We Are Taking Only What We Need

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  “Cal! Cal!” I yelled toward the house not willing to move or to take my eyes off of Daddy for fear he might change his mind.

  “We ought to throw this box of mutts in a creek,” he said, trying to tease.

  “Why would you say that? That’s cruel.”

  Daddy shrugged, embarrassed again that his attempt at reconciliation backfired. “I wouldn’t. That’s just the way people used to do it. Either that, or leave them on the side of the road. People leave horses now. You know it?”

  Tammy pursed her lips in disbelief. “No, they don’t.”

  “They do. It takes a lot to feed a horse and ain’t nobody got money to buy it. This guy at the shop ended up with two like that. Went outside to his pasture and instead of two horses, he had four.” Daddy laughed. “They don’t work that damn fast.”

  Tammy didn’t seem sure that she wasn’t being put-on, and she smacked Daddy’s arm to signal that he was back in her good graces. “You think you can tell me anything and I’ll believe it.”

  I knew Daddy wasn’t joking. I could tell he was serious, and the idea of waking up in the morning to the baleful, ignorant eyes of a horse terrified me. I concentrated on the box of puppies as Daddy settled it onto the ground. The pups tried to get out of the box, huffing and puffing, standing on, and crawling over, one another for advantage.

  “Cal, get out here,” Daddy yelled.

  “What?”

  “You come out here and see what.”

  Daddy was not the kind of parent to play one child against the other. There was no good child or bad child at our house. Only the certainty that at any moment you could go wrong and open the wounds of his anger, make the mistake that taxed or burdened him, told the story with your exasperated sigh, your briefly rolled eyes, the whined why not or everybody else can whetting your lips, but you dared not say it, since the subtext meant that you never had appreciated his sacrifices and never would.

  Cal stopped at the door and saw the box thumping from inside with fuzzy life, his face a picture of joy I can’t recall to this day without tears. Cal reached in the box to touch a pup, though none of them stopped the struggle to escape.

  For an hour, an evening, I’m not sure, since everything had changed for us, Cal and I sat with the puppies and watched them. To our delight, their combined weight finally succeeded in turning the box over onto the grass. All three puppies, from instinct, from first sight, from the animal knowledge that danger was close, too close, ran out of our yard as fast as they could, but of course we caught them.

  THE PUPPIES WERE TOO YOUNG and cried all night. Before we fell asleep, we heard them whimper at the dark, after we must have closed our eyes and forgotten them, and their whines settled like fine sand in our ears and nostrils. They had one another, but that wasn’t enough. At some time in the night, Daddy covered them with a trash can to try to muffle the pitiful sound. We didn’t know they weren’t weaned. How could we have known?

  The quiet one, my puppy, died in two days. I startled awake as I always did and went straight outside to see her. I hadn’t even had a chance to decide on a name, though Iggy, Otch, Scamp, and Victoria were all in the running. I’d never named a living thing and wanted it to be just right.

  While the other puppies were already out of the box, my pup appeared to sleep. While her brother and sister sniffed at gravel or dug their baby paws in the red clay, looking for a nugget of something killed, a disgusting treat under every piece of detritus, every stray piece of litter, my dog stayed put in the box. As he did every weekday, Daddy had gone to pick up Tammy to baby-sit.

  “Daddy, she won’t get out.”

  “Let the dog sleep.”

  “No, she’s not. She’s not asleep.”

  “You touched a dead dog?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t.”

  “Don’t touch it again.”

  “I didn’t, Daddy,” I said. I knew better. My mother was a champion napper, a log, until sometimes Cal and I, hovering over her, whispered to each other, wanting to poke her gently, rest our hands on her chest‚ to feel the rise and fall of her breath. Mama? Mama? But we didn’t dare touch her. We would know what we most feared. If we were alone in the world and nothing would ever stand between us and the dark, at least we would not touch that sadness for ourselves. Ma wouldn’t wake until whatever it was reached in and shook her upright. The explanation like most answers was a simple one. Our mother’s nights were full of vacuuming, laundry, staring out a dirty window at nothing at all, but not with sleep. All Cal and I knew of our mother’s nightlife was a wafer of yellow light under the door, the lulling factory sound of a sewing machine in our shared dreams.

  “She didn’t know he was dead, Roger,” Tammy said, startling me by calling my father by his name. I had forgotten that he had one.

  Daddy shook the box, kicked it, mumbled under his breath something that sounded like it had teeth. He came from around the house with a shovel and dragged it behind him, along with the box, to the woods. He would bury my dog, I thought. Daddy was back in a minute, maybe less, the sides of the empty box bent, torn, and scratched, banged against his leg. In the long afternoon, when I could take no more television and the sweltering heat of the house or my brother’s hundred slow-motion trips to stand, door open, and examine the insides of the mostly empty refrigerator, I went to bury my puppy myself. I wasn’t far in the woods when I saw her on her side, arms and legs pointed straight out like a toy. I started to dig a hole with a stick, when her rigid death, immutable and undignified, stung me. Many years later, I would tell the story of my puppy, my first pet, and how I labored with that stick, dug the terrible hole, patted the earth into a mound on top of her the way it is done, made a monument to her with sticks and rocks, instead of leaving her like trash.

  “You got other dogs,” Daddy said, which I knew meant that he was sorry.

  RIGHT BEFORE LUNCH, the white boy from the flea market came to our house. I hadn’t noticed when he arrived, but there he was in our kitchen, hanging on Tammy like a monkey.

  The boy had his hands around her waist from behind, looking directly at me in the doorway.

  “Stop. She’s going to see,” Tammy whispered.

  “She don’t care. Do you?” The boy nuzzled Tammy’s neck, not waiting for my reply.

  “Go,” Tammy said shrugging him off. “I’ll see you later.” The boy walked past me to his low-riding car. Tammy glanced a look of worry at me. “Tomorrow we can make snow-cones. I know how. You want to?”

  “Yeah,” I said. The lie was such a good one even Tammy believed it.

  “Don’t tell your daddy, okay?”

  I nodded, though I couldn’t be sure what I’d do.

  In the weeks following, Mike came to our house nearly every day, sometimes with McDonald’s french fries, sometimes with candy bars so melted we had to lick most of the chocolate off the wrappers. There was still no reason to like him.

  CAL’S DOG, BROWNIE, lived for nearly three weeks after mine. And then, just like my dog’s, his death was quiet and sudden, except this time when we woke, Daddy had already come back from the woods, had already put the shovel back to the shed in the backyard. Bobo, Tammy’s dog, was the only pup left. In the strange logic that sometimes afflicts animals and children, Bobo ignored the children, tolerated Tammy, but loved my father, the person in the house who paid her the least attention. Bobo followed Daddy around the house, to the basement, rested beside him as he worked on refinishing his furniture, perked her ears, the insides unexpectedly pink like a turned-down lip, when she heard Daddy’s tires hit the gravel at the top of the road. Bobo insisted that Daddy love her, made sure that if any of his love happened to fall like crumbs from a table, she would be there to catch it on her tongue.

  Daddy did not seem to mind. In fact, Bobo had privileges given to no other dog, and, only a few times, to children in Daddy’s house. Bobo got to come into Daddy’s bedroom. I didn’t know that for sure until I saw her for myself, chewing like a maniac on one o
f Tammy’s flip-flops. The sight of the smelly dog on his carpet shocked me. That the world could be so different from what I imagined. That I could have been so wrong. Daddy and Tammy on his bed, Tammy leaned against the wobbling headboard like a starlet, while Daddy draped sideways at the foot of the bed, the bottoms of Tammy’s blackened bare feet inches from Daddy’s face. I saw him grab her calf. I saw her lean to him, her small breasts struggling to escape the lax policing of her tank top. Tammy was the first to notice me in the doorway.

  “Your daughter is in here.”

  Daddy leapt up from the bed, scaring Bobo into stillness. “You ready to go home?” he said to Tammy.

  Tammy laughed like Daddy had just said something hilarious. “I’m ready, honey,” she giggled.

  It was dark already and Daddy had still not returned from dropping Tammy off at her home. Cal was too impatient to wait any longer for dinner, so he ate a row of saltines from the box, three slices of American cheese, the cellophane wrappers floating behind him down the hall as he chewed, the last of the family-sized box of Lucky Charms cereal sprinkled like gold dust in his hands. When the phone rang, I was sure it was Daddy, but Tammy’s voice, younger than in person, sang over the line. “Portia, are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Daddy’s not here.”

  “Portia, I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  “I don’t know. Isn’t he there?”

  I nodded no, though, of course, she couldn’t see my response.

  “I have to tell you something important.” Tammy sighed like what she was about to say might hurt her. I didn’t want to hear it.

  “I was pregnant. You know what I mean? The baby died, but I was still pregnant. You know?”

  I was eleven. I didn’t know. I had no idea.

  “Are you surprised?”

  “Yes,” I said, though the fact made no impression on me. Nothing of what she said had shape or existence for me. I was years from understanding the consequences.

  “You want to know what it felt like?”

  I am eleven years old. I am eleven years old. “Yeah,” I said aware that I had whispered.

  “Nothing else in the world. I swear, just wait. I knew I was but didn’t tell anybody. I got tests, three of them. They were all positive, but I already knew it. A couple of weeks later I started bleeding.” Tammy sniffled into the phone. She was crying. “Something comes sliding down my leg. Like Jell-O, like grape Jell-O.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It was a baby,” Tammy’s voice became hard as she tried to get me to understand. “Your sister.” Tammy wailed.

  I waited while Tammy sniffled into the phone.

  “You know what I did,” she whispered like she couldn’t tell any bigger secret. “I ate some of it,” Tammy whispered. “I really did,” she insisted like I’d protested.

  “What did it taste like?”

  Tammy was so quiet on the phone for so long I thought, for a moment, she’d hung up. Apparently, I’d asked just the right question to convince her that she would get nothing useful from me.

  “I don’t know. Nothing. I just wanted you to know. Your daddy’s not gonna tell you, but you should know.”

  BY THE TIME DADDY GOT HOME, the country sky had turned scary dark, the kind that came and dissolved before your eyes. Daddy plopped himself at the kitchen table, rested his head in his hands.

  “Portia, sit down here.” Daddy scraped a chair across the wood floor in my direction.

  “You doing all right?”

  In my life, I couldn’t remember a day that my father had asked how I was. He was Old School, and Old School parents don’t ask about your welfare. If you are fed and not bleeding, you are fine. You learn to believe this. There is no secret part of you that is not cured by food or a tourniquet. If you suspect differently, tamp it down, the feeling will go away.

  “You can tell me the truth,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Has Mike been to this house?”

  I must have looked confused.

  “Did Tammy ever bring anybody to this house? Anybody? Tell your daddy the truth.”

  Daddy’s softness wounded me. He wanted me to break his heart. I didn’t know it then, but the question that breaks your heart never wants an answer. That question is looking for a miracle and just the right combination of words to make the sharp pieces of the world dull and harmless, floating by like flakes in a snow globe.

  “This boy came. A white one,” I said, feeling the power of the knowledge, oblivious to my father’s pain. “He came a lot.”

  Daddy’s face collapsed.

  “Was that Mike?” I asked, feeling small and young again. The temporary power from hurting dissipated, leaving my chest concave and desperate for air.

  Daddy didn’t answer.

  “Go on in the living room and watch TV.”

  Daddy got on the phone in the kitchen, and in minutes, he was crying into the receiver. He didn’t care one damn bit if she didn’t love him. Oh, so he was funny, was that it? He was not the dramatic one. He was not an old man. He’d show her old man. She was the one better look out for the police. He had a fucking life!

  After he slammed down the phone, Daddy locked himself in his room, came out fully composed with his shotgun in his hand.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Stay in here.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Here’s what I don’t know. If Daddy called Bobo, I did not hear it. Maybe the puppy bounded up to him as usual. But I suspect that small lives learn to be shrewd. Though Bobo had never seen a shotgun, and the pup had no need to fear the object or the man, the dog surely smelled the stench of a rotting place in my father, the awful wound that made him the worst combination of desperate and determined. But Bobo probably waited, too knowing, too forgiving, to run. I heard the squeal of the pup so close to the shotgun blast I couldn’t swear they didn’t happen at the same time.

  I ran to the door in time to see my father pick up the dog and carry it to the back seat of the car. My father’s shirt was stained like he’d been the one shot. Blood marked his middle like a fatal wound.

  “Daddy!” I screamed, though I knew what I was seeing couldn’t be true.

  “Get Cal and let’s go,” he said.

  I ran back inside and pulled up Cal from the couch, dragged him by the arm as I wiped my eyes. “Just come on,” I hissed.

  “In the front,” Daddy said. “And don’t look back there.”

  But I looked, I couldn’t help it, and all I saw was a sleeping dog, and in that light, the only evidence of hurt was a patch of blood-stuck fur on her tiny back.

  Daddy said nothing until we got to Mama’s apartment.

  “Go on. Get on out.”

  Cal climbed out obediently while I sat waiting for something to come to me to say. “I hate you,” I said with calm surprise, like I’d just discovered it.

  “I know it,” he said, and drove away while we stood like orphans on the sidewalk.

  WE HEARD THAT Daddy left that dead dog on Tammy’s parents’ doorstep. He parked his car down the road from their house until the police made him move. They say he called her so many times that her daddy yanked the phone down from the kitchen wall, breaking it into pieces. My mother said he was crazy. “He loves you until he has to work for it,” she said. “Then he’s an ass.”

  But Daddy had it right. If I learned nothing else, I learned that love demands tribute. And whatever else you can say about crazy love, it is tenacious, it must be hyperbolic to survive or cooler heads, wise people with good sense—practical sorts who never find themselves drunk, crying, and stupid in the middle of the road—all those people and their boring practical reasonableness and their this-is-the-best-way, they win. And if that happens, love never gets the chance to look you in the eyes, inches from your face, never gets to say, Let me, let me, let me. You won’t regret it. Let me. Oh, Daddy, forgive me. I have been a fool.


  Unassigned Territory

  Leslie Pawlowski parks her blue Horizon on the shoulder of the dirt road—the best shade we can find. July is a killer in North Carolina. It’s always hot as blazes, hot enough for you, hot enough to fry eggs and on and on. We are in the thick of it, midmorning, our dresses clinging to our backs, way far in the middle of nowhere, preaching door to door, working in our congregation’s unassigned territory. This is the kind of dirt road, Hee-Haw, overalls, straw-in-the-teeth place even we Southerners make fun of. Pikes and Wagoners country. Did you hear the one about the Pike girl who went to a town doctor? The doctor says to her mother, ‘Ma’am has this girl had intercourse?’ and the mother, hands wringing, says, ‘I don’t rightly know, doctor, but if she needs it, you make sure you give it to her.’

  The passenger’s side window sticks in the middle of going up or down. Piece of junk car. And on the way to every door, we shed bits of poly foam from the car’s cracked upholstery. Leslie has a great attitude about her poverty. “Halcyon, salad days” she will remember with a withering chuckle when her future kids complain of their own first cars. We’ve visited too many houses without updating our field-service records, and we stop before we forget the details. We need to keep records. Records for ourselves, for the congregation file on the territory, and for the official log we store at the Kingdom Hall.

  “What was that woman’s name at the blue trailer, Steph?”

  I shuffle through my notebooks knowing I won’t find any useful information. You are supposed to write things like Ruth Boaz, 123 Main Street, blue trailer, lived in town all her life, no husband in the house, four kids—one still at home. Took the July 1989 Awake, “Making the Most of Your Youth.” Expressed an interest in tarot. Bring magazine Why Godly People Shun Spiritism. My records are to say the least incomplete. I wrote: Trailer is a nightmare. Looks like the time my brother and I played drug czar with an old suitcase and Monopoly money. Ryan threw my clothes and shoes out of the dresser and closet screaming, “Where’s the real stash! Where’s the real stash!”