The Padlocked Box Behind The Foreclosed House

“Wade and Tara Harlan. They’ve got a girl, Josie, ten or so. She used to bring Rooster in for his shots and pay with quarters out of a jelly jar.” She shook her head. “Wade was let go from the feed mill last fall. The bank took the house in June. Wade’s got a temper, Gene. He kicked over the bank’s sign in the front yard the day they posted it. He told the bank man at the Cenex station he’d burn the house down before he let them sell it.” She went quiet. “I’m not saying anything. I’m just telling you what people will say.”

People said it fast.

Deputy Cal Brewer met me back at Mercer Street that afternoon. He photographed the freezer and the scratches inside the lid and put the padlock in a plastic bag, and when he was done he looked over at the house and said, “The Harlans moved out sixteen days ago. You know that?”

Sixteen days since the family left. Thirteen marks on that lid. Somebody had been coming to this yard, one mark a visit, for thirteen evenings. And then they had stopped. Three days ago.

The same three days that dog had gone without water.

“Somebody was feeding him,” I said. “Every day. And then they quit.”

“Or somebody found out he was being fed,” Cal said, “and put a stop to it.” He tapped the bag with the padlock in it. “Wade Harlan’s been mad at the whole world since June.”

I went next door before I left. The woman who had dropped her curtain opened the door about four inches. Bev Sutton, seventies, neat gray hair, a cross on a thin chain.

“Did you hear a dog back there?” I asked her. “These last few days?”

Her eyes went to the side, toward the yard and away again. “I don’t get into the Harlans’ business.”

“Ma’am, he was locked in a freezer.”

Something moved in her face. For a second I thought she was going to tell me something. Then her mouth closed down hard.

“You might ask Wade Harlan what he did with that dog,” she said, and shut the door.

Across the street, a man in a feed cap was running a push mower back and forth over a lawn that did not need it. When I crossed toward him, he turned the mower around and went the other way.

Two neighbors, and neither one would look at that yard. It felt less like they knew nothing and more like they knew something they did not want to carry.

I let myself into the house with the bank’s keys. Inside was the usual foreclosure sadness, a calendar still on June, and a hole punched through the drywall beside the back door about the size of a man’s fist.

On the kitchen door frame, in pencil, somebody had marked a child’s height every birthday. JOSIE 4. JOSIE 5. All the way up to JOSIE 10, a little above my belt buckle. Beside the last one, in the same careful capitals I had seen inside that freezer lid, she had written: AND ROOSTER.

And there was a mark for him too, low down, about where the top of a big dog’s head would come.

I did not sleep that night.

Carol had wanted a dog our whole marriage. Every spring she would bring it up, and every spring I would say we would get one when I slowed down, when the business could spare me, when the timing was right. When she got sick, she stopped asking. I think about that more than I want to.

At three in the morning I got up, put on my boots, and drove out to the clinic. Nan let me sit on a cot beside Rooster’s kennel. When I sat down, he opened one eye, found me, and thumped his tail against the floor of the kennel one time.