The Nine Dogs at Mother’s Gate

Hung over the top rail was a stack of nine pans. A dented cake pan. A blue enamel dishpan with a chip. Two pie tins, a pot lid, a roasting pan older than I was. Washed so clean they shone in the last of the light. Someone had been here since the funeral. I did not think about who.

I laid the chain back on the floorboard.

“One night,” I told the dogs. “Because it’s cold and you didn’t ask for any of this.”

I want to be honest, because people like to make me better than I was. I was not moved. I was annoyed. The feed was back at the barn, and I knew where, which was its own small insult. I drove up the lane, went around to the lean-to where Mom kept it, found a galvanized trash can with a brick on the lid, and lifted the brick off like a man taking part in something. Inside was a sack of Pickering’s dog food, half gone, and a coffee can set in the kibble for a scoop. The Ranger sat in the barn with her work gloves on the dash. I did not look at the gloves. I loaded the sack in my own truck bed.

Then I made my first mistake. Back at the gate, I set the pans down in a row along the fence any which way, and poured.

The line fell apart.

The red hound sniffed the pan I had put in front of him and backed off as if I’d offered him something dead. The three-legged dog looked at the pan I’d set on the ditch side, then at the ditch, then at me.

“What,” I said.

He looked at the flat spot by the post.

So I moved his pan, a pie tin, to the flat spot, and he stepped over and ate. I saw that I had put the red hound’s pan on his bad side, and switched it so he could come at it from the right, and he ate. The terrier helped herself to the chipped blue dishpan, which I now saw was hers and always had been.

It took ten minutes to get it right. They were not confused. They were waiting on me, and when I got it right it was as quiet as church.

The old yellow dog had not moved from the gate. I carried the roasting pan over and set it down by her nose. She was thin through the hips, the way a dog gets at twelve or thirteen, and her eyes had a milk in them, and she looked up at me like I was a man who had come to the right house at last.

“Go on,” I said, and my voice was not what I expected.

She ate.

The gray dog by the ditch had not come, and I knew that if I stood there she would not eat. So I turned my back. I stood looking at the dark line of my mother’s cedar windbreak, which my father planted the year I was born.

Behind me I heard a small dog come up the ditch and a small pan being cleaned.

I did not turn around.

When it was done I washed all nine pans at the hydrant, because it seemed wrong to leave them any other way, and hung them back on the rail. I put the brick on the lid.