Year of the Dog (16 page)

“Talbot,” Aunt May chided him in a gentle tone, “fine old New England families do not like to be interrogated. I know James is too nice to make a fuss, but old New England families expect you to take them at face value and not pry into their history. They're not brought up that way.”

James, rescued, shot Aunt May such a look of gratitude that her cheeks flushed red. Daddy, in his turn, glowered for a second or two, like a kid being called down in class, and then, his dander up, asked, defensive, “What are you supposed to talk about then, tell me that.”

Aunt May passed around the floating island laced with bourbon in tall cold glasses while Kitty passed us thin slices of the all-white fruitcake, glistening with pineapple and citron, crisp with toasted almonds. When Aunt May handed Daddy his glass, she suggested, “Tell James about how you got into the hardware business, why don't you? Young men like to hear how successful men got their start in the world.”

“You want to know about that, son?” Dad took a large gulp and wiped the meringue off his top lip, then took another.

“Sure I do,” James said.

“It happened like this. Back then, this would've been in '67 as I recall, I had it on my mind to be an engineer. Engineering appealed to me. Engineers made money. They built things. And people liked to ask the advice of engineers, because you had your public buildings and your roads, you had your trains and bridges, you even had your telephone pole insulators. Engineers had a lot of facets to their work, it seemed to me. But first off, we had a war, that would be your Vietnam War, and in the second place, my daddy had himself a massive coronary. And you have to put in there the fact that my girl, Ida
Jean, was not as interested in my becoming that engineer as she was with my becoming a husband.”

He looked to be sure James was listening. “Now the hardware store there had been my daddy's, he wasn't the owner outright, it was just that folks called it his store, they'd say, Let's get that over to Horace's, or Let's ask Horace. So I figured that the hardware store, which in those days was the center, I mean this as true fact, the very center of the commerce of a town. In those days. Whatever you wanted, they had it at the hardware. And whatever you didn't know how to fix or look for or find or get a part for, they could do it at the hardware. So I figured, with those factors on the table and me not wanting to go to that war we had, the course of action I ought to go into was to marry Janey's mother—she wasn't that at the time, you understand—and to take my daddy's place at the hardware. That's called Runyan's now, Mr. Runyan, but you don't need to get sidetracked there.”

He stopped, my daddy, and stared at James who had been listening all ears to his words. And then he stared at Aunt May in her velvet dress, and, finally, having caught his breath, asked her, “Is that what you mean? Talking my head off like a fool? Is that what you do up here in
New England
?”

Mom, who'd been fidgeting the whole time during Daddy's story, not able to open her mouth, eating tiny nibbles of her cake and trying to catch her husband's eye to hush him up, said at once to Aunt May, “This cake is absolutely delicious. A person thinks they don't like fruitcake, because of their past experience with fruitcake, the store-bought variety, and then they discover they
love
fruitcake when they taste something like this.” She'd been sitting ramrod straight in her Christmas dress, her eyes narrowed, looking from one woman to the other, like she'd got some kind of notion in her bonnet, some idea she didn't like the looks of.

Aunt May asked her, “What do you think, Ida Jean, about
your daughter's use of her time up here, raising a puppy for the blind?”

“She keeps it in a cage,” Mom said. “How is it supposed to be a watchdog, tell me that, locked up in a cage?”

We got fresh floating island and second pieces of cake. James put more logs on the fire. He asked what kind of wood came in a cut cord, he had an interest in woods, he said. Then he and Aunt May talked about oak and ash, birch and beech, and how each wood burned. He said he couldn't bear the notion of burning cherry, and she showed him the cherry sideboard in the dining room.

Kitty sat beside Mom and asked about her women friends back home, was she going to bring them souvenirs of Vermont? Mom told her about Madge, her best friend, a loan officer at Peachland's only full-service bank, how they talked on the phone every single day at least once. How, as a matter of fact, the reason she'd wanted signed copies of Mr. Greenwood's books was so she could make a present of one of them to Madge. “We have the same exact taste in everything, and that includes reading.” Kitty promised that perhaps Bert could do an extra one, inscribed to her special friend.

At the door, when we had no more excuse to linger, Aunt May helped my mom get out of her red heels, back into the plastic boots, complimenting her on her furry coat. She shook my daddy's hand twice, and thanked him for the most interesting conversation, as well as for coming along, since James surely did need the company of another man.

James and I lingered behind on the doorstep. “Thank you, thank you,” I said, flinging my arms around both of the women.

“Our pleasure,” they said together.

Then we trudged, holding gloved hands, out into the frosty, already dark, late afternoon, hearing the door close behind us.

In the still air, Mom's voice carried across the deep
snow-banked yard. “Well, that was a no-brainer for sure.”

“How's that, Hon?” Daddy asked, as if he didn't know the topic of the remark.

“They think we didn't see what was going on? They think we're just country cousins? It was plain as the nose on your face, Talbot. All that chummy business, you think I didn't see right through that? That woman, that little Kitty person, has flat out taken Aunt May's man away from her. That woman has plain stolen Bert Greenwood.”

Avoiding Distraction

28

YELLOW TABBY APPEARED like a snake in The Garden, early in the staggering onslaught of February, the groundhog having seen her shadow and then burrowed back in for six more weeks of ice and bitter wind and back-cracking heat bills. In the house, I wore everything I owned: two tees, sweater, my good red hoodie (my constant companion), under a jacket or over my pajamas at night, plus my zip-ankle pants in the daytime. At Eastern Mountain Sports, I'd bought two pairs of thermal tights so that one always clung to my calves while the other wicked dry, and two pairs of wick-dry double-ply socks. Nobody had warned me about the intimate matter of trying, under all those layers, to remove a soggy tampon and to insert another into your
down-there
without a bloody icicle forming on your inner thigh. Last Monday, the radio had called it 8 degrees with a chill factor of minus 28. I'd called it
arctic
and sent Mom and Daddy a photo of a flock of seagulls on the snow-covered lakeshore. White on white.

Except on really frigid days, Beulah and I went for walks, her snuggy in her wool sweater and felt Companion vest. Stung by the comments of the trainer at this month's Puppy Evaluation—“You're raising a
follow
dog, not a
lead
dog.”—I'd begun to trek downtown on the street with the traffic signal that chirped, birdlike, when the light changed to green. A
sound supposed to encourage Big Dog Beulah to make the decision herself when to cross, with a little jiggle of the working leash from me. How on earth did blind people survive in bad weather? I imagined her in Santa Fe, all the sightless persons wearing turquoise and silver, sitting on the plaza in the warming sun against a backdrop of ochre, red and purple paintings, their trusty Companions keeping them safe from pickpockets and tourists. Would they send me pictures of Beulah? Could I even stand to think about that? Her gone?

She'd been through the bloody discharge and the onslaught of massive canines trying to mount, and had returned, older and calmer, to her eager self again. Thanks to me, she was still intact, though I was not, not in the puppy-training sense. I felt I'd been round the barn, down the garden path, in the woodshed. I'd been banging on dumpsters to create sudden, horrid noise until I suspected the Burlington police and the sanitation workers would be citing me for disturbance. I'd worked on her people reaction, noise reaction, traffic reaction, other-dog response, every day the weather permitted. Keeping in the forefront of my mind like a neon sign the trainer's bottom line:
HOW WELL DOES THE DOG DO WHEN HER RAISER IS ABSENT?

And then appeared yellow cat. A large striped tabby, in our yard as if she lived there, sitting at the bottom of the back stairs. She'd be waiting for us in the morning when we came out back, bundled like Inuit, to get busy, and she'd be waiting for us at night, the moon already high in the dark sky, as if she believed that she was going to get fed, as if she always got fed, just as soon as she'd walked over and taken a long sniff of Beulah's spot.

Not only did she make Beulah skittish, clumsy on the steps, looking back over her shoulder in her pile of yellowed snow, but she drove the crows next door into a cawing frenzy. Therefore calling attention in the neighborhood to the fact
that a certain rental property had both a dog and a cat in residence.

“Mew,” she said when we appeared, me often with a cup of Green Mountain coffee sending steam into the snow-fogged air, trying to rub against my legs as if Beulah wasn't present. “Mew, mew, mew,” she said in the black icy dark. “Go home, Puss,” I begged, “
go
home.” But obviously she had no home, to judge by the fact that she had no collar and the fact that no one had stapled a LOST TABBY notice to the telephone pole on our street, and that no one came out in a heavy flannel robe and winter boots calling for her.

Besides which, sending my blood pressure soaring into the low-lying sky, dandruff began to appear on Beulah's shoulders when she headed for her spot; she was
building worry.
And my own shoulders had grown flaky, too, and my own tail had started tucking under, because since the cat first started coming around,
James had vanished.
Maybe it happened just to be a correlation and not a cause, as pharmacists sometime said about feeling better when taking a certain medication, but it seemed the final awful result of the yellow cat in the snow. It made sense that orphans, such as James, might feel particularly offended by the idea of strays being unwelcome and a nuisance.

Finally, after nearly a week of tabby's unwelcome visits, I called Betty, our trusty advisor, to ask whether this was some trial that Beulah had to learn to deal with, a strange intruder in her territory, or whether I should call the Humane Society. Betty replied that if a blind person had an unwanted animal on her property that worried her dog and interfered with the dog's attention, they would send someone to take it off the property for her. But in this case, I should do it myself, for the cat's sake as well as Beulah's. “This is bad weather for any animal to be homeless.”

Taking action, I picked up a HavaHeart trap early the next
morning from the Humane office, “The Place Where Friends Meet” as their sign said. Back home, I set about to cut up a whole Bell and Evans chicken and put it to soak in buttermilk, planning to cook it slow, on low, till it nearly fell of the bone. Figuring I'd have a lot of tidbits—the tail fat, the wings, the neck—to use as tempting scraps for the stray. And, for once, I didn't feel that wrench of regret that Beulah couldn't eat people food, since this meant there would be no danger of her getting herself caught in the kitty-trap before I got a chance to stop her.

Also, of course, I hoped that a fine baked chicken might persuade James to take a break from the project that had kept him busy all week, and come over for supper and to warm my bed. But he said he couldn't make it today; he'd take a blizzard-check, ha ha. “Janey, I'm picking up sandwiches from Irv's and sleeping in my clothes. I miss you, but I'd freeze it off anyway in this weather.” And that felt like a major loss. I tried not to let my mind revert back to Curtis, which mostly I avoided, because that happened to be a long time and distance ago. But my ex could never get interested in sex unless I had on something he could pull up—a skirt, a nightie—by way of reassuring himself that what he had his hands on was definitely a girl, and he made clear he'd rather play pool than get near the idea of having sex with his wife wearing any kind of pants he had to pull down. So in this North Pole weather, I'd felt a rush of gratitude to be making love on a regular basis with somebody who didn't mind excavating down through three layers of various garments with legs to find the bare me.

Late in the day, having everything in place, I took Beulah's face in my hands and explained that we were getting rid of yellow cat, and, smoothing her ruffled coat, tried to believe it myself. Leaving her inside, off the leash, I headed down the stairs to the HavaHeart with a dripping strip of chicken neck. The thing worked in a tricky manner: the animal could take a
step into the antechamber and nothing happened. It could take another, change its mind, back out, and nothing happened.
Hey, safe place.
But as soon as it poked a paw to snare a tad of food in the back, rigged area, the wire door came crashing down—at least so the instructions promised.

Naturally, our striped kitty, no dummy or she wouldn't have picked my back yard, when she finally moseyed into view, made a couple of forays through the open door, daintily picking her way along the wire floor, took a sniff of the chicken delight, and backed out. Once, twice. The third time, she walked around the trap to the far end and tried to paw through the wire, but she couldn't quite reach the treat. From that moment on, she didn't even look at the contraption, but stood mewing at the foot of the stairs in the cold until it turned dark, her ribs showing.

Discouraged, I was ready to forget it, but then things took a different turn. I went out after breakfast, bundled to the gills, with chicken morsel number three, a bit of wing—planning to slip it in before yellow cat came by for her morning break, when she liked to lick off the grimy snow from between her toes and groom herself before taking a stroll up the driveway. Surely, I reasoned, she couldn't resist the smell of
food
another time. But blocking my way on the steps sat the roughest of the hoody persons upstairs: Roland, the bearded goon who I was supposed to believe had cleaned up his act and presently attended classes.