Hangman's Root (2 page)

Thyme and Seasons is small, and there's no room to store stock. The cookbook was stashed in my living quarters behind the shop, with the boxes of books, bags of bulk herbs and seasoning mixtures, and too many other things I couldn't make room for up front. "I'll get a couple of copies for you," I said. "What else are we out of?"

Laurel gave me the list. "Have you thought of building on?" she asked, then laughed. "Cancel that." She knew as well as I did that the lot was too narrow for an addition.

I guess there are cycles to everything. When I was practicing law, my biggest problem was not having enough time. For a couple of years after I opened the shop, I didn't have enough money—not nearly enough. Now I have the money to buy a little time, but it's space Fm short on.

My building has two retail shops in the front. Thyme and Seasons is one. Ruby Wilcox's Crystal Cave—Pecan Springs' only New Age shop—is the other. At Thyme and Seasons, every square inch is functional. Bundles of dried herbs hang from the ceiling, along with ropes of garlic and peppers, onion braids, and wreaths. Bulk herbs and herb products—handmade soaps, natural cosmetics, bags of potpourri, vials of oils, gleaming bottles of herbal vinegars, fragrant teas—pack the wooden shelves. Dried tansy and yarrow, celosia and goldenrod, sweet annie and salvia and love-in-a-mist fill baskets and corners. A book rack occupies one wall. The front yard is an herbal patchwork of fragrant beds and paths, and wooden racks of potted herbs line the front of the building. There's not another nook or cranny for anything else, although there are lots of things Fd like to add to my inventory.

Fd been aware for the past several months that Thyme and Seasons has a space problem. As far as I could see, there was only one possible solution: Evict Ruby Wilcox and expand Thyme and Seasons into her space. But that's out. Ruby is my best friend, and the Cave is what she does for a living. Fm not about to throw her out. But what could I do for space? I asked myself as I filled Laurel's list out of the boxes behind the sofa. What can I do?

But today was Sunday, not a day for beating my head against the current intractable problem. I had squandered the morning at the rattlesnake rodeo, but the afternoon was free to spend with Dottie—most of it, anyway.

"I'll be back about a half hour before closing time," I told Laurel, stacking the replacement stock behind the counter She turned away from the register to flash me a quick grin. I left, feeling good about having plenty of customers and bad about not having enough space for them.

Driving north from town, out the narrow Falls Creek blacktop toward Dottie's, I relaxed, forgot about the shop, and congratulated myself on having the good sense to abandon the asphalt deserts of Houston for the hill country. The woods were splashed with masses of purple redbuds and laced with creamy branches of Mexican plum and rough-leaf dogwood. The afternoon sky was watercolor blue, and the still-bare branches of pecans and elms were penciled in sharp lines against it. But the early March rains had turned the roadside grass spring green and edged it with frills of wild carrot and the flat, silvery rosettes that would blossom into bluebonnets in another week. Spring would be here in a matter of days, accompanied by Monarch butterflies from Mexico, skimming through the trees on the south wind, and sandhill cranes from the coast, flying high, riding one thermal to the next, heading north.

The land from which all this beauty arises was once the warm shallows of a rich Cretaceous sea, brimming with fish and mollusks, with families of dinosaurs wandering its muddy shoreline. So much life, so many species, some transformed in the relentless, rhythmic march of evolution, others swept away in the natural innocence of a random cosmic catastrophy. I couldn't help thinking as I drove past the huge cement plant on the far side of town that the catastrophes created by our species are not so innocent.

The houses in the Falls Creek subdivision, where Dottie lives, are built far back and far apart. When I turned off onto San Gabriel, all I could see were mailboxes on either side of the road. The houses themselves were screened by trees. And when I

finally parked on Sycamore in front of Dottie's mailbox, I could barely see the outline of the house behind clumps of yaupon holly and cedar—a long, low brown-shingled ranch, part of which Dottie had built herself. When I stepped onto the porch, I woke a clutch of dozing cats. Samantha, Dottie's favorite black cat, got up to greet me with an amiable sniff. With Dottie, favorite is relative. She has hundreds of favorites.

Dottie Riddle teaches at CTSU, where she's the only woman in the biology department. But when Dottie's name is mentioned, people don t think of her profession, they think of her passion: cats. Black cats, white cats, cats without tails, cats with fleas, mama cats with baby cats, any cats who need a home. For the past five or six years, Dottie has rescued as many cats as she could entice, trap, or trick into the cage she always carries in her Blazer, along with bags of cat food, feeding dishes, a net, and leather gloves. Until recently, she kept the animals in the house and in a small wire pen behind the garage until she could find homes for them. But there's a limit to the number of people in Pecan Springs who are willing to adopt a cat, and the extras keep adding up. When Dottie's mother died and left her some money, she built a spiffy new cattery, doing most of the work herself.

I've known Dottie for a couple of years now, and I like her, but her obsession is a great enigma to me, a mysterious center I've never quite been able to plumb. Here she is—an intelligent, educated, liberated, and otherwise reasonable woman who lets stray animals dictate the terms of her life. I don't get it.

But Ruby does. She told me the other day that Dottie's passion is just another version of the heart-to-heart connection that brings people alive. "Dottie's animals make her human," she said. "So stop trying to figure it out. Just appreciate it."

So today, I was here to appreciate Dottie's all-new, world-class Cat Holiday Hilton, with all the amenities of a luxury feline resort. In honor of the occasion, I had brought pink champagne

and lemon basil teacakes for the humans and a dozen catnip mice for the cats.

Dottie answered my knock in a gray sweatshirt and paint-stained jeans, with tendrils of graying hair escaping under a red bandana. Dottie is big boned and muscular, with the look of a woman who isn't afraid to put her muscle to work. When she shifted the orange tabby she was holding from her right arm to her left and took my hand, the strength of her grip was impressive.

"Glad you could come, China." Her voice was raspy from the cigarettes she smokes too much of the time. Her colleagues in the biology department, to a man, consider her strident and abrasive. But her students admire and respect her, even though she believes in calling an F an E They've voted her Best Science Teacher of the Year for so many years running that it's gotten to be an embarrassment to the rest of the faculty.

I held up the champagne and the catnip. "Party time."

Dottie's face is long and narrow, and her intense eyes signal an impatient, combative disposition. It's hard to tell because her normal expression is somewhere between a frown and a scowl, but it looked like she had something on her mind. She hefted the cat, which had just one ear. "Let me shoot Ariella and we'll see if we can find any clean glasses."

Ariella (the name, I understand, means "Lioness of God") did not appear to object to being shot. Dottie sat down with the cat on her lap and deftly injected something under a fold of shoulder skin. Ariella jumped off her lap and padded purposefully in the direction of the kitchen.

"Insulin," Dottie said, brandishing the empty syringe. "Ariel-la's diabetic."

"Isn't that pretty expensive?" I asked.

Dottie stood up. "Yeah. But she's a good friend. And a brave one. She lost that ear defending her last litter against a dog.

Anyway, if I weren't spending the money on her, I'd be spending it on one of the others." She coughed. "Or on cigarettes."

"I could say I told you so." For Christmas last year. Ruby and I went in together on a present for Dottie: the Surgeon General's warning rendered in needlepoint and framed in black. Dottie hung it over the toilet.

She grinned. "If you did, I'd tell you to mind your own damn business."

"That's why I didn't say it."

I followed Dottie into the kitchen, threading my way through the lineup of feeding dishes for the dozen or so cats she calls her "live-in lovers." Maybe she's a little on the nutty side. But then, aren't we all a little nutty about something? It might as well be cats.

A few minutes later, laden with glasses, champagne, and tea-cakes, we went into the back yard, where Dottie pushed a calico off a picnic table to make room for the food.

"I want to ask you a question," she said. I saw the look again. Something was definitely bothering her. "But let's take the tour first."

We started out in the new room she had built behind the garage, which served as treatment center and isolation room. It contained a stainless-steel sink, enameled table, and a large storage cabinet. There were several cages in the room. In one, a gray tabby was nursing a litter of five kittens on a bed of clean newspaper.

"I picked these up yesterday behind the freshman dorm." Dottie's voice was hard. "Students get tired of their cats and dump them, particularly at the end of the semester." She poked a finger into the cage and the tabby licked it. "I isolate the new strays in this room until I'm sure they're not contagious. Then I give them their shots and move them to the cattery."

"Who's your vet?" I asked.

"Joanna Wagner, on Limekiln Road." Dottie unlocked the

cabinet and opened it to show me its neat, fully-stocked shelves. "She keeps me supplied with free drug samples and sells me medication at cost. She used to handle the euthanizing, but I do that myself now. I hate it, but it has to be done."

Behind the treatment room was Dottie's cat hotel. She had built it out of wooden posts and wire fencing, a six-foot-high, tin-roofed cage on a cement slab that extended the width of the yard and half its depth. It contained dozens of deluxe plywood sleeping cubicles, a feeding center with offerings to appeal to the pickiest kitty, a sand latrine modestly situated behind a privacy hedge, and a playland that rivaled Fiesta Texas. And of course there were cats. Cats playing, cats eating, cats grooming themselves and each other, cats napping. While some were still obviously recuperating from the trauma of life on the lam, most looked sleek, serene, and self-congratulatory, having finally been admitted to cat heaven. When we opened the gate and went inside, they acknowledged Dottie with nonchalant affection but ignored me. I was only a tourist.

But they were a little less nonchalant when I tossed out the catnip mice. After a moment's hesitant sniffing, there was a mad scramble followed by a general free-for-all, as the cats batted the catnip mice, rubbed their faces against them, and rolled over on them in a frenzy of kitty euphoria.

"Fve always been curious about catnip," Dottie said, watching the melee. "What makes cats go crazy over it.^"

"It's genetic, actually," I replied. "Nearly all cats are attracted to the volatile oils in the bruised leaves, even the big cats—lions, tigers. But only about two thirds have the gene that makes them go bananas."

"Maybe I should grow some catnip," she said. "Trouble is, the house cats will tear it up."

"They will if you set out plants," I said. "But they'll probably ignore it if you grow it from seed. I'll give you some."

Dottie bent over to adjust a watering fountain. "Is it good for anything besides getting cats high?"

"You might try brewing a tea of the leaves if you want to relax before bedtime, or if you have a cough or an upset stomach. And once upon a time people chewed it to relieve toothache." I grinned. "Keep the root away from your enemies, though."

"Oh, yeah?" Dottie's laugh was not altogether pleasant. "What would happen if I slipped it into the departmental coffee pot? Mass poisoning?"

I shook my head. "Not exactly. According to folklore, you'd get people royally pissed. The root was said to turn even the mildest person into a mad dog, so back in the seventeenth century the hangman would brew a cup of tea from the root before he went out to do his deadly deed. That's how it came to be called hangman's root."

Dottie made a sound deep in her throat. "The guys in my department don't need hangman's root. They're mad dogs without it." I didn't think she was joking.

I stepped out of the way of a dainty-looking white cat bent on body-slamming a catnip mouse. "Just out of curiosity, how many cats do you think you've rescued over the years?"

"Not enough." Dottie picked up a tattered black kitten and cuddled it against her face. "Did you know that just one pair of fertile cats and their offspring can produce over seventy thousand kittens in six years?"

I goggled. "Seventy thousand!"

"Yeah. Nature is incredibly fecund." She held up the kitten with a grin. "Hey, wouldn't this little guy make a nice herb shop kitty?"

"Thanks," I said hastily. "I have all the pets I can handle." One, that is. He's an arrogant Siamese who permits me to share his home on the condition that I provide lightly cooked chicken livers, chopped, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. His former

patron named him Pudding. When he came to Hve with me, he became Cat. After Ruby complained that the name was too low class for His High-and-Mightiness, I renamed him Khat.

"Pets?" Dottie sounded irritated. "Come on, China. Cats are companions, not pets." She put the kitten down in front of a bowl of food and opened the gate for me. "No offense," she added, "but the word is anthropocentric, as well. Actually, we're their companions."

I felt chastised, but I knew that Dottie was right. Khat's cosmology is very simple: God is a cat, the devil is a dog, and humans are handy to have around because we have opposing thumbs and money to buy chicken livers.

Dottie closed the gate behind us. "Nice as this new cattery is," she remarked as we went back to the picnic table, "it's not nearly big enough. It only houses a hundred and fifty. There's a little money left in Mother's estate and I'm using it to buy the vacant lot next door. In fact, I've already made an offer on it. But there isn't enough money for construction and operating expenses, so I'm starting a cat rescue foundation—the Ariella Foundation."