The Power of the Dog

by Thomas Savage

  Now he stood unmoved when at school they said his father talked to a whore.

  And so his father had, talked to one who had started in a good house in Salt Lake City. When the bloom was gone and she’d had a few quarrels, she took the train to Herndon and worked there in the Red-White-and-Blue Rooms. In Herndon she began to pray a good deal, was found kneeling beside her bed many times. She would seek out churches at night (two were never locked) and she was thought to be out of her mind. Had she not drawn attention to herself by all this kneeling and praying, she might have escaped the sharp eye of her current madam who now detected symptoms of consumption. She liked to keep a clean house, and suggested that the sick woman, named Alma, go to Beech where a girl was badly needed and the clientele was not so fussy.

  ‘Maybe God will help you,’ the madam suggested. ‘You put a lot of stock in Him.’

  She arrived in Beech with a cardboard suitcase containing several kimonos, a carton of Milo Violets, and an old photograph of the father who had thrown her out. If only she had listened to him. Had he not loved her, he would not have disciplined her.

  It was apparent to Doctor Johnny, in for an early drink, that Alma’s trouble was other than consumption — the eyes showed it and the complexion, and the workings of the mind. He had an astounding gift for diagnosis. Years later, in the days of the specialist, he might have triumphed, might have had an office with heavy Spanish furniture and Persian rugs — and so are we sometimes born in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he examined a patient, he seemed to hear a whisper in his ear, perhaps through the stethoscope, and this gift for diagnosis was one he passed on to his son.

  Johnny took the whore Alma aside and bought her a drink. ‘You shouldn’t be working, you know,’ he said.

  ‘God told me to work,’ she remarked, and sipped her drink.

  ‘Not just because of yourself.’

  ‘I don’t owe them nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you do. You know you do, or you wouldn’t talk about God. You know what He wants.’

  She touched her temple with the flat of her fingers. ‘If God’s lied to me, what will I do?’ She had been in bed for some days and was now tottering.

  ‘Don’t have contact with anybody, just for now.’ And another month went by, many nights and many dawns.

  ‘It’ll be another week, anyway,’ Johnny told Rose. ‘Maybe a little longer, but she’ll never get out of bed; now they say they don’t want her to die over there, and anyway, that’s one hell of a place to die, in that little room.’ He glanced at Rose and took out a Sweet Caporal. ‘Of course, some would say she doesn’t deserve much.’

  ‘You’re very cold, aren’t you, John?’ Rose remarked. ‘I’ve already fixed a room for her here.’

  His smile was crooked, and he went to her and tipped up her chin. ‘That’s my little Mrs Vanderbilt.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Mrs Gordon, Mrs John Gordon.’

  Now in the town they called The Inn the Whorehouse Inn because a mad, praying whore had died there, and in Herndon and Beech many good women — doctor though her husband might be — felt free to cut Rose dead on the streets. And truly her beauty — useless and careless as a butterfly — was hard to forgive, and so was her quick smile and proud carriage.

  ‘Oh, he’ll be a doctor you bet,’ Johnny said, making plans. ‘How he reads all the time? Eyes open — notice? That’s the thing, open eyes. He loves the facts.’

  Peter did indeed love the facts, shut in his room with the Britannica; at twelve he was studying the drawings of Vesalius, reading Hippocrates and certain passages in Virgil and the medical journals his father no longer broke from their wrappers.

  ‘Oh,’ Johnny said, ‘he’ll get to places I never got to,’ and his heart grew big with pride, his mind swept over the enchanting landscape of his son’s future. ‘You wait and see.’

  ‘You’re a good man, too,’ Rose reminded him.

  ‘Good? A man once called me kind, not good. I don’t fool myself. That’s my virtue. If you notice, it’s almost always what a man wants is to have his son better than he is. Rose, I’ve noticed that. And then, I never had much confidence. But every man lacks something.’ And thus do we excuse our failures, by admitting them.

  Sometimes when Johnny drank he felt the equal of the big ranchers: they had money, he had education. When they drove cattle into town he’d saunter into the saloon after the dust had settled and the cowhands were in there whooping it up, and he’d talk — horn in, as the bartender put it. He’d stand up there with the best of them in his dark doctor’s suit and a starched collar and expound his theories on politics, on education and on Europe.

  ‘You wait,’ he’d say. ‘They’re going to fight over there and then we’re going to be in it, you’re going to be in it and I’m going to be in it.’ They thought him mad. He didn’t seem to notice when they edged away from him as his speech grew slurred, when he spilled on himself and impulsively touched people’s arms. For the most part they respected him; some pitied him. Some remembered how he’d wandered out on the highway when he’d first come to town, anxious to see his first big herd of cattle, and how a man had shot right over his head and cursed him, and how he’d run and cowered behind the freight depot. Lord, he must have been there hours.

  But once Johnny got talking to the wrong rancher. You could see the fellow standing there with his drink, beginning to get riled as Johnny pursued the most recent phantom in his mind — the lack of civic pride in Beech. Why, he wanted to know, didn’t they paint the schoolhouse? Why did they just dump their trash back there on the hill where the world could see it, why desecrate the beautiful country?

  ‘Why look right out there now!’ he commanded, and looked out the saloon door at the spot on the hill where the sun caught on the most recent cans and broken glass. ‘Ten feet and they’d have dumped it in the graveyard. It’s an eyesore, that’s what I call it.’

  The rancher spoke. ‘That’s what I’d call you,’ the rancher said.

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ Johnny asked, not understanding.

  The rancher said nothing, but there was a small appreciative murmur in the saloon.

  ‘Now you take flowers,’ Johnny advised. ‘You go into a little town, and you see flowers here and there and around and about, and you know the people in that town have what you call civic pride, from the Latin civatas meaning city. You take railroad stations, even right there in Herndon, they’ll have a nice bed of flowers out there on a neat green lawn there. People in the cars looking out the windows can see them, and they leave that little town with a mighty fine impression. You wouldn’t be surprised if sometime people came back to settle in that little town, now would you?’ Johnny paused and looked thoughtfully into his drink. The silence in the room encouraged him. ‘Now you take flowers,’ he began again. ‘You take what we did, my wife and son and I.’ He and his wife and son had prettied up The Inn, hadn’t they noticed? Hopvines climbing up the side of the porch, and you had to have the right kind of twine for them to climb on or they got up there and fell kerbang, a green heap, of their own weight. Well, hopvines, and the California poppies, and the nasturtiums. All grew well there in Beech, wanted only watering. ‘You probably’ve seen us out there watering plants.’

  The rancher spoke again. ‘Was that what you was up to a few years back when I shot a gun over your head?’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘I say, was it you out there watering your flowers when I shot a gun over your head?’

  ‘So it was you did that? Well, I will admit, sir, I had it coming. I didn’t know much about customs in those days.’

  ‘That a fact?’ the rancher said.

  ‘Come winter,’ Johnny said, ‘and you’ve got no flowers, have you? So my boy and my wife, that’s why they go out there in the fall onto the flats off from town and gather what some call weeds, and then they dye them, and you’ve got flowers all winter.’

  ‘That a fact?’ the rancher murmured, and somebody
coughed.

  ‘Nor is that all,’ Johnny said, and carefully slopped a drink of whiskey into his glass. ‘My son has a surgeon’s hands, very clever hands. He’ll take crepe paper and twist it and make it into artificial flowers and those, sir, are what you find on our dinner table in the winter months. Imagine,’ Johnny said, ‘a boy twelve studying the drawings of Vesalius and reading very deep material at the age of twelve years! Will you imagine that.’

  ‘And making paper posies, too,’ the rancher said.

  ‘Sir?’ Johnny looked up and down the bar, from face to face. Now he felt a sudden need to impress them further, and quoted some Greek concerning flowers.

  ‘What’s that?’ the rancher asked.

  Johnny smiled, and glowed. ‘Greek, sir. A doctor studies the Greek language, a part of his arduous training.’

  ‘It don’t sound like Greek to me,’ the rancher said.

  ‘I assure you, sir.’

  The rancher laughed. ‘You better go back then to your little school, wherever it was. The word in Greek for that sort of flower is πὁθos. They put them on graves.’

  The laughter was like a shot, and Johnny stood uncertainly, trying to understand and to focus on some face that might comfort him. He didn’t find that face. ‘Well, sir …’

  Now the rancher spoke, and the room was quiet again, thick with quiet. ‘Did you ever hear this one, doctor?’ and the rancher quoted a line from Ovid in Latin, ‘What do you think of that one?’

  Johnny understood, and blushed the color of blood. ‘Why would you say that to me?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I believe in telling the truth, doctor. Would you care to tell the fellows here what it means?’

  ‘No, sir, I would not.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell them,’ the rancher said. ‘It means you’re a horse’s ass. And for that matter, so is your sissy of a son.’

  Johnny removed his hat, smoothed his hair, and put his hat back on. He didn’t take his eyes from the rancher. ‘My son is not a sissy.’

  ‘The boys around here say so.’

  ‘Because he reads. Because he thinks.’

  ‘Because he makes paper posies. Because he don’t know a foul ball from a fly.’

  Foolish of a small man like Johnny to lunge. Foolish of him to say, ‘You can’t call my son a sissy!’ because the rancher could and the rancher did and did and did.

  The rancher held Johnny by the front of his starched white shirt, held him and shook him, and then straightening his arm, flung Johnny like a wet rag so that he smacked the wall opposite and fell in a heap. There Johnny started to rise, but sank back. Then after a little, looking at nobody, he got to his feet and they watched him wander across the road, across the empty space to The Inn. His progress disturbed some magpies who had found a dead gopher and they cried at him.

  ‘My God, what’s happened to you?’ Rose cried. ‘Who tore, who tore your shirt?’

  ‘I got in a fight, Rose.’

  ‘Please, are you hurt?’

  ‘No, Rose. I’m not hurt. I just want to go up to my bed.’

  ‘To bed, John? If you’re not hurt, why do you want to go up to the bed?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I want the bed.’ He got up from the chair. ‘Where is the boy, Rose?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Where do you suppose he is?’

  Rose spoke quietly. ‘I think he went down to the river.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want him to see me fighting.’

  ‘Please, don’t worry about that.’

  ‘Rose — Rose?’

  ‘Yes, John.’

  ‘Rose, I wasn’t telling the truth. I wasn’t worried about him seeing me fighting. Maybe the trouble with me is, I can’t stand the truth?’

  ‘I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about, John.’

  ‘Second ago, I said I didn’t want Peter to see me fighting. I said that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it wasn’t the truth.’

  ‘Why wasn’t it? You wouldn’t want him to see you fighting.’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  ‘Why, why would you?’

  Johnny screwed up his face. ‘To show him I’m a good fighter.’

  ‘There are better things to be. You know that.’

  ‘If you’re a good fighter, you can knock down anybody who tears your shirt and knocks you against the wall and says your son — says your son is a sissy.’ Johnny closed his eyes. ‘There, I said it.’

  ‘Said what, John?’

  ‘Said all the truth. What I wouldn’t want him to see is his father knocked down against the wall, and fellows looking.’

  ‘He didn’t see, John.’

  ‘Who can be sure? With so much noise in the place? You know how people hear a voice, and how they gather?’

  ‘I’m certain he was by the river. He has a place there he goes.’

  ‘You see, what a humiliation,’ Johnny said, and stared a moment into his wife’s eyes. ‘What a terrible, terrible humiliation. For a boy.’

  ‘Humiliation?’ Rose said. ‘For the boy or for you? How can there be humiliation if we’re humble, as Christ tells?’

  ‘Christ,’ Johnny said. ‘Would you fix me a cold towel.’

  She fixed the towel, and applied it and watched him until he slept. She expected the usual when he woke, the request for a drink; for the next few days she would carefully portion out just enough so that he could function; he never asked for more than she thought necessary.

  But now when he woke he lay there, staring, demanding nothing. Nothing. It was this time that she suggested he take a drink, for he had often told her that whiskey killed pain, and it was pain he had.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She brought him soup. It cooled, untouched. He lay with his hands clasped outside the covers; the day lengthened, the light faded, geese flew south. From the saloon across the vacant space came the bright tinkle of the player piano.

  ‘Please close the window, Rose.’

  It was not Rose who answered him, but Peter. ‘I came to bring you something, father.’

  Johnny opened his eyes, and smiled. His son stood in the middle of the room. ‘To bring me something?’

  ‘Can you see in this light, father?’

  ‘Oh, certainly.’

  ‘I did these things for you. This summer.’

  Johnny sat up, and his son propped pillows behind his back, ‘That feels good, Peter. The pillows. Now, what have you got there?’

  ‘These drawings, father.’

  Father, Johnny thought. My God, what a word, what a responsibility, and he took the drawings. There were ten, all of the root systems of plants from near the river. Johnny closed his eyes and sucked his lip. How they reminded him, in their excellence, of his own poor drawings! ‘I’m mighty proud,’ Johnny said. ‘I never did so well.’

  ‘You taught me,’ Peter said. When Peter had gone, Johnny turned his face to the wall. So the boy knew, or had heard, for why else would he bring gifts, but out of pity?

  During the next year, he didn’t drink. He no longer sang; the flesh fell away from his face and his eyes invited no intimates. He spoke to few, and no one called him Johnny anymore. Late one fall afternoon, the air smelling strong of snow, Johnny returned from a trip out into the hills behind the town. He had delivered a woman of a dead child.

  Lucky, lucky child, he thought. One soul who would never fail, would never cower before the inexorable naturalistic principle — that the weak are destroyed by the strong. Traveling up there in his old Ford motorcar to that tar paper shack he had looked down from the crest of the hill and seen the dust disturbed by the buggies and thin old saddle horses of the Indians thrown off the last of their land in the valley — thirty families, off to the reservation, wards of the government now, objects of stingy charity. So do the strong dispossess the weak. Some are singled out.

  ‘I saw those Indians,’ he told Rose that night.

  ‘Maybe in some ways they’l
l be better off?’

  ‘In some ways? But dispossessed, dispossessed. Rose, where is the boy?’

  ‘In the shed out back. He says he has more things to show you.’

  ‘He shouldn’t work by lamplight. His eyes.’

  ‘John?’

  ‘Rose?’

  ‘John, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You looked funny for a minute.’

  ‘Funny?’

  ‘You had gone away. Left me.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ He smiled, then went suddenly to her and he kissed her. ‘You’re a brave person,’ he said. ‘Now I’ll go see Peter and then I think I’ll go upstairs.’

  ‘Do you want anything? Is there anything?’

  ‘No, there’s nothing, Rose.’

  The shed, over which the windmill whirled, was attached to the inn; a small wood stove made it comfortable, and it smelled of smoke and kerosene. Around the walls Peter had built shelves that sagged a little under the dead black weight of Johnny’s medical books. There, too, were the stuffed bodies of gophers and rabbits, the beakers and retorts and such chemical paraphernalia; there Peter escaped the pain of the daily Gethsemane at school, the taunts and jibes; there he lost himself in a private world, the world he never doubted; sitting there at his table, his eyes had an inward gaze, the withdrawn, intent look of the deaf. His pale face was so smooth Johnny wondered if he’d ever have to shave, and nothing betrayed his emotion but the faint throbbing of a vein in his right temple.

  ‘Your mother says you have something new to show,’ Johnny said.

  ‘This new slide, father.’

  Johnny approached. ‘Peter, you seemed to be listening to something.’ The boy had fixed a flashlight to a wooden stand that threw the beams exactly under the lens. ‘Mmm. That’s a rare one.’ The slide was of a bacillus that kills rodents. ‘And fine drawing, too.’ Johnny straightened up slowly, and like an old man he reached around and pressed the small of his back, making a small grimace. ‘You have fine hands, Peter. Let me take a look at one of your hands.’ He took Peter’s hand, and looked into the smooth palm. ‘It’s so funny, you know.’