Church of the Dog (25 page)

“People who drink whiskey get mean,” she says.

“Hm. Yeah, well, if you think about it, people drink whiskey to escape their pain. Maybe the lesson your parents offered you is how much it hurts others when a person tries to escape their own pain,” I say, hoping she can hear that I’m trying to encourage her not to run from her child.

“So why aren’t we taking your car to your mom’s house?” I ask.

“It’s a bad scene there,” she says.

“Tell me about it,” I say.

“Well, tonight I locked Faith and me in the bathroom because I don’t have a bedroom. I sleep on the couch. And when my mom and her latest dud boyfriend start fighting, it’s important to lock me and Faith somewhere, you know?”

“You’re not safe?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “Like tonight, she was begging him not to leave. I was watching through the keyhole. She was drunk and standing in front of the door, trying to block him. He jerked the door open, and it smacked her in the side of the face. She fell, and he yelled, ‘Get out of the way, bitch!’ He pulled the door even wider so that it pushed her into a little ball behind the door. Before he slammed the door, he yelled at me, ‘Shut that fucking kid up!’ and then my mom started screaming at me, ‘This is all because of you, you little whore!’ ”

I tear up and exhale. “Ouch.”

“I didn’t care. I don’t care what she thinks of me. She’s pathetic. After that I watched her lean back against the wall behind the door and then slide right down it and eventually pass out. And then, I don’t know, it hit me that I was looking at my future, and if I stayed, Faith could expect a life just like mine. And I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, at this.” She gestures to her fat lip. “And I looked at Faith sitting in her little car seat on the bathroom floor. That’s where I put her when I’m afraid to touch her, afraid I’ll shake her or hit her. And I thought about how when she woke me up screaming for the fifth time last night, I lost it, and I smacked her just like my mom smacked me.”

I take a big breath and try to think of something to say.

Apparently I wasn’t quick enough because she looks out the side window and says quietly, “I smacked a little tiny baby, a helpless little baby. And it didn’t make her stop screaming, and it didn’t make me feel better. It didn’t solve anything. The only good that came out of it was that I realized I had to get rid of her.”

All that shame. I don’t know what to do with all that shame.

Kelli instructs me to park in front of the Elks’, which makes me uncomfortable. I get her out of the backseat and help her into the bed of Daniel’s pickup, which makes me even more uncomfortable. And from there, we drive her up the hill to the hospital.

I open the door, with Faith in my arms, and notice the sound the record player makes when the needle has run out of songs. I follow the sound, pick up the arm, lay it gently on the rest, and then turn the record player off. I pause to admire the old record player, forty or fifty years old now and still working. None of my CD players have survived even five years. I consider how this music technology might represent our generations. My grandparents were tough. They were built to last. They endured a lot of hard times. Meanwhile, two months of hard times sent Kelli running. But as soon as I think it, I remember the part of Kelli’s letter where she said she hit her daughter just like her mother hit her, and I realize it wasn’t two months of hard times that had sent Kelli running. It was a lifetime of hard times.

Mara guides Kelli into the downstairs guest bedroom.

“Um . . . I think Faith needs her diaper changed,” I say to Mara, although I doubt she has any more of an idea of how to do those things than I do.

“Kelli, you’re going to have to coach us,” Mara says.

Kelli talks Mara through it while I watch and learn. Then Mara hands Faith to me, and I take her to the kitchen where I try to make heads or tails of the directions on the formula can. She’s hungry and mad. I bounce her while I heat the formula and make exaggerated happy faces at her. Then I pour the formula in a bottle, squirt it on my arm like I’ve seen women do on TV, figure it feels all right to me, and give her the bottle. She devours it. I burp her, and she pukes all over my shoulder.

I carry her upstairs so I can get a new shirt. I set her down on my bed and wonder whether I’m supposed to lay her down on her back or stomach. I lay her down on her back and watch her carefully to make sure she keeps breathing. Then I pick her up and wonder if one day I’ll be going to father-daughter events with her when she’s older. I imagine attending her graduation and walking her down the aisle at her wedding. I’ve never considered escorting a daughter down the aisle before. In my imagination it feels good. I feel happy just thinking about it.

I also know it’s possible Kelli will take her away long before that. Then I consider it’s possible that I might escort Kelli down the aisle. Maybe she’ll end up like a daughter to me . . . or at least a little sister.

“I just can’t do it,” I hear Kelli say to Mara as I walk down the hall.

“It’s a really hard job,” Mara replies. “I can see you’re exhausted. ”

“I haven’t slept in two months.”

“Tonight you’re going to sleep here. Daniel and I are going to take care of Faith so you can just sleep the whole night and into tomorrow, okay? We’ll get some good food into you, keep some ice on this ankle, and get you feeling a little more like yourself. Okay?”

“Okay,” Kelli relents.

“You know, I can’t make you stay here or stay with your baby if you don’t want to,” Mara says to her. “If you do want to stay here, we’ll help you take care of Faith. When you start to feel like you’re going to snap, you can step out and we’ll cover for you. If you don’t want to live here, our door is always open to you. If you need a break, we’re here. Okay? You don’t have to make a decision tonight or tomorrow or this week. I think when you’ve caught up on your sleep, things will look a lot different to you.”

Faith starts crying again. “Sometimes I hate her,” Kelli confesses to Mara in a whisper. “Sometimes I find myself thinking she ruined my life even though I know I ruined my own life by having her.”

Oh, boy.

Mara says, “You know, Kelli, I think every path has a price. Every path. There would have been a price for not having her, too. I mean, there are other women out there thinking they ruined their lives by not having children.” Kelli doesn’t reply, so Mara tries a different approach. “Sometimes when I’m really tired, I hate teaching. There are days I’m so exhausted that I can’t remember what I was thinking when I chose this profession.”

“Really?” Kelli asks.

“Really,” Mara says. “And then by the end of summer vacation I’m ready to do it all over again. Why don’t you sleep for a few days and see how things look?”

“Okay,” she says.

Mara meets me in the kitchen and gives me a bewildered look. She takes some leftover lasagna out of the fridge, puts it on a plate, and sticks it in the microwave. “How do you feel about all this?” she whispers to me.

“I kind of like it,” I whisper back, smiling at Faith who has just fallen asleep in my arms.

I walk behind Mara as she takes the hot lasagna to Kelli. Kelli has already fallen asleep. “Geez, she looks small. Small and young. She’s just a kid herself,” I say.

“Yeah. No shit.” Mara shakes her head.

Three nights later Kelli chops cucumbers, tomatoes, cilantro, and green onion for the tabouli salad while Daniel sets the table and I fry up falafel balls. Faith fusses, so Daniel picks her up and gives her a bottle. Bluegrass music fills the house, making silence between us warm and comfortable. We’re taking it day by day, but I suspect Kelli is staying.

Zeus barks, Faith cries, and I notice headlights coming up the driveway. “Can you watch this?” I ask Kelli. She hops over on one foot and takes the spatula from me.

I wipe my hands on my apron and walk out the back door. The beams of light are coming from a VW Bus. I smile. Adam.

He parks, gets out, and walks over to me. His smile and his aura light up the whole yard.

“Welcome!” I call out to him.

“It’s so nice to see you again,” he says.

I put my arms around his neck and kiss him.

In the middle of the night Faith wakes me up. I walk outside with the child in my arms. Climbing roses have sprung up all around the entrance of our home. I take it as a good sign.

I hear a waltz about angels out of nowhere, like I do in my dancing dreams. Across the yard Edith and Earl smile at me and waltz. I step out into the yard, baby in my arms, and join them.

Kaya McLaren

AN INTRODUCTION TO
Church of the Dog

After coming to the startling conclusion that her fiancé was not really the man she wanted him to be (
that man
would pay the $10 to get her to the hospital when she is ill), Mara O’Shaunnessey abandons everything—her feisty grandmother, her job, her home, and her garden (carefully transplanted to her grandmother’s yard)—to take a position as an art teacher in a small farming community in rural Oregon. Excited to start all over again, Mara immediately makes herself at home; despite having nowhere to live, she has already acquired a companion, Harvey, a pig she rescues from certain doom at the local livestock fair.

With Harvey and the rest of her worldly possessions in tow, Mara is drawn to a ranch on the edge of town, the home of Earl and Edith McRae. Earl and Edith are busy people. Running their ranch, after all, takes a lot of energy—spiritual, physical, and emotional. And at first it seems that they don’t have time for someone like Mara, though Earl begrudgingly rents her the old cabin behind the McRaes’ own house.

But keeping busy is the only way the McRaes can keep their minds off the tragedies that have visited them. The indescribable heartbreak of losing a child. How much they miss their only grandson, Daniel. Keeping busy, though, also prevents indulging in frivolities—like dancing, laughing, and enjoying their time together.

As Mara sets about fixing up her little cabin, Earl and Edith become more and more enchanted by their new tenant. The moment she finishes up the mural of a dog she’s painted on the side of her house, the very dog depicted shows up during a thunderstorm. Edith finds herself compelled to do things she never expected to be doing at this stage of her life. Of course, making snow angels while naked and taking kamikaze horseback missions into town in the middle of the night isn’t something she thought she’d do at
any
stage of her life. Earl and Edith find themselves dancing each night in their parlor, roses woven into Edith’s hair, just like when they met. But what is Mara really? A witch, a shaman, a healer, a guardian angel? No matter, Earl and Edith are having too much fun to wonder for long.

The McRaes’ beloved grandson, Daniel, has been leading a life of his own since the day he fled to Alaska. Scarred by the death of his parents, Daniel has always been much better at running away than facing the disappointment on his grandparents’ faces. Despite all these years of near silence, his grandparents write regularly to ask him to come home. And until now he has always refused, content to forget what he was once supposed to be and concentrate on what he has become—a fisherman. But this letter feels different. This time his grandfather even says “please.” There are more than just fences that need mending.

What Daniel finds on the ranch astonishes him. Edith and Earl laughing more, flirting more, loving more. In fact, there are so many changes, all connected to Mara, that the ranch does not seem like the oppressive place he ran away from. Now it feels like a place of happiness, safety, and stability.

But this happiness, as Daniel is terribly aware, is fragile: Earl is gravely ill.

As Mara and Daniel become partners in running the ranch, she must help him finally make peace with his past and future. Mara knows no being passes through this life without making a difference for good or for ill. But as Daniel lashes out as the awful memories of the past begin to visit the present and Mara feels the powers she has relied upon for so long begin to fail her, she wonders if she has ever really been able to do any good at all. How can Mara hope to change this grown man whose emotions are so tangled? The clarity both Daniel and Mara seek arrives unexpectedly with a strange cry that splits the night. And suddenly the two are tied together as family, a clear future of both sorrow and joy spreading out before them.

ABOUT KAYA MCLAREN

Kaya McLaren teaches art and lives on the east slope of Snoqualmie Pass in Washington state with her dog, Big Cedar. Her second novel,
On the Divinity of Second Chances
, will be published by Penguin in winter 2009.

A CONVERSATION WITH KAYA MCLAREN

I didn’t grow up on a ranch. I wanted to. For a while when I was a kid, I did have a pony, and then later a horse. I rode my bike out to take care of them every day. There’s nothing like a good horse—nothing. After I no longer had a horse, I simply rode any horse anyone would let me ride. I still do. I was a horse instructor at a summer camp for a short time and I worked as a guide on a dude ranch, too. I had a horse a few years ago. She nearly killed me, though, so I sold her to a breeding farm. Now she just eats grass and gets lucky.

Mary Roberts is a rancher in Montana I interviewed. She’s the reason behind the great details. My second cousin Robin not only put me in touch with Mary, but also answered some of my questions. Robin and her husband are bucking bull breeders and stock contractors. Glimpses into their world are always a treat for me.