After school I slipped their harnesses on and hitched them to the sled and we headed for the golf course behind the house. I never saw snow so deep that Hermes could not break a trail in it. When we crossed the frozen stream at the back of the course, the clicking of their toenails on the ice always startled them. I loved the crossing; the shadow we cast on that bright surface made a grand sight.
In February the temperature fell to thirty-five below and stayed there. My mother could not bear to leave any animal outside in that weather. My father reminded her that we had no basement, no garage, no shed of any kind.
“We have a big living room,” she said. “We could partition it. Half for the dogs and half for us.”
She kept after him till he put a chain-link fence down the middle of the living room, while my mother took out the rug and the furniture. From then on, the dogs slept indoors. A maze of smaller fences separated them from each other. The gates on these fences were never locked. When I stayed up to watch the Saturday-night movie in the living room with my parents, the loping and breathing and snuffling and growling did not bother my mother or me, but it drove my father wild. I think he could have gotten used to this, but something happened to me that changed everything for all of us.
I got the flu, the kind that keeps you in bed for two weeks. I felt as if someone had sucked all the strength out of me and left me on the small white shore of my bed to find my way back to health. My father took over my tasks and did them, in his own way.
He exercised the dogs, but he did not take out the sled. He walked them singly. Of course, as he pointed out to me, he could not walk seven dogs every day. My mother walked them when she had time, but she reminded him that the dogstar man had willed them to my father, not to us.
He fed the dogs, but he refused to handle the fish meal and fat, and he bought canned meat and dehydrated chicken kibbles in hundred-pound bags that scarcely lasted a week. Soon the dogs were demanding four meals a day and howling at night. My mother found that if she opened the gate in the living room fence, the dogs grew quiet. After everyone was in bed, they would leave their quarters and gather in my room.
It is not easy sleeping with seven dogs, even when you love them. In the safety of my bedroom they went on dreaming of their old fears, just as I went on dreaming of mine. Roused by a remembered injury, Lou Gehrig would leap out of sleep and sink his teeth into John Kennedy’s neck, and I would fly out of bed to part them. When sled dogs fight, generations of jackals and wolves snarl in their blood. All night part of my mind stayed awake, listening for the low growl that signaled the beginning of a quarrel. When morning came, I never felt rested.
And Melville got sick. His fur fell out in odd patches, though my mother washed him with Castile soap and sponged his legs, chest, face, and tail with a special foam that Dr. Herrgott recommended for shedding animals.
A thaw surprised us in February, and my mother agreed to let the dogs sleep in the yard again. But the dogs had caught the scent of being human and could not get enough of it. From darkness till dawn they howled. I was back in school but not strong enough to take over caring for the dogs, and I suppose it was the howling and complaints from the neighbors that finally drove my father to make what he warned me was an important announcement.
“I’m going to sell Olaf’s dogs. I can’t afford to keep them.”
We had just sat down to dinner, and he looked at me to see how I would take his words. I said nothing.
“We’ll only sell them to someone who can really take care of them,” said my mother.
That night I fell asleep to the howling of the dogs. What woke me was a silence so sinister that I jumped out of bed and hurried to the window, certain they’d been poisoned. My heart nearly thudded through my chest when I saw someone was indeed in the yard. He was unchaining them. First John Kennedy, then Babe Ruth, then Hermes.
I never thought of calling my father. No, I pulled on my clothes, snatched my jacket from the bedpost, and marched out into the yard. When the thief turned his face toward me, I was speechless with fright.
“I’ve come for my dogs,” said the dogstar man. “They miss me, and I miss them.”
“You’re dead,” I whispered. My teeth were chattering. “You fell through the ice and drowned.”
“That’s true,” said the dogstar man. And he went on unchaining them. They were lining up, letting him slip the harnesses over them, taking their old places. Hermes first, then Finn McCool and Melville in the second spot, then Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, and in the last position, Eleanor Roosevelt and John Kennedy.
“If you’re dead, how are you going to take your dogs?”
“Easy,” said the dogstar man. “They can cross over. Didn’t you know that? Didn’t they teach you anything?”
The dogsled was leaning against the back of the house, and he pulled it down, hitched the dogs to it, and took his place on the back runners. He beckoned me over.
“For you,” he said. “I don’t need this where I’m going.”
And he dropped the whistle my father had made into my hand.
<
* * * *
Prism Tree
TONY DANIEL
F
ARTHER NORTH—Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia—the mountains are big. Big, big wrinkles in the land-skin of America, caused by a huge traffic accident a few million years ago—when Eurasia took a wrong turn at the equator and smashed into North America. But the wrinkle tapers out, grows narrower and smaller as it winds south. In northern Alabama, there are no more mountains—just foothills. That is where my grandfather lived, in the country, about five miles from the town of Newell, population: almost fifty, if you count the suburbs.
Grandaddy lived on his farm. Before him, it had been his father’s. His great grandfather had settled the land under the old homestead act.
On hot weekends, when the temperature climbed to the upper nineties, and the Birmingham air was full of the sweat and humid breath of a million people, my family would go over to the country, as we called it, to see Grandaddy and to dig our toes into the cool Randolf County sod. Well, it was my sister and I who did the toe digging.
First thing when we got there, we’d race through the big cornfield down the hill from the cabin. Each of us took a separate row so that we would only catch fleeting glimpses of one another through a green curtain of corn fronds; neither one would know who’d won until we burst from the other end and collapsed at the windbreak’s edge. Kim was two years older than I, and she usually won when I was a kid. After I hit puberty, I began to come out first more often, though I sometimes suspect that Kim, beginning to discover the secrets of the Southern woman—the strategic loss of battles to win wars—would let me win.
After the traditional race, we would go to the creek for a swim. Well, not really a swim, because the creek was four feet at its deepest. We waded and splashed, mostly. There was a rock that the creek fell over, must have been six feet long—and sloped at an angle just right for sliding down. Green algae covered it, slick as fish skin. You couldn’t stand on it; your feet would fly from under you, and your head crack hard against its deceptive soft covering. But you could sit at the top, push off, then shoot down the rock, watching the water pool below getting bigger. And you’re in, and the water is so cold at first you can barely breathe.
If you wanted to, you could float on down the creek into the Tub. The creek water had carved out a channel through a big rock, a channel in the shape of a bathtub, but about ten feet long and two feet deep. The creek bustled through the constriction at twice its normal speed. Kim and I would bring our knees up until we were tight balls, buoyant. We careened down the Tub, bumping into the sides like those toy ducks you see at carnivals.
Then we would put on our clothes and go bother the cows. Grandaddy’s cows would spook at anything, so the game was to sneak up on them and pet them. Kim would go and move the cows in a certain direction. I’d be in the grass, on my stomach. Cows can only see in black an
d white and are too stupid to notice something that’s not moving much. I’d have to wait until the cows were almost trampling me, then I’d jump up, run at them, and pet whichever one I could get my hands on. Kim was always the cow driver. Like I said, she is a smart woman.
Then we’d go back to join the old folks, laughing as we walked over the rocky pasture. Mother would’ve cooked lunch, usually pork chops and collards. She always did because Grandaddy wasn’t a good cook and ate the same things day after day since my grandmother died. Mom is a schoolteacher, and Grandaddy, like a kid resigned to his fate, let her make him dinner. “Dinner,” by the way, is what they call lunch in Randolf County.
There were the pork chops for meat, collards from Grandaddy’s garden, green and steaming, black-eyed peas and corn bread. That corn bread could not be duplicated. Grandaddy took a portion of his corn crop every year to a miller over the state line in Georgia. The miller—Mr. Hodges seems like the right name—had a stone grinding wheel turned by the falling water of Rocky Creek. I think it was from the miller that Grandaddy got the idea for a waterwheel.
After dinner, Grandaddy and I would go riding trees. I rode them, of course, and Grandaddy watched, giving me fine pointers on my technique. My father said Grandaddy rode trees until I was young, until arthritis and brittle bones forced him to stop. I would’ve loved to see my grandfather, a fifty-year-old man, his hair beginning to take on the smoky grayness which is all I have ever known it to be, come cascading down, hanging for all he was worth onto the top of a young hickory. There is nothing like riding trees—no amusement-park ride, no sport. There is nothing more physically taxing, for those few minutes you are inching your way to the tree’s very top. Then the descent down the empty air, and if you’re lucky, you’ve picked just the right tree and it sets your feet onto the ground as gently as cat’s breath on the hand.
Then my family would leave. We all loaded up into the Fairmont station wagon and drove away, leaving a billowing cloud of dust, with the tires crackling on the dirt driveway like distant thunder.
* * * *
But during my teenage years, in the summer, I would stay behind to help Grandaddy tend the land. We lived in the log cabin that his father built by the creek. Grandaddy had attached a waterwheel to it and that was where his electricity came from. He didn’t pay Alabama Power one cent. The waterwheel was the overshot type, and in order to get the head he needed to turn it fast enough, Grandaddy cut a ditch from two hundred feet up the creek to bring faster, higher water to the flume.
I fed the cows and drove the tractor, plowing fields, bush-hogging, for many summers; I always came back to Birmingham with a farmer’s tan. At night, Grandaddy and I would read, or talk.
He told me about growing up, wandering the newly turned fields looking for arrowheads, swimming in the creek, shooting down the Tub just like me. When he told me about his first meeting with Betty, my grandmother, his eyes would fix on the wall, as if he were concentrating on seeing in his mind every detail, every texture of her. But the image must have been blurry, because he always gazed through tearing eyes.
They had met when he was eighteen, she was twenty. He was squirrel hunting up the creek, in the woods one farm over from his land, when he saw the fattest squirrel in Randolf County sitting on a tree limb not twenty feet from him. What was better (and stranger), the animal did not move, even though Grandaddy was pretty certain it had seen him. Grandaddy fell to one knee, took careful aim. Slowly, with a fluid motion, he pulled the trigger—something hit him. His shot flew wild, too wild for even the wide scatter of pellets to harm the squirrel.
“What’s got into you, trying to shoot my squirrel! I ought to take that shotgun and wrap it around your neck.”
Grandaddy looked up to see a young lady with blond hair and a paint-stained smock leaning over him. The music of the creek and the woods filled the air. And he was in love. They were married a year later, in the First Baptist Church.
I never knew my grandmother, but I felt her presence all about the cabin. Her paintings were on the walls, paintings of birds, snakes, squirrels, trees—and at least twenty studies of the creek, in this light or that, near the Tub, the sliding rock. I got my schooling in engineering at Auburn, but I got my draftsman’s hand from my grandmother.
The best of my grandmother’s works—so good that it made the others look like crude paint-by-numbers landscapes, though they’re actually quite nice, almost professional—was a tapestry she had woven over a summer, three years after she and Grandaddy were married, when she was expecting my father. Grandaddy called this tapestry a wall rug, and he gave to it a whole wall of the cabin. It was a windbreak, he said, keeping out drafts, keeping us warm or cool, depending on the season.
The tapestry was of a huge old tree—the big oak tree directly above the cabin. My grandfather told me that he and my grandmother used to climb that hill, taking the easy way through the cornfield, on afternoons after the work was mostly done. They would look out over the farm.
“Betty called it her patchwork quilt,” my grandfather told me. “The way the fields and woods fit together, with the creek threading through them.”
And behind the tree in the tapestry was that patchwork of forms, a little close and out of perspective—or maybe that is just the way my grandmother saw the land, gathered together for warmth like a bundled-up quilt. The cabin was just to the left of the tree trunk, a small box in the distance, with a single thread of smoke curling out of the chimney. I never noticed until my grandfather pointed it out one day, but if you looked really closely, you could see that the smoke-thread was a twisted braid of my grandmother’s blond hair, looking more like sunlight streaming from the cabin than wood smoke.
The tree in the tapestry was depicted in the moment of being struck by lightning. There was a twisted cut down its trunk, in the same shape as the black scar on the tree on the hill. The tapestry was just a picture of lightning striking a big oak—nothing unusual, nothing special.
But beneath the tree, running out of the trunk’s base in meandering rivulets, was a rainbow of separate colors. That’s why Kim and I called the old oak the Prism Tree. The light from a woven, wool-white lightning strike jagged down through the tangled branches, into the tapestry tree’s trunk, then seemed to channel through the tree and emerge below it, split into a spectrum perfectly describing the makeup of the emotions the tree evoked, just as a spectroscopic chart will tell you what a star is made of. But there was no analysis here, no formulaic layout. Instead, my grandmother had put a fugue of color into the yarn, the heart of tree, lightning storm and the earth below. The tapestry was made completely of wool (except for that strand of hair) dyed from local plants my grandmother had collected to extract their colors.
My grandmother died of cancer, slowly and painfully, and Grandaddy buried her on that hill, facing her grave so that she’d have the same view as she’d depicted in the tapestry. He never said much about her, but there was no doubt he missed her. We shared the cabin’s main room those summer evenings, and sometimes I’d hear him wake up, shuffle around in his bed as though something were wrong, out of place. He’d speak her name, quiet and sweet, like the low end of a flute’s scale. Then, after a moment, he’d say it again, this time a whisper, full of loss and longing. When I woke in the mornings before him (which was not often), I’d see him crowded to one side of the bed, just in case, past all hope, his Betty should come back and want a place to lie down beside him.
* * * *
So I was there that summer afternoon the power man came.
The white sedan pulled up in front of the house, the gravel crackling and firing under the wheels like damp firecrackers reluctantly exploding. Dust from the road rose like smoke from those firecrackers and caked the side of the car from the bottom of the door up the side, almost obscuring the decal just under the window. The decal said Alabama Power Company. I wondered what the man was doing out here—Grandaddy had discontinued his power service years ago.
“Howdy, s
on,” said the tall, red-faced man who stepped out of the car. “I’m looking for John Dearburn.”
I had come back to the house to use the bathroom and was about to head back out to the cornfield.
“Grandaddy’s out walking the cornfield,” I said. “Want me to go get him?”
“I’d appreciate it,” said the man, not quite meeting my eyes.
Something was wrong with the man, I thought, as I ran to get Grandaddy. Tree shadows of the windbreak flickered over me. The man was slumped like he’d been punched in the stomach. Corn shadows of the field flickered around me. “Grandaddy!”
“Hiram Funderburg,” the man said. He said it while Grandaddy was still too far away for him to extend his hand. “Need to talk to you about something, Mr. Dearburn.”
My grandfather asked the man inside the cabin.
I did not follow them. Instead, I sat outside and watched the water-wheel turning—whizzing around like an out-of-breath courier trying to deliver a message to an impatient general, water flying from it like a spray of sweat. What message could a creek be carrying? But that little creek is powerful, I thought. It must carry hundreds, even thousands of gallons an hour.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 5