by Nino Ricci
“Dai, change it, she has all day to watch television.”
But Rita held her ground, her shoulder pressed into the dials and her back to us in sulky stubbornness, closing us out. She seemed so vulnerable there in her child’s gargantuan wilfulness, so pathetic, that I couldn’t bring myself to oppose her. For an instant we seemed suspended as in a dream, all possibilities open.
“Mbeh, tell her to get out of the way then, we can’t see anything like that.”
This was as far as he’d ever come to ceding anything to her yet he seemed to relax into his concession as though some threat in her had been diminished by it.
“What a stupid thing,” he said afterwards. “That a dog can do all that.”
But Rita had won her point: he’d been forced to see her, to react, and yet the world hadn’t come apart.
“Always that damn dog on the television,” he’d say coming in now. But then he’d settle into his chair and watch the show through with us to the end, boyish there in his masked sceptical absorption.
“You’re worse than the kids, glued to that damn thing,” my aunt said. “And then you complain that the supper’s cold.”
“Why don’t you just make it earlier, you know they always watch that show. Six o’clock is when other people have supper – there’s no reason we have to eat in the middle of the night on Sundays.”
“Who, other people? I think that television is starting to rot your brain.”
All the same she took him at his word, spitefully scrupulous, calling him at the club now if he wasn’t home by six. It was an unheard-of hour for us, the sun then still out when we sat down to eat – after years of living by its rhythms there seemed something oddly luxurious in resisting it, some shedding of our habitual immigrant unrefinement.
We seemed to enter then for a few months, on through that fall and into the winter, a period of uncommon stability in the family, a kind of attenuation or truce as if after years of holding ourselves in rigid defence it was no longer clear what enemy we faced. On the surface nothing much had changed – we had our habits by then, the careful balancing of avoidance and engagement, our ways of talking, the things that were never said; and yet something had gone, some sense of threat. There was a calm in us that seemed to reach a kind of pinnacle on Sunday evenings, our early suppers, the long evening of television that stretched before us, and I had a sense then that perhaps things could be all right with us, that we could live in a kind of protective normalcy like a television family. It was almost possible to ignore in all this how Rita still hovered at the edges of us, more accepted now and yet for that perhaps more truly forgotten, for the moment claiming no special attention from us and yet seeming thus to be merely continuing some silent protest against us.
Rita turned six in the spring. It was a kind of shock to think of her aging, having to go to school, requiring things outside us like any regular child.
Then one day not long after her birthday I returned from school to find her playing with a collie on the front lawn, a ghostly double of Lassie like a gift some fairy had brought.
“Where did it come from?”
“A man brought her in his truck.”
“What man?”
“A man with glasses. He said I could keep her.”
But the story sounded so improbable I thought Rita had made it up, that the dog had simply strayed from a neighbouring farm.
My father thought someone must have been trying to get rid of it. That was the usual way of getting rid of a dog, by driving it out to some distant concession road and abandoning it there.
“Oh, Leh-sie!” he said when he saw it. He checked to make sure it was male – he didn’t like females because of the trouble with litters.
“Mbeh, we’ll see how long he sticks around.”
But Lassie showed no signs of wanting to leave us. His first days with us he slept right up against the back door, as if afraid we might try to steal away from him in the night; and then in the mornings he’d be waiting for us there when we came out, manic after his long deprivation, bursting with his need for us. When it grew clear that he planned to stay my father finally built a doghouse for him from some scraps of old plywood, even took the trouble to paint it and to cover the roof with some shingles he found in the barn. He set the house in the courtyard against the back wall of the kiln, where it looked, with its fresh white walls and shingled roof, like a tiny mirror image of our own.
We all seemed to expect some crucial flaw to reveal itself in Lassie to explain his abandonment. Yet he took to the farm as if he’d been born to it, understood at once where he was allowed and where not, didn’t bother the chickens or the cats, didn’t chase cars or burrow in the fields or get in our way when we worked, his sudden appearance like a kind of miracle, as if he’d somehow leapt from the television into life. Only Rita seemed to see nothing unlikely in his having come, taking to him with a child’s unthinking acceptance that what was normal was simply whatever happened.
“Did you see the man who brought him? What did he say to you?”
“I don’t remember.”
Then when Lassie had been with us only a few weeks he was hit by a truck. From the boiler room I heard the long hard blare of a horn, a screech of brakes, came out to see Rita racing from across the road toward our lawn and Lassie a blur of motion behind her. The truck caught Lassie broadside and flung him a good dozen feet into the grass at the side of the road, where he lay unmoving, his head twisted unnaturally to one side. For an instant we seemed to remain frozen where we were, Rita on the lawn, me at the boiler-room door, the truck at its odd angle on the road; and then finally the truck’s driver climbed down from the cab. He was an enormous man, the fat layered so thickly around his belly and thighs he swayed like a water-filled balloon when he moved. He came over to Lassie and shook his head slowly, one hand wiping sweat from the back of his neck with a dirty handkerchief.
“She just came out like that,” he said, in a throaty monotone. But I wasn’t sure if he meant Rita or the dog.
My father had come out by then. He stood over Lassie and grunted with a kind of knowing grimness, as if he’d expected all along that Lassie would have a bad end. I was afraid he had seen what had happened and would blame Rita, but Rita had vanished.
“These damn dogs,” he said. “One is stupider than the next.” He’d taken on the special tone that he used with non-Italians, forcedly casual and authoritative, though it seemed oddly misplaced on this mountainous, thick-voiced man.
“Nice dog too,” the man said. “It’s too bad.”
My father and I carried Lassie into the orchard, his body still warm but limp as a sack.
“Dig a hole for it,” my father said, “or it’ll stink the whole place up.”
When I’d come back with a spade Rita had appeared again, was sitting in the dirt next to Lassie petting him and murmuring like a lullaby some lines from a nonsense song Tsia Taormina had taught her.
“Stupid, it’s dead,” I said. “Can’t you see it’s dead? Anyway it’s your fault.”
But Rita kept up her chant. I started digging, filled suddenly with an unfocused anger, then noticed a twitch in Lassie’s back leg. I thought it must be an after-death spasm of the sort animals had when they were slaughtered; but the leg began to paw the air slowly with the control of something alive, and then as casually as if he were simply rising from a sleep Lassie lifted his head, blinked, and rose unsteadily to his feet, whimpering and bobbing his head toward me with a guilty mournfulness.
“Can you believe that.” My father was standing suddenly at the edge of the orchard. “I never saw a thing like that before.”
Afterwards it was hard to shake that first sense of wonder at seeing Lassie rise up again as he had, even my father growing animated whenever he retold the story.
“He just got a knock on the head, that’s all,” Aunt Teresa said.
“Sì, let’s see if you get up again after a knock like that.”
But Rita seemed
to accept Lassie’s reawakening as unquestioningly as she’d accepted his arrival, all that mattered being the fact of his return, as if it hadn’t occurred to her at all that death could be some final, absolute state, beyond any redemption.
Summer began with a torrid heat: by midday the air hung so heavy and still that time seemed suspended, poised like a calm before a storm that would never come. My body appeared to have bloated with the swelter, to have become a dull, dead weight I’d been strangely burdened with, waited to shed now like a cocoon; at night sometimes it shifted against Rita’s and the muggy heat of our closeness made me dream this dead casing around me was slowly expanding, was threatening to swallow me in its folds of thickened flesh.
The weather made us all irritable; because of it we had to wake at five so we’d be finished our work in the greenhouses before the heat there became unbearable. Afterwards there were still the beans to be picked, the tomatoes to be hoed, the days stretching on infinitely, separated only by the dead sleep we fell into almost at once when we’d finished supper.
But Rita spent her days with Lassie, wandering the farm, lolling in the sun on the lawn. They were inseparable now, Lassie hanging on her with a blind solicitude, perhaps imagining in his animal’s version of things that Rita after all had somehow called him back from the dead.
“Ecco la principessa!” Aunt Teresa said to Rita. “You’re not a baby now, you should be out there working like Fiorina.”
But there seemed an acceptance that Rita had a kind of immunity from work, that to have expected her to take a role in our lives would have been an admission that she was part of the family.
Because of the heat we’d begun to take siestas after lunch, stretching out on the strip of lawn that flanked the courtyard under the shade of the maple trees there. My father played lazy games of fetch with Lassie or wrestled with him, good-humouredly aggressive, Rita sitting apart then, hunched in resentful silence at my father’s roughness. But during one of these bouts my father crossed some line and Lassie snapped suddenly at his hand. My father was outraged: he struck a full-handed blow against Lassie’s head, then another, Lassie bolting in cringing, yelping shame to his doghouse.
“Brutta bestia diavolo!”
A drop of blood had formed at the joint of my father’s thumb.
“Next time I’ll crack his skull.”
For days afterwards Lassie hung close to his house, approaching my father only in cowering repentance. My father teased him, seemed to have put his anger behind him; but there was an edge of contempt now in his baiting, a kind of disowning. I had the sense that some balance had been subtly altered, that Lassie had become contaminated by what had happened, like a charm or spell suddenly broken or gone awry. Even Aunt Teresa, who didn’t like animals much to begin with, was constantly shooing cats from between her feet and had always refused to help my father with his chickens, had begun to lose patience with him.
“Oh, frustilà.” And she’d swat him away like a fly.
More and more now the perception seemed to be that Lassie was not so much our dog as Rita’s, was a kind of indulgence she’d been allowed. Rita herself brazenly colluded in this shift: after my father’s outburst she began to conspire openly to keep him from us, leaving the table early after lunch to lead Lassie away from the courtyard before we came out.
“Is it possible she can’t help around the house sometimes?” my father said. “Her and that damn dog –”
But he said nothing to Rita.
Then he noticed how in Lassie’s absence the cats had begun to gravitate toward the leftovers Aunt Teresa or I set out for him after lunch.
“We’ll see, we’ll see if she goes on like this. And then after she brings him food from the house as if nobody sees what she’s doing.”
I was surprised my father watched her closely enough to detect such small delinquencies in her, that she could matter that much to him; yet still he said nothing to her, seemed walled up so surely in the silence that separated him from her that his anger couldn’t do anything more than relentlessly feed on its own impotence.
“My father’s angry at you,” I said to Rita, wanting the words to be adequate, to cut into her. But I saw from the fear in her eyes that she didn’t understand at all the power she had over my father, remembered that she was merely a child, that her mind could only work with the twisted, uncertain logic of one.
“It’s because of the cats,” I said, relenting. “Because you let them eat Lassie’s food and then bring him stuff from the house.”
But Rita, as if she’d understood only that the cats, somehow, had been the cause of my father’s anger, began now a silent war against them, keeping up a constant vigil around Lassie’s food dish and not suffering them to come close to Lassie at all. The cats, for their part, having early got over their suspicion of Lassie, learning to respond to his own overtures of friendship with a languorous nonchalance, now seemed to grow wary again. There were as many as a dozen of them on the farm at the time, part of a dynasty left to us when we’d taken it over – my father bred them like a kind of livestock, to keep down the rats, searching their litters out when they gave birth and setting one or two aside to carry on the line before drowning the rest; though where before they’d been as ubiquitous as air, now they grew strangely reclusive, could only be seen fleetingly rounding the corners of buildings or staring unfriendly from their dark retreats in the boiler room and barn.
But it turned out that some other terror had begun to conspire with Rita against the cats, one turning up dead one day in a corner of the barn. His corpse was so matted and stiff it might have been lying there already for weeks or months; but then another turned up a few days later in the bushes near the irrigation pond, this one still fresh, its neck showing teeth marks from an attack.
“Some damn fox or something,” my father said, and he reinforced the fence around the chicken run behind the barn.
But he’d begun to watch Lassie, noting the wide arc the cats made around him now whenever they passed. When we found a third cat dead in the boiler room my father carried it out to Lassie and flung it in front of him. Lassie stooped toward it warily, sniffed, whimpered, stepped back to bark, whimpered again.
“Always playing the innocent,” my father said. “We’ll see if you’re so innocent.”
The next-door neighbour, Mr. Olson, said he hadn’t seen a fox in our parts for fifteen years or more; the neighbour across the road, Mr. Dyck, had seen a racoon around his place in the previous weeks, but my father said he’d never heard of a racoon killing a cat. There were the other dogs on the concession, a vicious German shepherd the Kohls owned, a few others, but most had been around for years and had never come near our farm.
“He’s a smart one, that one,” Tsi’Umberto said. “He’s just playing with you, you’ll see he’s the one.”
Then a couple of weeks passed without any more killings, and in the flurry of work we had then with the end of summer it seemed the matter had been forgotten. But one morning my father returned to the house from his egg run to the barn red-faced with anger – something had broken into the chicken coop in the night. Some of the chickens had got out through the hole that had been burrowed under the outside fence and were wandering bewildered in the orchard behind the barn or scavenging among the bushes at the edge of the irrigation pond.
“Maybe it was the racoon that was at Dyck’s,” I said.
“Sì, a racoon was going to dig a hole like that.”
When we began to round up the chickens, we found one dead in the weeds at the edge of the pond, its neck broken.
“Cchella bestia, I’ll send them both to the devil, her and that stupid dog after her.”
In the evening, still raw with his anger, my father drove off with Lassie in his truck. Rita kept vigil by the back window till he returned, alone, an hour or so later, then closed herself away in our room without a word. I expected to find her crying there when I came in but the room was quiet.
“Are you okay?�
��
But she didn’t respond, merely lay there staring into the dark in unfathomable silence.
For several days afterwards she didn’t come out of the house at all, didn’t speak, simply sat watching TV the whole day with an air of entranced withdrawal.
“All this commedia about a dog,” Aunt Teresa said, not to Rita but to me, seeming to try to put some more normal cast on Rita’s strange mourning. “She should learn that she can’t always have her own way.”
But we had come full circle now, had retreated through what had happened back to our separate glooms, to the familiar tension in the house, my father’s familiar shutting down.
On the Sunday before Labour Day I took Rita to a matinée in town to try to break the spell of her bereavement; but the entire time she kept up her eerie silence, withdrawn into some private world, so empty of curiosity or desire it seemed she might crumble at a touch. Walking home we cut across a corn field, zig-zagging up its long gloomy rows, cut off then from the landscape by a thick wall of browning stalks and leaves; and for an instant I felt a peculiar self-consciousness at being alone with her there in that musty, becalmed silence, had a sudden awareness of her in her unknownness, heard her footsteps behind me like my own shadow suddenly taken solid shape and become a stranger to me.
IX
Some curse seemed to linger over us in the next weeks, an early frost leaving blistery lesions on the tomatoes and then two of our pickers quitting because of the trouble sorting the bad from the good. My father’s black mood grew blacker, something we had to accommodate now like another person living in the house. He’d begun to have stomach pains of some sort, eating special meals of milk and Campbell’s soup, the empty tins beginning to spot our garbage like odd bits of decoration. I imagined some tiny fire burning relentless in the pit of him, his inward-turned anger slowly beginning to feed on his own flesh.
From this darkness Rita and I set out for school every day like fugitives, standing rigid in the September chill to wait for the bus, our worn, unstylish clothes appearing to mark us as brother and sister. For the first week or so Rita clung to me like a frightened animal, the world, the newness of it, its enormity, seeming to panic her like sudden sight after blindness. Outside the unquestioning habitualness of home, what we thought of as normal there, she seemed a misshapen thing, as palely vulnerable and frail as a plant grown in insufficient light, ruined perhaps by the strange hermetic shadow-life we’d given her. Fiorina – Flora, she was called now – shunned her, had her own friends, her tiny world, flaunting it before Rita even as she ignored her; I could see the veiled understanding in Rita of how things were, felt repaid now for my own first contempt for Flora’s brothers years before.
