Church of the Dog (8 page)

I was relieved and confused when I arrived in Pendleton without findin’ anything but an old red Japanese fuel-efficient gumball machine of a car that had been at the bottom of one of those hills. I called to the car, and when no one answered, I studied the tracks and figured the car had gone down before the last rain. I figured I could just call the sheriff later to verify that he knew about it. I had no interest in lookin’ in that car.

I figured Daniel must’ve just froze up and drove off. I kicked myself for not keepin’ a closer eye on him that day. I knew Whitey and I could’ve kept him from blowin’ his big chance.

But I had it wrong. And I can’t really blame him for not takin’ that road.

Shawn is a seventeen-year-old mother in my class. I think about her life as a woman in the evening, filled with responsibilities beyond my comprehension, yet under the rules and expectations of a child in the day. It seems silly to me that I am supposed to be her teacher when she is, in truth, mine.

To assist her through the intimidation she’s feeling from the sculpture assignment, I put a piece of wadded-up newspaper under a slab of clay. It forms a dome shape now, and with that she reluctantly begins to sculpt.

When I check on her next, I see she’s made a very primal-looking mask. Maybe it’s not a mask; it doesn’t have any holes in it. It’s a sad face.

“I like it, Shawn!” I tell her. I make it my practice to only say things I mean, so when I give them a compliment, they know I mean it.

“Yeah, me, too,” she replies with an uncharacteristic shyness, momentarily dropping the tough-girl act.

After the bisque fire, she glazes it with tobacco brown, red-brown on the lips, and pinkish brown in the eye sockets. I think to myself, She’s going to ruin it, but she’s approaching it as an experiment. Since I see that as the fundamental mind-set of revolutionary creators of art, I’m not about to squelch it.

A week later, when I unload the kiln from the glaze fire, I discover the glaze did not ruin it at all. Quite the contrary: It looks old and authentic. It looks like timeless sadness.

I see her on her way to another class an hour before her scheduled art time. “Hey!” I call to her. “Your piece is out! It looks awesome! Go check it out!”

She glances back at the class she’s supposed to go to, and then with a sparkle in her eye, she slips into the pottery lab of the art room.

When she emerges, she smiles. “I like it.”

“I want to show it in the art show. What do you want to call it?”

“Let me think about it.”

When the next class arrives, she works at a table with other students. I ask a couple of the others about naming their works, and they easily spit out names. I ask Shawn for a title again, and she once again replies, “Let me think about it.”

“Think fast. I’m making tags now,” I tell her.

She approaches me maybe two minutes later, looks me in the eye, pauses, and whispers, “Unwanted Face.” I nod.

As I begin the mindless task of making labels, I wonder whose. Whose unwanted face? Hers when she was pregnant? Her child’s, unwanted by his father? Hers and her child’s, unwanted by the community?

Mara finished her sauna. Actually, it’s a small shed with a bench and a tiny tin wood stove. The sauna door has twelve small panes of glass in it, and we so enjoy looking out at the landscape. She made a triangle-shaped stained-glass window above the door, a wild sun, white and yellow marbles set among the triangles in different hues of yellow radiating into a purple background. I do love the gold and violet light rays that stream in.

“Hm,” I reply, looking at the floor. Mara has just told me the story of her student, Shawn, and we are talking about women. " ’Course, things were different in my day. Women and men had an agreement. Women expected and demanded that men marry them before having sex so that they knew their child would be cared for. People think we held out for moral reasons, but morality follows practicality.”

“Hm . . . so you’re saying young women essentially need to unionize,” Mara clarifies.

I chuckle. “Well, it’s hard to demand anyone buy cows when people are giving away free milk,” I reply. “Seems like it would be best for the kids.”

Mara throws a couple handfuls of water at the stove in the sauna to steam things up. “Double-edged sword for women,” she begins. “On one hand, they were materially provided for, so they could full-time parent; on the other hand, it seems many had to tolerate being treated like servants, becoming invisible, or being abused.”

“Sure, for some the arrangement didn’t work, but for most I think there was mutual appreciation. Men and women did different things. There was no competition. There was appreciation. We had fewer choices, but I think it was easier,” I explain.

“Now I guess it’s more extreme,” she says. “There are more women extremely worse off, and there are more women extremely happier than they would’ve been in that arrangement. I think in that day I could’ve never been an artist like I am now. Babies are so much work. They don’t leave room in your life for much else, though from what I observe, you love them so much, you don’t mind. . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what I truly want. I wonder if creating art is really just a pathetic substitute for creating life, you know? All that creative energy cookin’ inside me with nowhere to go. Maybe the whole reason I think it’s so much more fun to be an artist than a mom is that I’ve never really allowed myself to think about what it would feel like to be a mom . . . that new level of love other women try to tell you about. On occasion I allow myself to entertain the idea for about five seconds. Then I’m left feeling sad about not being a mom, and it strikes me as so unnatural that I haven’t had a child. You know, like what other animal has no offspring nearly twenty years after reaching sexual maturity? And then I feel angry that I’m choosing not to be a mom because if I ever decided to be a mom, I’d probably have to raise that child all by myself. It seems like being a mom should be our biological entitlement, and yet, because it takes so much to attain the standard of living we are expected to have, we have come to see being a full-time mom as a privilege.” She suddenly seems self-conscious at having gotten so intense. “So what can you do? Become a teacher and borrow other people’s kids.” With that she tries to lighten things up.

I don’t buy her idea about women today thinking that being a full-time mom is a privilege. “I think women don’t want to stay home with babies. I think money is just an excuse. I think the truth is, being a stay-at-home mom is the hardest thing they’ve ever done, and they want nothing to do with it. They can’t get out of their houses fast enough,” I declare.

“Do you think respect plays a part in it?” Mara asks. “Do you think moms are less respected now, so working that hard for no respect is contributing to moms not wanting to do it?”

“Hm . . . I don’t think it’s even recognized what it takes to raise a child. All these people asking mothers if they work. What is that all about? They have no idea. No recognition, no respect, and no idea,” I state.

Mara nods as she thinks. We are quiet for a while, and then she says, “I think I still prefer my choices.” There is another pause. “But I do see a lot of others overwhelmed by the same choices and getting lost.”

“I guess too many choices or too few choices can make a woman feel lost, depending on the woman,” I say, thinking of my friends, some who did have dreams outside of family, dreams they never even dared to tell their husbands about.

“Hm,” she says in agreement.

“Just seems like back then mothering was enough. Now no one gives a flying hoot about mothering. All men care about these days is money. They want their women to bring home money.”

“Hm . . . somewhere the choice became obligation?” she questions.

“Used to be, we were valued just for being women.”

“Do you think women lowered their expectations of men and let them off the hook, or do you think men are just plain dropping the ball?” Then she quickly adds, “Generally speaking, of course, because I do see some really great fathers out there.”

“Mm . . . both. You know, ‘Why buy the cow if you can milk it for free?’ ”

“You know, Edith, I don’t want to be milked for free, and by that I mean taken advantage of, but I don’t want to be bought, either.”

I wonder what these young women are so afraid of. I don’t really see them getting ahead to anywhere. Most of them just seem tired and lonely. We used to get respect.

The feed lot fences are in need of some serious repair. In a couple weeks about two hundred yearlings will be brought here, weaned, sorted, and fed for two or three months before being sent off to a larger feed lot somewhere else—most of them, anyway. The best-quality third of all the heifers will be kept to replace the old ones that have lost so many teeth that they’ll never make it through another winter. As I replace boards, I hear hooves and look up to see a tall, skinny guy who sort of looks like the kid on the cover of
Mad Magazine
, only with a narrower face. It’s Tim. The hips of his old bay stick out now.

“Hey! I heard you was back in town!” he shouts as he rides up.

“Word spreads fast!” I answer. “I just got here a couple days ago. Is that your old cutting horse?”

“Yeah, this is Shilo, all right. She’s thirty-one now, but she can still buck me off from time to time.”

“I’d buck you off, too, if I was an arthritic grandmother and you crawled on my back,” I say.

“Nah. She likes it. Gives her a sense of purpose,” he says. He ties her to a timber, reaches into his saddlebag, pulls out two cans of Budweiser, and hands one to me.

Out of habit I look back at the house to see if anyone sees me, and then I duck behind the barn with Tim. Our backs slide down the barn wall until we find our seats in the dirt. We carefully crack the explosive beers and slurp.

“So what have you been up to?” I ask.

“Well, I just got back from Moses Lake. I was visiting my son. He’s ten now.”

“Wait. You have a son?” I ask. “How is that possible? I was there when that bull landed on your nuts.”

“I know,” he says. “When my son’s mother first told me I had a son—that was just three years ago—I was like, ‘No you don’t, you golddigger! I know that ain’t me! I can’t have kids!’ I called Doc Anderson just to make sure I had proof if she took me to court, and he says that every once in a great while something like this heals, so I should come in for a test.” Tim takes a drink. “Well, he didn’t tell me I’d have to . . . you know . . . in a cup. After the first hour . . .”

I start laughing. “The first hour?”

“Yeah, after the first hour, Doc Anderson knocked on the door to ask how things were going, and I was like, ‘Doc! I think you just killed any chance I had of giving you anything today!’ ”

“Isn’t Ben’s little sister a nurse there now?” I ask.

“Oh, yeah,” he says, leaving no question that he thinks she’s hot. “But let us not forget that my great-aunt is the receptionist there, and she knows what I’m in the little room for and what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“No,” I say, horrified for him.

“Yes,” he says definitively. “So I finally pick up my cell phone—”

“And what? Call a 1-900 number?” I ask.

“No. I ordered a pizza and a half rack of beer. It finally arrived and that did the trick. After that, I just went . . .” He looks down at his crotch, “ ‘Mr. Wiggly! We got us a job to do with these here magazines!’ ”

“Mr. Wiggily?” I ask, laughing.

“No. Not Wig-gi-ly. Wiggly. Wiggly,” he corrects.

“Noted,” I say, still laughing.

Then I hear my grandmother’s voice. “Daniel!”

“Busted,” Tim says as he guzzles his beer. I hand him the rest of my beer, and Tim guzzles the rest of that, too.

“Coming!” I call.

Tim puts the empty beer cans in his saddlebags. “Better let you get back to work. Hey, come on down to the Elks lodge tonight.”

“The Elks?” I say in disbelief. “You always swore you wouldn’t.”

“Yup. I’m an Elkoholic now. Raising money for children’s charities while getting drunk. Bring that hot teacher if you can,” he says.

Ha! As if I would do that to my worst enemy. “I’ll get right on that,” I say.

“My dad thinks I’m fixing fences, so kindly don’t let it slip I was over here. I snuck through that gate you and me put in when we was fourteen. I still keep a bottle of Jack stashed under a pile of rocks there if you ever need it.”

“Thanks, man.”

Then he mounts up and rides off.

My secret place is at the top of the hay bales next to the window that looks out on the barnyard. There’s a loose board in the wall there that I move and pull out an old metal lunch box. I open it and inspect its contents: three small toy tractors and a dump truck, my mom’s locket with a baby picture of me inside, and a picture of my parents when they were teenagers. I flip the picture over and look at the date written on the back, 1978. I flip it back over and look at it even closer. I bet it never occurred to them the day that picture was taken that they would die young. No teenager ever thinks they’re actually going to die young. Then there’s a program from their funeral. I look at it very briefly, wince, and put everything back in the lunch pail. I shut the lid and take a deep breath. Then I change my mind, open the pail again, take out the photo and the locket, slip them into my shirt pocket, shut the lunch pail, and slide it back behind the loose board in the barn wall.

From the window I can see Mara open the outdoor brick oven, shovel out some coals, and sweep the remaining ashes out. Grandma walks out of the house with some large balls of dough on a cookie sheet. Mara throws flour or something into the oven while Grandma places a ball of dough on a large wooden paddle. Mara picks up the paddle, places it in the oven, and jerks it so the dough slips off. I can hear their laughter and voices, but not what they’re saying.