The Nine Dogs at Mother’s Gate
“You’ve been feeding them,” I said. It came out sounding like an accusation.
“Since the morning I found her. Mike drives me over in the evenings. I wash the pans and carry out what’s in the can. I couldn’t get the freezer lid up. I told myself I’d do it till you made up your mind.”
“I haven’t made up my mind.”
“I know. I watched your lights go down that lane twelve nights running.” Something moved at the corner of her mouth. “The first night I sat right here and watched you stand out there a good ten minutes with your arms folded.”
“Why did she do it?”
I had not planned to ask. It came out the way a stone comes up in a plowed field, because the frost pushed it.
“That’s hers to tell,” she said. “Go look in that freezer, Raymond. Go look in the green book she kept in the Ranger. And don’t go alone.”
We went on Saturday, Maren and I, and stood in the driveway at nine like two people who had been told to go into a house that was not theirs.
It was still Mom’s house. The dish towel hung over the oven door. Her glasses sat on the windowsill over the sink, where she’d set them down to wash a pan. The kitchen smelled of coffee and Ivory soap.
At eleven I said, “The freezer.”
It sat on the back porch, a fifteen-cubic-foot chest, white, older than Maren’s youngest. I had never opened it, since it was my mother’s, and a man doesn’t open his mother’s freezer. I lifted the lid.
What I found were rows of gallon bags, flat-frozen and stacked like library books, every one labeled in black marker in her small, straight hand.
Rice and chicken, soft. 8 cups.
Backs, ground. Judge, Amos, Pearl.
Liver, for the pill. Judge only.
“Chicken backs,” I said. “From the locker plant. A dollar-something a pound. She cooked rice for the old ones, the ones who can’t chew.”
Taped to the underside of the lid, where you would see it every time you opened the freezer, was an index card gone soft with handling, in handwriting not as neat as the labels. The writing of someone writing for somebody else.
Penny first. Always first. Soft food, warm it.
Hush: pan down, step back, turn your back. Don’t look at her.
Gideon: his pan on the flat spot by the post. He can’t stand in the ditch.
Amos: bad eye is the left. Come at him from the right.
Cricket needs a home. Ask Neil.
Don’t be late.
She had known someone would come. Not me, perhaps. Somebody. She had written it down for whoever came.
“Don’t be late,” Maren read, and her voice cracked down the middle. “She wrote it like it mattered more than the rest.”
I didn’t answer. I was thinking of every evening of my childhood, and the way my mother’s head would come up at the kitchen window when the sun touched the cedars, and she’d put down the dish towel and go.
I put the card back flat against the lid. Then I shut the freezer very quietly, as if it could wake.
The green book was in the glove box of the Ranger, under the owner’s manual. It was a clothbound ledger from Pickering’s Farm Supply, worn soft at the corners. On the inside cover, in her hand, was a verse. God setteth the solitary in families. Ps. 68:6.