Chapter 8 - The Visit from West Lafayette
On a bright, hot Thursday in mid-June, a small blue Japanese sedan pulled up the gravel driveway, kicking up a plume of dry white dust.
A young woman in a gray business suit got out of the driver's side, holding a leather briefcase and a small digital recording box.
It was Dr. Helen Vance—Dr. Kenneth Vance's elder sister, a professor of comparative animal cognition at Purdue University.
I was sitting on the porch swing with Buster, watching the swallows swoop in and out of the barn rafters, when she walked up the wooden steps.
"Mr. Hensley?" she asked, offering a slim, professional hand. "I'm Dr. Vance. Kenneth's sister. I spoke with you on the phone last week."
"I remember," I said, shaking her hand briefly without getting up from the swing. "Take a seat if you want. That wooden chair doesn't wobble if you keep your weight over the back legs."
She sat down on the edge of the wooden chair, her eyes locking onto Buster instantly.
Buster didn't get up. He was lying across my lap like a sack of warm grain, his chin resting on my left wrist, his half-missing ear twitching slightly as a yellow-jacket buzzed around the porch light.
"He looks remarkable," Dr. Vance said, pulling a small silver tape recorder from her briefcase and setting it on the small table between us. "Kenneth sent me his neurological follow-up charts from last month. His motor symmetry is at eighty percent. His visual tracking is nearly normal. For a cat with three distinct cortical lesions... it defies every clinical model we have on feline brain plasticity."
"He's just stubborn," I said, reaching down to scratch Buster behind his good ear. "Runs in the family."
She smiled, but her eyes remained sharp and analytical as she opened a thick blue folder covered in printed graphs.
"Mr. Hensley, I've spent six months reviewing his EEG recordings from the night of November twenty-eighth," she said, leaning forward. "The brainwave activity recorded twelve minutes before his sudden motor recovery showed what we call an flat-line pattern in the auditory cortex. Scientifically speaking, his temporal lobe was not processing sound waves."
"Is that right?" I said.
"Yes," she insisted. "Which means that from an acoustic standpoint, he couldn't hear your voice. The physical apparatus of his inner ear was functional, but the neurological pathways required to interpret human speech were completely dark."
She looked at me, her pencil hovering over her notepad. "So my question to you—the question our department has been debating for four months—is this: what do you think happened in that room when you yelled?"
I looked down at Buster.
His eyes were half-closed, enjoying the slow, rhythmic scratch of my calloused fingers against his neck.
I thought about the dark, cold mud at the bottom of Sugar Creek bridge.
I thought about the forty-two days of hums and clicks inside Room B.
I thought about the clipboard sitting on the granite counter with those dark words printed across the top: HUMANE EUTHANASIA.
"You scientists spend too much time measuring the wire," I said quietly, looking up at her. "And you forget about what's running through it."
She frowned slightly. "What do you mean?"
"If you've got an old tractor sitting in the barn for ten years, the wires can be rusted, the battery can be dead, and the rubber lines can be cracked dry as wheat straw," I explained, gesturing toward the machine shed with my chin. "You can bring forty mechanics out from town with their meters and their testing lights, and every one of 'em will tell you that engine is scrap metal."
I paused, feeling the deep, steady vibration of Buster's purr against my ribs.
"But if the man who built that tractor walks into the shed, puts his hand on the flywheel, and gives it a turn... sometimes the damn thing just remembers it's a tractor."
Dr. Vance stared at me for five seconds, her mouth slightly open, her pencil motionless above the white paper.
"Memory?" she whispered. "You think it was a memory reflex?"
"It wasn't memory," I said, swinging the porch swing one slow inch back and forth. "It was an obligation. He knew I was standing out there in that lobby about to quit. And he knew if he didn't get up off that towel, nobody was going to bring him his pork stew."
She didn't write anything down on her paper.
She looked at Buster for a long, quiet minute, then slowly closed her blue folder, turned off the silver tape recorder, and slipped them both back into her leather briefcase.
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"My brother told me you were a stubborn man, Mr. Hensley," she said, standing up from the wooden chair and offering her hand once more.
"He was right," I said, shaking her hand. "It's one of my better qualities."
