A Permanent Member of the Family

by Russell Banks

  But Louise would have none of it. “Just bring the damn dog back. Now,” she said and hung up. Her voice and her distinctive Virginia Tidewater accent echo in my ears these many years later.

  I was driving a Ford station wagon then, and because of her arthritis poor old Sarge couldn’t get into the back on her own, so I had to lift her up carefully and lay her in, and when I arrived at Louise’s house, I had to open the tailgate and scoop the dog up in my arms and set her down on the driveway like an offering—a peace offering, I suppose, though it felt more like a propitiation.

  This happened every week. Despite all Louise’s efforts to keep Sarge a permanent resident of her house, the dog always managed to slip out, arriving at my door just behind the girls, or else she came down the lane, increasingly, on her own, even when the girls were in their mother’s custody. So it wasn’t Andrea, Caitlin and Sasha that the dog was following, it was me. I began to see that in her canine mind I was her pack leader, and since I had moved to a new den, so had she. If she didn’t follow me there, she’d be without a leader and a proper den.

  There was nothing that Louise and I could do to show Sarge how wrong she was. She wasn’t wrong, of course; she was a dog. Finally, after about a month, Louise gave up, although she never announced her capitulation. Simply, there came a time when my ex-wife no longer called me with orders to deliver our family dog to her doorstep.

  Everyone—me, Sarge, the girls, I think even Louise—was relieved. We all knew on some level that a major battle, one with a likelihood of causing considerable collateral damage, had been narrowly avoided. Yet, despite my relief, I felt a buzzing, low-grade anxiety about having gained sole custody of Sarge. I wasn’t aware of it then, but looking back now I see that Sarge, as long as she was neither exclusively mine nor Louise’s, functioned in our newly disassembled family as the last remaining link to our preseparation, prelapsarian past, to a time of relative innocence, when all of us, but especially the girls, still believed in the permanence of our family unit, our pack.

  If Sarge had only agreed to traipse up and down the lane behind the girls, if she had agreed to accept joint custody, then my having left my wife could have been seen by all of us as an eccentric, impulsive, possibly even temporary, sleeping arrangement, and for the girls it could have been a bit like going on a continuous series of neighborhood camping trips with Dad. I would not have felt quite so guilty, and Louise would not have been so hurt and angry. The whole abandonment issue would have been ameliorated somewhat. The children would not have been so traumatized; their lives, as they see them today, would not have been permanently disfigured, and neither Louise nor I might have gone looking so quickly for replacement spouses.

  That’s a lot of weight to put on a family dog, I know. We all lose our innocence soon enough; it’s inescapable. Most of us aren’t emotionally or intellectually ready for it until our thirties or even later, however, so when one loses it prematurely, in childhood and adolescence, through divorce or the sudden early death of a parent, it can leave one fixated on that loss for a lifetime. Because it’s premature, it feels unnatural, violent and unnecessary, a permanent, gratuitous wounding, and it leaves one angry at the world, and to provide one’s unfocused anger with a proper target, one looks for someone to blame.

  No one blamed Sarge, of course, for rejecting joint custody and thereby breaking up our family. Not consciously, anyhow. In fact, back then, at the beginning of the breakup of the family, none of us knew how much we depended on Sarge to preserve our ignorance of the fragility, the very impermanence, of the family. None of us knew that she was helping us postpone our anger and need for blame—blame for the separation and divorce, for the destruction of the family unit, for our lost innocence.

  Whenever the girls stepped down from the school bus for their three or four nights’ stay at my house, they were clearly, profoundly comforted to see Sarge, her wide grin, her wet black eyes glazed by cataracts, her floppy tail and slipshod, slanted, arthritic gait as she trailed them from the bus stop to the house. Wherever the girls settled in the yard or the house, as long as she didn’t have to climb the narrow attic stairs to be with them, Sarge lay watchfully beside them, as if guarding them from a danger whose existence Louise and I had not yet acknowledged.

  Vickie wasn’t around all that much, but Sarge was not attached to her in the same intense way as to the three younger girls. Sarge pretty much ignored Vickie. From the dog’s perspective, I think Vickie was a late-arriving, auxiliary member of the pack, which I hate to admit is how the three younger girls saw her, too, despite my best efforts to integrate all four daughters into a single family unit. No one admitted this, of course, but even then, that early in the game, I saw that I was failing to build a recombinant nuclear family. Vickie was a free radical and, sadly, would remain one.

  Mostly, when the children were at school or up at their mother’s, Sarge slept through her days. Her only waking diversion, in the absence of the girls, was going for rides in my car, and I took her everywhere I went, even to my office at the college, where she slept under my desk while I met my classes. From dawn to dusk, when the weather turned wintry and snow was falling, if I was at home and my car parked in the driveway, Sarge’s habit, so as not to miss an opportunity for a ride, was to crawl under the vehicle and sleep there between the rear wheels until I came out. When I got into the car I’d start the engine and, if the girls were with me, count off the seconds aloud until, fifteen or twenty seconds into my count, Sarge appeared at the driver’s-side window. Then I’d step out, flip open the tailgate and lift her into the back. If the girls weren’t there I still counted, but silently. I never got as high as thirty before Sarge was waiting by the car door.

  I don’t remember now where we were headed, but this time all four daughters were in the car together, Vickie in the front passenger’s seat, Andrea, Caitlin and Sasha in back. I remember it as a daytime drive, even though, because of Vickie’s classes and the younger girls’ school hours, it was unusual for all four to be in the car at the same time during the day. Maybe it was a Saturday or Sunday; maybe we were going ice-skating at one of the local ponds. It was a bright, cloudless, cold afternoon, I remember that, and there was no snow on the ground just then, which suggests a deep freeze following the usual January thaw. We must have been five or six months into the separation and divorce, which would not be final until the following August.

  Piling into the car, all four of the girls were in a silly mood, singing along to a popular Bee Gees disco song, “More Than a Woman,” singing in perfect mocking harmony and substituting lines like “bald-headed woman” for “more than a woman,” and breaking each other up, even the youngest, Andrea, who would have just turned seven then. I can’t say I was distracted. I was simply happy, happy to see my daughters goofing off together, and was grinning at the four of them as they sang, my gaze turning from one bright face to another, when I realized that I had counted all the way to sixty and was still counting. That far into it, I didn’t make the connection between the count and lifting Sarge into the back of the station wagon. I simply stopped counting, put the car in reverse and started to back out of the driveway.

  There was a thump and a bump. The girls stopped singing. No one said a word. I hit the brake, put the car in park and shut off the motor. I lay my forehead against the steering wheel rim.

  All four daughters began to wail. It was a primeval, keening, utterly female wail. Their voices rose in pitch and volume and became almost operatic, as if for years they had been waiting for this moment to arrive, when they could at last give voice together to a lifetime’s accumulated pain and suffering. A terrible, almost unthinkable thing had happened. Their father had slain a permanent member of the family. We all knew it the second we heard the thump and felt the bump. But the girls knew something more. Instinctively, they understood the linkage between this moment, with Sarge dead beneath the wheels of my car, and my decision the previous summer to leave my wife. My reasons for that decision, my par
ticular forms of pain and suffering, my years of humiliation and sense of having been too compromised in too many ways ever to respect myself again unless I left my wife, none of that mattered to my daughters, even to Vickie, who, as much as the other three, needed the primal family unit with two loving parents in residence together, needed it to remain intact and to continue into her adult life, holding and sustaining her and her sisters, nurturing them, and more than anything else, protecting them from bad things.

  When the wailing finally subsided and came to a gradual end, and I had apologized so sincerely and repeatedly that the girls had begun to comfort me instead of letting me comfort them, telling me that Sarge must have died before I hit her with the car or she would have come out from under it in plenty of time, we left the car and wrapped Sarge’s body in an old blanket. I carried her body and the girls carried several of her favorite toys and her food dish to the far corner of the backyard and laid her and her favorite things down beneath a leafless old maple tree. I told the girls that they could always come to this tree and stand over Sarge’s grave and remember her love for them and their love for her.

  While I went to the garage for a shovel and pick, the girls stood over Sarge’s body as if to protect it from desecration. When I returned, Vickie said, “The ground’s frozen, you know, Dad.”

  “That’s why I brought the pick,” I said, but the truth is I had forgotten that the ground was as hard as pavement, and she knew it. They all knew it. I was practically weeping by now, confused and frightened by the tidal welter of emotions rising in my chest and taking me completely over. As the girls calmed and seemed to grow increasingly focused on the task at hand, I spun out of control. I threw the shovel down beneath the maple tree and started slamming the pick against the ground, whacking the sere, rock-hard sod with fury. The blade clanged in the cold morning air and bounced off the ground, and the girls, frightened by my wild, gasping swings, backed away from me, as if watching their father avenge a crime they had not witnessed, delivering a punishment that exceeded the crime to a terrible degree.

  I only glimpsed this and was further maddened by it and turned my back to them so I couldn’t see their fear and disapproval, and I slammed the steel against the ground with increasing force, again and again, until finally I was out of breath and the nerves of my hands were vibrating painfully from the blows. I stopped attacking the ground at last, and as my head cleared, I remembered the girls, and I slowly turned to say something to them, something that would somehow gather them in and dilute their grief-stricken fears. I didn’t know what to say, but something would come to me; it always did.

  But the girls were gone. I looked across the yard, past the rusting swing set toward the house, and saw the four of them disappear one by one between the house and the garage, Vickie in the lead, then Sasha holding Andrea’s hand, and Caitlin. A few seconds later, they reappeared on the far side of the house, walking up the lane toward the home of my ex-wife. Now Vickie was holding Andrea’s hand in one of hers and Caitlin’s in the other, and Sasha, the eldest of my ex-wife’s three daughters, was in the lead.

  That’s more or less the whole story, except to mention that when the girls were finally out of sight, Scooter, my black cat, strolled from the bushes alongside the brook that marked the edge of the yard, where he had probably been hunting voles and ground-feeding chickadees. He made his way across the yard to where I stood, passed by me and sat next to Sarge’s stiffening body. The blanket around her body had been blown back by the breeze. The cold wind riffled her dense white fur. Her sightless eyes were dry and opaque, and her gray tongue lolled from her open mouth as if stopped in the middle of a yawn. She looked like game, a wild animal killed for her coat or her flesh, and not a permanent member of the family.

  I drove the body of the dog to the veterinarian’s, where she was cremated, and carried the ashes in a ceramic jar back to my house and placed the jar on the fireplace mantle, thinking that in the spring, when the ground thawed, the girls and I would bury the ashes down by the maple tree by the brook. But that never happened. The girls did not want to talk about Sarge. They did not spend as much time at my house anymore as they had before Sarge died. Vickie moved in with her boyfriend in town. By spring the other girls stayed overnight at my house every other weekend only, and by summer, when they went off to camp in the White Mountains, not at all, and I saw them that summer only once, when I drove up to Camp Abenaki on Parents’ Weekend. I emptied the jar with Sarge’s ashes into the brook alone one afternoon in May. The following year I was offered a tenure-track position at a major university in New Jersey, and given my age and stage of career, I felt obliged to accept it. I sold my little house down the lane from my ex-wife’s home. From then on the girls visited me and their old cat, Scooter, when they could, which was once a month for a weekend during the school year and for the week before summer camp began.

  CHRISTMAS PARTY

  Harold Bilodeau’s ex-wife, Sheila, remarried, but Harold did not, and though he told people there was a woman down in Saratoga Springs he was seeing on the occasional weekend, he was not. Their divorce had been, as they say, amicable. She’d had an affair and fallen in love with Bud Lincoln, one of Harold’s friends and their Hurricane Road neighbor, and Harold had soon realized there was no way he could prevail against it.

  “I guess love happens,” Harold told folks, and shrugged. “Can’t fight it.”

  “We married too young, Harold and me. Right out of high school, practically, for God’s sake,” Sheila explained.

  People in Keene understood romance and forgave Sheila, and they respected Harold for his quiet acceptance of his wife’s love for another man. Keene is a village in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York with barely a thousand year-round residents, most of whom keep careful track of the births, deaths, marriages and divorces that occur among them. They monitor remarriage, too, especially when both parties are longtime residents of the town and continue after the dissolution of their previous marriages to live there, as both Harold and Sheila Bilodeau had done. Bud Lincoln had not been previously married and lived in his parents’ house, but until he took up with Harold’s wife he had been regarded in town as a “good catch,” so people watched him anyway.

  After the divorce, Harold got a bank loan and bought out Sheila’s interest in their double-wide and lived in it alone with their three dogs and two cats, all mixed-breed rescues from the North Country Animal Shelter, the half-dozen chickens, and the Angora goat.

  That was three years ago, and Sheila and Bud had been married now for two of those years. While the two men were no longer close friends, they frequently ran into each other at the post office or gassing their trucks at Stewart’s or grabbing coffee to go at the Noon Mark Diner, and there appeared to be no lingering hard feelings on Harold’s part. Harold seldom saw Sheila in town, but when he did she was friendly and full of chat, and he, in his taciturn way, reciprocated.

  Bud Lincoln was a building contractor, and he had built for Sheila a splendid three-bedroom, solar-heated house with mountain views up on Irish Hill. In spite of how friendly everyone was since the divorce, Harold was not surprised when back in October he wasn’t invited to Sheila and Bud’s housewarming party. In fact he was almost grateful not to be invited. It meant he didn’t have to decide whether to attend or stay home.

  But when in mid-December he opened a printed invitation to Sheila and Bud’s Christmas party, he was surprised and almost displeased. It meant he’d have to admit to himself that the divorce and Sheila’s remarriage still stung his heart, and he’d have to invent an excuse for declining the invitation, or else he’d have to test his ongoing pain against the new reality and attend the party. He’d have to act like an old family friend or a distant cousin, someone more than merely a neighbor and less than a cuckolded, abandoned ex-husband.

  “Help us decorate our tree!” the invitation said. “Bring a decoration!” The return address listed them as Sheila & Bud Lincoln. So she had taken Bud’s last
name, just as she had once taken Harold’s.

  Sheila and Bud Lincoln had built their new high-tech log house expressly to establish and celebrate their marriage. It was more than a fresh start; it was a repudiation of the past. Her past, especially. The new house turned a simple case of adultery and divorce into a story about finding true love. Sheila’s decade-long, childless life with Harold was now a closed book.

  Nor was the divorce itself a part of Sheila and Bud’s story either. Otherwise they wouldn’t have stayed in Keene and built their fancy new house on Irish Hill, barely three miles from Harold’s place. They wouldn’t have adopted a baby from Ethiopia, big news in an otherwise all-white, all-American small town. And they wouldn’t have invited Harold to their Christmas party, which they hoped to make an annual event. That was her story. And Bud’s.

  To Harold, however, Sheila was the past that wouldn’t stop bleeding into his present and, as far as he could see, his future too. Nearly every night, alone in the queen-sized waterbed they’d once shared, she appeared in his dreams, looking the same as when they went to Montreal on their honeymoon, a smiling blond swirl of a girl who adored him for his quiet, stoical ways. Now every morning, before heading to the garage for his truck, when he fed the dogs and cats, the chickens and the goat—creatures they’d acquired at her urging, not his, and which she, not he, had fed and cared for—he had visions of Sheila setting out the pans, casting the corn, filling the bins, gathering eggs in the morning sun with her long, tanned hands, and he ached all over again with the pain of knowing that she’d wanted the animals because she couldn’t get pregnant.