Dog on the Cross

by Aaron Gwyn

  JONATHAN CLOSED HIS EYES and pressed himself against the tree. He muttered, in his thoughts, snatches of prayers, old hymns, hearing more loudly the voices of the men, the shuffling of leaves. He began making entreaties to a God who, in his imagination, was always a strange amalgam of his grandfather and a face in the clouds, promising renewed dedication, vows of missionary work, physical hardship. He remembered, for some reason, having looked at naked women in a magazine, and he swore he would never again do this, never allow women to take his purity from him, never even take one to wife. He was straining to think of other things he might offer God when he realized that the woods had become silent. Lifting his head slowly from the tree trunk, he looked below him in all directions. The men were gone.

  Hours passed, and Jonathan watched the late summer afternoon fade into evening, a red-and-golden light dyeing the western edges of leaf and limb. All around, the forest took on a hazed look, and he glanced down at his ankle which was red and distended, swollen against his shoe. This was a time of day Jonathan had always feared. His mood seemed to decline with the sun, and now alone, away from home and family, unsure as to what might happen, this feeling was magnified. He thought of the men in the cave, and he hated them for leaving him in the woods alone and injured. And with that surge of hatred, something gave way—a surfeit of emotion, a point of absolute saturation. He lay back against the tree, closed his eyes, and in a few moments was asleep.

  He awoke to the sound of someone calling his name. The woods were dim now, but not fully dark, and when he heard the voice again, he did not give a response but began immediately to clamber, descending from limb to limb, sliding along the smooth trunk. When he reached bottom he saw that it was his grandfather who was calling: his grandfather and Jude McCoin, J.W. and his grandfather’s friend, Pete Cochran. Cochran led another man by the scruff of the neck—a grasp of bunched fabric as handle—and as they came closer Jonathan saw it was the man with the green jersey, the man from the cave.

  Leaning his weight against the tree, Jonathan shouted to his grandfather. The entire pack moved toward the boy, Beauford running ahead of the others, reaching Jonathan first, picking him up and carrying him some distance, asking, as he carried him, if he was hurt, interspersing his questions with thanksgiving, though to whom this was directed, the boy could not tell. He seated Jonathan on the ground and, kneeling, took him by the shoulders. The old man glanced the boy over, saw that his arms were covered with scrapes, that there was a lengthy scratch along one cheek. He turned his head.

  “Pete,” he said in an urgent voice, “don’t come up here. Keep that nancy back a ways.”

  Cochran seized a firmer grip on the man he was leading and, pushing him to the ground, knelt with both knees in the small of the man’s back. He grabbed a handful of his hair and pressed his face into dirt. “Stay put,” he said.

  The man muttered something Jonathan could not make out and he saw McCoin walk calmly up and place a hand on Cochran’s shoulder. He looked to be reasoning with him, but Jonathan’s attention was directed back to his grandfather, his face close to his now, something in his eyes that was utterly foreign.

  “Where’s Scoot?” asked Jonathan. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s just fine,” the old man whispered. “He’s with Brother Tim and the rest. They went around the other way looking for you.” Beauford stopped, lowered his head. “They came back and told us what happened, Jon. They came and told us what you saw.”

  A ruckus had broken out between Cochran and McCoin. The former swore, stood up, and pushed the sick man away. “This ain’t none of your business,” he told him. “It’s between Emmanuel and this—” He trailed off, delivered a kick to the man’s side, and climbed back atop him.

  “Listen,” Jonathan’s grandfather said to him, taking the boy’s face between his hands, “I want you to tell me the truth. No matter what he did to you, it’s not your fault; it won’t have even happened. The blood of Christ will make it so it will never have happened. He’s a devil from Hell, and the Devil’s got no power over the children of God. You just tell me, Jon.” The man’s face seemed to tighten. “You tell me exactly what he did.”

  Jonathan didn’t understand what his grandfather was asking. He opened his mouth to tell about his ankle, how he was running and it went too far into the ground, but instead of speech, there came a sudden burst of sobbing, all the fear and anxiety of the day tumbling out in one confused spasm. He buried his face in his grandfather’s chest and felt his big hand cupping the back of his head, stroking it at first, then trembling violently. His grandfather pulled away and looked at Jonathan once more. “That’s all right,” he said, faltering, his eyes gone strange. “The blood of the Savior will cleanse us both.”

  Turning, he called to McCoin. “Jude,” he said in a commanding tone, “take these boys back to camp. You’ll have to carry, Jon. There’s something the matter with his leg.”

  “Emmie,” suggested McCoin, “why don’t we—”

  “Do it,” Beauford ordered, rising, walking toward where Cochran knelt on the man’s back. Seeing Beauford’s approach, Cochran pulled the man upright so that he was genuflecting, his hands, Jonathan noticed, bound by something. McCoin attempted to step in Beauford’s path, but the latter pushed him clear, took two more steps, and brought his fist against the captive’s face. A spurt of black ejected into the leaves and the man pitched over onto his side. Jonathan saw the man was much younger than he had thought.

  Jonathan crawled nearer, toward his grandfather and the young man he now straddled, his grandfather slapping the man’s face, asking why he did it, did he know it was an abomination, did he know what they called his kind in Scripture, those who molested children and lay with others of their sex? All this time Cochran argued with McCoin, telling him to take the boys and leave, that they didn’t need to witness this. McCoin would not do it: “He’s going to kill that kid—don’t you see?” Looking over, Jonathan saw J.W. was bent double, vomiting.

  He had crawled even closer by this point, just five or six feet from where Beauford knelt atop the man, though neither they nor the others were aware of him. The young man was pleading with Beauford: he didn’t know what Beauford was talking about; he hadn’t hurt anyone; he was wide receiver for the Perser Football team; he’d just turned sixteen. Yes, he and his friend had been fooling around, but they had chased the boys only to scare them.

  “Please,” he said, mumbling around broken teeth, “we were just afraid they might tell.”

  “They told,” said Beauford, driving his fist once more into the side of the young man’s head. His face recoiled from the blow, and his body gave a tremendous jerk, then began to convulse. Beauford rose, startled by this. He looked over to McCoin and Cochran. “He’s going into seizure,” McCoin warned, and indeed, that looked to be the case, for the young man’s body shivered as if wired to a socket. Jonathan watched him, transfixed. He was aware that his crying had stopped, and he wanted the man to stop trembling; it disturbed him the way he moved. But he continued coming closer, wanting to tell the quaking figure that his grandfather was a very strong man, that he was sorry he had hated him, but that now he would know better: he wouldn’t chase children and force them to hurt their ankles and to hide, by themselves, in fear for their lives. And with this thought came another, as if traveling alongside and then eclipsing it entirely. He understood, finally, what his grandfather had before been asking, and he began to shake his head, as if the young man’s seizures were contagious—shouting that wasn’t what happened, that wasn’t it at all. And just as his protestations became their loudest, the man beside him gave one final shudder and then went still.

  McCoin pushed past Cochran, past Beauford who now stood above the young man, staring down at him mutely. He laid his head to the teenager’s chest for a full minute and glanced up at Beauford. When he went to speak, no words came from his mouth.

  Jonathan had also fallen silent. He sat across from McCoin, realizing, somehow, he’d
adopted the same posture—kneeling in the dirt with legs tucked underneath, hunching slightly, arms bracing him at the sides. He looked at McCoin, the man’s appearance seeming at once to soften, his features warm and thoughtful in the day’s final light. Jonathan shook his head, trying to divest himself of the strange affinity, this sudden sense of kinship. He turned and stared up at Beauford, hoping to find something to contradict these notions, some detail in his grandfather’s face in which to confide. But due to the hastening darkness, he could not see the old man’s expression, backlit as he was, clouded by night and the forest shade.

  DOG ON THE CROSS

  DEPUTY MARTIN DIDN’T want to take the call. It was the hottest summer Oklahoma had seen in two decades, and he wanted to sit in the station with his boots on the desktop, drink coffee, and read The Perser Chronicle. For the past three years he’d driven out to every farm and rural residence in the county—domestic disputes and petty vandalism, the more extreme cases involving a stolen tractor or possibly a camper shell. To him, “you’ll have to see it to believe it” meant an addled rancher and his hysterical wife, skinny calves hip deep in mud and bawling for their mothers.

  This was what he was thinking as he turned off the highway and into the white gravel parking lot of the First Pentecostal, a modest building overlooking a sea of black oak in the valley beneath it. Pulling into a space in front of the church, he put his car in park and switched off the engine. On the steps leading to the main entrance sat Doyle Withers, a dark-complexioned man in dress slacks and a long-sleeved shirt, the collar already damp with sweat. The man was thick jowled and portly; his stomach protruded over his belt. He rose when Martin stepped from his car and tottered over to meet him.

  The two exchanged pleasantries and then began walking toward the highway. As they spoke, Martin noticed for the first time the faded green tarp next to the sign at the side of the road. He’d been past the church hundreds of times and it suddenly occurred to him that beside the sign, a small wooden cross was set into the ground, that this was what the tarp had been draped over. When they reached it, Deacon Withers sunk his hands in his pockets and began to rattle change.

  “I come out this morning to do the books,” he told Martin. “We been in revival about a month now, and this morning I come out and saw it soon as I pulled in. I ran out to the toolshed, got that piece of canvas, and covered it best I could.” He paused, coughed into his hand. “Blasphemy is what it is.”

  Martin reached over, grabbed one corner of the tarp, and tossed it back. Starting, he retreated several steps, looked at the cross and then back to Withers. The deacon had lowered his head.

  On the cross was a beagle puppy, a dog of maybe six months. Its forepaws had been secured to the transverse beam by two sixteen-penny nails, its rear legs crossed and nailed through with one. Flies skimmed its muzzle, trailed along the strips of duct tape that held the dog’s mouth. From the angle Martin first observed it, the animal looked to be smiling.

  The deputy pulled the tarp back over and turned to Withers. His face had a nauseated expression.

  “What time you find this?” he asked.

  “Earlier this morning. About nine thirty.”

  “And you called us soon as you saw it?”

  “Just the minute I got done with the tarp.”

  Martin took a small tablet from his pocket, clicked his pen, and went to jot a few notes. His hands, he noticed, were trembling.

  “You have any idea who could’ve done this?”

  Withers began to nod, as if he’d meant to tell the deputy but hadn’t yet gotten to it.

  “I’m about satisfied it was that Hollis fella.”

  “Who?”

  The deacon gestured to the valley below them. “Jacob Hollis. Lives down the hill there.”

  “Spell his name for me.”

  “H-o-l-l-i-s. He moved in and built an underground home a few years back. Been after us ever since.”

  Martin looked up from the tablet. “‘Been after’ how?”

  “What’s that?”

  “How’s he been bothering you?”

  “He comes up every so often and starts raising a commotion, telling us we need to keep it down. Works out of his home, I think. Scientist or something.”

  “Scientist?”

  “I don’t know,” Withers told him, making vague gestures with his hands. “I think that’s what he does. He’s about half queer, you ask me. Big ole sucker. Brother Leslie and his grandmother went down and tried to witness to him one afternoon and he told them he was from back east. Said he didn’t even believe in God.”

  Martin wrote steadily for a minute or so, replaced the notepad in his shirt pocket, and buttoned it. The two of them began walking back toward the church.

  “You think he’s actually capable of this?”

  Withers bit his thumbnail and spat. “Yes, I do.”

  “But you don’t really know him?”

  “No.”

  “Ever talked to him?”

  Withers shook his head.

  “You still think he might’ve had something to do with it, though.”

  They had reached the building’s front porch. The deacon lowered himself onto a step and hitched his trouser legs.

  “I’ll put it this way,” he said, fixing Martin with a stare. “It surprises the living daylights out of me he ain’t already done a lot worse.”

  The deputy looked over to the cross. A sudden gust of wind raised one corner of tarp and held it almost vertically, dirt from the side of the road kicking up and spinning across the highway. The wind died and the air once again became hot and still. The angle of canvas lowered back to the ground.

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Martin crossed the churchyard, went over the fence at the turnstile, and started down the hill. He was a tall man and remarkably slender, still a few years shy of forty. His eyes were bright and his nose pointed; his red hair encircled a balding crown. Despite being lanky, he moved with a certain grace, as if each step had been planned long in advance.

  Below him lay the valley. Through the limbs of blackjacks he could just distinguish several outbuildings he assumed belonged to Hollis. He’d known Doyle Withers since high school, and though he didn’t figure the man for a liar, he thought it a bit handy that the perpetrator of this crime should be living a quarter mile from its scene. But, regardless of probability, an uneasiness began to grow as he went through the dense stand of trees, ducking branches, skirting thickets of thorn. When he came to the bottom of the hill, Martin unsnapped the strip of patent leather that lay over the hammer of his sidearm and loosened the weapon in its holster.

  He emerged from the woods, walked into the clearing, and saw Hollis’s home, only the front of it visible. Just above the door the ground rose and bled into the tree line, the rest of the structure dug back in the hill. There were a few round windows on one side of the door, a rectangular plate of glass on the other. A flagstone path led to the porch. Martin went up it and then, startled by a noise, turned to look behind him.

  Twenty or thirty yards from where he stood was a small pen made of chain-link fencing. Inside, were several beagle puppies, a larger animal the deputy took for their mother. When the dogs saw Martin, they began barking, a shrill noise that sent tremors along his skin. He stood watching the animals for a few moments and then walked toward the house.

  The door was made of solid oak. Martin gave a quick succession of raps with his knuckles, waited awhile, then knocked again. No sound came from inside. The dogs continued barking.

  Stepping into the flowerbed, he made his way carefully among the rows of iris and azalea, moving across to the large bay window. He cupped his hands to either side of his eyes to block the glare and peered into the house. Through the glass was a long room in which the only furniture was a blue recliner and a small wooden table. There was no television, no stereo or electrical appliance. Against the walls, stacked almost to the ceiling, were brick and board bookshelves, on them rocks and sticks and various items o
ne might find in the surrounding woods: pine-cone and spores, hornets’ nests, and bits of shale. In the spaces between the bookshelves, Martin saw that Hollis had hung an assortment of leaves, all of them dipped in lacquer, framed in oak.

  There was nothing inherently bizarre about any of these articles, but their cumulative effect on Martin caused him to back away from the window and glance nervously around him. He was not yet convinced that Hollis had killed the dog, but the beagles, coupled with what he’d seen of the man’s home and the fact he was nowhere around, didn’t speak to his innocence. Looking over, he saw that next to the house were tire tracks, a patch of faded grass that looked to be where a vehicle normally sat. Martin jotted a few notes, went down the flagstone path, and started up the hill.

  Withers was inside the church when Martin made it back to the building. He climbed the steps, went through the double doors and into a small office where the deacon sat rifling through papers, placing currency into stacks, and stamping the backs of checks. The deacon saw Martin out of the corner of one eye and motioned him over to the desk, holding up a hand to let the deputy know he was in the middle of counting. As he finished, he leaned back in his chair and looked at Martin.

  “Well,” he asked, “what did Mr. Hollis have to say?”

  Martin sat down on the far corner of the desk. “He wasn’t home.”

  “Is that right?”

  The deputy scratched at his cheek. “He’s got a pen full of dogs down there, Doyle.”

  Withers raised his eyebrows. “Beagles?”

  Martin nodded.

  “You’re telling me that sick so-and-so nailed up one of his own dogs?”

  Martin crossed his arms. “We don’t know that. Most the people out here have beagles. For all we know, some drunk teenager from Maud thought he’d drive over and play a prank. What I need to figure out is how much longer you guys plan on holding your little camp meeting.”