Year of the Dog

by Shelby Hearon

  “That was neat,” I told James, letting my parka put a squeeze on his. “The bit about my not wanting a woman in your garage apartment.”

  “Do you?”

  “You did good with them.”

  His voice sounded raspy with nerves. “I pretended they were the parents of one of my kids.”

  We rang the bell, and as soon as Aunt May opened the door, Mom dashed in, popped off her boots, slipped them into a paper sack from which she’d taken her red high heels, and passed the sack and her teddy-bear fake fur to Daddy—who stood there holding his green car coat and now her coat and the boots dripping through the paper. “Aunt May,” she gushed, once she’d got herself ready. “Aren’t you nice to invite your visiting family to your lovely home.”

  “Hello, Ida Jean, it’s been a long time.” Aunt May, in an elegant long wine velvet dress with an antique brooch on the shoulder, welcomed Mom and relieved Daddy of the wet boots. “Good afternoon, Janey,” she said to me, giving me a brief hug before turning her attention to the men. “Talbot, I’m sure you don’t remember me from the old days, but aren’t you the prosperous looking merchant now.” She presented her cheek to him, in the way of kissing kin, and then whisked his armload of dripping wraps into the front hall closet. “And you must be James.” She took his parka and offered her hand, which wore a large ruby ring. “Janey has told me so much about you.”

  He looked at me, panicked, then looked back to see her smiling and finally relaxed enough to say, “I’ve heard, uh, about you, too.”

  “Come in, do, please, all of you.” Aunt May took Mom’s arm and escorted her into the large windowed sitting room massed with white poinsettias, and full of old things which Mom did not know the value of: rugs, books, furniture, her aunt.

  “Isn’t this different,” Mom said, eyes wide, holding the wrapped mysteries close to her gold-buttoned chest, already slipping her feet out of her tight red shoes. “Potted flowers instead of a tree, that’s so imaginative. But you always were different, Mama said.”

  Aunt May guided us to the half-circle of chairs arranged before a blazing fire. “Foolish of us, I’m sure, my sister and me, your mother, falling out. She sided with our daddy when he broke up the first real romance of my life. I have to admit to you, Ida Jean, I bore her a grudge even after it had all washed away.”

  “That’s not my business, I’m sure,” Mom said, lowering her eyes, as if she hadn’t heard Grandmama say a zillion times that May had been prickly as a pin cushion from day one. “I just want to say how nice it is for you to have this little party for us. And I want to thank you for all the very nice things you have done for our Janey, why, without you, she wouldn’t know a single soul up here in the whole state of Vermont.”

  Aunt May, getting us settled, said she’d made the all-white fruitcake which her own mother used to make, Mom’s grand-mama—and she was sure that Ida Jean must have made it, too, from the very same recipe. She said that at first she’d thought to serve us toddies, so nice in front of a fire, but had fixed, instead, also her mother’s special recipe, a floating island custard thin as buttermilk, much better with bourbon than ordinary eggnog. “I also have spiced cider,” she added, “if anyone would rather?”

  Mom, maybe afraid the moment would get away from her and we’d all be eating and then saying our goodbyes, poked her package toward Aunt May. “I hope it’s all right, but I brought brand new copies of Mr. Greenwood’s books which I personally have read all of and appreciated. I hate pushy people and I would never do that, but I wonder if I could get them autographed? If he’s planning on being here? Mr. Greenwood?”

  Aunt May took the package, crumpling the paper for the fire, and, holding up the stack of matching hardbacks, selected one to open. “Ah, Hush, Sweet Charlotte. That worked all right, didn’t it? Certainly you shall have your inscriptions, Ida Jean. I don’t know if Bert—you know writers, at least you know what they say, they aren’t too sociable.” She looked at Mom in a friendly way. “He may not join us, there’s no way to soften that fact.”

  Mom’s face fell. “Sure, I understand. He must be very busy, I know, with writing. But I already told everybody I was coming here to see—.” She tried not to let the talk of him dwindle away.

  Aunt May looked sympathetic. “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I told you a little secret. I recently found a poem I hadn’t read for years, and passed it along to Bert—librarians you know are good sources. I’m sure he’ll have himself a new title soon. Here’s a bit of it, Thackeray it is:

  Charlotte, having seen his body

  Borne before her on a shutter,

  Like a well-conducted person,

  Went on cutting bread and butter.”

  She smiled at Mom, her niece, like this was going to make sense to her.

  Mom looked blank and then confused, and finally said, “I’m sure that will be suspenseful.”

  “Do you think?” Aunt May asked solemnly.

  Then we heard the front door open, and felt a rush of cold air even with the warm fire, as well as a gale-size rush of anxiety, for there was Kitty, wearing a long dress of soft lavender wool, which fell loosely from a yoke on her small frame.

  At the sight of her, Aunt May rose quickly and crossed the space between them. “Kitty, how lovely you look.” They came into the room together, arms linked. “Ida Jean, you have here the very next thing to Bert Greenwood in the flesh, Kitty Boisvert, the author’s researcher; you might even say the author’s right hand.”

  Kitty smiled warmly, showing her slightly crooked teeth. “May, you do it all. What on earth would a writer do without a librarian to look up all those pesky details? I just paint the era to be recalled with broad brushstrokes.” Running her fingers though her curly graying hair, she looked about. “Now then, of course I know Janey, and this would be her young man and aren’t you nice looking. And here is—it must be—Ida Jean. Let me shake your hand. And you have to be Janey’s father, wouldn’t that be right? I’m honored to be included in this family event, although I know—and don’t for a moment try to deny it—that you’d much rather have Bert Greenwood himself here than a poor emissary.”

  Mom held out her hand with the Christmas-red nails, and nodded her head up and down, being close to tears with disappointment.

  The women, so much more elegantly dressed than we were, went into the kitchen to fetch us our floating island with bourbon and our all-white fruit cake. It took them a while, and we could hear their chatter, their talk about which tray to use, did we need spoons, how about the long-handled iced-tea spoons? And at first we all sat, staring at the fireplace, tongue-tied and waiting.

  Finally, James got up and pretended to poke the fire, adjust the logs, and then, casually, he pulled up a chair next to my daddy, who looked startled and began to fiddle with his tie, getting the fir trees to line up straight. Daddy hadn’t spoken a word so far, only perking up earlier when Aunt May made mention of toddies and bourbon. He coughed a minute to find his voice, then asked, “You been here to this house before, boy?”

  James shook his head. “This is my first time. I know this area and the road with the cemeteries, and the road down below along the river, from having lived around here. This isn’t that big of a town. But I never met Janey’s aunt in person before. I imagine you did.”

  “Can’t say I have. My wife’s mother, quite a pistol, not the same sort as this one by a long shot, talked about her sister. They’d had a falling out. That happens, is my personal experience, in families.”

  “My students say that.” James’s arm started up as if longing to wrap itself around his neck, but resisted. He leaned back and stuck his hand in his jacket pocket, then took it out and clasped his hands behind his head. “So,” he said.

  Daddy, getting warmed up to the idea of a conversation, asked him, “Your folks live here? You grow up here? Your daddy a teacher, too? Seems like sometimes everybody in a family does the one thing, that’s what they all do.”

  I bit my lip. Sort of like w
atching Beulah take the stairs at Puppy Evaluation: I wanted to help out but held myself back. Then, just at the instant that James looked cornered and said, “Uh, well, sir,” Aunt May and Kitty came into the room carrying trays.

  “Talbot,” Aunt May chided him in a gentle tone, “fine old New England families do not like to be interrogated. I know James is too nice to make a fuss, but old New England families expect you to take them at face value and not pry into their history. They’re not brought up that way.”

  James, rescued, shot Aunt May such a look of gratitude that her cheeks flushed red. Daddy, in his turn, glowered for a second or two, like a kid being called down in class, and then, his dander up, asked, defensive, “What are you supposed to talk about then, tell me that.”

  Aunt May passed around the floating island laced with bourbon in tall cold glasses while Kitty passed us thin slices of the all-white fruitcake, glistening with pineapple and citron, crisp with toasted almonds. When Aunt May handed Daddy his glass, she suggested, “Tell James about how you got into the hardware business, why don’t you? Young men like to hear how successful men got their start in the world.”

  “You want to know about that, son?” Dad took a large gulp and wiped the meringue off his top lip, then took another.

  “Sure I do,” James said.

  “It happened like this. Back then, this would’ve been in ’67 as I recall, I had it on my mind to be an engineer. Engineering appealed to me. Engineers made money. They built things. And people liked to ask the advice of engineers, because you had your public buildings and your roads, you had your trains and bridges, you even had your telephone pole insulators. Engineers had a lot of facets to their work, it seemed to me. But first off, we had a war, that would be your Vietnam War, and in the second place, my daddy had himself a massive coronary. And you have to put in there the fact that my girl, Ida Jean, was not as interested in my becoming that engineer as she was with my becoming a husband.”

  He looked to be sure James was listening. “Now the hardware store there had been my daddy’s, he wasn’t the owner outright, it was just that folks called it his store, they’d say, Let’s get that over to Horace’s, or Let’s ask Horace. So I figured that the hardware store, which in those days was the center, I mean this as true fact, the very center of the commerce of a town. In those days. Whatever you wanted, they had it at the hardware. And whatever you didn’t know how to fix or look for or find or get a part for, they could do it at the hardware. So I figured, with those factors on the table and me not wanting to go to that war we had, the course of action I ought to go into was to marry Janey’s mother—she wasn’t that at the time, you understand—and to take my daddy’s place at the hardware. That’s called Runyan’s now, Mr. Runyan, but you don’t need to get sidetracked there.”

  He stopped, my daddy, and stared at James who had been listening all ears to his words. And then he stared at Aunt May in her velvet dress, and, finally, having caught his breath, asked her, “Is that what you mean? Talking my head off like a fool? Is that what you do up here in New England?”

  Mom, who’d been fidgeting the whole time during Daddy’s story, not able to open her mouth, eating tiny nibbles of her cake and trying to catch her husband’s eye to hush him up, said at once to Aunt May, “This cake is absolutely delicious. A person thinks they don’t like fruitcake, because of their past experience with fruitcake, the store-bought variety, and then they discover they love fruitcake when they taste something like this.” She’d been sitting ramrod straight in her Christmas dress, her eyes narrowed, looking from one woman to the other, like she’d got some kind of notion in her bonnet, some idea she didn’t like the looks of.

  Aunt May asked her, “What do you think, Ida Jean, about your daughter’s use of her time up here, raising a puppy for the blind?”

  “She keeps it in a cage,” Mom said. “How is it supposed to be a watchdog, tell me that, locked up in a cage?”

  We got fresh floating island and second pieces of cake. James put more logs on the fire. He asked what kind of wood came in a cut cord, he had an interest in woods, he said. Then he and Aunt May talked about oak and ash, birch and beech, and how each wood burned. He said he couldn’t bear the notion of burning cherry, and she showed him the cherry sideboard in the dining room.

  Kitty sat beside Mom and asked about her women friends back home, was she going to bring them souvenirs of Vermont? Mom told her about Madge, her best friend, a loan officer at Peachland’s only full-service bank, how they talked on the phone every single day at least once. How, as a matter of fact, the reason she’d wanted signed copies of Mr. Greenwood’s books was so she could make a present of one of them to Madge. “We have the same exact taste in everything, and that includes reading.” Kitty promised that perhaps Bert could do an extra one, inscribed to her special friend.

  At the door, when we had no more excuse to linger, Aunt May helped my mom get out of her red heels, back into the plastic boots, complimenting her on her furry coat. She shook my daddy’s hand twice, and thanked him for the most interesting conversation, as well as for coming along, since James surely did need the company of another man.

  James and I lingered behind on the doorstep. “Thank you, thank you,” I said, flinging my arms around both of the women.

  “Our pleasure,” they said together.

  Then we trudged, holding gloved hands, out into the frosty, already dark, late afternoon, hearing the door close behind us.

  In the still air, Mom’s voice carried across the deep snow-banked yard. “Well, that was a no-brainer for sure.”

  “How’s that, Hon?” Daddy asked, as if he didn’t know the topic of the remark.

  “They think we didn’t see what was going on? They think we’re just country cousins? It was plain as the nose on your face, Talbot. All that chummy business, you think I didn’t see right through that? That woman, that little Kitty person, has flat out taken Aunt May’s man away from her. That woman has plain stolen Bert Greenwood.”

  Avoiding Distraction

  28

  YELLOW TABBY APPEARED like a snake in The Garden, early in the staggering onslaught of February, the groundhog having seen her shadow and then burrowed back in for six more weeks of ice and bitter wind and back-cracking heat bills. In the house, I wore everything I owned: two tees, sweater, my good red hoodie (my constant companion), under a jacket or over my pajamas at night, plus my zip-ankle pants in the daytime. At Eastern Mountain Sports, I’d bought two pairs of thermal tights so that one always clung to my calves while the other wicked dry, and two pairs of wick-dry double-ply socks. Nobody had warned me about the intimate matter of trying, under all those layers, to remove a soggy tampon and to insert another into your down-there without a bloody icicle forming on your inner thigh. Last Monday, the radio had called it 8 degrees with a chill factor of minus 28. I’d called it arctic and sent Mom and Daddy a photo of a flock of seagulls on the snow-covered lakeshore. White on white.

  Except on really frigid days, Beulah and I went for walks, her snuggy in her wool sweater and felt Companion vest. Stung by the comments of the trainer at this month’s Puppy Evaluation—“You’re raising a follow dog, not a lead dog.”—I’d begun to trek downtown on the street with the traffic signal that chirped, birdlike, when the light changed to green. A sound supposed to encourage Big Dog Beulah to make the decision herself when to cross, with a little jiggle of the working leash from me. How on earth did blind people survive in bad weather? I imagined her in Santa Fe, all the sightless persons wearing turquoise and silver, sitting on the plaza in the warming sun against a backdrop of ochre, red and purple paintings, their trusty Companions keeping them safe from pickpockets and tourists. Would they send me pictures of Beulah? Could I even stand to think about that? Her gone?

  She’d been through the bloody discharge and the onslaught of massive canines trying to mount, and had returned, older and calmer, to her eager self again. Thanks to me, she was still intact, though I was not, not in the p
uppy-training sense. I felt I’d been round the barn, down the garden path, in the woodshed. I’d been banging on dumpsters to create sudden, horrid noise until I suspected the Burlington police and the sanitation workers would be citing me for disturbance. I’d worked on her people reaction, noise reaction, traffic reaction, other-dog response, every day the weather permitted. Keeping in the forefront of my mind like a neon sign the trainer’s bottom line: HOW WELL DOES THE DOG DO WHEN HER RAISER IS ABSENT?

  And then appeared yellow cat. A large striped tabby, in our yard as if she lived there, sitting at the bottom of the back stairs. She’d be waiting for us in the morning when we came out back, bundled like Inuit, to get busy, and she’d be waiting for us at night, the moon already high in the dark sky, as if she believed that she was going to get fed, as if she always got fed, just as soon as she’d walked over and taken a long sniff of Beulah’s spot.

  Not only did she make Beulah skittish, clumsy on the steps, looking back over her shoulder in her pile of yellowed snow, but she drove the crows next door into a cawing frenzy. Therefore calling attention in the neighborhood to the fact that a certain rental property had both a dog and a cat in residence.

  “Mew,” she said when we appeared, me often with a cup of Green Mountain coffee sending steam into the snow-fogged air, trying to rub against my legs as if Beulah wasn’t present. “Mew, mew, mew,” she said in the black icy dark. “Go home, Puss,” I begged, “go home.” But obviously she had no home, to judge by the fact that she had no collar and the fact that no one had stapled a LOST TABBY notice to the telephone pole on our street, and that no one came out in a heavy flannel robe and winter boots calling for her.

  Besides which, sending my blood pressure soaring into the low-lying sky, dandruff began to appear on Beulah’s shoulders when she headed for her spot; she was building worry. And my own shoulders had grown flaky, too, and my own tail had started tucking under, because since the cat first started coming around, James had vanished. Maybe it happened just to be a correlation and not a cause, as pharmacists sometime said about feeling better when taking a certain medication, but it seemed the final awful result of the yellow cat in the snow. It made sense that orphans, such as James, might feel particularly offended by the idea of strays being unwelcome and a nuisance.