Foggage

by Patrick McGinley

  “Even vets make mistakes.” He left her fondling the dog.

  Their problems had only begun, however. Judy began scratching her cheeks till they bled, then her sides till they were raw and weeping. This time Festus said that the dog was allergic to something at Clonglass and gave her an anti histamine injection. He continued to give her injections for three weeks but without any sign of improvement.

  “It’s a chronic allergy,” he told Elizabeth. “And the problem, as you’ve found out, is that it’s nigh impossible to discover the cause.”

  Elizabeth’s reply was to take the dog to another vet, because, as she put it, “a male chauvinist is not the best vet to treat a bitch dog.” The other vet confirmed O’Flaherty’s diagnosis and recommended that she take the dog back to Larch Lawn to see if it would make any difference. This treatment recommended itself to Elizabeth, but at Larch Lawn the dog went from bad to worse. By August the poor animal was practically unrecognizable. She had begun chewing the pads of her feet till she could no longer walk without growling, and her sides were covered in running sores. One morning, while Elizabeth was at school, Kevin went to Larch Lawn to see the foreman and was so horrified by the dog’s appearance that he resolved to take her to Festus right away.

  “There’s no cure for this,” said O’Flaherty.

  “Is there nothing else we can try?”

  “How would you like to live like this?”

  “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” Kevin said.

  “There’s only one thing left to do—put her out of pain.”

  “Put her down?”

  “Yes.”

  Kevin reluctantly agreed and afterwards went home to tell Elizabeth, who became so hysterical in her grief that she hammered his chest with her fists until he had to hold her hands to protect himself.

  “How could you do it?” she cried. “How could you let that woman-hater O’Flaherty kill my dog while my back was turned? It never occurred to you, I suppose, to come home to ask my permission.”

  She drove to Killage to retrieve the body of the dog, and then she and John Noonan buried it in the garden at Larch Lawn. She was in a black mood when she returned to Clonglass. She pointedly ignored him and went into the parlour to be alone. After an hour he could stand her absence from the kitchen no longer and he went to her to say that he was sorry.

  “The poor creature was in terrible pain and there was no hope of a cure. It seemed the only thing to do.”

  “You could have waited till you’d asked me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If it had been any other vet but O’Flaherty. I can’t help thinking than he enjoyed it. One female less in the world.”

  He sat beside her on the sofa with his arm round her waist, pleased that at least she did not push him away. “You mustn’t worry about it now; worry isn’t good in your condition.”

  After a while, to amuse her, he began reading aloud snippets from the local newspaper, and suddenly he burst into laughter. “Listen to this,” he said. “It’s that ass, the Minister for Agriculture again:

  “Brucellosis—Risk of Spread at Calving Time. The Minister of Agriculture, Mr. Liam Hyland, told local farmers at a well-attended meeting at Phelan’s Hotel that the greatest danger they faced was not rising taxes but the spread of brucellosis in calving herds.

  “’Proper care at calving time,’ the Minister said, ’can go a long way towards controlling the spread of the disease, the first essential being to make sure that all calving takes place in isolation from the rest of the herd. It is a fact that cows infected with brucellosis will often not abort but calve normally. These infected animals can spread millions of Brucella organisms when calving and while discharging after calving. As a precaution, all litter, discharges, and afterbirths should be disinfected and either buried in lime or burnt. These materials should never be put on the manure heap, into the slurry pit, or thrown on waste ground. They could be highly infective and spread disease by contaminating pastures and water supplies.’”

  “What’s so funny about all that?” Elizabeth asked.

  “The Minister makes this speech at least twice a week, as if he knew of nothing else to say. The man is a gowk, like any man who teaches his grandmother to suck eggs.”

  “Very few farmers could be regarded as his grandmother.”

  “There’s no brucellosis in my herd.”

  “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” she said, going to the piano.

  The following morning he woke before her, and when he tried to get out of bed he found himself weak at the knees.

  “There’s something the matter with me,” he said. “My legs are weak as water.”

  “Don’t get up then,” she said. “I’ll fetch the doctor right away.”

  Ignoring her advice, he tried to dress, but by the time he had put on his shoes he fell back on the bed exhausted. Normally, he enjoyed the rudest of health. He never suffered from anything more serious than the common cold, but now he could hardly believe that he was the same man who took his wife’s dog to Killage the previous day.

  Dr. Blizzard came in the afternoon, placed a black box of tricks on the stock of the bed, and tapped Kevin’s chest and back with delicate fingers. He listened to his heartbeats as if he could hardly hear them, took his pulse and temperature with fearful gravity, and peered into his ears and mouth with the aid of a pencil torch. Waiting for him to give judgement, Kevin watched his sickly yellow face, the creased skin like expensive patent leather, but the doctor kept his mouth firmly shut, as if opening it might invite the entry of untold microbes, disease, maybe death itself.

  “Is it flu?” Kevin asked.

  “It might be, and then again it might not.”

  “What could it be?”

  “When did it come on?” The doctor ignored his question.

  “In the night.”

  “It came on quickly.”

  “Could it be the bucko?”

  “It could be brucellosis.”

  “There’s no brucellosis in my herd.” Kevin laughed sarcastically.

  “I’ve heard that boast before.”

  “When will you know for certain?”

  “I’ll have to ask you to come to the hospital for tests.”

  “And if it’s brucellosis, how long will I be laid up?”

  “A month, maybe longer.”

  “It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I’m behind with the hay already.”

  “If it’s brucellosis, hay will be the least of your worries.”

  Elizabeth drove him to the hospital, where the results of the tests confirmed Blizzard’s suspicions. She drove him home and put him to bed in what used to be his father’s room, because the doctor at the hospital had told them that brucellosis was infectious. He lay between Elizabeth’s green sheets in the stuffy room, bathed in sweat, not knowing the time of day, while notes from a distant piano came up singly through the floorboards. The weather was warm and calm, and outside his neighbours were cutting and baling hay, but that was a remote world, for him a world of sounds rather than sights. Snoddy came up to the bedroom to report after dinner, and Kevin listened with effort and told him to hire what help he needed to get the hay in while it was fine. The world of crops and grazing cattle was far away; all he knew was the sticky sickness lying like thick treacle on his bones, making the smallest movement of a hand or foot exhausting as a mountain trudge. Elizabeth brought him food, but he could not eat, so she brought him orange juice and Bovril, which, in drinking, he spilt on his chest.

  He woke up to the barking of Pup, and for a moment he did not know where he was or if it was night or day. He hauled himself up in the bed and leant on his elbow while the running sweat cooled on his neck and chest. Then he knew that he was in the death room, where his father had died and also his mother, and that he could not fall out of bed, because it was deep in the middle like a canoe. Maureen’s hearty welcome came up from the kitchen; perhaps Dr. Blizzard
had called with another injection and another bottle of tablets. As he listened for an identifiable voice, he relived the moment of waking and his terror as his heart took a sideways plunge. It was an eerily disturbing experience, as if he had been dead and suddenly recalled to life and final judgement. What was most distressing was that his mind was blank as he awoke, as if he had truly been dead, and he wondered if in some preposterous way he owed his life to the barking of the dog. He felt as if he’d had a preparative brush with Death. The air in the room was stale and choking like the air in a crypt of cobwebs. He inhaled with his mouth closed, and suddenly the cobwebs were hanging inside his nose. Someone, not Dr. Blizzard, laughed in the kitchen. He felt shaken and insecure, as if neither life nor death was what it seemed.

  Exhausted, he fell back in the bed and saw his mother with one frail hand on the banisters coming slowly down the stairs. Shortly after she returned from hospital she came down to dinner, but no sooner had she sat in her chair than the kitchen was filled with a loathsome stink. At first he did not know where it was coming from. It was the foulest smell he had ever experienced, more offensive than the smell of pig shit in an unventilated piggery, or the smell of the decomposed afterbirth that Festus O’Flaherty extracted last year from one of his cows that had failed to cleanse. It was so thick that he felt it blacken the air, falling on his face like a mountain fog until he could almost taste it on his tongue.

  “Is that you, Mother?” Maureen asked as she ran to open the window.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it isn’t me, and I’m sure it isn’t Kevin.”

  “It must be me, then. I can feel the trickle of something warm on my belly.”

  Maureen ran to the door and retched against the outside wall.

  “I don’t know where it’s coming from,” his mother moaned.

  “Open your dress and see,” Maureen said when she came back to the kitchen. “Come on, Kevin, give her a hand.”

  Maureen unbuttoned her dress, pulled up her slip, and laid bare the scar on her belly, which had opened in one corner and was discharging a foul brown liquid like farmyard slurry.

  Holy Christ! he thought. She’s rotting alive in her own house, my own mother, and there isn’t a saint in heaven who gives a fuck.

  “Stay where you are. Don’t get up. I’m going to fetch the doctor right away,” he said, glad to escape from the suffocating smell.

  “A burst abscess, which should never have been allowed to happen,” Dr. Blizzard said and ordered her to hospital, where they inserted a drain to draw off the discharge.

  They did not keep her for long, however. They told him that she was incurable, that she would have to go home as soon as the wound healed, because they needed the bed. On her return the pains started in earnest. They came in violent fits that distorted her face and body as she screamed in the rage of pain. Her cries could be heard three fields away, and he dreaded coming back to the house at dinnertime to be reminded of her intolerable suffering.

  The flesh melted from her bones. Her face yellowed like a dying leaf, and her head became a case of bone in a cocoon of transparent skin. In her youth she had been big and strong, but never handsome. Now she seemed to him to have taken on the beauty of spirituality as the searing pain burnt away the impurities of the flesh till the flame within her flickered and darted like the flame of a sanctuary lamp in a darkened chapel. But he did not want the spirituality he saw in her because she was at death’s door. He wanted her to remain as she was, a big strong woman with a big plain face and hands white from kneading dough in the kitchen. Enraged at the unreason of illness, of life itself, he tackled Dr. Blizzard on his next visit.

  “What in the name of God are you giving her?”

  “Morphine,” the doctor replied, stepping niftily in the dirty yard.

  “Well, it’s doing her no good. The pain gets worse and worse.”

  “The longer you take morphine, the more resistant you become to it.”

  “But she hasn’t been taking it long. Can’t you give her more?”

  “I’m giving her the maximum dose as it is. If I gave her any more, it would kill her.”

  “Killing would be a mercy,” he said fiercely, blocking Blizzard’s way so that he could not escape in his car.

  “I’m not God, just a doctor.”

  “God is on holiday, sunning himself in the Canaries. Did you know that, Dr. Blizzard?”

  “Life is not mine to confer, nor is it mine to take away.”

  “I’ve known vets who showed more mercy to animals in pain than you’re showing to my mother.”

  “I’m doing my duty as a doctor. Don’t ask me to do less.”

  “You look like a man about to quote the Hippocritic Oath.”

  “Hippocratic, Mr. Hurley, Hippocratic. And now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got another call to make.”

  “Pompous fucker,” Kevin shouted after him as he vanished through the first gate of the lane.

  He came back from the field that evening to find his mother crying out again. Maureen had gone shopping and his father was lying on his back in the next room with cotton plugs in his ears. He went into her room and stood by the window unable to look at the twisted face. She reached for his hand and motioned him to sit on the edge of the bed.

  “Won’t some of ye put me out of my misery?” she implored with what breath she could find between gasps.

  Without a word, he lifted her in the bed and put the pillow between her face and his chest. Then he pressed her face against the pillow and held her like a lover, tightly against his body, until her futile struggle stopped. When she was quiet, he laid her gently on the bed and folded her arms over her stomach.

  Beneath the window were two apple trees and the apples were glowing in the evening sun. He looked down on their red and yellow cheeks and the sparrow droppings like calcified white worms on the ones near the wall where the birds roosted in the branches. He had once heard Festus say that in America farmers fed dried poultry droppings to beef cattle. Maureen was coming up the lane with bicycle and shopping bag. It was the fifth of October, he was in his thirty-seventh year, and his mother would never feel pain again.

  Lying now on the bed she died in, he was closer to her than he’d ever been in life. It was as if she were standing by the curtain in the thickening dusk. A tear trickled down his cheek. He heard steps on the stairs and he hid his face in the sheet.

  “And how is our patient today?” Monsignor McGladdery asked from the door. As a parish priest was the last man he wished to see, Kevin wondered about the best way to discourage him.

  “It’s a shame to be lying up here, and all the work that’s to be done in the fields.”

  “That’s good Christian thinking, my son. As the Pope himself said while he was here, Love the work of the fields, for it keeps you close to God, the Creator, in a special way. But you must wish for recovery only in moderation, you must not despair. God sends us these trials only to test our love for him. Think of Job. I know that you are a man, born of a woman and therefore full of misery, that in the span of a year you have lost your father, your nephew, and your best friend; but what’s happened to you is nothing compared with what befell poor Job. Now, repeat after me: ‘The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’”

  “I’m too weak to pray.” He closed his eyes.

  The Monsignor came to the bedside and took his wrist to feel his pulse. He was a tall broad-shouldered man in his mid-sixties, with unruly white hair that stood out in tufts from the sides of his big round head like lengths of thirteen-amp fuse wire. He never wore a suit, always a black cassock with a wide shiny seat, and though he was straight in the back, he leant forward at an angle of seventy-five degrees as he walked. For that reason, if no other, he had captured the imagination of his parishioners, the most devout of whom believed that it was only the strength of his faith, not his sense of balance, that kept him from falling flat on his face.

  In his youth he
was famous above all for his love of boiled bacon and cabbage. He was then much given to visiting farmhouses before dinnertime and supervising the cooking of the bacon, in return for which he expected to sit down at table with his host. Though he spent much time alone with women in kitchens, their husbands trusted him implicitly, believing as they did that harmless eccentricity is a certain hallmark of a celibate clergy. In recent years, however, he had to forgo his favourite dish because of high blood pressure. Dr. Blizzard told him that he must not touch salty foods, that on no account must he eat boiled bacon, that he must not even eat cabbage that had been boiled in the same water as bacon. The doctor’s interdict was a severe trial to him, but he submitted to it scrupulously except on Christmas Day, when he scorned turkey and goose and enjoyed a heaped plate of fine red bacon and the firm white heart of a cabbage with plenty of tomato chutney.

  During the rest of the year, he contented himself with collecting the string that is used to bind bacon in the pot. He would often enter farmhouses and demand bacon string, which he would then secrete in a watertight tobacco pouch that he carried for the purpose. Many were the theorists among his flock who speculated on the destination of the string, but most adhered to one of two schools of thought—those who believed that he chewed it in the privacy of his parlour and those who argued that he put it in his pipe and smoked it. Kevin belonged to neither school. He believed, though he never revealed his belief, that the string absorbed some of the carcinogenic agent from the bacon, and that the Monsignor was sufficiently saintly to collect the string for the protection of his less well-informed parishioners.

  “We often forget that God never closes one door without opening another,” the Monsignor continued, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  Sacred Heart of Jesus, for mercy’s sake take him away, Kevin echoed Maureen’s heartfelt prayer.

  “When Dr. Blizzard found that I had high blood pressure and decided to deny me bacon, I thought at first that life wouldn’t be worth living. But I hadn’t reckoned on God’s ingenuity in the land of darkness and the shadow of death, because I soon discovered that the pleasure of having your blood pressure taken is greater than the pleasure of eating bacon and cabbage.”