Nop’s Trials
A Novel
For my mother—
who always fed the strays
PART 1
The first thing I look for in a young dog is honesty. It is something in the way they look at you. If it is there, it can be seen immediately. An honest dog will never let you down when you are in difficulties.
DAVID MCTIER
ONE
A Dog’s Work
Early Christmas morning, like every other winter morning, Lewis Burkholder and Nop went out to feed the livestock. The Stink Dog came to the door with Nop and, as usual, Lewis said, “Stink, get back,” and shut her up in the kitchen. Nop did all the stockdog work on the farm though eight hundred woolies and seventy cows are really too much for one young dog.
Lewis’s boots crunched the frozen dirt. Although it was plenty cold, in this part of Virginia snow doesn’t stick until January.
The Big Dipper careened brilliantly overhead. Lewis chafed his leather mittens together and hunched deeper into his jacket. He was a rangy, brown-haired man who farmed his family land along the Shenandoah River.
On account of the holiday, Lewis will feed special this morning. Instead of the fine, fluffy orchard grass, he’ll feed the thick-stemmed, furiously green alfalfa, normally reserved for she-woolies with nursing lambs and he-woolies before they’re turned out to breed.
The tractor’s headlights throw fans of light on the frosted weeds beside the lane.
Nop scrambles onto the back of the hay wagon, among the aromatic bales, shivering in the chill and straining for the first glimpse of woolies. In the east the sky is deep dark blue and the stars are fewer and brighter.
They chug past the cornfields, past cow droppings like frozen black rocks among the stubble.
Tractor smoke smells bad, like burning things that have been too long dead. Nop can smell nothing but bad smoke.
When Lewis stops to open a gate, Nop climbs up on the very tiptop of the bales, balancing himself for a look-see.
Nop spots a few woolies, young ewes under Cinnamon Nose. Nop can hear their bells. One ewe stamps a warning, another bleats to a pal.
Nop skids down the hay bales and runs on ahead.
“Nop! That’ll do, Nop!”
Ah, how Nop hates that command. His instincts surging in him, instincts to run among woolies, to order, to gather woolies and bring them to his master.
“Nop!”
Nop returns to Lewis’s feet, drawn surely as by wire.
The field is twenty acres, sloping gradually upward to the scrub locust trees along the fence line.
Clumps of woolies. The end of the field looks like a moonscape—these scattered boulders are white sheep. More bleats. The woolies know the tractor sound.
Lewis pulls beside the long row of feeders and when he dismounts, Nop is down too, belly flat on the frozen earth. One eye cocked at his master. One eye cocked at the woolies. Oh, it’s hard to lie still when your body’s all aquiver!
The slats of the feed bunks glisten silver.
“Nop, Nop. Way to me!”
And Nop’s heart hurls blood into his arteries and his muscles flow and he is floating above the winter-killed grass, skittering like a stone on ice. As commanded, he runs out to the right side of the sheep. Balance: to come in near enough so the woolie sentries will see him but not near enough to panic them.
He races out, out, for a quarter of a mile, feeling the rush in his blood and the soaring in his lungs, running until he’s well past the flock before he turns inward, running flat behind them now.
More bleats. The sheep hurry to each other for comfort, for safety in numbers.
Nop pauses and comes on toward the sheep at a walk.
Before Nop began his run, Cinnamon Nose’s woolies were scattered, going about their separate enterprises. Now they were gathered tightly: a solid mass—one animal, one mind, faced away from the dog at their heels.
At a trial, with a smaller group of sheep, Nop would drive directly, pursuing them like a nemesis, like an unwanted, embarrassing relative. With a large flock like Cinnamon Nose’s, Nop casts from one side to another, rousting one flank of the retreating flock and then the other.
It was too dark for Lewis to see Nop. Behind the flock even the white tip of his tail and his ruff were quite invisible.
Nop had become his instinct. His moves were smooth, automatic and greatly satisfying in his bones.
Nop was a black-and-white Border Collie with tufts of brown at his ears. His habitual motion was low slung as a film star’s sportscar and quite as fluid. Anyone who hunts with bird dogs would remark the similarity between his approach and a hunting dog’s point. Anyone who’s ever seen a red fox slipping up behind an unsuspecting young groundhog has seen Nop’s delicacy.
Nop moved sheep by careful and specific intimidation; his sharp snout close to the ground, his eyes flaring and fixed, his forward motion implacable.
Sometimes, at play, a Border Collie pup will eye a human as Nop eyes his sheep. It’s odd and unpleasant.
Nop’s eyes were like searchlights with vague shapes behind the glare—shapes who might be armed.
He ghosted across the rear of the flock and the flock trotted briskly forward. Some of them pulled out in front, forgetful of the dog at their heels, hungry for the hay in the bunks, the warm excitement of heads together feeding side by side. Cinnamon Nose did a little jump in the air from sheer joy and a couple pals did the same. These were the young ewes born last January, bred late and fed heavy because they hadn’t finished all their growing and were carrying lambs of their own.
The hay wagon pulled forward.
“Nop, Nop. Come by!”
Though Nop was at the far corner of the flock and going away, the call threw him into the tightest turn he could contrive. In three lengths of his body he was around and digging in, full-tilt, because the woolies were far in front of him and Lewis wanted him around the left flank of the sheep.
From the hay wagon Lewis saw past the sheep to the flicker of white that was Nop’s ruff and called, “Nop, Nop!” just to encourage him.
Nop was running hard and fast, breathing in new life, breathing out the life he had no more use for. He passed the left shoulder of the flock and came around the head.
Twenty yards in front of him the tractor was stopped beside the feed bunks. Nop passed the first sheep in front of the tractor’s front wheels.
“Stand!”
When Nop swung past, the woolies turned inward, forming a bulb shape. The dog braked in Cinnamon Nose’s face and eyed her rushing flock.
Cinnamon Nose thought: Woolies need to feed. Feed in usual place. Woolies hungry. Dog. Dog teeth. Dog threat. Oh. Food beyond the dog’s teeth, behind the light in his eyes.
The woolies in the rear climbed onto the leaders’ backs—hungry woolies press hard to reach feed, sometimes right over the man with the feed bucket.
The woolies stopped hard against Nop’s warning eyes.
Lewis stood easy beside the bunk, cutting twine from a hay bale. He wound the twine around his hand and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.
Nop paraded before the flock, full of menace.
Cinnamon Nose took a step and lowered her head to butt. She pawed the ground. Nop slipped toward her, drawn to her resistance. He held. She held. Lewis arranged the hay in the bunk and turned his back to shelter his pipe. The flare of a wooden match shone in the eyes of a hundred sheep piled up against the dog’s will.
Cinnamon Nose backed and turned her head away. One woolie bleated. Another shook herself like a sponge rearranging itself.
“Nop, that’ll do.” Spoken quietly and Nop returned to his master for a pat and an ear pull before scrambling back on the hay wagon.
At each feeding station Nop gathered a flock and held them until Lewis finished his inspection and let them feed.
Once, on the outrun, Nop cut in too close and Lewis whistled “Get back” and Nop veered wider.
Once, he missed a few ewes hidden behind a low rise of ground and Lewis whistled a correction.
Like all dogs, Nop’s tail was the semaphore of his feelings: his fear, his welcome and his smile. Like all Border Collies it signified his work habits too. Once all the sheep were fed, his tail curled, happy and foolish, over his rump. Though he’d run ten miles this morning and reacted with the intensity of a quarterback calling Superbowl plays, he had extra energy and bounced from tussock to tussock, snuffling for the mice who sheltered there, finding no mouse but finding plenty of good mouse reek. When the tractor turned toward the hill pasture where the cattle grazed, right away Nop’s tail dropped into the working position: low, following the line of the buttocks, almost concealed by the legs except for the uptilt at the tip. (In Scotland, breeders sometimes refuse to certify a working dog if he works with his tail held high. A high tail indicates a frivolous disposition.)
The cows usually ate silage augered directly into troughs from the silo, but this was a holiday and today they were to have alfalfa too.
The cows were Chianina-Charolais crosses, great slab-sided things the color of a fawn’s belly. They put on weight faster than the black cows Lewis used to run. These crossbreds were much rougher than the black cows. Though Lewis had sold the cow who hurt the Stink Dog, there were plenty more where she came from.
The cows trotted toward them before Lewis had the gate fastened.
“Nop, you stay.” And Nop lay his head down on a hay bale and watched the huge silly things lumbering and bawling toward them. A growl came to Nop’s throat but he swallowed it. The stockdog must not growl and snap at the livestock like a house pet.
Their udders swung from side to side as they came on. Several stretched out their necks to moo. Lewis broke bales and scattered them on both sides of the wagon, remounted his tractor seat and drove forward to repeat the process. A cow’s digestive system can’t stand a sudden change of diet. Lewis fed out fifteen bales for the entire herd. Accustomed to ensilage, a full ration of alfalfa would start the cows scouring and by tomorrow morning the pasture would stink. The hay was a holiday treat. No more than that.
Nop lay at the edge of the empty wagon bed, hoping.
A few cows came near to investigate but lost interest after they saw the dog. Nop watched the cows eating, tossing the hay in the air. Lewis counted. Counted again. The first-calf heifers were bred to calve while the weather was still good enough to get to them and help if necessary.
“One gone, Nop,” Lewis advised. “Let’s see if we can find her.”
Like all cows she’d hidden her newborn—safe from whatever ancestral predators sought young calves. She was alone at the edge of the woods feigning disinterest. Lewis called Nop to his heels as he circled the cow. When he was directly between her and her calf, the cow lowered her head and snorted.
“Nop,” Lewis spoke softly and Nop froze, on guard. He was trembling on his hocks, eager as a sprinter at the starting line.
The cow snorted again with less conviction. Softly, Lewis moved back into the woods, ten, twenty feet.
“Little bull calf, Nop,” he called. Nop’s ears were pricked like a bat’s. Disturbed by Lewis’s examination of her newborn, the heifer mooed unhappily. Lewis returned to the tractor toolbox for the banding device, a small bottle of iodine spray and several thick green rubber bands, just big enough to go over your little finger. In another twenty-four hours it’d be real work for him and Nop to catch this calf, but right now it was birth-weary and one man could kneel on its chest and hold it. Lewis worked each testicle down into the scrotum. He sprayed the sac with iodine and the calf bawled against the sudden cold.
Mama bawled back.
“Steady, Nop,” Lewis said.
Nop was precisely balanced between his own urge to hurl himself at the heifer and his master’s command. Though he’d seen the Stink Dog hurt by an animal just like this one, he wasn’t afraid.
“It was the excitement that betrayed me, Nop,” the Stink Dog had explained when she came back from the veterinarians with the steel pins in her hips. “If I’d been rightly settled, it wouldn’t have happened.”
Lewis cast a glance back where Nop held the heifer. The Stink Dog’s ribs and both hips had been shattered. Lewis’s cracked ribs had hurt him all summer and made weary work of the haymaking. He slipped the bander over the bull calf’s scrotum and released the band. He double banded it. It’s the least painful way to make a steer. The calf bellowed. Mama charged.
Nop looked into the cow’s eyes and it was like the eyes of a snow-covered mountain. Mama was a mass of wrath, coming on, picking up speed.
From the tip of his flat tail to the tip of his nose, Nop was a projectile, poised.
Her dim sense had deserted her and the cow’s eyes were mad and opaque. She lost sight of the dog until the dog cocked itself: a small move. It got her attention. She dug in her forefeet, forgetting her urge to protect her young, forgetting her rage, forgetting everything except this silent weapon directly in her path.
The cow thought: wolf/thing/glowing eyes.
She filled Nop’s vision and peripheral vision. A clump of frozen dirt dislodged by her hooves slid through the air over his back. Particles of dirt and cow dung and dead grass rained down on the dog, on his drooling transfixed face and his lolling tongue. Nop did not blink.
Brought up short, the cow recoiled two, three steps, like she meant to try the matter again.
“Nop, Nop.” Ah! Lewis was near! Nop felt his presence and drew from his closeness and strength. Nop’s eyes glowed hot.
The heifer tossed her head. At once, she became quite unconcerned. No concern of hers what old two-legs was doing in the woods. She lowered her head and found a patch of dead grass and pulled at it like it was the best feed a cow ever ate.
A clatter when Lewis dropped the bander in the toolbox. Nop broke his gaze. The calf was up on its feet, stretching. It hadn’t been hurt bad, just alarmed. Ma grunted and hurried wide around the dog, man, tractor and wagon. She licked her worry off her calf.
“Good boy, Nop.” Lewis’s pat was heartfelt and Nop released. Nop had some foul-tasting stuff on his tongue. He wondered where it had come from.
Briskly, Nop trotted along beside the tractor and, while Lewis put the machine away, Nop galloped up on an unsuspecting barn cat and set her spitting and scurrying up a tree. Nop’s tail was as gallant and silly as a plume.
Food smells at the kitchen door. He and the Stink Dog touched noses.
“Did thou work woolies?” she asked.
“Oh, I worked them well! Worked cows and woolies. Oh, I am a fine stockdog.”
He retired to his rug beside the woodbox and started cleaning himself, happily.
His master, Lewis Burkholder, mixed vitamins and heartworm pills into his dogfood. The Stink Dog didn’t get medication because Lewis didn’t intend for her to travel again.
The Stink Dog weighed fifty-odd pounds; Nop, wet, forty. Her coat was short and dense. His was long and silky. Like him, she was a black-and-white dog. Her muzzle was white splotched on one side, black on the other and she seemed the clown. His ears were pricked, hers folded over. Nop’s two eyes were as soft brown as one of hers. Stink’s left eye was moonstone blue. Before the accident, when Lewis trialed Stink, he’d joke about her different eyes—said it meant she had two fathers. Now she spent most of her day lying behind the stove and he never joked about her.
Lewis set the bowl down more roughly than necessary and said, “I’d like to thank whoever didn’t leave me a cup of coffee.”
“Well,” Beverly said, “I suppose that’ll be my fault. It’ll just take a minute for the coffee water to boil if you’ll take instant.”
Beverly Obenschain had been Mrs. Lewis Burkholder for thirty years, but she still looked every inch an Obenschain: her black hair, the way the skin pulled in tight on her cheeks, her eyes blue as faded denim.
As a girl, Beverly had been pert. She’d bloomed as a woman and threatened to get hippy and busty unless she watched herself with the chocolate cakes and coconut pies (with real coconut shredded on top, the way Lewis liked them).
Lewis and Beverly had eloped. Just up and ran away together across the state line into West Virginia where they found a J.P. and got married and lived for a full week as man and wife at the Petersburg Motor Court before Beverly called on the phone to let everybody know where they were.
Beverly took the instant coffee out of the cupboard and set it on the table as evidence of her intentions.
Lewis grunted, meaning, “Don’t do me any favors,” and peeled the jacket off his shoulders.
“Say, can’t you smell that turkey?” Beverly asked.
Lewis’s daughter, Penelope, sat at the very end of the kitchen table. Her brand-new husband, Mark Hilyer, sat beside her. There never had been any Hilyers in this part of the country.
Penelope (Penny) Burkholder Hilyer burped.
Both Penny and Mark had full cups of percolated coffee before them.
“Here,” Penny said. “You can take mine.”
“I don’t use sugar in mine,” her father said.
“It doesn’t have sugar in it,” she said. “I don’t ever use sugar anymore.” She pushed the cup toward him, somewhat uncomfortably on account of her stomach.
“It’s cold,” Lewis said, folding the cup in his hands. But he drank it anyway.
Lewis (Lewiston) Burkholder had never wanted to be anything but a farmer. A livestock farmer—he never liked the driving-tractor part of farming. Lewis was about ten years shy of Social Security payments, if there was any money left when it came his turn. He made too much money anyway, almost eighteen thousand dollars last year. As a young man, he’d shown sheep and cattle at livestock exhibitions in Chicago and San Francisco, California. Lewis was the three times reelected chief of the White Post Volunteer Fire Department, treasurer of the state Border Collie association, and he worked six days a week, fifty-one weeks a year except for the vacation he and Beverly took at Virginia Beach each year. Not a paid vacation. He had to pay a neighbor to look in on his stock. Maybe this year his new son-in-law would do it. On second thought it didn’t seem likely.
That worthy wore an off-white shirt with pink flowers along the yoke and little pearl buttons on the cuff. Faded jeans, scuffed pointy brown boots. Only lacking the damn cowboy hat.
Lewis had never met any other Hilyers. None of them had seen fit to come to Penny and Mark’s wedding.
Penny asked, “How was Nop?”
Lewiston Burkholder had a real soft spot for his daughter, the apple of his eye. He replied briefly, “Nop was fine. Held one of those heifers off me while I banded a calf. Nice calf.”
Before she left home to go to ag school out in Ohio, Penny had worked dogs right alongside her daddy. Some days she just couldn’t do anything wrong. That was, let’s see, three years ago, when she was just sixteen, before she met up with Mark Hilyer and got married and pregnant, not in that order either. Oh, she’d been a real dog handler, Penny had.
At his name, Nop looked up from where he lay beside the Stink Dog.
The Stink Dog said, “Nop, thou must be wary of cows with new young.”
Beverly set a plate before Lewis. Sausage, three eggs and biscuits. The plate was one of the blue-enamel plates they sell at the Farmer’s Co-op in New Market.
The Home Comfort stove was the first thing Lewis and Beverly had bought when they came back from their wedding trip and it had taken every bit of the three hundred dollars they’d saved up between them. Oh, it had been thin pickings then. Lewis’s parents helped all they could, but the Obenschains never kicked in a nickel. They gave plenty of advice and felt they’d done their part.
Lewis and Beverly had lived in the tenant house on this very farm; the house was torn down now and had been falling down then. No kitchen table, chairs wired together from attic junk and their big new stove gleaming and gleaming like a bank vault. They hadn’t had anything but each other and had been happy. Sometimes Lewis wished he and Beverly could relive those days.
Beverly took his cold coffee and replaced it with hot instant. She already had the percolator going.
Mark cleared his throat. “Fellow came by from the Buckhorn Hunt Club. Dark-haired fellow named Ashby or Asher, something like that.… Says you know him.”
Lewis grunted. The Buckhorn Hunt Club drove deer through his woods on Doe Day every year. Lewis’s land wasn’t posted, but most hunters asked permission since the road to the wood lot passed right by the two-story frame house where the four humans lived with two dogs. The dogs were more comfortable with the arrangement than the humans. The Stink Dog wished someone was working her again. As she reminded Nop, “The master was crushed and we both felt bright pain. Now he works and I do not. Why is that, Nop?”
Nop licked her silky cheeks in lieu of an answer he couldn’t provide. “Do not worry,” he said. “Thou art a good dog.”
She always lay with one hip high because of the discomfort caused by the pins.
“Fellow, Ashby, or whoever, said he knew you. He’s put his jeep over the bank—you know that red bank by that camp of theirs. I guess they were pretty drunk.”
“Ashby? Fat fellow, short black hair, little mustache?”
“That’s him.”
Lewis grunted again. The food was sending warmth through him. His ribs, which always ached in the cold weather, seemed to creep back into place once he warmed up. He sopped up egg with biscuit.
His only daughter said excuse me and hurried through the dining room into the bathroom where she was sick. Lewis Burkholder set down his biscuit because he wasn’t hungry anymore.
The Stink Dog wasn’t hungry because she lay around all day, round and sleek as a torpedo.
Nop was ravenous, but the air was charged and no dog likes to eat in the presence of danger unless he must.
Trouble in the air—Nop could smell it. The young man was the trouble—Nop knew that too—knew it from the way the young man sat on the very edge of his chair and his place at the far end of the table.
Mark Hilyer had slightly too long, slightly too glossy brown hair and his mustache was more intention than fact. He probably didn’t weigh a hundred fifty pounds and he hardly ever ate anything. Nop had no dislike for Mark but never went to him from choice when he could go to Lewis or Penny.
“That fellow, Ashby, wanted me to come up with the tractor and drag him out. It’s worth fifty dollars.”
Lewis pushed his plate away. “No,” he said.
The younger man pursed his lips. “You gonna be needing it?” he asked.
“It’s Christmas Day. A Holy Day.”
Mark filled his cheeks with wind. His face was pale.
Nop began to bark. He rushed into the front parlor and put his forefeet on the window sill, wagging his tail, nose to the glass, barking.
“Hush, Nop,” Lewis said. “There’s no one out there.” He unbent very slightly. “Did anybody hear someone pull in?”
Brightly, his wife went to the window. “He’s just barking, Lewis. Are you done eating, then?”
Mark Hilyer lighted a cigarette. The flame trembled slightly and they all noted the tremble, even the dogs.
Nop returned, wagging. The Stink Dog stood beside Lewis’s leg and growled at Nop when he came too close.
“Stink,” Lewis warned. “You can stop that foolishness.”
And he rose from the table without making the explanation that weighed down his tongue like a sack of rocks. A tractor can never pull a vehicle back onto the road once it’s below the road surface. You need a wrecker for work like that. Any jeep that went over that red bank needed a wrecker from Mike’s Wrecker in Spotswood, no doubt about it. There are things a tractor just can’t do. Not even Lewis’s spanking new John Deere.
Mark was already getting into his jacket. A leather jacket cut just like a Levi’s jacket and just as worn as the rest of his cowboy gear. “It can’t be done,” Lewis said. “A tractor can’t lift a car. It can pull in a straight line, that’s all. Ashby needs a wrecker.”
“Never know until you try,” his son-in-law said, brightly.
Penny came out of the bathroom, face scrubbed and her cheeks flushed. “You goin’ out?” Penny asked.
“Yeah.”
She looked her question. Nop went to his bed and lay down. Soon the danger would go out of the air, he could smell that.
Stiffly, Mark Hilyer looked out the window. “Yeah. I thought I’d go down to Crossroads Exxon. Think I’ll go down and help Teddy Rexrode on his car.”
“I’ve tried it,” Lewis said.
“What?”
“You said, ‘You never know unless you’ve tried.’ I’ve tried to jerk a car up a bank with a tractor. It can’t.”
Mark said, “Seems like there isn’t anything you haven’t tried, is there?”
“Not much!” His own outburst surprised Lewis.
Nop lay low and bristled.
“Yeah. Well, I’ll be back in plenty of time for supper.”
“Mark,” Penny said. “That’s your best shirt.”
A faint smile. “I guess it is.”
When the door shut behind Mark, Nop went to his bowl and ate hungrily, bolting his food down with an occasional anxious look over his shoulder. He didn’t like people standing near while he ate.
Mark’s VW starter whirred, growled and whirred again before it hiccupped and caught. Time and time again Lewis had heard the boy warn Penny, “That old motor’s coming around for the second time and it needs a good warmup,” but today he shot away while the motor was still running ragged.
No helping it. Lewis cracked the oven door and said, “My, that bird sure does smell fine.”
Penny scraped her chair back and stalked out of the kitchen. Lewis kept his face toward the stove so he wouldn’t see her go. She slammed the bedroom door.
Lewis sighed. “I wish I knew what gets into me.”
“Darned if I don’t wonder myself. The way you treat that boy you’d think he was a criminal instead of your daughter’s chosen husband.”
“She didn’t have very much choice,” Lewis said, dryly.
“Lewis Burkholder, where have you been? I know of four girls from right around here who went ahead and got rid of their baby instead of having it. Penny could have done that and you tell me who’d be the wiser? She had her choice, Lewis, and it seems to me that Mark had a choice too. He didn’t have to marry her, you know!”
Lewis bit his tongue. Any man would be a fool not to want to marry Penny. Why, she was so pretty and so quick and it wasn’t just the dogs she was good with—any kind of livestock. If some old cow or sheep was down, wasn’t anybody better to have nearby than Penny Burkholder. Lewis had it in his mind to say those things but saw, from the set of her mouth, that Beverly had other things on her mind. Beverly could be sweet as syrup, but once you went too far with her there was no turning back. Lewis tried, “What time your family coming over?”
“I told you already. Three o’clock—same as last year and every year. Lewis, what have you got against that boy?”
“Oh hell. Hell, Beverly, I don’t know. I wish he had some kind of job. This farm can’t support two families.”
Beverly rarely spoke up when Lewis said Hell or Damn, and he almost never used any stronger language than that. But, with Beverly, there was no turning back. “I always thought a man who stooped to profanity lacked the ability to express himself.”
“There’s two families on a place that was only meant to support one.”
“One more mouth to feed, Lewis.” Beverly held up one finger. “We always fed Penny, and Mark makes one more, and since when couldn’t we feed family in trouble? When Aunt Alice was so sick we took her in, didn’t we? We didn’t have any trouble finding food for her plate and we managed to bury her decent too.”
“That boy plain aggravates me! Always wantin’ to do this thing or that thing and no more sense than … than … no more sense than a fool! Pullin’ a car up the red bank with a tractor!” Lewis snorted.
“He just wanted to earn some money, Lewis. He’s been huntin’ work just everywhere. Friday he went all the way down to Dayton to make an application at the poultry plant. They said they always laid off after the holidays.”
“There’s always work for willing hands.”
Stink crept to sanctuary behind the living-room couch. Nop scratched at the door. When the top dogs are quarreling, it’s time for the underdogs to make themselves scarce.
Beverly had her hands on her hips. “When you hear of some work, you be sure to tell Mark. He was hopin’ to find some work towing a car.”
“I told you and I told him. It can’t be done. Not in a million years.”
“Lewis, will you let that dog out before he peels the paint off the door?”
Nop was released to freedom and the open air. All his oppressions lifted right off him. He was a young dog in the pride of his strength. Like a brusk watchman, he roamed the farmyard, checking scent: mice, barn cats, the Stink Dog, the lingering oily smell of a polecat who’d passed through three days ago, moles beside the gatepost, the hot smell of winter birds.
Nop voided himself in the corner he always used for that purpose and trotted off, ignoring his scat. He marked some of the trees and bushes that served as billboards:
NOTICE! INTRUDERS MAY EXPECT TO ENCOUNTER A STUD DOG ON THESE PREMISES!
Beverly and Lewis tired of saying awkward things to each other. Lewis switched the radio on. Christmas carols. Lewis felt ashamed. He felt tired. He wished things were different. He wished it was lambing time when a man could get too busy to think.
He plugged in the Christmas tree and it glowed its cold glow. Beverly never was one to hang an icicle straight. He straightened several.
Beverly followed him into the living room. “The tree’s right pretty.”
“I cut it down in the Junction Bottom, you know, near that big dead elm where we had the picnics. Remember, Penny used to call that elm the ghost tree. Most of the limbs are off it now. The trunk’s still standing.…”
“Sometimes I wish Penny was still a little girl.”
Lewis met his wife’s eyes and they were brimming with concern and he wanted to say something, do something, that’d make everything all right. He didn’t have it in him. Lewis Burkholder smiled, patted his wife’s arm and turned away.
Though Lewis had made it through two years at Virginia Polytechnic before the draft took him for Korea, he never acquired a taste for reading. When Penny was born, it was Beverly who bought the encyclopedia (Grolier’s 14th Edition) that still graced the lower shelves of the corner cupboard. Beverly subscribed to the Reader’s Digest (“Improve Your Word Power”) and Woman’s Home Companion (“Six Ways to Beautify a Kitchen with Green Plants”).
Beverly had read articles about “The Midlife Crisis” and “Male Menopause” but wasn’t convinced that these interesting problems were her husband’s. Lewis Burkholder wasn’t quite like the men those articles talked about. Lewis wasn’t quite like anybody.
Beverly slipped the sweet-potato casserole into the oven at 350. Soon the Hicklins and Obenschains would arrive. Lewis was still fiddling in the front room. He got so restless in the winter months!
Beverly dated Lewis’s trouble from the day the cow hurt him and the dog. Before the accident Lewis and Beverly had been muddling along, just like they always had—maybe a little testier than usual, but basically on an even keel. Lewis was impatient for Penny to finish ag school, and any time he got the excuse of a dog trial in Ohio, he’d stop and visit her. When the trials were too infrequent, he’d hitch up the gooseneck trailer and hang around the Friday market until somebody needed a livestock hauler going west.
(Penny never introduced him to Mark. She never introduced Lewis to any of her boyfriends.)
One day in July—it was a hot day in July—the cow hurt Lewis and the Stink Dog. The vet bill was almost a thousand dollars. Selling the cow brought three hundred of it. Lewis could have got more for the cow if he’d sold her as a brood cow, but he sold her by the pound for slaughter.
The vet saved Stink’s life but said she’d never be the same.
Beverly thought Lewis was never the same either. Oh, he still had his young dog, Nop, but Lewis had had something special with that Stink Dog, something real special.
And next thing they knew, Penny came home without finishing the fall term to announce that she and this Mark Hilyer were going to get married.
Couldn’t they wait?
No way.
Lewis didn’t hide his distress. The wedding was a quick affair at the county courthouse and Lewis didn’t know Mark well enough to ask him why his folks hadn’t showed up.
Beverly had put her hopes on Christmas, praying that the Big Holiday would help pull her family together.
Last night they put up the tree and decorated it, just like they’d always done on Christmas Eve. Penny didn’t feel well. Lewis went to bed early. Mark went to see about Penny and never returned, and Beverly finished the tree herself, humming “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” slightly off key.
The Hicklins, Joyce and Eugene, were the first guests to arrive. Joyce was Beverly’s first cousin. Eugene worked in the NAPA Auto Parts and Joyce was a nurse’s aide. They’d been separated once but got back together a year ago and everybody had their fingers crossed. During the separation, Joyce had taken up with another man, a lab technician from where she worked, but since then, he’d quit and left the county.
Joyce Hicklin wore her hair in a blond beehive and her long eyes, outlined with green eye shadow, were her best feature. Eugene was comfortable as a saggy armchair. He had a comfortable belly and his thighs rubbed together when he walked. He was disappointed Mark was out and started to say how he might mosey on down to the Crossroads Exxon, but a hard glance from his wife nipped that idea in the bud.
Gene had brought his new coon dog along. Dixie Rebel Yell sniffed the corners eagerly until she caught sight of the Stink Dog. Dixie squatted and wet.
“Omigod! Stop that!” Gene’s blow rolled the puppy over. Stink, who’d been prepared to offer the formal growl that establishes dominance on these occasions, got excited by the blow and snarled deep in her throat and the puppy yelped, half in surprise, half in fear. Nop hurled himself at the back door trying to get inside where, obviously, a dog was in trouble.
Joyce hurried for a paper towel, Lewis quieted Stink with a word and the puppy sheltered herself behind Penny’s legs.
“Don’t worry yourself,” Beverly said. “It won’t be the first time my floor was wet by a dog. Is that Mama and Papa out there? I believe it is.”
Nop barked furiously when the Obenschain’s Chevy pulled up. He barked because he felt left out of things.
The Obenschains were one generation away from Old Order Mennonites and their plain black car was considered somewhat radical by their neighbors (and coreligionists) who farmed with the most modern equipment but drove horses and buggies to the store and church. Carl Obenschain was a slight, nervy sort of man. His wife, Emma, had the unlined, sweet, assured face of someone whose life is lucky, ordered and close to the earth.
Beverly poured Gallo Burgundy for her husband and Joyce. Penny said she’d wait, thanks. Eugene went into the refrigerator for a brew and the Obenschains weren’t having any, “No thanks.”
Every year Lewis felt obliged to make a remark about the last supper: “If wine was good enough for Christ,” he said, “why isn’t it acceptable to the Christians?”
The Obenschains had never forgiven him.
He’d never forgiven them.
Carl Obenschain was talking about the livestock market. He’d heard feeder lambs brought forty-eight cents. Awful. Awful. What was going to happen when the spring lambs hit the market?
Like an old wagon track, Carl Obenschain had two deep ruts, and once you skidded into either of them, it was the dickens to get out. Farming and the weather. Carl Obenschain remembered every year’s weather back to when he was a boy, and Carl was the thin side of seventy. If today was a dry day, he remembered when it had been dryer. If today was cold, Carl remembered the winter when the bulb fell out of the thermometer. He could recall, perfectly, that June twenty-first hailstorm in 1947 that beat the new oats flat.
Emma Obenschain leaned forward in her chair. “When did you say you’re due, dear? We’ll have to plan the baby shower.”
Penny always blushed when she lied.
Beverly asked could she pour more wine?
Lewis gave her a look. They never had more than one glass before dinner. Lewis checked his watch.
“Come on, everybody,” Beverly said, “where’s that old Christmas cheer?”
“I’ll never turn down a beer,” Gene said and heaved his bulk off the couch. “Don’t bother to serve me. I can help myself.”
Beverly waited, with the wine bottle in her hand, and Penny felt sorry for her and took a glass, though alcohol—any kind of alcohol—gave her the gas.
“I hope that bird isn’t overcooked,” Lewis said.
“It’s cooling.”
“If he don’t get back soon, we’ll have to start without him.”
Penny asked about the black-and-tan puppy’s breeding.
Lewis said, “I don’t like these new digital watches. I like the kind where you can see the hands.”
Nop wasn’t much older than a puppy himself. When he was let back into the house, it was love at first sight. He made the ritual growl but his plume tail was fluttering “hello” as he performed the introduction ceremony. She wriggled. He dropped into the invitation-to-play.
She giggled. “I’ll bite thy ear, black-and-white dog!”
“Thou shan’t.”
She did.
The two of them rolled around on the floor nipping and biting. Beverly shook her head. It seemed a long time since they’d had a pup in the house. Such foolishness!
Mark’s VW pulled up. Everybody made conversation that nobody was listening to.
Mark made his false, cheerful apology and went to the bathroom to wash up.
Penny offered to carry dishes to the table.
“Penny,” Emma said, “you’ll have to be careful not to strain yourself!”
“I’m not crippled,” Penny snapped. She said she was sorry. Everybody said it was all right. Emma remembered how testy she’d been when she was carrying Beverly. The first time she’d felt Beverly kick was at a social, down by the Winthrop’s farm. Mrs. Winthrop’s gone now, poor thing.
When Mark returned, Lewis asked, “Did you get what’s-his-name’s car fixed?”
“The coil’s shot. We’ll have to wait until Wednesday to get a new one.”
Gene said Mark should stop by the NAPA Auto Parts while he was behind the counter. He gave Mark the wink.
Mark hadn’t changed his shirt and Lewis opened his mouth to comment but closed it instead. When Mark and Penny had arrived at the farmhouse door, they only had two little suitcases between them and Lewis figured Mark didn’t own any other dress clothing. It was too bad the cuffs of his cowboy shirt were smudged with motor oil.
Never mind. It was Christmas.
Beverly and her mother kept up the chatter while they ate. It always amazed Lewis how much the Obenschains could say to each other without ever actually saying anything.
He and Gene Hicklin talked dogs. Hicklin hadn’t started hunting Dixie yet because she was too young.
“Uh-huh.”
“But I’ll tell you, she has the instincts. Before she was two months she was putting cats up the tree, and she’d stay right at the bottom and cry.”
“I love that sound,” Lewis said. “Pass me more of that corn casserole.”
As he ate, Lewis Burkholder relaxed. Man shouldn’t do anything when he’s tensed up and unhappy, but the world had never learned to wait on his moods. The dinner was real good though the turkey was a little drier than he usually liked it. He had a double helping of dressing with gravy. He watched his wife eating, talking to her mother, and felt a sweet unusual satisfaction. He breathed a prayer: thanks that his wife and daughter were healthy. He prayed they should stay that way. Though it wasn’t his custom, he helped clear the dishes away once they were done.
They opened gifts. Nothing expensive. Plenty of baby things for Penny.
Penny had bought a new collar for Nop; hand made, hand riveted, of pale yellow leather. “To Mom and Dad from Penny and Mark. Much Love!” That’s what she’d written on the card.
“Mark picked it out,” Penny said.
“Well, I’ll just put it on right now,” Lewis said and got the needlenose pliers and transferred Nop’s tags: his county license and the name tag.
Though the collar was quite handsome, Nop preferred the old one which smelled like a proper collar.
Mark opened the plain envelope. Five twenty-dollar bills.
Lewis said, “From me and Beverly. Merry Christmas.”
Mark held the bills like they were strange, maybe counterfeit. When you must eat humble pie, you must eat it—every bit. “Thank you,” he said.
Lewis smiled. If everybody just kept trying, things would work out, wouldn’t they? He said, “Maybe, after a bit, we could take the tractor over to the Buckhorn Hunt Club. I’ve got that old logging chain in the toolshed. If that jeep isn’t too heavy, we could chain it to the front-end loader and jerk it out that way. I’ve never done that before, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t work.”
“Mike’s wrecker got it. I passed them coming in.”
“Oh.”
Penny said, “Could we put these darn dogs out of here? They’re giving me a headache.”
The Stink Dog slipped back to her refuge behind the couch. Mark opened the kitchen door for Nop and Dixie.
The outside smelled wild and free. Indoors was too close, close as a closet filled with musty histories.
Dixie wasn’t interested in prowling the farmyard. She wriggled on through the side gate and Nop jumped the rail fence where he always jumped it.
He’d show her. The master kept his rams in a lot behind the barn. “Follow,” Nop said, and galloped off, his hindquarters flouncing.
Dixie took a deep sniff, lowered her nose and snuffled along in his track.
The yard was enclosed by a five-foot board fence but Nop launched himself over in a single leap and landed hard and fast enough to startle the rams who’d been picking through remnants of the morning hay.
They fled from him.
Neatly, Nop made an outrun on the side Dixie could see, creating an almost perfect gather. Down he went into his crouch and he brought the rams toward Dixie, like she was Lewis.
Dixie backed away from the fence. She barked. “Black-and-White, why dost thou pursue thy master’s woolies? It is not dog’s work to move woolies. Dogs hunt. Hunting is dog’s work and scenting delicious scent.” She flushed the fence line snuffling furiously though the ground held no fresh scent of consequence.
Nop was so surprised he lost control of his woolies. “Not work woolies?”
“The hunting of animals makes a good dog. The hunting and the giving tongue.” And the diminutive black-and-tan proved her point by sitting down and loosing a plaintive howl.
Nop stopped dead.
The terrified rams stampeded past him.
“Leave them be,” Dixie counseled. “Come with me and we shall hunt wild things.”
Nop’s tongue hung out, puzzled. He took two steps forward, stopped, took another two steps. She flaunted herself at him shamelessly.
Nop followed.
Usually Nop stuck pretty close to the farmyard but Dixie Rebel Yell had no such scruples. Snuffling along, she tracked through the cross pattern of scents, going always for the fresher, more aromatic trace.
Scent is no more than the oil from the pads of animal feet and that was the trace Dixie now pursued, through the barnyard, up onto the hill where a wide band of trees separated the farm from the state road.
Though the groundhogs had all retired to their dens for the winter and there were no raccoons in this stretch, there was deer scent, astringent and musky in the fallen leaves bordering Lewis’s pasture. This late in the year the only green grass was Lewis’s rye and the deer bedded in the woods next to their food.
Nop hurried around, heading his new pal. He dropped down into the crouch and, wagging his tail, invited Dixie to a romp.
“Black-and-white dog, thou block my path. Thou interrupt dog’s work.”
Nop looked pure puzzlement as she snuffled right around him. He dropped his own nose for a sniff. Like her, he could smell the deer but unlike her attached no significance to the scent.
Up ahead a squirrel thrashed loudly through the deep leaves. Dixie bolted. When the squirrel whipped up a tree trunk, Dixie put her little paws on the trunk and barked and howled.
Ten feet over their heads, the annoyed squirrel chattered and scolded.
Dixie howled. Nop sniffed, circled the tree and lifted his leg.
The squirrel had important business to get on with. There were uncollected hickory nuts in this grove and his winter cache wasn’t quite full. Though he had buried so many nuts he couldn’t remember all of them, his instinct to gather was strong. With a final irritated complaint he rushed along a branch until the branch narrowed, and he dropped onto another tree, his new perch bending like a bow.
Now this was more like it! Like all Border Collies, Nop had bird dog far back in his ancestry and he chased this flying creature through the woods, leaping at the springing branches.
Surely the squirrel must miss a jump! Surely he must fall into the dogs’ open mouths. Over the road a great black walnut and a squat red oak scarcely touch—just brush—at their furthest extremities. Surely now his branch will bend and drop him to the hard dirt road and the excited dogs.
The truck was light blue, robin’s egg blue, though that wasn’t the color’s official name. The Ford Motor Company called that particular shade of blue Andalusian Blue. Andalusian Blue was reserved for Ford T Birds, LTDs and certain custom truck packages.
Big Foot had the optional trim package, the optional chrome wheels, an antenna for AM and another for CB and a black roll bar behind the cab. BIG FOOT was stenciled on the hood.
It was fat-tired and high enough off the ground you could push a tricycle clean underneath it.
“Goddamn,” Lester Gumm said. “Now that’s a real black-and-tan.”
“Take my beer,” his half brother said. “Don’t you spill it now.”
Big Foot coasted, clutch in. Dixie sniffed through the leaves beside the road.
“You’re gonna hit that dog, Grady.”
“No I ain’t. Goddamn, get a look at that little bitch. Lester?”
“Uh-huh.”
“When I come beside her I want you to open your door and get her in here. Set your beer on the floor. Lester, be quick about it.”
With a spring squeak, Big Foot stopped. Click, click. The latch unlatched. “Come on over here, doggy. Come on. Nice doggy.”
Dixie didn’t hesitate a minute. She wagged her way right up to the door of the truck, and when Lester Gumm lifted her in, she licked his hand in gratitude.
“Okay. Let’s roll.” Lester Gumm hissed his words.
“Hold your water. Ain’t that Lewis Burkholder’s dog?”
“How the hell would I know Lewis’s dog?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s him all right. I seen Lewis with him. Lester, that’s a three-hundred-dollar dog. Merry Christmas.”
“He’s just another stockdog,” Lester whined. “The black-and-tan’s worth some money, but that other dog’s common!”
“Come here, son. Come here.” Grady Gumm knew the way of dogs and whistled a low whistle. “Hold that black-and-tan. Hold her where he can see her.”
Nop slunk down. His tail was curled under his buttocks and the tip of it touched his belly. One false motion would set him to running.
But Grady had dog sense and patience. Nop inched forward. Grady stayed still, giving him no excuse to bolt.
Nop was trained to obey. His daddy and granddaddy had been trained to obey.
“Come over here, Old Son. Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”
Oh, Nop didn’t want to come and even the sight of Dixie wiggling and wagging didn’t convince him, but man had called him and leashed him with his words and Nop dragged himself along the road until, quick as a wink, Grady Gumm had two fingers under his new collar.
“Three hundred dollars!” Grady crowed. “Hot damn!”
TWO
All Dogs Are Formal. Some Dogs Are Mad.
Grady Gumm’s eyes were the exact color of pond water in the light of the full moon: silver, opaque. His lackluster brown hair was combed off his forehead in a pompadour more usual in the 1950s. Once he made his mind up, Grady Gumm never changed it. His hands were never still.
His half brother, Lester, asked, “What we gonna do with a stockdog?”
“Just you never mind.”
Nop lay on the floorboards just where he lay in his master’s truck. His dark brown eyes were terribly worried. Not so with Dixie, who clambered up Lester’s pant leg, grunting determined little grunts.
Lester batted at her. She yelped.
“Stop foolin’ with her.”
“No dog’s gonna muddy my trousers,” Lester said. “Damn, you see where she splotched me?” He smacked Dixie again and the pup howled.
There isn’t much room on the floorboards of a pickup truck—not even when that pickup is a three-quarterton with the stretch frame—and there’s no room at all for panic. Nop breathed deep. He told himself this journey was his master’s will, just like all the other rides he’d taken. “Lie still,” he counseled the younger dog.
Lester said, “Hush, down there. I won’t tolerate whinin’ in a dog.” He set his boot on Nop’s fluffy tail and pressed to punctuate his point. Nop jerked his hindquarters until the thrashing made Lester turn him loose.