At five-thirty on Friday morning, Bernice had the water and oatmeal boiling, bacon strips laid out in the skillet, and the dogs in their kennels fed. She was using the last of the tongue to make sandwiches for her husband’s and sons’ lunches, which she’d put into black barn-shaped lunchboxes with thermoses of coffee, wedges of cheese, and a Tupperware dish of canned pears. She wore a pink housedress, a frayed terrycloth bathrobe, fur lined boots, and the old coat she had put on to feed the dogs. It was still cold in the kitchen, but the coffee had brightened the room. The red glow of the small electric heater in the corner by the row of boots was working on the cold. She could still see her breath, but her fingers were feeling the warmth from the coffee and boiling oats.
Loggers and large equipment operators, her husband and sons owned one logging truck, a cat, and a backhoe. They hired out the truck when they weren’t using it themselves. They drove skidders and trucks, set chokers, cut trees, limbed, whatever the jobs called for. They usually worked for Jansen Logging Company, a small independent outfit whose pot was sometimes full and sometimes empty. Usually they got up earlier than five-thirty, but the haul this morning was short and they could sleep in. She would wake them at six with breakfast on the table and their lunches made. Sleep cottoned their brains most mornings, and they mumbled and grumbled their way out the door, leaving their dishes and silverware on the table, the napkin still folded beside the plate. She was used to their unshaven, rumpled looks, their gruff manner of communicating. She knew their jobs were dangerous. They came back exhausted, smelling of pitch and sweat and dirt, their pants grease stained and torn. She patched them when she could, though they hardly seemed to notice.
Saturday before last, they had killed a steer, half of which they sold, but she had boiled the tongue and stuffed and baked the heart for their sandwiches. She would have to pick up the rest of the meat when the butcher called them, then restack the food in the freezer to make it all fit. The butcher was a Polish immigrant with a thick accent. He had fat fingers, though the index finger on his left hand had been cut off just below the knuckle. Attached to his house was a shop large enough for one glass case of sausages and jerky and a few cuts of meat. At the house end of the counter was a door that led into his basement where he did the cutting and wrapping. Bernice had never been down the steps to see what it really looked like, but it seemed to be a dim, smelly place. The butcher’s wife sometimes worked the counter. She was a large-bosomed, large-mouthed woman with red lipstick and gray roots to her orange-brown hair. She laughed in a tight brief way as if the world itself was slightly askew. She did the books and controlled the money, and Berniece envied her freedom, her large personality.
Berniece felt that she herself had no personality. She didn’t have time for it. Her life was portioned out into task after task: gardening, cooking, canning, washing and mending clothes, shopping, taking care of her husband’s mother, Elizabeth, who had Alzheimer’s. Bernice felt her mind would go in one direction, advance tentatively, then the tap water’s temperature, the paring knife’s blade, the shell of a walnut she was cracking would break up the line or sequence and all would disappear like the opening of her eyes from a dream. Yet even her dreams seemed colorless, disjointed, disappearing into the dark silence into which she awoke.
Bernice’s mother had died of cancer in her early sixties. Her father had been killed at the end of World War II, and her stepfather forced her out of the house at the age of ten. She went from her grandmother’s house on her mother’s side, an uncle’s house on her father’s side, then to marriage, all in seven years. In each she was a kind of maid and cook. She discovered the safety of silence, how a meek unobtrusiveness had its rewards. She had gone to college for two quarters, but her husband resented having to pay for tuition, and she couldn’t earn enough to do it herself. After the birth of her first son, she gave it up, though her brief taste of the world outside the women and men she had known all her life lingered in her memory like the linen table covers and silver of the restaurant they went to on their honeymoon. She had given up having pretty things in her own house, not only because they were ridiculed by her husband and sons, but in their rough-housing those things would get broken or torn. It seemed easier to opt for a bare and frugal cleanliness. She felt her personality was in a constant state of concession, a submission to circumstances as they were, an even-tempered practicality. And she found in busyness a kind of refuge, from regrets, from judgments themselves, from a lot of things that might have bothered other women.
“Smells like bacon,” her husband said when he came in, buttoning his plaid shirt.
He was a tall man with large hands whose nails were often dirty and unclipped. He had a head of thick black hair which was graying at the temples. She found the slow, rhythmic cadence of his voice soothing, despite what he often said.
“Bernice, hand me that sugar, there.” She had already put sugar in his coffee, which he knew, but he often added some as a way of telling her she had not thought of everything, after all. “You got them boys up yet? They’d sleep all day if you let ‘em.” A large spoonful of honey drooled out over his oatmeal.
“I called them, Marv. They’re coming.”
“When you get that meat, hold out a roast. I’m hungry for a little beef.”
Bernice brought him his bacon wrapped in buttered toast, the way he liked it. The plates for the boys were already set out. The milk carton stood between their empty glasses. She had given up on a pitcher long ago.
Glen, the oldest, came in trying to attach his red suspenders which had twisted in back. His pants with a patch on the left knee were turned so the zipper went up one side of his leg.
“Damn things, could you straighten this out, Mom?”
Bernice wiped her hands on the towel beside the stove and untangled Glen’s suspenders, placing them gently over his shoulders, her hands waiting to touch his and hand off the buckle. She didn’t know if Glen wore suspenders because his father did or if they were part of a code she didn’t fully understand. Marv had explained that they were for safety, that something might catch on a belt and drag them away or cut them in two, but she thought that too was part of the code, how danger motivated so much, including the rough-housing, that tension in their lovemaking, that knife-edge of violence when he drank whiskey. The code had a beautiful side too. It had a kind of stammering regard for loveliness in nature—a vista of a wide sweep of trees, and old growth cedar, trout in a clear stream, a patch of shooting stars or alpine lilies or balsam on the eastern slopes of the mountains. It loved a cleverness with things, newness salvaged from the old. Marv had been doting and playful with his sons, too, in a boisterous but loving way, on his hands and knees, rolling and snarling and tickling in the thoughtless joy of whatever game they’d invented. The suspension of the code was part of the code itself, but she wasn’t sure how all the rules worked, even after over twenty years.
Andrew came in with rumpled hair, the blond stubble on his face making him look older than he was. At nineteen, he had an affectionate energy that Bernice was fond of, but she knew that it too was a cover for something darker inside him, this almost animal need to press boundaries as if even clothes were a cage. She did not expect that he would continue logging; it was more of a rite of passage, proof that he could measure up, so that his escape would not be cowardice but an adventurous setting-out according to the measurement of his own soul. Bernice envied his nonchalant assertiveness, his almost unconscious bravado. She knew Marv would resist, would hound him, lean on him, try to break him down. She knew it was only a matter of time, of how long Andrew felt his initiation was required to last. She’d be in the middle of this battle for independence, until some dreaded day of reckoning. Just last weekend, Marv had asked Andrew to clean up the piles of dog shit in the yard which dotted the dry grass after the snow melt. Andrew lit up the propane torch and burned pile after pile so that the yard looked like a smoldering battlefield. Marv called him a damned idiot, but she knew Andrew secretly relished his smoking, smelly solution. Glen was delighted as if Andrew had suddenly played a song on a piano without ever taking a lesson. When they passed a sign saying “Slow, Congested Area,” Andrew was the kind of child who would start a meek coughing in the back seat and keep it up for miles. Glen was his most satisfied audience.
“Eat up, boys, we ain’t got much time,” Marv said, putting jam on his second piece of toast with absorbed care.
“You got less than we do,” Andrew said, as he sat down, winking at his mother.
“Pass them preserves,” Glen said with a mouthful of oatmeal.
Marv had a frugality that Bernice both admired and loathed. He was a perfectionist about things that didn’t require an ounce of thought. Just paying a bill took thirty minutes as he read it carefully, found his checkbook, filled it out, recorded it, found an envelope and stamp, and wrote the transaction down in his ledger book. He would not throw anything away. They had stacks of boards of varying lengths and widths, old motors, appliances, speakers, batteries, wire, rope, string, horse equipment. All were saved for that one day a nut, coil, screw, gasket, board-end could be used again to fix something. Marv bought nothing for himself which made Bernice feel like a squanderer if she bought a new bra, lipstick, or a more expensive brand of cereal. She could feel his muscles tighten, his face squinch, as he read every receipt that came through the house, yet they never seemed to save any money. There were contracts overbid and money lost, new equipment costs, accidents that were costly to flesh and wallet, and in winter there would be a couple of months of no work. She did her best to make it all run, to raise her boys without the stint gobbling up all the air in the house. She was always relieved when they left to work, and she had some quiet.
After cleaning the dishes, she worked on the beds, stripping them and changing the sheets, which she always did on Fridays. She washed the sheets and the slips, and hung them out to dry. She had a dryer, but she knew it was going out, that it created too much lint and the clothes smelled a little burnt if she left them in too long, especially the whites. She knew Marv would object to buying a new dryer, so she had been checking the want ads for something used that would last, but she hadn’t found anything that she thought Marv wouldn’t object to. She swept the floors and mopped the kitchen. She was hemming some pants for a neighbor, a divorced realtor, when the butcher called. She took in small sewing jobs to have a little spending money that didn’t come out of Marv’s pocket.
The dogs started barking when she opened her car door, so she reminded herself to bring them some bones. Marv kept six huskies and had a sled for those winter months when the logging was over. He had a trap line and sold a few pelts. His shed out back had perfectly skinned and tanned pelts of beavers, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and martins. It was more of a hobby and a way to get out of the house when there was no work. She had him build the shed for the pelts and traps because she didn’t want them in the basement. Although she didn’t really feel attached to the dogs, she made sure they were fed properly, that her sons cleaned their cages regularly, for they could be forgotten weeks on end when the men were logging. About a month ago, the dogs had gotten out and killed three of the neighbor’s chickens, and of course she was the one who had to bring the dogs home, find hens to replace the killed ones. She had to drive all the way to Moxee to pick up the hens. Marv’s attention to details did not include fence building, and Bernice had been after him for almost two years to build a proper fence and lay down a cement slab so they couldn’t dig under it, but he preferred the “practicality” of mending mending. The dog pen was made of WWII iron panels for interlocking landing strips, chickenwire above that, rocks piled along the bottom, a homemade plywood door with chains at the top and bottom. The chickenwire had been held in place with iron fenceposts which leaned at all angles. In the past the dogs had dug underneath the fence, broken through the door, especially when the bottom chain wasn’t latched, and pushed their way through the chickenwire. The bones would give the dogs something to do, to take their minds off their small enclosure.
Bernice enjoyed the eight mile drive to town. It gave her a little time to herself. She passed a few farmhouses, some looking almost empty with dead grass, broken branches, peeling paint, the windows blank. Some families she knew, others she didn’t. One small house had been empty for three years, but the family who had inherited the property had a lawn service do the mowing in summer time. The roof was collapsing, one of the birches had died from beetles, but she remembered Charlie Morgan, how he had a garden next to the barbed wire fence with sunflowers at each end. Once she saw him in the middle of winter getting his mail. He had to cross the road to get it, and he stood in cowboy boots, a mackinaw and beige ball cap on, naked from the waist down, shit on his backside. She knew he was alone, and was “slightly off,” as Marv would say. Charlie collected butts from outside Happy’s Market where people snuffed out cigarettes before going into the store. He’d gather a pile and then sit down, peel out the tobacco, and roll his own. She knew his brother, who was right as rain with three daughters. Every time she passed Charlie’s mailbox, the thought of him standing there in his cowboy boots in January made her sad. What was it like to be “slightly off”? Wasn’t she slightly off too? When she thought of her time in college, the life she led now was more than slightly off, a progress whose momentum she couldn’t stop. She was the world going by Charlie’s house, but she was also her own kind of Charlie. That neat linen world, of flowers and pretty things, of hanging fuchsia baskets, of matching towels, soft sheets, candle-scents, China, bookcases, doilies… was as distant now as the girl who took notes in a classroom, watching the professor get animated about the poetry of some recluse dressed in white.
The wind started to blow and everything looked colder. The redtails on the fenceposts hunkered into it. The horses had their butts to it, grazing. Angus cows were strung like beads through the fields as they fed on the arc of hay the ranchers dropped off their pickup beds in clots and clumps. There hadn’t been any snow, but it could come any day now. A few early calves were curled up on top of the dropped flakes of hay or nursed as their mothers stood, postponing their own meals. The cows stood placidly as the calves butted their udders for a faster stream and wagged their tails. Loose hay tumbled across the field. She felt she understood those cows, standing there, waiting to eat. In the shadows, the sage-covered hills were still frosted. The fall-plowed fields were in muddy furrows. The ground itself seemed waiting for the luxury of its own transformation.
When she arrived in town and parked at Jakob’s shop, the wind was only a little dust in the air, nervous paper in the gutters. The shop itself was a converted garage with a brick edifice and two small windows. The sign over the door said Kaminiski’s Custom Market in black cursive letters handpainted on white board. The butcher was whacking steer tails into soup bones with a cleaver. Each was about eighteen inches long, a vee shape tapering to a round end. He didn’t look up when she walked in, busy with the rhythm of his motion. With each chop, a little ripple was sent up his flabby cheek. She didn’t want to disturb him and make him lose another finger, so she waited until he finished.
“Ah, Mrs. Johnson, didn’t see you der,” the butcher said, wiping his hands on a towel that hung from the block. He was short with a broad chest and peered out of his glasses bound on the right corner with first-aid tape. His apron was bloody where his belly hit the block. He always looked a little confused by interruptions.
“Hello, Jakob, I parked in back.” She held her purse with both hands by the counter, waiting.
“How is dat husband you? Dat steer had sebenty dollars fat, you feed it too much. It like me, huh.” He laughed as he walked over to the counter, “Maybe mine cost more.”
“He’s ornery, stubborn as a goat, as usual. What do I owe you, Jakob?”
He pulled three receipts off the brass tail of a mouse then stuck the other two back on. Bernice thought the mouse was for jewelry, bought at a yard sale and adapted to this purpose. She was sure that it was Ewa’s idea. There were a number of practical solutions to things in this shop. A little row of livers hung on hayhooks that had been cut and bent to their new purpose. A horseshoe hatrack, two large milkcans with tractor seats as chairs, the string on the door’s window shade made of large metal paperclips and ending in a dresser’s glass knob. She knew Marv admired Jakob, his industry, ingenuity, his beer-making, his ready laugh. But Bernice was always a little wary of the shop. No one complained of getting sick, and she was sure the health department would shut the place down if anyone did. Yet this too seemed part of the code—let the man do business, he was a good man, worked hard and was honest as daybreak. His saws and knives, the blocks, the hooks, and the floor in the little shop were kept tidy and clean, but she wondered about the basement, its darkness, its brown smell of sawdust and vinegar and old blood.
The steer was heavier than she thought. It had dressed out at 990 pounds; their half was $207. It would be double-wrapped and a plastic sheet placed between each steak. Jakob was meticulous and the meat lasted longer in the freezer. The meat came in five large boxes, a red rubber stamp marked the contents of each white package. She got some bones for the dogs which Jakob insisted on wrapping in white butcher paper too. He carried the boxes out to her pickup. He thanked her and shook her hand forcefully, his body jiggling with laughter that seemed to bubble over like a boiling pot.
By the time that she had all the boxes unloaded and had rearranged the contents of the freezer, it was after noon. She fixed some tea she had made from a blend of chamomile, mint, and sumac blossoms, and then made a grilled cheese sandwich. She did not like the meat of “innards” as she called it—liver, kidney, heart, tongue, or sweetbreads—but she was willing to cook them for her husband and sons. She felt that eating the innards of a thing was like eating its soul. The heart especially had a toughness, a resilience, even after she stuffed and baked it. The soul in it was stubborn, and she just couldn’t swallow it. Her boys liked it though, and Andrew liked to say it was a hearty meal. Marv, too, liked it, especially with mashed potatoes or sliced thinly on sandwiches, said it was filling. Just as she sat finished her tea, she remembered the bones in the front seat of the pickup.
When she carried the package to the kennel, she discovered the dogs were gone. She called and called, but they weren’t around. She could see that behind the doghouses in the kennel, they had dug under the fence, undeterred by the few rocks piled on the other side. She stood for a few moments with the package of bones in her hands, staring at the empty kennel. She didn’t know which way they may have gone this time. To the northwest, there was sagebrush and trailerhouses with old cars, overgrazed patches of ground. Marv hated the way no zoning rules allowed these people to abuse the land, though he never seemed to adhere to county rules that regulated what he wanted to do. The dogs may have gone that direction to be with other dogs, or they could have gone east where it was pasture land, and they could dig for voles or chase a rabbit or roll in cowshit. They could go south along the creek and cottonwood trees and willows. Once they got in there, they were hard to find. She knew she would have to postpone her other chores to find them. She hated these dog hunts; the dogs generally wouldn’t come when she called unless they thought they were getting fed. Luckily, she had the bones to help her get them into the pickup.
She drove first to the northwest because it was easier to get to and she could see a wide expanse of ground at once. She passed place after place with its sad dust puddles, slack barbedwire fences, ribbed horses, the vivid litter of this plastic age—green tarps, red barrels, white buckets, blue piles of twine. Dogs lay on porches or stood in the corners of yards and barked at each passing car. The gray and white of the huskies would be easy to spot against the sagebrush and blonde bunchgrass. The six mile loop she drove yielded nothing. Once a glimpse of white in the sage caught her eye, but it turned out to be a yellow lab digging for a vole. She stopped to ask a woman riding a horse along the road if she had seen anything, but the woman said no but would keep an eye out. Bernice decided to drive back home and walk south along the creek.
All their dogs were from the same litter. Marv had named them Slade, Doc, Dixie, Dino, Booth, and Scoop. Bernice could tell Booth from Scoop, but could not tell Doc from Dixie, or Dino from Doc. And when they all got to playing, she couldn’t tell one from the other. All the dogs had been neutered but that hadn’t stopped them from breaking out of their kennel and chasing down the hapless and helpless.
Bernice changed out of her town clothes, put on her boots and a lined Levi jacket. She put the bones in a cloth bag and slung it over her shoulder. She would walk along the creek’s trees, whistling and calling for the dogs. They usually didn’t come to her whistle, but they might recognize her as the source of their food. The land to the south of her house was a section that belonged to the state but was leased by Myron Walters, a rancher who grazed about eighty cows on the three hundred acres that was irrigated, but full of rosebushes and chicory and rocks. Myron was a slow-talking cowboy from Oklahoma who had an exaggerated politeness, but was mean to his horses and had, in Bernice’s opinion, a sadistic sense of discipline—wire twitches, snubbing poles, chain headstalls. He always wore a straw cowboy hat and a white cotton shirt with snaps on the pockets and some colored piping on the back and sleeves. His teeth were flecked with tobacco, whether he had a chaw in at the time or not, but she didn’t know how to take him. He had a soft voice, crisp manners, and an understated humor that could be darkly funny. If he was on his horse and met up with her carrying her sack of bones, whistling for her dogs, she didn’t know what kind of story she would become over a few shots of whiskey.
She felt nothing for the dogs but pity. All of them stuck in that stinky pen or let out into the fenced yard when the boys were home because that fence too had “soft” spots as Marv called them, places an ambitiously bored dog might crash through or tear apart. She had read an article about the “soft release” of wolves into Yellowstone where they were put in a one-acre enclosure with a ten foot fence and a two-foot top slanted inwards because the wolves could build up speed and leap out, using their teeth on the wire. The scientists also put a four-foot skirt of wire underneath the fence to keep them from digging out. It wasn’t just wild things that wanted out. Marv’s huskies had a need to roam that was as deep as thirst. If it weren’t for the trouble they’d get into, she’d just let them run. It didn’t seem right that she had to chase dogs she didn’t even want to own. She didn’t trust them. She and Marv had argued about the dogs until there was nothing but tears and slammed doors left in them. But nothing changed, nothing ever seemed to change.
She would be late to visit Elizabeth; she had washed her clothes and a set of sheets and had promised to be there about 3:30, the usual time on Fridays. She knew that when she was done with Elizabeth, Jacob’s shop would be closed, so she had to make two trips to town. She hated wasting the gas that way. Marv hadn’t seen his own mother in about a year. “What’s the point? She doesn’t even recognize me.” His own mother, the one who cooked and cleaned and changed his pants, and held his head when he was sick. What’s it all for, especially if it’s boys you’re raising? Women know things, feel things. They know the slop of life–the bleeding, the shit, the pee, the vomit, the sickness, the pains. Men know how to cause things to bleed and sicken, but can’t clean up the mess, can’t imagine their own shit on their backsides until it’s too late and they stand at the mailbox in winter with a hat on, going nowhere and expecting a letter.
Bernice felt herself getting angry again and decided to look outward, not inward. She could do this; she was practiced at it. The December afternoon had a cold wind but blue skies and sunshine. A few last dried leaves clung to the cottonwood trees. The creek was down because the irrigation water was turned off; intermittent springs kept it to a robust trickle. The cows had made trails to the water through tangles of willow and rosebushes and hawthorn whose two inch needles could pierce through a pair of jeans and stab a thigh. She made her way to the outside edge of the treeline and walked for thirty minutes. Occasionally, a few cattle that had been grazing together looked up, then bolted across the pasture in a panic as if they had never seen people. They were wild and skittery, but out here among the coyotes and the wandering cougar, this nervousness could save their lives. The few steers Marv fed out for extra money were usually docile as donkeys, not the speckled spitfire of crossbred range cows. Bernice watched them crash through the brush and disappear in a lumbering frenzy, sorry that she provoked this tail-flying, udder swinging melee.
She saw a few magpies up ahead, some flying, some perched on the branches of hawthorn and cottonwood trees. They made little ratcheting machine-gun noises. She always thought they were beautiful, even if they ate days’ old dead skunk beside the road. Their long black tails had an iridescence like oily water in a marina. She liked that they stayed around in winter when most of the other birds had flown away. When she neared them, they flew to the next clump of trees. As she came into a little clearing, she saw all the dogs around a bloody black carcass. Dixie lay to the far side with a bloody bone between her front paws, her snout covered in blood. Dino and Doc had their heads plunged inside the rear cavity of the animal; Slade was pulling at a rib; Booth had something bright red in his mouth like a section of lung. Only Scoop, or what she thought was Scoop, seemed to notice that she stood at the edge of the clearing. He watched with an affronted surprise but didn’t move. She didn’t know what to do. If she ran in yelling and waving a stick, they might go after her. She didn’t know whether they killed this late yearling or found it; it was too badly torn for her to tell. The blood looked fresh.
Her bones would be of no interest to them now. She looked around for a long stick and found a cottonwood limb as thick as her wrist. It was about five feet long and tapered to a broken point. She peeled some of the rotten bark off the end and walked in slowly with the stick over her shoulder. She talked to them quietly, and they all looked up, then resumed a guarded stance over their meat and bones. Scoop was the largest of the dogs and the dominant male; Marv used him as the lead dog on his sled. She thought if she could get him to come the rest would follow. As she got closer, Scoop hunched down slightly as if he were going to spring. She continued to talk soothingly but firmly, using his name. When she was within a few yards, she called to him more firmly, telling him to come, but he ignored her. Closer, she changed her tone, became more commanding and resolute. But the dog merely snarled, baring its teeth and growling, low and threatening. Just as he appeared to be ready to spring, she slammed the stick’s blunt end as squarely and as hard as she could across his head. The thunk and yelp and whimpering whine of Scoop got the attention of the others.
As Scoop lay sprawled out and dazed, a little of his own blood trickled from his nose. She tied a length of rope to his collar and waited for him to regain enough consciousness to be led. When he could stand, she began to lead him home, commanding the others to follow. Red-mouthed, their faces and necks splashed with blood, the dogs followed Scoop out of the clearing and into the brown grass along the trees.
Bernice thought about how late she would be for her visit with Elizabeth, not that Elizabeth would know or mind, but that would also make her dinner late, and she wouldn’t have time to deliver some of the mending she had finished. She would tell Marv that this was the last straw, that he either fix the fence or…. or what? She would leave? Where? She had no place to go, and they had no money that might allow her to get away. She could refuse to cook anything until the fence was fixed, though she’d rather he just got rid of the dogs. He didn’t have time to care for them properly, and she was tired of it. Maybe he would agree to it after the trapping season was over? Next March? And what would be the cost of the yearling if the dogs had killed it? Myron didn’t raise expensive cattle, but the yearling could cost $600-800, money they didn’t have. Not to mention the monthly bill just to feed six large dogs. They’d have to sell another steer themselves. She had close to $300 from mending clothes, but she wasn’t about to spend it on dog damage or even let Marv know she had it.
As she made her way around a clump of rosebushes the size of two semis, she noticed a rider in the distance, coming her way. He was on a buckskin, so it must be Myron out checking his cows. She was glad she had gotten to the dogs first. He would have every right to shoot them if he saw them. Although she had no love for the dogs, she couldn’t stand the thought of their being wounded or killed, and it wasn’t their fault they lived in a pen and had no training, not that “training” was always the answer. Marv’s brother’s dog, a golden retriever, a purebred hunter, got into their pigpen and killed nineteen piglets; the frenzy of killing and the squeal of trapped and frantic prey were too much to resist. Marv’s brother shot the dog “to get the kill out of him,” but Bernice knew that that vengeful killing frenzy sat inside the brain of just about everything and the right stimulus would make it stir in dogs or men.
Myron was within fifty yards of her, and she watched his body move with the horse’s motion over the dry rocky ground. His white straw hat bobbed, and his shoulders swayed. He wore a heavy black coat, zipped up the front; the fleece collar hugged his neck. His jeans were dirty, and he had spurs on his cowboy boots. When he got close, he tilted back his hat with a gloved thumb.
“What them dogs been up to, Bernice?”
“I don’t know if they killed that yearling over there,” she said, pointing behind her with her thumb, “but they were in it up to their eyeballs. We’ll be glad to replace it if they did it, Myron. I’m sorry they got out again.”
“That steer was killed by wolves yestidee. I ain’t supposed to shoot ‘em, have to call the state and get reimbursed, they say. They killed two others, too. Elk don’t even bugle no more. Ought to come out of the pockets of those who brought ‘em back. I didn’t vote on it, did you? Ever get anything from the state that didn’t require a ream of paper and thirty-seven signatures? One dipshit scientist said in the paper this pack was ‘well-behaved.’ Them guys just play pattycake with each other and rob taxpayers to find out how high pigs jump. They want to make a pet out whatever it is they ‘study’ like that dumbfuck who loved grizzles so much they ate him.” He paused long enough to spit a stream of tobacco over his horse’s neck.
Although Bernice had heard Myron’s rants before, she’d never seen him quite so irritated, and she was grateful her dogs hadn’t done the killing. She also needed to cut him off before he got his second wind. “I got to get these dogs home before they do any more damage. I’ve told Marv a thousand times to get that kennel fixed. I’m tired of chasing his dogs. See you later, Myron. Good luck in getting your money.” She jerked the rope around Scoop’s neck and started on her way.
“Yeah, like I have time to fill out papers. I’ll shoot the bastards if I see ‘em.” He nudged his buckskin forward and nodded the gloved index finger of his right hand in farewell.
By the time Bernice got back to the house and put the dogs in the kennel, filled in the dirt tunnel, put some boards and rocks over the old hole, it was 4:30. She washed up, put Elizabeth’s clothes in the plastic laundry basket, and pocketed her mending money. She then sat down to write a note: Marv, the dogs got out for the last time. I found them eating one of Myron’s steers about a mile or so down the creek. I won’t be back until that kennel is fixed. I didn’t have time for dinner. You and the boys are on your own. Bernice
She read it over, was satisfied, and taped it to the refrigerator door, the first place Andrew and Glen would look. She packed her overnight bag, enough for a couple of days. They would be home within the hour, so she got in the truck and drove to town again.
She visited with Elizabeth who called her by the right name but spoke to her as if Bernice were her mother. Elizabeth’s mind had moments of clarity, but then would lapse into memories and concerns from sixty years ago. And lately her eyes had taken on a milky opacity which was a little unnerving. Her silvery-white hair was always pulled back into a bun, and her face seemed to collapse on itself. She had wandered out of the nursing home two months ago, but they found her within an hour. She was trying to find her own house which had been sold five years ago and was three hundred miles away. With that gumption and head-down determination of farm women from her generation, Elizabeth may have walked for days had she not been discovered. She still had that wiry leanness and fixity of purpose which had characterized her life, yet now the purpose wandered from thing to sliding thing.
Bernice felt sorry for her, sitting day by day in this nursing home. Elizabeth had outlived most of her friends, and now Bernice was all she had, whether she wanted her or not. They had never really been friends. Elizabeth took the side of her son on everything, no matter how small the issue. She made excuses for him, explaining how hard he had it as a kid, how badly some of the other kids treated him because he was poor, how she did the best she could with no husband around, how at heart he was sweet, her pride and joy. It had been years since Bernice had taken her troubles with Marv to Elizabeth.
Bernice put Elizabeth’s clothes away, helped her change into a clean nightgown, and gathered her dirty laundry for next week’s washing. When she sat on the bed and held her hand to say goodbye, Elizabeth asked when Daddy was going to come home and take them to the horseshow. Bernice patted her hand and said he’d be there soon. An old woman on a walker looked in and asked if this was her room, and Bernice said, “No honey, it’s the next one down.” When she left, she closed Elizabeth’s door.
She needed to find a hotel room and try to sort out what was going to happen and how. Along the strip of fast food places near the freeway, she found a cheap room in the Lighthouse Motel whose only connection to the sea was a bad painting over the bed. The light-filled waves were a fake green, and the beach was a streak of brown. The two seagulls were stretched out m’s on the horizon. The room smelled of cigarettes and carpet cleaner. She took a shower and got dressed for an early dinner.
She knew Marv would start calling her cell phone, so she turned it off. Tomorrow was Saturday, and she knew Marv and the boys could make time to buy the materials for fixing the kennel, that they could do it in less than half a day if they wanted to. She didn’t know what she would do if Marv got stubborn; she had an older sister she could go to, but they hadn’t communicated in over a year. Her sister would take Bernice in if she suddenly showed up, at least for a couple of weeks. She thought Andrew would be on her side, that he would see the validity of her stance, that he might even relish the opportunity to argue with Marv, to provoke him a little. Glen was harder to read, needed his father’s approval more, and seemed sullenly distant the closer confrontation came. And the irony was that Andrew earned his father’s affection more by being contrary, by needing him less, by a haphazard flippancy that dismissed his cautions and criticisms. She knew Marv loved her, in his reticent way, that he depended on her for almost everything, but there was also an irascible stubbornness that could be vindictive and hard-hearted. He could turn easily against his own best interests to prove some point, some subscription to the code he himself only vaguely understood. She knew her stance, her ultimatum, was a risk, but she was fed-up, and it was time she did something.
She ate that night at a little Thai place, new to town, one that Marv would never enter if he were looking for her. She ordered red curry and jasmine rice, something none of her family would eat. She savored its rich full-bodied flavors, ordered a beer when the heat of the curry got a little hot. She watched people come and go, thinking about how different their family relations must be. Some were in jeans and tee-shirts, some in retro-seventies tie-dyed shirts and skirts with headbands and homemade bracelets, some in suits and evening dresses as if they were going to a dance or a play. There was an enviable freedom in their choices. What if she did walk away? She knew that sometimes her thoughts had a boldness her own voice rarely enacted. Certainly, she was too old for fantasies of some escape, but she was glad she had written her note.
She turned her phone on at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, thinking this would give them enough time to rebuild the kennel. She had a phone message from Marv which simply said that the problem was solved, that she could come home now. She had checked out of the motel at eleven, taken a walk by the river, eaten lunch at the New York Café, and shopped for dryers at two appliances stores. She put a Whirlpool on her credit card, and it was to be delivered on Monday morning. It was a sunny afternoon and the morning frost had melted away. The dry leaves on the path by the river had leapt ahead of her shoes. She enjoyed her own deliberate aimlessness, the horned owl sitting so solemnly in its tree, a blue heron delicately stalking fish in the river’s shallows. But she knew too that one day of solitude multiplied into hundreds could be profoundly lonely. She drove home hoping her day’s calm would help her weather the storm that was surely to occur the moment she opened the door.
When she drove in and parked beside the house, the kennel looked the same: the metal panels, the chickenwire, the splayed fenceposts, the door, the little cluster of doghouses inside. Glen’s car was gone. The waning afternoon light put a sharp coldness in the air. As she carried her laundry basket with Elizabeth’s clothes up the front steps, she could see Marv at the kitchen table.
“The kennel isn’t fixed. I thought you said the problem was solved.” She put the basket on one end of the table and folded her arms.
“It is.”
“How? Everything looks the same to me.”
“I took care of it.”
“Which is?”
“I buried them with the backhoe this afternoon.”
“Oh, Jesus, Marv, you didn’t kill them? Why would you do that?”
“You said they killed Myron’s steer. I can’t keep cattle killing dogs. I ain’t goin to have to make Myron kill ‘em. I hated having to do it. But it ain’t right to have someone else do your own dirty work, Bernice.”
“I didn’t say they killed that steer. I said they were eating on it. Myron said wolves killed it. I’m sure they just followed the blood smell.”
“Well, why in the hell didn’t you say that? You as good as killed those dogs yourself.”
“Don’t you act like it’s my fault. I asked you to fix the kennel, not kill the dogs. Besides, I said eating on, I didn’t say they killed it. I had no idea you’d do something like that.”
“I tried to call to make sure, but you had your phone off.”
“Marv, you never reason anything out, you just jump right in and start ‘taking care of it,’ but generally only make the problem worse. I can’t live like this anymore. I just do and do and do for you and we don’t even talk anymore. You haven’t seen your mother in over a year. Why is it my job to look after her? I’m only the maid around here. And killing those dogs is just plain cold, Marv, and don’t you dare try to blame it on me.”
“Why is it that every time we get in an argument, you bring up all this shit. We were talking about the dogs, remember? How did that get to my mother? I loved those dogs. If you got dogs killin’ livestock, there’s only one solution. They was my dogs and I had to do it.”
Bernice turned, marched to the bedroom, and slammed the door. A few minutes later she could hear Marv’s truck start up and grind out of the driveway. He would be gone until late. She undressed to take a bath. She looked at herself in the mirror. She pulled her hair up on top of her head. She felt sick inside. She was forty-eight, still had a good figure, only slightly sagging breasts, a creased but strong face, no gray in her hair. Yet, she felt older than she looked. She let her hair fall to her shoulders, went to run the bath, saw Elizabeth’s basket of laundry in the hall, the floral housedress on top that needed mending. As she ran the water, she looked out the window. December had that empty, withdrawn look, as if it were just waiting for the snow.
*
Joseph’s latest poetry collection, The Slow Subtraction ALS, is published by Moon Path Press and is available here.
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