The Nine Dogs at Mother’s Gate
Below it, in a different ink: Not for the dogs. For me. Though I suppose it’s for them too.
It was ruled in columns. Date, name, where from, notes. A feed record, but more than that. A roll of names.
Hush. January 2019. Would not come in. Sat in the ditch eight days. On the ninth she ate from the pan while I looked away. I do not look at her now.
Maren turned pages with her fingers pressed against her mouth, reading and crying at once. Pages of dogs, with dates, and beside many of them the word placed, and a name, a family, a town. A boy in Maryville. Eleven years of ordinary mercies, written down the way you write down weather.
I had to put my hand flat on the table.
It was not the dogs. It was that she had kept a book. My mother thought a diary was for people with time on their hands, and she had written down every creature that came to her gate. I had called it foolish for eleven years, and she had been paying attention to something harder than I ever had.
On the back page was a tally in pencil. Dogs fed: nine or ten, depending on the week.
Maren had been counting the placed with her finger. She lost track somewhere past thirty.
“Thirty-some dogs,” she said. “She found homes for thirty-some dogs and never once told us.”
The checkbook was in the kitchen drawer with the rubber bands and the church directory. A man who has farmed thirty years can read a register the way a preacher reads Romans. I went through it with a pencil on the back of a seed receipt.
Dog food from Pickering’s Farm Supply, about two hundred a month, and Wes had been giving her a standing discount on the sacks for years without a word to anyone. Chicken backs and rice from the locker plant, forty or fifty. And a check every month to Brandt Veterinary Clinic. Some months forty, some eighty. In March, four hundred and twelve. Shots, heartworm pills, and spays and neuters at about a hundred fifty apiece, because she would not have a litter born on that gate.
It came to a little over four thousand a year, give or take, and I rounded it up out of habit.
My mother’s Social Security was a little under two thousand a month. That ran the house, with something left, and for eleven years I had worried that the dogs were coming out of what she needed. I had said it to Glenda a dozen times. She’s shorting herself for those dogs.
But I rented her seventy tillable acres. Last year’s check was thirteen thousand three hundred, and it had never dropped under ten. I had handed those checks across that kitchen table and thought, there goes her bill money.
It was my rent that fed the dogs.
I had been paying for them for eleven years, close to a third of every check I wrote her, and complaining about it to anyone who would stand still. She never said one word.
“Ray?” Maren said. “You’ve got your hand over your eyes.”
“I know where my hand is,” I said, and my sister laughed, a wet, surprised laugh, and then I was laughing too, and neither of us could have told you what was funny.
Doc Brandt came out the Wednesday after, at dusk, in his white clinic truck.