from his nest of blankets and old stuffed toys at the foot of the bed, the dog like an old stuffed thing himself with all the stuffing dragged out, all the living heaviness gone from him now, hardly more to this creature in her arms than the sack of skin and the brittle bones it held, the riddled bones, and her dream, whatever it was, was gone.
Downstairs she set him on his feet by the door and waggled her own feet into the soft boots there and fed her arms into her father’s old canvas jacket and unlocked and swung in the wooden door, “Watch your toes, boy,” and pushed open the stormdoor and followed him out onto the small wooden deck that overlooked the long slope of the yard and the wire fence and the fifty acres beyond that she rented to old Jimmy McVeigh, or, rather, to his sons now. The dog making his way over the top crust of snow to the iron clothesline bar, and no sound at that cold hour but the soft press of the snow under his paws. Stopping and lowering his haunches at the foot of the iron bar, no longer able to lift his leg, the snow hissing and steaming beneath him.
There he squatted, the dark outline of a dog in the glistening white. A thin and homely shadow of a dog, much as he’d looked when the boys had first brought him home, what—thirteen years ago? Brought him to her as if there would be no question, no resistance, this starved and dirty animal. Danny and Marky coming up the walk with the animal wobbling along behind them and nearly through the front door before she pushed them back outside, then reached to pull the boys toward her, to separate them from the animal, the shocking thing, a creature that surely would’ve died given another day.
Get inside, she’d told them. She would call the pound, the Board of Health, the county sheriff.
But Danny had looked at her, and then at Marky, who with his strange agility had twisted free of her and stood petting the animal’s skull.
You know what they’ll do to him, Danny said quietly.
He was sly, her Daniel, so sly. And Marky knew at once what he meant, and the fight was over; she could never do that to her son.
Danny kneeled next to his brother and began stroking the dog’s ragged spine. What will we call him? he asked, and Marky said Snickers, but then rethought; the boys had been watching westerns on TV. Wyatt Earp! he said, and Danny nodded. The outlaw sheriff, he said.
Fifty feet of hose lay sun-heated in the grass and as they washed the filth from his coat Wyatt Earp stood docile, soaked, the more wasted and pathetic for his soaking, a living skeleton. Rachel at the kitchen window shaking her head. Her good fabric shears flashing in the sun as the boys snipped the burrs from the dog’s coat, the boys quiet and serious as surgeons. Danny emptying one of Roger’s old jelly jars of screws and pouring in lawnmower gas and dropping into this—he alone, not Marky, who could not be the cause of any creature’s death—tick after tick, some as fat as blueberries. They cleverly made a collar out of an old leather belt, and lastly they pooled their savings for the vet’s shots and for dogfood. The county would do the neutering for free.
Well. He’d been a good dog, after all. Smart, obedient, happy—devoted to Danny as if he’d never forgotten that day, that sudden change of fortune. When Danny went away, years later, leaving him behind with Rachel and Marky, he was not the same animal. His heart was broken. Sickness saw an opening.
Now in the dawn, in the cold, the dog returned to her. “Good boy,” she said and held open the stormdoor. So much life, so much love, and memory, and grief in such a short-lived life. Does he have any idea what a life is? What his might have meant?
In the kitchen she filled the kettle and lit the burners and took out the half can of dogfood from the fridge and spooned the remainder into the saucepan. She crushed up one of his pills and added that to the dogfood, and with the spoon began to break it all down over a low flame while he sat on his kitchen blankets, watching her, shivering with cold and pain. Rachel at the stove stirring