The Nine Dogs at Mother’s Gate

Nine dogs were already at the gate when I pulled in, and not one of them barked.

That was the first thing that bothered me. I had expected noise. All the way over from my place, six miles of county road with the combine dust still in my teeth, I had worked out what I would say to a pack of hollering strays. I had a roll of chain and a padlock on the seat beside me. And in my shirt pocket, folded small, I had a seed receipt with the number of the animal shelter in St. Joseph written on the back.

I was fifty-four years old and had never been talked out of a plan by a dog.

The gate is a quarter mile down the lane from the house, at the east edge of the old pasture, and I could make them out from the yard as a row of low shapes along the wire. I drove down with the window open. Nothing. Not a yip.

They stood in a loose line along the gate. A big red hound with one cloudy eye. A little black and white terrier mix who had planted herself in the middle like she owned the county. A tan dog gone soft around the middle, a white one with a pink nose, a heavy brindle with a face like a mailbox, and a young black scrapper that kept looking at the others to see what to do.

A black and tan shepherd cross stood a little apart, on a flat spot by the post. He had three legs. The left hind one was gone clean at the hip, and he stood on the other three like it was nothing he planned to discuss.

Out at the ditch a small gray dog sat with her back half turned, looking at nothing.

And in front of all of them, closest to the gate, lay an old yellow dog with a white muzzle, her chin on her paws, the way you lie when you have waited a long time for something and mean to wait a good while longer.

I counted twice. Nine.

My mother had been in the ground for seven days.

I shut the truck door and stood there with my arms crossed. The sun was a red coin on the bean stubble across the road. The old yellow dog lifted her head and looked at me. The others did not look at me at all. They looked past me, back up the lane, at the place where my mother’s Ranger should have been coming with the feed in the bed, and I understood they had been looking at it every evening for a week.

“She’s not coming,” I said.

Nobody moved.

I had said much the same thing to her at Easter. She had gotten up in the middle of dessert to go out and do what she did every night when the light started to go. I followed her to the door. I said, “Mom, you’re feeding every mutt in the county. You’re eighty-two. You’ll fall out there in the dark and nobody will know for a day.”

She had her coat half on. She said, “Somebody will know.”

“Who?”

“Eat your pie, Raymond,” she said, and went out.

Eleven years she had done it, ever since the winter after Dad died. My sister Maren said it was grief that never got put down. My wife said it was a lonely woman’s company. I said it was money a widow could not spare, and a lawsuit if one of those dogs bit the mailman. The word we all used was foolish. We said it kindly, mostly.