The Power of the Dog

by Thomas Savage

  And George was gone from her so much of the time. When Peter and Phil rode into the fields to fence haystacks, George rode away to do the same thing in another direction. Why couldn’t it have been George and the boy who rode together! And how should she fill her pointless days — Lola doing the housework, Mrs Lewis cooking?

  She drove often to Herndon — ‘shopping’ as the Recorder had it, and at Green’s she was an easy mark for the salesladies, buying hats and gloves and shoes. Trying on dress after dress — frocks they were beginning to call them — frocks she was certain had been ordered for her alone. She began to look on clothes as costumes, disguises, masks to hide the useless and frightened self she was becoming. She charged everything, having little cash. It had never occurred to George to give her a checking account; like the Queen of England, his mother never carried any more money than enough for tips, and to Rose he handed a ten dollar bill or so when she drove off to town — something to put into her purse. Change, he called it. And with it, after charging perhaps two hundred dollars’ worth of shoes and hats and frocks, she would go on the errand that had driven her to town — at first to the drugstore for a ‘prescription’ and later to a house on Kentucky Avenue she approached from the rear, loathing herself, a house covered in the summer with purple trumpet vines.

  One afternoon she frightened herself by running off the road; she was helped by a neighboring rancher. She lied to George about the slight damage to the fender.

  Her headaches continued. Fearing to expose herself to Phil’s possible remarks — remarks that any time now might be made before George, she kept to the pink room and did her tippling there. She thought she now saw a pattern in Phil’s pressures, certain he had said nothing to George about her drinking, feeling that Phil knew the thing unsaid is more potent than the thing said. Had she not caught him watching her with a curious, stalking patience?

  Oh, but the house was cold! Insulated by its logs and the thick layers of earthy plaster, the sun had no chance, and up from the basement seeped the damp of the flooded cellar. She did not understand the furnace, nor the means of getting to it by stepping from one water-soaked block of wood to another, didn’t understand its several drafts George talked of, and how much coal to shovel on, and when. Thus the fire often died those rainy days of late summer, and her attempts to rekindle it failed. She apologized to George for her failures, and when he went silently and uncomplainingly down the stairs to repair the damage she could scarcely bear the sounds down there, the banging of the iron door, the rasping scrape of the flat shovel over the concrete floor. Listening, she would move about the pink room dressing for dinner, arranging the mask, hoping to please him by her appearance, to draw his attention from her increasingly uncertain gestures, the little touchings of furniture as she moved about the room.

  She had better luck with the fireplace, and began to burn up bits of trash she found around the barn and the shop. Dressing herself in dark green jodhpurs she’d bought when she’d had the courage to think she might learn to ride, she hunted about for scraps of lumber, orange crates, apple boxes, short lengths of pole left over from making buck rake teeth, lengths of firewood brought from the shed to prop up machinery and abandoned there.

  The supply of burnable trash getting low, she noticed that her efforts to keep warm and to occupy herself were achieving a certain order, a kind of tidiness about the place that gave her a sense of achievement. She had never understood why the grounds of the richest ranch in the valley must look like a junkyard, and now she had got together and piled in a cleared spot between barn and shop a remarkable array of trash, much of it cast-off clothing, socks and overalls, shoes stolen by puppies from under the beds in the bunkhouse, twisted and shrunken in the weather.

  Some trash she could not manage, the grass-filled stomachs of a fresh-butchered cow supposedly buried by the men out back but dug up and dragged to the yard by the older dogs, trailing intestines. Neither could she manage the severed, disinterred heads.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Peter told her, and with a pitchfork he urged the guts and stomachs into the iron wheelbarrow with the silent heads and trundled them off for reburial. The dogs watched, the chief mourners.

  She thought those hides thrown over the top poles of the butcher pen must make a bad impression on those who passed the ranch. What must they think of the magpies quarreling over bits of flesh?

  ‘Oh, a little later, Phil burns the hides,’ George said. ‘He burns them once a year.’

  Sometimes in the bunkhouse Phil picked up the funny papers. The Katzenjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan, Maggie and Jiggs. He had watched the men moving their lips as they read and wondered if the brighter among them saw beneath the crude humor to the social comment. Who among them saw in the Katzenjammer Kids the ultimate triumph of roguishness, the irrepressible spirit of youth? Could they identify themselves with Happy Hooligan, that moron with a tin can for a hat, whose armor was his stupidity? What did they make of Gaston and Alphonse who with their ‘after you my dear Alphonse’ and their ‘after you my dear Gaston!’ maintained that manners were more important than intelligence? He’d listened closely to their laughter over Maggie and Jiggs, at how old Jiggs sneaked off to Dinty Moore’s for corned beef and cabbage when he was supposed to be at the opera. But did they see that the fellow who wrote the thing, who inked in the limousines and colored the fancy clothes that Maggie wore to some shindig was simply lampooning social climbers?

  With this on his mind, who could wonder that Phil, watching George staring out across the flats to the mountains through the binoculars, had suddenly remarked, ‘What’s up out there, Jiggs?’

  George had stood motionless, staring out. Then slowly he brought the glasses down, and turned. ‘Jiggs?’ he said. ‘Jiggs?’

  Thunderheads loomed and piled up over the mountains to the south. She dreaded the thunder and lightning that sometimes struck so close the telephone bell jangled and the air smelled suddenly of ozone. Fresh was the story George had told of the station agent at Beech who had been struck and killed as the train pulled in, of six head of cattle huddled against a barbed wire fence, all killed instantly when lightning struck the wire a mile away. Over the whole country this afternoon brooded silence that announced the first fall storm. Mrs Lewis had not yet come from her cabin to grumble and begin the searing of meat. Lola was upstairs with her True Romance magazine. She had pointed out to Rose the story she was saving for just such an afternoon, one called ‘Why I Sold My Baby.’

  Standing in the pink room, a sweater about her shoulders, Rose vaguely considered her ‘costume’ for the evening.

  ‘You always look so pretty,’ George used to say. ‘I feel so proud with you.’

  She worried about George and she worried about Peter down in the fields, and she wondered if she could endure it if the telephone jangled. Was it safe by the window? The wind shook the leaves of the sick cottonwood tree.

  What was that? Dust?

  Dust up the road! And out of it came a car, a shabby little truck that slowed, hesitated, and then crept into the yard and stopped.

  She rose carefully. She had learned in the last months to walk cautiously, to move from chair to table to chair to wall, touching each, as if she found strength there. An unbroken trip across a room was impossible — she might falter and stumble. Carefully she made her way to the living room and looked out at the strange little truck. On the driver’s side were the inexpertly painted letters HIDES, the pigment chalky with age, and the bed of the truck was piled with layers of hides roped down hard.

  She blinked, amazed at the formal appearance of the man who opened the door of the truck and stepped to the ground; he wore a dark business suit, a dark, rather wide felt hat, and a beard that recalled prophets. Across his vest was stretched a gold chain, dull in the darkening air. As he passed through the little gate and started up the steps, she saw beyond him the other figure in the car. His son?

  She opened the door before the knock.

  He removed his hat,
and made a little bow, ‘Good afternoon, ma’am.’

  What a gentle voice, she thought. What a welcome, gentle voice. ‘Good afternoon,’ she murmured.

  ‘I wondered if you had any old hides?’ he asked.

  The question was rhetorical, for the butcher pen was in sight not a hundred yards away. ‘Why, I don’t know,’ she said, and walked out past him onto the porch where she touched the chair and stood looking at the hides. Eyesores. ‘I see we do,’ she remarked. ‘They burn them, you know.’

  Distant rumble of thunder.

  ‘Burn them?’ The man looked at the dark hat in his hand and then at Rose.

  ‘Yes, I understand they burn them.’

  ‘Why not take thirty dollars for them, ma’am?’

  ‘Thirty dollars?’

  ‘I couldn’t see my way to offer more.’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t that,’ she said, gripping the back of the chair.

  ‘What is it, then, ma’am?’

  She could not have explained to the man what it was, if it wasn’t that. But thirty dollars was a strange sum. Thirty dollars had no meaning to the Burbanks. Thirty dollars would once have meant riches to her and Johnny Gordon, but a check for thirty made out to the Burbanks would find its way to a sheaf of other uncashed checks she had seen in a cubbyhole in George’s office, refunds from mail-order houses, small tax rebates, a few dollars a man had paid for an old saddle, perhaps a hundred dollars in all, checks dated far back. Were such checks, like the hides, at intervals ritually burned? She smiled vaguely at the thought.

  ‘What’s that, ma’am?’

  ‘Nothing. Did I speak?’ She gripped the chair. When she went ‘shopping’ George always handed her ten or twenty dollars, and that was that. With the charge accounts she bought anything she wanted except what she got at the drugstore and that vine-covered place. Cash for that. ‘No, that sounds like a reasonable sum.’ She felt the silence was long, and spoke again. ‘Make the check out to my husband.’

  ‘To your husband?’

  She felt tears spring to her eyes, and smiled to cover their import.

  He said, ‘What’s that, ma’am?’

  ‘Did I speak?’ she asked. No, she thought. It’s Phil who burns the hides. It’s Phil who must have the check. He can burn the check instead of the hides. ‘Make the check to Phil,’ she said.

  ‘To Phil, ma’am?’

  ‘Why, yes, just to Phil.’ Why, she wondered, did that seem odd to him? ‘No,’ she said suddenly. ‘Don’t do that.’ If the check was to go uncashed or maybe burned, why must it be a check? Why not cash? She would have cash in her hands! ‘Would you mind giving me the money in cash?’

  ‘Of course not, ma’am.’ Now she watched closely as he drew out a purse, long like a black stocking with a bright metal frame at the top that closed when one little ball slipped past another. He opened it and reached down, disturbing the silver there. Once when she and Johnny had first come to the country — long, oh, long, long ago — that country of the silver dollar, a patient had paid Johnny with two silver dollars and he had stood grinning and rattling them in his pocket. ‘Nothing sounds like money more than silver,’ he’d said. ‘The pretty, pretty sound of silver, the pretty sound of silver, my pretty lady.’ She watched the man bring out bills, worn bills that must have passed many, many times for one favor or another. He offered them; she took them. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and bowed his formal little bow, and turned and with an arm made a gesture to the other figure. Then he walked down without looking back. She watched him go, and watching him felt a queer urge to follow, to call out, to return the money, but her throat was dry, her tongue lifeless. And truly, the feel of the bills gave her a precious sense of security. Thus, she stood gripping the back of the chair and watched while the truck drove away from the house, made a slow turn and then proceeded rumbling across the pole bridge to the butcher pen. A cloud of magpies rose and settled like dirty ash, one by one, on a fence at a safer distance.

  She turned carefully, steadied herself a final time on the back of the chair, and moved into the house. Inside, she began to laugh to herself. How strange it all was!

  How strange, how strange.

  Since she had married a Burbank she had become sly.

  She had become dishonest.

  She had become an alcoholic, a common drunk. She hadn’t been entirely sober in weeks. Nothing but George’s kindness had kept him silent. But in weeks he would divorce her. And now this final thing, when he found she’d become a petty larcenist for the sake of thirty dollars.

  She forgot to remember the long, long distance from the door of the bedroom to the bed, and found herself with no handy chair, no trusted table. She tottered and fell halfway to the bed, lost a slipper, a fancy shoe, so fancy she’d never get used to them, shoes ordered especially for her, an excuse for a ‘shopping’ trip. Shoes for Mrs Vanderbilt, the Mrs Vanderbilt only in Johnny’s mind, only in his. He’d believed she was, so she was. She couldn’t be anything unless someone believed in her, nothing at all. She could be nothing but what someone believed she was.

  She left the shoe and staggered to the bed, the big Burbank bed. Lying there, she brought her fist to her mouth.

  And there George found her asleep, three ten dollar bills scattered beside her, like leaves.

  14

  Piles of poles were sanctuaries for small living things.

  Under there gophers were safe from badgers who wished to eat them whole. There cottontails were safe from coyotes who worried the poles with their paws and teeth. Living there until men came to use the poles to build the fences around the stacks, the small living things knew every recess and cranny and brazenly insulted the big animals in their little voices. They shared their bastion with animals even smaller than themselves, with moles and mice, and helped make war with the smallest animals against snakes who threaded their way in, the skin whispering against the wood as they slithered in, hoping to eat another’s young. A cottontail rabbit with its long hind toenails can rip a snake wide open.

  It was a sport of ranch boys to rout out the gophers, the cottontails, the mice — to exhaust themselves lifting pole after pole to expose the hiding place of some terrified creature grown too confident. How moving it was to see it cowering, the eyes mad with fear, limbs trembling, hoping by stillness it might yet again escape. Often the boys let it scurry to another hiding place, and the boys imagined the slowly subsiding fear, the return of confidence. But then again the boys set to and moved the sheltering poles, worked with stolid patience until once again the little creature was exposed to unspeakable dangers. Some boys, tired at last, desisted. Some were perhaps diverted by a bird call, a killdeer pretending a broken wing, fluttering just out of reach to draw away from eggs or young. A few boys felt the first stirrings of conscience. Some boys — bored, disappointed in what they had hoped to be a more exciting sport — tortured or clubbed the creatures, and even that was sometimes strangely unsatisfying. Just so one learns how hollow is the pursuit of pleasure.

  It was often said of Phil that he never lost a certain boyish air; you saw it in his eyes, in the step of his high-arched foot. He was forty, yet his face was innocent of lines except those around the eyes that hint of one who looks often and long into the distance. Only his hands had aged, and they only because of the baffling pride he took in going gloveless. Yes, he still took delight in boyish games. Idle for a moment in the shade of a willow, he might take out his pocketknife, open the big blade and the small blade, and holding it between thumb and index finger he would toss it to turn over once, twice or three times before it pricked the earth at an angle of exactly forty-five degrees. Thus he kept expert at an old game called mumblety-peg. If you lost, you were bound to root out from the earth with teeth a peg pounded level with the earth. You ate dirt. Many’s the game Phil had played with George, and many’s the peg George had rooted out of the ground.

  Phil had astounded the young son of a cattle-buyer who represented
himself to Phil as an expert at marbles, had indeed brought out a chamois bag of chinks, agates and flints and those lesser stones of baked, glazed earth. A fat little boy, Phil had thought, a greedy child, passing his precious bag of marbles from hand to hand so they rattled richly deep inside the pouch. George and the cattle-buyer, some new fellow, sat jawing on the running board of the buyer’s fancy car. Phil had squatted on his haunches looking into the distance when the fat kid sauntered over and spoke up.

  ‘Want to see my marbles?’ he asked Phil, bold as brass.

  ‘Why sure,’ Phil said, smiling pleasantly.

  How like a miser that kid looked, how he looked this way and that way before he drew the bag open, knelt, and then he poured out the precious marbles. ‘There’s two hundred of them,’ the kid said softly.

  ‘Well, how about that!’ Phil said, listening at the same time to George’s palavering with the buyer.

  The kid scooped up the marbles and let them fall on each other. ‘Did you ever play marbles when you were a little boy?’ the kid asked.

  ‘Oh, just a little bit.’

  ‘Do you know what?’ the kid asked.

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘I was champeen marble player this year at my school.’ The kid’s eyes challenged Phil.

  ‘Well, how about that!’ Phil said.

  The voices of George and the buyer droned on. They weren’t getting down to cases yet, Phil knew, and he could safely turn his attention to other things. The sun beat down mercilessly in the middle of the field where the steers they had brought the buyer to see — curious as steers are — stood at a distance, heads lowered, sizing up the fancy car.

  ‘I was champeen two years in a row.’ The kid was fat, so fat he felt the heat; needed some good exercise to get that fat off. He was a town kid, Phil knew, but he dressed up in boots and stetson like his old man. Funny rig, Phil thought, for the marble champion to sport.

  ‘I expect you’re mighty proud,’ Phil said dryly.

  Yes, the sun was hot. Looked as if George and the buyer were going to yammer for some time. The buyer had got out a pad of paper and was figuring. ‘Want to try a game of marbles, mister?’