The Nine Dogs at Mother’s Gate
He is a tall, stooped man of sixty-one with big knuckles, and I had known him all my life as the one who pulled calves in the spring. I did not know he had been coming to my mother’s gate for eleven years.
“She never told you,” he said. The dogs had finished and were lying about in the gravel.
“She told nobody.”
“She wouldn’t.” He set his bag on the post. “I tried to write her off once. She sat in my waiting room until I took her check. Said a favor you don’t pay for, you owe. Said she had enough to carry.”
He crouched, slowly, with a grunt, and held out a hand to the three-legged dog, who leaned his whole weight into it. “Hold his collar, Ray.”
I held the collar. Gideon stood for his heartworm check and a booster without a flinch and looked at me as if I’d done it.
“County doesn’t have a pound,” Doc said over his shoulder. “Closest is the shelter you were going to call. Takes six, maybe, on a good week. Holds a stray seven days. Then it’s a numbers game, and nine’s a bad number, and old and three-legged and shy are worse ones.” He didn’t look at me. “I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you where they’d have gone.”
I said nothing. The sun went down behind Roberta’s house and the cold came up out of the ground.
“I asked her once, when Penny’s hips started,” Doc said. “I said, Lorraine, is nine too many for one person? She thought about it. And she said, then it’s lucky it’s only nine.”
I laughed. Then I couldn’t stop looking at the old yellow dog, her chin on her paws.
“The card says to ask Neil about Cricket,” I said. “I don’t know any Neil.”
“Neil, that’s me, Ray.” He almost smiled. “Your mother was the only person in this county who used it.” Then he did smile. “My granddaughter Kaylee’s been after me since July. Her grandmother says over her dead body, which I take to mean Christmas.”
When he’d gone I reached for my shirt pocket, for the receipt with the number on it. I had been moving it from pocket to pocket for three weeks. It wasn’t there. Glenda had washed it. I found it later in the bottom of the washer, a gray pulp, the number gone to nothing. I did not mention it, and neither did she.
The first hard freeze came the last night of October. Twenty-four degrees, and the breath coming off the dogs in clouds.
The old yellow dog was shivering, a fine tremor down the shoulder, and I got two bales of straw out of the barn and broke them open a foot deep in the lee of the cedars. She walked in on her own and lowered herself down with a groan.
The little gray one was still out by the ditch, as far from us as she had been in three weeks, short-haired and thin and shaking. That night, with my back turned, she ate three steps closer to the gate than she ever had.
I took off my brown Carhartt, the one Glenda bought for my fiftieth. I walked halfway to the ditch without looking at the dog. I looked at the cedars. I folded the coat into a pad on the gravel, and I walked back and sat on the ground against the gatepost, in my shirtsleeves in the freezing dark. And I stayed.