“She’s out there on the front porch, I’d guess,” he said.
“You don’t think I’ll do it, do you?” Kate said to her father.
He liked the spirit that burned proudly in her eyes. Kate had a wonderful temper, the same temper her mother had had. “Up to you,” he said, after a moment.
“I’ll go with you, if you want me to,” Carrie said timidly.
Kate sighed. She rubbed the clean counter top with a damp cloth. “That’d be a great help,” she complained. “The first thing that’d happen would be Neelie putting on that look like we’ve just whipped her with a leather strap, and you’d start to cry and that’d be that.”
“Well, put the blame on me,” Carrie said defensively.
“Don’t go getting upset,” Kate said. “You know as well as I do what I mean. It’s Neelie’s way.”
“Both of you are making a mountain out of a molehill,” he said. “What’s she done that’s so bad?”
“Neelie makes out you’re starving, like we don’t care what happens to you,” Carrie sniffed. There were tears in her voice.
“What I told her this morning,” he said.
“Daddy!”
“Oh, Carrie, he didn’t say that,” Kate replied. “You know Neelie.”
“Well, I don’t like her thinking that. She’ll tell everybody that we don’t care what happens to our daddy. You know how she talks. She’s always telling us what goes on that nobody’s supposed to know about.”
“She’s not going to say anything about us,” Kate said.
“She talks about everybody else that way,” Carrie argued. “What makes you think she won’t talk about us?”
“Well, nobody pays it any attention,” Kate said. She sat at the table and took food for her plate from the serving bowls. “Daddy,” she said, “what’s this about the dog? I thought you said it’d left.”
“Guess it didn’t,” he said. “Showed up again yesterday. Here this morning.” He looked at Carrie. “You going to eat?”
“When I find the kids. They’re outside playing.” She left through the kitchen door and he could hear her calling them.
“Daddy, I don’t know why none of us can’t see that dog,” Kate said cautiously.
“I don’t either,” he said firmly. “It’s there.”
“I’m not saying it’s not, Daddy. I’m—”
“Yes, you are,” he said. “I know what you think. You think I’m seeing things. Think I’ve got some old-age crazy disease and I’m seeing things. Well, I can’t help that.”
“Daddy, it’s not that. Not that at all. You know how stray dogs are. They show up everywhere, go house to house. They may sneak around, but they don’t hide.”
“This one does.”
“Why?”
“How do I know? Could be that somebody beat it. Could be it don’t like being around people.”
“Could be,” Kate sighed. “You don’t think it’s a mad dog, do you? You want Noah to come out here in the morning, be here when it shows up?”
He shook his head. “If it was mad, it would’ve shown it by now. If it’s that stubborn about staying around, might as well give it a chance to live. No need killing something that’s making it on its own. If it was in misery, that’d be different.”
“I thought you said it looked like it was about dead.”
“Don’t look that way now.”
“All right, Daddy.”
He knew she did not believe him.
6
He put it in his mind to awake early and he did, in the predawn. He cooked his breakfast as usual in the darkened kitchen, adding a single pad of hot sausage to his oatmeal diet, and when he had eaten his fill, he mixed the scraps in a bowl and placed it on the porch step. Maybe the dog had wandered away for the last time, he reasoned, and had returned to stay; besides, he had no other need of the scraps.
He bathed in a tub of hot water, hot as he could bear, and dressed in his work clothes and then slipped outside as the morning began to bubble in the east. He picked his way across the lawn, through the paling light, to a row of rose bushes that he could see from the kitchen window. She had planted the roses in that spot, near the hedgerow, to watch them grow and flower as she worked at her kitchen sink. She had loved the roses and jonquils and tulips and glads. He cut as many as he could carry in the basket that he had taped to the handgrip of his walker, and then he went back into the house and had his morning coffee.
He left the house through the back door. The bowl of breakfast scraps on the porch step was still filled, and he shrugged nonchalantly and moved to his truck and put his walker into the truck bed, beside the hoe he used in his nursery plot. He pushed the basket of flowers across the seat and muscled himself inside the cab. He could see the houses of both his daughters who lived near him. The houses were still dark. Won’t be in a minute, he thought. He laughed silently. He knew that when his truck was started, lights would pop on in the houses of his daughters, and they would be urging their husbands to get out of bed and see why the truck was running. He knew that Kate would be bellowing commands to Noah, and that Carrie would immediately telephone Kate and ask, in her worried voice, what was happening. He turned the key and pushed the starter pedal with his foot. The motor boomed, like an attack, and the truck shook violently. “Don’t start giving me trouble now,” he said aloud. He pushed in the clutch and pulled at the gearshift and released the clutch and the truck bolted forward. He saw the lights snap on in unison in the houses of his daughters. He pushed hard against the accelerator, and the truck jumped, throwing him against the back of the seat. “Great God,” he exclaimed.
He was at the bottom of the hill, at the flat of the pecan orchard, and going up the next hill before he realized he could not see the road well. He pulled at the light switch, but nothing happened. “Got to get Hoyt to look at that,” he said. He squinted his eyes and slowed the truck. He did not need lights. He’d walked or ridden over the road for fifty years. All he had to do was steer between the two gullies. The truck was barely moving and he wondered if he should shift gears, but he did not. No reason to chance stopping altogether, he decided. He looked out of the window and blinked in surprise. There was the dog, leaping gracefully in the field beside the road, a white blur, like a burning star falling and rising, falling and rising. The dog was chasing him. “So you’re still around,” he said softly. “Yeah, I see you. I see you.” The truck vibrated violently in the steering wheel, and he could feel the tickling in his hands. It was a good feeling. Two old things getting about, being chased by a dog no one could see.
He drove the backroads to the cemetery, trying to watch for the road, to stay between the gullies, and for the dog, but the dog was soon lost from his view. Probably got tired of chasing, he thought. But it’ll be there when I get back, slinking around somewhere, waiting for a refill of the bowl.
At the cemetery, in the silvering of dawn, he took the hoe and cut away at the weeds, balancing on his walker, until the plot was clean. Then, kneeling between the graves of his wife and his son, he smoothed the sand mounds with his hands and divided the gathering of roses and placed them in buried vases. I have never placed flowers on the grave of my son, he thought. Never. It was something she did. I stood back and let her do it.
The death of their son was a grief that she could not release, and she had obsessively tended the grave, pushing him away with her sobs and her bitterness. It was the one thing they had never been able to resolve: she blamed him for their son’s death. “Drove him away from home when he was too young,” she had said. “Too hard on him. Too hard.”
He touched the mound of his son’s grave. A wave of tears hit him like nausea, and he began to cry openly. He pushed his hand deep into the mound, reaching for the son he had driven away.
He did not know how long he had been at the cemetery or how long he had sat between the grave mounds of his wife and his son. The day was bright, the sun had untangled from the trees and was in its stretch across the
day, and on the highway nearby, cars rushed into the town. He looked at the tombstone. His family name was chiseled in bold letters across the face of the stone: Peek. His name and his wife’s name and his son’s name were in smaller letters. Names, dates. The same as in his journals. He looked at his own name: Robert Samuel Peek. The date of birth: October 16, 1892. A blank space was left for the date of death. Soon enough, he thought. Soon enough.
He gathered the hoe and flower basket and, holding to his walker, moved carefully back to his truck. The dog was under a tree near the truck, watching him. He saw it as he opened the truck door. “Found me, did you?” he said. He closed the door quietly and stretched out his hand to the dog. “Come on, come on. You that determined, you might as well come out of hiding.”
The dog whimpered and dropped its head, but it did not move.
“Come on,” he urged. “I’m not going to hurt you. You earned your right. Chased me all the way, did you? Guess it was easy enough, just following the racket.” He made a soft whistling sound through his lips. The dog edged forward, pawing at the ground with its front feet. “All right,” he said. “It’s up to you. My walker’s already put up in the back of the truck, and I’m not getting it down. You want to come here, you can, but I’m not coming to you. You got four good legs, I got one. You got me outnumbered. You do the walking.” He squatted on his good leg, balancing with his right hand on the handle of the truck door. “Come on now,” he said to the dog. “You think I’m going to beg, you wrong. You got about a minute before this leg gives out.”
The dog inched its front feet forward, lowering its belly to the ground. It raised its head and began to whimper and crawl forward, and then it stood and crept to him, just beyond his fingers. “That’s better,” he said quietly. “You got another inch to go, and you better not bite. You bite me, I’ll take that hoe to your head.”
The dog stretched its nose to his fingers, touched them, then stepped forward and slipped the jaw of its head into his palm. “Good girl, good girl,” he said playfully. “That’s what you are, a girl.”
He ran his hand under the dog’s stomach. “What you are,” he said again. “Good girl.”
At midnight, alone, sleepless, he wrote in his journal:
Today marks three weeks since my wife, Cora, died. She was 75 years old. On the day she died she had been at the rest home, sitting with “old” people. She always wanted to be a nurse and she believed she had become one, spending her time with people who needed company. Being alone myself now, I understand how much she must have meant to them. I worked in the cemetery this morning, before it got hot. I put roses on the graves of Cora and Thomas. It was the first time I had ever put flowers on my son’s grave. Cora always liked to do that and I knew it. I missed both of them while I was there, I guess more than I have ever missed anything. If the Almighty is willing, I look forward to the time I will be with them again. I finally got to touch the white dog today. She followed me to the cemetery and got up enough nerve to come to me. I tried to get her in the cab of the truck to ride back, but she wouldn’t. Shows she has some sense, I suppose. I still don’t know why she won’t show herself when other people are around, but I won’t question her. Carrie and Holman brought out some Brunswick stew for supper that Holman had picked up in Athens. It was hot with seasoning, the way I like it. We’ve gone a week without any rain.
7
It was his habit that he read daily from the obituaries in the newspaper and listened at the noon hour for the radio broadcast of hospital reports. It was no longer a surprise to him to learn of the death of someone he had known more than seventy years. “They’re all dying,” he said to his sons and daughters. “Not many left, not the ones I grew up with, but I don’t guess it matters. Haven’t seen most of them in forty years or longer.”
It did matter when he read of the death of Hattie Lewis.
“I guess you could say she was my first little girlfriend,” he confessed to his youngest son, James, who was visiting for the weekend. “Her name was Hattie Carey, before she got married. Of course, it was nothing like it is today. We didn’t do anything but look at one another. I gave her a comb one time. Then all the boys started in on me about having a girlfriend, and I don’t guess I spoke to her after that.”
“Sounds like love, Daddy,” James said, teasingly. “Did Mama ever know about this?”
He laughed. His eyes moistened in merriment. “Lord, no, son. She’d have had a fit. How old was I, then? Twelve? Maybe thirteen. Long time before I met your mama.”
“Sounds serious to me, Daddy.”
He laughed again. He liked his youngest son. It was a gentle family joke that James was an accident of passion, a mid-life surprise. And there was truth in the teasing, but irony in the birth. Cora had dreamed it before the pregnancy. She had dreamed there would be another male child, a replacement for her buried son. From the day she was certain of the pregnancy, she had declared, “This is a boy.”
Even as his laughter over being teased about Hattie Lewis quietened, he remembered the day James had returned from Asia, a week earlier than expected. He was working in the field near the Civil War cemetery, and a car stopped on the road and James got out and crossed the field to embrace him. They set up a plan to surprise Cora—James circling the house to come in the side door, while he confused her with gibberish.
In the house, he said to her, “If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“What would it be? If you could have anything.”
She looked at him with a puzzled expression and with suspicion. “I don’t know. A new car. Why’re you asking?”
“That’s it? More’n anything else, you’d want a new car?”
“Well—”
“Think about it. Anything you wanted.”
Her eyes brightened suddenly, dampening, and her lips trembled. “I’d want to see my baby,” she said softly.
And at that moment—that precise moment—James walked through the side door, behind her, and said, “Hello, Mama.”
A chill struck him, caught in the smile that still carried his laughter. He had never seen her as joyful, holding her youngest son.
“Yeah, Daddy, that sounds serious to me,” James repeated.
He took a swallow from his homemade grape wine and realized that was another reason he enjoyed being with James. He could drink homemade grape wine with James and not feel uncomfortable. James was not a preacher. He was an investigator for the U.S. Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
“She wound up marrying Neal Lewis, who was just a plain fool,” he said. “Always doing some fool thing.” He nodded his head to agree with his memory. The smile deepened in his face. He said, “One time, son, we had to recite a stand-up poem in school and the teacher—old lady Milbury—got to Neal and said, ‘Stand up and do us your poem, Neal.’ And Neal stood up beside his desk—I can see him now, just thinking about it—and said, ‘Pecker-wood, pecker-wood, pecking on the door. Pecked so hard, his pecker got sore.”’ He laughed hard, remembering the scene, laughed until the tears oozed from his small eyes.
“Sounds like a character, Daddy,” James said.
“One time old lady Milbury was trying to explain that we belonged to the animal kingdom,” he said, “and Neal was giving her the devil about it, saying he didn’t believe one word of it. Said a cow was an animal, but he was a human. She said, ‘Neal, what’s the difference between me and a cow?’ And Neal said, ‘Cow’s got four tits, you ain’t got but two.”’ Again he laughed until the tears seeped from his eyes, and he dried them with the tips of his fingers. “Never did know what Hattie saw in him,” he said.
“Daddy, why don’t I take you over to the funeral home to pay your respects?” his son suggested.
“I’d like that,” he said. “I think I’d like that. I need to get me a haircut while we’re out, too. And pick up a few things at the grocery store.”
There were six m
en on the porch of the funeral home. They were sitting in a semicircle of rocking chairs when he arrived with James and walked his slow aluminum-legged walk across the lawn and to the porch. The men were sitting quietly, with the look of people enduring a familiar ritual. James was surprised that his father knew them and they him, and that the presence of his father seemed to interest them. They met with feeble handshakes and cackles and immediate old stories that had lapses of reason in the telling, and James could sense that for one energetic outburst of pushing away years they were again young and vigorous.
“Awful bad about Hattie,” he said. “I read about it yesterday.”
“Mighty fine lady,” one of the men said in sympathy. Then, in an afterthought: “Seems like I remember you being sweet on her, Sam.”
“Well, now, by shot, that’s right,” another of the men said. “What was we? Ten, eleven years old?”
“Lord, God,” he said easily. He turned to his son. “Here we are, seventy years later, and they still making up lies, son.”
The men laughed warmly.
“How’s Neal holding up?” he asked.
“Doing all right,” one of the men said profoundly. “He’s gon’ miss her, that’s for sure. That woman straightened Neal out, much as he could be, I reckon. Sure to God, she did.”
“Don’t guess he’s as big a fool as he used to be,” he said.
The men laughed again, knowingly. “He was that, all right,” one of them said. “Always has been, in his way. Hattie couldn’t wash that out of him. She just starched him a little bit.”
“Don’t guess I’ve seen him in fifteen or twenty years,” he said. “Not since I was in the Farm Bureau. Used to see him then, at some meetings. He was always cutting the fool, but everybody liked Neal. We went to New York on a convention one time. Got himself lost in a department store. He here?”
The men became solemn. “Inside there. His two daughters and his grandkids was here a few minutes ago. They left.”