I nod.
This pail is more specific now — only meat goes in, raw or cooked — with other buckets for the chickens and the pigs. Ever since I read Taylor a passage about the dangers of rancid meat, the kitchen has been filling the dog pail with fresh scraps.
I make my way to the east gate. The yard is less crowded, the previously leased men trickling away to their new prisons and camps. There is nothing to keep me hoping for Wilson’s life anymore — no papers, no sightings, no presence. I can only hope that his was a quick death in his mine, and that someone took note of his name so that Moa and the kids would stop their hoping, too.
Yet another new guard is on the gate, and he lets me through with few words. The guard on the other side has been here as long as I have, and he is cordial enough.
Taylor is staring off in the direction of a couple grackles, pathetic birds with their haunting insect noise. I wave to him and go directly to the barn to start on the dogs’ feeding. My shoulder doesn’t exempt me from the routine of this place.
The smell of the dog room hits me strong and foul as soon as I cross inside. Taylor’s other boys don’t tend it quite the way I do, letting the meat linger until it’s fetid.
I make my rounds to the pens, then set to filling the water buckets. Other than Taylor, I’m the only one out here, and I prefer it that way. Jackson and Jones have been gone for years. Stevens came on six months before me, and working with him is a punishment, everything that comes out of his mouth either an insult or an idiocy. He loves to be the one hitched to the dogs while I’m the one running, pride flushing him as if it were a real run, and he were a real deputy warden.
Taylor’s other men aren’t much better. I imagine he agrees.
Taylor is at the fence when I finish. “I’ve made a decision, Martin. I’m retiring Maggie to the whelping trade.”
“Sir?”
“You’ve seen how bad some of them pups from other places turn out. Figure we can at least do better than that.” He’s still blaming the ruined off-lead experiment on the dog rather than his own misuse of information. “Plus, the dog’s not so quick as she once was. Falling behind. One of the best I’ve ever had, so I figure we might well get some good stock out of her.”
Maggie is just on the other side of the fence, and I reach over to tug her ears. She’s my favorite of the dogs, and motherhood doesn’t seem a fitting retirement. Her eyes are reticent, as though she already knows.
TAYLOR hires out the stud from another friend of his in the industry — not Atmore — and I’m forced to listen to Maggie’s cries while the male’s in residence. She is locked in the smallest pen with him, and she does everything she can to climb the wire walls.
Soon enough, he is gone, though, and Maggie rounds larger by the day. This is Taylor’s first litter, and he’s jittery as any new pa. “Read, Martin,” he shouts. “You best swallow down every word you can on the subject of breeding.”
I put requests in to Rash. “Dog breeding? You think I’m stocking that subject in here?”
“You know it’s for Taylor.”
Rash still likes to chide me, though, and the first periodical to arrive is an old copy of the Dog Fancier out of Battle Creek, Michigan. Rash chuckles as he hands it over.
“Well?” Taylor asks, and I must tell him that Dr. O. P. Bennett recommends stewed sheep and calf heads once the pups are born, macaroni, spaghetti, and any other noodles.
“Good Lord, Martin,” Taylor shouts. He’s taken to only shouting during Maggie’s pregnancy. “I don’t have any goddamned macaroni. What the hell do I do when the pups come?”
“I haven’t found anything yet, sir.”
Taylor rubs his belly and looks at Maggie. “I paid a chunk for that stud, Martin. I have expectations of these pups.”
“I’ll keep looking.” I want Maggie’s pups to turn out as much as he does.
I take care of Maggie — bringing food and occupying her time. Taylor lets me walk her around the outside perimeter of the wall, all those guards watching, and I often wish young Marie would join us, barefoot and blue-dressed, her hair lighter from the regular days in the sun.
I see the excitement in you, she might say. You can’t wait for these puppies to come.
I nod, thinking those same thoughts, my eyes on Maggie’s growing belly.
DOGS don’t take too long to grow inside their mothers. Sixty-two days, according to The Complete Book of the Dog. Around day sixty, we need to give her sloppy food and some salad oil.
Finally, I find a note about whelping for Taylor. “ ‘No help is necessary,’ ” I read to him, “ ‘and one may come down in the morning to find her with her litter comfortably nestling at her side.’ ”
“That’s as unhelpful as the damn noodles,” Taylor shouts. “What in the hell are you talking about, Martin?”
“It means Maggie’ll do just fine all on her own.”
Taylor looks out over his pack of dogs. Maggie lies near the north edge of her pen, barely the animal she was. Her stomach is a giant protrusion, spiked with her dropping nipples, and she waggles the way Marie did with Gerald.
“Is she close?” Taylor asks.
“By my count.”
“We best separate her, then.”
Her new pen has a shed in the back, a small protection from rain when it falls, built up on rough beams atop stone squares.
“She’ll go in there to have them,” Taylor says. “I’ll get us some old blankets from the laundry.”
But Maggie isn’t answering her master’s orders, now. Two days later, she’s nowhere to be seen, and only the mewling gives her away. She’s burrowed under the shed on the back side where we couldn’t see her digging. When I squat low to peer in, I can see the rise of her head and back, bony shoulders and haunches. The rest of her lies deep in a curved bed, dirt and wood obscuring her body and the puppies she must have birthed overnight. I can’t see even one of them, but they are noisy little things, bawling like kittens. Gerald sounded this way, only louder — bigger lungs and mouth.
“Hey there, girl,” I say to Maggie.
When I lie on my side on the ground, right up next to the rough wood, my good arm is just long enough to reach her head. There’s not room for my face under there, so I go by feel, trying to pet her, to give those dangling ears of hers a gentle tug. I’m wanting my hand to say, You’ve done good work, here. You are a good dog. I’m looking to comfort this new mother, to ease the terror she must be trembling under with all that need sucking at her belly.
“Martin! What in the hell you doing on the ground back there?”
My boots must be all Taylor can see, sticking out from the side of the shed, boots and ankles and dirty cuffs.
I run my fingers over Maggie’s head once more and pull my hand out.
“You hear that?” I ask, coming round.
Taylor tips his ear to his shoulder and squints. His hands rest on the wooden rail of the fence, and I can see the blood sucking from his knuckles with the force of his squeezing. He is always pushing the red out of some part of him, gathering it back to his massive heart, extra reserves for the next run.
“That the pups?” he asks, but he does not need an answer. His wide mouth pushes out into a smile I’ve never seen, and he releases the wooden rail in favor of a few flat-palmed slaps, a child’s joy in his hands and face. “How many are there? What’s the bitch-to-male count? What’s their color? All red like Maggie? Or some of that black and tan from the stud? They healthy? Any runts?”