The Lord God Made Them All Read online

Mr. Biggins nodded with glum satisfaction, then raised his eyebrows. “Where you goin’ now?”

  “Into the house. I’ve got to use your phone to report to the Ministry. I can’t do anything till I get permission. I’ll pay for the call.” I added the last few words because he was beginning to look worried.

  He stood by me as I spoke to the Ministry clerk. He fidgeted impatiently when I asked him for his full name, the proper name of the farm, the breed of the heifer.

  “Didn’t know ah’d have to go through all this,” he mumbled.

  I went out and produced my postmortem knife from the car boot. It was a large and dangerous carving knife that I used only on dead animals.

  Mr. Biggins’s eyes widened at the sight of it. “By gaw, I don’t like the look of that bloody great knife. What are you goin’ to do with that?”

  “Just take a bit of blood.” I bent and made a nick at the root of the heifer’s tail and smeared a film of blood onto a glass slide. I took this, along with the microscope, into the farmhouse kitchen.

  “Now what do you want?” Mr. Biggins asked sourly.

  I looked around. “I want the use of the sink, the fire and that table by the window.”

  The sink was full of dirty dishes which the farmer removed with groans of protest, while I fixed the blood film by drawing it through the flames in the hearth. Then I moved to the sink and poured methylene blue over the slide. In the process, a small blue pool formed in the white sink bottom, and the colouration stayed there after I had swilled the slide with cold water from the tap.

  “Look at the bloody mess you’ve made!” Mr. Biggins exclaimed. “You’ve stained t’sink. The missus’ll play ’ell when she gets home this afternoon.”

  I forced a smile. “Don’t worry, that isn’t a stain. It will come off quite easily.” But I could see he didn’t believe me.

  I dried the slide off at the fire, rigged up the microscope on the table and peered through the eyepiece. As I expected, I found only the usual pattern of red and white corpuscles. Not an anthrax bacillus in sight.

  “Well, there’s nothing there,” I said. “You can call the knacker man quite safely.”

  Mr. Biggins blew out his cheeks and made a long-suffering gesture with one hand. “All that bloody fuss for nothin’,” he sighed.

  As I drove away I felt, not for the first time, that you just couldn’t win with Mr. Biggins, and a month later the conviction was strengthened when he came into the surgery one market day.

  “One of me cows has wooden tongue,” he announced. “I want some iodine to paint on.”

  Siegfried looked up from the day book where he was checking the visits. “Oh, you’re a bit out of date, Mr. Biggins,” he said, smiling. “We’ve got far better medicine than that now.”

  The farmer took up his usual stance, head down, glowering under his eyebrows. “I don’t care about your new medicine. Ah want the stuff I’ve allus used.”

  “But Mr. Biggins.” Siegfried was at his most reasonable. “Painting the tongue with iodine went out years ago. Since then we’ve used intravenous injections of sodium iodide, which was much better, but now even that has been replaced by sulphanilamide.”

  “Big words, Mr. Farnon, big fancy words,” grunted the farmer. “But ah know what’s best for me cow, so are you goin’ to give me the iodine or not?”

  “No, I am not,” Siegfried replied, the smile fading from his face. “I wouldn’t be a competent veterinary surgeon if I prescribed something as totally outdated as that.” He turned to me. “James, would you slip through to the stockroom and bring a pound packet of the sulphanilamide?”

  Mr. Biggins was protesting as I hurried from the office. In the stockroom the sulphanilamide packets stood in rows, some pounds, others half-pounds, but there were plenty of them because at that time this drug bulked very large in our veterinary life. It was such a striking improvement on our old remedies. It was useful in many kinds of bacterial diseases, it was an excellent dusting powder for wounds and, of course, as Siegfried had said, it cleared up actinobacillosis, or wooden tongue, quite rapidly.

  The packets were square and wrapped in white paper tied down with string. I grabbed one from the shelf and returned at a trot, listening to the two voices echoing along the passage.

  The argument was still raging when I came back to the office, and I could see that Siegfried’s patience was running out. He seized the packet from me and began to write the instructions on the label.

  “You give three tablespoonsful in a pint of water to start with, then …”

  “But ah tell you ah don’t want …”

  “… you follow with one tablespoonful three times daily . . “

  “… got no faith in them new things …”

  “… and after you’ve used the packet, let us know, and we’ll give you another supply if necessary.”

  The farmer glared at my partner. “That stuff’ll do no good.”

  “Mr. Biggins,” Siegfried said with ominous calm. “It will cure your cow.”

  “It won’t!”

  “It will!”

  “It won’t!”

  Siegfried brought his hand down on the desk with a thud. Clearly he had had enough. “Take this, and if it doesn’t do the trick I won’t charge you, all right?”

  Mr. Biggins narrowed his eyes, but I could see that the idea of something for nothing had an irresistible appeal. Slowly he stretched out his hand and took the sulphanilamide.

  “Splendid!” Siegfried jumped up and patted the farmer’s shoulder. “Now, you get in touch with us when you’ve used it. I bet you anything your cow will soon be much better.”

  It would be about ten days after this interview that Siegfried and I were out together castrating colts, and on the way back to the surgery we had to pass through Mr. Biggins’s village.

  Siegfried slowed down when he saw the farmhouse. It was square-faced and massive, and the front garden showed only the sprouting heads of potato plants. Mr. Biggins did not believe in wasting money on ornamentation.

  “Tell you what, James,” my partner murmured. “We’ll just drop in there. We haven’t heard from our old friend about the sulphanilamide. Doesn’t want to lose face, I suspect.” He laughed softly. “We’ll be able to rub it in a bit.”

  He turned the wheel and drove round to the yard at the back of the house. Outside the kitchen door Siegfried raised his hand to knock, then he gripped my arm. “Look at that, James!” he said in an urgent whisper.

  He pointed to the kitchen window, and there on the sill was our square white packet, virgin and unopened, the string binding undisturbed.

  My partner clenched his fist. “The cussed old blighter! He won’t try it — out of sheer spite.”

  At that moment the farmer opened the door and Siegfried greeted him cheerfully. “Ah, good morning to you, Mr. Biggins. We were just passing and thought we’d check on how your cow was progressing.”

  The eyes under the shaggy brows registered sudden alarm, but my partner held up a reassuring hand. “No charge, I give you my word. This is just for our own interest.”

  “But … but … I’ve got me slippers on. Was just havin’ a cup o’ tea. There’s no need for ye to …”

  But Siegfried was already striding towards the cow byre. The patient was easy to pick out. Her skin was stretched tightly over the jutting ribs and pelvic bones, saliva drooled from her lips and a long swelling bulged from under her jaw. She was a scarecrow among her sleek neighbours.

  Siegfried moved quickly to her head, seized the nose and pulled it towards him. With his other hand he prised open the mouth and fingered the tongue.

  “Feel that, James,” he said softly.

  I ran my hand over the knobbly hard surface which for centuries has given actinobacillosis its evocative name. “This is awful. It’s a wonder she can eat at all.” I sniffed at my fingers. “And there’s iodine here.”

  Siegfried nodded. “Yes, he’s been to the chemist despite what I said.”