She halted at the doorway to the conservatory, arrested by the brilliant morning sunshine that bathed wraith-like forms wheeled in from the psychiatric ward. She fought back tears and clutched her gift to her breast. The figure with the haunted eyes in the far corner, frozen in psychic pain, appeared more like wheel-chair apparatus than the father she knew and loved.

Neighbors said Kelly was the image of her mother—same blue eyes and sandy, red hair, same fiery Irish temper, too. Since her mother’s death two years ago she was all that was left of Major William Shields’ family – and of his sanity. Kelly’s fourteen years seemed more like forty and she could scarcely remember happier days before the war: the estate house at Glenboig, the family fortune, days of sunshine and roses with her mother and father and a Scottie named Glen— memories now threadbare like her winter coat.

In Glenboig, villagers said her father’s mind was gone after the war. Kelly’s mother never talked about it except to say the Major saw things in the trenches he could not forget. “Your father is wounded inside,” she told the girl. “Deep inside where doctors and medicines can’t reach.” Kelly and her mother nursed him to tenuous health.

From his first day home it was clear, however, that the Major’s best medicine was a Scottish Terrier named Glen. They were inseparable, the man and that dog, and in their shared silences the animal whose eyes had such capacity for language cleansed the Major’s septic soul as the doctor’s medicine could not. The dog’s name was Glen. He came into the Shields’ home as an anniversary gift from the Major to his wife when Kelly was two years old. The dog, however, exercised his own will in the matter, attaching as soul-mate not to Margaret, but to the Major. They were never apart except during his war years. And even during those dark times it seemed to the girl as she watched Glen sleeping at the fireside that he fought demons in his sleep and her child’s mind wondered if he were somewhere in France in spirit with her father seeing things too horrible to forget.

But the Kaiser’s mustard gas was not the end of the Major’s pain. Bad investments devoured the family fortune and not long after the humiliation of leaving the family estate for a small cottage outside the village, Margaret died. That was the day Kelly found the Major huddled beneath shrubbery behind the cottage wearing his army uniform sobbing to Glen that he couldn’t save his men from the gas.

He went back to the sanitarium after Margaret’s death.

On good days he was almost himself. “You’re just like your mother,” he’d say to Kelly, trying to be cheerful. Then his mood would darken. “You’re all I’ve got,” he’d whisper. Then, catching himself, he’d add, “But who could want more? I have you and old Glen, don’t I.”

On bad days it was Glen who brought the Major back from his dark terrors. When his trembling began and his eyes grew grey and terrified, Kelly knew to place the dog on the Major’s lap. His frantic fingers would search the Scottie’s hard thick coat, then slowly relax like disquieted children calmed by a nanny.

It was during a release from the hospital the accident happened. On a whim he rented a motorcar in Glasgow to take Kelly and Glen for a holiday to Isle of Aran. As he drove the open road lost in warm thoughts of Maggie and the days before the war he approached Kirse Gate near Carluke not far from the cottage. Out of nowhere the dogs came, a dark blur beneath the wheels. The Major braked but could not stop. He heard a leaden thump beneath the car which exploded in his brain like an artillery shell.

His doctors said he “let go his hold on reality” after the accident. “Cruel fate,” one of them lamented to Kelly the following day at the sanitarium. “That dog was the Major’s life line. I feared what little health he had would go if anything ever happened to that old dog. Who could have dreamed Glen’s fate would come to this?” “I’m afraid I can’t hold out much hope for your father now. You know as well as I do that dog was what the Major was clinging to.”

“He was my life line, too,” Kelly whispered.

“You poor, poor child,” he said, hugging the girl as she broke down in tears. “How do you keep going? It grieves me to see you come day after day so full of hope. I’m afraid there just isn’t much hope now in your father’s case. He’s been through too much, Kelly. He’s been through too much.”

Over the two months following the accident Kelly watched her father sink deeper and deeper into a trance-like state neither speaking nor seeing nor interacting with anyone. Once again she stood in the doorway to the conservatory of the sanitarium. Arrested by the sunshine she gathered her courage.

It was Christmas morning, 1922. She brought a very special gift for the Major—a Christmas gift she secretly hoped might do for him what the doctors couldn’t. It was a Scottie puppy, of champion stock, purchased from the Heather kennels at Glenboig—purchased with her own money earned as a dog-walker at the kennel. As she studied the lap-robed shell of a man in the wheel chair in the far corner she whispered to the small bundle clutched to her chest, “It’s up to you, Glen. We’re counting on you.”

She walked into the room, down the long phalanx of seated, broken veterans, and made her way to her father. Kelly stood for a long time before him. His paralysis was total now. No voluntary movement for more than a week. The sight of lifeless hands in his lap, sunken eyes fixed permanently on some distant place, evoked a prayer.

“Please, God,” she whispered. “Please let this work. It’s all we’ve got.”

Tearfully her mind flashed to her mother, vibrant and full of life, saw again the three of them and old Glen on holidays together at Rothsay and Aran, saw again Christmases past.

Inside her coat her Christmas gift stirred. As if sensing his defining moment the pup poked his head out from under her lapel with an air of purpose. “He needs you,” Kelly whispered in his puppy ear. “We all need you.”

She leaned forward and gently placed the pup on the Major’s lap. The tiny bundle sat for the longest time, his onyx eyes and his one ear up and one ear down taking full measure of the man before him. Having assessed the man’s worth as that breed does best, the pup climbed onto the Major’s chest and began licking his face with consummate purpose as if washing away the grief of all the man’s troubled years.

Kelly began to cry. The Ward Nurse comforted her as best she could, but the child’s pent up grief flowed out of her like a torrent. “I so wanted my gift to reach Father,” she sobbed. “But even my gift can’t get to him. We needed a Scottie miracle this Christmas!” Other nurses swarmed around the young girl whose courage and spunk they’d grown to admire and love.

In their collective grief they forgot about the Scottie pup and the Major.

His eyes were the sentinels. They began filling with tears, slowly forming great pools in his deep-set eyes. Like dawn in the eastern sky came a glimer of a smile to the Major’s lips. A single finger twitched on his left hand, then another, until both hands trembled. Hesitantly, awkwardly, his hands began to move over the pup’s fur.

The Ward Nurse glimpsed the movements first. Quickly she summoned the doctor. Kelly watched speechless as the Major smiled for the first time since her mother’s death. Scarcely audible they heard the Major say, “Glen, it’s you, old boy. You did make it out of the trenches, you did!” Then, clutching the dog to his face, he sobbed the tears of abject remorse.

“That’s the breakthrough I’ve prayed for!” the doctor whispered. “His first words in two months! For two years I’ve tried to get him to talk about the trenches; he’s never before uttered the word. I’d given up on him, frankly! Never thought I’d see his first inkling of emotion. I really thought we’d lost him!”

“Looks like your Christmas miracle after all, Kelly,” the Ward Nurse said. “That’s some dog you brought your father! What’s his name?”

“He’s Glen the Second,” Kelly answered without the slightest hesitation. “Do you believe in angels?” she asked, turning suddenly to the nurse.

“I’m not sure,” the nurse answered.

Kelly watched her father draw new life from the Scottie pup in his arms.

“I think I do,” she said. “Mother once told me angels come in many forms, and often go unrecognized by those they help."

She watched her father's animated fingers fondle the pup in his lap.

"As I see it old Glen was an angel in more ways than we knew . . . and he had unfinished business when he died.”

She went quiet, the vision of old Glen vivid in her mind.

“I know this much. The one thing that old Scottie would never do is add to my father’s burden over that dreadful Kirse Gate accident. I think Old Glen sent us this special pup to carry on his work of healing.”

Kelly stood quietly, drawing strength from her words.

“Yes,” she said resolutely. “I do believe in angels . . . in Scottie Angels, and this one will never be forgotten!”

©2001 Tartan Scottie. Reprinted from Great Scots Magazine, Vol 6 No 6 (Nov/Dec) 2001.