The Power of the Dog

by Thomas Savage

  Well, Phil rode there pronto. From up there on his horse he looked down. The young Indian was nowhere in sight, maybe inside the tent or snooping in the brush. The old buck had his back to Phil, and he didn’t turn at once, although he must have heard Phil’s approach. The old buck was maybe putting off the inevitable until the last minute, as some do. The old buck was leaning over the new fire. On either side of the mounting flames the old buck had pushed in a forked willow; these sticks supported a third, a crossbar, and from the bar hung a battered pail of the kind you buy axle grease in. In the pail was what looked and smelled to Phil like fresh meat, fresh beef.

  Well, the old buck looked pretty sheepish.

  Phil spoke. ‘I thought I told you to get on your way.’

  ‘But the lady,’ the old buck said.

  ‘But the lady what?’ asked Phil.

  ‘The lady to the big house. Said, camp here.’

  Phil had to snort. ‘So that’s what the lady to the big house said, is it? Well, you start folding your tent.’

  Phil wheeled his sorrel around and paced to the back door of the barn.

  It was a long log barn, huge doors at either end, and damp. The cool, sudden gloom blinded Phil a moment as he led the sorrel up to the stall. He unsaddled, hung the saddle from a peg; as he started to lead the sorrel to the back door, the horse hung back before obeying the reins, and Phil had to jerk him. The sorrel loose and rolling in the dust behind the barn, Phil marched himself right back through the dark barn and, still a little blind in the gloom, almost collided with George.

  George was a dedicated user of binoculars. A good pair of Bausch & Lomb, properly in their case, had since memory began rested on top of the bookcase in the living room. Pair after pair of the same make had disappeared — perhaps into the cardboard suitcases of departing hired girls or cooks, for field glasses are both valuable and portable. But still the glasses remained in plain sight up there on the bookcase, for to hide them was to suspect someone of a crime incomprehensible to George, and rather than entertain the painful thought, it was easier to buy new glasses. He would sometimes spend an hour at the window watching the movement of cattle or horses, judging the far retreat of snowdrifts, watching for forest fires. He had this day watched Phil’s rapid progress from an upstairs window, and once Phil had stopped to parley with the Indians, George had come right downstairs, picked up his hat and gloves, and gone to the barn where he waited beside Phil’s stall. Phil, when angry, would speak his mind no matter who was present, hired men, cooks, family, guests, friends, and in a way George supposed Phil was right — speaking up and not bottling up everything. But the lack of reticence gave Phil a towering advantage, for people thought twice before crossing him, dreading the fireworks and the terrible truths he spoke — even to the Old Gent and the Old Lady.

  So if there was to be an explosion over the Indians it had better spend itself in the dark of the barn.

  ‘What in the good holy hell,’ Phil began, colliding with George. As always when disturbed or angry, Phil chose bad grammar. ‘What in the good holy hell are them Indians doing out back?’

  ‘Take it a little easy,’ George said quietly. ‘I told them,’ he said, ‘they could camp here a few days.’

  ‘You told them?’ Phil took a step back from George and looked him up and down. ‘Boy — are you out of your fugging mind?’

  ‘They won’t do harm,’ George said. ‘I expect in nineteen twenty-five we can hold our own against the Indians.’

  ‘Got a real tongue, haven’t you, Georgie boy? A real tongue for humor or sarcasm, what? But just start using your noodle.’

  ‘That’s all right, Phil. Take it a little easy. You got to think how people feel.’

  ‘People feel? Who feels? Just exactly who feels?’

  ‘How the Indians feel, for one. The young Indian.’

  Phil measured George again with his day-blue eyes that missed nothing, and his lips curled in a smile. ‘What’s all this sudden love for Indians? That gives me a good fat laugh.’ And Phil laughed. ‘Sometimes it honestly gets my goat how blind a man can be, Georgie boy.’

  George leaned against the stall. ‘Just what do you mean by that, Phil?’

  Phil ducked his head as he finished laughing, a ripping, tearing, dry laugh, laughter not only at George but at the woman in the house who was going to have to go. ‘Take a good look at yourself sometime. Go take a look at yourself in the mirror, take a good hard gander at your fiz. Then you take and ask yourself why your missus married you.’

  George blinked once, but he kept his eyes on Phil. ‘Think what you like, Phil,’ he said. ‘But the Indians stay.’ And George turned and left the barn. But oh, how Phil knew how to touch the sore place. Lord, how he knew how to lift a scab.

  11

  Long, long before Mrs Lewis cooked for the Burbanks, a tree fell on Mr Lewis in the woods and killed him in his ‘prime.’ Mrs Lewis hoped to be one with him again in what she called their eternal home, but the suspended relationship left her with a mixed bag of acid sayings, bitter observations and chilly maxims.

  ‘Eaten fruit is soon forgot,’ she would suddenly remark, looking up from her work, from pummeling bread dough and slamming it down without mercy on the scarred face of the zinc-topped table. ‘If we could only see before us,’ she often remarked, ‘the deepest river wouldn’t be too deep.’

  Rose had made a light, uncertain laugh. ‘Things can’t be that bad, Mrs Lewis.’

  ‘Do you really believe that, Mrs Burbank?’ Mrs Lewis asked.

  ‘It’s a small world,’ she once remarked, and moved heavily to the cook-stove. Her heavy black shoes were slit to relieve bunions got from years of treading floors of strangers. She dropped the letter into the coals and watched it curl and disappear. ‘A friend of Mr Lewis,’ she remarked. ‘He drank with Mr Lewis. It’s a small world.’

  She frightened Lola with stories of ‘bad’ girls who ended up in trunks left forgotten in sheds and railway stations and with tales of people remembered, friends and enemies. She told of a woman with a tapeworm that moved up into the woman’s throat at mealtime, to remind her. Mrs Lewis, finishing a story, would blink slowly, like a tortoise.

  The removal of a graveyard that blocked a projected federal highway required the digging up of coffins, among them that of a friend of Mrs Lewis; a clumsy tractor driver had split open the coffin with the tractor blade and it was found that the woman’s hair had continued to grow after death.

  ‘The whole coffin,’ Mrs Lewis marveled, ‘just stuffed with her lovely golden hair, except for a few feet from the end, where it was gray.’

  When Lola came to work for the Burbanks she used money from her first paycheck for a subscription to True Romance, a magazine her father had forbidden her to read; once when he found her reading a copy borrowed from another girl, he had made her stand before him and rip it up, page by page. She was grateful he had not whipped her.

  Two women alone so much in the front of the house, she and Rose became friends, a friendship that perhaps began when Lola asked if what they said about the movie stars was true. Like the men in the bunkhouse, she believed that if a thing was printed, it was true. She believed that people could be put in jail if what they printed wasn’t true.

  ‘What special thing was it you had in mind?’ Rose asked.

  ‘Well, there’s this big star,’ Lola said. ‘Darlene O’Hare.’

  ‘Yes, I think I’ve heard of her.’

  ‘Well, it says —’ And Lola flushed. ‘It says she takes baths in milk.’

  ‘Then I’m sure she does. I can’t see why they’d say it unless she did.’

  ‘My father would certainly never hold with anything like that,’ Lola said.

  ‘I believe your father is right,’ Rose said. ‘A person could get into no end of trouble, starting with that. One thing would lead to another.’

  ‘You bet your life it would,’ Lola said with sudden passion. ‘My father is very strict.’

  She talked a
good deal of her father. He went down to Beech to church, she said. Once the dog was lost in a wild snowstorm and her father went out to find the dog in the middle of a night. It was caught in a trap. One time, Lola said, there were some sick Swedes who had no money, and her father took some meat they had and gave it to the Swedes because he said that God would pervide.

  ‘And do you know what happened?’ Lola asked. ‘A deer came right down into the yard. It came right into the yard and stood there and looked right into my father’s eyes, asking to be shot.’

  Each week she wrote her father, and Rose worried because her father never answered, and at last she asked, ‘Do you often hear from your father?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Lola said. ‘My father never learned to write. He can’t read much, either. The kids have to read the letters to him. But my mother was a wonderful reader and a writer.’

  ‘She taught you, then?’

  ‘Oh, my yes. Before I went to school, even. And she’s been dead many a year, Mrs Burbank. And do you know what my father said?’

  ‘What did he say?’

  Lola stood with a limp dustcloth in her hand, and as she spoke she stared out at the face of the sagebrush hills. ‘He said my mother needn’t’ve died.’

  ‘What did he mean by that?’

  ‘The doctor wouldn’t come to him. He knew we didn’t have money. Oh, we never had money. My father said if the old doctor was still there, my mother wouldn’t of died.’

  The clock beside the door whirred and prepared to strike the hour before noon. ‘What was the other doctor’s name?’

  ‘His name? What was his name?’ The clock began to strike and all but drowned Lola’s voice. Rose looked out the window up the road. A few hours before she had stood on the porch watching the old Reo disappear over the rise; earlier, she had come on a curious scene. George hadn’t heard her come into the bedroom and she saw him at the bathroom mirror, looking at himself. He had finished shaving, and simply stood there, looking. Quietly she left the room. Then he came out dressed for town. He made no mention of her driving with him. She couldn’t understand it.

  ‘Was his name,’ Rose asked, ‘Dr Gordon — the old doctor?’

  Lola looked at her astonished. ‘Yes. That was it. So you knew him, too.’ Lola marveled at the coincidence, the sort of coincidence that gave credence to the awful stories of Mrs Lewis. ‘Dr John Gordon.’

  Rose parted her lips. It was almost as if she had heard her own name on the lips of a ghost. ‘John.’

  ‘It’s a small world,’ Lola remarked.

  Yes, Rose thought. Much too small.

  Now over the rise up the road came Phil on his pacing sorrel horse. This was the day, with George gone, that she must speak to Phil, and already she felt the terror that preceded her recent sickening headaches.

  Did she have a headache at the moment? the doctor had wanted to know.

  No, she said. At the moment she didn’t.

  Would she describe the headaches.

  She said they were directly behind her eyes, and that pressure seemed to force her eyes out of her head.

  Ah, then. Did she do a great deal of reading?

  Not recently. True, she had once read a great deal. She had read often to her husband, and to her son. ‘My first husband,’ she explained.

  The doctor sent her across the hall to the optometrist. ‘My brother-in-law,’ the doctor pointed out.

  The small, puzzled optometrist made her read the big letters and the small ones. He drew the shades and flashed lights into her eyes. Then he sent her back to the doctor, with a note.

  ‘Your eating habits, Mrs Burbank?’

  She could think of nothing odd, except that she seldom ate breakfast, and then — well, she’d almost never eaten breakfast.

  Ah, then! Hunger can cause headaches. Did she notice that often before the noon meal she had headaches?

  … Yes, she did. Often she had them just before noon.

  ‘You just start with a good hearty breakfast, Mrs Burbank. Why, breakfast is the most important meal! And I can pretty well assure you …’

  Breakfast for the men was at six, and George and Phil joined them in the back dining room for oatmeal, pancakes, ham and eggs and coffee, and while they sat smoking for ten minutes and picking their teeth, George would give the orders for the day. Then the men would file out to the bunkhouse, smoking, still picking their teeth, bringing gifts of cold pancakes to the dogs who jumped and whined.

  In the days when the Old Gent and the Old Lady ate a breakfast in the front dining room at eight, they sat opposite each other across the white expanse, spoke to each other in well-bred syllables and ate omelettes, perhaps creamed chipped beef on points of toast, salt mackerel and boiled potatoes. They might eat strawberries or grapefruit, delicacies hardly known in that country, and shipped at great cost and the risk of freezing from Salt Lake City. Finished, they touched their mouths with napkins, touched the surface of the water in their finger bowls, wiped their fingers, folded the napkins, rolled them and poked them into silver rings. These little ceremonies took a bit of the curse off the hopeless view from the front windows, the sagebrush hill, off the bitter winter weather and the sometimes appalling knowledge that Boston was over three thousand miles away. Their doubts about the nature of their lives they never dared communicate to each other, each depending on the conviction of the other that what they had done with their years was reasonable if not rewarding. Each morning, breakfast done, the table cleared, the one or the other spoke as the sun crawled up from behind the hill.

  ‘Looks as if it’s going to be a good day.’

  Or, ‘Looks as if it’s going to storm.’

  Or, ‘Well, the storm must be over before long, don’t you think.’

  Then the Old Gent, hands clasped behind his back, began to pace in stiff, straight, military fashion across the carpet.

  Step, step, step. Smart turn. Step, step, step. Watching his feet, watching his feet make the step, make the turn.

  The Old Lady escaped to her pink room, there to lie a bit on the chaise longue, if the room was warm; to regard the distant mountains, to fuss with a little needlework. She wrote voluminous letters back East. It had often puzzled people why these two had come West, these two who scarcely knew a Hereford from a Shorthorn, who neither rode nor hunted, who could only nurse their little ceremonies.

  She decided against telling George the doctor’s orders about breakfast; he might suggest her eating at the table, as his mother had; but servants embarrassed her. She had often felt Phil’s eyes as Lola offered peas or beets, aware that her straight back and rigidity was embarrassment and not the poise Lola might take it for. So she went each morning to the kitchen for a bowl of oatmeal.

  The doctor might be right.

  She was poised, safe for the moment on a tightwire, and no net below.

  Then the headaches struck again, swiftly, and the pain pushed tears to her eyes. About one thing the doctor was right. The pain seized her shortly before meals. Aspirin again, and the Bromo-Seltzer. She pressed her fingers hard against her temples, seeking to block the nerves.

  Toward the end of Johnny Gordon’s life, when he had vowed never to drink again, she had found him pouring himself a drink. He was startled, and his eyes looked naked; when he spoke, he stammered. His stammering surprised her, for she had never judged him. ‘I have a bad tooth,’ he explained. ‘The pain is about to kill me.’

  He told the truth. The tooth was pulled.

  Now, driven to the same distraction, she went to the liquor cabinet in the buffet, first picking from off its hook the key hidden in the china cupboard. She stooped before the small door, amazed at her pounding heart. Lola’s step on the stairs. She rose from a crouching position, and stood until Lola passed into the kitchen. Then she stooped again, and hurried with whiskey to the bathroom, shielding it in the crook of her arm. She locked herself in the bathroom, poured it down. The effort left her gasping. She held the ends of her fingers so tight against her temple
s that white flames flickered in the dark of her brain.

  And it worked. Quite calmly she regarded herself in the mirror over the washbowl. The only other comparable pain was childbirth. Of that agony, she remembered little; surely not sharper, never so lasting as these headaches.

  The noon meal was pleasant.

  ‘My, but you seem happy today,’ George smiled, and stood awhile in the living room. He glanced in the direction of the dining room, and hearing and seeing no one, he leaned and kissed her.

  ‘I am very happy,’ she murmured, and George left, whistling.

  When Lola had cleared the table, Rose replaced the bottle and turned the key thinking that deadening of pain was hardly worth the shame she felt. Or so she thought then, for when she thought it, she had no pain. She would not go to the bottle again.

  The next attack tested her resolve, and she began then those pointless walks over the face of the sagebrush hill, thinking to find relief in the fresh air, in physical exertion; and the walks did help, at first, and it was on a walk, Peter just ahead of her finding a random path through the high sagebrush, that she understood her trouble. For Peter had said, the brother makes you nervous.

  Perhaps in his father’s books he had read that nervousness could split your head in two; she was silent, for why burden Peter, who wished to believe that she was happy and respected? But each morning she worried about the noon meal, and each afternoon about the night meal, sick at the thought of sitting with Phil, butt of his silences, his crudities, his scratching himself and snuffling, his talking past her to George. How he pulled his chair out and stepped over it had become an obsession, how he referred to beef as ‘a piece of cow.’ If this caused the shocking headaches, where was the end of it? Why, there was no end of it, to the thrilling pain that would send her again to the buffet, wondering how to replace the whiskey it was so difficult to come by. How long could she go on watering first one and then another bottle before George noticed when sometime he offered a drink to a passing friend?