She rubbed Birch’s ears. “I had a dog once, Birch, didn’t I? You can get closer to a dog than to a human being. After he was gone I said I’ll not put myself through that again, no siree. But you’re only a pup, aren’t you, Birch. You’ll outlast all of us.”
At home I poured a drink, turned on the television set. It was strangely silent, a fixed image of a darkened city, sand-coloured, low-rise buildings in the foreground, faintly lit. A broad city boulevard in the middle distance, street lights gleaming but no sign of traffic. In the distant darkness above and beyond the city, soft light flashes. I adjusted the sound, but the picture was still silent as a photograph. Then a car, cautious, solitary, creeping through, hesitant, uncertain as if driving over broken ground. And then a quiet voice from the television told me that the silent city was Baghdad.
How can everybody in the village know and Mary not have heard? Mary didn’t seem to know a thing. Then logic spoke: They don’t know. And I asked logic: So how does Neil know? Then I remembered, Graham the prison guard. He must have overheard. But how would he know Neil? When and why would he report something that was inconsequential to anyone but me?
From the television came a sudden jarring crash and a flash from somewhere off-screen. The commentary grew more urgent. Coalition forces had landed in the distant desert, were advancing on the silent city. The moment and tomorrow fused. Everything and nothing happening at once. The unseen future now implacable, unthinkable, inevitable.
17.
The dog woke me with his whining. Then he barked once. He was at the door. Someone on the television was calculating how long this newest war would last. I stood, killed the television picture. “Nature calling, Birch?” He whined again and when I opened the kitchen door he dashed off across the porch and into the night. I shouted sleepily after him, “Don’t be long,” then turned back to the living room and sat. How did I forget to close the outer door? I was completely sober coming home. I yawned.
When I woke again it was daylight, soft and silent, shortly after dawn. I remembered that the dog was still outside, swore silently, opened the kitchen door expecting he’d be huddled in the porch, full of accusation. The porch was empty.
I stepped out. There was a distant truck sound lingering in stillness. A crow and then another crow responding. “Birch,” I called. Then: “Birch Bark!” No reply. A momentary flash of irritation. “Where did you go this time?” Then I thought of Mary’s place. I shouted: “No more treats for you, asshole!” I shuffled upstairs, removed my shoes, lay on the bed in my clothes to wait.
Damn. I sat up, looked at my wristwatch—it was just after nine o’clock. I climbed off the bed and ran downstairs, yanked open the kitchen door but the porch was still empty. I walked to the telephone, punched in Mary’s number. She answered on the second ring. I said, “Shall I go pick him up or will you drop him off?”
There was a brief silence. “Who are you talking about?” Mary asked.
I felt the first flash of fear.
“The dog, you mean? Lord, Tony. He isn’t here,” she said, alarmed. “When did you last see him?”
I explained that he’d wanted to go out during the night. Didn’t come back. “My God,” she’d said. “I hope it wasn’t the coyotes. They’re getting worse, it isn’t safe to let the cat out anymore.”
It felt like hours, walking the trail, poking through open spaces in the bush. A light snow falling, feathering the ground, my fearfulness rising with every passing minute. Then I was at Strickland’s lane and I considered walking up but knew that if the dog had come this far he’d have gone to Mary’s.
I called Caddy.
“Well,” she said, “the stranger.” Her tone was testy. “I was starting to wonder, how long it would be before you’d surface.”
An instant gush of relief. “So that’s where he is.” I laughed nervously.
“Who?” she said.
“Birch Bark,” I said and then explained that he’d gone missing.
“He isn’t here,” she said. “Why don’t you come over? I’ll put the coffee on.”
“I should stay here, for when he shows up.”
Silently I promised: I will never let you out of my sight again, you little shit.
“Can you think of anywhere he might have gone?”
“No,” she said. “But if he wandered outside of his usual territory it’s possible he got confused.”
That makes sense, I thought. I know that feeling.
“I think I’ll drive around a bit.”
“Sure,” she said. “But come by later. I’ll make you lunch.”
The snow was falling thickly then. With a gloved hand I swept it off the windshield. And that was when I saw a yellow notebook page tucked underneath the windshield wiper blade. And at that same instant I saw him, curled up on the seat, on the passenger side. How on earth … I rapped on the window. He didn’t move. I quickly opened the truck door. He was stiff. And then I saw that his eyes were open, bulging, tongue hanging through bared teeth. And in the fur around his neck, a thin wire tightly knotted.
I snatched the paper from the windshield. One word crudely printed: “Oink.”
The truck fishtailed violently as I swung up Strickland’s lane, hit the ditch and then bounced back out again, headed for the other ditch. I held the accelerator to the floor and the truck slalomed almost to his doorstep. I still had the paper in my hand as I hammered on the door. The house was silent. I kept hammering. Through the window I could see that the kitchen was empty. The silence of abandonment. There was a rock on the doorstep and I grabbed it, hefted it, then smashed the glass, reached in, unlocked the door. Raced through the house. Upstairs, just the one bedroom was furnished. Unruly bed, clothes piled on a chair. Empty beer bottle on a dresser beside a pile of coins.
Back downstairs I caught up with myself, the other me. It was as if I was meeting myself coming in again, this time, slow and cautious. A moment of confusion, then wary recognition. Thinking crisis in the yard, thinking cell extraction, remembering a hundred situations, now moving with deliberation, brain suddenly engaged. Calm down, I told myself. Get hold of yourself. Breathe deeply. There’s nobody here. Think this through.
I sat at his kitchen table, absorbed the room, the silence. A faint odour of kerosene awakened memories. Cold winter mornings at home, Ma at the stove, dousing kindling with the fuel for a quick fire start, quick warmth. And me, shivering over steaming porridge. I was calm then. His absence was the proof I needed. He’d have anticipated my reaction, he’d have savoured the anticipation of my fury. He wouldn’t have to see it. I could feel him gloating, somewhere.
I saw the rock that I’d used to smash the window where I’d dropped it on the kitchen floor. I stood and picked it up, placed it at the middle of the table, smoothed the crumpled note, placed it near the rock. There was a pencil on the windowsill. I wrote on the bottom of the note: “You will not enjoy the end of this.” Then I put the rock on top of it. I headed for the door, then went back and wrote, “Tony Breau.”
I remembered Caddy. Come for coffee, she’d said. I felt the pressure of tears. How can I possibly tell Caddy? I was sitting in front of my house inside the truck. The dog had slid off the seat and was awkwardly on the floor, stiff legs folded, teeth bared. I pounded on the steering wheel until I realized that I might break it. The snow was tumbling softly, the hard ground whitening. “I don’t want to remember you like this,” I said. I got out, then walked around to the passenger side, carried him to the side of the house where I wouldn’t be able to see him. Placed him gently on the frozen ground. Went inside the house and sat with my coat on. I stared at the phone for a while before I picked it up.
She answered cheerfully and I couldn’t speak at first.
“Caddy,” I said, more to prevent her hanging up than because I had anything to say.
“Tony?”
“Caddy,” I said again. And then I told her, bluntly, artlessly, angrily. And she was silent.
“Do you want m
e to come over?” I asked.
And when she finally replied the voice was distant. “No,” she said. “Not right now.” And she put the phone down.
The snow continued, a soft blanket growing on the stony shrunken body. I found an ancient pick and shovel in the barn I’d rarely visited. Behind the house the ground was like concrete. And then I remembered a pile of stone near where my field dropped off into the sea. “I’ll build a cairn,” I said. “It’s what they used to do.” I returned to the house for Jack’s old coat.
Near the edge of the field I scraped the crusted snow aside until the ground was bare and I placed him on the dead grass with the coat on top of him. And I spent the next hour moving the pile of stone until it had become a grave mound. I stepped back and studied it. There was something heroic about the pile. And I remembered a phrase from the ancient language of the MacMillans: clach air do charn. A stone on your monument. “And that’s what it is, Birch. A monument so I’ll not forget this.”
The store was empty for a change. Mary covered her mouth with a hand. “I can’t believe somebody would do a thing like that,” she said.
“I can,” I said.
“Who do you think?”
I studied her open, honest face and an old instinct, maybe from that deep aspect of myself they used to call “professional,” prevented a reply. I just shrugged. “We’ll see,” I said.
——
Caddy didn’t speak when she saw me on her deck. She hesitated, then nodded her assent so I entered the kitchen.
“The coffee will be cold.”
“That’s okay.”
I saw that with one hand she was manipulating the wedding band she still wore, something I hadn’t noticed before now. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to remove it or if she was just fidgeting. And then she looked up and met my eyes. I was shocked by the blue unblinking clarity of hers.
“I don’t want you to go feeling that this was your fault,” she said. “I know it’s as big a blow to you as it is to anybody.”
My voice was paralyzed. I looked away from her laser stare.
“Tony,” she said, almost sharply. I looked back into her face again. “It was just a dog.”
“I’m going to deal with this,” I said.
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
I stood.
“Sit,” she said. “I’ll heat the coffee in the microwave.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll come back another time.” I tried to smile. “Don’t worry.”
“There’s too much foolish talk around,” she said. “I’m worried about where something like this can lead.”
And I blurted, “Jesus, Caddy. You, of all people.”
She stood quickly, eyes like ice. “Tony. Don’t. You. Dare.”
Okay, so I drank.
The snow had stopped, the sun had pierced a thin layer of cloud and the ground, except where floes of winter snow survived, was bare again. I’d been sitting alone in the silent house for what I estimated to be hours. Just sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window, down the field to where a small dark mound of stones now stood outlined against the bulge of the sea and the slope of the horizon.
There was surprising logic in Caddy’s reaction, I told myself. Dear pragmatic, unsentimental Caddy. I suppose most of my long reflection at the kitchen table was a reminiscence about that part of Caddy’s character. God, how it hurt in 1966, her resolute and unremarked departure. Why? And even after I had the explanation, the harder question: “Why wouldn’t she have come to me?” Not because we thought we loved each other, which was probably delusional, but because I was—and there was no doubt about this—her best friend in the world. Lovers always treat each other shabbily, but friends don’t.
And then the light outside seemed to be diminishing and at the same time casting a glow on the field and the gulf beyond it. I stood. My body felt stiff from all the sitting. I opened the cupboard door and the whiskey bottle was half-full. I took it with me down the field.
The sun melted, a scoop of butter oozing, briefly delineating the vague separation of lowering sky from rising sea. I was chilled, had another swallow from the bottle, one part of my brain saying this will make you feel warm while the other part, the smaller voice of reason, said go back to the house, this is not warmth—get warm before you make yourself sick.
And then, as if by some unheard command, it was dark. The sudden consciousness of darkness seemed to wake me, and I noticed that the bottle in my hand was empty.
Somewhere in that space of time I lost two days.
By checking back to the timeline of the Iraq invasion I know it was in the early morning of March 20 that someone killed my dog. Yes. My dog. And that’s why he was dead, because of me. I remember all too clearly what happened two days later, on March 22.
I think I slept a lot on March 21 but it’s all vague, except for one unforgettable dream.
I hardly ever remember dreams and Sophie told me once that this is healthy. We should be vigilant about dreams, avoid confusing dreams with memories. Many people make that mistake, she said, finding insights into past experience from later dreams. Dreams are just anxieties, Sophie thought. She was big on anxiety, her view being that most of what we do, including our achievements, rise from anxieties that are rooted in our awareness of mortality. “We are the only species,” she told me cheerfully over lunch one day, “with the ability to reflect on the inevitability of extinction.”
I asked, sensibly, “So why does the rabbit run away when he sees me coming?”
“That’s instinctive,” she said. “We have instincts too, to run or fight when the circumstances require us to. But we also have the ability to sit, in moments of relative safety and calm, and think about ourselves as mortal and ultimately doomed.”
“Lucky us,” I said. “I think I’d rather be the rabbit.”
So the dream: I’m on a high rooftop. I’m talking World Trade Center high. CN Tower high. Places I’ve visited and where I’ve always sensed that awful feeling of electricity in chest and groin, the watery knees, the irrepressible dread that takes the breath away on the edge of the abyss. And in the dream I was prostrate near the edge and struggling to move away, to the safety of the middle part. But the roof keeps tilting and I have no strength in my arms or legs, and the area of the roof keeps changing shape so that I’m always, when I’m moving, crawling closer to the precipice.
And the odd thing is that I’m not alone on the roof. I see Neil and Collie and John Robert and Lester, the men who hang out at the store, moving around with nonchalance, chatting and laughing. And at one point Neil walks to the edge of the roof and sees something far below and turns toward the group and summons everybody over. In that moment, in the angle and the light, it seems that he is suspended in mid-air, hanging in the fatal nothingness of space. And he is as unbothered as I am terrified, limp in legs and arms and voice, struggling and calling out without movement, without sound. But Neil is in command. The others crowd around him, exclaiming excitedly, unafraid, looking back at me and laughing as the roof continues tilting and shrinking.
I’m drenched. For a moment I’m convinced I’ve pissed in the bed. And then I realize the sound that woke me was the telephone.
“I heard what happened,” Neil’s message said.
I thought, How the hell can he know so much so quickly?
“I’m not saying a word about it,” he said. “Just let me know if you need anything.” Then he was gone.
It’s just a dog, Caddy said. Of course, she was right. But that small presence had reawakened something hopeful in me. Fool. Idiot, loving anything. Learned nothing during all those years among convicts and coppers and complicated women. Loved a dog.
I laughed.
The milk had been on the counter, obviously for days, and curdled when I poured it in the coffee. Bread nibbled by the small silent phantoms that owned the house in my absence. I should get a cat, I thought. Then: You must be joking. Threw the bread outside. The crows will
never let you down. But I hear they have an almost human sensibility so you should be wary of the crows along with everybody else.
Refrigerator empty, but for two cans of Keith’s. Stomach lurched at the brief temptation.
Mary was silent handing me the newspapers, totalling the groceries. The papers were full of the invasion of Iraq. The war had started in earnest when I was asleep or drunk or both and was already almost over. The relentless coalition juggernaut advancing through the helpless hapless country.
“I’m surprised Neil isn’t in here celebrating,” Collie said. “Everything seems to be going just the way he planned it.”
“I haven’t been paying attention,” I said.
“Like a knife through hot butter, the coalition,” Collie said.
“Neil must be sick,” Mary said with a faint edge of sarcasm. “He hasn’t been in here for days.”
I ate. Eggs and beans and toast. And I felt ill immediately, and returned to bed.
It was dark. There was a pounding noise. Bam, bam, bam. My head cleared and I realized the noise was coming from the porch. Bam. Bam. Bam.
It was Neil.
“You weren’t answering the phone,” he said. He was looking at me intensely, face close enough that I could smell a trace of alcohol. “Everything okay over here?”
I switched on the kitchen light. The clock said nine.
“I was sleeping,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I had a call,” he said. “I have to go up to Strickland’s. Check it out. I’d like you to come along.” He was all business, hands on hips.
“Strickland’s?” I grunted a half-laugh.
“John Robert thinks his little girl is up there. He’s freaking out. She’s supposed to be home, part of the bail arrangement.”
“Why doesn’t he go and get her himself?” I turned and opened the cupboard where I keep the liquor. There was a half bottle. I retrieved it, held it up.
Punishment Page 28
