The Power of the Dog

by Thomas Savage

  Son of a bitch! he said. Castrate fifteen hundred head and then nick your thumb when you’re finished! But he healed easily, and he grinned. ‘Well, Fatso, I guess we’re finished.’ And got to his feet and kicked dirt over the dying fire.

  George finished coiling up his rope and walked over and tied it to the pommel of his saddle. ‘Guess you’re right,’ he said. Outside the corral the dogs lay with their noses between their paws, resting but watching, no longer interested in testicles. Two young cowboys who had wrestled calves shrugged their sweaty bodies back into their blue chambray shirts.

  ‘Yup,’ Phil said. ‘Finished.’

  On the day that Peter came to the ranch from Herndon, the men were trailing cattle to the forest, cows and calves whose new brands were already beginning to peel; the fresh leaves of the sagebrush, bruised by the hoofs of the trailing cattle, gave off a heavy odor. Ahead, the mountains were vast and cool.

  Much of the flat across which they now trailed cattle had been taken up by dryland farmers, and rusty barbed wire fences blocked the original trail to the mountains; here and there the herd had to zigzag to get around; the fact always angered Phil. The drylanders were foreigners, for the most part, Finns and Swedes and such, and he had not much use for foreigners, and none at all for farmers. The shacks of log or clapboard covered with tar paper, their futile attempts to grow shade trees in the cranky, alkali soil, the clothes they wore — the big overalls and broken shoes — the wives who planted and hoed beside them, all reminded Phil of the changing times.

  ‘The bastards can’t even talk United States,’ Phil told the young cowboy who rode beside him. Phil was a burning patriot. ‘Twenty years ago there wasn’t a bastard of a barbed wire fence in the whole country. Not like them days I was telling about, back when Bronco Henry was alive and kicking.’ Again the herd had to change direction before starting straight for the forest reserve again. Many of the dryland farmers had failed — most of them — for sufficient rain never came, prayers were not answered, and the ranchers owned the water in the streams. It did Phil good to see the shacks deserted, refuges for bats and mice; after the doors sagged and collapsed on dry leather hinges, wild horses pushed in out of the sun; even so, rusty barbed wire fencing remained to divert your course until you got so God damned sick of it and tired of it you tore it down, rolled it up and tossed it into the brush.

  ‘Them must a been good days,’ the young cowboy said.

  ‘You bet your whistle,’ Phil grunted.

  Just ahead, a cow in heat climbed up on the back of another cow to show her need, and then the broad back of a bull crowding through the herd to her. As she slid off the cow the bull reached and sniffed her. Coy, she ran ahead, but he followed swiftly and mounted her, harpooned her and then hunched away; she staggered under his enormous weight until, sated, he let her crawl out from under him and trot humpbacked ahead.

  Sometimes Phil chose to ignore these things. Sometimes not. Now he watched the young man beside him, whose lips were parted. ‘Don’t worry,’ Phil said, ‘won’t be long before you get to town.’

  The young man blushed.

  Phil grinned to himself. He judged that was about all they thought about, and what did it get them? Took their money, gave them a disease, or they ended up hitched to some little floozy in Herndon who cheated on them when they were out of the house, and that was the end. It beat him how people could destroy themselves over a piece of tail, themselves and the lives of everybody else. The fact was, George was no wiser than this young squirt beside him. Got himself hitched, and now there would be a stepson on the ranch. ‘No,’ Phil said to the young fellow. ‘Those were the great days.’ He felt like smashing something.

  Rose left for Herndon in the Reo shortly after the men started trailing the cattle to the mountains, and began to worry at once. At her age, she couldn’t accept Phil’s silence, his dislike, as simply another curious aspect of life. Doubtless in many families some didn’t speak to others. But you had to live to know it, get old enough not to expect much, old enough to accept the unpleasant, to add things up and see the balance.

  But was Peter equipped to endure? How would he weather the scorn and the silence? Should she prepare him to expect them? What mother does not want her son to see her respected? What mother not want to spare the young the chaos adults have learned to manage?

  Just before noon she arrived in Herndon; the steering wheel of the old Reo was of an awkward height and pitch for her; it was hard to decide whether she wished to be seen — as Mrs Burbank — straining to see over it or crouched to see through it. Already a hundred sprinklers played on a hundred lawns, the mist catching rainbows; the flag hung limp on top of the pole before the courthouse; at the base a dog sniffed; on the steps of the building a group of men talked, their faces to the sun, but as she passed they turned to stare. The sun’s reflection bounced off the plate glass windows of the Ford garage where men stood around a new car. In the windows of a grocery store a clerk built pyramids of oranges. There she was catered to; but even there she felt an imposter, a child playing grown-up, playing Mrs Burbank.

  Peter was ready and waiting. The water he had used to fix his hair had already dried. His shoes were polished, he wore a tie.

  ‘You haven’t been eating enough,’ she told him.

  ‘I eat enough,’ he smiled.

  ‘Why, your hips are so thin I don’t see how you keep your trousers up. I don’t, really.’

  ‘Now, don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘I look like I always did.’

  His father’s books. As she followed him upstairs to the room that looked as if it had never been lived in, she was seized with a dread she couldn’t describe, nor could she guess the source. The un-lived-in quality of the room? Surely the boy must cause some disorder! Was it his father’s books? They were a painful reminder of Johnny, and of Johnny’s conviction that he was a failure.

  Rose had taken pride in Peter’s neatness; now she saw it as a threat to him; she was sickeningly aware of his slight lisp. That and the neatness would draw Phil’s scorn at once, and she now saw the possibility that the boy might be so unhappy he would want to return to that dead room in Herndon. ‘And you’re taller, too,’ she said. ‘You could stand a lot more weight.’

  If he eventually returned to Herndon, there would be talk in town, of course. They would smell the beginning of the end. How people did like to see the beginning of the end! But she knew there was no good in being aware of talk; and if he was happier in that dead room with the chessboard, the books and that skull — well.

  … if he was happier in that room until such time — until such time as what? Her inability to see into the future left her with the dregs of the same sensation she’d had when the men on the courthouse steps turned to stare at her: she didn’t know who she was or where she was going. ‘Have you thought,’ she said, ‘of just leaving your books here for the summer?’

  ‘Leave them here?’ Peter asked. ‘Why leave them here?’

  ‘There are such a lot of them.’ And indeed there were. The Britannica. A complete medical encyclopedia, huge, heavy, musty old black books Johnny had got secondhand. Books on flesh and books on bone.

  ‘I thought about it,’ Peter murmured. ‘But you understand, don’t you? Do you understand?’

  ‘Oh, I thought — well, of course I understand.’

  ‘And when we get started for the ranch,’ he said, ‘you tell me about the dinner you had for the Governor. You didn’t say much about it.’

  Opposite each of the two brass beds in Phil’s room was a similar glass-fronted bookcase, one Phil’s and the other George’s, they had always been there. George’s had not been opened for years, since it contained nothing but stacked copies of St Nicholas Magazine and American Boy — had not been opened since George took up the Saturday Evening Post. Phil often thought that the bookcase was a microcosm of Geoge’s life. George’s life was largely what he read. He had but few opinions of his own.

  Phil’s bookcase contained
neither books nor magazines, but was used as a display case for objects that caught Phil’s interest over the years. Behind the glass were arrowheads he’d found, mounted on a board first carefully covered with green felt; the mounting itself was masterly, each arrowhead having a nice balance in size and material with the one on the other side, a fan pattern. One of the finest he had fitted into the shaft of an arrow, exactly as the Indians had. Here, too, were fossils of trilobites and ferns pressed into sandstone, relics of the days that country was under ancient waters. Here was the skull of a wolf, a stone marten he had trapped, killed, skinned, stuffed, and mounted realistically, its sinuous body alert on a small log. Each object reflected some facet of his gifts and talents, his stunning ability to grasp what others missed, his monumental patience. One shelf supported rocks, water-crystal, agate — and a fist of gold-bearing quartz.

  Phil often smiled, thinking of the quartz. A friend of the Old Gent’s, a mining engineer, came up for a few days some years back from Salt Lake; this fellow had held the quartz in his hands, eyes fairly popping. ‘Where on earth did you pick that up?’ he asked Phil.

  ‘Out back,’ Phil told him. ‘Up in the hills.’

  ‘Did you have this piece here assayed?’

  ‘Why, no,’ Phil said. ‘Why should I?’ Why should he, indeed? He knew the worth of it.

  ‘Did you look for the vein, where this piece came from?’ the fellow asked. Phil was amused, watching the fellow try to control his excitement.

  ‘Oh,’ Phil said, ‘a few years after I spotted it, I tried to find the place again. I never did.’

  ‘Out back, you say?’

  ‘All I remember,’ Phil said innocently, ‘is that it was up Black Tail Creek, not far from a spring that runs into a creek. Look valuable to you?’ and Phil raised his day-blue eyes.

  ‘Well,’ the visitor said. ‘Now that I look it over, I guess not especially.’

  So Phil waited. He was good at waiting. He wasn’t surprised the next summer when a pack outfit headed up Black Tail Creek. He got the field glasses off the top of the bookcase and watched from the window while the Old Gent’s so-called friend and some of his dude cronies blistered their pretty hands on picks and shovels, looking for something that wasn’t there. Phil knew where the vein was, all right. It was a good twenty miles from where the Old Gent’s friend snooped around. How he despised people who humiliated themselves for money.

  Just before the fellow and his outfit gave up and pulled up stakes, Phil caught up his sorrel and rode up there; did him good to hear the fellow try to explain himself, face red as a beet. ‘Thought maybe if I could find some of that quartz,’ he said, ‘It’d look good in the museum down there.’

  ‘Well,’ Phil said, ‘enjoy yourself. Going to stop down and see the Old Gent?’ The God damned fools.

  Now, imagine Phil’s coming into his room one June afternoon and stopping short. For something was wrong. Something had been moved, and sure enough, it was George’s bookcase. Not only moved, but gone. The furry gray dust of years lay on the floor right there from where the case had been lifted, and in the thick feltlike dust were two marbles of the kind boys used to call chinks. Seeing them, he made his hand into kind of a fist, as if he were playing marbles again. He’d been an expert.

  Well! Phil marched himself down the hall into the living room and spoke two of the few words he’d ever speak to George’s missus. ‘Seen George?’

  She touched her throat. ‘Why — I think he’s in the garage.’

  George had the hood of the old Reo raised, poking around, leaning over the fender; without straightening up, he turned his head at the sound of Phil’s steps. ‘What’s up?’

  Phil said, ‘What became of the bookcase?’

  ‘Bookcase?’

  ‘You know. Your bookcase.’

  ‘Oh,’ George said. ‘I couldn’t think for a minute. I told Rose’s boy to take it. He wants it for his father’s books.’

  His father’s books! ‘I thought,’ Phil said, ‘that I’d go to work and make a guncase of it.’

  ‘I imagine it’s put to pretty good use this way,’ George said, and leaned back over the fender of the old Reo.

  His father’s books! Phil stood in the middle of his room and looked at the marbles, and reached down and picked them up and put them in his pocket. It’s a wonder Miss Nancy didn’t take them, too!

  For it was as Miss Nancy that Phil spoke of Peter to the men in the bunkhouse, and they had a good laugh, and among themselves they called him the same thing, watched the boy wander up alone along the face of the sagebrush hill, exploring, accustoming himself to the long, long summer. Why wouldn’t they laugh at him? He looked like no ranch boy; he was prissy clean, and lisped. At breakfast, the men winked at one another.

  Phil knew if you cut off any old willow branch and stuck it into the ground where it’s moist, you get the start of another willow; they take root right off and spread. When he and George were just young squirts they’d snitched pieces of lumber and built a secret shack out back where they could smoke and get away from the old folks and everybody; it was so small you had to sort of crouch. They’d stuck willows around it. Then when they got out of the swimming hole in the bend of the creek where the water circled slowly, the surface so still it reflected a perfect sky — when they got out and dried off in the sun that fell through the opening in the willows they could duck into the shack and sit there and smoke or chew and read the magazines the Old Lady would have had heart failure about, some of it pretty hot stuff. They must have been about twelve and fourteen, then. After the first year George lost interest (he lost interest easily) and only Phil went there to swim, sometimes strangely moved by his own naked reflection.

  Long, long since the willows they’d planted had crept up to the shack and embraced it, hidden it, moved in, barred the door, latticed the windows and then finally poked right up through the floor and out places in the roof so that pretty soon you couldn’t tell what was willows and what was shack, for the wood gradually rotted and fed the willows that twisted and grew thick; no one in the world but he and George — and once one other — knew about the shack, and even right up close you had to strain to see in the dark shape what remained of roof and wall; it was a last proof of childhood, like those marbles found in the dust — a secret shrine.

  The opening itself had, in fact, become a sacred grove, the swimming hole a place of ablutions; only there would he expose and bathe his body. The spot was precious, and must never be profaned by another human presence. Luckily, that spot could only be approached through a single passage in the willows, so grown over that you had to stoop and crawl. In all the world, only this spot was Phil’s alone. Not much to ask, was it? Even now as a grown man, he never failed to leave it without a sense of innocence and purity; the brief communion there with himself made his step lighter and his whistle as gay as a boy’s.

  Imagine then, his outrage when that summer he stood naked beside the creek preparing to wade in and wash himself when he heard a rustling that was not a magpie, not a cottontail, and turned, and saw Miss Nancy. The boy was poised as delicately as a deer, and the eyes as huge, and as Phil turned, he ran as a deer might run, leaping back into the sheltering bush. Phil had just time to stoop, grab his shirt and cover his nakedness. Thus standing, he stared at the spot where the boy had stood, at the ragged hole in the atmosphere, the ugly void. His shock turned to anger, and his voice burst clear across the stream. ‘Get out of here,’ he cried. ‘Get out of here, you little son of a bitch.’

  10

  When the last of the Indians were herded off their lands and sent packing to the reservation, the government no longer even pretended to believe in treaties. Land was now too valuable for bargains, and there was no reason now to fear violence from the Indians and every reason to fear the wrath of the white voters. Those last Indians in the valley that went straggling off in their broken buggies, riding swaybacked old ponies, were those Johnny Gordon saw from the high seat of his old Model-T mo
torcar, and his thoughts had gone with them to the sunbaked flats of southern Idaho, where in winter the wind howled and the ground cracked with the frost. Few trees grew in so arid, so sour a soil, and the drinking water in shallow wells stank of sulfur.

  The Indian agent lived in a neat, white-painted frame house and was scrupulous about raising and lowering the American flag at the proper times. It pleased him to let his two clean, bright-eyed children assist him, and they had learned never to let the flag fly in a storm nor to allow it to touch the ground.

  The agent was not a bad fellow, but against the arrival of the men from the Department of the Interior, he thought it expedient to sometimes enforce the rules of the reservation.

  No liquor sold or consumed. All the world knows Indians do not drink so well as white people.

  No leaving the reservation without a permit. The whites could not be bothered with wandering Indians. Permits were granted only for some pressing reason. As the Indians had no place to go and no friends to shelter them, the question seldom came up.

  No firearms. There was no need for firearms. Once the Indians lived on the reservation, all meat was doled out to them at the government store.

  But Edward Nappo had a gun, a twenty-two rifle that had belonged to his father and the last thing his father owned that had not been burned, as is the custom, at his father’s death. The small rifle leaned in a corner of the shed where the cow slept; not much of a gun, but it was an accurate little piece, and his father’s. His father, the chief.