“Lawd Jesus,” Maud moaned, withdrawing into the order and sanity of her kitchen, “dey freeze-dry dog in America! I-must see dat place wid me own eye before I dead.”
Steeling herself for bad news, Precious nervously tore open the envelope.
Inside was a note written in a neat hand on personalized stationery with the letterhead inscription: From the kitchen of Mannish Chaudhuri. It said:
Dear Precious,
I am taking the liberty to post you Riccardo from Montego Bay where Beulah and I enjoyed a delayed honeymoon and to which I carried him in my suitcase, to spare you difficulties with Customs. (My cousin is right: A freeze-dried dog is very portable.) Beulah says that dog fur makes her sneeze. Plus, she thinks this dog particularly ugly. Rather than throwing him away, I thought it only right that you should have him.
Your troubles with the mistress are past. She has completely accepted my explanations for the dog’s disappearance. You were too hasty to leave, for you are utterly forgiven.
Love,
Mannish
p.s. Good news! I have been with Beulah only seven months, but already I have repaid one camel.
There was a noisy row that night between Precious and her pastor, who objected to the display of a freeze-dried rival in the respectable drawing room of the woman he was courting. Precious tartly reminded him that it was her drawing room, that no collection had been taken up in church to pay her mortgage, and grumbling bitterly the pastor walked over to where the lifeless dog crouched in a solitary diorama, turned it over, and blared out an accusing “Aha!” as he pointed an indignant finger at a quarter-inch extrusion of raw dog hood. Precious blinked and heard the cousin’s mocking laugh.
“De only rightful thing to do with this dog,” the pastor declared huffily, “is to make him a burnt offering. We can build a funeral pyre in de backyard and fire up de dog with a prayer. Like Abraham wid him lamb.”
“I don’t want to do dat.”
“Why not? Why you want dis stinking dog in a respectable drawing room?”
“I just don’t feel to do dat.”
“Why?” thundered the pastor.
Precious stumbled about trying to think of a reason, but she could utter none to appease him. He pressed his case for making the dog a burnt offering. They were in courtship, and he was a man of the cloth who knew what vile liberty the dog had attempted to take with his future wife. As a Jamaican national, not to mention an ordained minister, he was deeply offended that his wife-to-be would wish to retain a replica of a rapist American dog in her drawing room, the scene of his own warmhearted wooing. Precious stuck to her guns. They had a furious quarrel that ended with the pastor stomping out of the house and roaring off into the night.
The pastor stayed away for three nights. On the fourth he returned complaining of her heartlessness. He sat on the veranda and begged her at least to please shift the dog effigy to a spot where he did not have to endure the animal’s faultfinding stare. Precious tucked the dog behind a stuffed chair.
Clearing his throat as if he was about to deliver a eulogy at the funeral of a known crook, the pastor renewed his courtship.
A few evenings later, they were basking contentedly on the veranda in a cool breeze with the pastor trying to persuade Precious to feel up the gabardine hillock over which his zipper zigzagged when they heard a car rattle deep in the throat of the-long driveway and saw splinted headlight beams stab the night sky.
Soon the throb of an engine and the squeals of springs grew louder and a car roared up the final gradient and spurted onto the level apron of lawn.
They sat still on the porch and stared while the dogs hurtled from under the house and eddied around the car with a fierce barking. Precious turned on the outside lights, peered into the glare, and heard a familiar voice cry, “Precious, it’s Lucy Johnston!”
“Lawd Jesus,” Precious gasped, digging her nails into the arm of her pastor. “Is Mistress Lucy!”
“Is your soul cleansed? Have you fear of secret sin?” the pastor scoffed. “Buck up and trust in de Lord, Precious.”
“My soul is cleansed,” she hissed spitefully, “only because I-didn’t heed your call to do nasty feeling-up.”
She walked boldly down the veranda stairs and over the bumpy lawn to peer cautiously into the darkened car where Mistress Lucy looked back at her from the passenger seat. Beside her sat a muscular stone-faced white man whose eyes darted coldly over the snarling dogs.
Precious timorously greeted her former mistress, shooed the dogs, and the two women pecked at each other with small talk as they settled uncomfortably on the veranda. The man remained in the car, boring his gaze into the dark cellar where the dogs had been driven.
In the watery yellow of the veranda light Precious got her first good look at her former mistress and gasped. She looked as if she were being hollowed-out, devoured from inside by a slowgnawing worm. Over her gaunt features curdled a deathbed shallowness.
“I’m sick,” the mistress quipped in response to Precious’s gaping. “But it’s six hundred and fifty million American dollars against one disease. Who do you think’ll win?”
The pastor drew a sharp, audible breath at this stupendous number. Precious felt weary and heavy-hearted, for she could plainly see who was winning.
“Precious, can we talk alone?” the mistress asked, glancing impatiently at the hovering pastor.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” the pastor said, standing up and touching his brow in a ludicrously formal salute. “I’m Pastor Wilburn Clarke. How do you do? I will now leave you good ladies to hold solitary converse.”
Then he rumbled away into the kitchen. Mistress Lucy stared suspiciously after him before she turned to Precious.
“You didn’t have to run away, Precious. Mannish explained everything. I would have understood. I felt I had to see you to tell you that.” She gestured at the dark figure hulking in the car. “It cost me nearly $15,000 to track you down. Private detectives like him aren’t cheap.”
Precious waved her hand helplessly and mumbled, groping to fathom Mannish’s possible explanation.
“You didn’t mean to hurt Riccardo. Men die between the legs of women every day. And so does the occasional dog.”
“Mistress Lucy!” Precious cried, reeling in her chair.
“Don’t you see, Precious?” the mistress said intensely, her sickly face lusterless and bruised like the dark side of the moon. “The same thing happened to Barbarosa. I would have understood. I would have grieved with you. We could have mourned together. You didn’t have to run away!”
Precious sprang to her feet, protestations churning angrily inside her. She inhaled mountain air and felt the giddy intoxication of nighttime scents and righteousness. She raised her hand to point, perhaps to smite, and glared at the mistress, who slumped in the chair and looked up at her with a feeble crinkle of sickly, querulous wonder.
But Precious did not bellow, and she did not smite, and she did not explode. She had expanded and gained ominous mass that could have detonated at any moment, but she deflated with a resigned wheeze, stalked into the drawing room, and returned carrying the effigy of Riccardo by the scruff of its neck.
Her eyes brimming with tears, the mistress settled the petrified dog upright in her lap like a cannon, its snout aiming a muzzleful of white teeth at the gingerbread rinding the veranda.
“We women carry such frightening power between our legs, Precious,” Mistress Lucy whispered with a shudder.
Chapter 26
There was an awful, raging argument on the quiet veranda after the mistress had driven away and the last rattle of her car slapped harmlessly against the dark and bony mountains. The pastor raised his voice so loud and thundered such fury that cows began to low deep in the distant pastures. Precious should not have said that she had slept with the dog unless she really had slept with the dog, and she had sworn to him that she had not slept with the dog. How could he woo a woman who had just confessed that she had killed a d
og with her pum-pum? Precious should have boxed the face of that nasty American woman and ordered her off her porch. She should have flung the freeze-dried dog in her face to carry back to America.
Precious sat still and stony and raised her head occasionally to ask what business did he have to eavesdrop on her personal conversation? and who told him to listen? and please not to raise his voice and make her ears ring in the lateness of the night for she had to work tomorrow.
The pastor was beside himself with vexation. He stomped over to her chair, thrust his face provokingly near her nose, seared her with a fiery glare, and bellowed, “Did you or did you not grind de dog?”
Precious got up with disdain and moved out of range of ministerial exhale.
“I did not,” she said with dignity.
“But you tell dat woman dat my future wife not only grind her dog, but grind him to death! Now I can never migrate to America!”
He said more. He bellowed up and down the chromatic scale of fit and fury. And when he was spent and wasted and reduced to a quivering mass of impotent rage, Precious got up and calmly announced that she was retiring to-bed.
“Precious, just answer me one question,” he begged from the top of the veranda stairs as she prepared to latch the door. “Why in heaven’s name did you tell dat woman dat you grind de dog to death if you didn’t even grind de dog?”
Precious squinted hard and long at him. She shrugged and said, “N-E-N.”
Then she went defiantly, unrepentantly, to her empty bed.
Dog War Page 17
