All God's Creatures

by Carolyn McSparren

  "Thank God," the man whispered. "I don't know how I'd ever face Jack and Peter if I killed Greta. They dote on that dog."

  I glanced at Eli. She'd heard the names the same as I had. Oh well. Somebody that age and that gorgeous and without a ring on his wedding finger was bound to be gay. Too bad for single women.

  "Look," I said. "There's a coffee pot in the room next to reception. You know how to operate a Mr. Coffee?"

  He nodded.

  "Then make a pot. We're a long way from done here. We have to make certain her kidneys are working and that there's no brain damage. Greyhounds can't take extreme heat or extreme cold. They have very little hair, very thin skin and no layer of fat at all."

  "I know she's sensitive, but I didn't realize how sensitive."

  "You couldn't have foreseen the power outage, Mr. -?"

  "Shepherd Fischer. Shep." He held out his hand to me and smiled for the first time. Then he went to find the coffeepot.

  "Damn shame," I whispered as soon as he was out of earshot.

  "What?"

  "He's obviously gay."

  "No, he's not."

  "Of course he is. His two friends, Jack and Peter?"

  "Bet you twenty he's straight."

  "How do we find out? Ask him?"

  "He's going to ask me out before he leaves," Eli said. She sounded very smug.

  "He is not."

  "Trust me."

  We worked over the dog for an hour until finally she could walk without stumbling. Apparently her kidneys hadn't been damaged because she piddled in the snow outside the back door. Eventually she ate a bowl of dog food. Shep stuck with us the whole time.

  "How does she do around other animals?" I asked.

  "Fine. Greyhounds are the sweetest dogs in the world," he said as he stroked Greta's long, narrow head. She stared up at him adoringly.

  "She get along with cats?"

  "I think so, why?"

  "Because I have two Maine Coon cats and a Siamese. It's already dark outside and the roads will be like glass. Do you have plans for Christmas Eve?"

  "A large glass of Glenfiddich and a salami sandwich, actually," he said with a deprecating grin. "You two probably have families to go to. If Greta's okay to travel, I'll take her home with me. I have power, or I did when I left home this afternoon."

  "I'd like to keep an eye on her overnight," I said. "Why don't you join us for Christmas Eve dinner?"

  "Oh, I couldn't barge in."

  "You wouldn't be barging," Eli said. "There's plenty for a whole army of extra guests if I know my Maggie."

  "No Glenfiddich, but I can offer you a glass ofwine. A guest room as well, if you decide to get blotto," I said. "I'm serious. We'd love to have you, and I'd really prefer to watch Greta sleeping in front of my fire tonight. No cages."

  He glanced at Eli. "If you're sure..."

  "Absolutely, positively."

  So he stayed. By the time we'd finished the roast, he had already asked Eli to an evening of jazz at a new Memphis nightclub down on Beale Street.

  "Cool jazz, you swear?" Eli asked. "Modem Jazz Quartet cool? I'm not overly fond of honkers."

  "Marsalis-cool," he replied. "Decent food and we can hear ourselves talk. You game?"

  "Sure. Why not?"

  Morgan and I left them arguing about whether Charlie Parker ever descended into honkerdom. Eli said yes. Shep said no.

  In the kitchen I asked Morgan about Shep.

  "Straight as a die. He has no end of lady friends who'd like to snare him, but he's never been married. Some kind of lost love a long time ago."

  "Nuts," I said. "I just lost twenty bucks."

  Chapter 25

  In which we meet Vickie

  The only place that veterinarians generally meet one another is at local meetings. We are in a sense competitors, and from time to time one of the guys turns cutthroat, but usually encounters are pretty amicable. That was especially true among the women.

  By the time Vickie Anderson came onto the Memphis scene in the late nineties, Eli and I counted as old campaigners.

  Vickie moved to the Memphis area to follow her husband, Herb. Big mistake. I had one unbreakable rule about my friends' husbands. "If he makes you happy, I'll love him like a brother. If he makes you miserable, I will put voodoo hexes on him."

  Herb Anderson was a corporate lawyer. The multi-national company that transferred him from Kansas City to Memphis without a moment's consideration of his wife's career shall remain nameless. In this case, Momma made more than Daddy, so she needed a job. Herb's company couldn't have cared less.

  The first time Eli and I met Vickie was at a Christmas party for the local DVM society. She came alone. Her husband, she said, was working on a big case for his company. Eli and Lanier came with Morgan and me. The moment Morgan realized Vickie was alone and didn't know anyone, he adopted her, sat her at our table, and brought her into our group to share our rubber chicken.

  If I had been the jealous type, Vickie would have set off my greeneyed monster. As a matter of fact, Vickie's eyes were green. Her hair was a real mahogany red (as opposed to Patsy's red hair, which varied from strawberry blonde to Lucille Ball henna depending on her moods).

  Vickie was a runner and a gym rat, so she had a wonderful figure on that five foot nine frame of hers. Her two sons, Adam and Jason, were in high school.

  Vickie was working as many shifts as the local veterinary emergency clinic would give her, but she was searching for a partnership in a going small animal practice that offered both boarding and grooming.

  "That's where the money is," she said. "I was close to closing a deal on a partnership in Kansas City. Now I'm back to square one until I can build a client list."

  Dr. Parmenter had died two years earlier, and had left the practice to Lanier. She didn't have room for a partner, but she did call me to say Vickie impressed her. "She's concentrated on opthamology. Ifyou have a tricky eye case, you might consider bringing her in."

  That was where we left it. We had liked one another at once, but our orbits didn't coincide. One late afternoon in June, I was finishing up a string of straightforward small animal cases at the clinic.

  A scarlet macaw that shouted obscenities at me in Spanish needed its wings and beak trimmed. According to its owner, it called every female puta, Spanish for prostitute. The bloody bird nearly impaled me twice, but I managed to avoid losing a finger.

  A half dozen Labrador puppies needed dew claws removed and baby shots.

  A lilac-point Siamese queen needed ear mite treatment. She was highly incensed when I put the oily stuff down her beautiful ears and let loose a string of Siamese howls that made puta seem like an endearment.

  Standard stuff.

  I ushered my last client of the day, Lilly Padmer, out to the waiting room after she picked up her Shih Tsu. "Lula Mae's ulcer should be fine in a week or so," I said. I wanted to wring Mrs. Padmer's neck. She'd fed Lula Mae General Tsao's chicken, a Hunan specialty loaded with hot peppers, because Lula Mae liked it. It's a miracle the little dog had any stomach lining left.

  "Thank you so much," Mr. Padmer simpered. "Come on, Mommy's sweetheart. I've got some lovely liver for you."

  "Mrs. Padmer," I said, "Remember, bland food. Preferably out of a can of dog food and not from the takee-outee. And don't forget her medicine."

  "Oh, yes, of course." Mrs. Padmer smiled vacantly and left.

  "She'll have that dog back on tortilla chips and salsa before the week is out," I said.

  Suddenly the door burst open. One of our older clients, Wilfred Grantham, stood there with his silky terrier, Elly, in his arms. "Maggie, for God's sake, help me, please. Oh, God."

  The terrier's head lolled.

  "Ew!" said our receptionist when she saw the blood. New receptionist. Veryyoung. Mercifully, I have forgotten her name. For obvious reasons she didn't last long. It didn't do to react that way to blood in a vet's office.

  "Give her to me, Will," I said. "What happened?" I ru
shed back to exam one and laid the terrier gently on the table, still wrapped in the bath towel in which the man had carried her.

  "My grandchildren were swinging in the backyard. It's a new swing set and Elly is fascinated by it. Kept running up and barking. I should have put her in the house, but you know how she loves those kids." He dropped his head in his hands.

  "The swing hit her."

  "Right on the temple. Look at her. All that blood! And the eye!"

  I had already begun to check the terrier's vitals. She had a goose egg nearly as large as her small head. Her left eye hung completely out of its socket. I couldn't tell whether the eyeball had been ruptured for all the blood.

  "Maggie?" Eli said as she stuck her head in my door. "Oh, my God."

  "X-rays first to check for skull fracture, then we drain the hematoma." I touched the little dog. She whimpered and tried to turn her head, but didn't try to bite me. "Then we put the eye back in."

  "Can you do that? Will she be blind?" Wilfred ran his hand down his face. "Tina and Tommy are hysterical. My wife's trying to calm them down."

  "You left them at home, didn't you? They're not outside, are they?"

  "No, I left them. I just bundled her up and came right over. Elly's been awake, but groggy."

  "I'll bet she is," Eli said.

  I nodded to Eli. "Call Vickie Anderson. Tell her we've got a bad eye case. Ask her if she can come out here stat."

  "Right "

  "Can't you do it?" Wilfred asked. "You've looked after her since she was bom."

  "I can and I will if I have to, but we have a new vet in town that specializes in opthamology. She's had better and more recent experience that I have. If we can get her quickly, I recommend we do it."

  "Anything. I don't care what it costs."

  A good thing since Vickie-or any specialist for that matterwouldn't come cheap.

  I picked up the little dog and headed to X-ray. Eli met me in the hall. "Vickie's leaving right now. She should be here in half an hour if she drives like you and forty-five minutes if she stays under the speed limit."

  By the time Vickie rolled in twenty-five minutes later-talk about my driving-the little dog was prepped, shaved, and ready for surgery. We hadn't anesthetized in case Vickie needed to test reactions.

  Miraculously, despite the hematoma-the goose egg-the x-ray showed no skull fracture, and there seemed to be minimal bleeding into the skull.

  Eli handled anesthetic while I assisted Vickie.

  She was good. She sewed up the rip in the little dog's eyeball, then stitched the eyelid shut with stitches as fine as any I had ever done.

  "What do you think?" I asked.

  She shrugged. "There was a small tear in the retina, but it wasn't completely detached. Despite all the blood the vitreous was intact. With luck we'll save not only the eye but most of the vision."

  When she told Wilfred that, he burst into tears.

  "Call your family," I said, and handed him the telephone off the reception desk.

  "It looked much worse than it was," Vickie said.

  Eli and I glanced at one another. The injury was every bit as bad as it looked. Either of us could have done the surgery, but we might not have saved the eye, and certainly wouldn't have been able to reattach the retina as well as Vickie did.

  "You'll never know how much this means to me," Wilfred said. "I have to get home and reassure the kids." He took Vickie's hand in both of his. "Thank you so much." He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "Thanks, Maggie. I knew I could count on you."

  The three of us stood in the front door of the clinic and watched him drive away. "Funny," I said, "I was thinking what a boring day this has been."

  Eli said, "You do good work, doctor."

  "Who's here to check on her during the night?"

  "We are," I said. "Eli or I will check on her every hour all night."

  "You mind if I stick around until she's out of the anesthetic?"

  "Love to have you. How about some dinner?"

  "I don't expect you to feed me," she laughed. "Herb's off at some meeting. The boys can feed themselves. I'll pick up something on the way home later when I'm sure little Elly's out of the woods."

  "Nonsense," I said. "I'm on my own tonight too, so it's just Eli and me anyway."

  Over soup and sandwiches at Eli's, she asked Vickie how she got into the vet business in the first place.

  "Mom bred and showed dogs all my life. I was a junior handler when I was eight."

  "What breed?"

  "She started with Borzois-Russian wolfhounds." Vickie shook her head. "They are beautiful but can be dumb as dirt. And the grooming! After she got rid of the Borzois, she fell in love with Irish Terriers."

  "Not stupid, but definitely high maintenance."

  "Tie a dozen Irish terriers on a treadmill and you could generate enough electricity to light New York. After another couple of years she got sick of all the coat-stripping and clipping and went to basset hounds. She stuck with bassets until Dad died and she moved to Florida. The money I planned to use to buy a partnership comes from the dogs." She sighed. "If I can keep Herb's greedy paws off it."

  That was the first time Vickie joined us for dinner and the first time she ever said anything about Herb. I suppose it was the start of what eventually came to be known as Maggie's Militia. I didn't name it, mind you. Through the years other local female vets have come and gone, but the core has remained. We meet once a month at my house for dinner, and we are in some ways closer than family.

  Chapter 26

  In which Maggie and Morgan enjoy their empty nest

  The first Christmas without the children-the empty nest Christmas-was meant to be our first truly laid back, do what we wanted to, grownup Christmas. Sarah was sailing to Catalina with some friends who had a big sailboat, and Nathan was going skiing with the family of a girl named Lisa he'd met at Brown.

  "Sounds serious," Morgan said after he'd talked to Nathan.

  "He's much too young to get serious," I said.

  "He graduates in June, my love, and he's got a job lined up in New York already. He's a grown man."

  "You didn't get married until you were over thirty."

  "I didn't meet you until I was thirty. Remember Romeo and Juliet?"

  I cuddled deeper against his back. This was not difficult to do since we were smack in the middle of our new king-sized bed. "Romeo and Juliet were lousy planners," I said sleepily. Morgan simply grumbled.

  Morgan and I should have felt lonely and abandoned. Not a chance.

  We invited Lanier and her daughter Susan, Vickie Anderson, and several other vet friends to join us for our usual Christmas Eve dinner. Adults only. Morgan bought champagne to go with my trifle. Eli played carols on the spinet in the den and we all sang. We even danced to music that Nathan and Sarah would have found antediluvian. Morgan always was a good dancer-one of the skills that any Southern gentleman must possess.

  We had told the answering service not to disturb either Eli or me for anything less than an apocalypse in the animal kingdom.

  After midnight, and therefore on Christmas morning, Morgan and I were drowsy from making love and I was curled against his chest playing with the increasingly gray curls of hair when the phone rang.

  "Apocalypse?'-'- he whispered sleepily.

  "Damnation." I realized it was our private line and not the line from the answering service. Immediately I saw Nathan and Sarah in the midst of some horrible disaster. Nathan had run into a tree on the downhill slopes in Vermont, or Susan had fallen off the sailboat. I stared at the telephone until Morgan picked it up, listened a moment, then handed it to me.

  "It's Bernadette Coleman."

  "What?" I took it from him.

  "Damn it, Maggie, Bella's about to foal." Bernadette Coleman sounded personally affronted.

  I brushed my hair out of my eyes. "Did I or did I not warn you to wait another month last year to breed Bella just to be on the safe side?"

  "Don'
t you dare rub it in. Can you come? She's a week early. I'm here by myself. She seems to be having a tough time."

  "The water hasn't broken, has it?"

  "No, but she's sweating and biting at herself. She keeps lying down and getting up again. Her teats have waxed and are dripping already. I don't like the look of her, Maggie. It's gone on too long with nothing happening. I know It's Christmas, but I'm scared. We can't afford to lose that foal."

  I hung up the phone, kissed Morgan lightly, and swung out of bed. He swung out of the other side. "What are you doing? Go back to sleep. I'll be home before morning," I said.

  "You have enjoyed wine and champagne, and need I remind you, some pretty good sex. You do not need to be driving alone tonight."

  "You enjoyed some pretty good sex too," I said.

  "But nowhere near as much champagne and wine, and I had coffee."

  I started to remonstrate, then nodded. "Okay. Thanks."

  I napped against Morgan's shoulder on the thirty-minute drive to Bernadette's farm.

  Being born just before January first seriously handicaps a racing thoroughbred. Although he'll be listed as a yearling on New Year's Day, he'll actually be only a couple of weeks old, and far behind the January foals that won't be considered yearlings until next New Year's Day.

  I prayed Bernadette was mistaken, even though it meant a wasted trip in the middle of the night. Foals born even a week or ten days early have a bad rate of survival. A late foal is better.

  Victor and Bernadette Coleman's foaling barn lay in semi-darkness except for the spotlight and heat lamps suspended above Bella's stall. Bernadette met us at the stall door. "Maggie, I'm sorry about this. Oh, hello Morgan. I'm glad you came."

  "You said you're alone? Where's Victor?"

  "Lying in bed with a torn ligament in his ankle. One of the yearlings stepped on him. He'd try to hobble down here if I asked, but he wouldn't be much help." She hugged herself. "Besides, I knocked him out with a pill earlier."

  "Okay, let's check the mare."

  I peered through the door of the stall. Bella, a professional broodmare with a number of stakes-winning horses to her credit, looked miserable. "Doesn't get any easier, does it, old girl?" I whispered to her.