The Nine Dogs at Mother’s Gate
“Roberta.”
“He told her to wait at the gate. He told her he’d be back by dark.”
I could not make my mouth work.
“I was eleven,” she said. “I saw something pale on the gatepost from our upstairs window, long after supper, and thought it was a feed sack. It was her. Daddy went out with the lantern near midnight, and she was still sitting there with the pillowcase on her knee and her hands folded like someone in church. He said, honey, it’s long past dark. And she said, I know. I’m still waiting.”
I put down my coffee. My hand wasn’t steady enough to hold it.
“He never came?”
“Never. We heard he went to Texas, and we heard nothing after. Daddy carried her in. Mama put her in my bed. She grew up in our house, and she married your father at twenty. The spring she married she wrote to the ones in Texas, once. Nothing came back, and she let it lie. She wouldn’t say his name.” Roberta pressed her lips together. “She told me once that the worst of it wasn’t that he left. It was that she kept watching the road, even after she knew. She said the waiting was the only part of it that had been hers to do.”
I looked at the green porch rail through the window.
“I hope somebody forgave him before I had to,” I said. “Because I am not sure I can yet.”
“You don’t have to today,” Roberta said.
I had not cried when my father died, and I had not cried at my mother’s funeral. I did not cry now, either. I held onto the table.
“The winter after your father died, she started going out at dusk with a pan,” Roberta said. “I asked her what made her, and she said she couldn’t have told me. A yellow dog turned up at the gate, and she couldn’t turn it off, and that was all she’d say. I didn’t push.”
“She prayed,” Roberta said after a while. “Did you know that? Every night at the gate. Out loud. She said she couldn’t pray over the whole world, it was too big. So she prayed for the nine, by name. She said the Lord could handle the world and she’d handle the nine.”
“Why dusk?”
Roberta looked at me with her old clear eyes.
“I never asked her that,” she said. “I only know what she told me about that road, and what she did every evening of her life. Whether the one is the reason for the other, I couldn’t swear to you. I quit trying to make them fit a long time ago. People are not as neat as the stories we tell about them, Raymond.”
I drove out to the old Tuttle lane before I went home. I hadn’t planned it. The truck just turned that way.
It’s corn stubble now. The gate is long gone. There is only a culvert and a line of wild plum along the ditch, and the gravel road going off both ways to the horizon, flat as a table.
I took the green book off the seat and opened it to the first page, by the dome light. I had gone straight to the dogs and never read the first page. One entry, in a hand younger than the rest.