Red Dog, Red Dog

by Patrick Lane

  Mother’s needs became Eddy’s to serve, for him to hold her when she was drunk and hallucinating over some injury imagined or real, caused by Father or not, or when she was crying over some memory from the past, the farm and the early years, her mother’s breast cancer, her father’s suicide. It could simply have been the loneliness of the land, no one her age near enough to know, the places she might have been just pictures in a borrowed magazine. It was up to Eddy to sidetrack Father and keep him away from her, find a lost or hidden bottle to put in her hands, fill a bowl with crisp radish roses from the water jar, lay out on a plate tag-ends of Farmer’s sausage, and slices of store-bought bread slavered with margarine and strawberry jam. Eddy climbed up on her bed when he was a child and when he was grown. Only his soothing touch could quiet her when she was drunk and crying. Eddy would lie on the covers and let her hold him as she stroked his cheeks. She said his hands were heavy angels. She said they brought her peace.

  She blamed Father for all her losses. Her room was locked each night and Father, drunk as he might have been, never dared to enter it. He might splutter his rage at the door but he never tried to break it down. Her looks could wither, her sharp words cut. Tom would hover in the kitchen and listen to them shouting. Then the back door would slam and Father would head to the Legion or to whatever widow’s door would open for him. That’s when Mother called Eddy. Tom would creep down the hall after his brother and sit on the floor with his back to her door, his arms around his scant knees, his thin face buried like a blunt blade in his chest, echoes of hymns he’d learned when he was small spinning in his head. These were holy songs Mother had drawn from her own childhood, tales from the other west, the prairie flatlands she spoke of when she told of her youth to him and Eddy in their early years. Nettie had taught her daughter prayer, keeping her on her knees when she was small, thanking God for the little they had. Mother would sing “Tell Me the Old, Old Story,” her boys intoning the words as they waited for her story to come.

  Each fragment would begin with, I remember, Mother staring over their heads at the moon in the night window, talking to them as if she could explain what living used to be. Tom was hungry for the past. He wanted to know each day and night of Mother’s life. In that way he thought he’d know himself, the why of what he was. He’d ask for the stories again and again, listening close in hopes that the new telling would reveal something hidden, some clue, some key as to a puzzle he didn’t know the nature of. Her words were the catechism he memorized, every detail burned into his mind.

  Tell me again, he’d say. Tell me the night of the Indians, and Mother would, so long as Eddy was near. She’d only tell it in the winter when the snow was on the ground. It had happened the year she was thirteen and the Indians came to the farm out of a two-day blizzard, her father and Nettie gone to Nokomis and stuck there in town, the wind and snow having buried the roads. She was only a girl when she opened the night door to Indians, thinking it was her parents come home somehow through the snow, drifts deep across the road. Five Cree, Mother would say, dressed as strange as anyone could imagine, one with a crushed top hat and a cape made from a black-bear hide so he looked like an animal alive split open by a knife, his flannel shirt underneath a bright red as if made of meat so that she thought she could see his lungs breathing there. Icicles hung down from the brim of his hat, his hair. They made a tinkling noise as he stood in the door, his mouth moving them as they melted with his breath. The others were as strange in deer hide capes or wool coats with brass buttons, beads on their pants and shirts. Mother always said how dirty they were, smelling of rancid fat smeared on their skin, and not washed since god-knows-when. Savages come in out of the storm, she said, and she certain she’d be raped and murdered where she stood.

  What’s rape, Tom once asked, and Mother told him not to interrupt. Eddy snickered at the question. Mother had given food to the Indians from what there was, thin meat left on a deer haunch hanging in the shed. As the man with the bear hide cut off gristle strips with his knife, she boiled shrunken potatoes and cabbage from the bins, and broke for them the bread Nettie had made before they left, dried prunes and crabapples put up in jars, whatever there was, the brown coal fire in the stove smouldering. They ate all there was and then they slept on the floor curled around the stove like animals, clouds of steam coming off them like the dawn mist off a sour slough.

  Mother waited for hours as she peered around the edge of the curtain that hung in the doorway between her bedroom and the kitchen. She said she must have slept a little, for the Indians were gone in the morning when she awoke, nothing left but their smell. Her father was angry when he and her mother finally got back two days later, the storm abated, the roads still mostly blocked, the wagon and horses finding their way among the drifts, the sky as clear as it always was in winter, brighter than the sun itself. Her father swore he’d hunt the Indians down for breaking into the house as they did, and he made sure his daughter wasn’t touched, Nettie laying Mother down on the bed and probing her with a finger to prove her purity. She’d go on to tell that every few weeks for a year they’d find the gift of a haunch of venison, moose, or bear, a brace of geese or grouse, even gophers strung on a rawhide loop hanging from the gatepost, all left there by the Cree. Twice, Nettie saw them through the window on their horses. Mother’s father hated what he saw as charity, not thanks. He couldn’t abide being beholden to them for anything, a bunch of savages who’d smelled up his house. Afterward, some of the older girls at school wouldn’t speak to her. The few that did said they’d heard their mothers talking about how her father had raged about it at the bar in Nokomis, telling people that Indians had come to his house and raped his daughter.

  The men in town looked at her in a different way after her father’s telling. They thought me easy prey, she would say. In their minds one rape was as another. What did they know, she’d say, her breathing quick. Once, two friends of her father’s wiled her into an alley behind the feed store with promises of chocolate, but her father stopped their play, their hands slipping out from under her dress. He cursed her for being what she was, he didn’t curse them.

  My father lay in wait many a night but could never catch the Indians leaving meat, Mother said. He ate it grudgingly when my mother cooked it, saying over and over that he could feed his own family without the damned Cree paying for fouling his daughter, my mother looking at him through narrow eyes, her tight hands hidden in her apron.

  Mother told that story more than once, decorating it or stripping it down to nothing, a few words: The Indians came. They left us food. Father hated them being there with me when he was gone. Each time, Tom yearned to know more. He knew there was something that wasn’t being told. He could tell by the darkness in her eyes, the way she’d look into the corners of the room as if her father might appear, as if the Indians were still there, huddled around the stove. As if the gifts they left were for more than food and shelter, but if not for those, then for what?

  Tom would ask her what each man was like, the colour of their beads, what kind of buttons, bone or brass or iron. Were they like the Indians who lived on the reserve up at the head of the lake or like the Indians in the movies? He thought if he could see it all, could touch the things they wore, their guns and knives, their gloves and leggings, he’d understand what happened.

  Eventually the stories about the old days dropped away and there was little telling of them again. Yet Mother would still read to them, drunk or sober. The Bible, always, when they were little, one of the few books she had in the house. She frightened Tom with the curses of Jeremiah, the suffering of Job. It was as if she enjoyed watching him flinch from her. Eddy would smile when she made Tom hold the black book. She’d place the Bible in his hands when he was small and when he first looked down at the words he thought they were crushed insects. He came to believe there was a seeing in those words. The Bible was his first reading, the book he kept close as he grew. He’d trace the verses with his finger and place the prophecies in
his head where he could recall them. To him the Bible’s words were a passionate army. Isaiah raged in his young mind, Jeremiah doomed his hours. Verses chilled him. And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortress thereof; and it shall be a habitation of dragons, and a court for owls. He’d track words across pages in the same way he tracked a Spruce grouse up a draw. Elusive and wily though the holy book might be, Tom believed whoever wrote it left a track. There were times he would sit in front of the Bible and stare at a single sentence and get no further. Words sometimes hung in his head for days as he tried to shape them into meanings he could understand. One day he was sitting in the bathroom, the door locked, counting the red fishes on the shower curtain again, and he heard Mother as she passed by in the hall. Her voice scared him as the words slipped under the door. O daughter of my people, she said. Gird thee with sackcloth, and wallow thyself in ashes.

  It was Tom’s name Little Rose called out to me when I lay in my last breathing. Tom, she said, Tom. He was the brother she turned me to, the hands I knew alive when he fed me stolen milk, a boy I watch over dead. I saw him then for what he was, his solemn face beyond the bars of my crib. He was a boy gone early to old. He was born in the wrong season, wind in a rocky country, desert snow. He carried a sack of grief in his heart, in his eyes the story of us all.

  I listened to the howls of the coyotes in the hills, the seething grasses, and the clatter of the far trees. Even the stones cried out. I lie among them now, a shroud around my bones, and try to think of what love might be and I remember Tom, just nine, and the dog he saved that would be with him five years more.

  It was early summer. The pup was the only one alive in a litter he’d found at the town dump in a tied gunny sack tucked under a rusted bedspring. He’d been foraging for batteries, anything of copper, the chance of silver, some fork or knife, a cup. The potato sack had moved in the clutter beside a broken baby-carriage and Tom, seeing something hidden that might be alive in such a place, pulled the sack out into the sun. He took his jackknife and cut the cord that bound the bag, the pups and dam rolling out, all of them dead except for the one Eddy would name Docker, then barely alive, matted and wet from shit and urine. The auburn dam was a spaniel with a stump for a tail. The bitch had tumbled from the sack, this single pup attached to a cold hind teat, sucking, blind. Tom had to push his finger between the gums to free it from its mother.

  He carried the pup home inside his shirt and hid it in the root cellar in an empty apple box with an old blanket he took from the house for it to lie on. He knew what Father would say if he found out he’d brought an animal home. Father didn’t want chickens or geese, a steer or a sow, any more than he wanted a budgie bird, a cat or a dog. If he did ever talk of having a dog around the place it would be a Rottweiler or mastiff. Mostly, he didn’t want anything around that would add to the bother he thought he already had with a wife and two sons. But when Tom brought the pup home, Father was away, down in Washington with some woman he’d found with money to spend and a body to share. He carried pork chop bones for the pup to gnaw on with its needle teeth, and bits of stewed chicken or marmot Tom had scavenged from the kitchen’s leavings. Each day Tom snuck a cup of milk to the cellar, dipped a corner of his shirt into the milk, and let the pup suck just as I had suckled in my crib when Tom brought milk for me.

  Two weeks later, Father came home and staggered through the moonlight to his root hole in the ground. He had worn out his welcome in Wenatchee and had scuttled home, some enraged husband roaming the desert roads in search of him. It was summer and the cellar was cool. There was no point in him going into the house, for Mother would have woken at his step and the usual fight begun. Instead, he’d stumbled down to the root cellar and passed out on the cot. He woke to the pup’s mewling cries as Tom stood by the apple box with the pup in his hands, trying to stuff the dog inside his shirt. Wild-eyed, thin white hair damp on his forehead, the red pup squirming in his hands, Tom stared at Father, caught by him in an act of love.

  Father roared: What the hell is wrong with you?

  He reared up off the cot as Tom ran out the door and up the sandstone steps, Tom fleeing through the rough grass into the orchard, then down the bank of the failing creek and around the cracked clay margin of the summer slough. He didn’t come back for days. It was Eddy brought him home finally. Tom had hidden the puppy in a cubbyhole cave near a windowless shack in a cul-de-sac arroyo off Cheater Creek, keeping it safe in a cage he’d made with old boards he’d found behind a deserted barn in a nearby field. Father took Tom down to the shed above the root cellar and beat him with his belt for what he called disobedience. He swore to Mother he’d beat the lies, the rebellion out of him, and he tried, but Tom said nothing to his father about where he’d been or where the pup was hidden. After the beatings, he’d walk back to the house behind his father, his bare feet in the boot prints his father left, each step he took hardening him. Fear his father as he did, he was willing to die in order to save his pup’s life.

  It was the summer of the beatings. Father demanded that Tom obey him. He forbade him from leaving the gravel reach of the yard. Tom was not to go near the road or out past the well. When Father was driving a logging truck in the water shed west of Sugar Lake, Mother was to watch Tom, but no matter how close she kept her eye on him, he would slip out of the yard, bits of food in his pockets, a jam jar of milk inside his belt. He would stay away the day and sometimes a day and a night, but Father would not give in to his son. Such rebellion was impossible for him to accept. He swore to Mother he’d teach the boy to obey, but after two months of Tom escaping and Father beating him, Mother said that unless Father was going to tie his son up in the root cellar or chain him to the clothesline pole, he might as well let him bring the dog home.

  She had always denied Tom, and most days she might wish him far from home, but seeing Father dragging him down the path to the root cellar week after week began to plague her. Eddy had pleaded with her to make Father let Tom keep the dog, and in the end, worn down from seeing Tom limp back up the path with Father in front of him threading his heavy belt through the loops in his pants, she finally stood up to him. After hours of fighting and longer days of heavy, bitter silence, Father reluctantly agreed, promising Mother he’d do nothing to hurt the dog, and Tom brought his pup back from the arroyo. Father and Mother watched him cross the orchard, Eddy close behind, the puppy tumbling alongside Tom, tied to his wrist with a twist of binder twine.

  Two days later, Father took the pup into the shed and chopped its tail off with the kindling hatchet. When Tom cried out, Father said: It’s a spaniel, for Christ’s sake! That’s what they do to spaniels, they cut their tails off. If we’re going to have one around here then it might as well look the way the dog is supposed to look.

  Tom tied off the stump and bound it with a rag dipped in iodine he’d taken from the medicine box in the bathroom. Tom never said a word more about it to Father. He carried the pup up to his room in the attic and kept it there till the stump healed. Father said he didn’t know what the damned fuss was all about.

  Tom loved that dog more than he loved anything in the world, even Eddy. They roamed together in the fields and hills. Docker would sit at his feet when Tom shot a Willow grouse or a Blue. The dog would quiver, waiting for the sign, the long ears decorated by now with burrs and grass seeds. When Tom told the dog to fetch, Docker would run in a red blur and bring the bird back to his whistle.

  A boy and his dog.

  I’d see them when they set off for the hills, the rifle slung from Tom’s hand, that dog at his heels. I followed him when he ranged the fields and hills. He’d take the Cooey .22 out across the farms and up into the dry coulees and arroyos. He’d hunt rabbits and squirrels, chipmunks and marmots. He got so he could shoot the head off a Spruce grouse from thirty feet, leaving the breast meat clean for eating. He’d come home with a sling of grouse, the birds tied one to one by baling twine knotted round the scales of their feet. From a distan
ce, coming across the last fields home, he looked like some feathered creature, his shoulders and arms draped in the bodies of birds, a golden boy with white hair, Docker barking at his heels, delirious with joy.

  His quietness when he saw a pheasant break from bunch grass and ride a complaint down the wind was a beauty all its own. He knew the creatures of the sloughs and swamps, the dry clay hills and the Ponderosa meadows. He would lie on a rocky outcrop of shale high above Grey Ditch and stare across the valley to Ranch Road and Cheater Creek. There were the times he’d circle round and come upon the house from behind. He’d cross the old orchard from Pottery Road and at our graves he’d kneel, in his hands the white skull of a mink he’d found or an eagle’s feather he’d watched fall from the clouds, and he’d set the treasure on the stones that marked our place.

  5

  the fight had begun when Norman had been trying to impress anyone drunk or sober that he was smarter than they were. His latest obsession was Nietzsche. He’d been standing with his back to the counter where the liquor was, going on about someone called Übermensch who’d walked a tightrope above a crowd of fools. Billy, who would’ve thought anyone walking a tightrope stupid, had gone over to grab a couple of Lucky Lager from the cold water in the sink and heard Norman explaining to some girl about Superman. Billy thought he was talking about the comic book and said to no one in particular that he liked reading Superman. Norman, who had saved every issue of Captain Marvel and Batman comics that had ever come out, prized Superman most of all, but that wasn’t who he was talking about.

  What the hell do you know about Superman?