Say No More (28 page)

I had so many questions I wanted to ask. Who would care for me now that Cecil was gone? Would Bernadette, despite the fact that I made her sneeze? The farm was not hers. I had been to her home only once. It was a small, but cozy rental house two blocks from the library in Faderville. Smaller, even, than Cecil’s little farmhouse. There were crocheted afghans and framed jigsaw puzzles and silk plants everywhere, as if every square inch needed to be filled with color. In nearly every drawer containing cloth items, she had stuffed sachets scented with lavender and cloves. The closets smelled of cedar and mothballs, the kitchen of pumpkin and nutmeg potpourri, and the living room of the peppermint candies she kept in a dish by the front door.

Cecil’s house had smelled of the dirt that fell from the treads of his boots, of the hay that clung to his overalls at feeding time, of black coffee and burnt toast. Simple things. I had smelled them in my dreams when I was trying to find home. I could smell them now ...

—o00o—

“Halo, honey. We’re home.”

I blinked, stretched my legs, and yawned. The car door gaped open. Cool air surrounded me, tickling my whiskers, awakening my senses. Bernadette stood just outside the car, her plump, short body washed in the harsh glare of the barnyard floodlight.

She looked over her shoulder. “Merle, you’re gonna have to help me this time.”

Merle wedged herself between Bernadette and the door to look at me. “My, my. Sure has been through the ringer, hasn’t she? Can she stand? Walk yet?”

“Barely, but the vet told me she’d gradually get better, although she’ll probably never be able to work livestock again. Shame. She was so good at it.”

Together, they pulled the blanket on which I lay toward them. Merle grunted as she took hold of my back end.

“Careful now,” Bernadette cautioned. “She has a pin in that back leg — and a new hip.”

“Like you. Soon, anyway.” They lowered me to the ground and made sure my legs were solid underneath me before letting go. “When are you scheduled?”

Bernadette rubbed at her lower back with both hands. “Later next month. I’m not looking forward to it, but I don’t know that I can last much longer like this. It’s getting harder and harder to do simple things.”

“How are you going to manage?”

“I’ll be staying with my daughter near Bowling Green. Soon as I’m well enough to go home, there’s in-home care that’ll help me out. Paula wanted me to just move in with her, but they’ve got four kids and barely have room as it is. No, I told her, I’ll do fine on my own once the doctors say it’s okay. Besides, all my friends are here. And the library.”

While I did my business, they chatted about Bernadette’s grandchildren. Then we walked slooowly toward the front porch. I stopped at the first step. They might as well have expected me to climb to the top of one of the catalpa trees. There were only four steps total, but I was not up to going up even one right now. I looked at Bernadette, waiting for her help.

With a series of grunts and puffs, they helped me up and onto the porch. As winded as they both were from that simple task, I reckoned I was on my own as far as making it around on the flat. Abruptly, the conversation turned back to me.

“So,” Merle began with a drawn out sigh, “what are you going to do with the dog?”

“I haven’t quite figured that out yet ... but I have an idea.”

C
ecil had never owned much. Just as he had a tenuous attachment to words, he was the same with physical objects. If a thing didn’t serve some practical purpose, it had no place in his home. There were only two exceptions to this: Sarah’s picture and the trophies on the closet shelf. Still, even though the farmhouse had always been uncluttered, the stark bareness of it when I walked in with Bernadette and Merle that first day home was a shock I wasn’t quite prepared for.

You wouldn’t think that dogs would have an attachment to things, either, but we do. You see, we are creatures of habit. It’s not that we covet things. A dog could care less whether the sheets are designer brand or secondhand. It’s that their presence is the landscape of our surroundings. Removing physical objects from a home is like clearing the trees from a forest. Without Cecil’s things in this house, it was no longer Cecil’s house. It was just
a
house.

Somehow seeing the place stripped of its furnishings — save the couch where Bernadette occasionally slept and the little dinette table and its two vinyl padded chairs — it was like walking into some other dimension. A shell of a dwelling, haunted by memories so fresh they still stirred the senses.

Even though Cecil’s scent had faded, I could still feel his presence: in the impression of his body on the kitchen chair seat, in the tarnish on the doorknob he had turned every morning, in the gouge mark on the counter when he missed the cutting board with the butcher knife and nearly took off the tip of his thumb. It was as if he could walk in the door at any moment. Except ... I was slowly beginning to realize that wasn’t going to happen. Ever.

Too much had changed. The toaster where Cecil had toasted his white bread every morning, the coffee maker that percolated and steamed the air with its sharp aroma, my rug under the kitchen table ... all gone. Stiffly, I gimped my way through the house, checking all the rooms. The bedroom had been stripped of all its furniture, save the bed, which was nothing but a metal frame and a lumpy old mattress. Doors gaping open, the closets had been emptied of their clothes and linens. The rugs had been removed, the handful of pictures taken down from the walls. A short wall of boxes, scribbled with black marker, lined the hallway.

“So when are they kicking you out of here?” Merle looked inside one of the boxes.

“Not anytime soon.” Opening and closing three different cupboards doors before she found what she wanted, Bernadette set a box of teabags on the counter and a container of sugar. “Blackberry Pomegranate okay? It’s all I have left here.”

“Sure, that’s fine.”

With my rug from underneath the table gone, I had nowhere soft to lie. So I carefully lowered myself next to the register at the edge of the living room, where I could see into the kitchen. The metal grate was still warm from the last time the furnace had kicked on. Cecil would have chased me out of the room. I wasn’t supposed to be in here, but then ... Cecil wasn’t around to tell me so.

“Say, I think the cups are in that next box, if you wouldn’t mind checking. And if they’re not, they’re in the one underneath. I’ve just been so scatterbrained dealing with all of this, I can’t remember where I’ve put what lately.”

The teacups tinkled as Merle grabbed two and brought them to the counter. Bernadette filled the tea kettle and put it on the stove. They sat across from each other, the old chairs creaking as they shifted, trying to come up with words to fill the dreadful silence.

Tapping a spoon on the table, Merle looked around. “No family at all? None?”

“He was an only child. Had a couple of cousins who passed years ago and from what I gather, his more distant cousins lived out in California and Oregon. Fortunately, he’d recently written up a will with provisions for auctioning off the place and his belongings and giving the proceeds to charity once his funeral arrangements and debts were paid. And as far as debts, they didn’t amount to much. He inherited this place from his parents. Paid cash for every vehicle or piece of farm machinery he ever owned.” She twisted a ring on her left hand, her eyes growing damp. A diamond sparkled in a gold pronged setting, surrounded by a corona of alternating sapphire and emerald stones. “Even this.”

Merle patted Bernadette’s fingers. “I’m so sorry, Bernie. My heart just about broke when you told me he’d proposed on the Ferris wheel and not five minutes later ...” She squeezed her hand tighter. “Just doesn’t seem fair when a good man like Cecil is taken from us without warning like that.”

Bernadette looked down at her lap. “I think he knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That he wasn’t well. I heard from Darla Willoughby a few days later that he’d been to the heart specialist over in Elizabethtown a couple times lately. Her sister works there and — well, it was probably violating some patient confidentiality for her to say so — but she said the doc there was trying to talk him into having some kind of procedure.”

“Procedure? What do you mean by that? Like an angiogram? An EKG?” Merle covered her mouth with her hand. “A bypass? Kenny Mills had a triple bypass. The surgeon said he was one Quarter Pounder away from kicking the bucket.”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say.”

“He didn’t tell you about this?”

“No, you know how Cecil was. He didn’t talk much about himself. I wish he had, but then ... I thought we had years left to get to know each other.”

The tea kettle shrieked, and Bernadette poured the water into the cups and set them on the table. She didn’t sit down right away. Instead, she went into the hallway, moved two boxes aside, and lifted a little wooden box from one of them. She came back into the kitchen and took a yellowed newspaper clipping out of the box.

“What’s that?” Merle pushed her glasses further up onto the bridge of her birdlike nose.

“I found this when I was cleaning out that hall closet. You know how I told you Cecil and Sarah had been married and never had children?” She hurried on without waiting for a reply. “Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Here.” She pushed the clipping across the table and waited for Merle to read it.

“A little boy?” A frown tugged at Merle’s mouth, distorting her wrinkled lips even further. “And only a week old.”

“His wife Sarah was forty-three when she had him. He was born with Down syndrome. Just like Rusty down at the library. Unfortunately, Cecil and Sarah’s little one had other complications.”

Merle didn’t seem comfortable talking about the death of an infant. For a while she busied herself dunking her teabag and then squeezing it before she set it on a paper towel. “You didn’t say — what charities is his money going to?”

“Some will go to the library, to help pay for a new building and to continue the literacy program. The largest portion will go to the cancer society. His wife died of uterine cancer. The remainder will go to the local animal shelter.”

They both glanced at me. I shut my eyes, pretending to sleep.

“Well,” Merle said, taking a final sip and then getting up to place the cup in the sink, “I have to be at my son’s house early in the morning to watch little Max. Call me if you need any more help. Will you be here until the auction in two weeks?”

“No, I’ve done about all I can do here. I’m heading back to my place day after tomorrow.”

As much as I adored Bernadette, I didn’t like the idea of staying at her place — not that the house was too small for me. I didn’t need a lot of room indoors. But Bernadette had no sheep. Besides, the patch of grass she called her backyard was barely big enough to park her car in. The garage took up most of the space and it was full of the remnants of her life.

“I’ll see you Friday at lunch then.” Merle took her coat from the peg on the wall and went to the back door. Just as she went to pull it open, the phone rang. They glanced at each other with a startled look.

“I’ll get it.” Shrugging, Bernadette heaved herself up from the chair. “Might be Paula, making sure I made it back okay.”

The phone was on the wall next to the hallway. It was the only phone I’d ever seen that had a curly cord attached to it. Bernadette once told Cecil they hadn’t made those for decades, but he dismissed her by saying it still worked. She waited until she’d caught her breath before lifting the receiver from its cradle.

“Hello? ... Yes, hello Sheriff Dunphy. I’m just fine. How are you this evening? ... Yes, I have her right here... Oh, she looks pretty ragged, God bless her heart, but she could’ve been much worse. She fell into good hands, thank heavens... Yes, I have someone coming day after tomorrow I think she’ll be glad to see... Is he, now? Well, that’s troubling to hear. The boy has serious issues. Running from the law isn’t going to help that any. He needs more than a slap on the wrist... Oh, you bet your life I will when the time comes. I don’t care if he’s family or not... Thanks for all your help, sheriff... Mm-hmm, will do.”

The moment she hung up, Merle was right in front of her. “So they finally found Tucker, did they?”

“I wish. He was holed up with one of his many girlfriends over in Owensboro just yesterday, but the rascal got away before they got there. They think he might be headed down to Tennessee to one of his old army buddies.”

“So when they do catch him, what’ll they charge him with?”

“Theft, extortion ...
and
turns out he was part of a gambling ring. It’s true what they say about the apple. I tried to get him on the right track, went to all that trouble of getting him fixed up with a good job, and he goes and does a stupid thing like this. What in the world was he thinking?”

“Hard telling. But you did the right thing, Bernie.” Merle gave her friend a hug. “Don’t you dare lose a wink of sleep over it. It’s exactly what Cecil would have wanted you to do.”

“I know. Just a terrible shame that nephew of mine didn’t turn out better. I wish I could have made a difference in his life, that’s all.”

“You’ve made a difference in the lives of a
lot
of young people, Bernie. Not your fault Tucker couldn’t see what a blessing your help was. Say, how did the state police figure out he had Halo after all?”

“Bill Clancy turned him in. You know how Tucker told me someone had let Halo out of the stall at the fair before he ever got there? Well, turns out he’d taken her after all. After that, he headed up to Michigan, to Saline, where Clancy was slated to trial again the next weekend. The birdbrain tried to sell him a spayed dog as breeding material for a premium price, so Clancy knew something wasn’t right. Tucker told him I’d given the dog to him after Cecil died. After Clancy turned him down, Tucker headed back south. The trailer blew a tire somewhere up in Ohio. Near Lima, I think. He’d noticed a state trooper tailing him earlier, so he evidently became a little paranoid and abandoned the trailer. The best we can figure is that Halo either got away from him or he let her go. She must have traveled hundreds of miles on nothing more than instinct. Amazing, isn’t it?”