All God's Creatures Read online

  I could see it now. Your Majesties, may I present Princess Drowned Rat?'

  I groaned. Mother would never be able to hold up her head in society again. One mad impulse on my part and the Evans family would be social pariahs forever.

  But then again, Mother wouldn't die. If I didn't get this shivering little pup some help quickly, it would.

  Bingo. I saw the sign. Aveterinary clinic. As I looked, the lights that shown through the glass front door flicked off. I peeled into the parking lot, grabbed both pups and sprinted for the door just as someone inside started to turn the key.__

  "No! Stop! Please open!"

  He smiled, but shook his head.

  "Look!" I held up the pups. "Help me."

  He opened the door and stared at me. "Young lady," he said, "Do you generally dress that way?"

  He took both pups. "Brother and sister, I'd say. No more than three weeks old." He held his finger against the bundle that had not moved. "Drowned, I suspect. Where did you find them?"

  I poured out the entire story.

  "Some bastard probably tossed them out of a car. You see any others?"

  "God no. You mean I missed some?"

  "No way to tell. Doesn't matter now." The pup wriggled and nibbled at his finger.

  "He's a fighter." I pointed to the bundle that was already beginning to fluff in the warm, dry air. "I thought he deserved a chance."

  "So he does. Let's see if we can save him."

  I glanced at the clock over his head. "Oh, Lord, I have to leave. My mother will kill me."

  "He's your pup, miss. I may need your help."

  I have to use your telephone," I said.

  "Help yourself. Meanwhile I'll stick this young man in the oven while I get some things ready."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Don't worry. I won't broil him."

  When I finally reached her, Mother was frantic.

  "I'll be there within half an hour," I said. "Find me some towels and dig out your makeup and comb. I'm going to need some work."

  "Cotton Carnival party?" The doctor peered over his bifocals at me.

  I nodded and hung up on my mother's hysterics.

  "To whom do I send the bill for all this? Or shall I pass him along to the Dog Pound for euthanasia?"

  "Euthanasia? I just saved his life. Nobody's going to kill this pup, dammit! Are you crazy?" I'd never spoken to my elders that way in my life.

  "Ah, then I shall keep him for you. You can pick him up tomorrow morning."

  "About the bill..."

  "We'll make some arrangement." He pulled the squirming puppy from the small oven and handed him to me. "Now, first we need to get some fluids into him."

  "He's nearly drowned. Fluid is the last thing he needs."

  "At what point in youryoung life did you become a veterinarian? Intravenous fluids. You will have to hold him very still. Hard enough to insert a needle into a Great Dane. Finding a vein in a scrap of fur this size requires a genius." He stared at me over his glasses again. "Which, fortunately for you, I am."

  So far as I could tell, he was serious. As I came to learn, he was also correct.

  He inserted a needle into the pup's left front leg and attached it to a small plastic bag filled with liquid. "Here, hold this bag," he said. "Above the table, blast it, not down by your side. Functions by gravity."

  "Yes sir."

  He busied himself at the other side of the examining room. His back was to me, but I heard water running, and a moment later, he came back holding a doll bottle. "Let us pray he'll suckle. If I have to shoot the formula down his throat by syringe, he might aspirate milk into his lungs. He doesn't need pneumonia."

  He took the now empty bag from me and handed me the bottle. I stared at it until he said, "Young lady, don't you have bat brains? Stick it in his mouth."

  Old coot. But I did as I was told, and miraculously, the baby began to suckle. Its tiny little black paws moved in and out rhythmically against the towel on my lap. I laughed. "Look at that. Go to it, little bear."

  "He'll need to be bottle fed every four hours around the clock."

  "Will he live?"

  "I will give him a shot of antibiotics as a prophylactic." He glanced up. "The word merely means protection."

  "I realize that. I asked if he'd live."

  "That depends on his will to fight, his God, and you." He looked at me over his glasses again. "Who might you be when you're not royalty?" He took the pup from me and began to rub his tummy, which now bulged with milk.

  I reached into the beaded evening bag hanging from my wrist and brought out an engraved visiting card. It was a little damp. I can't believe I actually ran through dozens of the things in high school and college. I stuck it out to him. He ignored it and continued rubbing. "What are you doing now?" I asked.

  "His mother is not available to stimulate his bowels and bladder. I am in a sense in loco parentis."

  "oh."

  "Read me what your card says."

  I did.

  "Hum. Margaret Parker Evans." He wiped the baby's belly and spoke to it. "Good. You'll do, young man."

  I wrote down my address and telephone number on the back of the card.

  "Leave it on the desk," he said, "and take back your animal while I shoot him full of anti-germ juice. No doubt he's full of worms, but they'll have to enjoy his happy home until he's stronger."

  I nestled the now fuzzy baby into his towels, and watched the doctor shoot him with antibiotics.

  "Do you intend to raise this pup?" he asked.

  I took a deep breath. If I said the words, I could never take them back. "Yes sir."

  "Good. When you come to pick him up tomorrow morning, I will set you up with formula, and a schedule for shots and worming."

  "Who'll feed him in the meantime?"

  "Not your concern so long as he is under my care. As a matter of fact, a young man who is waiting to leave for medical school comes in at ten tonight and stays until eight. He handles such chores."

  "Oh." Dollar signs flashed across my brain. The bills for this Cotton Carnival fiasco must have been horrendous. I couldn't ask Daddy to pay a fortune for a foundling, and I definitely didn't have any money. "Uh-can I pay your bill in installments?"

  "I assumed from your garb and your automobile that you are rich."

  "I'm poor. Extremely poor. Look, I'll work my tail off for you until the bill is paid if you'll let me. I'm free after two in the afternoon four days a week. I'll scrub cages, mop floors-whateveryou need. I couldn't do night duty. My mother wouldn't let me."

  "We will discuss it tomorrow morning if he's still alive."

  "He will be. Oh, Lord, my mother's going to kill me." I ran out without another word.

  I checked the sign beside the front door as I ran out. "Hubert Parmenter, D. V. M." The man had asked for my name, but never bothered to give me his. He was rude and arrogant. I didn't care. I was crazy about him. I didn't stop to think why. Maybe it was that heavenly perfume of alcohol and wet dog. I'd never smelled it before, but I knew I preferred it to Chanel No. 5.

  Maybe because he didn't know anything about me, but simply accepted me and let me help him. Maybe it was the way he looked at me. He didn't see a soggy, would-be debutante, but an assistant. A stupid assistant, grant you, but an assistant nonetheless. Nobody had ever required anything like that of me.

  There are defining moments in every life. Mostly, we don't recognize them, but that night, I knew my life had changed forever. That dingy, antiseptic clinic felt more like home than my bedroom. My life clicked into place like a puzzle when the missing piece finally shows up. I wanted to spend my life smelling that wet fur, holding that little creature whose heart beat so fiercely against mine.

  I wanted to be Dr. Parmenter.

  What I didn't want was to go to my dad-dratted parry, but of course I went.

  I slipped into the back door of the Nineteenth Century Club and ran straight into my mother in the kitchen.

 
"Margaret, where have you been?" she wailed. Then she took a good look at me. "Did you have an accident? Oh, Lord, you didn't hurt that car, did you?"

  "No, mother, the car is fine. I had to rescue a puppy."

  Of course I should have kept my mouth shut. I should have run the car into a telephone pole or off the Mississippi River Bridge. I should have told her I'd been kidnapped by Gypsies. Anything but the truth.

  "You what?" For a moment she stared at me blankly. Then she began to simmer. She was swelling toward a full-fledged hissy fit. "I do not believe this. The most important night of my life and you ruin everything! Just the way you always do. Oh, God, I don't know why I try. What will people think? You look like something the cat dragged in. When I think of what that dress cost!"

  The Southern hissy fit takes a while to lift off. Mother was fast approaching a rolling boil.

  "Mother, we don't have time. You have to fix me up quick."

  It was the only thing that could have saved me. Nobody ever said my mother wasn't good in a real crisis. In her estimation, this was right up there with Armageddon.

  She went to work. Under her breath and around the hairpins she used to re-pin my hair, she kept up a running commentary. "You do not have the brains God gave a goose. You have never listened to me or your father. just wait'til he hears about this! All that money down the drain. We'll be the laughing stock of Memphis. It's no wonder you can't get a date. Nobody in my family was ever crazy."

  She started scrubbing the mud off the bodice of my dress. "You've never appreciated one thing we do for you. We scrimp and save and what do you do? Pick up some drowned cur. There. That'll have to do." She looked up at me. "You've never loved me. You did this on purpose just to ruin things."

  That's when the maitre d' announced the arrival of the court.

  Actually, I doubt that anybody noticed there was anything wrong with the way I looked. The entire court was wet from running to and from the buses and cars in which they were traveling from party to party. They'd already been to three or four other parties, so they were fairly soggy. And fairly drunk.

  My prince and I welcomed the court and were presented in turn. I whispered to my mother on my way to the dance floor, "Don't worry. They wouldn't notice how I looked if I were stark naked."

  She glared.

  The court stayed for one full set played by the combo Mother had hired before they dashed off to their buses and limos for the next party.

  I was expected to stay for the whole evening and dance with every male there, most of whom were my fathers age. Mother kept thrusting me toward my prince.

  I was so chastened I only insulted him once. Mostly we danced in stony silence, while I stared over the top of his balding head and prayed to be allowed to go home.

  When I finally got to bed, I lay awake until dawn wondering about my pup. I cut my eight o'clock class and drove straight to the clinic.

  Dr. Parmenter had been at the clinic late the previous night, so he'd hardly be there early this morning. But there he was. As I walked in the front door, he scowled at me. "Well, Miss Maggie, you here to pick up your dog?"

  I started to give him my correct name. A great many Southern belles bear the last names of illustrious ancestors as first names. Mother had tried to have me called Parker, her maiden name, but for once my daddy put his foot down.

  Thus I had spent eighteen years as Margaret. Not Meg. Not Peggy. Certainly never Maggie. Why bother to correct him? Besides, I liked it.

  "Could I leave him here until Carnival's over?" I asked. "I'll come by to feed him and look after him as often as I can, and next week I'll be here to scrub floors to pay for him." Then what was I supposed to do with him?

  With Mother?

  She had fallen into bed exhausted at three a.m. the previous night. I'd managed to sneak out before she or Daddy stirred, but I knew I'd face the third degree the minute I showed up this afternoon. I had promised Dr. Parmenterto raise the pup, but that had been in the heat of the moment and to keep him out of the dog pound. The only way to avoid a major confrontation with mother was to have a suitable place for the pup to go to.

  I couldn't do it. The Chinese say that when you save somebody's life that person is your responsibility forever. This fuzzy, nuzzly, cheerful little black pup was mine forever. He would go to no one's home but mine. Mother would simply have to suck it up.

  "Little Bear," I whispered as I massaged his bulging tummy, "You have got me in one hell of a lot of trouble."

  He grinned up at me.

  "Very well, Miss Maggie," Dr. Parmenter said. "I suspect we can find some lovely cages for you to scrub out next week."

  "I'll leave my schedule of classes with your receptionist. Thank you." God knows where I got the chutzpah to do it, but I leaned down and kissed him.

  He growled. Dr. Parmenter, that is, not Bear.

  I managed to run by the clinic twice on Saturday between visits the court paid to retirement communities and hospitals. By then even Dr. Parmenter believed the pup would live. That meant I had to tell Mother I was bringing a dog into our lives.

  But not until after Carnival.

  Saturday night of Carnival was the final party called "Last-Nighters," for obvious reasons. After the king and queen declared the official end to the festivities everybody in the court wound up at The Peabody out of costume and ready to party'til we dropped. The Prince of Darkness escorted me into the room, sat me down at a table with some of my friends from school, set a fifth of bourbon in a paper bag in front of me, and disappeared without so much as a goodbye.

  I was amazed that I was asked to dance every dance-and not out of pity either. Being without a stuffy date had its advantages. At seven in the morning, six of us wound up at the Whitsitts' big old house in the Garden District for breakfast.

  Then I drove home for the final time in my fancy convertible and collapsed into bed. I never told mother how my prince had deserted me.

  Sunday afternoon after I woke up, I convinced Daddy to help me talk to Mother about Bear.

  She was horrified. "It goes outside."

  "Bear's tiny, Mother, he'll live in my bathtub until he can eat on his own."

  Then I regaled her with further piteous details of his dead sister and being tossed out of a car to drown.

  Mother was really a pushover. I'd been counting on that.

  "Very well," she said, "but only until he's old enough to stay outside in a dog yard."

  When I brought him home Monday, she took one look and said, "My God, Margaret's got a rat."

  He weighed about five ounces. That evening as I held him on my lap in a nest of towels and listened to him suckle happily from his baby bottle full of formula, Mother walked in. "Humph, ridiculous creature," she said, and touched his little black head with her index finger.

  He was in. I knew he'd never live outside in a doghouse.

  By the following Sunday none of us could imagine life without Bear.

  He toddled after Mother when she charged into the breakfast room at eight o'clock, slammed The Commercial Appeal down in front of me and pointed to a photo and story on the society page.

  The photographer had done a nice job of hiding the prince's flaws. He stood in the shadows behind a blonde Delta Deb, who had the most vapid eyes I'd ever seen. The story announced their engagement and their marriage in three months.

  "If you'd played your cards right, that could have been you," Mother snapped. She picked up Bear and cuddled him against her chest to prove she preferred him to me.

  "I can just see our write-up," I said. "'As the highlight of the engagement parry, the bride-to-be slit her wrists. '

  "He's been running from matrimony for years. One week with you and he's engaged to another woman. What did you do to him?"

  "Told him the troth."

  Mother started to throw up her hands in despair, realized she was still hanging onto Bear, and stalked out of the room.

  Until Bear came into our lives, my father and I had never realized ho
w lonely my mother was. She knew darned well that neither Daddy nor I bought into her view of life, even though we tried. Bear knew at once. He loved us, but he adored Mother and she adored him back He became her shadow

  After two weeks of working with Dr. Parmenter, I slipped into Mother and Daddy's room to say goodnight, and sat on the end of their bed. "I'm going to summer school," I said.

  "You're working too hard," Mother said.

  I knew she meant the hours spent with Dr. Parmenter.

  "I need some additional credits if I'm still going to finish in four years."

  Daddy sat up and looked at me over his bifocals. "I thought you had most of your English credits already."

  I had declared myself an English major two semesters earlier. B. B.-before Bear.

  "I'm changing my major to biology," I said, not daring to meet their eyes. "I'm going to become a veterinarian."

  While they were still gaping at that I scooted. At the door to the hall, I turned back and said, "Oh, by the way, y'all mind calling me Maggie from now on?"

  "Margaret! You come right back here this instant!" Mother shout ed. I heard her feet hit the floor and knew she was coming after me. I bolted.

  Mother's reaction to my announcement that I was changing my name and planning to become a veterinarian was typical.

  "Don't be ridiculous, Margaret," she said. "Girls do not become veterinarians. And Maggie sounds like an Irish washerwoman."

  In my previous attempts to break out of the mold she kept trying to force me into, I had meekly gone back to being a nice obedient daughter and relinquished my goals.

  Not this time. Mother took to sighing deeply and casting her eyes to heaven every time I mentioned anything about Dr. Parmenter or vet school.

  She even enlisted a couple of her Junior League buddies to 'counsel' me.

  I never answered back or argued. I simply smiled and signed up for more chemistry lasses. Now, that really infuriated her.

  By the end of that August I had endured summer courses in biology and chemistry in un-air-conditioned classrooms, and nearly died of asphyxiation. The straight As kept Mother's disapproval at bay, but only barely. She had retrenched, and was now suggesting that I become a nurse. Then I could marry a doctor.