The Nine Dogs at Mother’s Gate
Nov. 9, 2015. Yellow female at the east gate. Thin. Would not leave. Named her Penny.
Nothing else. No reason. She had written the date and the fact and left it at that, the way she wrote everything.
I got out and stood on the shoulder and tried to see it. A girl of nine in a cotton dress in August, a pillowcase on her knee. The heat going out of the gravel, and the road empty.
And I remembered a boy of seven on his bike in the road after supper, the light going, and my mother on the porch with her arms crossed against the chill, calling us in. Home by dark. Every mother on that road said some version of it. I had never thought it meant more in our house than in anyone’s, and I could not tell you, standing there, that it did. But I could not remember her ever going inside until the last of us was in. I had thought she was strict.
Maybe she was only strict. I will never know, and neither will anyone alive.
I stood there until it was dark. I held my cap in my hands and said her name once, out loud.
Then I drove to her gate. I was late. Twenty minutes past dusk. The dogs were at the fence, all nine, and the old yellow one had come up to the very wire and was standing with her head high and her white face pointed up the lane toward the house.
I got out of the truck and said, “I’m sorry,” to a dog, and I meant it more than I have meant most things I’ve said to people.
The second Saturday of November, I built the shed.
I had not decided anything. I told myself a dog should not freeze while the grown-ups decided. The night before, by the headlights of my truck, I cut and set the plank floor myself, a foot off the ground, because I wanted that much to be level.
Doc Brandt came out at eight with a cordless drill and a box of screws, and Mike Tuttle behind him in his truck with the lumber and a tin roof he had been saving for a project he never named. By noon there was a three-sided shed against the cedars. Not a kennel. A porch, really, where a dog can be out of the weather and still see the lane. When it was done, the old yellow dog walked in, turned once, and lay down in the straw as if she had ordered it.
Maren came up the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Glenda made a pot roast and we sat at Mom’s table, the three of us, with the ledger in the middle like a Bible, and for a long while nobody said anything.
I told them what Roberta had told me. I told it badly. Maren cried the whole time, and when I reached the part about the pillowcase she said, “Stop,” and then, “no, go on,” and I went on.
“The lawyer called Tuesday,” Maren said at last, wiping her face with both palms. “The house is ours to decide. There’s nothing in the will about the dogs. She just left the card.”