Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “C’mon, old man,” Ashton fairly sang, “give me a hand on it! Seventy-five bucks. It ain’t like I was asking for a bigger share of your profits, right? Now that I don’t look to expect.”

  “It might maybe be dangerous for you—”

  “Not me. Not me and a bunch of scrawny pups.”

  “It might maybe—”

  “Might maybe,” Ashton said in his uncle’s mournful voice, irritated by the old man’s language—for it often annoyed the young man that his family—well, not his family but his relatives—the Vickery and Sayer people spread out through most of the county—were so old-fashioned. Even the word they used (“old-timey”) upset and amused him. “Look: you going to shake on the bet or back down? Talkin’ about them miserable little buggers like they’re the Devil himself or something nobody can touch—”

  “Watch your mouth, boy: what if there was a customer in here?”

  “There ain’t any customer in here, not that I can see,” Ashton said with an impatient smile, “and what’s wrong with calling them buggers if that’s what they are? They killed your goddam chickens, didn’t they? I don’t see no point to talking about them as if they were something so special that nobody could touch—I can’t halfway tolerate that kind of a mentality.” Ashton felt obscurely threatened and even insulted and it seemed to him that his uncle was partly to blame. But he managed to retain his smile. “If I kill them bastards I ain’t gonna haul my ass around the countryside without some remuneration. Fifty bucks?”

  “Fifty bucks what?”

  “As a bet. Between you and me. You are saying I can’t get them and I’m saying I can. C’mon, Uncle Ewell, you gonna shake my hand?”

  “You don’t have any fifty bucks that I know of,” Ewell said sullenly.

  All things must be fulfilled . . . consequently they shook hands, and that evening Ashton whistled cheerfully as he cleaned and oiled his guns, and when his sister Elsa asked him was he going hunting next day, and his mother’s big frame filled the doorway of the shed and she asked him was he going to take a holiday from the store again and anger his uncle again, Ashton said only that he was taking a day off with his uncle’s permission and it was none of their business what he did. “I wouldn’t halfway mind, though, if one of you sweethearts packed me a nice lunch,” he said.

  They both snorted with laughter, but in a few minutes Elsa returned, honey-haired sweet-faced fifteen-year-old Elsa, with the breasts and hips of a full-grown woman (“I pray God she won’t grow to be my size,” Mrs. Vickery said often), leaning in the doorway to tease him. “How far are you going? Who’s going with you? Them silly old friends of yours? Just a bunch of overgrown boys, Mamma says; playing around in the woods. You going after a bear maybe? A grizzly? You going after some big game?—maybe out in our woods?”

  “Honey,” Ashton said, “I’ll bring you back the makings for a fur outfit: coat and hat and muff. Dress you up just fine for the winter.”

  She laughed scornfully but nevertheless made him a delicious lunch of roast beef sandwiches on rye bread, and almond and orange-peel brownies, and a thermos of coffee pale with cream. “This should fuel you up for as far as you’re going,” she said, setting it on the kitchen table that night for him to take in the morning.

  “I thank you, sister,” Ashton said with mock formality.

  “I SURELY DO thank you,” he said, eating the last of the brownies atop the rotted tower.

  He drank half the coffee, cold, as he liked it, and saved the rest for later, and bit off another plug of tobacco, and moved a few inches so that he was in the shade, and yawned contentedly, studying the countryside. Did he see its beauty, did he take note of the birds’ morning cries?—a trio of kingfishers by the river, rattling at one another; a jay singing the gentler of its songs, liquidy and breathless; a cowbird whistling in a pasture somewhere near. He smelled the wet grass, he filled his lungs with the scent of wet clover. For a half hour he was neither awake nor asleep, in a kind of alert doze, his eyelids lowered partway, the movement of his jaws slowing but never quite coming to a halt. In his mind’s eye he saw the dogs. He saw them drawing nearer. Still, very still he was, not daring to move even in his dream; but he could not control the sudden leap of his blood. Ah, he saw them now, he saw them: deranged with hunger and therefore incautious, flea- and mite- and mosquito-bitten, worm-gnawed, eyes rolling a sick crazy yellow, tongues aslant, teeth gleaming inside black-gummed mouths . . .

  He waited.

  He waited and it seemed to him that the fresh breeze that lifted from the river would urge the dogs to him; he sniffed the breeze and half fancied he could discern their scent upon it. He had no doubt they would turn up and that he would slaughter them one by one. It would come to pass sooner or later; if not today, then surely tomorrow; if not tomorrow, another day; wasn’t Ashton Vickery a peculiar young man (so people said admiringly), brash and all-in-a-hurry sometimes, possessed of the slow cold methodical cunning of a hunting owl at other times?

  He had oiled his guns and laid them atop the pine bureau in his room and he’d slept a fine, full, deep eight-hours sleep, which was what he always required; he had slept with the grateful, quivering abandon of a healthy animal, or of a very young child; he had slept as he always slept. A dreamless and absolutely satisfying sleep that refreshed him utterly (as sleep didn’t seem to refresh his father: but wasn’t it the old man’s fault that he worried so much about his patients’ illnesses and deaths and debts and quarrels and silly old-maid fears?). Waking at five-thirty, he had jumped from bed and in twenty minutes was at his uncle’s farm and parked back of a lane between a cornfield and a cow pasture where the family wouldn’t notice his car—for the last thing he wanted was his aunt chasing him up to offer midday dinner, or one of his boy cousins coming to join him, or one of his girl cousins coming to flirt; he had to be alone the way his grandmother had to be alone to pray if he wanted to get the job done.

  “Come along, little bastards, little buggers,” he whispered.

  His father had written a letter to the Yewville Journal on the subject of the wild dogs, but the newspaper had not printed it. That had infuriated the old man! Ashton hadn’t bothered to read the letter since he not only didn’t care for his father’s exaggerations and the big words he used, he didn’t care for reading at all; it seemed to him that if people had anything important to say they would say it out loud and eventually it would get around; what was the need to keep things tiny and secret, writing them down . . . ? He was like his grandparents that way, like his mother’s people, who hadn’t even gone to school much beyond fifth or sixth grade and always brought the subject up since they were proud of it. Thaddeus Vickery had gone to school for years, years and years and years, and when he got his degree he’d had to borrow money to set himself up in a practice and where had he borrowed money from if not his in-laws, old William Sayer with his immense farm in the valley—? Now that he had been a doctor for twenty-five years he still hadn’t any money, it was Sayer money that kept the house from going to the bank in the thirties, and Sayer money Mrs. Vickery had inherited that allowed the family to be superior to most of the people of Marsena—not that Ashton minded being superior, he rather liked it, but he was inclined to think his superiority had to do mainly with himself, his face and body and personality. Maybe a little with being the doctor’s son: that had always impressed his teachers, who’d graded him higher than he deserved. Being the doctor’s son, however, was often an embarrassment, since the old man believed he knew the cure to everything if only people would listen, and naturally they were fools for not listening, for not printing his meticulously typed-out letters to the newspaper in town and granting him a public forum for his ideas. Ashton had not read the letter, but he’d had to sit through a meal while his father read the family parts of it in a preacher-like voice, jabbing the air with his forefinger (as he forbade anyone else to do, especially at the dinner table), making some long-drawn-out clever point about the dogs being victims: victims of hum
an beings: victims turned killer in order to survive. They were all abandoned dogs, Dr. Vickery charged, some of them had been pets belonging to Yewville residents who hadn’t wanted them any longer but were too kindhearted to have them put to sleep by the Humane Society, so they took them out into the country on a Sunday drive and let them go, and drove away thinking—thinking what?—thinking the dogs would find new homes, thinking farmers would take them in and feed them and give them new pet names and love them? Selfish fools! Selfish criminal insensitive fools! Pet-owners from Yewville and Derby and Rockland and as far away, even, as Port Oriskany, strangers who saw no evil in giving their pets “freedom” out in the country—they were common criminals and should be fined if not jailed and if he, Thaddeus Vickery, were an attorney instead of a medical doctor (yes, Ashton thought, exchanging a glance with his mother, the old man must allude to that: what pride!) he would certainly encourage farmers to sue for damages against the dogs’ owners, could the dogs’ owners be tracked down; didn’t these people know it wasn’t just farm animals that were slaughtered by the wild dogs, but people had been bitten, a nine-year-old child had been severely bitten and had had to undergo the agony of a series of rabies shots—didn’t people know how their responsibilities branched out to include not just their own families but all families?—everyone?—everywhere? Old Thaddeus’s voice had rung clear and strong and outraged. Mrs. Vickery murmured assent, Elsa avoided Ashton’s eye so that she wouldn’t be drawn into giggling and sent from the table, and she too murmured assent; Ashton alone said nothing, his head bent over his plate, eating beef and mashed potatoes and string beans and cauliflower and glazed carrots and cornbread and butter as fast as he could, and not lingering for dessert either—though his mother and Elsa had made blueberry pie, one of his favorites. How could these “humane” pet-lovers abandon their pets to the vicissitudes of the wilderness, Dr. Vickery demanded, had they no imaginations?—no intelligence? Their beloved pets became scavengers, butchers, outlaws, maddened and diseased and terrorized, not even animals any longer but simply coils of intestines about which matted fur grew. It was only a matter of time until they killed someone. A child, perhaps. Why, within Dr. Vickery’s memory there was a hideous case out around Mt. Ayr, a dog had gone mad and attacked his master and killed him and had acquired a taste for blood and before he was tracked down and shot he had attacked a half-dozen people and partly eaten a young child and—

  “Thaddeus, please,” Mrs. Vickery said suddenly.

  Dr. Vickery looked up from the letter, blinking. His face was ruddy, the pupils of his eyes appeared to be dilated.

  “No more,” Mrs. Vickery said with finality.

  Elsa giggled, Ashton guffawed and slipped away from the table.

  “Ashton,” his mother called, “don’t you want any—”

  “Nope: no thanks!” Ashton said.

  THE DOGS WERE trapped and he killed them one by one, agitated at first and then more methodical and then, near the end, very agitated again—shaking with excitement. Such noise! Such struggle! And the livingness of it—the dogs scrambling against the high walls of the ditch and falling back, yowling, wounded, crazy with terror—the kick of the rifle, and then, as he drew closer, the masterful discharge of the shotgun, which tore a partly grown hound in two and ripped off most of the skull of a shaggy coyote-looking creature with a bad leg—and on and on it went, Ashton carried with it, buoyed along by the noise, the desperation, the clawing, the howling and wailing and barking. “Oh you little buggers, take your medicine now, filthy little flea-bitten motherfuckers, c’mon, c’mon, you there!—where you think you’re going,” and since there was no danger now he slid down into the ditch and followed a mongrel German shepherd—a pregnant bitch, in fact—that was crawling through the underbrush, crawling on two front legs, dragging herself frantically—the lower part of the spine blasted away, gushing blood; he ran after the bitch and, standing practically over her, fired the shotgun one last time.

  “Filthy little bastards,” Ashton cried. “Now how’s it feel? Now you know!”

  Had any escaped? It was possible. He counted eight bodies. But had there been more than eight; had there been more than eight in the ditch? He counted them again, counting aloud. Seven, eight, nine. Ah: nine. Had miscounted the first time. But there were bodies atop bodies, and parts of bodies . . . He counted again, wiping his sleeve across his forehead. Six, seven. Eight. And was that a dog there or merely part of . . . Yes: nine. The bitch would have had pups and so he had really killed a dozen of the buggers. See how they liked it now, how did their medicine taste now. “Motherfuckers,” Ashton said scornfully.

  It was quiet. It was very quiet.

  No birds, even: all flown away.

  Ashton walked carefully among the bodies, for it was necessary that they be dead; no hunter allowed a dying creature to drag itself away into the bush, there to suffer until it died; no hunter worthy of the name. “That didn’t hurt much, did it,” Ashton crooned. He poked at the head of a Labrador retriever with a bit of Doberman pinscher blood in him, sprawled dead against a rock. Vicious-looking thing, all those teeth. Stained. Broken. Could have torn a leg off if he’d had the opportunity. One of the dead hounds resembled a dog Ashton had seen somewhere recently—hound with a brown-spotted left ear, a white right ear—might have been from the same litter: whose dog? One of his friends’ father’s, maybe. Ashton counted the dogs again. Five, six, seven, eight, nine. Or was it ten. Up ahead there, in a tangle of dried-out willow bushes, was something—something that lay very still. Ashton scrambled up the ditch and went to peer down, shading his eyes. It was midday now and the sun was quite strong. A tangle of fur, a bloody grizzly snout, eyes rolled back into its head: ah! Did that make ten now, or did it make eleven?

  Ashton laid the guns carefully on the ground and took out his hunting knife, the blade of which was razor-sharp, and went to cut off the dog’s ear. That was one. Flies were already alighting on the broken body, buzzing and humming about the sticky blood. Ashton worked fast. He went to each of the dogs in turn and cut off an ear, whistling, not at all revolted, though of course the flies annoyed him. One fly bit him on the back of the hand and he cursed loudly, the sting was so painful.

  “You want swatting, you sonuvabitch!”

  One by one he attended to them, taking his time. He was still excited but he forced himself to work methodically. That heartbeat, that swelling sensation—the queer expansive awareness of—of his own body, his own life—his selfness—him—straddling the dogs, working over them, joshing with them as he might in other circumstances; as if, now they were dead, they had become kin to him, prized possessions. They were no prizes, however. Even the coyote had been a wretched specimen. No sheen to the coats, no flesh or muscle to disguise the protruding ribs. The pregnant shepherd was very nearly obliterated—a mass of blood and guts and fur—but Ashton could see that both her ears were eaten pink and scabby by mites on the inside. He wondered casually what the mites would do now, next. Could they remain on the body for a while or must they leap off immediately and find another host? Once on a camping trip he’d been attacked by sand fleas—he believed that’s what they were, horrible little things so small he couldn’t see them, they’d just started rising up his legs and he’d slapped at them absent-mindedly while he and his friends were putting up the tent—and after a while of slapping it occurred to him that something was wrong, something was very wrong, and he began yelping frantically and jumping about, and at that moment his friends too realized the fleas were upon them, and crawling up their legs, and—

  “Hold still now, Tiger; this ain’t gonna hurt,” he said, and so he rose from the last of the dogs, part of its ear in his hand.

  Raw appetite and fear, Dr. Vickery had charged, where once they’d been pets beloved of man. Was there no justice, was there no—

  “Hush,” Ashton murmured, thinking of his father. The old man would not like it when he heard the news, but everyone else in Marsena would be excited; maybe Ash
ton’s picture would be in the paper again, as it had a few times before (once when Ashton was the first hunter of the season to bag a deer, another time when he’d been hardly more than a boy, fourteen, and had pulled another boy from the river back of the schoolhouse where they were swimming, like fools, in freezing-cold water one autumn day).

  One by one he put the ears in the paper bag that had contained his lunch, and then he gathered up his guns and stood at the edge of the ditch for a while contemplating what he had accomplished. Strange, he thought, that everything was so quiet. Alive and yelping one minute, dead and stiffening and forever silent the next. It was the same breeze blowing from the river, the same breeze blowing up from the field of sweet clover; very distant now was a hoarse rattling call, a bird’s cry of caution. He realized the tobacco he was chewing had gone tasteless, so he spat it out.

  “That’s the last time you’re gonna trespass on Vickery land and mess around with our livestock,” Ashton said.

  He was feeling good. He was feeling very good. Maybe just a little tired—a little sad. Drained from all the excitement. But no: mostly he felt good. As if he’d just wakened from one of his deep dreamless nights. His muscles tingled, his brain was jumpy and alert, his eyes felt almost sun-seared from having had so much to attend to; the sensation in his groin had become now almost an ache.