The Dog I Loved

by Susan Wilson

  “Yuck.”

  “Desiccated old mouse poop—dogs love it.” Tucker pulls his LED flashlight out of his other back pocket and shines it into the space. A few sticks of kindling, an empty, lidless preserve jar, and a broken candle are all that he can find. “Take a look.” He hands me the flashlight so that I can get a good look at the tall, narrow space, perfect for playing hide-and-seek. Tucker starts tossing pieces of the old wallboard into the big blue barrels he’s brought in.

  Shadow keeps pushing his head into the narrow space; the sound of his deep olfactory exploration is almost explosive. I think about the dogs that Meghan talked about, the explosive-detection dogs, whose noses keep soldiers safe.

  Following the direction of the big dog’s nose, I aim the flashlight into the cupboard and see that, high up on the left-hand side, there is a narrow shelf. At first I don’t see anything, but then I realize that there is an object on the shelf. I tilt the flashlight slightly and the object becomes a narrow book on its side. I reach for it. “Hey, Tucker, look at this.” The dog’s nose follows my hand with the book in it. The book isn’t so much a book as a chunk of pages evidently torn out of a larger volume. “The pages are sewn together, repaired from their extraction from the original volume. I read the faint pencil writing on the top page. “Susannah Day, her book.”

  Together we go into the kitchen, where the light is better this time of day. The paper feels thick and fragile at the same time, dusty to the touch, and the pages are brown-edged, like sugar cookies left just a little too long in the oven.

  I gently open it to the first page.

  1st March 1832. Mr. Day at home. Set my loom with last year’s flax. Called out to attend Mrs. Tarr in Lanes Cove. Safe delivered of daughter, her third.

  4th March. Mr. Day at sea. Two yards good cloth made. Attended Mr. Lyons for sore throat. Gave him a gargle.

  “It’s a diary, or journal. Susannah Day must have been a nurse. Wonder where the rest of it is.” The backmost page is torn in half.

  Tucker carefully wipes his hands on his jeans. “Can I see?”

  I hand him the pages. “I wonder why it was stuck in the wood box. Imagine that someone put that in there and it’s been there, out of sight, for decades. Forgotten.”

  “More than a century, if you look at the dates.

  I take the book back. As gently as Tucker had, I turn another couple of pages. The writing is so thready, and, in the inadequate kitchen light, not terribly readable.

  5th March. Spun six skeins. Mrs. Pierce called. Brought apples.

  7th March.… brought to bed with dropsy. Will dose with …

  Some of the words are illegible.

  “Do you know of her, this Susannah Day?” I ask.

  There were Days in the area, even in Dogtown, but I have no idea who she might be.” He shrugs. “You know that I’m not that old, right?”

  “I just think of you as the local historian, you know so much about the area.”

  “Thirteen generations.” Some folks are satisfied with being second- or third-generation residents here on Cape Ann, and are equally as proud of their Azorean or Italian or Finnish heritage, but Tucker takes a particular satisfaction in the antiquity of his heritage—of being descended from one of the first European settlers. “It’s what the ex makes such fun of, my, in her words, ‘self-awarded medallion of merit based exclusively on being stuck in the same place.’ But to me, it’s important that my kids are fourteenth-generation Bellinghams.” He pauses. “I’m glad I won’t be the last.”

  “And your ex-wife, does she come from such old stock?”

  “No. Her folks came here because her dad was hired as the hospital administrator.”

  I set the old pages down on the kitchen table. The dog rests his head on the table, nose inches away from the diary. He’s sniffing so hard that tiny flakes of paper are breaking off the delicate edges. Tucker slides the book closer to the center of the small table and then I put it back.

  “I do get attachment to place.” I run a hand down the dog’s back, then move to the sink, where I fill the kettle. “My family was pretty rooted to their neighborhood, even though they were only”—I emphasize the only kind of teasingly—“in this country for two generations. They were also in Bunker Hill for two generations.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “My father passed a few years ago. My brothers are all over the state—Worcester, Stoughton, New Bedford; even one out in Stockbridge, trying to find his agricultural roots.”

  He notices that I don’t mention my mother. “Your mom?”

  And I burst into tears.

  * * *

  Tucker sets a cup of tea in front of me. I’d apologized and blushed red and then wept again. Tucker has clearly enough experience of women to recognize a crying jag that just needs to happen. He found a box of tissues in the bathroom and quietly placed it at my elbow. The dog, for his part, keeps his big head on my lap, and in between wiping my eyes and apologizing to Tucker, I’ve fondled the dog’s ears in the same way I used to fondle the threadbare ears of my comfort bunny when I was a little girl.

  If he’s got somewhere else to be, Tucker doesn’t say so; he just sits and waits out the storm. Finally, it subsides with a couple of deep breaths, a self-conscious laugh, and a gathering up of the plenitude of tissues decorating the edge of the table. I excuse myself to go into the bathroom, where the gush of water makes me think of Bob the Plumber and whether or not he’ll really show up tomorrow. My wits gathered and my hair combed, I go back into the kitchen.

  I touch the journal with a forefinger. The dog whines. “Thank you.”

  Tucker takes his cup to the side of the sink. “I’ll finish cleaning up that mess in there tomorrow.”

  “Bob the Plumber is supposed to be here tomorrow.”

  “You’ve learned to say ‘supposed to be.’ Good for you.”

  Although I can still feel the skim of moisture in my eyes, it’s more a little glint of mischief when I say, “That’s not all I’ve learned. I’ve become a pest. Six messages, all sweet, and then a stern one. That’s when he called me back.”

  I follow Tucker out to his truck, the dog behind us. I’ve grabbed a leash from a peg, but I don’t clip it to the dog’s collar. It’s getting dark a little earlier now. This coming weekend is Labor Day weekend.

  Tucker’s hand is on the door latch. In the dusk, he looks faded. “The thing is,” he says, “my ex is moving the kids away. She’s getting remarried to a guy in Weston.”

  “Why doesn’t he move here? Surely the views are better.”

  Tucker laughs, but his face reveals the pain. “I worry that they won’t be from here anymore. That’ll they think of themselves as kids from Weston.”

  I don’t touch men, but I find myself reaching out, touching his arm where he leans against the edge of the truck bed. “Nonsense. This place is in their blood. You’re their blood.”

  “And blood is thicker than water?”

  I look away, and the set of my jaw is suddenly tense. “Not necessarily.”

  Shadow

  The man, Tucker, has left them alone. The woman is sitting in the small rocking chair with her sweater drawn tightly across her chest and her feet tucked up under her. She isn’t weeping anymore, and the dog takes that as a good thing. But the intensity and the unexpectedness of her outburst had startled him, and that he was powerless to halt it was his failure. He lays his head in her lap, and she halts the jagged motion of the rocking chair. There is a certain comfort in fulfilling one’s purpose. This woman is much like all the others, not firmly tethered to happiness. It is pleasant to feel the warmth of her hand on his head, to discern that she takes comfort in doing so. The women he has guarded all came to depend on his presence for far more than simple protection. This one is no different. He knows that what he has to guard her from isn’t outside danger, but her own thoughts.

  Rosie

  I am widowed. Benjamin lost at sea. I must apply to his sons. I do not thi
nk that they will have me.

  Called out to attend Mrs. Lynch’s lying-in. On the day that my husband is reported dead, a new life enters the world, and I am reminded to lift mine eyes to the hills, from whence shall my help come.

  Mr. Baxter has already informed me that he expects me to vacate the house by month’s end and is self-pleased to have given me as long as that to find new accommodations. Certainly he expects Ben’s sons in Marshfield to have the keeping of me. I have heard nothing from them. A childless widow is without protection. Even one such as I, with her own way of making a living, is not to remain under her own roof alone. Unless she is one of those war widows in Dogtown.

  They warned me against tending the citizens of Dogtown when I first arrived here in Gloucester twenty or so years ago, a new, albeit aged, bride. Dogtown is a dangerous place. The residents will cheat you. Don’t expect payment; each is a charity case. I tend them anyway. Old women, mostly. In Dogtown there are no babes to bring into the world, just poor souls to see out of it.

  I have set aside all the other books that I have stacked up on the kitchen table—otherwise known as my command post. This journal is fascinating. Whoever Susannah Day was, she reveals herself in the tiniest and most mundane of entries, and then she drops a bomb—for example, that her husband has died at sea. And then goes on to mention some household accomplishment. It’s taken me a few days to decipher her handwriting, which is at once old-fashioned and very idiosyncratic. It isn’t copperplate script, and blots and places where she’s scratched out words give the whole thing a feeling of her personality. I imagine her to be a lovely woman, if weary. I can so picture her here in this house, maybe even using the rocking chair that I’ve commandeered from the upstairs storage area. Now that Tucker has revealed the parlor fireplace, I see her rocking gently, staring at the fire, mourning her lost husband, annoyed with her unfeeling stepsons. What this journal has done for me is to imbue this old place, despite all its flaws, with a feeling of family. Tucker has told me about “old Mrs. Baxter,” whom he remembers from childhood, but it isn’t the house’s most recent tenant who keeps me company in my imagination; it is nineteenth-century Susannah Day. Maybe it’s because all of the twentieth-century “improvements” have been ripped out of the house, but it is just easier to see it through the eyes of its more distant residents. Even the attached barn means something to me now, and finding a rusted milk can forgotten in a corner of it immediately conjures Susannah and her cow.

  Speaking of modern improvements, Bob the Plumber and his crew have gutted the bathroom ell. I’ve tucked my little composting toilet in a discrete corner in the barn. I’m left with the kitchen sink as my only water source. I feel like I’m regressing into a past life. What’s next? Carrying buckets from a stream? Bob the Plumber promises to be quick about it, but he’s held up by the fact that we need to order fixtures. Nothing can be reused; nothing meets modern code. At some point in the house’s life, the original claw-foot bathtub was replaced by a drop-in one, and that has a giant crack down the center. And the toilet is, well, let’s just say it’s off to Home Depot today. Oh, and that all of the pipes under the house have to be replaced. When Bob came back up from the crawl space, he looked like he’d been on an archaeological dig. “Swear those gotta be the original pipes from when they brought in indoor plumbing.” Which suggests that I’m drinking water from lead pipes.

  Bob had a guy with him, nameless and completely silent. They were here for two solid days and I never heard a word out of him. I wondered if he might be deaf, but I saw him with a phone to his ear; plus, Bob talks to him. As I usually do when there are men here, I made myself scarce once I knew that they didn’t need anything from me. I didn’t want to get in the way and I’m still not entirely comfortable around strangers. Maybe I was concerned about Silent Plumber because he reminded me of one or two of the prison guards. They were silent, too, until they weren’t. Fortunately, I have Shadow, so I fear no evil.

  I haven’t told anyone—anyone being Meghan—about my embarrassing crying jag in front of Tucker. It was just having his innocent and natural question come so close to that call from my mother, when the line went dead, that set me off. I can’t believe she’d dial and then hang up, and as hers isn’t a cell phone, but an old-fashioned landline, it is crazy hurtful to think she’d do it deliberately, that it wasn’t a butt dial. Maybe she thought she could speak to me but then she lost her nerve. I still offend her.

  * * *

  I fled from my parents’ house knowing full well that I would never see my father alive again. What I never imagined was that I wouldn’t ever again see the rest of my family after his funeral. I pushed past the priest and my brother and got myself back to South Station in time for the next Acela to Penn Station. I didn’t call Charles. I didn’t text. I sat in my seat, face to the window and the ever-changing scene from urban to suburban to urban, and tried not to think about my epic failure as a daughter and as a fiancée. I had pleased no one. The one thought that I had that comforted me was the idea that I would swing by the dog sitter and pick up my puppy, Tilley. In the two months since I brought her home, the poor thing had spent more time with the dog sitter than with me. Every step forward I had taken in her training had gone backward from my repeated absences, Paris, Long Island, Boston.

  * * *

  I had believed that a fait accompli was a great idea. Charles had said no dog every time I brought the subject up. I had pleaded, cajoled, bargained, and still he was firm in his convictions, which I thought of as simply the reluctance of someone who had never had a pet and didn’t know how wonderful it could be. In my naïve stubbornness, I had convinced myself that all I had to do was bring the dog home and he would fall in love with her. Who could resist the appeal of a tiny ball of white fluff, big brown eyes full of charm? I’d put a deposit down on the puppy even before she was born and was almost sick with nervousness on the day I picked her up. I was gambling on seeing a side of Charles that I wasn’t sure even existed—his softer side.

  “What the fuck is that?” Charles dropped his expensive leather backpack to the floor.

  “Our puppy. Matilda. Tilley.”

  “Not ours. Take it back.”

  “I can’t.” I should have said “I won’t.”

  “Get rid of it. I said, no dogs.”

  “I need her, Charles. I need the company.” This wasn’t the way this conversation was supposed to go. He was supposed to melt. I lifted the puppy up, offering her to him. “Just touch her.”

  “I will not.” He snatched his backpack up off the floor, and for one horrible moment I thought that he meant to swing at me. He reached into a side pocket, extracted his phone, which I hadn’t heard ringing, the high hard whine of anxiety already in my ears. He left the room. I sucked in a lungful of air.

  I had defied him; there was a crack in the mold into which he had poured me, that of grateful, obedient, presentable girlfriend.

  * * *

  Charles would have nothing to do with her, and made me keep her out of his sight, so I had to rely on a dog sitter. I’d been lucky, and found a good one, who also sat for the neighbor who had turned me on to Tilley’s breeder. So now, on the train back to New York, my arms longed to hold that little white bundle of wriggle, to feel her soft pink tongue against my cheek. I needed comfort, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get any at home. Charles was certain to be angry at my failure to convince my family of his well-meaning offer. What I had come to figure out was that he had a lot riding on this particular venture. The new position in New York had been predicated on his success with such a major real estate project in Boston. I didn’t think he’d be sent, like a failing pitcher, back to the farm team, but Charles had made promises. As I rode that train back to New York, all I could think about was how my failure with my family meant his failure with his firm.

  “Charles? Are you home?” I pushed open the apartment door, flung my overnight bag into the room, and set the puppy down on the hardwood floor. Her little
legs scrambled as she scurried around the place, sniffing corners, reclaiming her stuffed mouse. I moved quickly and got her onto the training pad before her excitement caused a problem.

  “Rose. You’re home early. Are things better?” Charles came out of the room he used as his home office, or, as I referred to it, his “man cave.” Untouched since his grandfather’s time, it was done up in the style of an earlier age, the way I imagined an Edwardian-era man of the house might have kept his private space. Books on shelves, worn leather club chairs that had, indeed, belonged to his father and his father before him, as had the apartment. Buffed with the generations of male Foster backsides, they were in the center of the room, facing the tall French doors that led to a Juliet balcony and thence over a thick slice of Central Park. A glass-topped table sat between them, Charles’s late-afternoon drink in its cut-glass tumbler sitting on it beside his tablet.

  “No.” I had no words for the story I needed to tell him. In the hours since I’d left my parents’ house, it was possible that my father had passed; and I had obsessively held my phone in my hand for the entire journey.

  “Don’t make me ask the question, Rose.” He could have meant had my father died, but I knew that what he really wanted to know was whether they would finally accept his offer.

  So I gave him an answer that was true in both ways. “Not yet.”

  He didn’t say anything. I wanted to read a little compassion in his eyes, but I think that what I saw was disappointment. “I wasn’t expecting you, so I made plans to have dinner with a couple of the guys from work. Will you be all right here on your own?”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll get you a drink.” Kindness itself.

  I sat in the right-hand leather club chair, slipped off my shoes, and took in a deep breath of books and leather and whiskey. Charles handed me a tumbler with a quarter of an inch of twelve-year-old scotch, not the good stuff, which was far more aged and trotted out only for special—male—guests. I really don’t like hard liquor. But the bite of it and the fumes on the back of my tongue had the effect of finally relaxing the tension I’d held on to for hours. It didn’t make anything better, but it soothed. I thought that perhaps I’d have another taste after Charles left. I’d sit here in the coming gloom of night with my puppy on my lap and let the whiskey work its mellowing magic. Wouldn’t everything look better if I were a little drunk?