Nop's Hope

by Donald McCaig

  Penny said, “I never worked goats before. What should I know?”

  “They don’t flock good. They shed easier than sheep.”

  “I hear you won the Winter Olympics. Congratulations.”

  He kept his eyes on the course. “Who are you?”

  “Penny Burkeholder. From Virginia.”

  “You kin to Lewis Burkeholder? That Nop dog?”

  “My daddy.”

  “You must be the one won the Bluegrass eight, nine years ago with some crippled-up dog.”

  “The Stink Dog, she—”

  “That was a piece of luck.” He walked to the other side of the truck, refolded his arms, and went back to watching.

  Penny Burkeholder got a nice plaque for her fifth place and an envelope with forty dollars in cash. Ransome Barlow was stuffing his first-place money in his wallet when Penny said, “I thought goats were easy to shed.”

  “They are. You didn’t ask about keepin’ ’em shed.”

  Oren Wright told her it was tough luck at the shed but he’d sure enjoyed her run, enjoyed the whole day, in fact. The FFA kids were throwing a banquet and there’d be a dance. Oren asked Penny did she know the cotton-eyed Joe? That was a real Texas dance.

  Penny said she wanted to get back to Lampasas and pack, the lambing was finished, there was no more reason for her to stay in Texas.

  He said he didn’t know about that, there was always work on a ranch and he’d got kind of used to having her around.

  “Oren,” she said, “If I was looking for a man, I’d probably give you a whirl. I got no room in my heart for anyone but this dog.”

  SOUTHERN ARIZONA INTERNATIONAL LIVESTOCK ASSOCIATION (SAILA) SHEEPDOG TRIAL

  March 3, 1st go-round, Tuscon, Arizona

  Judge: Bill Berhow, Lavina, Montana

  62 Open dogs went to the post

  1. Ransome Barlow

  Bute

  94½

  2. Betty Maddux

  Mirk

  89

  3. Roger Schroeder

  Don

  88

  4. Ted Johnson

  Craig

  86

  5. Sandra Milberg

  Val

  83

  THE WINNEBAGO WAYFARER that Beverly and Lewis Burkeholder had fixed up last summer sat under the roof in the hay shed and the barn pigeons perched on the air conditioner and cooed. The windows were dusty and the bright colors of the checked curtains Beverly had sewn (she would have been the first to tell you she was no seamstress) had faded. The sign Mark had fastened beside the door when everybody thought they’d start taking it a little easier, not retiring exactly but leaving most of the farm work to Mark and Penny, that sign—WELCOME TO OUR ROLLING HOME—had faded too.

  Nop inspected the tires. Though he smelled no dog sign but his own, he freshened his mark. His snout was streaked with gray and, first thing in the morning, his joints ached, but his eyes were clear and last summer, he’d come in second at the Mason Dixon trial. Lewis had retired Nop then, saying that Nop was getting past it and the trophies he’d won were enough for one dog. Nop was indifferent to trophies. If the work went well and Lewis was pleased, Nop was pleased too. Sometimes, not very often, he and Lewis would get it just right and Nop knew they were beautiful then and those were the days—not very many—he carried in his memory.

  Lewis had built a traveling shelf over the driver’s seat of the motor home where Nop and Hope were to have traveled, but things hadn’t turned out: Mark and baby Lisa were dead, and Penny was off with Hope on the road.

  It had rained and frozen the night before, so the trees along the river bottom glittered with ice, and it hurt the eyes to look where the sun touched the hill behind the Burkeholder farm. All the gate latches were ice crusted and Lewis Burkeholder had to break each latch open when he went out to feed. He unrolled a big round bale for the cows and stuffed another in the calf creep. The ewes weren’t due to lamb until spring, so Lewis was feeding them square baled alfalfa. Nop invariably accompanied Lewis on his rounds, and they’d been working together for so many years, sometimes two or three days would go by without Lewis giving Nop a command. Nop would have liked Lewis to talk more but Lewis had fallen silent.

  When the pair came back to the farmhouse, Preacher Shumway’s red Fiesta was parked in the dooryard. “Nop why don’t you stay outside for awhile,” Lewis said, and shook the hay chaff from his pant cuffs before he went inside.

  Nop was glad enough to make his morning inspection of the barnyard, glad to initial the Preacher’s tire. As he got older, routine became more important. Nop never wondered about Hope, though sometimes he dreamed of the younger dog. Sometimes he dreamed about his mate for so many years, Bit O’ Scot, run over by the mail truck, or the Stink Dog, who’d simply failed to rise from her bed one morning. Sometimes he dreamed about people, but usually he dreamed about sheep or other dogs. Now he sniffed where a polecat had visited two nights ago, digging his conical depression after grubs. Nop made certain the polecat wasn’t going to return by marking that spot too.

  Inside the house, his untouched cup of tea steaming at his elbow, the Preacher was saying, “May God grant these good folks some understanding of what has happened. Through Jesus Christ our Lord …”

  “And please watch over Penny,” Beverly Burkeholder said, her eyes squeezed tight shut.

  Lewis waited in the doorway while his wife and the Preacher prayed, and now he set his crook and hat on their hooks, peeled off his heavy woolen jacket and said, “Mighty pretty out there, the ice on the trees and all.”

  “Good mornin’, Lewis,” the Preacher said. “I just thought I’d stop by and see how you folks were doin’.”

  “Oh really, we’re fine,” Beverly said too brightly.

  “Could be better,” Lewis said. “We still haven’t heard a word from Penny. I got a copy of the Ranch Dog Trainer Wednesday and she came third at the sheepdog trial in Fort Worth, Texas. I didn’t know most of the handlers she was running against.”

  “Have you thought about, uh, calling the folks you do know? Maybe they can put you in touch.”

  Beverly had lost weight and could fit into clothes she hadn’t been able to wear in years. Her face was drawn and lined and her black hair was streaked with gray.

  Lewis went to the coffee pot. “Penny knows we love her,” he said. “When she’s ready, she’ll give us a call.”

  IN THE SEPTEMBER TWENTY-EIGHTH Clarke County Gazette, the headline said: ACCIDENT CLAIMS THE LIFE OF WHITE POST FARMER AND DAUGHTER

  Had that been the whole of it, blunt and plain, the Burkeholders might have healed quicker. It is small things they cannot forget: Lisa’s outfit (red skirt, brown overblouse, white socks, tennis shoes) she’d worn that morning when she passed her grandparents’ farmhouse. The way she lifted her hand when Beverly waved from the window. And Lisa turned away, resolutely, and Beverly dreams Lisa was turning her face toward her death, rushing toward it.

  And Mark’s truck: the tie-rod ends were loose, so Lewis had taken the truck down to Crossroads Exxon to have it fixed, and though Lewis knows perfectly well the job was done carefully, that there was nothing wrong with Mark’s truck, Lewis dreams of coming around the outside of the curve in the rain and the semi appearing through the rain curtain and Mark jerking the wheel and trying to stay on the road after the semi sides wiped him and not having enough steering to do the job.

  Lewis knows the steering wasn’t bad, but he cannot believe it, and he tiptoes downstairs, not to wake his wife, who lies awake anyway while he sits by the dying living room fire and worries about the steering of that truck and, nowadays, when he has mechanical work on his truck or tractor he never takes it to Crossroads Exxon.

  Lewis, a stubborn man impatient with concepts, dreamed about tie-rod ends. Beverly, who was a better Christian, dreamed about Lisa going to her own death, with determination. When she told Preacher Shumway, she asked, “Was she going to meet Jesus?”

  The preacher, a kind man, sa
id, “Perhaps she was. Lisa is with Jesus now.”

  But how could she have known?”

  The Preacher was one man tending to the spiritual needs of a congregation of 160 souls. Monday night was Bible study, Tuesday night, congregational care, Wednesday was his own, Thursday was the evangelism committee and choir, Friday was the foodbank. Saturday he traveled to Strasburg for the meetings of the Presbytery. He’d known Beverly Burkeholder fairly well before the accident and seen her weekly since.

  “We heard from that trucker’s insurance company,” Beverly said. “They say it was Mark’s fault, that he was ‘driving too fast for conditions.’ How can they tell a lie like that? That semi truck forced Mark off the road into that pond …” (Beverly had a memory flash of what the rescue squad man had told them. No doubt the man had meant a kindness, to tell mother and daughter how brave Mark had been at the end. “That pond is right deep,” he’d said. “Wasn’t any of that pickup showing from the road. When we towed her out, the driver—that was your husband, ma’am—he had his arms around the child. Until the last he held her up to breathe that last pocket of air.”

  That became Penny’s detail. She couldn’t think of the accident without picturing her daughter, Lisa, in the pickup cab, doors jammed, under twenty feet of water, held up to the last pocket of air as her father’s drowning hands weakened. Penny’s detail was her daughter’s final terror.

  Beverly, who’d been a practical farm woman all her life, shied at that picture, refused it, believed the child was dead as soon as the truck submerged, that like any other animal Lisa’d been too busy dying to feel much one way or the other.

  Since she was a child, Penny had been skeptical about life, readier to understand reverses than pleasures and now life played into her hand. Somewhere deep in her soul, Penny had expected something like this: hadn’t she been too happy?

  Two years ago, Mark attended sheep shearing school down at Steeles Tavern, and after shearing the Burkeholder flock, he went on the road, spring and fall, sometimes with another shearer, sometimes alone. On a good day, shearing a big flock, Mark could pocket two hundred and fifty dollars, and since he’d sleep with the farm family and eat their meals, most of that was profit. From February until June he sheared six, seven days a week. June, July, August, he’d stay on the farm for the haymaking. In September, they planted rye and next year’s alfalfa. Penny’d always been a good hand with livestock and was in charge of animal rations and medical care. Penny started selling freezer lambs to Washington customers. With 1-64 finished, the DC suburbs were only an hour away, and during Apple Blossom Festival in Winchester, Lewis and Penny would put on sheepdog demonstrations and pass out leaflets about their “naturally reared lambs—no antibiotics, no hormones” and take orders.

  Penny substituted at Lisa’s school, and though sometimes it was awkward to be called in at the last minute to teach, any grade from one through nine, the money came in handy: she’d earmarked every penny for Lisa’s education, and the account already held more than a thousand dollars.

  Like most married couples, Mark and Penny drew close for periods of time then moved further apart. There was a rhythm to this motion, like the beating of a heart. They’d get too dear to each other and Mark’d just naturally have to go off hunting, or go down the road to help Junior Maxwell restore his 1953 Dodge Power Wagon. Junior had the body off it and the frame sandblasted and primed.

  When Mark was off shearing, Penny took her meals at the big house with Lewis and Beverly.

  Beverly’s father, Carl Obenschain, had died three years ago, and though they’d seen it coming—Carl had survived two strokes—he was a bigger loss when he was gone than he’d been a presence when he was alive. Mrs. Obenschain was in the Mennonite home.

  Lewis Burkeholder wasn’t a real regular churchgoer, just Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter, but after their granddaughter died, he accompanied Beverly most of the time. In church Beverly prayed and Lewis looked at the preacher and listened, as if any minute something would explain his loss.

  That expectant look on Lewis’s face distressed the preacher, and some parishioners remarked that Preacher Shumway’s sermons certainly were “interesting” these days. On some Sundays, the young preacher outspoke himself, spoke as if inspired by the Holy Spirit, oblivious of his congregation, his wife sitting in the front row of the choir, and when he’d finished, wrung dry, there’d be Lewis Burkeholder’s sturdy face, expectant, unsatisfied.

  The day after the accident, Lewis made the arrangements for the funeral, picked out the coffins too. Penny had looked him in the eye, his own daughter, and said, “What difference does it make what they’re buried in,” which shocked Lewis so much he never told Beverly.

  Lewis knew George Hansen from the White Post VFD. George wasn’t much for answering fire calls in the middle of the night but he’d show up to cook for every chicken barbecue. George’s father, Old Bob Hansen, had buried Lewis’s parents, and now the son was to bury Lewis’s son-in-law and granddaughter. Lisa’d upset the steady progress country people expected from the boisterous cradle to the dignity of the grave.

  Beverly’s sister and her husband came for Family Night, and a couple of Lewis’s cousins drove over from Martinsville. Mark’s mother came all the way from Ohio. George Hansen opened his biggest parlor for the occasion, the one they’d redone with the peach paint and recessed lighting just that summer, George and his wife, Emily, doing the painting themselves. Under the flower perfumes, you could smell the faint bitterness of fresh paint.

  Lewis and Beverly sat in the viewing room at the foot of the smaller coffin. Other kin waited in the parlor, just outside. “Yes it is sad, and her so young.” Penny kept about as far from the coffins as she could get.

  And as the women (and men) came to her and took her hand or gave her a hug and said, I’m so sorry, or How could this have happened? she said, “Thank you. Thank you for coming.”

  George Hansen greeted everybody at the door, in the hallway where they could hang up their coats and take off their galoshes. George made sure everybody signed the little book he’d give to the family later, along with the record of who’d sent flowers.

  The White Post VFD had voted to send a forty-five-dollar funeral wreath. Beverly’s sister had sent another large display, dahlias, which balanced the VFD on the right-hand side. The most expensive tribute came from Lisa’s classmates. The whole school had contributed and a great spray of chrysanthemums loomed above the coffins with a ribbon that said TODAY, THOU ART WITH ME IN PARADISE.

  State Assemblyman John Purdy touched Lewis’s elbow. “Lewis, a tragedy,” and shook Lewis’s hand and headed for the thickest crowd to talk hunting and fishing, maybe politic a little. Billy Harkenrude, the school principal, made an appearance, three of the county’s four supervisors.

  Lisa’s teacher, Mrs. Lynch, arrived in her best blue Sunday dress and her seed pearls, and her husband came in behind, like a dinghy towed by a cruise ship.

  “Lisa was a wonderful child,” she said. She took Penny’s hand in her own and patted the back of Penny’s rougher one. “We’ll all miss her so much.”

  “Thank you. Thank you for coming.”

  “Dear, what will you do?”

  Penny’s eyes focused, recognized the teacher talking to her. She said, “I don’t know.”

  Little Melissa Dowd, same age as Lisa, brunette where Lisa had black hair, didn’t take off her blue coat, wouldn’t, and it stood out from her short body like she was a Christmas tree ornament. With one hand she was attached to her father, a round man with three chins who was the butcher at the slaughterhouse in Stephen’s city and whose normally merry face was solemn and bug-eyed for this occasion. Like Humpty-Dumpty and Alice the pair marched toward the back room that held all the death. Melissa’s hand-me-down coat’s sleeves were too long. As the child neared the room where her best friend lay, she took a fresh grip of her daddy’s hand. They were silhouetted by the lights over the coffins. “I wish Lisa wasn’t dead,” Melissa
said firmly.

  And it was Beverly—who loved children, talked easily to children—whose eyes gushed tears so she had to turn away as Lewis said in a deep gravely voice, “Yes, honey. That’s what we wish too.”

  Penny bolted and pushed by George Hansen. “Stuffy,” she said, though it wasn’t, though George kept everything at a pleasant sixty-five degrees. Outside on the concrete stoop she looked at all the cars and pickup trucks, waiting like so many metal insects to ferry their people home.

  The door opened behind her and Lewis Burkeholder took his daughter’s arm. “Right brisk out here,” he said. He took his old pipe out of his pocket and fumbled around for tobacco but didn’t find any, since he’d stopped smoking his pipe (at Beverly’s urging) two years ago. He stuck his pipe in his mouth anyway.

  “Silly damn thing,” he said. “I suppose I should throw it away. You remember that blue teething ring, with the silver handle Aunt Helen sent to Lisa?

  He stopped talking and pocketed his pipe and blew his nose.

  Melissa and her dad came out and Mr. Dowd shook Lewis’s hand and shook his head sorrowfully and said, “ma’am,” and led his daughter to his car.

  After their headlights came on, Penny said, “If he doesn’t lose some weight he’s going to leave that child an orphan.”

  Lewis said, “I don’t know what a child thinks. I don’t know when we should protect them. Out here in the country they see dead creatures all the time.” He blew his nose again and said, “Twenty years ago you’d look up at the Blue Ridge and not see a single light; all those houses up there now. That child came to say good-bye.”