Hitting the concrete floor, I’d landed on my left elbow. Pain ran up through my shoulder and down my back. As I struggled to raise myself, I could feel the blood drain from my head. Through the pain and the rising nausea, I fought off the fear that, within seconds, that loathsome rodent would be locked in Rowdy’s predatory jaws and that I—the dog-obedience pooh-bah, the alpha figure in Rowdy’s life—would be powerless to make him drop his mauled and bloody and probably poison-infested prey.
After what felt like several hours—five seconds?—I managed to crawl from my knees to a firm sitting position. Finding myself near the ancient Xerox copier, I braced my feet against it, gave Rowdy’s leash the kind of neck-wrenching jerk I hadn’t administered for years, and finally succeeded in finding my voice and croaking Rowdy’s name. As Rowdy briefly turned his head, the rat must have seized its chance to escape. “Rowdy, watch me! Rowdy, here! Good, good boy! Good dog. Good dog.” With sweet words and tugs on his leash, I drew him to me. Digging scraped, bleeding hands into my pockets, I found scraps of desiccated cheese. Rowdy licked them off my palms. His eyes were bright. His beautiful white tail was tailing back and forth across his back. The escape of the rat bothered Rowdy not at all. “You disgust me,” I told him.
Leaning on Rowdy, I finally got to my feet and retrieved the box I’d dropped, the one marked with Jack Andrews’s name. My retreat from Damned Yankee Press was uneventful. The cheerful young woman paid no attention to the box I carried, to the holes in the knees of my jeans, or to what must have been the pallor of my face.
“There really are rats there,” I told her.
“Yes,” she said with a smile.
An hour later, in my own kitchen, when I’d disinfected and bandaged the wounds on my hands and knees, I drew a kitchen knife across the tape that sealed the box. Rowdy sniffed eagerly. The scent, no doubt, awakened happy memories. Kimi explored my shoes with her nose. I opened the box. Inside were the pens, pencils, and paper clips I’d expected. To my amazement, there actually was a small framed photograph of Claudia, Brat, and Gareth. Among the other odds and ends, I found only one item of interest, a slip of paper on which someone had scrawled four words:
And One Fought Back
.
The privately printed book about Hannah Duston.
CHAPTER 22
In case you, too, are ever traumatized by a rat, let me give you some advice: Don’t expect any sympathy from your vet. Steve’s attitude that same Monday evening made me half wish I’d started an affair with an exterminator instead. Steve did, however, insist on examining the physical damage. For strictly medical reasons, he made me take off my jeans. Wearing nothing but panties, socks, and a Big Dog T-shirt he’d given me—YOU CAN MOVE A MOUNTAIN, BUT YOU CAN’T BUDGE A BIG DOG—I sat shivering on a kitchen chair as he gently removed the gauze and tape from my knees.
“What’s this grease you’ve smeared on?” he asked.
“Panolog,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Panolog cream. Prescribed by
you
. It worked just great on Kimi’s—”
“Into the bathtub,” he ordered. “Soap and hot water. These abrasions are filled with grit. Don’t they teach first aid in Maine?”
“They teach you to go to the dump and shoot rats, only it’s a nighttime sport, and you just see the ugly things from a distance in the headlights of your car.”
As Steve led me to the bathtub, scrubbed my knees and elbows with soap, and made me rinse the scrapes under hot water, he accused me of maligning some of his favorite patients. “Clean, intelligent pets,” he said.
“Cop-out pets! You ever hear of ‘a boy and his rat’? ‘A girl and her rat’?”
“Some people don’t have time for dogs.”
“Cats. Cats are
real
pets. They’re not disgusting, beady-eyed, humongous
rodents
. This one weighed a minimum of five pounds. Steve, that’s rinsed enough. I’m freezing. Can’t I get out of here?”
“No, and if it weighed five pounds—”
“Oh, it did! Professor Foley’s neighbor, Lydia, said that he told her he saw one the size of a woodchuck, and naturally, I thought that was an exaggeration. But
now
I realize it was probably an underestimate. I am getting out of this tub now!”
“Whoever would’ve guessed,” he said, handing me a clean white towel, “that beneath this feminist exterior—”
“Rats are the enemy of the human race. It’s just that women are a lot freer than men to express everyone’s true feelings on the subject.”
Back in the kitchen, as the dogs assisted Steve by licking my injuries and running off with gauze pads, I said, “Besides, this was a
sick
rat. All the hair had fallen off its tail, and the bare skin was all scaly . . .” I shuddered at the memory.
“Rats have hairless tails. The skin on their tails is supposed to be scaly.”
“All the more reason to exterminate the damned things.
Now
I finally understand why Jack Andrews had that sodium fluoroacetate. If what you’re dealing with is
rats,
no measure is too strong!”
Steve’s Fletcherizing relative must have forced him to chew his thoughts as well as his food. He ruminated for thirty seconds before he said, “The only good rat is a dead . . . ?”
Another half-minute passed in silence.
“Rats are rats,” I finally said.
“There is nothing inherently evil about rats.”
“Rats
are
rats,” I repeated. “The situations are not comparable.” I now had a towel wrapped around my waist. I’d left my socks in the bathroom. My legs and feet were an unattractive shade of winter white; by comparison, the fresh bandages had a great tan. I was still wearing the T-shirt, but its sleeves were damp. I went to Steve and held his face between my gauze-encased hands. “But the feelings are.”
He stroked my hair.
“The feelings are comparable,” I said. “We all have it in us, don’t we?”
And then, naturally—it happens all the time—even before the dogs had had a chance to pounce on us, Steve got called away on an emergency caused, as usual, by yet another Cambridge intellectual who hadn’t been able to endure the prospect of depriving her dog of his so-called freedom to be a dog—his natural right to savor the ultimate canine experience of being crushed by a car—and now expected Steve to repair the damage that was her own damned fault. In cynical moments, I wonder why these dog-murdering romantics bother to let their dogs run loose. It would be altogether simpler and easier if these people would just get in their cars and run over their dogs themselves. The effect would be the same, really, only the owners would have slightly more control than they do now over which body parts get destroyed and whether the dogs live or die.
After Steve departed, I called Brat Andrews. I did not confess that I’d passed myself off at Damned Yankee Press as her cousin. I told the truth: I said that I was very sorry about Professor Foley’s death. Brat’s response was terse, but the pitch of her voice was high and she sounded sincere. “Uncle George was a good friend of Daddy’s.”
I said that I hated to bother her right now, but that I had a few questions. I’d be as brief as possible. “Your father grew up in Haverhill,” I said. “I know this may sound off the wall, but the local heroine there is a colonial woman named Hannah Duston, and—”
“Daddy knew all about Hannah Duston. There’s a statue of her in the middle of Haverhill. Daddy did a report about her when he was . . . in high school, I think. Maybe when he was younger. I remember because he used to make fun of himself for what he called it: ‘Intrepid Heroine.’ He got an A on it. I don’t think the title is so stupid, but Daddy did.”
“There’s no chance you still happen to have a copy of . . . ?”
“Of Daddy’s paper? That probably got thrown out the day he brought it home from school. I’m sure he didn’t have it.”
“One other thing. Brat, I’m really sorry to keep raising painful topics, but—”
“You’d rather ask me than Claudia.”
I cleared my throat. “Brat, you don’t happen to know who adopted Chip? You told me that right after your father died, Shaun McGrath took Chip. But I don’t know where Chip went after Shaun—”
Brat’s voice was deep and angry: “Is this some kind of joke?”
“Not at all. Your mother said she found him a good home. I wondered—”
“Claudia is a goddamned liar. The night Daddy died, after he didn’t come home, she went over there, and she didn’t have a key, so she called Shaun McGrath, and she sent Chip home with him. And then that slimy little bastard killed Chip, too.”
“He killed
Chip
?”
Brat’s voice was high again. “He said Chip was stolen out of his car while he was at Daddy’s funeral. I always knew better. He wasn’t satisfied with murdering Daddy. He had to go and murder Chip, too.”
CHAPTER 23
It could be worse. When Elizabeth Emerson was eleven years old, her father, Michael Emerson—Hannah’s father, too, of course—was convicted of cruelly and excessively beating and kicking Elizabeth. Michael Emerson was fined and released. Fifteen years later, in 1691, when Elizabeth, already the mother of one out-of-wedlock child, was charged with murdering her newborn twins, the law presumed her guilty, and not a single witness stepped forward to defend her. During the nine and a half months that Elizabeth Emerson spent in prison before her execution, not a single person visited her. Not her sister Hannah. Not her mother. Not her father.
So it could be much worse. Still, I sometimes long for the kind of father who calls and announces who he is. “This is Daddy,” maybe? Is that what normal fathers say? I wouldn’t know. Even when my father phones mere acquaintances, there’s no need for the preliminary statement that he is Buck Winter. Whether you hear Buck bellow long distance in your ear or see him close up, the only creature you could possibly mistake him for is a bull moose. Other people’s fathers, I believe, say things like “How are you, dear?” The vocalization of the bull moose, in contrast, is usually rendered as a deep
ugghh
. Not that my father is unsolicitous. For example, he almost always begins by asking about my dogs.
Not long after I’d finished my conversation with Brat Andrews, the phone rang and the familiar paternal roar crashed into my left eardrum. The pad cut was healing, I replied. Leah had worked with Kimi this afternoon.
My father then produced a weirdly smug-sounding version of
ugghh
while simultaneously speaking comprehensible English: “Tracy, uuugghhh, Littlefield!”
“How did you find that out?”
“Guess!” he challenged.
“Surfing the Internet.” I wasn’t kidding. Buck was, in fact, the principal reason I was not yet on-line. Having him embarrass me at dog shows was bad enough. I had no desire to become his roadkill on the Information Superhighway.
“No,” he ugghhed.
This time, I got it. My late mother collected dog show catalogs. “Old show catalogs. I should have thought of it myself. You found Jack’s name—John Andrews’s name—and she was the agent for his dog.” In a catalog,
agent
means handler.
As usual, Buck corrected me. “Dogs. Plural. Tracy Littlefield. They co-owned two goldens. Maybe more.”
“And you don’t remember . . .”
The show catalogs had, indeed, reawakened old memories. Instead of supplying a detailed description of the tall Tracy Littlefield, Jack Andrews, or both, my father launched into a critique of their golden retrievers, which, as I’d assumed from Chip’s picture, hadn’t come from my mother’s lines and which, my father claimed, were sound but not typey. “Not typey” was not a compliment; in Buck’s opinion, the golden in question hadn’t represented the essence of the breed. My father seldom says anything negative about a dog. I concluded that on at least one occasion under one AKC judge, one of Jack and Tracy’s goldens had beaten one of ours.
I was eventually driven to bellow back at him. “Tracy Littlefield’s address!”
In an apparent non sequitur, Buck replied in tones of grief-stricken disappointment, “You know, Holly, your mother”—here he paused lugubriously—“was a woman who understood dogs.”
I ignored the combined eulogy and lecture that followed. At the back of a show catalog, I should mention, is an index of exhibitors, together with their addresses. “Do you have the catalogs there? Would you please look up Tracy Littlefield’s address?”
“Georgetown,” he growled, as if it, too, had let him down by failing to understand dogs.
“Georgetown, Maine?”
“Georgetown, Massachusetts,” he replied in disgust. “Never heard of the damn place.” My father is almost as loyal to the state of Maine as he is to dogs. He takes particular offense at innocent cities like Portland, Oregon, and Augusta, Georgia, which he evidently suspects of an attempt at geographic social climbing that consists of a futile effort to pass themselves off as their betters.
“It’s near Haverhill,” I said, more to myself than to my father. “It’s right next to Bradford.” I can never shake the irrational impulse to try to please my father. “Bradford,” I reminded him, “is Rowdy’s birthplace.”