Authors: Sam Michel
I said, “What kind of name is that,
The Anchorage
? Isn’t
Hope
enough already? He’ll go in there thinking that he’ll find a Schnauzer, and his heart’ll
break as soon as he can see that all they’ve got down there are dogs that look like
dogs. I’ll let him help me bury her,” I said. “This time of year, we all have got
a right to see about our comforts.”
Well, my wife ignored me. She let me go, at least, she didn’t interrupt me. I followed
her around, and should be pictured through these prior arguments in postures of complaint.
Bent a little at the waist. Flourishing my shovel. Simpering. On the verge of stamping
feet. It wasn’t really argument at all. A real argument depends upon a real belief
in the efficacy of argument. From the outset, I believed, but became an unbeliever
when I saw my wife unwrap what looked to me like pretty near a pound of liver. Liver!
That quakey, brown, gelatinous slab. I hadn’t seen one in awhile. It seemed to me
she dropped the thing from a dramatic height. You forget how wet a piece of meat can
sound. How final. But she wasn’t finished. She had first to salt the thing, then to
pepper it, then to smack it with a waffled mallet. Too, there was the onion. No doubt,
once I was reduced to talk, my talk was cued in part by her ensuing preparations.
I know the meat was to the fire by the time I was concluded, and that the two of us
were standing elbow then to elbow, I with my shovel, she with her fork, listening
to the sizzle.
My wife said, “Is that all?”
After I recounted to myself the little history I’d just delivered—its corridors and
concrete, its sunlessness, its stinks and howls and pleady eyes, the old bones, and
the stiff hearts, and the old, encalming mysteries disrupted—I confessed to her I
could not see what more.
My wife laid down her fork. She faced me. She jammed her fists into her haunches and
accused me “just for starters” of hysteria. She said that I was being “awfully sentimental”
for a farm boy, said she thought that I was giving Lincoln Jr. too much credit. She
reeled me back into his age. Its blessings and encumbrances. She raised her voice,
speeded up her speech, erupted in a whirligig
of homey nounals.
The roof over our heads, our lucky stars, chicken and peas, pots to piss in.
I remember our fence, the fridge, the mailbox, and the boy, of course, and I remember
Hope, Hope, Hope. All else was for me a gravy stain my wife had slopped onto her sweatshirt,
approximately sub-navel, from where I came, I thought, to apprehend an immanence the
sound and the finish of a saltborn foam. I clung in it. I waited her out. In the quiet
lapse between the body of her speech and its conclusion, I attended to this stain,
believing I might be delivered to what lay beyond those bones and howls I turned up
at the bottom of a life and always missed out knowing. An unimpeded joy? An unpanicked
God? A happily hereafter?
In parting, I think I said to her, “Well, we’ll see.” Or, “That’s what you think.”
Something spoken from the corner of my mouth, several things, half-spoken, over my
shoulder, or to my feet, things like: “I’m the guy who wears the pants around here.”
Or, “I hope he picks himself a Dane.” And, “Why don’t you go and dig your own grave?”
Mutterings, sore sportsmanship, a few rounds fired from the hip in fast retreat. Nothing
deeply satisfying. And then less so, owing to my having shortly to return to her,
to ask her where the boy was.
“He’s out there with Hope!” she said. “What did you think? My God! Now get out! Before
I—I don’t know—before I kick you out! And I’ll warn you one last time—if you don’t
come back with a dog, I’ll take that cleaver there, and I’ll make—I’ll make—I’ll make
mince-meat out of your recliner!”
And so, at last, and once again, I am delivered to the boy. He was there, with Hope,
in the gutter, just this afternoon, just
as she had promised. How long, I asked the boy, had he been out there? He could not
say. I mean he seemed incapable of speech. I repeated myself until I could not doubt
I had been heard, and understood, and yet still he did not speak. I was skeptical,
as usual. As usual, I suspected he was acting on his mother’s counsel. His eagerness
to shape a word, so far as I recalled, was never stymied by the limitation in his
actual capacity to do so. He did not require words, as we know them, he made them
up. They hovered, ineffable, like music, sometimes, hymn-like, I almost want to say
seraphic. Perhaps it was the thickness of his tongue by which he was inspired and
assisted. A mania to compensate. Perhaps he really could not help himself. With my
son, if it wasn’t music, I thought I sometimes heard him speaking French. Swahili.
Dog. Wren. Anything. Though when I pressed him he admitted it was nothing. Then continued.
So what possessed him? Why such silence? Why such distance? Oh, I knew why, of course,
in my heart—but I was cautious not to have myself determined by the heart’s discoveries,
preferring not to chance the misery the winsome quickness of the heart so often used
to cause me, before I learned to let myself be patient of the plodding, rural action
of my mind. So I took my time and watched, leaned a little nearer, saw the fluids
leaking clearly from his nostril. I saw his lips begin to move, shaping what I thought
might be the silent mouthings of his private language; saw at length the tears come
down, watched the little chest expand, heard the wheezing there, the whistle in the
nose, saw the cloud come out of him, hover, and disperse, and I gathered up these
public emblems of his private life inside my mind and I thought:
Hope, my wife’s first errand, my son’s best friend...
Well, she was a mess. I do not think she can have suffered. Not much. With Hope,
I told my
son, it must have been the blinding panic, instantaneous, when she saw the time to
move, and found her legs were not what they had been, and she could not move, and
understood the chase was over, no more leaps, no more sprints and tumbles, no more
barking at the wheels and bumpers of the vehicles that nearly crushed her, but had
passed her by, and passed her by, until this final set of wheels had come, and there
she was, crushed, completely, mercifully, I told the boy, her life gone out of her
before she ever really felt it.
I waited on the boy, gave him ample time to doubt me. There was room in my surmise
of the dog for some dispute, as for instance with regard to what she did or did not
feel, whether life had truly left her in an instant, or had lingered, cloyingly, and
frantically, like a crab, when the tide comes in, and when the tide goes out, as we
have come to know life’s habit. Yet if dispute was in my son, he did not voice it.
I turned myself to Hope, who was as she was, indisputable. There were the heart and
the lung, the craw and the kidney, the diminutive version of the liver I recalled
my wife was inside frying. She should be here, I was thinking of my wife—the splintered
ribs, the flattened paw, the eyeball lying on the pavement—a viscous fruit, it seemed
to me, tethered on a bruisy-colored cord extended several inches from a crumpled socket—she
really ought to see.
Here was Hope, one of God’s, God made Hope, a dog, and worse, a Schnauzer. Another
test, I thought, to measure our devotion to the beasts He put us here to share the
world with. Could I love a Schnauzer? A dead one? Could I find it in myself to seek
out Hope’s replacement? From a theological perspective, the task seemed more compelling
to me than it had when I perceived myself proceeding under purely matrimonial duress.
I felt suddenly, haltingly expansive. I let myself believe I’d glimpsed the outer
and
the inner limits of His Plan; I believed in effects, and therefore causes; I saw myself
enfolded in His Flock, a necessary actor in the drama of His Final Judgment. I was
tentative, however, I paused to check my progress through the stopgaps of my mind,
fearful of discovering, through the semi-rigors of my custom, some reason in myself
that needed His elimination. I balked. I turned toward myself, instead of Him, threw
custom to the winds and listened to my heart. Might I indulge my heart, I wondered,
set forth as if I were a free man, capable of tolerance, where I had been intolerant,
of patience, where I had been impatient, capable of loving where I had not loved,
where salvation lay in loving? Well, all sorts of crazy thoughts were moving through
my head, understandably, I had not seen a corpse since Father’s.
I asked the boy, “Are you sure it was a Buick?”
I said, “Would you like to hold the sack?”
I asked him, “Do you need to use the potty?”
Naturally, the way we went was slow. We moved as water moves, on a flat, in a desert,
in a flood, toward the sink. It was messy work, despite the sack, she was a mess,
a person can imagine. Had I procured material less permeable than burlap, you might
not have had her dripping. All the way up to my neighbor’s porch, across the pavement,
and the concrete, the frozen turf and porchboards. Briefly, I wished I owned a pick.
And yet I doubted I could swing one. Growing up, we used a backho for our burials.
I had forgotten. I had forgotten, then remembered, too, the reason I requested burlap,
recalling to my mind its prevalence around the barnyard, and the common sense my mother
said it made to use it for the sacking of our smaller animals, those we loved enough
to bury, and those we had respected, enough to keep the dirt off. Yet I do not recall
these animals as ever being messes. Their deaths
seemed never accidental. Any evidence of violence reposed within the peaceful brisket.
This was called
going-to-sleep.
It’s what it looked like, prior to the rigormortis. For the dog, I wondered, what
should I call it, for my son? I thought I ought to call it something. I thought I
owed the boy a name to help him shape whatever must have moved ungoverned there inside
him.
To see him there, across the burlap—so small, his little grip, the smeary glasses,
the complications of his feet, so serious, resolved—I don’t know, I guess that I was
proud to see him keep his end up. So few do. In circumstances such as these, our friends
and relatives far oftener are the cause of our most memorable regrets. I myself was
grateful to discover that it must have been a day for Keno, that our neighbor wasn’t
home yet, fearing, had he been there, that I might have dropped my end, smack onto
my neighbor’s porch, betraying in the sound of the corpse my deepening urge to flight.
But we did not flee, and soon I understood our trouble, more pressing even than the
freeze, was seepage. We stood there on our neighbor’s porch, and the little spots
of stain I watched were merged and grown beneath the burlap sack between us. You could
not rub it out, the stain, though I tried, with my foot, rubbing briskly at the porchboards,
with the grain, and then again against the grain, all vainly. Matters rather worsened.
It was as if the dog had meant to force out every drop of life from every vital organ
on her master’s porch, as a token of farewell, perhaps, and a sign to him suggestive
of the kind of spirit that would work so hard to see a dog’s farewell erased.
Was it possible, I asked myself, in so little time, to have fallen so far from the
right reward of my intentions? I had come to help secure her from the gawkers, after
all, from the elements, from the magpies, ants, and maggots. It was me who fetched
Hope from the
gutter. I might say that I was moved by God, and by my son, from light and love to
bury her. But how could any neighbor know this? By now I understood that any discourse
hinting at communion with His holiness, in my mouth, was anathema. Dubious, at least;
unlikely, anyway; definitely iffy.
“Nothing to be done,” I said to the boy. “What say we go dig ourselves that hole?”
He seemed to be agreeable. Though who knew? The mouth ajar, the tongue retracted,
the whites apparent clear around the iris—he could have been exhausted. He wasn’t
saying. I did not ask. My question for the boy was nearly always what he did, not
how he was. The few times I forgot myself and asked him how he was, the boy became
confused, and then embarrassed, and then desperate, as if mine were an inquiry to
which he’d given little thought; as if
how he was
were a condition he might puzzle failingly for his entire lifetime, once a person
set him thinking. Drawrin, diggin, singin, nothin: these were the sorts of soothing
truths for which I learned to hold the boy accountable. Slow enough, I thought, asking
all the questions necessary to decide us on the place where we might do our digging.
Our yard, or our neighbor’s yard? front yard, or the garden? Would it be “nicer” if
she rested near the fragrance of the flowers, or the nourishment of vegetables? Would
the dog be happiest within the hearing of our neighbor, or of us? Or would she be
the happiest to hear the quiet, and the wind, the grasses and the leaves, the gentle
luffs and hisses in the barren branches? Though I cannot recall the sequence, there
seemed to be an admirable logic present in the boy’s responses to my questions, the
direction his resistance took us, an ironic and befitting and inexorable thrust which
left us standing with the dog and shovel at the fencebreak.
Yet what is there to say? I mean about inexorability? About irony, the fencebreak,
and our digging? What is there to say about a hole that can’t be dug? I mean to say
our shovel broke! The boy went first, and then I went, and then the shovel broke!
I hadn’t thought that ground could be so hard; this wasn’t any digging; there wouldn’t
be a hole; there would only be my son’s dismay, and mine, and the stubbornly reanimated
question:
Okay, all right, okay, so what about the carcass
? My thoughts, in part, were these:
Well, at least the dog is drying up some. Could just leave her till the next good
warming trend. Could maybe find her twin. Mean dog, I thought, homely. Pound’s about
to gas her. Naw, I thought, boy would blab. His mother. Likely some foul habit of
the dog’s the neighbor would discover missing. Licks the lint between his toes. Cleans
his teeth. Old man like my neighbor. How’d we get so needy
? Well, I took my time. I saw things through to their impracticable negations. She
isn’t going anywhere, I reasoned, the day is pretty young yet, you’re the one in charge
here. I told myself,
Think, man, there must be some decision you might make whose opposite cannot be equally
decisive.
Yet if there was, I did not come to it, and decided I would rather think about it
later. Why not take her for a ride, I thought, wrap her in a sheet of Visqueen from
the garden, stow her in the trunk and drive?