All God's Creatures Read online

  Praise for Carolyn McSparren

  'All God's Creatures is one of the most endearing and entertaining stories I've read in years. Carolyn McSparren has created a world rich with animals and the people who love them. It's about friendship and family-and the animals-who, without intention, remind us what unconditional love is all about."

  -Sharon Sala

  author of MISSING, November 2004, Mira Books

  'A great read, even more so for horselovers!"

  -Vickie Presley, Amazon.com

  "Carolyn McSparren delivers all the ingredients for good reading: unique story elements, tantalizing suspense, an engaging subplot and a myriad of well-written characters."

  -Cindy Whitesel, Romantic Times

  "Carolyn McSparren provides the audience with a powerful tale that will evoke feelings from the hard core reader yet does it through humor rarely seen in a sub-genre novel."

  -Harriet Klausner

  "Impressive and original! I can't resist giving a five star review to the talented Carolyn McSparren."

  -Brenda Mott, Amazon. com

  "Carolyn McSparren treats us to a compelling pageturner guaranteed to please the discerning palate."

  -Cindy Whitesel, Romantic Times

  Dedicated to the veterinarians who treat the animals we love, and to the animals that so enrich our lives.

  All God's

  Creatures

  Carolyn McSparren

  Smyrna, Georgia

  BelleBooks, Inc. ISBN 0-9673035-8-3 All God's Creatures This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors' imaginations or are used ficticiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by BelleBooks, Inc. Printed and bound in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by: BelleBooks, Inc. • P.O. Box 67 • Smyrna, GA 30081 We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers. You can contact us at the address above or at [email protected] Visit our website- www.BelleBooks.com First Edition November 2004

  10987654321 Cover art: Monica Van de Meer Cover design: Martha Shields

  Chapter 1

  In which Maggie disappoints her mother and chooses a new name

  The day I told my mother I intended to become a veterinarian was the first time I disappointed her by choice. It would not be the last.

  The kicker came when I changed my name. Becoming Maggie when I'd spent my entire life as Margaret might not seem like much, but to my mother it was the equivalent of burning my bra and going off to live in an Ashram.

  For eighteen years I had attempted to live up to her vision for me, although I knew it was an impossible fit. She held desperately to the forlorn hope that one day I would blossom into a Southern belle with streaky blonde hair. I was supposed to marry a rich planter's son and present her with half a dozen blonde grandchildren. Mother dreamed big.

  I never fully understood how she planned to transmogrify all five feet ten and a hundred and thirty pounds of Margaret Evans into a petite size six. The only time I let her bleach my hair-normally the color of the water afteryou've mopped the kitchen floor-it had come out in tiger stripes-white on the ends, beige in the middle and teint du rat at the scalp.

  Mother's given name was Minnatrey-can't get much more Southern than that. She longed to be a member of polite society. In Memphis, Tennessee, where I grew up, that required either a family lineage traceable to General Andy Jackson and his contemporaries, or a sizeable fortune.

  The Evans family had neither. We weren't rich. We were solidly upper middle-class. Daddy was a Certified Public Accountant and made a good living, but nothing that could be considered wealth. Mother stayed home or worked on charities. The family hadn't inherited money either.

  Mother spent a bundle on genealogy charts. She longed to be eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution. Turns out her family fought for the British in 1776.

  She would have been happy to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Unfortunately, her family fought for the Yankees in what is known in the south as The War of Northern Aggression.

  Daddy's family had even less cachet. His great-something grandfather and his great-something uncle snuck into the country from Scotland by way of Canada. They preferred the dangers of the frontier to starving while the Duke of Cumberland hunted them down after the battle of Culloden. Unfortunately for Mother's hopes, they took up stealing and selling horses on the Natchez Trace. They were both eventually hanged. My cheekbones and my nose come straight from one of the Cherokee maidens they married along the way.

  Mother's only hope was that I'd marry somebody whose family would shoehorn me into the Junior League, and give her an entry into society as a by-product.

  I tried to become a Southern belle, but I was too brainy, too gawky, and much too out-spoken. And I never learned to lie. Successful Southern belles in the 1960s sucked in duplicity with their mother's milk.

  Mother had to be content with running the Altar Guild and the Women of the Church at St. Cecilia's Episcopal Church. Both meetings rotated throughout the year from house to house. The week before Mother's turn, we polished every bit of silver we possessed, ironed tablecloths and linen napkins, and scrubbed until we both had housemaid's knee and permanent bum scars on our fingers.

  And boy, did we fix food. I have made a million of those nasty little ham horns wrapped around cream cheese. I can still aim and fire a pastry gun of filling into a deviled egg straighter and faster than Wyatt Earp ever shot his .45.

  Mother's crowning achievement came when I was a sophomore at Southwestern College in Memphis. She managed to persuade her music club to sponsor a princess at Cotton Carnival. Me. They had never sponsored a princess before. I'm not certain they ever did again.

  Cotton Carnival had originally been invented to rival New Orleans Mardi Gras and advertise cotton. Memphians had always called it simply "Carnival."

  I don't remember precisely when it lost its association with cotton entirely and became simply "Carnival." For a while it dwindled into a tame and 'inclusive' little parry. Lately, it's been enjoying a resurgence, but with less emphasis on old money and more on just money.

  In the early sixties, however, stuffy, staid Memphis turned rowdy and bawdy for one week in May each year because of Cotton Carnival.

  Memphis did not allow liquor by the drink in those days. Every time the city fathers suggested regular bars would be good for tourism, the bootleggers and the teetotal preachers joined forces to defeat the proposal. Unless you were a member of one of the country clubs that were exempt from the statute, you brought your Jack Daniels to parties in a brown paper bag and consumed the whole thing during the evening. Not worth carrying home a quarter of a bottle, so most people drank one hell of a lot more than they would have if they'd been buying whiskey sours or margaritas.

  During Carnival, however, the secret societies (that were not secret at all), all took'club rooms' in The Peabody and other fancy hotels, set up twenty-four-hour-a-day bars for their members, and partied down for almost an entire week-Tuesday through Saturday. The married women who were crowned queens of Sphinx or Memphi or chosen as duchesses spent fortunes on their costumes and their parties. I can remember they all had very tall stand-up collars like Dracula's, except as he would have been interpreted by Liberace. I doubt there was a sequin, a paillette or a rhinestone to be had this side of St. Louis for months before the first day of Carnival.

  The
children of Memphis society were co-opted to act as pages and flower girls for the court. The little girls probably loved the dress-up.

  The boys were dressed in elaborate cotton velvet Lord Fauntleroy suits. Since most of them were accustomed either to jeans or Little League outfits, I don't even want to consider the coercion it took to cram a bunch of seven-year-old over-bred tow-headed thugs into short pants and lace. The organizers had learned years earlier that the fewer pockets were available to be filled with live toads and spitballs, the better for everyone concerned.

  Sometime during the roaring twenties, the husbands of the duchesses and secret society queens had gotten sick of being ignored for that week, so they invented their own society-the Boll Weevils. They rushed around Memphis in black masks with boll weevil snouts hoorawing and courting alcohol poisoning.

  The only real fun I ever found in Carnival was in the separate (but equal, right?) Cotton Makers Jubilee held by Memphis's African American social elite. Things were still very much segregated in Memphis and the mid-south at that time, although the cracks were visible in the white monolith. The Jubilee took place down on Beale Street. They had the best jazz, the best blues, the best dancing, and far and away the most awesome parades.

  The merry-makers involved in the jubilee were also polite to white interlopers from Carnival who found their way to the clubs where the jazz greats were playing. I doubt the white secret societies would have been so welcoming to them.

  Did I want to be a Cotton Carnival princess? Hardly. My parents had struggled to send me to a private school with most of the girls who were princesses of old, established country clubs, that had been sending princesses to Carnival for donkey's years.

  I knew most of the boys-those scions of wealth and privilege Mother wanted me to court, but none of them had ever asked me for a date. They thought I was weird, while I thought they were stupid and shallow.

  Ditto the girls. But rich and beautiful. Who doesn't envy rich and beautiful when you're eighteen?

  Anyway, the one stipulation about the costumes the court had to wear was that they all had to be made of cotton. Not drip dry, not wrinkle free-your basic iron-it-and-starch-it-every-whipstitch cotton.

  I'm sure Daddy couldn't easily afford either the day and evening costumes I had to wear as a member of the court, nor the even fancier dress I was supposed to wear to "my party," the ball given by my sponsoring club for the entire Carnival Court. He never complained, bless him.

  The other sticking point was that every princess and lady-in-waiting had to be accompanied either by a prince charming or a lord-in-waiting to dance attendance on her. Possibly other Carnival ladies got to pick their own boyfriends. My escort, however, was chosen for me.

  He was one of those scions, so Mother tossed me at him the way you might toss a bone to a hungry Rottweiler.

  He was not a happy choice. First of all, he stood only an inch taller than I do, so when I wore pumps with heels, I towered over him. Second, poor Giles had been born with no discernible chin and had little piggy eyes set much too close together.

  Since he had gone away to college and was four years older than I was, I had never actually met him before. We agreed to meet at the old Fortune's Jungle Garden on Poplar to get to know one another. I intended to make the best of it, I really did.

  Within five minutes, I discovered that his political and religious beliefs had been handed down intact from Attila the Hun. Within five minutes of meeting me, he informed me that women were much happier in a subservient relationship to a strong man, and that held true for the "colored folks" as well. Both civil and women's rights were nothing more than a minor impediment to the forward march of history's dominant, preferably Southern, white male.

  If not for Mother, I would have walked away and never looked back. But I was still being a good girl. I did tell him he was a Neanderthal idiot. We hated each other from that moment on.

  One of the few good things about being a Carnival Princess was that for the week I was lent a brand-new yellow Cadillac convertible to drive with a sign across the back that read "Cotton Carnival Princess." The bad thing was that I couldn't remove the sign.

  Tuesday afternoon Giles, the Prince of Darkness, and I drove together all the way down to the tip of President's Island on the Mississippi River. He hated having me drive. That was a man's prerogative.

  I parked the convertible, and we clambered aboard the gigantic barge that had been fitted up with lights and fireworks for the trip up river to the foot of Beale Street. Once we landed, the Carnival King, an older married man wearing more gold braid than a Paraguayan dictator, declared Carnival open. Fireworks, music, party down.

  Then came the first of several parades at which the court got to ride in open wagons called'tally-hos' We would wave and throw candy to the peasants who lined the streets. I was about as happy riding the tallyho as I would have been on a tumbrel in the French Revolution.

  After opening night on the float, the prince and I arrived at the staging areas for hospital visits and parades in separate automobiles. It says a good deal for Memphis that I thought nothing of driving home alone at two in the morning in an open convertible with a sign the size of Arkansas across its trunk.

  My special Princess party was to be held Thursday night at the Nineteenth Century Club, an elegant old mansion on Union Avenue in the Garden District. Mother wasn't a member, but she had a dear friend who allowed us to use her membership.

  There was no place to dress at the club, so I dutifully decked my self out in my ball gown-a white cotton eyelet affair with a Scarlet O'Hara hoop and four crinolines under it-at home. Mother had made me practice sitting down in the hoop. If I didn't smash it flat at the optimum moment it would flip up in front and bare my underwear to the waist.

  No matter how warm and sunny May had been to that point, it always rained during Carnival. The night of my party rain was sluicing down in buckets, so Daddy put the top up on the convertible for me. Mother had left hours before to dither about the food and flowers. She expected The Son of Dracula to pick me up in a limousine with champagne and roses. Daddy and I let her think that.

  Instead, I squeezed myself into my whalebone corselet, ducked under my crinolines and hoop, fidgeted while Daddy fastened all the buttons down the back of the dress, shoe-homed myself into my convertible and drove north down Cleveland Avenue from our house in the Garden District.

  The area of Cleveland close to Union was lined with seedy apartments that rented by the week. I generally drove through that area ten miles faster than the speed limit, but that night I could barely see to navigate. I hugged the right-hand side of the road even though the water was deeper there. The car lights reflected against the curb to provide me an idea as to where I was driving.

  If I hadn't been close to the curb I'd never have seen the movement. I have no idea why I didn't assume it was a raccoon trying to cross the street. All I saw was something black and shiny scrabbling in the light my headlights cast.

  The gutter was running with water. Whatever the thing was, it was being swept closer to the storm drain. A rat? No, too dark a lump. And two things, not one.

  I slammed on my brakes, rocked up crinolines and hoops above my knees, and jumped out practically into the path of an eighteen wheeler. God knows what he thought I was, but I'll bet he went home sober that night.

  I didn't consider the rain. I had to keep those things from disappearing down the storm drain.

  One was fighting hard to stay afloat. The other was just floating.

  I reached down, grabbed one, clutched it to my bosom, and snatched the other just before it slipped out of sight. The one against my chest lay inert.

  The one in my hand, however, opened its little pink mouth and gave a pitiful imitation of a howl.

  Puppies.

  I shook the inert one. No response. Dead? Or unconscious from water and cold? I couldn't tell. The other pup was obviously still alive and fighting to stay that way. He scrabbled against my hand with sharp
little claws.

  "Oh, no you don't," I said. I clutched both pups with one hand, smashed my hoop flat with the other, dove into my car and slammed the door barely in time to avoid a wall of water thrown up by the wheels of another eighteen wheeler.

  As his lights swept across my rear view mirror, I caught a glimpse of my face. God in heaven!

  My beauty-shop-arranged French twist was hanging down around my face, and I could barely see for the water running off my eyebrows into my eyes.

  My fancy satin pumps squished against the floorboards as I felt for the pedals.

  I checked my skirt. The bottom eight inches of my ruffles felt sodden, although the crinolines underneath had somehow stayed dry.

  "I'm dead," I said aloud. For one frantic moment I actually considered heading west across the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and driving across Arkansas until I ran out of gas. I must have been crazy. How could I show up at my party soaking wet? Mother would be mortified.

  I would be toast.

  The dashboard clock said I had an hour before I was supposed to be presented to the court. Despite the warmish weather outside, I turned the heater on full blast and aimed it straight at my shoes and skirt.

  At least one of the pups seemed to love the warmth. He snuggled into my lap.

  I couldn't run away from my responsibility, either to the pups or to my mother. Those little critters needed professional help. Fast. I didn't dare take them to the party. I'd never be allowed to leave once I actually showed up.

  I'd never had a pet. Mother thought dogs were dirty and stank up the house, and my father was so allergic to cats that one whiff could send him into anaphylactic shock and twenty-four hours in the emergency room.

  That meant I had no idea where to find a veterinary clinic.

  I turned right onto Union Avenue and wracked my memory. I vaguely remembered the sign for a veterinarian's office east of the Helen Shop where I'd bought my dress. If I found it quickly, I could dump my charges and race to the club in time for Mother to make repairs before the court showed up for my presentation.