The Truth of the Matter Page 5

  Once, while she was chopping vegetables in the kitchen, the thought crossed her mind that Will was burly in the muscular way of the big dray horses still to be found on some of the farms in the county, whereas, although Warren had been about the same height as Will, he’d been built more along the lines of a jumper, a sleek thoroughbred. Agnes had been efficiently chopping chunks of celery and onions but suddenly she laid the knife flat down, opening her hands and bracing herself against the low chopping block as she leaned forward in surprised embarrassment at her own wandering thoughts.

  She straightened and instinctively covered her face as she felt herself blush, but her hands were moist from the onions and celery. “Ah! Oh, oh,” she said and made a small hissing sound of dismay. Finally she ran upstairs for the eyecup and flushed her eyes as best she could. She had always been sensitive to onions, and it was hours before her eyes stopped tearing. But she was helpless against her imagination, and if an image of Will came to mind at some odd time or other, she found that she literally salivated, and it became her greatest pleasure—in a tangle of bedclothes—to abandon, finally, every other thought of anything at all.

  In late February, Ernie Mullins came to school with a note from his mother asking if Mrs. Scofield would tell the class that the family was moving and had a good dog that needed a home. Agnes explained that she had to check with the principal before she could announce it to the class. That evening, however, after putting together a quick supper of sardines on crackers, which she ate standing over the sink, she put on her coat and went out herself to the Mullinses’ house in a run-down neighborhood near the school, which looked all the more bleak with the last of the snow melted and windblown into yellowing patches that scabbed the stingy little yards like the end bits of soap floating in brackish bath water.

  Mrs. Mullins didn’t invite Agnes in, and Ernie walked her around back, where the dog was tied. It let out a single, declaratory bark of greeting and came forward to meet them. Agnes took one look at the animal standing alert at the end of his chain and was taken aback by an immediate welling-up of admiration.

  The dog was a reddish-brown, medium-size shepherd mix, with his ears cocked forward at their approach, his strength leaning into his shoulders as he stood absolutely still except for a quiver of the silky fringe of his sweepingly curved tail. He approached them almost as far as his chain would allow, but that slight though definite arc of the chain’s slackness—the dog’s dignified refusal to pull it taut—was a bit of restraint that won Agnes over in less than a minute. This was too good a dog, anyway, she thought, to be subjected to the whims of Ernie Mullins or anyone of his family.

  “Why don’t I take him home with me, Ernie?” He merely shrugged his shoulders. Ernie was unnerved to have his teacher standing in his own yard.

  Ernie’s mother wanted the collar for some other dog her family would eventually have when they had moved away from Washburn, Ohio, and settled in Illinois. She stood leaning against the door frame, making it clear from her stance that she had other things to do. “Unless you want to buy it. It’s good leather, and it might be hard to find one now. I just don’t have the heart to ask you to pay for King, even though my husband says he nearly ate us out of house and home. Well, King never went hungry. I’ll tell you that. Anyway, I said we should find him a home, though I don’t know if he’ll make a good watchdog for you or not.”

  Agnes looked at the dog, who stood calmly between her and Ernie, and she stooped down to unfasten his collar. “I’m sure he’ll be just fine,” she said. “And especially grateful, since he’s going to cost me so much in groceries.”

  Mrs. Mullins put her hand on her hip and relaxed even her pretense of goodwill. She looked tired and hostile. “My husband said we should just leave him behind. That he’d make do for himself. But it seemed to me we could try to find a place for him.”

  Agnes searched through her purse, fishing out two dollars, which she handed over to Mrs. Mullins along with the collar. “I’d like to pay for him. I have a collar around someplace, I think. I’ll be glad to have him,” she said. “I’ll take good care of him.” She turned to Ernie, who was a scrawny little boy with a very round head too big for his body, and features so unassertive that Agnes was always unreasonably annoyed at him. “You can come visit your dog anytime you want to before you leave, Ernie. You can walk home from school with me tomorrow if you like.” But Ernie looked blank, and when Agnes turned away and slapped her hand against the skirt of her coat to signal the dog to follow, the dog came right along by her side.

  She and the dog moved away from the Mullinses’ house and turned the corner onto Marshal Avenue, and still Agnes was floundering for the right thing to say. “Good boy! Good boy!” she said to the dog, finally, who moved along with her briskly. She was surprised to find that she was shy about addressing him at all, and she was especially embarrassed to think of calling him King, which seemed such a silly name for a dog, but she did want to encourage him. “Good boy! You’re a good boy, Pup!” And “Pup” was as much as she could impose on this amiable dog. She glanced at him and thought that she had no right to invent a name for him. He seemed to be a dog who was perfectly aware of who he was.

  When Dwight and Claytor were six or seven years old, Warren had come home one day with two puppies. Agnes had been baffled, but the boys were delighted, and she didn’t say anything to Warren until that night when all the children were finally in bed. “I don’t understand why you bought two dogs, Warren,” she said. “They aren’t littermates.”

  “Oh, no. I was at the Aldridge’s in Coshocton, and they have a nice hound of some kind or other who just had pups. They only had that one left.” Agnes eyed the puppy, and wondered what his father had been, because he already had coarse brown fur that stuck out all over. Not at all like any hound she’d ever seen. Maybe it wouldn’t have a hound’s personality, either.

  “Hounds are hard to train, though,” Agnes said. The other dog was about three months old, Agnes would have guessed, and looked to her like it might be part collie. It had a sweet face and tipped ears.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” Warren said to her, his voice suddenly nasal and sharp, “but you manage to throw cold water on every surprise I come up with!” He shook his head briefly in resigned disappointment. But then his tone fell back into its normal, amiable resonance as he recalled his day. “I had to search high and low to find another puppy. But when I was in the bank and happened to say I needed one, one of the clerks spoke up and said his brother’s dog had had pups a few months ago. I went on over there and there were three left, in fact. I thought that one was the best looking of the lot.”

  “He does have a sweet face,” Agnes acknowledged. “But why two males? They might not get on together so well . . .”

  “Agnes,” he said, explaining to her patiently, “can you imagine how bad either Dwight or Claytor would feel if there was just one puppy and it took to one of them more than the other? I remembered how I admired Robert’s dog when we were growing up. Ajax was devoted to Robert, of course. Sometimes I just couldn’t stand that idea. It was hard to feel that dog wouldn’t like me as much as he liked Robert. I was always with Robert. Always in and out of his house. Well, Ajax was really Mrs. Butler’s dog. She didn’t want him to roam. Robert and I would mark off twenty paces and then stand apart and both of us would call the dog to see who he would come to. ‘Jackie’ was what we called him. Mrs. Butler was the only one who called him Ajax.”

  Agnes waited for him to go on, but his attention had wandered back to the newspaper. “And who did he go to?” she finally asked, in spite of herself.

  Warren looked up, raising his eyebrows in a question, and then he remembered what they had been talking about. “Oh, he always went to Robert, of course. He was Robert’s dog. But with a dog for each boy . . .”

  “But, Warren, you can’t be sure with dogs. The dogs won’t know who they belong to. You might buy two children two horses. One for each so they could ride togethe
r. That would make sense. But no one can tell who a dog’s going to decide he belongs to. Well, at least if the dog has a choice,” Agnes said, but she objected softly, because Warren’s mind was made up.

  He remained pleased with his gift to the boys. Dwight and Claytor named the semi-hound Tunney and the collie mix Dempsey, and the boys played with them and fed them and cleaned up after those puppies for almost two weeks, which was much longer than Agnes had imagined they would remain interested. Eventually, of course, when the boys started school and Warren was traveling in the field, those two dogs followed Agnes everywhere. Sometimes it seemed to her that she spent most of the day rounding them up and getting them out of the house only to have someone let them in again. They nearly drove her crazy hustling one past the other alongside her as she went up the stairs, each dog trying to be first in such a tumble that Agnes had to hang on to the banister. But she didn’t really dislike them; she made sure they were fed and had water.

  The two dogs were an odd pair from the start—the bristly hound had a squared-off terrier’s head but with long, floppy ears, and the collie mix had stumpy legs that didn’t match his body. And just as Agnes had expected, as those dogs matured, they became obsessed with one single desire: each one was bent upon killing off the other. She had to keep them outside and apart all day long, and she was constantly rushing out and dashing a pail of cold water over their backs, which usually broke up a fight if she caught it at the beginning. Finally she had Harold Ostrander, who helped around Scofields at all sorts of odd jobs, build separate pens for them out of sight of each other. Even so, Tunney, the hound, eventually very nearly killed Dempsey in a terrible, bloody battle. Agnes had done everything she could think of to try and break it up, but it continued in a moving, snarling, muscular tumult, and it was clearly a fight to the death.

  The hair-raising yips and snarling that went on and on attracted everybody in the vicinity of Scofields, and Mr. Ostrander finally got the animals apart by smashing a wooden ladder down over their backs. Tunney let out a terrible sound—a dog shriek—and backed off but continued to circle Dempsey, who was down and bleeding. Harold Ostrander continued to yell at the dogs and wave the ladder at Tunney, so that his circle around Dempsey grew wider and wider until finally he raced out of the yard, crossing the street and then the park. The Scofields never saw him again, although when they came home from school Dwight and Claytor went out searching for him.

  Agnes nursed Dempsey back to health, but then he, too, simply took his leave one day. He adopted for himself an older couple who lived a few streets away. Agnes only discovered where he’d disappeared to when she was downtown one afternoon and saw the couple walking him on a very fine leash. Dempsey was glossy with good health and didn’t so much as glance her way; he seemed quite pleased with his situation.

  Dwight and Claytor didn’t appear to be unduly distressed over the abandonment, but Warren was amazed at such treachery. Agnes tried again and again to explain it to him, but he had never had a pet as a child, and this had happened before Agnes finally recognized a pattern to Warren’s moods. She hadn’t understood then that Warren’s initial enthusiasm about the whole business would have dissipated regardless of whatever happened to the dogs.

  During their childhoods Agnes hadn’t encouraged the children to have pets of any kind, although there was always some sort of creature in residence. Ernie Mullins’s dog, though, was the first pet Agnes had ever chosen on her own. He came right along into the kitchen with her and briefly investigated the downstairs rooms, and she fed him the rest of the sardines mashed with some saltines and an egg.

  About nine o’clock she put him outside, but ten minutes later he gave out one quick, anxious bark at the back door, and she let him in again. When she went upstairs to bed, he followed tentatively but determinedly behind her in an odd sort of crouch and with hesitant, nervous footing. Agnes watched him take the last two stairs up the staircase and was surprised that his effort left her choked up and teary-eyed. In all probability, she realized, he had never been up a staircase before, but she was baffled to find that idea touched off such an emotional response on her part. She left her door ajar, but after standing at the threshold for a moment and wagging his tail, Pup had the good manners to choose Claytor’s room just across the hall. He stretched out full length on the single bed against the wall.

  Chapter Three

  IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Agnes was both embarrassed and irritated by the consternation awakened on her behalf because of the company of the dog. One evening Robert came over after supper to drop off the newspaper and her mail, and the dog stood between the two of them, canted across the sill as Agnes greeted Robert at the door.

  “Move away, now, Pup!” Agnes admonished but without any spirit of command, and the dog stood his ground.

  “I have to say, Agnes, that appears to be a mighty fine dog. He’s not going to let any strangers walk into this house.” Agnes relaxed her tense hold of the door and swung it wide to invite Robert in, and as soon as she gave an indication of welcome, the dog eased back and lay down in the hallway with his chin between his paws.

  “Can you come in for a cup of coffee, Robert? I’ve just made some. Or would you like a drink?”

  “I’d like that. A glass of that good sherry.”

  “I’ve got Scotch and bourbon, too. Will brought it back from Cleveland.”

  “Bourbon, then. Bourbon and just a splash of water. With ice if it’s not any trouble.” Robert handed her the paper and mail and a package wrapped in butcher paper.

  Agnes led the way through the house with Pup close behind. “Lily’s off to her Ladies Aid meeting,” he said, “but she sent along what she tells me are very good soup bones she thought the dog might like.”

  “She won’t want them herself? For soup?”

  “Oh, I imagine Lily was very glad not to tackle it.”

  Robert and Agnes smiled in mutual acknowledgment of Lily’s grudging, harried attitude toward cooking, for which, in fact, she had developed a real talent over the years of her marriage. “My mother always told me that a person would love the things he did well,” Lily had once said to Agnes, when they were putting up preserves in Lily’s steamy kitchen. “But it’s not true! It’s never been true for me, anyway. Not with mathematics and not with cooking.”

  Robert took his place where he always sat, in the brown velvet curved-back rocking chair next to the radio, both of which Agnes had moved into the kitchen once she occupied all the rooms of the house by herself. She gave Robert his drink and poured another cup of coffee for herself. It was laced with chicory because of the shortages, and it was pungently acrid, but she had developed a passion for it, and it was all she could get, anyway. She savored the dry, clean, ashy feel of her mouth after she swallowed. Robert went through the little ritual of filling and lighting his pipe and settled back comfortably.

  He shifted in the rocker as he reached for his drink and studied it a moment before he took a sip. “Lily and I have been wondering if it might not be hard for you to keep a dog with the food shortages. The rationing and so forth? It’s pretty safe around here, I believe. I wouldn’t think you’d have much need for a dog.”

  Agnes was surprised. Will Dameron kept the houses of Scofields fairly well supplied from the farm with poultry and eggs and even a nice roast of pork or beef now and then, although Robert so disapproved of Lily accepting these gifts during rationing that Agnes became the conduit through which all sorts of things made their way into Lily’s household. And she and Lily had always put up plenty of fruit and vegetables from the garden Robert had tended with absorbed passion since long before the war began. In fact, one summer day she and Lily had been so engrossed in a two-handed game of canasta that, until they finished and moved from Lily’s screened porch into the kitchen, they hadn’t realized that the top had blown off the pressure cooker, plastering the ceiling and walls with bits of peeled tomatoes. But maybe Robert really didn’t know that Agnes had ample food for herself and one med
ium-size dog.

  “Oh, the dog won’t make any difference. You know that! Not a bit. I always have leftovers.”

  “Well, Agnes.” He sat at ease for a few moments, drawing on his pipe. “But a dog can be a good deal of trouble. They can get so attached to a person. You might find that he’ll want to follow along with you anywhere you go.”

  “That’s true. That’s exactly what he did this morning. I felt like Mary and her little lamb! I didn’t even know he’d followed me, and I don’t have any idea how he got into the school. I suppose he slipped in behind one of the children. When he found me in the office, where I was turning in the midterm attendance . . . the evaluations, too, I had to explain to Mrs. Daniels that he’d had a bath before I even gave him breakfast. And that’s a good deal more than she could say for most of my pupils. But it was peculiar, Robert . . . he doesn’t want to play with the children. He didn’t even go outside with them at recess.” She was perplexed once more, as she remembered it. “Not even little Ernie Mullins. You know that family? They live down toward the end of May Street? They’re moving in a few days. He was Ernie’s dog, you see. But Ernie didn’t even seem to notice the dog was in the classroom. Well, Ernie’s not very noticeable himself. He doesn’t have much character . . . or substance, I guess I’d say. To tell you the truth, there’s not much to Ernie one way or another. He’s not any trouble. In fact, I have to remind myself to call on him now and then. Oh, I always have a child or two like that. Transparent children. I really think the dog wasn’t attached to that family a single bit. He just came right away with me without any sort of persuasion. Just came along as if he’d been expecting to go somewhere.”