At that time, Miranda probably still thought of him as just the family’s handyman, content as her family had been in her erroneous assumptions about him, with no idea that he was both college educated and land rich. His parents had been architects. He was an only child. He had slowly acquired property over the years, mostly just to preserve it. No one knew, no one even suspected, how much he owned.
People always underestimated her father. She had always considered that a failure of imagination on their part. Maybe, it occurred to her, he liked it that way.
Dix was sitting on the front porch talking to the caretaker. One full-time person and a changing cast of down-on-their-luck humans, dogs, and various other critters lived here. There was a barn and a handful of other outbuildings, along with several large corrals and two pasture areas. The lawn was well tended. There were baskets full of colorful flowers hanging from the porch rafters. Comfortable, birch-twig rocking chairs on the deck. It looked like a rustic B&B or inn, not an animal shelter.
It hadn’t always been like this. Colden remembered the first time her father had brought her here. She must have been eleven or twelve. Small trees grew in the gutters, shutters hung askew, windows were boarded up. Paint peeled from the sides of the outbuildings. Dix had, uncharacteristically, let the place return to a feral state. They hadn’t gone inside on that visit. They didn’t even get out of the truck. They’d bounced up the muddy drive, he’d given her a huge oatmeal cookie and a cup of hot chocolate from her own kid-size thermos and unscrewed the black cup from his man-size thermos of coffee, and they’d just sat there a while, sipping and chewing.
She remembered she had waited for him, wondering why they were there, knowing a story would come. Colden had had a sense, even as young as she was, about what she was going to hear, and she didn’t want to rush it. Dix told her a lot that day. About the history of the house, her mother’s family, how Miranda had sought out a sort of life that he wasn’t able to give her. He never said that he had failed Miranda. But Colden could feel the regret and self-recrimination in his voice. He never said that she’d gone wrong, just that he had. He’d not done enough to save her from herself and from the man who led the commune.
After that day, he had begun to put the house back together. At first, he did the straightforward things to arrest the decay and destruction wrought by simple inattention. Then, repairs began to overlap with collecting more wayward animals. A tenant had left a couple of dogs behind. A feral cat had kittens in the barn. Someone left a dog tied out at the post office. He found a starving horse in a small pen outside a falling-down trailer when he was driving down a back road.
Dix built a few dog runs in the shop. The garage was given over to the cats. He built an enclosed “catio” off the back, enclosing a couple of trees so the felines had natural climbing posts. An ornery donkey, a potbellied pig, and a crippled sheep joined the horse in the barn.
Back then, all this work on the outbuildings alone made Colden think that Dix was afraid to take over the house itself, as if he was worried about disturbing ghosts that might still haunt the long hallways and dark corners. But eventually, he did open the doors and fix the broken windows. He removed the mouse nests and replaced the oakum between the logs. He furnished the place with secondhand finds that were no strangers to dog hair and hired a caretaker, someone Sally had followed in a series of foster-care homes, a young woman who needed a safe haven as much as the dogs and other creatures did. This woman eventually went away to college and was replaced by a middle-aged woman with a teenage daughter fleeing an abusive husband. Dix sealed the place’s fate the day he put up a small sign on the door naming it “Ragtag Farm.” The property’s transformation from rich person’s getaway to animal sanctuary was complete.
Colden hadn’t spent much time at the farm. She had been busy with her own pursuits, and her father did not ask for her assistance or interest. She did have vivid memories of her first visit to the house once its rehabilitation was completed. Wandering the space, she’d tried to imagine what it was like when the dining room was set with silver, china, and crystal instead of a veterinary exam table and supply cabinets; when the back deck was used for cocktail parties instead of as a puppy playpen; when the shop had a lounge chair, humidor, and bourbon decanter instead of half a dozen dogs and innumerable shredded blankets and chew toys. She found she could only conjure images from some period drama set in Victorian England. Her mother and her mother’s family were not just unknown to her, they seemed mostly unknowable.
The animals didn’t care what the house had been. They made it their own. This was a lesson the humans eventually learned, as well.
On this warm May day, Colden slid from the seat of her truck, slammed the door, and listened to the resulting cacophony. A chorus of barks began within the house and garage. Chain link fencing jangled as dogs jumped against their runs. A donkey brayed. Guinea fowl and geese made a screeching racket. A swayback horse trotted lamely up to the gate and whinnied. Her father watched her approach, grinning.
Colden could not help but smile at this untidy assemblage and especially at the grin on Dix’s face. Something came over him when he was here. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that something fell away from him. Dix was not exactly serious, but he took things seriously. Yet, when he was here, his movements were looser, his expression less guarded, and something approaching joy animated his features.
Dix waved at her, rose from his seat, met her in the yard, and directed her to one of the corrals. There, a sleek, well-muscled, medium-size black dog with a square head and a strong jaw was leaping vertically up and down, putting a couple of feet between her back legs and the ground every time. Colden was equal parts impressed and intimidated by her manic athleticism.
“Isn’t she great?” Dix asked.
Colden looked at him to see if he was serious. He was.
“Hyperactive lunatic are the words that come to my mind,” she answered.
Dix led Colden through the double gates, into the dog’s yard.
“This is Daisy,” he said, crouching in the dirt.
Daisy wriggled toward them, and Colden reached out to pet her. The dog jumped aside, avoiding her touch.
“I thought you said she’d make a good companion,” Colden complained.
“She will. She just doesn’t know you yet,” Dix explained.
“She certainly doesn’t seem interested in getting to know me,” Colden said.
“She has no reason to,” Dix said. “We need to give her one.”
Daisy was staring intently at Dix’s hand, which held a yellow orb. He cocked his arm and threw the tennis ball as far as the quarter-acre fenced yard would allow. Daisy raced after the ball, caught it on a bounce off the chain link, then ran back and dropped it at his feet. They repeated this routine several times.
“She’s not exactly friendly or affectionate, is she?” Colden observed.
“You’re not exactly warm and fuzzy or soft and cuddly, either,” Dix replied, handing Colden the ball. “You’re both focused on work. You’ll make a great pair.”
Colden stiffened. Independent, self-contained, not needy: she’d always thought those qualities were good things. But these same adjectives had often enough been used as accusations. Especially by the men she had known. It was no wonder she liked being a field biologist. It was a way to be alone. There was a reason she preferred wild to domestic animals. They didn’t want to curl up on your lap.
Colden threw the ball. Hard. It clattered against the chain link and made a wild bounce. Daisy caught it, anyway. Then brought it back to Dix. He looked at Colden, questioningly.
“I’m not criticizing you, honey,” he said, picking up the ball and handing it to her. “It’s just an observation.”
Colden threw the ball again. Less hard. Daisy brought it back, and this time, she dropped it at her feet. But when Colden bent to pick it up, Daisy snatched it away, chomped on it a few times, took a couple of steps backward, and dropped the ball again.
Colden closed the distance and reached for the ball. Again, Daisy snatched it away. This time, she kept it in her mouth.
“Drop it!” Colden demanded.
Daisy and Dix both looked at Colden in mild rebuke.
“She won’t listen to me,” Colden pouted.
“Why would she, when you talk to her like that?” Dix asked.
Colden threw up her hands, crossed her arms, and rolled her eyes.
“Yep, a perfect match,” Dix said. “Stubborn and demanding. Training you both is going to be a blast.”
He held out his hand. Daisy placed the ball in his palm. He threw it for her, and she raced away, her body shining and rippling in the early summer sun.
Two weeks later, Colden was at one of her regular trailheads, sticky with sweat and itchy with mosquito bites. Her arms were crosshatched with scratches from briars and scrub and pockmarked with welts from blackflies. There were several ticks crawling up her legs, their tiny bodies black spots against the beige of her pants.
She brushed the ticks off her pants. They seemed worse when she was with Daisy. She got a bowl from the truck and squirted some water into it from her bottle. Daisy’s messy lapping sprayed the water onto the dry, gravel ground of the turnout. The dog emptied the bowl and looked up at Colden expectantly, her red tongue lolling out the side of her mouth. This had been their first time camping and working together in the field. It hadn’t gone well. Daisy chased deer and chipmunks instead of scent. Colden knew she was to blame for most of the problems—she’d let the dog off lead when she shouldn’t have; she pushed her too hard, too fast; she didn’t do as her father had instructed her.
It was so easy to resent the dog; she knew she really resented her own incompetence around the dog.
She didn’t want to face her father, his excruciatingly patient instructions, his natural facility with Daisy. She wasn’t ready. She was stalling. A solution presented itself. She’d go see Gene.
The air was still and the light flat when she pulled up to his cabin and got out of the truck. Colden felt chills wriggling up and down her arms as she stood in the yard. It wasn’t just the cooling air on her skin that caused the sensation. There were no dogs running out to greet her. Colden listened for the slight whine of Gene’s wheelchair. She cocked her ear, hoping to hear the dull thumps of his crutches. Quiet. Nothing but quiet.
Colden called out, “Hello? Gene?”
A small movement at the front window of the cabin caught her attention. A curtain was moved and then dropped back into place. She heard the familiar sound of crutches against a wood floor. A lock scraped.
A lock? Since when did Gene lock his house?
The door opened. Two dogs pushed each other through the opening, and then Gene rocked his way out after them, followed by Buck. Killer and Jake swarmed Colden’s legs. Buck laid down on the porch with a grunt. Gene lowered himself to his well-used rocking chair. He looked worn out. Wrung out. Colden waited. She tried to look through the gap of the front door.
“Where’s Lucy?” she asked.
Gene shook his head and compressed his lips.
“Gene?”
He wouldn’t look at her. He closed his eyes, and Colden watched reluctant tears squeeze their way free and roll down his cheeks. She pushed past the dogs and sat on the raw edge of the porch. She reached up to touch Gene’s leg but thought better of it and pulled her hand away.
“Gene, what happened? What’s going on?”
Buck got up and rested his chin on Gene’s lap. Gene stroked the dog’s head and sniffed away the tears. He stutter-started his story several times. Colden held on to each disconnected piece of information he offered, waiting for enough details to emerge so that she could put together a complete picture.
He’d heard a strange sound. He’d been asleep. He’d had trouble sleeping lately. He’d taken something, smoked something. It was hard to wake up. He was a little foggy. Something had come onto his property. It was the middle of the night. Maybe it was early in the morning. Still dark. So late, it was actually early. He heard some rustling around out by the barn. Whatever. This was nothing new. Probably just a raccoon. Nothing to worry about. Anything a raccoon might want was locked down. Must have been a young one. One that didn’t know any better. The dogs barely lifted their heads. At first, anyway. Something fell. There was some kind of metal-on-metal clattering. Then the dogs whined and barked for a bit. Everything got quiet again. Lucy wouldn’t settle. He wasn’t going to let them out. What if it was a bear, not a raccoon? A bear would rip the dogs open with a single swipe. He got out his gun. He went to the window. He looked out and saw that the door to the barn was half-open. Had he left it like that? He couldn’t recall. Honestly, he’d had one too many that night. Maybe a few too many. There was only a tiny bit of light. There was something out there that was just a shade darker than what was left of the night itself. He went to his back door, opened it a bit, listened, heard more rustling, and popped off a warning shot. The dogs started barking again. He looked around the door. He saw some large, indistinct shape slide out the barn door and begin shuffling away. He shot again. This time at the shape. If it was a bear, it was a nuisance. He wanted to scare it. He heard a yelp, and the animal shuffled off. The dogs stopped barking. He set the gun down. Killer, Jake, and Buck looked at him from where they were on the sofa, paws on the windowsill that faced the barn. No Lucy. He called. Whistled. The dogs in the house came to his side. He called Lucy’s name over and over. Nothing. The other dogs looked stressed. They wouldn’t move, wouldn’t go out the door.
Gene got a flashlight, stumbled out into the night, and found Lucy by the barn. She was lying on her side, bleeding out. She looked at him, took one deep breath, and was gone. It wasn’t the bear, or whatever the visitor was, that had killed her, though. Gene had done it. He’d shot her. He hadn’t meant to, but there it was. He’d shot his own dog. She must have slipped out the back door, he hadn’t noticed, and then he’d shot her in the dim, predawn light. After all she’d been through, all she’d recovered from, all he’d nursed her through, this was how she had to die—at his hands.
His bad sleep, his damn eyes. He needed glasses, but where was he going to get the three hundred bucks it took for an exam and specs? He’d been saving up for new teeth. He’d lost so many, he was cooking everything down to mush these days. He had thought his teeth were more important than his eyes. He saw perfectly well close-up. It was just the distance thing. Those damn painkillers, too. A friend had given him a few he’d had left over from some dental surgery. His back had been hurting like a son of a bitch. Lucy had gone out the door because she was trying to protect him, and he, the fool, had shot her.
What a dog. The best dog. Now she was dead. He’d buried her out back. With a bunch of tennis balls and toys she loved. With her bed. He hoped she’d forgive him. He’d saved her, and then he’d killed her.
“Some shit just isn’t right,” Gene murmured. “Some shit just doesn’t make any sense.”
Tears dripped down Colden’s face. Killer licked them off her cheeks.
“Oh, Gene. Oh, Lucy. I’m so sorry, Gene,” Colden said.
There were no words to comfort him, so she sat and simply tried to share the sadness. The sun lowered, taking the light with it. The mosquitos came out. The dogs snapped at them. Colden slapped at her arms and legs. Gene sat totally still.
“Brutal year for the skeeters,” Colden said.
“Time to go in,” Gene answered.
Colden wanted to say something like, “It’s not your fault. Accidents happen.” But remarks like that would be unwelcome. Lucy’s death was Gene’s fault. She knew it. He knew it. It was an accident, yes. It could have been prevented. And it wasn’t. This was Gene’s fault and now his burden. Colden knew that any effort she might make to mitigate his justifiable regret was nothing more than a cheap papering over of ugly emotions. They were emotions he needed to have and work his way through. She respected his anguish and self-condemnation.
Sh
e stood and left him with no more words between them. Sally and Dix were eating dinner when she got back. Colden washed her hands, put some kibble in a bowl for Daisy, served herself salad and shepherd’s pie, and joined her parents on the screened-in porch.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Colden, but you look like crap,” Sally said by way of greeting.
“Well, it’s been a crappy few days,” Colden replied miserably.
They ate in silence, the only sounds cutlery scraping against plates and mosquitos tapping against the screens. When the plates were empty and set aside, Colden sighed and told them Gene’s story, which conveniently saved her from having to tell her own. When she was through, Dix sucked his teeth and asked if anything was taken.
“Taken?” Colden asked. “What do you mean?”
“Stolen.”
“What would a bear want to steal? Other than food?”
Dix sipped his beer. Sally watched him. Colden glanced from one to the other.
“Maybe it wasn’t a bear,” Dix said, his voice subdued.
“More of those silly robberies? Is that what you’re suggesting, Dad?” Colden asked, incredulous and annoyed. “It’s not like Gene has much of anything worth stealing.”
“True, but someone might not know that until they checked.”
“Well, I didn’t think to ask him,” Colden said. “Given how upset he was, it wasn’t, you know, a great time to start playing private eye.”
Daisy wandered into the room and shoved her nose under Dix’s hand.
“Well, how did things go with this girl?” he asked hopefully.
“Horrible, if you must know. You’ll see the scrapes on her belly from crashing through the brush when she ran off after a deer or something. Yes, it was my fault. Yes, I took her off the line, like you told me not to. It’s a total pain to hike in the backcountry with a leashed dog. Of course, nowhere near as much of a pain as spending forty-five minutes bushwhacking and hollering for her. I’m sure we scared off any and every wild animal in three counties. Not very helpful for my research. Oh, and she barked at night in the tent. Every tiny sound caused her to bust out yapping. I hardly got any sleep. She didn’t mark on any coyote scat. She dug after chipmunks, destroying old stumps. She ate deer poop and then licked my face. It was all frustrating, disgusting, totally unhelpful. A complete waste of time and effort.”
Beneath the Trees Page 15
