The Nine Dogs at Mother’s Gate
It was a long time. My knees went numb. The stars came out hard over the stubble. At some point I took off my cap and held it. I am not a man who prays out loud. But I sat there with my cap in my two hands and I said, to no one, “She’s yours now, Lord. And I guess these are mine.” Then I felt foolish, and kept sitting.
I heard her before I saw her. A small dog on gravel, coming out of the ditch crooked, stopping at every third step with her head down. She came to the coat. She sniffed it all the way around, like a person walking the boundary of a field. Then she walked off, back toward the ditch, and my heart went with her.
I did not move. Twenty minutes later she was back. She turned around twice and lay down on it and put her nose under her tail.
I could see the small gray ribs go up and down. When I finally stood, my legs had gone to wood, and I had to lean on the post, and Hush did not wake. A dog who had not let a human being within ten feet of her in seven years slept on my coat.
I left the coat. I bought another.
I walked into the kitchen and my wife looked at my face, and then at my arms. “Where’s your coat?”
“A dog’s using it.”
Glenda put down her pen. She got up, crossed the kitchen, and put her arms around me and held on. I stood there like a fence post. And then I did not.
I could not sleep. At midnight I took the flashlight and a third bale of straw and drove back out. I broke the bale open along the cedars, ten feet off, and laid it deep, and held the light low until I could see the gray ribs going up and down on my coat. I was back at first light, before coffee, with frost white on the stubble. She had dragged the coat into the straw by one sleeve and was curled in it, and she lifted her head and watched me go by, and her ribs were moving.
I went to Roberta’s on Sunday after church. She had said she would put the coffee on.
Her kitchen is yellow and warm and smells of cloves. She poured two cups and sat across from me the way a woman sits when she has decided something.
“You never wondered why she went out at dusk?” she asked.
I never had.
“Sit down, Raymond,” she said.
I was already sitting. I think she meant something else by it.
“I said it was hers to tell,” Roberta said. “She left no way to tell it, so it falls to me. She said to me once, when the dogs have somebody, tell the children. Three weeks of you out there every night, I figure that counts.”
I waited.
“You know she wasn’t raised by us,” Roberta said.
“I know she lived with your family. After her parents passed.”
“Her mother passed. That’s so.” Her thumb moved along the rim of the cup. “Her father did not.”
I waited.
“Lorraine was nine,” Roberta said. “Nineteen fifty-three. A dry year, and his wife had died in the spring, and he had four children and a truck with a bad clutch. He was a Bowers. He carried the little ones down to his sister in Texas, and she wouldn’t take a girl old enough to work. That’s as much as I ever got straight. Nobody told me why it was Lorraine who got left. He packed her a pillowcase of clothes in August and took her out the county road to the end of our lane, the long one. You’d not know it now, it’s corn.”