Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God

by Paul Gallico

  “Oh dear,” said Mr. Peddie softly. The blind man was sitting in an armchair facing the door. His head had not fallen forward but somehow remained in the position of listening, the strained, anxious listening for footsteps that had been his attitude when death had come to him.

  Mr. Peddie bent down and looked up into the sightless eyes to see whether there was any sign of life remaining, but MacDhui hurried forward and placed his head on his chest to listen, and then took his wrist to try to find a pulse. The sere arm was still warm, but there was no heart within the body.

  “He’s gone,” MacDhui said. “He cannot have been dead for more than an hour or two.”

  Peddie nodded. “Yes, I know. I—knew.”

  MacDhui suddenly emitted a harsh and horrid laugh that exploded through the silent house. “I saved his eyes!” he brayed. “Where is your God now?”

  He shocked Mr. Angus Peddie into anger. The minister drew himself up to all of the dignity his size and form could muster, his round face flushed, lips quivering, eyes behind the spectacles hot with indignation.

  “Be quiet, Andrew,” he cried, “and be damned to you for your impertinence.”

  “Aye, you can damn, but you cannot answer me. What was the good of it all? What is the use of the work I have done? What kind of God do you worship who permits the dog to live and the man to die?”

  “Is God your servant then, or is He God?” cried the minister, in most un-Peddie-like outrage. “Must He admire your work and flatter your vanity like a father to a child, or is He to go about His business?”

  “Tosh! Is this then your great design that we are supposed to worship and believe in and give thanks for?”

  Ruffled and angry, they faced one another across the unheeding form of the old man, who sat like one in quiet judgment upon their folly and the humanity of it.

  MacDhui shouted, “What has he to be thankful for?” his beard thrust out toward the top of Peddie’s head.

  The minister was the first to recover. He said, looking at the dead man, “He was an old man; he died peacefully; he died with hope in his heart.” He looked up at MacDhui and said, with such contrition in his mild eyes that MacDhui was similarly moved, “I should not have lost my temper, Andrew, I am sorry.”

  MacDhui said, “Well, nor am I proud of shouting at you over this poor fellow. I am sorry I was impertinent to you—”

  “Oh, you weren’t to ME,” Peddie said. “That wasn’t what I meant. It has unstrung us both, except I knew as we climbed the steps that it would be so.” With the greatest gentleness, he closed the eyes of the blind man.

  He paused momentarily in the middle of this act as he was struck by a thought that seemed unrelated at the time and which yet he knew somehow was not. He said, “Mary Ruadh was in your waiting room this morning. She told me her cat was ill. Whatever became of it?”

  To MacDhui, the morning’s scene sprang to life again with painfully vivid clarity. He saw and heard again the hurt and moaning dog upon the table, with Willie Bannock sponging its tongue and muzzle, and his daughter standing outside the door with the dying cat in her arms. For, he told himself again, it had been dying and no doubt of that, and mentally his tongue formed the exact long medical term for the nature of its illness. No one knew whether it was communicable or not, and there had been Anne, his wife. He smelled again the sweetish scent of the chloroform rag as Willie Bannock had carried out his orders and destroyed the animal, and in his ears once more was the helpless drumming of Mary Ruadh’s fists upon the panels of the door and her fearful cries. He wished he could get the sound of the thrumming of those tiny hands upon the door from out his ears.

  He replied, “I had the animal put away. I suspected a meningeal infection. Better safe than sorry. Besides, I was attending the dog and couldn’t take the time. I have no doubt the beast was better off dead.”

  A frown clouded the serene face of Mr. Peddie, and he pulled at his lower lip with his fingers, a trick he had when he was greatly worried. “Oh dear,” he said. “Oh dear!” For he seemed to be feeling into the future again; sometimes he wondered whether he was not in some manner related to the Norms the way occasionally for him the carpet of tragedy seemed to unroll, long before those came along who were to tread it. The cat was dead then, and the child would be desolate and there would be far-reaching consequences.

  “Oh dear me,” he said again, and, still fingering his lip, walked out of the room and down the stairs, with Andrew MacDhui following him, uncomprehending.

  9

  The procession led by Jamie Braid, the sergeant piper’s son, wound its way through the town by way of Rob Roy’s Square and across the quay northward, skirting the shore where, guided by Wolf Cub Geordie McNabb, it crossed the river by the old saddleback bridge and then turned westward into the mouth of Glen Ardrath, passing on the way the gypsy encampment in the valley, with its many caravans whisping smoke out of crooked pipe chimneys.

  Jamie was a thin boy and so tall for his age of eleven that he seemed to be proceeding on stilts, though they were actually the long shanks of his legs striving to reach into his body. His face, too, was thin so that when he puffed out his cheeks to inflate the tartaned bag beneath his arm he appeared to have a crab apple stored in each one, while his eyes threatened to bulge from their sockets. But he had a fine head of thick, wavy brown hair and his Glengarry was cocked bravely upon it at the angle proper to his father’s late regiment. There were streamers attached to it and streamers and ribbons, too, from his pipes, and his kilts rose and fell as he walked the slow piper’s tread he had learned from his father.

  Behind him, bearing the sacred pennant of their Wolf Cub troop, marched Geordie McNabb with several of his fellows in uniform, lending the military touch. Next came the hearse itself, drawn by four of the younger girls of the first class of the Inveranoch elementary school, hitched tandem fashion in pairs. This was a fine bit of improvisation on the part of Hughie Stirling in the brief time between luncheon and the appointed hour for the cortege to form. Having to compromise between a caisson and a cart, the casket containing the mortal remains of Thomasina reposed on the body of an old toy express wagon he had routed out of one of the potting sheds.

  The casket itself was a large wicker comfit case lined with satin that Hughie had seen in his mind’s eye as left over from Christmas and stored away against the day when it might be turned into a sewing basket or something else useful. The children had lined it with young heather to make a bed and upon it had laid Thomasina curled into a lifelike position as though merely sleeping, and over all, as a covering, and in lieu of the flag with which the military draped its coffins, a length of the Stirling tartan had been flung.

  Directly behind the casket marched Mary Ruadh in her weeds, on the arm of Hughie Stirling, who had seized upon the occasion—and in the face of certain retribution to follow—to make of himself the glittering star of the production.

  Thus he had filched his formal attire from the chest where it reposed in moth balls waiting to be called forth reverently by The Games, or a visit from someone royal. There was genuine Mechlin lace at his sleeves and his jabot was a thing of frothy splendor against the short-cut black velvet jacket with the silver buttons bearing the crest of the Stirlings. He wore dirk and sporran and white gloves; his bonnet was set on the back of his crisp, curly hair and he carried an authorized prayer and psalm book. Rarely had such a handsome lad been put together, or one who lent such tone to a funeral.

  Mary Ruadh was draped in Mrs. McKenzie’s best black wool shawl, which, being too long for her, was wound first around her shoulders and then her waist, with a curiously oriental effect.

  Hughie, on his successful raid through the grownups’ quarters of the manor, had unearthed a purple veil of his mother’s, or more likely his grandmother’s, since it was the kind ladies used to wear when they went motoring in the open juggernauts of the twenties, and this was now draped about Mary Ruadh’s head in the manner of a summer thundercloud through which gleamed
the red-gold of her hair, like the sunshine attempting to break through the storm. The effect was both startling and striking, if not exactly funereal.

  And finally, trailing behind the principals and dignitaries, followed those adherents of the Stirling coterie, members of the school, plus a scattering of summer-visitor children raised by word of mouth and bush telegraph, who came in what they had, or thought appropriate to the burial ceremony of the best cat in Inveranoch, and as the imposing cortege moved onward, it attracted quite a few more to walk in its wake, so that it numbered a good twenty by the time it burst from the northern boundaries of the town and headed for the glade in the glen that Geordie McNabb had suggested as the burial ground.

  The town itself took the masquerade in its stride and as indicative of the changing times when youth no longer walked solemnly in the steps of its forefathers as well as a to-be-endured manifestation of that summertime madness which descended upon Inveranoch with the influx of holiday visitors. A nearsighted old gentleman standing by the side of the road removed his ancient, flat-topped, curl-brimmed bowler as the cortege went by, several people smiled indulgently, and that was about all the stir created by the affair.

  But if this was but innocent children’s fancy and play to the onlookers and a delightful afternoon’s make-believe for the participants, there was one to whom it was not, and who in a small way was trailing the remnants of the complete innocence of childhood out behind her as she proceeded on the arm of the exquisitely beautiful Hughie Stirling. This was Mary Ruadh MacDhui, for after all it was not only her cat but her alter ego that lay in the silk- and heather-lined casket beneath the Stirling tartan, and which was now on its way to being buried forever.

  The place of interment had been chosen by Geordie McNabb, who remembered it from the visit he had paid to the Red Witch with his injured frog, and approved by Hughie Stirling. The proximity to the strange weaver of Glen Ardrath known as Daft Lori held no more terrors for Geordie, for he had looked upon her, but it did add a fillip of further adventure for the others.

  Thus the little Wolf Cub guided the procession to that faery circle in the woods, the glade formed by beach and ash and presided over by an enormous graybeard of the forest, an ancient oak beneath which surely Rob Roy, the outlaw, wrapped in his cloak of invisibility from the King’s men, had slept on many a summer night.

  It lay some thirty yards or so off the main path that climbed up into the glen, but away from the burn, whose rushing descent made cool music to background the doleful droning of the pipes. A shaft of the late-afternoon sun like theatrical illumination, penetrating the glade, cast its spotlight upon the colorful pageant of the children.

  It splintered on the silver buttons of Hughie Stirling’s jacket and the silver chain of his sporran, and a darting arrow of reflected light caught in the eyes of Daft Lori almost a quarter of a mile away, higher up in the darker, deeper woods above, where she roamed in quest of mushrooms and varieties of herbs. She wore a skirt and shawl of green wool that she had woven herself and her red hair was bound up in a green cloth. Over her arm she carried a light basket in which reposed a small knife and trowel.

  She was as sensitive, alarmed, and wary as a young deer at this unusual invasion of what had come to be regarded as her territory. Not even picnickers came to this part of the glen. The wind now brought the cry of the pipes to her. She glided forward cautiously, moving from tree trunk to tree trunk, ever closer until she paused behind the smooth bole of a copper beech clinging to the hillside a hundred yards or so from the glade, into which she now had an almost unobstructed view.

  She thought at first it was a faery rout, a visit from the Little People of another age, for she believed in them, and in gnomes and pixies, nymphs and brownies, elves and hamadryads, and angels too, and frequently communed with them. She caught flashes of the gay colors, the lace, velvets and tartans, the ribbons and streamers; the pipe music smote her with melancholy and sadness and, because of the distance, she did not at first recognize the intruders as children.

  But later it became plain to her, and though she could not hear their voices clearly or immediately distinguish what was toward, or fathom the meaning of the curious ritual they seemed to be performing, she remained quietly concealed in her vantage point until at last the meaning of it all was revealed.

  In the Scottish thoroughness of his organization, Hughie Stirling had even thought to provide a gravedigger, one of the young sons of the gardener at the manor, who had marched, spade over shoulder, in the procession and proudly too, and now his moment of importance had come, as Hughie intoned solemnly, “Gravedigger—do thy job.”

  The lad made the earth fly in the glade and soon had prepared a creditable shallow pit into which the wicker basket was lowered as the principals and mourners stood about the graveside enjoying themselves thoroughly. Mary Ruadh watched the proceedings silently, with round, serious eyes, and no one could tell what she was thinking.

  Hughie Stirling, somewhat out of his depth with ritual, scattered some earth over the top of the basket, saying, “Return unto the ground from which you wast ta—I mean thou wast taken, for dust thou art and unto dust returneth, amen,” and then remarked, “I think we ought to sing something—”

  No one had thought to bring a hymnbook; none of them was strong on doxology. One of the girls struck up a tentative quaver, appropriately nasal, but was not followed and subsided in embarrassment. It was bullet-headed Geordie McNabb who came to the rescue, his years as yet unencumbered by theology or ritual, and having been asked for a song, launched into the “Bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond,” in which they all joined with the fine fervor of familiarity. The strains of it drifted up the glen and reached the ears of the Red Witch of Glen Ardrath herself, resembling a hamadryad, watching from behind her tree.

  When the last chorus had been rendered, Hughie cleared his throat preparatory to delivering the valedictory he had been composing in his head during the march and wherein he felt more at home.

  He said: “Brethren, friends, and fellow mourners at the graveside. We have come here to bury Thomasina and to praise her. Thomasina was the beloved cat of our own grieving Mary Ruadh MacDhui here, who I am sure you all know. Anyway, here she is. Thomasina was a good cat. She was one of the best cats in Inveranoch. I suppose it would not be too much to say that she was one of the best cats in all Argyllshire. Those of us who knew her well were proud to be her friend and now that she has been taken from our midst her place cannot be filled and we all feel for her sorrowing mother.”

  Several of the visitors were so overcome by this eloquence that they burst into applause at this point to be quelled by a stern, “Not yet, you cutts.” When they had subsided he continued.

  “Thomasina never did anything wrong such as catching birds or biting or scratching anyone. If she caught a mouse in the cellar she would bring it to Mary Ruadh to keep, instead of eating it herself. She was never cross or bad-tempered. She was also very clean and was always washing herself. She liked Mary Ruadh best of all, but she would also let other children pick her up and play with her, which most cats, as you know, will not do. She could purr louder than any cat I ever heard and the expression on her face was very becoming to her. She had a few faults, but I will not mention those here. Her mortal remains now lie at our feet, but her soul has already ascended straight to heaven, where it will sit at The Right Hand and will wait there until Mary Ruadh’s soul comes to join hers when they will be together again, forever and ever, amen!”

  The amen having given the direct clue that he was finished, all of the children now responded to the magnificence of this speech with prolonged rounds of applause that awakened the echoes until the pattering appeared to bounce from side to side of the rocky glen. Hughie Stirling bowed modestly and said, “We’ll fill in the grave now, but first, Mary Ruadh, you ought to attempt to throw yourself weeping across the casket like the bereaved always do.”

  Mary Ruadh said succinctly, “I don’t want to. I want to go home.
”

  It had been a long day and tremendous things had happened to her, how tremendous she was not yet even aware. The procession and the funeral had been exciting and diverting; she had enjoyed being the center of attention, but now she wished to be at home, where her sense of loss could be more sharply identified than here. The connection between her and the object in the basket was no longer clear, since she could not see it, the glade was foreign and the sun was beginning to sink. Tea time was coming on, tea in the warm, friendly surroundings with Mrs. McKenzie about, her dolls on their chairs and Thomasina opposite her with napkin tied about her neck and the little bit of pink tongue showing between her lips as it always did when there were goodies to be shared. The picture in her mind was so vivid that it startled her momentarily into tears that had not yet flowed since the burial had begun. She knew in her heart that Thomasina had gone away, or had been “put away” and that she would never see her again, but she could not do her mourning here and in front of them all. It was at home she had her rendezvous with misery.

  It had all been rather much for one small girl to grow so old in the brief span between morning and afternoon . . .

  Truth to tell, Hughie Stirling was wanting his tea too, and in a shed back behind the manor there was a cache of food, the funeral feast or draidgie he had organized, and it was getting on. Too, he had noted the glint of tears again in the eyes of Mary Ruadh and so he remarked reasonably, “All right. You don’t have to. Sometimes the bereaved bears her sorrow nobly and silently without unseemly show of emotion. Fill in the grave, Gravedigger.”