by Haven Kimmel
I looked up and saw Dad gently setting the raccoon down in the middle of the yard, about twenty feet from the row of kennels. By this time the dogs were hysterical, throwing themselves against cage doors and leaping up and smacking their bony heads, repeatedly. When I was sure that none of them would actually escape, I walked out and joined my dad at the epicenter.
“That raccoon is gonna have a heart attack,” I shouted. Lights were coming on all over Mooreland, everywhere except Reed and Mary’s house. “It must be scared out of its wits.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” Dad said, glancing at the dogs and then at the raccoon, as if he were watching a tennis match.
“What’s the other way?”
“Well, this is the luckiest night of this particular raccoon’s life. There’s no chance it’ll ever come across thirty-six caged coon hounds again.”
I nodded. After a few minutes Deputy Jim drove up next to our house slowly, with his lights off. He stepped out of his cruiser and stretched, then moved his head from side to side to pop his neck. He was wearing his pajamas and his deputy hat.
Dad walked over to the car and talked to Jim for a few minutes. The dogs never slowed down. They would have barked and howled and heaved as long as they had oxygen. Jim took off his hat to scratch his head, and Dad said something that caused him to guffaw and bounce his forehead up and down on the roof of the car. Next to me the raccoon seemed to be having a seizure. I tried to make out its features in the moonlight, but it was just one big panicky fur ball. By this time Johnny Scroggs was standing in his yard watching the proceedings, and Edythe, who never slept at night anyway, had decided it was a good time to play the piano. She was banging away at “When the Roll Is Called up Yonder,” and whistling. My sister came over with a lawn chair, then sat down and started brushing her hair. My mom was conspicuous by her absence.
Before the night was over half the town had gathered in our yard, as if we were hosting a fourth of July picnic. Sometime before dawn Dad carried the raccoon, who was clearly permanently damaged, over to the bed of his truck and drove it out to the woods at the edge of town. The dogs continued howling for about ten seconds after he left, then collapsed into dog heaps and fell asleep. Throughout the conflagration there had been no sign of Kai and Tiger, neither hide nor hair, as my Mom Mary would say. They had stayed safely tucked in their dog houses, silent.
By the time Mom and Melinda and I got up for church the next morning, all the dogs were gone. Dad was already out in the garden, watering his fruit trees. I slipped on an old dress that had lost its hem; my gym socks and saddle shoes; grabbed my little pink New Testament from where Dad kept it on his end table, and told Mom I’d meet her at the corner.
I reached Dad at the same moment Reed reached the fence. Dad said hey to me, then looked up at the sky as if he’d just realized it was morning.
Reed cleared his throat so long and ferociously I feared one of his lungs had worked its way loose. “Pretty funny,” he finally said, without laughing.
“What’s funny?” Dad said, turning off the hose.
“You know what I’m talking about.” Reed bit off the end of every word, like a drill sergeant.
“Nothing funny happening over here, that I can see,” Dad said, wrapping the hose in a loop between his elbow and his hand. “It’s just another Sunday morning with me, Not Fit To Kill and Not Fit To Kill, Jr.”
In the yard Kai was lying on his back looking up at a cloud that was shaped like a daisy and Tiger had just tipped over sideways after chasing her own butt for ten straight minutes.
“Hmmph.” Reed snorted. It sounded like a thunderstorm that lost the nerve to strike.
Dad looked down at me. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Sunday School?”
I nodded. “I’m on my way. I’m meeting Mom at the corner.”
“Go on, then,” Dad said, carrying the hose back to the shed. “But don’t you cross that street.”
“Dad,” I moaned, collapsing in the middle like an old balloon. “There aren’t even any cars to watch for.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” he called back over his shoulder. “There’s danger everywhere.”
Reed closed his eyes for a moment, leaning against the fence, then sighed and began to clomp back toward his porch. He wore the same thick, heavy shoes my dad had to wear at Delco Remy, the factory where they had both worked, and the seat of his brown pants was shiny. I hated the feeling old people aroused in me, especially when they were eating so carefully and patiently, or when they were waiting for someone, or at times like this, when they were working so hard to get from point A to point B. I wanted to just quick take the situation in hand and make it better—here, give me that spoon, or climb on my back, I’ll just carry you home—but it also made me want to kick something and bite myself.
I swallowed, rubbed the nubbly outside of my Bible, then skipped out of the garden and began to hopscotch past Reed and Mary’s house. Reed was just stepping up onto the porch, slowly making his way back to his chair. As I passed them I called out, “Hey, Reed! Hey, Mary!”
And Reed took the time to turn all the way around and wave at me, and Mary called from the glider, “Hello, sweetheart.”
* * *
FAVORS FOR FRIENDS
Some families had lived in Mooreland since before it had a name; those families lived in their houses the way the rest of us live in our skin. But Minnie Hodson’s house couldn’t seem to hold anyone for very long. The years Petey Scroggs lived there I felt like I walked under a dark cloud, and then the whole rabbit-butchering bunch of them left, and the sun came out in a crazy bright spring, because Andy Hicks and his family became my neighbors. There were eight Hicks children, which was a lot even by Mooreland’s standards, and they were all excellent, but Andy was my favorite.
There are people in this world so perfect that the fact of them feels like a personal gift, and Andy was one of those people. Here are some perfect things about Andy: 1) He could be funny for a whole solid day without ever once being stupid, and one time during lunch he made me laugh so hard a noodle came out my nose. 2) He took me to the park to explain the facts of life to me. We were on the swingset, and what he told me was so graphic and so utterly wrong that I had to stop swinging; get sick; go home and not speak to my parents for three days because I feared they had done a particular thing that was known only by initials. Then I went to my friend Rose’s house and passed the information on to her, and her mother stopped speaking to my mother for three days. 3) Down the street from us lived a redheaded bully named Eddy Lipscomb, who was forever threatening to look at my panties. Andy wrote a song about him:
Eddy Spaghetti with the meatball eyes;
Put him in the oven and make french fries.
4) Andy was tall and blond and soft and kind of girly, and nothing like Eddy Lipscomb. 5) He could sing like the main singer of God’s own singing angel band. He could sing any kind of song, and would sing anytime I asked, even if we were walking down the street. Sometimes he just stood up in Friends Church and started to sing, and it was nothing but religious. His singing almost always made me feel happy and sad at the same time, but sometimes it was so beautiful that I just got mad, like once at the Mooreland Fair Talent Show, when it hit me especially hard and I decided to make him forget the words through mind control so he would stop singing, and he forgot the words and stopped singing and then I wanted to die.
When Andy came over one afternoon in August and asked if I would be willing to take care of the Hickses’ old dog, Jiggers, for a week, while the family went to visit relatives in a holler in Tennessee, I was thrilled to say yes. The last song I had heard Andy sing at church began “Feed my lambs, my son / Feed my sheep.” There was nothing about me that made me deserve a friend like him, and I wanted to feed his sheep.
I STOOD ON THE sidewalk outside the Hickses’ house, waving to them as they drove away in their massive station wagon. I was generally trying to look responsible. The
Hicks parents, Homer and Loverline, had somehow fit all eight of the children and at least a little bit of luggage into that one car, and the rear bumper was so close to the ground that sometimes sparks flew up.
When I turned around, Jiggers was still standing in the yard in exactly the same position she had been ten minutes before, her brown head bowed down by the long-term effects of gravity. It seemed that controlling her bladder was her one, overwhelming priority, because sometimes a little bit of pee would start to come out and she would look sad and shut it off and stand and stand and stand, and then a few minutes later a little bit more pee would come out. It was steambath hot that day, and she couldn’t even muster up the strength to pant, which made me worried, because as I understood it, dogs did all their breathing through their tongues.
I walked over to her and patted her on the head. Her fur was so soft it was like something already leaving this world. “Jiggers, honey, why don’t you just let all your pee out and then go lay down in the shade?” She looked up at me with her filmy eyes, which had once been brown, but were turning a milky blue. She moaned some, then shuffled over to the shade and lay down.
I sat down beside her. I wasn’t at all certain what was required of me as a dog-sitter. I knew I was supposed to give her food and water, but was that all? Obviously we were not going on any brisk walks; we weren’t going to play fetch; she certainly was not going to get me out of any life-threatening scrapes. When she plopped her head down and started to snore I decided to leave her be. I checked her food and water dishes, which were both full, and went on my way.
What with bicycle rodeo and some general town duties, I didn’t get back to check on Jiggers until it was dark, and then I couldn’t find her anywhere. Her dishes were still full, but she didn’t come when I called, and it was too dark for me to do any Indian tracking.
I ran home to my dad. He was sitting in his chair watching Bonanza when I burst through the door.
“Dad! I can’t find Jiggers! She’s nowhere to be seen and won’t come when I call!”
“She’s probably sleeping under the porch,” he said, without looking up from the television. “I’d get under the porch if I was Jiggers. It’s hotter than billy-be-doggone bangtree outside.”
“What does that stupid sentence mean, anyway?” I asked, sitting on the floor beside his chair. Everyone in my family said it except for me, because I had some standards.
“How can you say it’s stupid if you don’t know what it means?” he asked, giving me the one eyebrow.
“Okay, what does it mean?”
“I don’t know.” He turned back to the television.
“Aaaahh! Then where did you hear it?”
“From Mom Jarvis. I suspect you’d better take it up with her.”
“Mom Jarvis is dead! I never saw her in my whole life!”
“Don’t ask her, then. Ask your mother.”
“Don’t ask me,” my mom said from the corner of the couch.
“Do you even know what we’re talking about?”
“No. Just don’t ask me.” She was reading Stranger in a Strange Land for the sixteenth time.
“Now, Zippy: have I ever told you the origin of the saying ‘slicker than snot on a doorknob’?” Dad asked, causing me to fall over laughing. And thus I comfortably forgot about Jiggers, and went to bed without thinking about her again.
THE NEXT MORNING I looked in on Jiggers and saw nothing, and that afternoon and that night the same, and the third morning following the Hickses’ departure I was feeling a bit fluttery in my stomach, and by that night, when there was still no sign of her, I was basically panicked. When I went home that night Dad asked, incorrectly, if Jiggers had plenty of food and water and I said, honestly enough, that she did.
When Andy had been gone four days a distinctive smell began to hover around his house. On the fifth day it was strong enough to keep me from opening their gate, and on the sixth day customers at Newman’s Marathon began to complain, and gasoline still had lead in it.
The truth of the situation was not lost on my dad, and a certain binding sheepishness grew up around us. I didn’t know what to do, and he knew what to do but couldn’t do it, and it became clear that our relationship was simply not forged out of confrontation.
THE HICKSES CAME HOME late on a Saturday night. I was lurking like a bandit around the gas pump farthest from their house, periodically covering my face with my favorite T-shirt, which had printed on the front a large-mouth bass leaping up out of a lake.
The ten of them got out of their station wagon, one after another, slowly, as if out of a clown car at a very sad circus. Faced with the meeting of the two elements—the actual dead dog and the actual family—I could only smash my face up against the cool glass of the gas pump until my nose hurt. I kept thinking of how long my friends had Jiggers in their life; how she had been their family dog for as long as some of the little Hickses had been alive, and how I would have felt if we had lost Kai this terrible way, because of a stupid little neighbor girl who didn’t even know how to dog-sit.
Homer walked over to me in his exceedingly slow and shambling way and asked in his slow accent what happened.
“I think Jiggers must have tore her stomach on a sharp rock crawling under the porch, Homer, it was hotter than . . . it was so hot the whole time you were gone,” my voice was just a wretched little squeaky whisper, and I couldn’t seem to peel my face off the gas pump.
Homer had a high-pitched, breathy mountain voice, as gentle as a time that will never come again, and he turned to his eldest son, Chris, and told him to go fetch a blanket and a flashlight, and then he did the unthinkable. He crawled under the porch where the smell was nearly visible, and wrapped Jiggers’s body in an old blue blanket and dragged her out, and then he and his sons set to silently digging a grave in the backyard, under the shade of the mulberry tree we shared. It seemed to take hours. I stood out by their gate the whole time, fierce tears burning my face. When Jiggers was completely covered, all the Hicks men stood up and leaned on their shovels, and Andy began singing “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” His voice was sweeter than grief, and the last note of the song hovered so long I couldn’t bear to leave the front gate, even after all the Hickses had gone inside and begun getting ready for bed. Homer saw me there when he came to turn off the porchlight, and ambled out to me.
He stood before me quiet for a minute, and then his big hand covered the top of my head.
“We all want to thank you for taking such good care of Jiggers. She was an old dog, and it must have been a comfort to her to have you near her at the end.”
I could only nod, and then I took off running for home, wiping my face on my fish shirt as I went, so that no one would ask any questions. But when I ran in the door my dad barely looked up from his program and my mom just waggled her fingers at me from around her book, and I knew Dad would never mention Jiggers again, not her life or her death or her grave.
THE HICKSES DIDN’T COME to church the next day, but Loverline’s two sisters, Ernestine and Deltrice came, and they stood up and spoke about what a blessing it was to visit the home place with all their family gathered around them, and how we only know God through our relationships with his children, and when they sat down we all felt closer to Jesus, except for me, because I thought the whole idea was a bunch of crap.
I didn’t see Andy that whole week, because I mostly hid in my house, and then the following Sunday I wore some gorgeous plastic fingernails to church, and a little ways into the silent time Andy slid into the pew next to me. I couldn’t bear to look at him. He took a pencil out of his pocket and wrote on the church bulletin: “Don’t you have the most beee-yuuuu-ti-ful hands?!” And I wanted to write back so many things, but it was time to start singing, and when Andy opened his mouth, I knew absolutely that this was not one of the mourning days, but one of the rejoicing.
* * *
HAUNTED HOUSES
Julie and I had pitched a pup tent
in my front yard, right next to the fence where we very first met when we were three years old. We were lying on our bellies looking through binoculars at Edythe’s front door; Edythe, the evil old woman who had lived across the street from me my whole life. Edythe, who appeared to be immortal.
My binoculars were from the Mickey Mouse Club, and I knew that they were absolutely, inarguably intended for moral purposes, such as Finding Hurt Or Lost Things, and that the Mouseketeers might be unhappy to find me using them to Spy On An Old Woman, but I had to keep a safe distance from her.
Julie’s binoculars were great big and professional, and came in a crumbling leather case that left brown streaks on our hands. We had swiped them off Julie’s Granny, who was all the time forgetting where she put stuff anyway. If necessary, we were both prepared to swear on the Holy Bible that Granny had given them to us and then forgotten. This was, I very well knew, a shameful use for a Bible.
I don’t know how long we’d been lying there watching Edythe’s door, but it must have been forever. Julie was getting cranky because we’d forgotten to bring candy bars, and I was feeling the beginnings of about six hundred chigger bites in the waistband of my shorts. I was about to give up when Edythe’s front door opened, causing my throat to close so tightly that my breath came out in a little whistle.
We snapped our binoculars into a locked position, and as soon as I stopped wheezing I told Julie what I had learned about Edythe since our last reconnaissance mission.
“My sister says she eats a stew made out of puppies.”
Julie turned and looked at me for just the briefest second. “Nuh uhn,” she said, but in a way that was like she wanted to hear more. Edythe was standing on her front stoop, looking up at the sky and withholding her approval.