Before We Sleep

by Jeffrey Lent

  She waited and then, cautious, not sure if she should speak, not sure what charm was being spun, ventured, “What?”

  “Why he gone keep turning around to make sure you chasing right behind him. Yes, ma’am. That’s what I see there, that pup. So, no. He ain’t for sale. Worthless, like that? But, you take him home, take care a him like you will, he gone be a fine little dog just for you. You hear?”

  “Oh, my,” she said. “You mean it?”

  “Why yes. I do. I think so. But you forget one thing, ain’t you?”

  “I did?”

  “You got to ask you papa it be all right with him.”

  She looked at Oliver.

  After a moment he said, “We can discuss the rules on the ride home. But I think it will really help with Mom if you had a name for him before we get there. She’ll be home from school.”

  “Tinker,” she said. “I’m going to call him Tinker.”

  “Now there,” Cappy Levesque said. “A good name, that one.”

  Katey said, “Daddy’s always tinkering with something. What Mom says.”

  The puppy chewed a pair of rawhide laces from a pair of Oliver’s boots and while snowshoeing he clambered upon the back of Katey’s small shoes and tumbled her headfirst into the snow but they couldn’t leave him home because he would not so much howl as bay, a deep-chested roar of outrage and anguish. While still very young he made his way onto a chair and then the table and when Ruth returned from a quick trip out of the room, she discovered he’d eaten an entire plate of cookies. Summers, he would not quit or be dissuaded from digging his own den under one of the apple trees, where he’d spend the hottest afternoons, as well as seek quick shelter from rain if not caught first and brought inside. Except for Katey’s bed, he was not allowed on the furniture and he seemed to understand this but protested the policy when left home alone—the opening of the door was accompanied by the loud thump of his jumping down from the sofa or a living room chair. He would bark at night to any passing car; other times the cause was not so obvious but from his daytime patrols the family knew he included all dogs, cats, once a woodchuck in the garden and once—learned hard at dawn by his furious determination to be let outside—as Ruth, for she had been the one to let him out, heard a sound from the dog, somewhere between a cough and gasp and then even before he came crying to her the air carried the dense sour rime of skunk. He had a passion for garbage of any sort and haunted the family of chipmunks that made their home in the barn foundation, killing a few over the years. He snored loudly while sleeping and even with frequent baths carried about him a pungency, the odor of hound. And, despite Levesque’s prediction, he was an ardent trailer of rabbits, often of a summer causing them to drive the backroads above Beacon Hill, calling his name and stopping to hike out into fields to call some more. Twice he was gone overnight and while Oliver feared the worst, both times the next morning he come loping and panting back into the yard to bark at the door to be let in, then to sleep for the rest of the day.

  When he wasn’t a bother he was a plague upon them. But he was a shadow of Katey and once she started school and after his first weeks every year baying over her absence, he’d settle into the workshop with Oliver until midafternoon when he knew she’d be walking up the hill, then whining to be let out to meet her. He seemed to know weekend mornings, although Ruth pointed out this behavior was not brilliance but observation: there was no alarm set and Katey simply slept until she woke. Tinker happily stretched out on his side atop her blankets.

  In his third October, two weeks apart while hiking with Katey after school up Beacon Hill, he encountered a porcupine. While Katey tried to hold him, his head flaring bloody slobber from his mouth as Oliver worked over his tongue and gums with tweezers and a fine pair of needle-nose pliers, she asked if he’d not learn better. “Perhaps,” Oliver said. “Or perhaps the temptation is just too great. You’ll only have to keep him close a couple more weeks, then the porcupines will be hibernating. That’s why you run into em this time of year.”

  Tinker roared with pain and outrage.

  “Daddy, you’re hurting him.”

  “Lord, Kate. I’m doing the best I can.”

  Summers, weekends, and afternoons he went where Katey went, as long as she was on foot or her bike. A friendly dog, he’d growl at strangers and Oliver and Ruth never doubted her safety, in town or in the woods, as long as he was with her. But his life excluded automobiles—he became excited in the car or the truck, slobbering heavy ropes of drool, even coughing up clear bile. When he had to go along, she carried a towel to wipe his muzzle, dashboards, windows.

  Despite Oliver’s initial silent prediction, it took eleven years for Tinker to break Katey’s heart. He began to lose weight although his stomach grew larger. She’d seen photographs in National Geographic of sub-Saharan children that reminded her of Tinker. The vet palpated and contemplated and then sat with Tinker, Katey, and Oliver as he explained that the dog had growths in his stomach, likely within his intestines as well. She said, “Can you take them out?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re everywhere. It would kill him if I tried.”

  “What will happen, then?”

  “They’ll continue to grow. I can’t say how quickly. But there will come a time when he won’t be able to eat. At all. He’ll become very bloated and uncomfortable. And he’ll be starving, also. His kidneys may fail. It’s hard to determine what the course might be—one thing affects another and so on. Do you understand?”

  Tinker was on her lap, she was stroking him. She said, “What can we do?”

  “Not much. Take care of him, feed him a little bit a few times a day, rather than all at once. As long as he’ll do it, exercise is probably a good idea, just don’t overdo it.”

  “I don’t want him to hurt.”

  “Neither do I. When the time comes, and it will most likely be clear, the best thing then will be to put him down.”

  “Kill him?”

  “I can give him a shot. He’ll know no pain.”

  She bent over the dog and a tear struck her hand. Tinker licked the wet from her skin. She remained like that a long pause and then looked up and said, “No. I’ll take care of him. I’ll find ways to feed him. He trusts me. I won’t abandon him.”

  She didn’t see her father and the vet exchange looks. But the vet said, “Of course you won’t. And, as I said, there’s no way to know how it will be for him. I can help with ideas for food and I’ll see him anytime you want me to. All right?”

  She’d stood, gathering the dog tight and careful to her chest. She was crying but she looked first to her father, then to the vet. And said, “All right. Thank you. Daddy, can we go now?”

  “Of course you can go,” the vet said. “But I want you to think about one thing, as you go along. Okay?”

  “What?”

  “When the time comes, we—you and me, too—hope for him to pass easy. But Katey, if he comes to great constant pain, you have to ask yourself, Is he suffering for you, or is he suffering his own way out of life?”

  The last week he’d take no food at all, the hamburger and rice she cooked and mixed with beef broth and mashed with her own hands into a paste. He’d lick her fingers but not eat. He was oddly massive, as if somewhere within him he was resurging. But it had been weeks since he could make the leap onto her bed and so she’d made a nest of blankets and quilts on the floor and slept with him, daytime lifting him onto her lap until she quit that because those efforts broke a painful sharp yelp from him. She missed two weeks of school. She was almost fifteen years old and her eyes were red-rimmed and pouched, as if she’d gained a greater age than was possible.

  Oliver and Ruth talked. At night in bed, before and after her school day, passing. After dinner. Talk cautious but gentle. Both agreed this was Katey’s time, Katey’s choices, Katey’s heart. The only question was how, if they had to, would they intervene. For both of them also loved the
hound. They agreed they’d know that time when it came.

  And she saved them. She came to his shop, still in her pajamas, not even midmorning of a Thursday. He was repairing a crack off an f-hole—a most common job but also one demanding for all things to align properly. He’d just glued in the little temporary blocks either side of the crack when she opened the door. Her face a defiant ruin but also holding a particular glow, she said, “It’s Tinker. We need to go see Doc Rodgers. But, Daddy, could you make that call? I can’t do it.”

  He stood and went and hugged her and she clung hard to him and then, the dog in mind, he lifted away and said, “Of course, sweetie. You go back to that Tinker boy. I’ll let you know when I get the vet.”

  She went out and he followed her to the house, his heart bursting all ways, knowing that the most important call had already been made.

  When she started work as a waitress at the Double Dot, Friday and Saturday nights, Sunday morning breakfast until noon, she preferred to drive the truck. If he needed it, she used her mother’s car but she liked the truck. He attributed this to the many trips they’d taken around Vermont and northern New Hampshire, for fiddle repairs, when she’d been just a few years younger. And a couple of times he allowed her use of the truck for dates; he liked that she wanted to drive, to have some control, although she tended to date well-mannered boys. Best he knew. During the summer, mostly, she walked to work and back. In a rainstorm, he or Ruth would pick her up. So he’d heard her the night she snuck out for her test-drive to Royalton and back. He’d guessed she was meeting a boy, hoped it was nothing more than that. The same way he heard her stealthy creep through the house the night in June when she left. He lay awake a long time waiting for her homecoming. When first light smeared the windows and she had not returned he was still awake. And had a pretty good idea what she was trying to discover. He didn’t know about the hoard of Christmas cards but would, within hours. Sometimes, everything in a life feels like a mistake.

  To Ruth, he honestly could not say why he’d blurted the news that wretched night. Or, worse, not even news but something wrong thrown down that he then left Ruth no choice but to pick up. And explain. Which, after several tension-stretched days of all three walking around each other, avoiding the others as much as possible, what few meals were taken together in a pitch of silence, Ruth informed him she’d done her best to be honest and open with Katey and had no idea to what extent she was believed. Oliver then went very silent for several weeks. Although he assured Ruth this wasn’t a long-held anger; he’d taken her explanation at her word, after all, he’d said, no one knew better than he did how a pitched-high moment could alter a life. He wasn’t sure she entirely believed him but then what could she say? And, those weeks after the truth came to Katey, he caught her often looking at him, studying, trying to determine something of him she’d never before contemplated. Or had reason to. He was the silent man and in his silence he continued on as he always had. Certain both women would come to understanding and life would slowly regain what slender compass waver it had long attained. And what he did not tell Ruth, could not begin to tell Ruth, was that on that evening of unintended revelation he was responding to something else altogether: For months, no, spread over the past couple of years, there had been many times when he felt he was not living with mother and daughter but rather two fractious, unstable young girls.

  He had no experience to draw upon but certainly his father had never imposed upon him the unreasonable demands Ruth did upon Katey. It seemed to him nothing the girl did pleased her mother and everything, or almost everything she did was a matter of dispute. And he lived within the swirl and on one level knew the girl was attempting to make herself anew and knew also her efforts were tentative, half-formed, idealistic and often angry. As, he thought, was natural. What he did not understand was his wife. She was furious, ferocious, pugilistic. Over small things, things that Oliver understood did not matter to Katey, and things he knew she already understood and would carry forward with her through life. But for this constant harangue from Ruth. How Katey dressed, the state of her room, her failure to do expected chores, how one assignment would be slapdash, the next some deep immersion she would not discuss or share with her parents. All, as he saw, so very petty. All so dreadfully important to both women. But especially Ruth.

  He thought these were unfair odds, mother against daughter.

  He thought Why in the world is she doing this? Pushing her away.

  He never asked. It was a question to be held tight and silent. He understood this much. If nothing more.

  Mostly, through this period he worked. His workshop a refuge and over the past twenty years a comfort and locus of his heart, of his life. Although in the past few years the work had fallen off somewhat, or rather the complexity of it. There were fewer old fiddles in need of careful extensive repairs but a greater flow of student violins and fiddles with bridges or tailpieces that needed to be replaced, a crack from carelessness to be re-glued. The children had less interest in the old music, the old instruments—some learned the violin for music classes in school, a very few were taking lessons because parents demanded it of them; children sullen and prone to damage their instruments through neglect if not outright hostility. Most wanted to play guitars, electric or acoustic. Or drums.

  But in his shop was a lovely fiddle at least a hundred years old, made by some anonymous master and brought down to the states from Cape Breton by the grandfather of Ross Sutherland, a serious, dark-faced and fine-featured boy from Haverhill, New Hampshire, who told Oliver he wanted to learn the old songs before his grandfather could no longer play. But the fiddle had bad sound; his grandfather guessed the sound post was shot, maybe the bass rib, also. Oliver bowed a few notes and agreed. Perhaps replace the linings, the top nut as well, the ivory worn down with age. Which meant he’d have to open it up. And had the presence of mind to loan the boy one of his own fiddles, not his best but a pretty good one. The boy played bits of a couple of reels, one into the other, not even remotely familiar but sprightly well-made tunes. Ross Sutherland dipped his head and assured Oliver he’d care for it as if it was his own. Oliver had no doubt of that. In the end, the loan was a smart thing to do. Two months after the dinner-table debacle, some weeks yet before Katey left.

  And then she was gone and he couldn’t work. Every morning he had his coffee and went to his workshop and sat there. He’d go in for lunch. Ruth was home from school of course but was busy, it seemed, with everything and nothing at all: the garden, working with her flowers, reading, cooking something or other for supper, canning rhubarb, taking afternoon naps with the shades in the bedroom down. They spoke to each other, formally and from a great, hidden distance. He was back in the shop for the afternoon. Evenings they’d sit and watch Walter Cronkite as he drank a single beer. Sometimes she’d have a gin and tonic. Many of those evenings he’d go back to the shop and listen to the Red Sox games on the radio. He’d never really loved baseball the way many of his acquaintances did but it was better than television. It took his mind away, a bit.

  Mostly he was struck by the profound absence of his daughter who now knew she was another man’s daughter, and was seeking that man, heedless, it seemed to him, of the previous years of her life. And of his life.

  The Cape Breton fiddle lay on the bench, in pieces. He’d replaced the sound peg, the bass rib. Decided to put in new blocks but hadn’t yet. The maple sides and back were lovely, the spruce top also, in the quiet muted way of old wood. And there it sat. He’d reach, those mornings, afternoons, a finger to move one part or another. Then left it be. To reassemble it raised a host of questions, ones that usually he’d be of the mind to sort through and then come to an order and proceed. Instruments, much like people, were individuals and as such called for scrutiny and understanding, a sense gained through observation and touch of their hidden pasts and, importantly, not only what would heal their obvious needs, but also what work might be done to bring them most fully alive. Work that was not
what was agreed to with the owner but what the instrument revealed. But this instrument had fallen mute. Or Oliver could no longer hear its language.

  He hadn’t lost knowledge of the technicalities. Of the woods; maple, spruce, ebony. Of hide glue. Of varnish. Of the multiple ways of fine-sanding coats of varnish. Of patience. Perhaps the most important tool of all.

  What he had lost was the girl. Who had come to him almost at the same time as the knowledge. Almost twenty years, the two. Close enough so any discrepancy was meaningless. Music, a language of the soul, the unspeakable rendered to emotional comprehension and expression, at a time when he’d understood all other such attempts to be empty efforts, lies, embellishments, or most often, delusions and so false excuses of the human engine, the impulse toward striving forward, all of these things had been met and leavened, by the delivery into his arms of that fresh-minted soul, intact and fully formed, gazing upon him as his reason for life, her protector but also simply her guide. And he’d accepted that responsibility. And done his very best to see it through.

  He’d felt, mostly, to be doing a pretty good job.

  And now, nothing made sense. He knew she thought she hadn’t rejected him, was simply trying to fill her picture to a wider level. To find another old song that she’d recognize, to add it to the songs of herself. And likely she would.