Over Bridie’s objections, Hark ate dinner at the table with them that night. Vandal insisted. The dog tried to climb into the chair with arms, Vandal’s seat at the head of the table. Vandal wasn’t going to protest, but Bridie wouldn’t allow it. She flapped the kitchen towel – it was covered in delicate blue cornflowers – at him, waved her hands and shouted “Shoo! Shoo!” until he slipped down out of the chair and, throwing resentful glances her way, slunk over to one of the chairs at the side of the table and took his place.
He ate like an animal, she noted with satisfaction, chasing the duck leg she had given him around and around the rim of the broad plate with his sharp snout, working to grasp the bone with his teeth, his tongue hanging drolly from the side of his mouth. Always, the leg escaped him. Each time it did, she put it carefully back in the middle of the plate, and he went after it again. From time to time he would stop his pursuit of the drumstick and watch Bridie and Vandal manipulate their utensils, raise their forks to their mouths, dab at their lips with napkins. His own napkin was tucked bib-like under the broad leather strap of his collar, and it billowed ridiculously out over his narrow, hairy chest. Vandal watched this process through a number of repetitions, his brow furrowed, before he put down his knife and fork.
“You can’t let a dog have duck bones like that,” he said. “He’ll crack the bone and swallow it and the sharp edges will lodge in his throat.”
Good, Bridie thought. Let him. The dog stared across the table at her, his face twisted into what she took to be an accusatory grimace. Hark had always been Vandal’s dog, never hers, and she had never felt much affection for him, but he had always seemed to her to be a perfectly normal dog, not overfriendly but that was normal in an animal that was brought up to work rather than as a pet. Restrained in his affections, but never hostile. Lean and quick and hard-muscled, with the bland face and expressions of his kind. And now he looked at her as though he knew what she was thinking – an image of Hark coughing, wheezing, hacking up blood on the kitchen floor swam back into her consciousness – and hated her for it.
Was there an element of surprise there too? she wondered. He hadn’t known about the bones. An unanticipated danger, and now he knew, and she could sense him filing the information away, so that such a thing would never be a threat to him again. What else was he ignorant about?
Bridie had never disliked Hark before, had never disliked any of Vandal’s boisterous happy-go-lucky hunting dogs, the bird dogs, the bear dogs, the coon dogs, all of them camped out in the tilting kennel attached to the pole barn. They shared the long fenced run that stretched across the barnyard, and they would woof and whirl and slobber when she went out to feed them. Dogs with names like Sam and Kettle and Bengal and Ranger. And Hark. Hark the waterdog, a little quieter than the others, more subdued, maybe, but nothing obvious about him to separate him from the rest of them. They were Vandal’s friends and companions, they admired him even when Xerxes fed him scorn, and they were kind to him when even she herself wasn’t. She didn’t fool with them much.
Something had come alive in Hark, something that allowed him, compelled him, to say no, and now he was at her table when the rest were outside in the cold and the dark, now he was looking her in the eye. That was another new thing, this direct confrontation; he had always cast his gaze down, properly canine, when his eyes had locked with hers in the past. He’d regained his earlier cocksureness, and the impression of self-satisfaction that she had from him made him unbearable to her.
Vandal was leaning over, working his knife, paring the crispy skin and the leg meat away from the bone. “Here you go,” he told the dog, his tone fond. Hark sniffed.
“If he plans to eat his food at the table like people,” Bridie said, “then he better learn to pick it up like people.”
Vandal stopped cutting. Bridie half-expected Hark to say No in the light voice that sounded so strange coming out of that long maw, with its mottled tongue and (as they seemed to her) cruel-looking teeth. Instead, he nudged Vandal out of his way and planted one forepaw squarely on the duck leg. He understands, Bridie thought to herself.
The plate tipped and skittered away from him, the duck leg tumbling off it, the china ringing against the hard oak of the tabletop. The dog looked perplexed, but Vandal slid the plate back into place, picked up the drumstick and laid it gently down.
Just as gently, Hark put his paw on the leg bone, pinning it. He lowered his head, closed his teeth securely on the leg – the chafing squeak of tooth against bone made Bridie squint her eyes in disgust – and pulled away a triumphant mouthful of duck. He tossed it back, swallowed without chewing, and went after the leg again.
“Good dog,” Vandal said. The dog’s ears flickered at the familiar phrase, but he didn’t raise his head from the plate. Bridie bit into her own portion. Duck was normally one of her favourites, but this meal filled her mouth like ashes. Vandal stopped chewing, leaned down close to his plate, his lips pursed as though he were about to kiss his food, his eyes screwed nearly shut. He made a little spitting noise, and a pellet of lead shot, no bigger than a flea, pinged onto his plate, bounced, and lay still.
After supper, as Bridie retted up the kitchen, Vandal sat cross-legged on the floor in the parlour, the shotgun broken down and spread out on several thicknesses of newspaper on the floor before him. A small smoky fire – the wood was too green to burn well, hadn’t aged sufficiently – flared and popped in the hearth.
Hark sat in the comfortable chair, and his posture had become – she felt sure of this – more human than it had been previously. He was sitting like a man now, a misshapen man, yes, with a curved spine and his head low between his shoulders, but he was working to sit upright. He looked ridiculous, as she glanced in at him from where she was working, but she felt no impulse to laugh. Was he larger than he had been? Did he fill the chair more fully? While she watched, he lost his precarious balance, slipped to the side, thrashed for a moment before righting himself again.
The television was on, the usual chatter from the local news, a terrible wreck out on the state highway, a plant shutting down in the county seat, a marvel on a nearby farm, a Holstein calf born with two heads, both of them alive and bawling, both of them sucking milk. Who could even take note of something like that in these times, Bridie wondered to herself as she worked to scrub the grease from the plates. The next day it would be something else, and something else after that, until the wonders and the sports and the abominations (how to tell the difference among them?) piled up so high that there wouldn’t be any room left for them, for her and for Vandal, the regular ones, the ones that remained.
A talking dog? Was that stranger than a two-headed calf? Stranger than poor old Woodrow Scurry’s horses eating each other in his stables a fortnight earlier? Every day the world around her seemed more peculiar than it had the day before, and every day she felt herself getting a little more used to the new strangenesses, numb to them, and wondering idly what ones the next day would bring.
How you use? They were Hark’s words, clumsy and laughable, coming to her over the din of the voices on the television. There was another sort of show on, this one a game of some type, where people shouted at one another, encouragement and curses. That thing, Hark said.
“So,” Vandal said, “you can say more than No.”
How you use that thing, Hark said again. A demand this time, not a question.
The shotgun, Bridie thought, and she dropped the plate she was washing back into the sink full of lukewarm water and dying suds and hurried into the den, drying her hands on a dishtowel as she went.
“Don’t tell him that,” she said.
Vandal looked up at her, startled. Just above him on the wall hung a picture that his mother had hung there as a young woman. She had died young. In the decades since it had been hung, the picture, it occurred to Bridie, had taken in every event that had occurred in that low-ceilinged, claustrophobic room. It depicted Jesus, a thick-muscled Jesus, naked but for a drape of whit
e cloth, getting his baptism in the river Jordan. The Baptist raised a crooked hand over his head, water spilling from the upraised palm.
Vandal was fitting the barrels of the shotgun – which had been his old man’s but which was now his, like the house, like the farm – back into the stock. The metal mated to the wood with a definitive click. “Why in the world wouldn’t I tell him?”
Bridie was at a loss for a cogent answer. It seemed obvious to her that Vandal ought not to impart such information to the dog just for the asking, but he didn’t share her worry at all, it was clear. How to explain? The dog looked at her with, she thought, an expression of feigned innocence. “A dog ought not to know how to use a gun,” she said.
Vandal chuckled. “He doesn’t even have hands. He has no fingers.”
“So why tell him how a gun works?”
“Because he wants to know.”
“And should he know everything he wants to, just because he wants to know it?”
Vandal shrugged. Bridie felt heat flooding her face. How could he not understand? He thought it was terrific, the way the dog had decided to talk, the way he could sit there with it and watch television, the way it asked him questions, the way it wanted to know the things that he knew. He was happy to share with it: his table, his food, his house, his knowledge. He was treating the dog like a friend, like a member of the family. Like a child, his child.
“What he wants is to have hands. What he wants is to be a man. To do what you do. To have what you have.”
She caught Hark gazing at her intently, his eyes gleaming, hungry, his nose wet, his broad flat tongue caught between the rows of his teeth.
“What’s wrong with that?” Vandal wanted to know.
He is not your boy, she wanted to tell him. He is not your son. He is a dog, and it’s wrong that he can talk. You want to share what you have with him, but he doesn’t want to share it with you. He wants to have it instead of you.
The dog wrinkled his nose, sniffing, and she knew suddenly that he was taking her in, the scent of her. A dog’s nose was, she knew, a million times more sensitive than a man’s. He could know her by her scent. He could tell that she was afraid of him. He could follow her anywhere, because of that phenomenal sense of smell. In prehistoric times, before men became human and made servants out of them, Hark and his kind would have hunted her down in a pack and eaten her alive. Her scent would have led them to her. Hark’s eyes narrowed, and her words clung to her jaws. She couldn’t bear to speak them in front of the dog. She blinked, dropped her gaze and, under the animal’s intense scrutiny, fled the room.
Behind her, Vandal spoke. “This here’s the breech,” he said. The gun snicked open. “This here is where the shells go.” The gun thumped closed.
Vandal always wanted her after a meal of game meat: duck, venison, bear, it didn’t matter what. It was something about the wild flavour, she thought, and the fact that he had killed the food himself. It made him happy, and when he was happy he always came to her in bed, his hands quick and his breath hot. He was at her now, pushing up her nightgown, slipping the straps off her shoulders, throwing one of his heavy, hairy legs across hers. She shoved at him.
“Don’t,” she said. “He’ll hear.”
After supper, after television and the lesson about the gun – he could name all the parts of it now, Hark could, and his speech was becoming rapidly clearer, the words coming to him swiftly and easily; and maybe that was true of his thoughts as well, slipping like eels through that clever brain in its dark prison in the dog’s skull – Hark had refused to go outside to sleep in the kennel. He had simply braced his legs at the house’s threshold and bared his teeth and muttered at them, No.
“For God’s sake,” Bridie had said to Vandal.
“What’s the harm?” Vandal had asked. Plenty of people, he had told her in a patient voice, owned dogs that lived indoors.
“Not you,” she said to him. “Never you.”
No, he agreed, he’d never owned an indoor dog before. Xerxes wouldn’t allow such a thing.
Xerxes. He couldn’t understand what was happening to him, to them, because of Xerxes and the shadow he cast, even from the grave. Vandal had always wanted an indoor dog, a pet, and Xerxes wouldn’t hear of it.
So Hark became an indoor dog, sleeping in the parlour. Bridie had tried to lay down a couple of old rag rugs on the floor for him, but he had just stared blankly at her from the chair, and she had left him there rather than risking having to hear that flat refusal another time.
“He won’t hear anything,” Vandal said. Bridie knew how sharp a dog’s hearing was. Vandal knew it even better than she did, but he was saying what he imagined she needed to hear, because he wanted to get hold of her. A dog’s hearing was like its sense of smell, a million times or more what humans are capable of. “He’s downstairs. He’s probably asleep,” Vandal said. He nuzzled her, took the lobe of her ear between his teeth and nipped. He slid her nightgown down to her waist, his hands on her breasts, his palms and the pads of his fingers tough with callus. Her breathing quickened as he pushed her hard against the mattress and pressed her legs apart. “Who cares if he hears us?”
“I care,” she said. She knew that Hark would not be asleep, not on his first night in their house. In his first moments alone and unguarded in a human place. He might not even be in the parlour anymore. She pictured him creeping down the hallways, clambering up the stairs, sloping through their rooms, looking at everything, that keen nose taking in the odours of the house and its denizens, possessing them, filing them away. He might be climbing up on Xerxes’ bed – the guest bed, she corrected herself, Xerxes was gone – right now.
“We’ll be quiet then,” Vandal assured her, and she meant to protest, but he put his hands under her hips and lifted her, and she groaned and opened to him. He gave a sharp cry of delight. She shushed him, but he continued to exclaim as he moved against her, his voice growing louder with every fierce thrust of his hips, until he was calling out wordlessly at the top of his voice. By then she was far gone too, her voice mingling with his, and under it all the sharp metallic crying of the bedsprings.
In the night, while Vandal slept, Bridie considered Xerxes. X, as he had told her to call him, all his friends called him X. He had many friends on the neighbouring places and in town, the men he hunted with, roistered with, brawny old men like himself who had fought in one war or a couple, men who took no shit from anyone. Terrible X, Mountain-Man X, X the Unknown and Unknowable, his eyes on her always, his hands on her too whenever Vandal was out of the house, when he was out hunting or tending to his dogs in the kennel. Sometimes when Vandal was in the house, too, sometimes when he was in the same room. X wasn’t afraid, he wasn’t afraid a bit.
Be quiet, he would say to her.
She never told Vandal because she was afraid of what he would do. What was she afraid of, exactly? That he would confront Xerxes, Daddy Xerxes, Daddy X as Vandal called him. Was she afraid that Vandal would challenge Xerxes, fight him, shoot him, kill him? Or was she afraid that he wouldn’t? She could imagine no happy outcome to her revelation, and so she chose not to make it.
“No,” she would tell Xerxes as he pawed her, plundered her. He didn’t even hear her, she didn’t believe. She might as well have been speaking another language, or not speaking at all. “No.”
When a brain stroke had taken him one wonderful day – he had cornered her in the parlour, was squeezing her breasts, crushing her to him, one great hand pressed hard in the middle of her back so that she couldn’t escape him – she had simply stood away from his stumbling, twitching, stiffening body, had watched him topple over like a hewn tree, had watched him spasm and shudder on the floor, his mouth gaping, hands clawing at his own face, one of his eyes bulging grotesquely, rolling upward independent of its twin to take her in where she stood.
She stared back into the rogue eye, in which the pupil was contracting, swift as a star collapsing, until she realised that X’s gaze was no longer f
ixed on her, but on something behind her, above her. She was seized with an awful terror, and the effort of turning left her shaken, exhausted. Nothing. Nothing but the picture on the wall, which was as it had always been since the hand of Xerxes’ wife had placed it there: Jesus and, standing over him, John, the Baptist, clothed all in ragged unfinished animal hides. She turned back to the dying man before her.
The eye reeled farther, impossibly far – it was funny to see, really, or would have been in any other circumstance – to fix on the ceiling, until finally the iris and the pupil disappeared altogether and the eye turned over white.
She leaned down to him, breathing hard from the fright he had given her over the picture, and put her mouth right up against his thick cauliflower ear, its whorls filled with stiff grey hair like the bristles of a boar-hog. This time, she wanted to make sure that he heard. “No,” she told him.
Some folks, the voice said, have too much life in them to die all the way.
Bridie snapped awake, sure that the words had come to her in X’s voice. That gruff commanding voice, weirdly distorted with wolf-tones and as full of echoes as though it were being broadcast from the moon. How else should the voice of a dead man sound? she asked herself. He’s come a long way back to say what he has to say to me.
The gruff voice, and an answering sound, staccato: Hark’s mirthless laughter. The sound of it chilled her. She had never cared much for loud laughter. The bared teeth, the closed eyes, the contorted features of the face, the shuddering, it all looked too much like pain to her, like convulsions or madness. She herself always laughed behind her hand, her eyes down. The voice went droning on below. It sounded like it was giving advice, and Hark’s laughter had stopped. She could picture him soaking in whatever notions Xerxes was giving him.
“He’s watching TV.” Vandal’s voice at her shoulder startled her. His eyes glinted in the weak light that filtered in through the window, the moon’s final quarter. His good straight teeth glittered. He slid his hands to her breasts, kneaded her flesh. He wanted to go again. “He ain’t paying any attention to us, is he?”
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