“Rabbit!” I draw my gun and shoot. The shadow within the shadow stops.
Rufus leaps up and tears across the field. “Get it, Rufus!” I yell. “Get it, boy! Bring that sad little bunny over here.”
Rufus finds the animal easily enough, but he doesn’t carry it back. He tears into it, then shakes it like he’s trying to pop apart its bones. The rabbit doesn’t look quite right, like maybe it has a long tail. Before I can move, Daniel is halfway across the field shouting at Rufus. “Leave it! Leave it!” When he doesn’t, Daniel hauls off and kicks the dog hard in the ribs, yells, “Bad boy! Bad boy!” Rufus yelps and drops the prey, slinking away, his thin tail limp.
When I get there, Daniel is kneeling next to the thing with the shredded throat. He reaches over and turns the collar so we can read the tag. “Jingles,” he says. It’s the Wileys’ gray cat.
I see myself in that field now, crazed, hopping up and down, flicking my hands as if wet with what I’d done. “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” Every part of me is shaking, and from this distance it’s hard to remember why I freaked out like that. Must have been about my dad. He was always teetering on some kind of brink, and his son killing a neighbor’s cat might be the thing that would send him flying.
“Calm down. You didn’t kill the cat,” Daniel says. “You stunned the sucker. Messed it up some. But you didn’t kill it. Rufus killed it.”
I could kiss him for saying that. We both look around for Rufus. Daniel spots him hiding in the bushes by the house, his rear hanging out. Daniel stands, pissed, and I know he’s planning on kicking the dog’s ass some more.
“No!” I say. Something about defending the dog makes me calmer. I’m not shaking now. “I shot it. I told him to get it. He was just doing what dogs do.”
“You didn’t tell him to kill it,” Daniel says, but he doesn’t sound so angry anymore.
“Might as well have.”
We squat back down, watching the cat, like its throat might miraculously heal, like it might rouse and lumber off. Finally Daniel says, “I’ll get a shovel.”
I stay with the dead thing and watch the muscles of Daniel’s back on his way to the shed, his skin still bare despite the breeze and afternoon shadows. Rufus is nowhere to be seen, not even his butt.
When Daniel returns, he hands me the shovel, lies back on the ground, and stares at the sky unblinking. I hack at the hard earth, digging the animal’s grave. My arms tire, lose their muscular control, but I don’t stop. I keep hacking, that shovel’s edge plunging into the dirt again and again.
13
As the girl showered, I purified the kitchen. That’s the word that came to me: “purify.” The filth and decay that had comforted me a few hours before suddenly seemed a form of sacrilege. And though “sacrilege” is a strong word for something as common as unwashed dishes, the girl carried with her, despite her own filth and dishevelment, a light that flashed about the room, that revealed the grimy counters and foul sink for what they were: a refusal. I couldn’t say what was being refused, only that something had been offered, was still being offered, and was being wrongly rebuffed.
I gathered foul-smelling dishrags and overflowing trash, papers and junk mail, empty yogurt containers and aluminum cans then ventured into the dark again and again, rain pelting as I made my way to the garbage and recycle bins. Back in the kitchen, I piled slime-covered dishes on the counter, refilled the sink, and got to work. When every dish was dried and put away, I polished the old counters and mopped the sticky floor.
I kept thinking of the girl, how she too had wanted cleansing, had gone to the sink to plunge in her filthy hands, couldn’t wait to take a shower. She’d stood in the guest room, uneasy and shifting, as if she believed herself too foul for the house. Whatever she’d been doing these past weeks or months, she was trying to clear herself of it.
I battled an urge to collect her clothes and wash them, make them fresh for her. With a boy, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But she couldn’t be more than sixteen. I taught girls her age and knew how easily they could be harmed, how little it took to intrude. A particular kind of glance or standing an inch too close. Certain male teachers routinely pressed against those lines. While some girls shrank back, others played into it. Either way, it was a violation.
This girl, she’d be one to feign enjoyment. I saw it in the way she smiled on entering the kitchen. She let her eyes linger on my old face as if this was her currency and she was asking what I might be willing to offer for more of the same.
But I find myself preaching, getting downright biblical with my purifying and sacrilege, my dishevelments and violations. If Katherine were here, she’d frown and say, “Just talk, Isaac. Like a normal person. Please.”
And I’d say, “But thee loves me, right? No matter how I talk?” And she would hug me, because she knew in my world, “thee” was an endearment of the highest order.
But, of course, this isn’t true. If Katherine were here, there’d be no hug, and even if there were, it would be made in pity, consolation for the desire she knew I still held and what she could no longer give. Katherine had long suffered both my silence and my soliloquy, and while I can blame my Quaker father for the silence, I’m not sure where the latter comes from, though my mother’s maternal grandfather had been an evangelical preacher, so perhaps the battle of spiritual styles runs deep in my blood.
As for the girl’s filthy clothes, I would let her be. For now, she had Katherine’s deserted things. In the morning, I’d offer to do a load or, better yet, show her the laundry and let her decide how to proceed.
* * *
—
I WOKE AT SIX THE NEXT MORNING not the slightest bit tired. Rufus, who’d spent the night pressed against the girl’s door, lumbered upright when he saw me, stiff-legged from hours in the cold hall. After his bowl of kibble and a short trip outside, he curled into his overstuffed chair near the woodstove, his old bones needing the heat.
Peter was expecting me at school the following week, and I set up in the kitchen with my books and lesson plans. In truth, my purpose was to guard the door, prevent the girl from sneaking off. She was probably a runaway, and if she preferred hunger and cold and wild animals sniffing her at night, would rather claw at the dirt in hope of a wilted carrot than return home, she’d likely had good reason for leaving.
I tried to outline a new section on maritime habitats but found myself staring at Rufus. He’d begun to snore. He was nearly eleven, and while not ancient for his breed, he’d aged faster than most. His feet twitched at the air, and a bark dead-ended in his throat. As usual, snot ran from his nose and his black-spotted tongue swung out, wet and slurping even in his dreams.
I loved Rufus, and he had loved my son. But love didn’t dispel the strange disturbance that hung about him. The dog knew things. Not only the transitory sufferings of others but serious matters, matters of life and death. Rufus had known for over a decade how my son would die. He had prophesied it to me.
* * *
—
WHEN DANIEL TURNED SEVEN, he started begging for a puppy. We snuck out one June morning and drove to the local shelter. Katherine opposed the idea, but not so severely that we felt constrained. Once there, Daniel wanted all the animals, even a huge malamute that howled and thrashed against the walls of his kennel. I didn’t see any dog that seemed suitable, and we were about to leave over Daniel’s noisy protests when a young woman, a volunteer, pointed to a different section, to a black pup, probably six months old. She said he was scheduled to be put down later in the day. “He’s a good dog,” she said, “despite his looks.”
Sitting quietly on the concrete floor of his wire kennel, thin-haired and scabbed, with his own shit smeared on his muzzle, he was waiting for me. For Daniel too, apparently, because we agreed the dog was staring intently into only one pair of eyes. Only I would say mine and Daniel his. I’m not sure what Daniel saw, but I me
t something that knew me, had known me before I existed—a puzzling, formless knowing that had taken on a dog disguise and drawn me to it.
These words, as inadequate as they are, have only just come to me. Back then I would have credited the pick entirely to myself, my intuition, my judgment about animal natures and the fit of temperaments. Even so, I hesitated. The dog was part pit bull. You could see it in his blocky head and the depth of his chest, and I knew the neighbors would worry. It was likely this unfortunate heritage, more than his obvious poor health, that had left him homeless. As he was longer legged and narrower chested than most pit bulls—he probably had some black Lab in him as well—I hoped that would soothe any neighborly jitters.
But I would have chosen him even if he’d been pittie through and through. I’d grown up with a pit and believed the rising hostility toward the breed was more contagious polemic than a true reflection of their nature. When I was a boy, pit bulls were called nanny dogs. They were known for their good cheer and stability, their patience with the clumsy handling of children. Humans are forever picking their heroes and villains in waves of reversing fashion. Though at times—and this has happened not only with some pit bulls but with all manner of people and entire countries—we name our villains and then treat them in such a way that they prove us prophets.
But again I lecture, a trait Katherine came to loathe. She never understood that it was nearly always myself I was attempting to instruct. In any case, when we took the dog out to the shelter’s run, another dog, a rottweiler, lunged at him, and the pup did the strangest thing. He sat completely still, oddly serene, and watched with cool interest at the snapping and snarling of a crazed canine that grew increasingly furious at his lack of response. Finally a staff member yanked the other dog away.
On the ride home, Daniel and I teased each other about whom the dog had been waiting for, but it wasn’t long before his choice became clear. Once the dog was fed, he trotted after Daniel. Later I found them together, Daniel curled on his side on the living-room floor, the dog’s back to his belly, its head tucked under Daniel’s chin. Boy legs and pup legs were flopped together, and the image was that of a mythic creature, a boy-beast newly birthed in that patch of sun on a warm June morning.
Daniel named him Rufus. I told Katherine that he had wanted to honor Rufus Jones, a weighty Quaker. She gave me an amused look. “It’s a dog name, Isaac. Our seven-year-old is hardly a Quaker historian.”
From the first, the dog suffered not only the noxious emissions common to the breed but a chronic sinus condition that colonized his chest and made him wheeze. Yet by the time he reached the age of two, his coat glistened and he was coming into the full breadth of his chest, with a powerful neck and a muscled forehead that tensed when alarmed. He was tender and attentive with all of us, particularly Daniel, and that was a relief given the many well-intentioned warnings of friends.
One night, I arrived home late. Katherine had locked the back door, likely due to a recent burglary in the area. I didn’t have my key, so I tested the other doors and found the side one unlocked. As I entered that darkened room, an intensity of silence caught my attention, then a rush of air as a powerful beast went airborne, a demon flying. Light glinted off the creature’s eyes. In that moment, we recognized each other. Rufus twisted, taking the brunt of the impact against the closed door. But it was too late, because I’d seen what he could be.
A week later, Katherine left for an early-morning shift. I came down at six and let Rufus out. He returned a half hour later, blood dripping from his muzzle. I checked him for injury and, seeing none, grew worried. I closed the dog in the kitchen and scoured the grounds. The back gate was open. Just outside the fence, I found the entrails, a revolting pudding of blood and shit, and a rake of childlike ribs where muscle had torn away. I began thrashing through the dense brambles, kicking and tearing, scouring for more pieces. It wasn’t until I saw a leg with a hoof attached and tender white spots on a brown hide that I understood I’d been reassembling a fawn.
The next thing I remember is being back in the kitchen, Daniel in his pajamas, sobbing, “Don’t murder him, Daddy! Don’t murder him!”
I couldn’t make sense of it. Then I saw my fist twisted through Rufus’s collar, choking him. Daniel screamed about a pack of coyotes, how Rufus had jumped from his bed during the night and hurled himself at the window trying to get to them.
“He didn’t kill the baby, Daddy! He was trying to save the baby! Save the baby!” He was hysterical with certainty.
I remembered then how I’d woken from a predawn dream, heard the snarls and yelps of coyotes rising, turning the sky red. Yet my fist knotted Rufus’s collar, and though he’d gone still, I couldn’t release it.
“Daddy . . . Daddy . . . Daddy.” The word fell from my son’s mouth over and over, staccato and dead, as if already too late.
The dog’s eyes were bulging. I released him and slumped in a chair, Rufus collapsing at my feet. Daniel threw himself on the dog, hugging and kissing him. When I pulled Daniel away, his face was smeared with blood, and I saw it again, the vision I’d first seen behind the shed, before I realized I was gathering pieces of a deer. It was a vision so visceral, so full-blown in imagery and sensation, that for years I believed it a premonition. It haunted me until Daniel became a young man and I chose to dismiss it as one dismisses the terror of monsters lurking under a childhood bed.
What I had first seen behind that shed was not the savaged carcass of a fawn but that of a boy. It was Daniel I’d seen torn to pieces on the forest floor.
* * *
—
A DECADE LATER, on a late-October morning, Rufus was too old to conjure a new dream for my son, too exhausted to reenvision a broken world. He too was grieving. He hadn’t eaten in days.
I forced my arthritic limbs to move, went to the dog, and knelt before him. I cupped his face and watched his eyes open. They were dull, and I sensed he’d retreated to a place he held inside himself. I studied him, believing it was only there, in those dark animal eyes, that I would find my son.
14
At noon, Evangeline entered the kitchen. The man, hunched at the table, jerked at the sight of her as if he’d forgotten he’d found a girl under his tree in the middle of the night.
“Hey,” she said, suddenly embarrassed. She was wearing an oversize tee and the pair of torn khakis from the box. “Hope it’s okay. My stuff was so gross.”
He scooted his chair back and stood, tall and formal, as if she were a lady and he a knight or maybe a poorly groomed maître d’. “Of course. Take whatever works. Fit all right?”
“A little big, but it’s better that way.” She laughed, knowing he wouldn’t get the joke.
They stood awhile, looking at each other. She kept thinking he’d say something, but he seemed okay not talking to this random girl in his kitchen. Maybe he didn’t have the energy. There was a hollowness to him, some great deserted need that made Evangeline want to run. Instead she wandered to a corner nook and picked up a framed photo of Daniel, surprised when it made her feel nothing at all.
“This your son?” she asked. She didn’t know why she did that, went straight in at the hardest part. Maybe she wanted to knock him off-kilter or cover her own dirty tracks. Or maybe, and this was most likely, she was just screwing up.
His mouth hung open a little. He closed it and said, “Yes.”
She set the picture down and turned to him. His skin had gone ashen, and she saw now that his clothes hung in great folds as if there were nothing underneath. She had no idea it would be like this, facing a man so far gone, pictures of his dead son littering the counter. She’d been so certain, so very certain of her plan, but seeing this man in the daylight, his suffering thickening the air, she doubted she had the strength.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should go. This was a mistake.”
“No. It’s fine. Really.” Though he tried to hi
de it, she felt his urgency. He took a moment to collect himself, then said, “At least let me make you some eggs.”
“Okay,” she said. She could use another meal before she took off. “That’d be nice.”
He shoved the books to the side and indicated for her to sit. She hesitated. “Would you mind if I started a load of laundry? I’ll clear out after that. I promise.”
Isaac said he wasn’t worried about her clearing out and showed her where everything was. By the time she returned to the kitchen, a plate of warm, cheesy eggs and thick-cut buttered toast was waiting. As she ate, he sat across from her. He pretended to work, but his eyes kept flicking her way, and when she licked the raspberry jam that slid down her wrist, he dropped his head to hide a smile.
After she’d washed down the last of the eggs with orange juice, after he’d cleared her plate and wiped the table underneath, he sat opposite her again.
“Evangeline,” he said. She’d told him her first name the night before, but he hadn’t used it till now. It seemed a heavy door he had to press open.
When he didn’t say more, she thought he might need confirmation. “Yup,” she said. “That’s me.”
He took a while to gather his words. She could see him mining for each one. Finally he said, “If it’s all right with you, Evangeline”—trying her name out again—“I’d like to contact your family, let them know you’re safe.”
Hadn’t they gone over this last night? She explained again how there was no one. Yet he persisted, and as more questions arrived, she decided to come clean with a new version of her life, one thoroughly, completely, absolutely true even if a few details were altered.
What Comes After Page 6
