Heel - § 5: The First Day

They drove out to Hollis Ward's on a Saturday in October with the windows down and Denny up on his knees in the back seat the whole way, too wound up to sit, and Walter kept telling him to get down before he went out on the road, and Lorraine kept her hand back over the seat with her fingers spread for the boy to hold or not hold as he liked, and he held two of them, hard, his whole fist around them, and did not stop talking about the dog he did not have yet.

It was the kind of fall day the county only made a few of. The corn was cut and the light came long and gold across the stubble and the maples along the fence rows had gone the colors they go, and the air coming in the windows had woodsmoke in it and cut hay and the cold underneath that was the year turning. Out past the Ward place the land ran flat to the tree line, and past the trees there was the gray, standing up pale along the edge of everything where the sky stopped, and Lorraine's eye went over it and did not stop on it, because there was nothing out there to stop on, there never had been, it was only the edge of the county and a person did not look at it any more than they looked at the rim of a plate. She had her boy's fist around her fingers and her husband's hand loose on the wheel and the whole gold day coming in the windows.

Walter had not wanted to make the whole Saturday of it, a drive clear out to Ward's when there were pups to be had closer to home, but Lorraine had wanted the outing and Denny had wanted it more, and Walter gave way on the things that cost him nothing and held firm on the ones that did, and a Saturday was a thing he would spend on them and be glad. He drove with one wrist over the top of the wheel and his elbow out the window in the cold, and now and then he looked across at her and said nothing, and she did not need him to say anything.

Arlene and Earl were already there when they pulled in, their car nosed up by the barn, and Petey came running, five years old and all legs, hollering that there were six of them, six, and one was little. Arlene was up by the porch with Hollis Ward's wife, and she lifted her arm and waved them over, big, glad, her whole self in it, and called out that Lorraine had better come quick before Petey picked one for her.

Hollis Ward had a good tight place, a white barn and a yard of guineas that scattered hollering when the car came in, and the smell of it was cattle and cut field and the apples gone down soft under the trees along the fence. The men shook hands and stood with their hands in their pockets over the price of feeder calves, and Earl swung Petey up onto his shoulders, and it was a day with nothing wrong in it anywhere, a day a person could stand in the middle of and turn clear around and see only faces they knew and were glad of, out in the open, in the long gold light.

The pups were in the lee of the barn in a place Hollis Ward had fenced off with chicken wire, in the straw, six of them, and the mother lying off to the side with her ribs going and her eyes half shut, done in. Five of the six were a knot of them in the middle, climbing on each other and falling off, biting ears, going after a corncob one of them had dragged in, their feet too big and their bellies round and their tails going. Denny got down on his knees in the straw at the wire and put his hands through and made the sound a boy makes, and Walter crouched down by him with his elbows on his knees, and the two of them looked at the pups, and Lorraine stood over them with Arlene and looked too.

Denny had his arm through the wire to the shoulder, and one of the pups had his sleeve and was hauling on it and falling over backward and coming again, and Denny was gone, just gone, lost into it with his whole body. Lorraine watched the back of her son's neck and the cowlick on it that no water would lie down, and she thought there was not a thing she would not give the boy if it was hers to give and it would keep that exact set on the back of his neck for good.

"Pick the one with the deep chest," Walter said. "That one, see, the dark one, look at the feet on him. That's a dog that'll go all day. You want one with some size coming."

The dark one was the biggest of the knot and he had hold of the corncob and would not give it up, and he planted his big feet and growled a baby growl, and Denny laughed at him, and he was a fine pup. Anyone could see he was a fine pup.

But off in the corner, away from the knot of them, back where the straw was pushed up against the wire, there was the sixth one.

He was half the size of the dark one, small enough to close one hand around, his ribs going quick under the plain brown fluff and one ear not yet stood up to match the other. He was a brown so plain it was hardly a color, and his coat stood up in tufts where he had slept on it, and he was not climbing on anybody or going after anything. He was sitting up against the wire on his own, not crying, not tumbling, just sitting, with his too-big paws set in front of him, and he was looking out through the wire at the people. At all of them. His head went from one to the next, slow, taking each one, and it came around to Denny and stopped.

"That one's the runt," Hollis Ward's wife said, coming over, drying her hands on her apron. "I won't lie to you. He's the runt of them and he's been slow to do everything, slow to nurse, slow to walk. Hollis says you don't want to give a runt to a boy, they don't always make it through the first winter and then you've got a crying child on your hands." She looked down at the little brown one against the wire. "We're like to have a hard time placing him."

Denny had gone still. He was looking at the runt and the runt was looking at him, and nobody had to say what was happening, because it was on the boy's face, plain as weather, where a six-year-old keeps all of it.

"Now, son," Walter said, gentle. "Look at the dark one there. Look what a dog that's going to be."

Denny did not look at the dark one. He had not looked at the dark one since he saw the little one against the wire, and he did not argue with his father and did not whine for the runt, he only looked at it, and his chin had the small hard set to it that meant the boy had gone off somewhere none of them could call him back from.

"Oh, let the boy have the little one if his heart's set," Arlene said, laughing, leaning on the wire. "Look at the two of them. You'll not talk him out of that now, Walter, you might as well try to talk the sun down." She put her hand on Lorraine's arm. "Get him the runt, Lorraine. The big ones always get took. Somebody ought to want the little one."

Lorraine bent down and reached through the wire and picked the runt up.

She had picked up pups before and they squirmed, every one of them, they kicked and twisted and cried and wanted down, that was what a pup in a stranger's hands did. This one did not. He came up out of the straw into her two hands and he went still, all of him, and he turned his head up and looked at her. He looked straight up into her face from down in her hands, steady, his eyes dark and wet and open wide and not moving off her, and he did not squirm and he did not cry, he only lay in her hands and looked up at her and let her be looked at, and a small thing went through Lorraine, there and gone, a cool thing low in her, that she did not have a name for and did not try to find one for.

"Well, would you look," she said. "Aren't you the calm one."

"He likes you," Arlene said. "Look at him. He's picked you."

"He's a good pup," Lorraine said, and she brought him in against her front and he settled there like he had always been meant to fit against her, warm, his heart going quick and small under her hand, and the cool thing was gone and there was only the warm pup against her and her boy on his feet now and dancing and Walter shaking his head and smiling and giving it up, and Hollis Ward's wife saying well, that was one she hadn't expected to find a home, and glad of it.

They put him in a peach crate in the back seat with an old towel, and Denny rode the whole way home with his arm down in the crate and the pup's chin over the boy's wrist, and Walter said they'd have to think of a name, and Denny said it was already named, it was named Buddy, it had been named Buddy the second he saw him, and nobody argued because there was no arguing with how the boy said it.

The sun went down red behind them as they drove and the fields went blue and cold, and Walter put the heater on so it ticked, and in the back the boy talked to the pup in a low steady stream that did not stop the whole way home, where it would sleep and what they would do and where he would take it, on and on, and the pup lay in the crate with its chin over the boy's wrist and made no sound, and took it all in.

At home they set the crate by the stove where it was warm.

That evening was the fullest the kitchen had ever been. Lorraine fried chicken because it was a kind of holiday, and nobody called it a holiday and everybody knew it was one, and Walter sat with his stocking feet up on the open oven door and told the story of the dark pup and the corncob, the corncob getting bigger every time he told it. Denny would not stay in his chair. He was up and down to the crate between every bite, carrying bits of his own supper down against all the rules with nobody stopping him tonight, and the pup took the chicken soft off the boy's fingers and looked up at him the whole time it ate. The windows went black and held the warm yellow room inside them like a picture of itself, the three of them and the new small life down by the stove, and Walter caught Lorraine's eye across the boy's empty chair and gave her a small private look, and she gave it back to him, and outside the dark came over the open street and not one house on it drew a curtain, because there was nothing out there to keep out and no reason in the world to think there was.

The pup did not cry the first night. Lorraine had braced for it, for the crying the books all promised, a pup pining after its mother and its littermates until you had to harden yourself and let it cry itself out. He did not cry at all. Denny wanted to sleep on the kitchen floor by the crate and was not allowed and went up grieving over it, and Walter banked the stove, and the house went quiet, and Lorraine came down once more before bed to see to the fire and to look at the new thing in the house.

The pup was awake.

She had thought he would be asleep, worn out, a fed pup in a warm crate on a full belly, asleep like the dark one surely was back at Ward's, down in the straw with his brothers. This one was not asleep. He was sitting up in the peach crate in the dark with his too-big paws on the rim of it, and his eyes were open and on her the moment she came in the door, already on her, as though he had been sitting up in the dark waiting to see which of them would come down, and he watched her cross the kitchen and watched her crouch at the stove and watched her hand work the damper, his head turning to follow, slow and certain and without any of the wobble a thing that little ought to have, and he made no sound at all.

"Go to sleep," Lorraine whispered to him, and put her finger down over the rim of the crate, and he turned his head and looked at the finger and then looked back up at her face and did not take his eyes off it, and out the window over the sink the yard was black and the street past it was black and quiet and open the whole length of it, every house dark, nobody watching anybody, the whole street asleep and trusting and unwatched under the cold clean stars, and down in the warm box by the stove the little brown thing sat up on its big new paws in the dark and watched her, and Lorraine straightened up, and looked at it a moment longer, and could not say what made her stand there, and then she put the light off and went up to her family, and left the eye open in the kitchen behind her.

~End~

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