The Nine Dogs at Mother’s Gate
The phone number was still in my pocket. I told myself I would call from home.
Glenda had left a plate in the oven. She was at the table with the seed catalogs she starts reading in October, when nothing can possibly be planted, and she didn’t look up.
“How many?” Glenda said.
“Nine.”
“Mm,” she said, and turned a page.
I ate my meat loaf. Later I noticed my shirt in the basket was full of yellow hair. I put it back.
The next night I told myself I was going out to check the lane gate. The night after that I stopped at Pickering’s Farm Supply and bought two sacks of dog food, because Mom’s was running low. Wes Pickering rang them up without a word, which for Wes is a speech.
By the end of that week I was at the gate every night as the light went, straight from the combine, still in my dust. Saturdays I came early, in plain daylight, and crouched at the gate setting out the pans while they waited along the fence, because I was done pretending I had somewhere else to be. I would say, “I’m only here to see to it,” and the dogs would listen with their whole bodies and not believe a word.
They were not the well-behaved congregation they had been the first night. The terrier barked at my truck every evening for a week, to let me know the arrangement was temporary and she was not the one who had set it up. On the fourth night the brindle and the tan dog went at each other over the cake pan, all noise and no blood, and I stood between them with a pan in each hand like a man selling something, and ten minutes later they were eating side by side as if nothing had happened.
I learned them without meaning to. The three-legged one leaned his whole weight on the post when he ate, and I came to look for it. The terrier ate first if you let her and bullied the young one, who had a scar on her ear and ate like she thought someone would take it. The old yellow one was first, always first. If I set a pan down for the terrier before I set hers, the whole line went still and waited, like a church waits for a late bride.
And the gray one ate only when my back was turned. Every night I turned my back. Every night I heard the small pan scrape clean.
Maren called on the ninth night.
“Glenda says you’re feeding them.”
“Glenda talks too much.”
“Did you call the shelter?”
“I’m getting to it.”
“You’ve been getting to it since the funeral.”
“There are nine of them,” I said. “You don’t just call.”
“I’m not asking you to stop,” my sister said, gently. “I just wonder if you know you’re doing it.”
“I’m doing it till we sort out the house,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s what I’ll say too.”
Roberta Tuttle lives across the road from my mother’s place in the white house with the green porch. She is eighty-four and has the hands to show for it. She stood at the funeral in a navy dress, holding a handkerchief, and said nothing to anyone.
On the twelfth night I came early because the beans were done, and found a pickup parked at the road end of the lane with an old woman in the passenger seat. Her grandson Mike was behind the wheel, a lanky man of thirty in a seed cap, studying his dashboard. Roberta rolled the window down.