she and Marky would’ve gone into town for groceries, and so he parked the truck and got out and stretched, and stood looking over the farmhouse and its outbuildings. The shapes of abandoned machinery under the snow; Great-Granddad’s old Massey-Harris, flat-tired and snow-heaped and the red paint all gone to rust—a miracle that that old Swede didn’t come back from the dead to raise holy hell. The coop yard where he told Marky to go make the chickens fly and Great-Grammy Olsen coming out with her broom and Marky flapping his wings away from her as she cussed him in a foreign blue streak.
They had liked playing around the farm but they did not like that kitchen. Did not like sitting around that table.
Why on earth not? she’d wanted to know, staring them down.
Just don’t, Ma.
Why?
It smells Momma. Marky spitting it out.
What do you mean it smells?
Shrugging his shoulders. It just smells Momma.
He means it smells like them. It’s hot in there and it smells like them.
Smells like them?
Yeah, Ma. Don’t you smell it?
Putting her hands to her hips, looking from him to Marky and back. You know what that smell is? Do you? That’s the smell of working people. Of hard work all your life. Of never having money for yourself but making sure your kids are fed and have shoes on their feet. The kitchen smells! Shaking her head. Next time we’ll just have Grammy throw your food out to you in the yard like a couple of dogs. How will that be? Raising her finger and pointing it at Danny’s face. Don’t even think it, wise guy. Just keep that smart tongue of yours still for once, OK?
The side door was not locked, was never locked, and when he stepped into the kitchen he thought the old smell was still there, faintly. Then he thought it might be the smell of old Wyatt who’d had his nest of blankets near the stove. Who did not raise his head now at Danny’s entrance, or come hobbling in from the living room, wagging his old tail. No sound of his dog tags rattling, his ears clapping as he shook off sleep. No sound at all in the house, not even the refrigerator running its compressor, though when he opened the door the light came on and the jug of juice he picked up was cold.
He went back out the way he’d come in and stood looking at the Minnesota sundown. Bright bands of red and pink in the west, but dark winter clouds overhead. Near the middle of the yard the snow had been disturbed—excavated, and darkened with what looked like soot, and he knew what it was before he reached the edge of the site.
The fire had melted back the snow and left sharp fins like rock formations, and down in the pit lay the upturned earth, the dirt patted down with the back side of a shovel. At the head of the grave, or the foot of it, stood the rusted iron T-post, rising from the snow at its tilt like a ship mast—just the right height for boys to swing from, one to each side, making the bedsheets shimmy on the lines . . . until one day the post shifted down in the turf and they felt it going and Oh shit oh shit, they dropped and ran for their lives.
No idea then that they swung their sneakers over the future grave of their dog. No idea they’d ever have a dog. How many times had they asked her? Begged her. Promised to take care of it, to feed it, she wouldn’t have to do a thing. No, no, and no, she said, I know how that story ends. But then one day you take off to the tracks, the forbidden tracks, and The train is coming Danny, Marky says, hurry! and you center the penny on the rail and jump back down the bank and into the trees so the conductor won’t see you, and it’s then, the train growing big and your hearts beating, that Marky says, Danny there’s a dog.
And you look and look before you finally see it in the weeds and shadows. Hardly recognizable as a dog at first with its shabby, mud-brown coat, every kind of burr and thistle in its low-slung tail. Big animal in any case, though starved almost to death: ladder of ribs and caved-in stomach and hunched, bony spine. Dark lips drawing back to show