Читать книгу No Worst, There Is None - Eve McBride - Страница 7

A Thursday Morning in July 1986

The first thing she notices is the sky. For three days it has been aflame, the rising sun a glaring orange. And there have been violent thunderstorms. “Red sky in the morning …” This morning it is subdued, benevolent, glazed: gold below blending into silvery blue above. There is not a single cloud. And even this early, this low, the sun is yolk-yellow and hot. There will be no rain.

Magdalena is walking from the stone farmhouse to the road. Her wellingtons are muddy and she splashes in the potholes to clean them off.

The long lane dissects a line of ancient maples with sprawling crowns. A few stray drops from the shimmering canopy run down Magdalena’s neck, which already feels sticky in the humidity. She reaches up and touches her head. Her short-cropped grey hair is damp. Her khaki army shorts feel as heavy as canvas. Perspiration trickles down her torso and she pats it with her sleeveless T-shirt. The fabric clings. She runs her tongue over her upper lip and tastes salt. Walking the dogs will be an effort today.

She is a handsome woman, unusually tall and large-boned with elegant, curved cheek bones. A prominent nose offsets her strong, square jaw. Her mouth is full and toothy, prone to great grins. But it is her eyes that influence. They are dark and shadowy, heavily lashed, and though she wears no makeup, they appear lined. In them is a compassionate, profound, constructive warmth.

Magdalena is ambling down this laneway, as she does every morning, to get the city newspaper, her and Joan’s only concession to the outside world. They are anxious to read it. An eleven-year-old girl disappeared Monday afternoon and is feared abducted. Lizbett Warne, actress. By yesterday morning’s newspaper, she still has not been found.

Four years earlier, the Warne family adopted one of Magdalena’s Great Danes, Mistral: daughter of Zeus and Artemis. She had helped to train the dog. Then, at two, Misty had to be put down … “put down” … she hates that expression. Misty was euthanized because of bone cancer. Magdalena had seen sorrow with the death of an animal, but this was … she wouldn’t say excessive because she didn’t doubt their feelings … more wrenching. Lizbett, seven at the time, had called sobbing, “We had to kill her, Maddie. It’s not fair. I loved her so much.” Meredith, the mother, weeping as well, said, “I held her in my arms while the vet gave her the shot. She looked at me with these scared, sad eyes. I know she knew what was happening. I watched the needle go in and suddenly she was limp. She was just gone. I’ve never experienced death so closely before. And Misty was so huge and heavy on me. She just lay there, as if she were asleep. I couldn’t bear to leave her. I kept going back to her. I feel so guilty having such deep grief over an animal when there’s so much suffering in the world. But I’ve lain on every place in the house where she slept.” Thompson, the father, choked up, merely said, “She was a special dog.”

Magdalena can’t imagine their coping with a missing child.

A seven-month-old floppy Great Dane the colour of pewter is close at Magdalena’s heels. She turns and checks the five adults behind, all “blues” as well. The two 180-pound males, Zeus and Apollo, are rearing up, growling and mouthing each other with their powerful jaws. Both dogs stand well over six feet with their front paws on Magdalena’s shoulders. They are equine in bearing: magnificent, with enormous chests, great slabs of muscle and bone and thick, long necks. They even snort like horses. Their coats gleam.

Magdalena can just see the heads of the two smaller females, Artemis and Athena, above the Queen Anne’s Lace and Black-Eyed Susans as they tear around the adjacent meadow. Their leaps are graceful and long. The delineated symmetry of their shoulders accelerating their speed is wondrous. A third, Minerva, is prancing along behind, neck arched, satiny ears flapping (Magdalena does not crop them), proudly carrying a large, fallen branch.

Magdalena’s heart soars at this time with her dogs. She revels in the secure freedom of her fenced fifty acres. And to her, her dogs are numinous, with their effortless, massive elegance, their unfettered zeal. Occasionally they bound up to her and she embraces their hugeness. They nuzzle her face with their big black leathery noses and whiskery jowls and kiss her with great wet slurps. Their eyes are sympathetic, soulful. These dogs are her life.

Magdalena and her partner Joan raise blue Great Danes. At the entrance to their property is a large sign:

CELESTIAL KENNELS

HEAVENLY BLUE GREAT DANES

CHAMPION STOCK KC REGISTERED

OWNERS: MAGDALENA WARD DVM, JOAN RICHTER RN

Boarding and Training available

The puppy bounces in the puddles, unusual for a Dane. Normally they don’t like water. This one is a return from Magdalena’s last litter or, actually, Zeus and Athena’s: the “O” litter — twelve puppies, four males and eight females. All were sold, this particular puppy, Ophelia, or “Lia,” to a family with a teenage boy. Magdalena had had her doubts about the Lavernes because they had never had a dog. They had just moved into a recently gentrified neighbourhood adjacent to subsidized housing where there had been a lot of break-ins. Their son, Jason, an awkward, scrawny and sullen boy with raging acne, had not handled the transition well. His parents indicated that there were problems at school with bullies. And they were worried about the security of their home. They thought a big, strong dog would help give Jason confidence and also protect the house.

Magdalena watched Jason bend down and jostle with Lia and laugh at her licks. She was encouraged by his enthusiasm. She had seen the power of dogs to transform and since the Lavernes agreed to call Magdalena for the training, she let the puppy go.

But they didn’t call.

Now Lia, whom they renamed Brunhilde, is back because the Lavernes have said they found her unmanageable. When she left Celestial Kennels at eight weeks, she was a twelve-pound, gregarious, curious puppy, with outsize, floppy paws and velvety ears. She has been returned as a gaunt, skittish, fearful animal with nicked ears who hides in corners and cowers and growls when approached. Magdalena suspects she has been abused and she is heartsick and enraged.

Yes, she has been abused. Magdalena can only imagine this scenario. Because Brunhilde was rambunctious and chewed the legs of tables and chairs, the corners of rugs and pillows, because she jumped on their white furniture, because she still peed everywhere, the Lavernes kept her in her wire crate except to take her out into their fenced backyard a couple of times a day. Whenever Jason went by he would run a large metal spoon back and forth across the side of the cage and poke it at the puppy. It was the same spoon they banged on the crate when Brunhilde yelped and whined from the confinement. When Jason was out in the yard with her, he chased her, raising his arms and yelling to get her to run. Or he’d hold out a toy and snatch it away if she went for it.

He was supposed to walk her morning and night, but he left it too late in the mornings and in the afternoons when he took her out, she pulled on the leash and he couldn’t control her. He would take a rolled-up newspaper and smack her nose over and over to get her to obey, but that only made her cower. Then she didn’t want to walk and he would have to drag her so he found a stick and beat her to make her follow, but she still refused. He gave up.

When the weather warmed up they had a doghouse built and simply kept her chained beside it, taking food out to her in the evenings although that was also Jason’s job and he often forgot. He neglected to fill her water bowl as well.

Jason constantly tormented Brunhilde with a large stick which she grabbed and pulled. He yanked back. They played tug, the dog growling and Jason mimicking her. When she wouldn’t give it up, he kicked her. Then he took the stick and shoved it at her again. After a while, Brunhilde wouldn’t take the stick and he hit her with it. Soon she was curling her lip when he approached her. So he whacked her. She retreated into the doghouse and snarled and leapt at him if he got too close. Twice she had bitten his hand.

He thought this was great. Just what he wanted. A fierce dog. He enticed the bullies to come and see her and they challenged Jason to let her fight their dog.

Clobber, a Lab/Staffordshire Terrier cross was an intact, squat black dog with a broad, square face, heavy jowls, and muscular chest. The two dogs faced each other, tails erect, hackles raised. Clobber was a scrapper. In a few seconds he was on Brunhilde. She screamed and tried to get away, but was restricted by the chain and Clobber grabbed her by the neck and pinned her on her back, shaking her. Her cries terrified Jason who had never seen a dog fight and he yelled, “Get her off! Get her off!”

The boys hesitated, then grabbed a resistant Clobber by his choke collar and yanked him away. He strained, gagging, trying to get back at the puppy. She lay cowering on the ground.

“Here’s what losers get,” they said and the three of them jabbed Brunhilde with their cigarettes. Then they left, laughing, shouting back, “Let’s do this again and watch him kill her!”

When Magdalena was called to retrieve Brunhilde, she had to muzzle her.

Now Magdalena sees the raw, red cigarette wounds. There are punctures in the flesh and a tear that bears the marks of stitches. But what causes Magdalena the most pain is Brunhilde’s eyes. Where they once were animated, trusting, and responsive, they now reflect terror, mistrust, and ferocity.

Magdalena feels as she did when her mother was dying of ovarian cancer: helpless, distraught, and so influenced by her suffering, she incorporates it into herself. As with her mother, Magdalena wants to lie alongside the dog, to stroke the bony body, scratch the damaged ears and whisper reassurances. “I promise no one will ever do anything like this to you again.” But Brunhilde is a shaking mass of frightened rage. She is dangerous.

Magdalena has been working for several weeks to gain the dog’s confidence and she is beginning to respond, but it is going to be a great challenge to turn her into a safe pet. Magdalena is very careful about matching puppies and owners and she is utterly disheartened and ashamed that she made such a mistake with this one. Not every match is as successful as the Warnes and Misty.

Misty was one of her best Danes. She had character and beauty. She was a “solid,” had no patches of white on her toes or her chest, as Brunhilde does. Of all the eleven puppies in the litter, Misty was the most outgoing and responsive when the family got down on the floor with them. She was all over Lizbett, but showed an almost instinctive gentleness with little Darcy, who was a teetering one-year-old at the time.

When Misty was six months old, Magdalena spent a week with the Warnes in their home to train her. Magdalena liked them and she liked their neighbourhood. It was a treed street of grand Victorians, but some of them were rooming houses and flats and since it was near the university, fraternities. The Warne family was a little like the street: privileged, but unpretentious, a bit haphazard even. The mother was loud, garrulous, the father taciturn, but to Magdalena, they had an innate, unerring, and affectionate sense of one another. They seemed mutually “plugged in.” As a pair, they were clever, stimulating, she playing off his reticence, he quick with understatement. They hugged and kissed frequently and called each other “lambie” and “lovey.” At least she did.

It was a family brimming with love and verve, with an unaffected sense of its charm, its comfort, a family where the children shrieked and jumped into their father’s arms when he got home. He lifted them in the air. They danced with him on his insteps. He made them laugh with silly antics and nonsensical jokes. And they sat snuggled into him when he read to them every night.

The mother roughhoused on the floor with them. She constructed huge tents with sheets and blankets and played inside with them. She got behind the sofa and did puppet shows. She was always singing.

Lizbett, the eldest girl, was high-spirited and demanding, but respectful and responsible, even at age five, taking charge of Misty’s food and water. The little one, Darcy, was placid, sweet-natured. Magdalena never heard her cry.

Even though Misty was imposing, with a noble forehead and a strong, square muzzle, she was obedient to the point where even Lizbett, with supervision, could handle her on the leash.

However, the Warnes broke a lot of Magdalena’s rules. Misty slept on the couple’s bed and curled up, as Great Danes do, on any couch or big armchair. She sat on laps. Magdalena decided she couldn’t discipline away that much love. It seemed like a match of a perfect dog to a perfect family. Then Misty died from cancer at only two.

And Lizbett has been missing for two days.

Magdalena believes there is no such thing as perfection and she hates the disillusionment when occasionally she does.

Certainly her own family couldn’t approach what she thought the Warnes had. It was that exuberant love that she had missed, a love without boundaries or expectations, where imperfections were accepted, overlooked, even. Magdalena’s father, Nicholas Ward, a large animal veterinarian, had loved his patients, but he was a stern, exacting man whose only channel for affection was attending to them. When he was alive, the farm was a working one with horses, a small herd of Charolais, a dozen sheep, and Horatio, a donkey, all of whom he talked to unreservedly. But to Magdalena he was unreachable and unreaching.

Magdalena longed to be as beloved by her father as his animals. She has found that devotion with her empathetic, responsive Danes.

It made sense that she became a veterinarian. She loved the farm and her father had an established practice she could join. But when he died in 1980 when he was seventy-four, after a cow kicked him in the stomach, Magdalena felt freed, freed from a pressure to be the dutiful daughter striving to keep her father pleased, trying to win his affection. So she sold off the livestock and reduced her practice to part-time, treating pets only.

She lives with and loves Joan Richter, a night nurse in the ICU of the local hospital. They have had a joyous, concentric alliance for six years. They met when Magdalena treated Joan’s Great Dane, Daphne, for bloat. Magdalena couldn’t save her. The women became friends while Joan was grieving. Every time an animal died, Magdalena wept. Joan was attracted to the depth of her compassion. Joan sees constant death in her job and cannot afford to lose that much of herself.

When Joan moved to the farm, the two women decided to breed Great Danes. Great Danes suit Magdalena. They are dogs whose enormous strength and will are offset by their gentleness and generosity.

Joan, ten years younger, is small beside the great dogs. They could easily pull her over. But she brooks no nonsense. She is wiry and muscular with tawny skin and blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. In spite of the pressures of her job, the frequent dealing with death (or perhaps because of these), she is a beaming, enthusiastic woman, constantly on the move.

In the farm kitchen Joan is making muffins with cut-up peaches from their small orchard. She has already brewed a pot of coffee. She is just home from her shift. The evening before, a fifty-year-old farmer had come in, comatose from a stroke. He hadn’t made it through the night.

At the end of the lane, Magdalena bends down to a puddle to pick up the newspaper, thankfully wrapped in double plastic. She shakes it, clucking, splattering muddy water on herself and heads back to the farmhouse. She yells, “Hello, paper’s here,” and places it on the back stoop. The urge to rip it open and see what’s inside is pressing, but she is surrounded by five panting, expectant dogs. The news can wait. Their hunger cannot.

She walks to the barn and they follow, bounding through the stable door, swarming around her, tails waving like whips.

First, with a hose, she rinses out an aluminum tub and fills it with fresh water. The clean dishes are lined up on a bench and she orders the five adult dogs to sit. They do so, drooling, until she has measured out four cups of kibbles from a grain bin into each dish. (She will do this again in the evening.)

“Wait!” she commands. “Wait!” And the dogs’ drool reaches the floor. Then she says, “Okay,” and the great beasts lunge and gobble.

And to Brunhilde she says, “C’mon, Hildy, my girl, you get yours in the house.”

Magdalena climbs the back steps with the puppy and they enter the kitchen, an old-fashioned, high-ceilinged space with a wood stove and pale green cupboards with chipped paint and an oversized, stained enamel sink. The room is filled with the delicious odour of freshly baked muffins. She smiles at Joan and goes over to embrace her at the Formica table but something stops her. Joan’s face is grim. She angles her head toward the newspaper on the table. The headline reads, “Missing Girl’s Nude Body Found Near Industrial Canal.”