him he could not think what it was, or why he had thus stopped. It was only later he remembered. Mary Ruadh had not been there to greet him on the pathway, her ginger cat hanging over one arm like an extension of her hair.

Nor was there any charging of small feet accompanied by shouts of “Daddy—Daddy!” as he crossed the threshold. However the odor of food cooking cheered him somewhat and he went to his quarters for a scrub-up and thereafter proceeded to the dining room where a startling sight met his eyes.

Mary Ruadh was seated at the table set for two. She was still clad in mourning dress—that is to say, Mrs. McKenzie’s black shawl wound about her middle and the purple cloud of veiling, now draped about her head and shoulders madonna style.

In the background Mrs. McKenzie was seen through the door to the kitchen in the throes of those final hurried operations of opening and closing oven doors and potlids that indicates food is about to be got onto the table. She glanced in anxiously through the door when she heard Mr. MacDhui enter and then quickly ducked back to her tasks. Mary Ruadh did not look up at all when her father came into the room, but sat staring before her, her hands in her lap.

MacDhui called out cheerily enough, “Hello there, chicken: what’s all this? What are you dressed up for, Queen of the Night?” He cocked his head and beard at her and said, “Becoming, though not exactly cheery in view of the kind of day I have had. How about putting it off now that we are about to have supper?”

The child raised her head and with a steady and unwinking gaze, looked at him, through him, and beyond him, and did not reply.

Mrs. McKenzie put her head in through the door, an anxious and worried expression upon her long, narrow face and called, “Mary Ruadh, are ye no fer sayin’ good evenin’ tae yer feyther?”

She shook her head in silent negation. Her father chose the wrong moment to be jocular, and an even worse allusion. “What’s the matter, child? Cat got your tongue?”

Two tears welled forth from the eyes of Mary Ruadh and rolled down her cheeks, and her small face puckered for a moment as though she were about to break down. Had she done so, it might have been better, for the huge man would then have gathered her to him, hugged and cuddled her, chucked her under the chin and comforted her and in the familiar warmth of his arms and affection, her new resolve might have melted then and there and been dispelled.

But the tears were not followed by others, the crying wrinkles smoothed from the young face, to be replaced by an expression of stony distaste as she stared her father down.

The veterinarian called in the direction of the kitchen, “Mrs. McKenzie! I say, Mrs. McKenzie—what ails the child?”

The housekeeper came into the room, nervously wiping her hands upon her apron, looking with worry as well as some trepidation upon the likes of a Mary Ruadh such as she had never encountered before. The plain but rather sweetly odd face of childhood innocence, the perpetual breathlessness of one who lives half in, half out of childhood’s dream world, had turned hard and curiously adult in its concentration. It was as though a changeling had suddenly entered the house. Mrs. McKenzie was a simple soul and quite out of her depth in the presence of primitive emotions.

She tried to explain: “The puir bairn’s in a swither o’er the death o’ her pussy baudrons. She canna thole to be wi’oot.” When the veterinarian stared at her blankly she added, “The weans had a funeral for her this afternoon. The procession was a grand yin wi’ Jamie Braid, the sergeant piper’s son from the great hoose blowin’ the deid march. I dinna ken whaur they laid her awa’—”

Impatiently Mr. MacDhui said, “Aye, aye, but that is nought but a lot of children’s play and gilaver. I wish to know why she will not speak with me? What has got into her?”

Mrs. McKenzie looked from the glowering child to the glowering man and plucked up her courage. “The bairn maun be ower fashed. O’ course she couldna mean it, but she said ye mur—I mean tae say, she said ye put away her puss baudrons Thomasina, and she will no speak tae ye again ’til ye bring her back.”

MacDhui stared unbelieving, a flush mounting from out his shirt collar and rising to join the flame of his hairline. In the tragedy of the blind man and the part he had played in it, the episode of the chloroforming of his daughter’s cat that morning had been pushed clean out of his head.

It is most certain that under other circumstances, relaxed in his home as he was inclined to be after a hard day’s work and in the company of the child he adored, MacDhui would have handled her otherwise and, with sympathy and understanding, cozened her out of her rebellion.

But the reference to what had happened that morning triggered once more, it seemed, the whole train of his frustrations brought on by that fatal plea of the blind man. It was those eyes he had been working on when his daughter had brought in her sick cat to shake him from his dream. He saw again the stark, stubborn, and stricken face of the child when he had pronounced the death sentence upon her pet, as he had felt compelled to do upon so many others that did not seem worth trying to save. Once more he heard the helpless beating of her small fists upon the surgery door and her exhausted, hysterical sobbing. Into his mind again came the haunted eyes and face of old Mrs. Laggan and her fat, wheezy, miserable dog, and the gentle words of his friend, the Reverend Peddie: “But it was
that
poor, wretched dog she loved—”

And he saw the picture of Tammas Moffat prepared to wait into eternity, sitting in his chair listening with his sightless eyes turned toward the door.

And so he turned upon his child as he did upon clients who tried his patience, red beard thrust forward belligerently, eyes hot, voice harsh, and shouted, “What nonsense is this, Mary Ruadh? I’ll not have it, I say. I told you your cat was so ill it would likely have died in a day or so anyway. Now then, go at once and remove those garments and then return to the table and be yourself.”

To his surprise, the child arose obediently, left the table, and went to her room. MacDhui suddenly felt as foolish and contrite as he had the moment he had found himself shouting at his friend Peddie across poor Tammas Moffat. When she returned a few minutes later without the offending clothes and took her place once more he said disarmingly, “See here now, Mary Ruadh, I’m sorry about Thomasina, but there’s no restoring her and that’s a fact. Now, how would you like another cat for your own, a wee kitten? When I looked in upon grocer Dobbie on the way home he offered me a choice out of six his mother cat brought in. And one of them was snow white without a mark. Now what do you say to that?”

Mary Ruadh said nothing. She did not seem to have heard. Mrs. McKenzie fluttered in the doorway with the tray. “Well, bring it in then, bring it in,” MacDhui ordered impatiently. While they were eating he tried again. “Well then, a dog perhaps for a change, to be all your own, eh, Mary Ruadh, and follow you about wherever you go? Or perhaps a Siamese. Now there’s an idea and I believe I know where I might lay hands on one. Come, Mary Ruadh, speak up.”

The child turned her silent, stubborn gaze upon her father, and in her eyes was the look of one who regards a stranger. She compressed her lips tightly. MacDhui felt himself swept by that exasperation verging upon blind, helpless rage that adults experience in the presence of a willful and headstrong child whose contempt is written clearly and plainly upon its face. With an enormous effort he controlled himself, said no more, and fell to eating his supper, but with small appetite. Silence hung heavily over the room, and in the kitchen he had a feeling that Mrs. McKenzie was going about on tiptoes.

Mary Ruadh ate too, but listlessly and without looking at her father. Sinkingly MacDhui thought, What if she were really never to speak to him again—ever ever again? What was one to do? What would he do? What
could
he do? But it was, he told himself, preposterous and impossible, all over that damned cat that he should have turfed out of the house long ago as a potential carrier of disease germs and a general nuisance. The love she had lavished upon the beast should be reserved for a human—she treated it almost like— With an effort MacDhui wrenched himself away from remembering Mary Ruadh’s mother holding the child in her arms and the look upon her face before she died. And for one fearful instant he asked himself the question, denying it with all the inner vehemence he could muster—whether he had put the cat away out of jealousy—

At this point the uncomfortable and unhappy silence was broken shatteringly. “Please, Mrs. McKenzie,” Mary Ruadh said, “may I have some more apple pudding?”

This unexpected end to the painful quiet, and the child’s addressing herself to the housekeeper, he found a hundred times more unbearable and exasperating than if she had not spoken at all. Yet the first words she had said since he had returned home that evening appeared to him to offer an entering wedge. Thrusting his beard across the table at her, he said, “Have you not had sufficient apple pudding, Mary Ruadh?”

The child stared at him across the table and remained silent. At the kitchen door Mrs. McKenzie hesitated with the basin in her hands, not knowing whether to bring it or not.

“If you wish more dessert, Mary Ruadh,” MacDhui said meaningfully and with all the pregnant emphasis and self-satisfaction of the chess player who, seeing game in hand, announces his first “check!” to his opponent, “If you wish more, you will ask it of me.”

Again the child turned her gaze upon her father and this time added the insult of a longer study, quiet, thorough, contemplative, and hostile.

The figure and person of her father was there, the great, warm, smelly man to whom she cuddled, in whose beard and neck she buried her face, in whose arms there was safety, whom sometimes when she felt overwhelmed with love for him she could not hug strongly enough or devour sufficiently with kisses. Yet none of these feelings were present in her now.

For she was now looking upon the person who had ordered the life of Thomasina taken and the remains flung out upon the refuse heap, and who, now that she was punishing him for it, was not playing fair. And this was perhaps an even harder blow, for in the world in which she lived and played, the world of Hughie Stirling and Geordie McNabb, and even the simple world of Mrs. McKenzie, the great and unforgivable crime was injustice. The line between fair and unfair was sharply demarcated. Adults as well as those of their own age who crossed it were judged.

She was still too young to know the word “blackmail,” but at her father’s words she was filled at once with an understanding of its power and essential loathsomeness and she felt herself smitten to the heart with a sadness and disappointment almost deeper than any she had already experienced that day. First it was her cat which had been killed and now her father, for the look that she was giving him was his execution. In the short space of a few hours the two beings that she had most loved in all the world and who had made up the sum of her security and happiness had been taken from her.

Thereupon Mary Ruadh took her double loss with the quiet and deceptive stoicism of which the sensitive child is capable when deeply hurt. Withdrawing her damning gaze from her father she said, “No, thank you, Mrs. McKenzie, I don’t think I want any more apple pudding.”

Andrew MacDhui flung his napkin to the floor, scraped his chair angrily back from the table, and without another word turned and slammed out of the room and the house. She had defeated him. To his “Check!” she had replied with “Checkmate!” He knew that she had been aware of the logical extension of his gambit to, “If you wish anything to eat, you will speak to me and ask ME for it”—and that he would not browbeat her into compliance, for in those stony eyes and grimly clenched lips he had read her unshakable determination to be starved rather than speak to him.

Hot flushes of rage surged through him as he flung himself along the foreshore of the loch in a kind of desperation effort to work off the anger of the wish to pick up the child and shake her. It was MacDhui’s first experience with that peculiar kind and intensity of rage that comes to a parent when he encounters some trait or facet of his own character mirrored in his child.

The sea loch was bathed in that unreal light of Northern lands where the clock calls for darkness or dusk to settle, but night refuses to fall and the falsely greenish glow of day lingers long after the sun appears to have sunk beneath the horizon. The loch was not moving, for the tide was slack. A heat mist covered it so that it seemed less a body of water and more a low-lying cloud through which extended the barren rocky mountainsides and peaks rising from the opposite shore. To the north MacDhui could see the lights of Inveraray and the crown of The Cobbler, that massive mountain barring the road to the Trossachs, colored by an afterglow.