Faithful Unto Death

by Stephanie Jaye Evans

  You are in my prayers nightly and on my heart always. I hope you’re being faithful about church attendance, it’s so important not to drift.

  Love you,

  Dad

  From: Merrie Wells

  To: Walker Wells

  Subject: re: touching base

  Hey dad good to hear from ya :). Yes, texted Jenasy no haven’t heard from jo lately im sure everything is fine you can access my grades via the tx tech website get mom to show you how—do c of c preachers make real $$ if they don’t get a book published? just asking ;). merrie

  Nine

  Our talk with Jo didn’t go all that well, even though Annie and I did have a plan. We’d prayed, too. It might have been partly my fault. After Rebecca’s comments concerning Jo’s shoulder blades, I paid more attention at dinner to what was actually making its way into Jo’s stomach—not all that much, as it turned out. She fed more to Baby Bear, our Newfoundland, a horse masquerading as a dog. Baby Bear (yeah, great name) was sending Jo psychic-dog-brain-waves to get her to sneak him food. That mutt has terrible manners, but no one except me seems to notice.

  Annie Laurie had been right when she said I had to let Jo have the Newfoundland puppy that had grown into Baby Bear. Five years ago, we had gone over to Bobbie and Bill Woodruff’s for dinner and brought nine-year-old Jo with us because Merrie had plans for the evening and we couldn’t find a sitter. Jo had grumbled but that had all changed when we got to the Woodruffs’ and discovered that their Newfoundland bitch had nine fat little puppies, just a month old.

  I’m not a dog person, but even I was charmed by the tumbling, nipping, silky-coated jet babies. Jo climbed into the pen and Hermione, the Newfie mom, raised her massive head. I thought she was going to eat Jo for violating her space. Instead, Hermione thrust a huge wet nose into Jo’s crotch and snuffled. Jo didn’t scream, which is probably how I would have responded to that inspection. Jo put her hands under Hermione’s chin and drew the dog’s face level to her own. Hermione’s head was the size of a small television—Newfoundlands are big dogs. Then Jo rubbed her face all over Hermione’s, chin to cheek and forehead to forehead. I’d never seen anything like it and neither had the Woodruffs. Jo settled herself down among the litter, her back against Hermione, and spent the rest of the evening puppy-sitting while Hermione caught up on her sleep.

  Annie Laurie and I had thought Jo looked pretty cute, our mite of a daughter surrounded by the wriggling mass of puppyhood, but Bobbie and Bill watched like Jo was being baptized into some sort of sacred puppy club. Turns out, she had been.

  Toward the end of the evening, Bobbie asked if we’d like to take Hermione on her evening outing while they cleaned up the kitchen, and while I didn’t have any interest at all in taking a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound dog out for a walk, I didn’t see how I could say so.

  Annie Laurie, Jo, and I led the dog out into the cool night, and in spite of my misgivings, Hermione proved a placid, calm companion. She peed gushingly a number of times, and when she squatted to leave a cowpat-sized dung specimen, I balked at picking it up in the newspaper bag Bill had handed me on the way out. But my fastidious Jo snatched the bag from me, scooped up the steaming stink, and carried it back to the Woodruffs’ as though she were delivering a trophy.

  Bill and Bobbie beamed at this confirmation of Jo’s inherent dogginess and, with great ceremony, sat us down to announce—Bill gravely, and Bobbie tremulously—that they were going to give Jo one of Hermione’s puppies, and that she could choose which one. My hair stood up and my jaw dropped down and Annie Laurie got a pincher grip on my knee and applied some pressure, but not enough to keep me from saying that we couldn’t possibly, we wouldn’t dream, and our yard really wasn’t big enough, and Annie increased the pressure and I shut up.

  Jo flung herself into Bill and Bobbie’s arms and assured them that she loved them better than anyone in the world (yeah, “how sharper than a serpent’s tooth” and all that) and that she would be the best puppy mother who had ever lived and then that canny little nine-year-old did something very interesting.

  She climbed back into the pen and picked up each puppy in turn. She tickled and stroked each puppy, but all the while, from the corner of her eye, she watched the Woodruffs. I don’t know what Jo was looking for there, and I don’t know what she saw, but when she got to puppy number five, whatever she was looking for, she found.

  “This one!” she said.

  Something like relief passed between Bill and Bobbie, but Bill said, “Jo, if that’s the puppy you want, you can have him, but I have to tell you that though he’s a purebred Newfie, and perfectly healthy, you won’t be able to show him.”

  Bill held out his hands for the puppy and Jo passed over the protesting fur ball.

  Bill turned the yowling puppy over on his back and touched the puppy’s scrotum with a finger.

  “See this?” Bill asked.

  Jo leaned over Bob’s shoulder. “It’s his wee.”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “Boy puppies are supposed to have two, umm, two …” Bill looked at me.

  I was not helping Bill out with this. The man had just foisted a puppy on me that would soon grow big enough to leave cowpats all over my yard.

  Bill tried again. “Boy puppies should have two danglies with their, um, wee. This fella only has one. The other hasn’t dropped. It’s tucked up in his tummy.”

  “Will he miss it?” said Jo. She fondled a pink-lined ear and the puppy reached up and caught a finger in his mouth and started suckling. Jo’s eyes grew misty—she was a woman in love.

  “He won’t, Jo. This puppy isn’t going to need his danglies at all. Your momma and dad will take care of it for you when he’s older.” (No way was I going to be a party to that bit of emasculation; Annie Laurie later had to make that trip to the vet on her own.)

  Jo had pitched a fit when she realized she wasn’t going to get to take the puppy home with her that minute; she would have to wait two months for the puppy to be weaned. Then she pitched a fit when I told her no, she could not live with the Woodruffs until the puppy was old enough to come home with us.

  When the time finally came to pick up the new family member, the puppy weighed sixteen pounds and had paws the size of dessert plates. Jo brought one of her old baby blankets with her. She wrapped the puppy up and held him against her chest, his chin resting on her shoulder. No new mother ever looked prouder.

  “What will you call him, Jo?” asked Bobbie.

  Jo leaned her new puppy back so she could look in his face. They stared at each other for a long time. A long pink tongue rolled out and slurped her cheek.

  “Baby Bear,” she said.

  Annie Laurie and Bobbie started laughing.

  I said, “Jo, you can’t call him ‘Baby Bear.’ Bear is my name.”

  “He looks like a bear,” Jo said. Newfoundlands do look ursine. “And he’s a baby.” Jo had that implacable look on her face that, even then, portended somebody other than me getting their way.

  “Well, but he won’t be a baby forever, and that’s my name.”

  Jo rubbed noses with the puppy as she worked this out. Not whether or not to name her dog Baby Bear—that was already decided on—but how to get the name past me. It came to her, and she lifted her sunflower face to me.

  “You named me ‘Josephine’ for Nana. I’m naming him Baby Bear for you. It’s a family name.”

  Big smile. Checkmate.

  And so we became the proud (Jo), bemused (me and Annie Laurie), and envious (Merrie) owners of a Newfoundland dog named Baby Bear. After me.

  Merrie had wept buckets when she found that the Woodruffs had given Jo—not her—a puppy. I said the dog would be so big, there would be more than enough of him to go around, but she was inconsolable. My genius wife told Merrie that a dog will always love best the person who takes care of him and gives him the most walks. That, no surprise, set up a fierce competition between the girls, and Annie Laurie and I didn’t have to walk the dog once until years la
ter when varsity sports for Merrie, and dance classes for Jo, so ate into their schedules that we started taking up the slack. By then I didn’t mind.

  As ridiculous as it is for a preacher to own a purebred dog that sells for fifteen hundred dollars, as absurd as it is to have a long-haired, pony-sized dog in the hell of a Texas summer, I love the mutt. It’s embarrassing, but I do. Baby Bear will choose Jo over me any day of the week, even though she slips him veggies and I give him the fat I trim off my meat, but even though he’s not the guy he once was (halfway, at least, there was that undescended testicle), still, he’s the only other male in the house. We stick together. When he isn’t sticking to Jo.

  So anyway, tonight we were eating in the kitchen. Annie had given up on serving dinner in the dining room about two years after our second baby was born. This was a huge concession on Annie’s part, because in the home she grew up in, there was this social dividing line between people who had their meals in the dining room with an ironed linen napkin in their laps, and people who ate in the kitchen. People who ate in the kitchen were grouped together with people who lived in trailer homes that were periodically repositioned by tornadoes, and who had season tickets to monster truck rallies. I truly love my mother-in-law, Gaither, but there are times … I figure maybe Martha Stewart came up to her standards, before the prison stint. Nobody else is likely to.

  Anyway, even though we’re eating in the kitchen, Annie does things nicely for her family. I mean it. We don’t have linen napkins in our laps, but the napkins are cloth, and not polyester, either—a polyester napkin works about as well as a sheet of wax paper. Annie uses cotton napkins. She doesn’t iron them or anything. She’s not psycho. She just smooths and folds them straight from the dryer, same as she does the girls’ jeans. I think little things like this matter, even if Annie’s mom thinks I’ve dragged her baby to new and unimagined depths of depravity.

  Jo put plenty of food on her plate, scrupulously avoiding the grilled chicken and anything it might have touched. Annie Laurie has never made a big deal over Jo’s deciding to be a vegetarian; she just started adding more vegetable dishes and nearly always had some sort of beans to make sure Jo was getting protein, but contrary to Rebecca’s comment, there wasn’t ever tofu on the table because Jo won’t eat it and neither will I. Even Baby Bear declines tofu. So what went on Jo’s plate were kidney beans (bland from being cooked without any bacon or ham), grilled sweet potato slices (Annie cooks the veggies on the top grill because Jo won’t eat them if meat juice drips on them), grilled red and green peppers, and that kind of salad they make at Carrabbas’ restaurant, where you stack tomato slices, fresh mozzarella, and fresh basil leaves. Annie always makes sure Jo has a big glass of milk, too. That’s the only food item she’s a real stickler on—Jo can’t leave the table until she finishes her milk. My point being that there was plenty of good food on Jo’s plate.

  But tonight I was watching to see if Jo was really eating what was on her plate. First Jo used her fork and knife like surgical instruments: she peeled the thin skin off the sweet potatoes, slipped it to Baby Bear, then slipped him a whole slice of sweet potato. He kept a guilty eye on me, but he ate it noisily. He doesn’t know any other way to eat. Then she peeled the skin off the grilled peppers, not an easy thing to do, and set the skin aside. She pushed the now-skinless peppers to a new location on her plate. Baby Bear won’t eat peppers. Jo then pierced two beans with her fork tines and brought the fork up to her mouth. The fork went back to the plate with one bean gone. There was a long, thoughtful chew. Jo unstacked the salad, ate the basil leaves, all four of them, slipped the fresh mozzarella slices back on the lettuce leaf, and started cutting the skin off the tomatoes. I swear, it was like watching an autopsy. I was almost done with my dinner and Jo had eaten a sum total of four basil leaves and one unsalted kidney bean. I nudged Annie Laurie and nodded at Jo’s plate, but Annie poured herself another glass of wine and ignored me.

  I stayed quiet as long as I could and then very gently pointed out to Jo that she had eaten nothing so far but garnish, whereas I was already finished with my dinner.

  She didn’t look up from her plate. “It’s not a race, Dad. You don’t get a prize for finishing first.”

  Just as cool as you please, still dissecting that perfectly decent tomato. She was removing the tomato seeds with one fork tine.

  “It’s not only the time you’re taking to dismember the good food your mother set in front of you,” I said, “it’s the fact that you aren’t eating any of it.”

  Baby Bear made a fussy, nervous noise and pushed my leg with his nose. He had a string of drool depending from his jaws that got left on my slacks. Baby Bear readjusted his bulk under the kitchen table to make sure I had no place to put my feet. I pushed back.

  “What do you weigh, Dad? Two-fifty? Two-sixty? I’m less than half your size; I don’t need the same … mass of food that you do.”

  I suddenly felt like I’d eaten an entire horse. With my fingers. Raw. And I keep my weight right at 235, thank you very much.

  I tried to explain. “You keep telling me that ballet is a sport same as track or basketball or volleyball. A healthy, growing girl needs fuel to play sports …”

  “You mean a healthy, growing girl like Merrie?”

  Annie Laurie’s sneaker made a restraining tap on my foot.

  “Well,” I said, “Merrie is a good example of a healthy—”

  Still not looking up, Jo flipped her hair back and cut right in while I was speaking.

  “Merrie is a moose. If Merrie wanted to do a pas de deux, she’d need Arnold Schwarzenegger for her partner.”

  Baby Bear groaned.

  “The young Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Jo clarified.

  I stood up so fast I bumped the table, and the plate holding the grilled chicken slid, sloshing some of the chicken juice on Jo’s hand. Hardly any at all, but you would have thought I’d scalded her to death. She jumped up screaming like a banshee and rushed over to the kitchen sink, scrubbing at her hand with a soapy dishcloth.

  I said, “Your sister is not a moose, Josephine Amelia. She’s five foot ten and—”

  Jo whirled away from the sink, her hair flying out around her. What with the steam from the sink and all that dark hair and that pinched, furious face, she looked like a little witch. She had tears in her eyes, too. I don’t know why, crying over some chicken juice.

  “Oh!” She stood in front of me, shaking, she was so angry. “I swear to God I must have been adopted!”

  She slapped the sloppy cloth down on the counter and flew out of the kitchen. Baby Bear slunk off and put his head under the couch. The rest of him wouldn’t fit.

  We don’t take the Lord’s name in vain in this house, and I wasn’t going to stand for that one minute. I was going after her but Annie Laurie barred my way and pushed me back toward the kitchen.

  “Sit down, Bear. Well, now, I think dinner went unusually well tonight, don’t you? Everybody’s going to go to bed with a full stomach and a peaceful heart.”

  “I sure hope you aren’t going to blame her hissy fit on me because—”

  “No, Bear, I’m not. I’m not, because I’m biting my tongue in two to keep from it, but we won’t go into that right now. What I want right now is for you to clean the kitchen, and please don’t throw the leftovers away just because that’s easier than sticking them in Tupperware. Don’t give them to Baby Bear, either, or you’ll be cleaning up dog mess, from whichever end he expels it, before the evening is over. I’m going to walk Baby Bear and give Jo some time to cool off and then I’m going to have that talk with Jo that you and I had planned to do together. We’re going to change plans and make it a mother-daughter talk.”

  “She’s probably got her period, flying off the handle like that.”

  Annie Laurie shut her eyes for a minute. Then she got the leash off the hook, grabbed a dishcloth for drool emissions, and called to Baby Bear.

  “Come on, Baby Bear, let’s get out of here before I sa
y something to my husband that I’ll have to pretend to be sorry for.”

  It isn’t easy living in a house full of women. Fortunately, God made me a patient man. I went ahead and ate the leftovers myself. Saves time.

  I was propped up in bed, reading a Minette Walters thriller—I’d recently discovered her and she’s great; doesn’t describe everything to death—when Annie Laurie came in after talking to Jo. I said, “Well?”

  “Let me get my shower, it’s been a long day.”

  Annie Laurie slipped into our clean white sheets fifteen minutes later. No Waverly prints on the beds in our house. White sheets only. That’s another thing Annie picked up from her mom, and one she refuses to turn loose of. Not that I care. I think it’s interesting, is all.

  She smelled of oranges and lavender and peppermint, a combination of shampoo and lotion and toothpaste. Her lips were still stained pink from the lipstick she’d worn during the day; her hair was wet and slicked back. I was kind of thinking we should have some private time with each other before Annie told me what Jo had to say for herself, but Annie Laurie gave my hand a squeeze and pushed it away.

  “I’m going to tell you what I’ve learned. Then, if you still want to get close, at least we’ll both be starting from the same place. Otherwise, I’ll be playing catch-up the whole time and probably never get there. You want the light on or off?” She looked at me, hand on the switch.

  “Is it going to be easier with the light on or off?”

  “If we segue into private time, that’ll be easier with the lights off.” She switched the lamp off and eased into the curve of my arm, her damp shoulder fitting in my armpit. “Do you want to pray before we start this?”

  “I’ve already said my prayers.”

  “You don’t want to say a prayer with me?”

  “Okay. Please, God, would you help Annie Laurie go ahead and give me the information she is so uneager to give me. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

  “You know, Bear, even when you’re flip, God still hears you.”