I would always go to her, forgetting my anger, because I liked her. I liked that she was usually in the kitchen and there were smells from what she was cooking, so there were always scents and warmth that felt good against my fur and paws. She stood by the door, her hair in a ponytail, wearing slippers, and scolding me as I approached her. But she liked me too; I could tell, she’d rub me behind the ears and when we were alone in the kitchen she’d often take a small piece of meat from the roasting pan to give me.
I liked the children too, three girls and the boy; it was only the father I learned to avoid. When he was home, it was either quiet in the house or there would be loud voices between the father and mother or the father and the two oldest girls. He’d sit in the living room, snapping the pages of the newspaper as he read, complaining and muttering. A smell followed him into the rooms where he sat, a smell like something burnt, smoldering and I knew from the mother’s silence and the tension it created that it was best I left. And so often in the early hours of night, I’d meet the dogs in the nearby fields where a sort of camaraderie would touch us, just as the moonlight touched us, so that we’d roam together, listen to the sound of the woods around us: the bird’s caw, the rustle of bushes as we trampled, and behind it all, traffic, sirens and voices. These moments with the pack, moments with the cool air in our fur and the feel of stone under the pads of our paws, were the moments that furnished my wandering dreams and made me twitch while I slept in my bed beneath the kitchen table.
z
Most days when I’d return to the back porch in late afternoon, the boy would be sitting on the stoop wearing sneakers that were grey and brown from dust and mud. He’d ruffle my fur and we’d wrestle in the high grass. Then he’d find the stick and throw it to the end of the yard. I felt the cold air in my lungs fill me with a kind of glee as I chased the stick, grabbed it in my mouth and ran back to him. I could feel my tail swishing behind me and that made me happy too. Then the boy again threw the stick, and again I chased it and when we heard the woman call, we both went in the house for supper, like two brothers.
His sisters preferred the cat, a sleek grey animal who spent her days sleeping and when awake stretched and yawned and tried to ignore the ruckus of the house. I knew she saw me as a nuisance; I was loud, dirty, I brought the smells from the outside into the house and I always panted with excitement to play. She watched me with her yellow eyes, then licked her paw as if finding it delicious, looking down from the sofa, and yet I remember when I first came here to live, feeling lonely from the loss of the warm, squirming spaces of my puppyhood, she had let me lean against her to sleep.
The father was short, the same height as the woman, always dressed in dark, heavy clothes, even in summer, and he was unhappy. I could smell that on him too, just as I heard the constant hum from that seething place, where he lived, alone and hating. I’d seen this condition with dogs too, unhappy and usually sick dogs that you could never approach, who would growl without warning and were never part of the pack. I knew this man had the same kind of feral bitterness at his core, I could feel it when I was in the living room, sitting on the floor beside the woman when she’d lean down periodically to rub my ears. When I looked over at the man I saw that his hostility and anger was the trail he made through life.
Sometimes he’d catch the woman looking at him and growl, “What the hell are you looking at?” and she would look away but I’d keep staring. Yet it wasn’t for me that he saved his most hardened contempt. “I said, what the he’ll are you looking at?” At such times the woman would try to leave the room without speaking but often he’d jump from his chair and rush at her, at times hit her, so that she squealed and raised her hand to her head. After the fight, when she and I were in the kitchen and she was making him a bologna and mustard sandwich, she cried without making a sound.
z
Whenever I saw the man on the street, he was closed in, with his head bent down, ignoring the teeming, loud life he was walking through. Even the woman, who’d sit in the kitchen looking through the window that framed the static image of the backyard, sat in a muted, unconnected way. She’d look up stoically, drink a cup of cold tea, glance at the yard, and look down again to her hands. There’d be only her and me in the room, and it would be one of those bleak days when the sky was blank as cement and the weak light showed the yard worn in places to earth, the fence bent to the ground where the kids had trampled it for a shortcut. I’d nuzzle my nose into her limp palm and sometimes she would stop and speak to me, cupping my face and patting the top of my head.
I enjoyed the sounds that lifted from the street, sounds of children chasing each other, televisions heard through the windows, car tires squealing. The street was a stew of such sights and sounds, of smells, and by the time I was four, I knew them by heart, as I knew the members of both my human and dog packs. My life was fashioned from these patterns, times with the other dogs, with the family, times on the streets, in the backyard, sleeping under the kitchen table. How I came to love the smells, a roast cooking in the house, mud from the paths in summer, the scent of burnt leaves, or the cold, wet feel as I rolled in the snow. My life went on in this way, and could seemingly have continued like this forever, except for a day in mid-December of the year I was four.
The marigolds that the woman had planted close to the house in spring had decayed and were mouldy and their bitter scent filled the back yard. When I arrived home, I found the boy waiting on the back step. He picked up the stick and without saying anything threw it to the end of the yard and I dashed after it; there was nothing that could have stopped me, not the cat’s disdain, the settled cold of the air, or my own tiredness. We played like this until the woman called from the kitchen, “Don’t go away, I may need you.”
In the last few months, a stuffy smell had invaded the kitchen, similar to the early spring smell of winter’s rot. When we were alone, the woman seldom patted me. I noticed too that she’d stopped humming, that she would often rub her forehead and speak to herself, even as she worked about the kitchen, peeling vegetables, moving from the stove to fridge, her slippers shuffling along the linoleum, a cigarette in the ashtray on the table. The man too was quieter, but this had come as a relief. I seldom saw the girls but lately the boy seemed to have grown wary of his parents, quiet when they were around and even with me a bit slower, less likely to play. On the porch that day after the boy tired of our game, the stick kept taunting me, but rather than react, I lay down beside the boy, resting my head on my paws.
I heard the man arrive home and call out the woman’s name and then only minutes later angry voices came from the living room. This was not unusual except on this day she called for the boy and then we heard her say to the man, “Because I have to.”
To this the man replied, “You’re an idiot if you think I’m going to let you go.”
I noticed two bags by the front hall when I came into the house after the boy opened the door. The woman had her coat on and was in the process of tying her galoshes, “I don’t want to fight. I just need to leave.” She turned to the boy at this point and said, “Please try to understand. I love you, I do. And I’ll be back, but right now I have to go.” The boy was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. His parents stared at each other and ignored him. And then the man rushed toward his wife, pushing her against the door as the boy hurried to her side, facing his father, “Let her go. She’ll come back; just let her go,” he said.
In response to the smell of fear and anger that was everywhere, I barked, barring my teeth, as the boy tried to hold me back. I jumped on the man’s thigh and the boy grabbed his father’s arm so he could not reach me. We were caught like this for a moment, maybe two, when the woman slowly—as slowly as cats circle each other before pouncing to fight—reached for her bags, her gaze not leaving the man’s face. Once she had them, she turned quickly and left the house.
Then she was gone, her absence forcin
g time to resume. The man kicked a hole in the wall and cursed loudly and the boy hooked his finger on my collar and together we moved through the kitchen to the back porch as the man continued swearing. We sat on the steps as the cold night drew in, both of us trying to ignore the father’s rant, which eventually quieted. The sky was huge, full of threatening clouds that gathered at the horizon, and the yards abandoned to the night’s descent felt edged in sadness. Blinking Christmas lights from a house on the adjacent street distracted us as we sat on the porch, the yard in front of us where the season’s first thin blanket of snow rested.
After an hour one of the sisters came to the yard to get the boy, who in turn dragged me into the house. I wanted to leave, to find the other dogs and travel to our spot in the field. The sisters made a dinner of macaroni and cheese with wieners, and in silence they spooned its orange curls onto their plates. The boy poured my dry food into the bowl that was kept under the kitchen table and so my munching was the only sound in the room where the boy and his sisters ate. The father ate in the living room in his big chair and somehow his silence over the continuous noise from the TV was louder than any of his rants.
No longer would the woman be in the kitchen if I came home during the day for food or water. And so the boy became the only person who fed me regularly. As he got older and started living beyond his home, becoming part of a gang of boys who lived in the housing project, he’d often forget. And so I’d hunt in the fields and scavenge, checking out the garbage bins at the back of houses and drinking from puddles along the street. At times the neighbours would shout and chase me. But I could always depend on the nearby neighbour, a woman who lived there with her daughter, and who always left bones and scraps on her back porch. The oldest sister left, taking the cat a few months after the mother’s departure, and over the next few years the other sisters also went to live with their mother.
When I was in my eleventh year, only the boy, who was fifteen, still lived with his father. The house had become disheveled, and an earthy smell had crept in, so that the inside of the house began to smell more and more like the outside yards. The curtains became frayed, the garden untended and grime outlined the linoleum tiles in the kitchen.
Just as the house had changed, so too in slow stages it had become more difficult for me to walk to the hill close to my home where I’d been going since I was a pup. I had aches, pains; my nails were hard and made a clicking sound on the floor, when I walked around at night, staying indoors as I tended to do more and more. A weariness had settled in my bones leaving me feeling the weight of time on damp days and my coat became matted with burrs, leaves and dried mud. But I still loved the back alleys and even though I’d seen the fields and nearby land be taken over by housing construction, I’d still return to what remained of the field to sit as the sun went down and the air cooled.
Peggy-Sue moved away with her family years ago and Cracker had died, must be a year or so before. Or so we assumed because he stopped coming at night, and the last few months he was there he was dreamy and forgetful or he twitched and barked at imaginary threats. Purdy is much quieter, much slower, as, I suppose, am I.
z
It is meant to be. I see that now. This quieting of life. I was meant to live my life here, to grieve the passing of those days and nights when the breeze would lift my fur, the sun would warm my paws, nights when the sky turned navy and the moonlight spread into the fields before me like a fog: the path, its weeds and the sullied yards glowing in twilight, its diamond glint as sure, as beautiful, on the trash as on the cars and street lamps. This has been my vantage, my neighbourhood, with its squalor and dramas, its humid nights wired with the threat of violence, its own form of despair. Even my tail feels heavy now and it droops when I walk.
z
I saw the woman once after she left. She was standing on the street, in front of the house. It was a spring afternoon and she walked by, stopped for a moment and I lifted my head from the cement veranda, sniffed, could it be, the woman returning? She was watching each window evenly, when she saw me get up and walk toward her. I could feel my tail swinging behind me. She smiled then and bent to pat my head, “Duke, my God, Duke, how are you boy? Oh, how I missed you.” She looked me full in the face and there was something that passed between us, something warm and communal, something that gave me back the memories of those days spent in the kitchen while she baked, hummed, and gave each child a hug when they came home from school. I was young then, spending most of the day curled on a pillow under the table and I’d wag my tail and wait for the scraps, wait for the boy to come home to take me into the yard, and wait for night to come when I could roam the alleyways, and follow the trail to the untamed clearing.
My Brother’s Condition
My brother was eighteen when he was sent to the provincial psychiatric hospital. I knew his leaving us was a tragedy because of the way my mother spoke of it, and the sadness that descended on our home. Tragedy suited me then. I could look at it without flinching and say, “So, this is the truth that lurked beneath my childhood.” I imagined saying things like that, strong things. I was sixteen and convinced truth was found in tragedy; now, I can’t even watch a sad movie.
The episode that led to my brother’s first hospitalization, that forced us to realize his behaviour was a condition and not part of what was always considered his willful nature, happened one afternoon when my mother was at work and I was at school. When I came home I found our house ransacked. Cutlery had been thrown on the floor in the kitchen where boxes of cereal and pasta were scattered and splashes of mustard and ketchup streaked the walls. In the living room, ornaments and lamps were toppled; some had been broken and left where they fell.
Three teenage boys my brother had met at a club in Hull who’d come home with him one afternoon were responsible for this destruction. They went through my room emptying drawers of clothes on the floor and stealing my mother’s ring and watch. My brother grinned and refused to reply when I asked what had happened. We were arguing when my mother arrived home, when she dropped her grocery bags in the vestibule and sat slowly down in the chair closest to the door, her look one of quiet amazement, as if she was deeply impressed by the transformation of the room. My brother, sitting in the middle of the mess, looking back and forth between the two of us, asked, “What’s the big deal?”
“Do you understand, Stevie?” my mother said. “I have to call the police and they’ll ask you questions?”
“God,” he let his head drop on the back of the chesterfield and stared at the ceiling. “I’ll clean it up, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I’ll get your things back.” He lifted his head. “It was just a joke.”
My mother was across the room, on the edge of her chair, her elbows on her knees. My brother started to hum, to annoy her or perhaps merely because he wanted to and after a few minutes she said, “I’m taking you to a doctor. This is it. I have to.”
“Why? I’m not sick.” She left the room and we could hear her in the kitchen, putting pots and pans away and running water to clean the floors and counters. Without speaking or looking at me he got up and left the room and I heard the front door open and close behind him.
z
When he returned three days later, I called my mother at the department store where she worked and she told me to have him stay there until she arrived home. “Yeah, yeah, yeah”, he said. He was still dressed in the jeans and denim jacket he was wearing when he left, but they were soiled and dusty as if he’d slept in dirt and his hair hung in his face in dirty black curls. “So, little sister,” he said standing at the kitchen table, eating from a bowl of macaroni and cheese he found in the fridge, “How’s it been here with Mother Crow?” He smirked, cheese sauce caught in the corners of his mouth.
“Well, she was worried, you know.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said, without looking at me.
> When my mother arrived home he went to the living room and said, “Look, Mom, I’m sorry.”
“It’s not that, Stevie,” she said slowly. “I have a cab outside. Put your jacket on, we have an appointment.” I stood by the front door and watched them leave. My brother turned before he entered the cab, looked back and waved. He looked young and wayward even to me.
z
The first psychiatric ward where he was admitted was in an old hospital in the west end of the city where the grounds were as groomed as those of a university campus. The staff wore casual clothes like the patients and shared an attitude of calm detachment so that often patients and staff were indistinguishable. My brother stayed there for three months, in a private room the size of a cell, which looked out onto a parking lot, a field, and beyond, the highway.
He said that being in therapy was like being in a race or contest. “You sit there and spill your guts and you know how after you puke so much you can’t puke anymore? Well, that’s how it is there. You keep thinking, well, I told them about my childhood, my father’s death, my brother and sisters, and about my mother who no doubt they’ll find a way to blame, and they still sit there waiting, expecting.”
We were in the sunroom at the end of the hallway. I could see the same flat field visible from Steve’s room and beyond, the skyline of the city. It was a bright, cold day in December and I’d come directly from school, carrying my book satchel and wearing a duffel coat, which I kept open. My brother was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, smoking a cigarette, his long hair pulled back into a ponytail. His face had an angular look and the muscles were pinched above his eyes as if he was squinting or in pain. It was a new expression, the first sign of the melancholy that would eventually settle there and give him the look of an old man by the time he was in his mid-thirties.
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 8
