Instead

by Jason McIntyre

“Seen ’em before,” Danny said, careful not to show his face to his granddaughter. He coughed again. It was a deep, phlegmy thing way down in his chest. He recovered and said, “They’ve never been this far south, not for years.” He looked back towards that dark tunnel leading into the thicket. “I should have been on a better lookout. A winter like this, with all this cold we’ve had…I’ll be back before sundown.”

  He turned and headed for that dark hole.

  Saying nothing, Farrah turned and went back into the house.

  Wordlessly, she and Kath got Barrington rolled onto a large bedsheet, doubled up. They removed him from the house and took him out back of the shed where a plot and marker showed Danny’s wife. Another, small post marked the spot where Barrington’s mother lay in rest. The two women understood each other’s intentions and set the animal down there.

  They went back in the house and, without a word between them, finished cleaning the kitchen. They put their clothes and the cleaning rags into garbage bags.

  Farrah showered in the bathroom on the main floor and Kath had hers upstairs.

  Kath finished first and lit a fire in the living room fireplace. By that time, the sun was easing its hold and the world beyond the Hellegarde windows had begun to lose its light, finding itself swallowed by dark grey.

  Farrah was warm now, but could not stop shivering.

  3

  Danny arrived back at the yard around quarter-of-six. In the shed, he found a painting drop cloth and took it around back, presumably to cover the animal. Though, from the windows of the house, neither Kath or Farrah could see exactly what he was doing back there.

  He came in the house and propped the rifle in the corner by the stacks of beer cases and newspapers. He was pink in the cheeks and nose. He kicked off his muddy boots and silently climbed the stairs.

  Farrah and Kath sipped tea in the quiet while they waited. The water in the shower ran for a half hour or longer, then it stopped. In time, Danny creaked down the stairs. He wore his tattered robe with strings hanging from the collar and sleeves.

  He sat in the big easy chair closest to the fire. His grey hair was wet and combed back. He’d shaved. He looked like he was ready for church. Finally, he spoke.

  “I tracked them for a couple miles. Over the creek. Up past the new places, across Predis. Caught sight of them at one point.

  “There was a man out there with them.”

  “A man?” Farrah and her mother both said nearly in unison.

  Farrah thought of the redheaded man. Maybe Kath had the same fleeting vision.

  “Yeah, never seen him before. He wasn’t hunting. Don’t know what he’d be doing out there. This time of year, too. Wasn’t dressed for snow. He was wearing dressy shoes. Black leather tippers. Like you’d wear to a…well…to a funeral. Last one of those I went to was in the fall. Nice woman. Weird situation. Someone bust into the house after we had the burial.

  “Never laid eyes on the guy, but it’s weird that we’d have another vagrant or a lost camper out here, ’specially so soon.

  “I followed him for a while. Strangest thing. The strays went right to him. I was gonna shout to him, warn him, but he saw them coming. They came and sniffed at him. They licked his hand. By God, it was a sight. They still had Baz’ blood on their snouts but they went right up to this odd-looking feller and licked his hand. One by one, as if he had peanut butter smeared up his sleeve.

  “So I call out to him.

  “I say, ‘Hey there,’ but he only turned to look at me, then kept walking. The dogs scattered. I didn’t want to shoot at them with him there. No matter how angry I was, I couldn’t put anyone in harm’s way. Even if he was what yer daddy says is the lowest form of life on earth, a tourist.”

  Danny let out a laugh then caught himself. He glanced toward the kitchen doorway and that patch of floor where he’d spent an hour trying to save his dearest remaining friend. He looked at the girls, tears in his eyes.

  “Poor bugger,” he said, his voice cracking. “Too dumb to know he couldn’t make friends with those wild ones. Too far gone, crazy, starving animals like them.”

  Farrah wanted to say that those animals were vicious and unkempt. They were all those things, but they weren’t starving. And they weren’t wild. Not exactly. And she wanted to tell Gramps that Barrington never wanted to make friends with them. That wasn’t what he was doing, not even for a second. When she saw Baz out with them yesterday running through the field, she had been mistaken. There was no ‘palling around’ with them. Not for Bazzy.

  But Danny knew. He was just talking. This was his grief. And for him it was talking out loud.

  Being out here in his own section of nowhere, he’d not had anyone to talk things out with. Farrah (and Kath too, it seemed) was going to let him say what he needed to say.

  4

  Grandpa Danny rose from his chair slowly. Hi knees gave a pop, each. He rubbed his hands together as he stood with the orange-yellow flicker of firelight on him. “Can’t get warm,” he said. He turned and gave a solemn smile to his granddaughter before leaving the room. From here, she could see him trundle down the hall and across to the kitchen where he gave a wide berth to the place where he had failed to revive his Labrador.

  On the other side of the island bar, he clunked around a bit and finally came back to the counter with a bottle of Dewar’s White Label, what Farrah’s father had once told her was the older man’s go-to weakness in bottled form. He poured a shot in a short glass and threw back his head to down it. He paused, letting the burn of the Scotch whisky linger. Then he glanced at that spot on the kitchen floor and poured himself a second without looking away. He downed that one, winced against the heat, paused and then let out a loud harrumph of a cough to clear his throat.

  He slowly made his way back to the living room where the women sat with their backs in darkness and their fronts in the gently twinkle of heat-glow from the fire.

  “I’m sorry,” Danny said at the opening to the living room where he stood, throwing a shadow out behind him that moved and shuffled as though it was alive. “Sorry you had to see that…and be there for it. But thanks for bringing him home, for helping me to…try. I could have taken him out back—”

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Kath said. “We didn’t mind...carrying him.” She looked at her father and brought her knees up to her chin in a fetal hug while she looked back at the fire.

  Farrah asked, “Mom? Why’d you go after Baz? Out into the woods, I mean. You tore off down that path like the wind.”

  “Did I?” Kath said. “I don’t even really remember. I was in shock, I think. Didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “You could have gotten really hurt. Those dogs were…they’re aggressive. Wild.”

  Kath didn’t say anything further. She looked vacantly into the burning fire and only nodded her head slowly like she had on the drive up here. She didn’t acknowledge her daughter any more that night.

  The two of them had eaten sandwiches an hour ago. A boring supper but just something to fill their bellies since they’d missed lunch dealing with what had happened.

  “I’m tired,” Kath finally said. She got up and looked like she was shivering too, even though she’d been sitting closest to the hot fire for a good hour or more. She leaned over and kissed Farrah on the forehead. She walked to Danny in the entryway and hugged him quickly before Farrah heard her in the hallway and creaking up the stairs. She wondered if Mom would be cutting her nighttime pill in half like they’d discussed.

  Danny came and sat with Farrah. When they heard the bathroom door upstairs click and the water running, he said. “She’s not quite back with us yet.”

  “No,” Farrah said with a sigh. It was a reluctant admission.

  “I don’t want to upset you—we’ve had more than enough of that today—but your mom—they gave her different kinds of...therapy, while she was away.”

  Farrah crinkled her brow and her nose, a leftover look from childhood, and a look that Danny re
membered well in that instant. “Therapy?” she asked her gramps.

  “She’d never want you to know, but it was electro shock. She never said a word to me, not about any of the hard parts of her life at the hospital—but I was writing letters to her doctors in the early days. You can see the scars in her temples. Broke my heart to hear it, but knowing how bad she was back then, I…well, I accepted it.”

  Farrah swallowed a lump. She didn’t look at Gramps. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I need you to be realistic. I need you to know that, even if we want it all to be exactly like it was, it might take a long time. And…it might not ever get there. Not after something like that.”

  Farrah said nothing, only stared with glassy eyes at the fire as its brew fell to a lower colour and a lower heat.

  “In the war,” Danny said, “I heard of men coming back from the other side, you know, after the treaty got its signatures. They just opened the gates and let our young men come home—”

  “You never talk about the war—” Farrah said, blinking hard in Danny’s direction.

  “I know, but this is important. Those young men, they’d been captured. Some never came home. And some…they did but they were not the same. Some of them had been blasted with electricity. The same kind of thing your mother got in the hospital when she was…sick.”

  Upstairs the running water stopped. The bathroom door drew open and both Grandpa and Farrah listened as Mom’s light footsteps strode down the hall before her bedroom door clicked shut. Bedsprings squeaked gently a moment later.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Farrah said again, the defensiveness of a child in her voice.

  “You’re an adult now,” Danny said gently and putting his hand on her knee. “Time to put away childish things.”

  “Can’t we just—?” She wiped at tears that betrayed her by tracking down one cheek.

  “We can,” Danny said. “But it’s harder in the long run if we don’t face certain things. The truth, I guess is the blasted name for it.”

  Farrah shifted suddenly, turned around in a flop and crossed her legs to stare directly at Danny. “I think she went out there,” she said in a huff and sucking back phlegm and snot to try and regain control.

  “Out where?” Danny asked with a look of mild confusion.

  “Before…Bazzy…and those dogs. Mom was sleepwalking last night. She was all messed up and banging into the linen closet. I think she thought something was in there…out there, I don’t know. I put her back to bed, but in the morning, her feet were all muddy. She had gone out in the yard, I think. She went down the path, same one Bazzy and those dogs did.”

  Danny thought for a moment.

  “Your Grandma Kit, she used to sleepwalk. Lots of what your mother’s gone through is the same as Kitty. I don’t know about things like that being hereditary but…did your mom say anything?”

  “She said something about the redheaded man.”

  Danny’s face went slack.

  “Thing is, Gramps, I think I might know who she’s talking about. I knew a redheaded man when I was a kid—”

  “Sean Ketwood,” Danny said. “Lived just north of here with his wife and two boys. He picked you up from a bad spill the night Dougie’s mom died. I remember him telling me.”

  It was Farrah’s turn to make a funny face. “You knew him?”

  “Knew of him, I guess. There weren’t any other electricians. He put in an outlet for the new stove,” he said nodding in the direction of the kitchen and considering things, turning them over in his head like a book with upside-down and backwards writing on its jacket.

  “Was that who you saw out there…tonight? Mr. Ketwood. The one that had the dogs licking his hands?”

  Danny shrugged his lips, “Heavens, no, this guy—I didn’t want to freak your Mom out—but this guy was…different-looking. His skin was all leathery and his hair was patchy. He was wearing a suit jacket and pants that didn’t match. Sean Ketwood, poor feller, he went and put his gun in his mouth, oh, must be four or five years ago.”

  “That’s right,” Farrah said, feeling her face flush. That had been the last time she’d thought of the redheaded man, when she’d heard about his end at school. His two boys were quite a few years younger than Farrah and Jamie. The teacher had given their class a ‘closed-door talk’ about how to treat the boys after that.

  She’d liked Sean Ketwood. In the months after he’d brought her home after the tumble she took, she’d seem him someplace and that would remind her. She’d go home and have the strangest dreams that night, dreams that, she would never admit to Grandpa Danny or Mom, had made her feel naughty. There were frogs and puzzling insects in those dreams too. But in the dreams, she didn’t mind when those things crawled over her. They’d made her feel good. She remembered that those dreams were intense and she’d wake up from them feeling good, never bad. But, over time, those dreams and the memories of them had faded away to become a crumpled photograph in an album barely picked up anymore.

  She’d thought of them fleetingly on the day she’d found out about Mr. Ketwood and his gun. But not again since, not until this morning, in the wee hours, when Mom had been talking about a redheaded man.

  “Did Mom know him?” she asked.

  Danny thought for a moment. “Likely,” he said. “He really was the only electrician left.”

  That’s not exactly what Farrah meant. She thought of how her Mom and Dad had fought during those months before Mom had finally left. It had happened one day while Farrah was at school and she had come home to have one of Doug Birkhead’s ‘difficult talks’, this one about where Mom was and why. Though her memories of those understandings were as hazy as those of the frogs and the naughty dreams with Mr. Ketwood in them.

  She never understood why Mom had gone. Had only grown into the idea over time: that Mom was sick.

  Farrah said nothing for a few minutes. Danny sat with her. The silence grew to be uncomfortable.

  “The dogs,” Farrah said. “Will they come back?”

  “I don’t think so, sweetie,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to worry about. We’re sealed in here, tighter’n a drum.” He gave a smile and a reassuring leg squeeze. His breath smelled of Scotch Whiskey, but not in a bad way.

  “What if they do?”

  “They won’t,” he said.

  Farrah waited, not wanting to say it. Then she did. “I want to call my dad.”

  5

  The two of them let Farrah’s words linger in the air.

  A log snapped in the fireplace and sparks burst. A shot of vibrant orange flame licked at the air and brightened the young woman’s face.

  Grandpa Danny straightened his back up and looked at the fire too. He said, “In the morning, after a good sleep. It’s late now. Tomorrow, I’ll head back out and I’ll take care of the pack.”

  Farrah said, “Did you hear me? We have to call Dad.”

  “Not necessary,” Danny said. He pursed his lips and leaned closer to the fire. Farrah couldn’t tell if his face had reddened or if it was coloration from the fire.

  “Gramps,” she said. “He’s the Chief of Police.” Her tone was that of a school girl telling her teacher that she would never need to learn logarithms because she intended to marry rich.

  She tilted down at him as he leaned on his knees and stared at the patterns of the fire. “He can go and talk to this guy out there. If someone is feeding those dogs, they’re going to keep hanging around. They’re brazen enough to come right into the yard here and go after Baz. Imagine if they got the guts to head into town. There’s kids. Dad needs to know.”

  She tried to get Danny’s attention, but he only stared at the black logs and the flames eating them up.

  “Dad’s got staff. He talks with the mayor every day. They can, I don’t know, get a group of men to go in and take care of the problem. Before anyone gets hurt.”

  Danny let out a huff. “It’s too cold this year. Any camper out there would be a fr
ozen bump on the ground after the winter we’ve had. I haven’t seen or smelled a lick of smoke except ours.”

  He looked at Farrah now. “Sides, I can head out and take care of the problem by midday.”

  He got up and stood towering over Farrah for a moment. “We’re not calling,” he said. He turned and went down the hall to the kitchen, presumably for another shot of Scotch.

  After a few minutes of fuming, Farrah got up from the couch. She knew better than to argue with a man who’d lived alone for as long as Gramps had. He didn’t have to compromise on anything and had, quite likely, forgotten how to do it. Farrah, an only child, raised mainly by one parent, knew how but it was different. They might not see eye-to-eye on this. And she understood why. Her father had married Grandpa Danny’s only daughter and that had fallen apart. Avoiding his son-in-law, this is all Gramps was doing.

  The fire was dying. She was chilly and exhausted. She’d check on Mom then get some sleep herself. “Going to bed,” she said as she headed up the loud stairs. No reply from Danny in the kitchen. Just the clink of glassware.

  Upstairs, Farrah cracked Mom’s bedroom door as quietly as she could. Mom was under blankets on her back. They’d put fresh sheets on the bed after they’d taken care of the kitchen cleanup in the afternoon. So much for a holiday. Time at Grandpa Danny’s had been stressful, tearful and tiring.

  Maybe it would get better tomorrow. Maybe she would do what Dad always suggested: sleep on it. Things always looked brighter in the morning, he’d often told her.

  She didn’t bother brushing her teeth. She’d done them after supper. She was too tired. She flicked off her own lamp and got under the covers. The familiar smell of mustiness of these sheets reminded her of Grandma Kit and, subsequently, of childhood. She was too young for nostalgia, she thought as she drifted.

  As her mind gained relaxation, it swirled with images and ideas. She saw those dogs’ teeth ripping at poor Baz, taking his throat, going at his ribcage. The film of this played over in her head, but, thankfully, in stark silence. She didn’t hear the awful noise of them, or the barking, or her Mom shouting at the animals to leave Bazzy alone.