Toward the last pales of Maggie’s heat spell, there was a day when the Doberman was gone from the porch, and we thought it was all over. But the morning after, there was a new suitor-dog outside. He wasn’t on the porch. He was out in the edge of the cane. He was a sick, scabby, and practically hairless combination of Spitz and setter. From way over in the cane, he watched Maggie at the screen with wheat-colored rheumy eyes. You could see he was trying to respond more than he was; he just lay there nodding and raising his ears, then falling asleep unwillingly, it seemed. There was a mule with him. The mule was emaciated and showed burned, hairless marks where an old harness had been. His nosy face looked older than stone, and he crumbled around the knee knobs with tremens. This mule stood in the shadowed bend of the cane behind the dog. Apparently the mule and dog were friends, joined up to see the last of it together. They were both clearly terminal. A big mule like he was, by the way, is a sensational sight to be-hold when you get up early and just look for the usual cane and St. Augustine grass. He seemed to be looming back and sponsoring some last romantic wish of the Spitz-setter in front. I think the dog had brought them as far as they could go.
The old man and I saw them together at the bay window. Both of us were looking for the leaves, and then, surprise!
“All right, Daddy, I’ll go be getting the lime in the garage while you get the shotgun. Better put in some double-aught shells.”
“Just hold it…”
“… put both those scarecrows out of their misery in a minute, you get a good shot to the brain on ’em. I can tell they ain’t gonna run.” I was thinking, “Big Game. See something big collapse, at last”
“You better quit running your mouth that direction, Harry. I don’t want to hear that kind of … We’re just going to leave those poor fellas alone. They look like they’re on the move.” My mother had come up, in her robe.
“That’s the strangest thing I ever saw in my life. Did you ever see a mule and a dog go along together?”
“I believe they may have hydrophobia, Donna. Now what we’re going to do is just ease out to the car, me and Harry, and see if we can’t just not disturb them driving out. And they’ll go on away. But Honey, you don’t go outside till they do.”
“You want me to call the sheriff?”
The old man faked three paragraphs of thought.
“I don’t think so. We don’t know anything for sure yet. They look like they’re on the move. Don’t they? You ever seen a mule and a dog hang around together more than …” He chuckled, and kissed her. He took me to school in the car.
The animals didn’t leave. They were still out there four days later. The old man’s sense of beauty was hurt. The mule looked like an upright hewed-out cowchip, the dog just a mangy rubble. We had a lovely yard, ordinarily. He sent me out to scare them off, but there was a massive odor coming off them when I got near; I quit waving; they’d ignored me anyway. Another day he sent me back in my room for my air rifle. He wanted me to pop them. I was groping away at the lever in an unworldly bliss and breaking out the screen door, when he called.
“Wait!” he said. “Don’t do that. No use to hurt them if they just can’t move.” The old man’s as gentle as a nerve, I find out. It got him into tight moments later. When he gave me money, and other prizes; when he raised up Harley Butte, a mulatto, to a foreman over white workers at the mattress factory. There were certain bawling natural demands he couldn’t deny. He thought Harley wanted the foreman position to a suicidal degree; he thought the mule and the dog had seen enough trouble.
“There’s an organization I’ve heard of that handles these types of animals,” he said. The dog and mule outside were getting sicker. The mule lay down. The dog attempted something drastic toward Maggie. It brought him out to the middle of the yard, and the mule wallowed loyally out in the grass too, ten feet behind him.
There was no SPCA around, burrow the phone book as the old man did. He would not call the sheriff, or any kind of exterminating veterinarian. Everybody knew that the Dream of Pines vet was an incompetent softy who always advised death for the least bruise on dog or cat, such a hater of animal pain he was.
I was spying in the cane one afternoon and caught him, the old man, out in the yard right by the dog; he was whispering something to the creature, and smiled. The dog lifted up, grunted pitifully, and moved a couple of feet over, then collapsed. I moved in to the old man’s thigh, not caring about any secrecy then. Where the dog had lain in the grass, hair remained, and hundreds of maggots.
The old man winced, and groaned, “Harry. This is the first time in my life I ever knew God let things like this happen.” The old man was born on a farm, but he was the spoiled child, with his mother practically holding her hands over his eyes until they moved to a thirties village called Town, Louisiana, twenty miles east of Dream of Pines. “Don’t let’s tell Mother about this now.”
He looked over at the mule.
“I guess you’re getting worked on too. Old fella.”
He scanned his yard beyond the mule, with his eyes full of tears.
“I’ve read books about it,” he said flatly. “But somebody has been keeping the real information from me. When things die, they get eaten by worms. They really do.” He milked the cleft of his chin with a hand.
He hadn’t wanted the sheriff to come over and finish the animals with a quick.32 slug. He didn’t want the sheriff’s checkerboard demarcated car in his driveway. The old man, as a snob, thought he was too well reputed for that. He knew that a number of people in Dream of Pines worshiped him as the boss of the only clean and decent factory in town, and stood in line to apply for work under him, quitting the paper mills because of toxic dirt in their skin, and the old man gave a 100 better wage per hour. Because of gentleness, modicum gentleness on his part: he thought no one should work for 850 an hour, be he a wino goof-off, even. He was not a hero of tender feelings; this gentle portion of himself mixed up his mind quite a bit, and landed him in protracted confusion, when some simple act was called for. In his study, thinking about a case like the dog and the mule in the yard, he’d get a box of matches and strike them one after another just to see them burn. Like me, he’d have to dream an answer before he knew it was right. He’d wake up and know what he ought to do, having just seen some righteous version of himself in his dream. Either that, or my mother told him in a simple sentence what she thought he ought to do, and he’d do it immediately, the old man thinking, like me, that the voice of a female was God’s direct edict. The old man and I always tended to trust every girl we ever knew, and little else but our own dreams in sleep. Eh, old man?
Mother didn’t say a word this time. The animals stayed two weeks in the yard. The old man came in to breakfast beat out and his mouth curled around a Camel. His eyes were dull and bloody. He drank coffee like there was bourbon whiskey in it. Who knows what he thought on in the office, a little acoustically insulated glass cell on the mezzanine of the factory.
Then on a Saturday night he woke me up sometime way into the sleeping hours. He wore these dull flannel pajamas with duplicated scenes of the Hawaiian islands on them. My mother was up; I heard her rustling around the old man’s study, and calling out softly to him asking where the cigarettes were. A cigarette was a rare experience with Mother, like fireworks once a year every July Fourth at the country club. I knew something extraordinary had happened. He’d dreamed something, or the old lady had risen up in the night and commanded something in short, simple English. She was babyishly nasal like Elizabeth Taylor in the shadows, and had to be listened to.