Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God (29 page)

I raised my head and sniffed. Again I caught it—a faint hint and it was gone again. But it loosed such a turmoil of dreams and longing in me. In the darkness, with the now quiet breathing of Lori deep in sleep, my lost ka seemed suddenly very near to me, almost as though I could grasp and hold it and, holding it, be lost no more.

Once more this sweet scent came to me out of the night, just as I was dropping off to sleep. They would be good dreams that night at the foot of Lori’s bed and I hurried on to sleep to meet them.

But I remember, just before, making up my mind that now that I had become Lori’s upstairs cat I would make it my business to investigate the source of this wonderful and exciting odor at the very earliest opportunity.

2 6

T
he house was ablaze with light as Mr. MacDhui hurried up the footpath, and Mrs. McKenzie stood behind the open front doorway, peering out. As he entered she said, “Och, ’tis me that is glad ye have come. I sent for the doctor, sir. When I went to make her comfortable for the night after reading tae her I saw that she was failing—her eyes seem tae have sunk in so—”

He nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes. You did quite right,” and went in and hurried to Mary Ruadh’s room, where he came upon the doctor by her cot looking down upon her, his face grave with concern. And it struck him as odd that in that moment of panic and crisis, he should notice how beautiful and compassionate was the face of the old man.

Dr. Strathsay looked up as MacDhui came into the room, saying, “Ah, good. I am glad they found you.”

“Is she dying?” MacDhui asked.

The sad-eyed general practitioner considered for a moment. “She has lost the will to live,” he replied. “She is no longer fighting. Unless this process can be reversed—”

MacDhui asked then, “How long, Doctor?” He felt almost an avidity to hear the worst, to hear the full extent of this catastrophe, to see it at its darkest.

Strathsay shrugged. “I cannot say—” He had his opinion—the morrow, a few days at the most, but he would not deny a man hope while there was yet the breath of life. “The child had great vitality, but it is burning low. She has all but succeeded in extinguishing it.”

MacDhui nodded, went to the cot, and looked down at his daughter. He noted the bluish tinge of the skin, the lusterless eyes, and the all too faint rising of the bedclothes at her breast.

“Man!” Dr. Strathsay burst out with a sudden explosion of energy and drive akin to exasperation, “You must do something! You must arouse her interest; restore her desire to live. You are her father. You should know your child. You love her and surely she must love you. Wake up! A life is hanging in the balance. Surely you can think of something, some way of awakening her to fight.”

MacDhui looked at Dr. Strathsay heavily and his reply led the doctor to fear for a moment that fear, grief, and worry had momentarily driven the veterinary out of his mind, for his bitter reply was, “Aye. If a dead cat could be brought to life again and placed in her arms, she would smile again and will to live.”

“I do not understand you,” the doctor said.

“Medicine—” MacDhui began, but Dr. Strathsay shook his head. For the first time he noted the disheveled condition of the veterinary, his torn coat and slit sleeve and the bruises on his face. “Man,” he cried, “have you been brawling in a tavern at a time like this? When medicine fails there is only one appeal left—to a higher power.”

MacDhui turned upon the doctor, filling his huge chest with breath, his face purpling with choler and outrage. “You! You! YOU!” he shouted, unheeding of others present. “How can YOU believe in a God who permits so much suffering, injustice, and misery as you encounter daily on your rounds? What does your God want with the life of this child here when—it is everything to me?”

The room was silent after his tirade. He had not done yet. “I would crawl upon my hands and knees, begging for her life, if I thought there was any mercy, justice, or design to any of it,” he cried, glaring at Strathsay.

In his loneliness, in his isolation, the memory returned to the animal doctor of a cry he had heard that night, when all seemed lost, including life itself. “A MacDhui! A MacDhui!” And for the first time he lifted himself from the depths of despair. “Ah, wait,” he said, “I have thought of something. If she lives until tomorrow, there is hope—”

Dr. Strathsay sighed and picked up his bag. “There is always hope. I will look in in the morning,” he said, and went out.

MacDhui remained standing in the center of the room, lost in thought. There was Lori—Lori—Lori no longer daft—Lori who could fight like the very devil of a Scotswoman at the side of her man—Lori would pull Mary Ruadh back from the brink of the grave, and perhaps himself too. His spirits began to lift. His whole being sang with the name of Lori. In the morning he would go to her—

Dr. Strathsay came the next day, looked at the child, gave the verdict that there had been little change during the night, and left. Mr. MacDhui made his dispositions at his own surgery with Willie Bannock, left Mrs. McKenzie in charge again with instructions, climbed into his jeep and departed.

He had not gone to bed that night, but had remained awake with Mary Ruadh, sitting at her bedside as she slept, holding her hand, stroking her forehead when she stirred, trying to communicate his love to her, feeling himself almost a battery stored with love, a life-giving charge to flow from him to her. Thus he kept vigil until the dawn broke and the new day showed her to be still living. He then made ready to go upon the errand he hoped would bring Lori to his aid.

On his way to the foot of the glen he passed the scene of the battleground of the night before and paused there for a moment in astonishment. Except for trampled grass and wheel ruts, some ashes and bits of burned wood and canvas, the field was as deserted as though the gypsies had never been. They had decamped, bag and baggage, during the night, taking their burned wagons with them. There was no sign of the carcass of the bear, nor any indication of what had become of the animals MacDhui had liberated. They had undoubtedly taken to the hills. He smiled suddenly at a picture that came to him: the monkeys eventually turning up at the cottage, tugging upon the rope of the Mercy Bell, and Lori coming forth to take in these lost children from the fauna of a distant land.

The urgency of his own need set him upon the road again quickly. He drove up to the entrance to Glen Shira, parked the vehicle, and hurried on foot up the now familiar path that led to the place where Lori lived.

He climbed so quickly that his heart was pounding violently when he reached the covin-tree and he had to pause for breath as well as to collect the words he would speak when Lori appeared. “Help me, Lori. Come to me. My child is dying. Only you can save her.”

Yet now that he was there he found himself experiencing a strange reluctance to tug upon the rope and set the echoes clanging with the ringing of the bell. The clearing was unusually quiet that morning, there seemed to be no animals about and the stillness weighed upon him. The bell, once rung, would start a chain of events beyond recall.

His great chest still heaving, MacDhui stood gazing at the stone cottage. The green door was shut. As always, the blinds were drawn at the windows fronting the clearing and the covin oak. There was no discernible change in the physical aspect of its mass and yet in some way the house seemed to have averted its sleeping face from him and sealed its lips. Was it only his imagination, heated by the urgency of his quest and his sleepless night, or was there no longer a welcome there?

To his surprise he heard the sweet, silvery tone of the Mercy Bell in gentle vibration, and looking up, startled, saw that he had brushed the rope with his shoulder and that the clapper had touched the side. The accident decided him. He seized the cord and rang it, setting the echoes afire, raising the wind of a hundred wings about the house. From the barn behind, that was Lori’s hospital, furious barking arose, but no dogs appeared. The echoes died away; the birds subsided. The dogs were stilled. Lori did not appear.

He rang again, crying, “Lori—Lori— It is I, Andrew MacDhui.”

The dogs barked again, but the birds this time refused to take wing . . .

MacDhui had a moment of panic. Supposing Lori had been seriously injured or burned in his defense the night before and was unable to answer the summons. It should have sent him shouldering through her door, yet the sleeping, evasive, unwelcoming house forbade this. And the picture of her returned to his mind, the clasp of her hands to his face when she had kissed him, the softness and passion of her mouth, and the sound of her flying footsteps as she fled from the scene.

He tugged at the bell rope hard and harshly to shatter the dreadful oppressive silence that clung to the place that day and shouted again. “Lori! Lori! Dinna ye hear me? ’Tis I, Andrew.” And he was growing angry.

He was growing angry because of the love he felt for her, to which he could not give expression, things he wished to say to her, the confessions, the promises, the pleas and the sweetnesses.

“Lori!” he bellowed then at the top of his lungs, “Come forth! I love you!”

The confession shouted to the winds, the trees, and the rushing burn in the background inflamed him further, and he tugged upon the clapper of the Mercy Bell as though to tear it from the tree. His rage and despair drove even his daughter’s need from his head. “Woman, can ye no’ take heed for a man who’s sick with love for ye?”

The clearing was a-quiver with the endless clangor of the bell as MacDhui, near the end of his senses, pulled it wildly and endlessly; the birds now rose again in panic; the dogs and other animals in the rear matched the hysteria with shrill cries and barks. His bellow arose over the shattering clangor. “Lori! Did ye no’ hear me tell I love you? Here I am. Will ye no’ have me? Will ye no’ listen to my offer of marriage?”

Later it was said that the clamor of his proposal was heard all the way to the edge of Inveranoch.

Within the cottage, kneeling by her bedroom window, peering through a crack in the lowered blinds, Lori looked down with panic upon the great, bristling, love-enraged man summoning her, and could not move a muscle or stir a limb.

Within her she was crying silently, “Oh, my dear dear man, my dear love, cannot ye wait? Och, it is too soon, too soon—”

His fury and his violence confused and frightened her. He had led her at first so gently out of the tranquil world in which she had lived for so long, that wonderful world of dreams and phantasies and the love of gentle creatures. She had discovered it when she was very young and had chosen to live in it until the Red MacDhui had come storming into her citadel as man, as healer, and a little, in a way, as God. It never dawned upon her that she had likewise led him part way from his world into hers—

He had taken her far, but the echoes of her lonely, dedicated life were still heard. She wanted more time—and gentleness.

His bellows and bell ringing rattled the shutters outside her window. “Aye, ye were no’ so proud last night. Ye cried ‘MacDhui!’ kissed me, and were my woman. Will ye then no’ have me now?”

The memory of the fight and the battle-passioned kiss she had bestowed returned to fill her with confusion and she no longer looked upon the man courting her in such strange fashion, but hid her face in her hands and wept hot tears of shame.

“As ye are—I want ye to wife, Lori!”

She cowered, remembering how fiercely she had clutched the great, bleeding head in her hands and pulled his mouth to hers.

He struck the bell a tremendous clang and shouted, “ ’Tis the last time. I’ll no’ be asking ye again, Lori.”

She shivered as she remembered her fierce pride in the victory they had won and yet was in vain, for the little bear had died. She lived over the fiery night when another Lori seemed to have come forth from the flames.

Then she became aware that the unruly clamor of the Mercy Bell was stilled and that the glen echoed no more to the untamed bellowings of MacDhui. Lori removed her hands from her face and peered through the crack. He was gone. A different kind of panic beset her now, and she ran down the stairs, unlocked her door and fled through it to the covin oak. “Andrew!” she called, “Och, Andrew—my Andrew.”

She waited a long time beneath the covin-tree, should he perhaps return. But he did not do so.

MacDhui was stumbling, a beaten, insensate man, his ears closed, his eyes half blinded, down the path, nor heeded where he went or where the way lay and so he came into the woods below the clearing, tripping over roots, falling upon rocks, cursing, thrusting his way bull-like through the shoulder-high bracken, tearing himself on brambles.

For he was at the end of all his high hopes, to the end of all hope. His temper and frenzy of rage mounted as he crashed his way through the undergrowth as though by charging blindly ahead he could come to grips with the fates that had tricked him and robbed him at every turn of everything he held dear.

Thus in the course of his descent through the woods he emerged into a small glade bare of trees but ringed round with beech and oak and dappled birch. The floor was carpeted with leaves and moss and small strands of fern and low shrubs that bore red berries. In the center of this glade was a small grave mound over which new grass had crept and weeds and broad-leaved plants had grown up around it. Sun and rain had faded the lettering upon the wooden marker headboard of the grave and the winds had somewhat shifted it so that it now stood not quite straight.

Astonishment at finding a burial place in this wild and deserted spot halted MacDhui in his flight and momentarily restored him to his senses, so that he paused to look about him.

It was such a grave as a small child might have occupied and MacDhui was swept by a new wave of bitterness as he reflected that the once gay and happy Mary Ruadh was to be confined beneath the sod in a crowded dour churchyard, less sweet and peaceful than this lonely forest retreat.

The reminder was all the more poignant and painful in that the child still lived, but must die. There was still a spark that glowed in the almost extinguished twin coals of her eyes and he thought how he had looked upon her all through the night, trembling lest the faint movement of her breathing should cease and the beginning of the days and nights must be faced when he would never see her again.