“I’ve no idea, sir. She’s dug herself under the shed there. I haven’t gotten a look at the pups at all.”
The mirth leaves him quick as it came. “Now, why’d she do that, the damn dog? Those blankets are good enough for you men, and she’s turning her nose at ’em?” He lifts the sagging gate to get it clear of the dirt. The hinges are about done. I’m sure he’ll have me framing out a new one any day. “Where’s she at?”
I lead him round the back, and it’s a worry to see him crouching down. I keep as much a distance as I can, but I can’t close my ears to his grunts and curses, laboring to haul that body around.
“Well, goddamn,” he finally says, belly balanced on one of his knees. “I can’t see a goddamned thing.” He lifts himself from the ground the way he pours himself into the saddle — fluid and easy. “You got to dig this out, Martin. Get us a line to those pups.”
“From what I’ve read,” I venture, “it’d be good to let them alone for a few days.”
He points his eyes at me. “You running this show now, Martin? You the new deputy warden?”
I know not to answer, so we stand quiet for a bit, Maggie’s pups keeping up their racket in their den.
“What’s it we’re supposed to do for the bitch?” Taylor asks.
“Broth. And sloppy food. Not too much at the start here. In a day or two, we need to get her a little exercise. Helps keep the milk up.” I have been reading.
He looks down at the raw dirt under our feet, recently turned by Maggie’s paws. He toes a clod, then kicks it toward the wire fencing. “Let her rest till tomorrow. Then you start digging this out. Be good for her to have an easy run in and out, too. You head over to the mess and get us some broth, now. Make her up a slew with the bonemeal and all.”
“Sir,” I say, and make toward the gate.
I start early. The days are long and sun-hot, the corn high. I’d like to have my digging done before noon. Taylor’s good about giving me shade breaks with water and food, but there is no escaping a midday sun in early July. It drops closer to the land, these interminable days of summer, hovering just above our heads, a great round furnace. This low sun turns every lick of water to steam, even the fresh-pumped drinks in our mess-issued bottles. The sun bakes those metal canteens, boiling the liquid inside, and we chase our thirst with water so hot it burns our tongues.
This is the season Maggie’s pups have been born into. They will learn how to pant before they open their eyes.
Maggie crawls out when I get there. There’s still slop in the bowl I left her last night, and a bucket of water, and she goes after each with fury. She has transformed again, yet another dog I’ve never seen. Her spine ridges out of her back, jointed and sharp, and her ribs show through her skin. All that remains of her belly are the sagging red teats that hang from her like the Guernseys’ udders. She curls her tail between her hind legs.
I set to work with the hoe, my left arm fronting the work. On my fourth drag, I wrest loose the hardened remains of a giant rat. Its body is still intact, the skin stretched tight and hard over the bones, something in the soil preserving it this way, rather than eating it back into dirt. The claws are long and yellowed, and the teeth are the same color, jagged extrusions from the sunken skull. The nose is a hard, blackened ball atop them, the whiskers like blackened string. The tail coils toward the hind legs, spiraling in on itself like a pig’s.
Maggie comes to inspect. She brings her nose close to the body and huffs loudly, sending dust into the air. She raises her head to me, indifference on her face. The rat is so past life, it doesn’t register as anything more than ground, something to dig loose in the making of a den. I scoop it up with its surrounding dirt and deposit it in the wheelbarrow.
Maggie paws at the ground. I’ve blocked her way in.
“Give me a minute, girl.” I chain her while I finish. “Wait.”
She won’t listen, pulling against her chain.
Finally, I have the trench dug, and with one of Taylor’s spurned blankets against my side, I belly-crawl my way under the shed. The ground is cool and rich as turned soil in the spring, the scent and lick of short winter days bound up in that dirt, seeping out with every fresh turning until the high-summer sun parches the rows dry.
The warmth of the puppies crowds my face.
It’s difficult to bring an arm round the front of me, a hand to close round these small, whimpering beasts. A muscle near my right shoulder blade squeezes itself tight in protest, a stiff cramp that takes my breath. In the movement, my head strikes the sharp edge of a shed beam, hard enough to bring blood. There is no reason to remove these dogs from this space. But, still, I load them one by one onto the blanket, their round bellies and tiny ribs stirring the pain from my back and arm. I grope in the semidark to be sure I’ve collected them all, my hand running over the round nest, its edges gone dry with age. Maggie is a mess of noise by my feet.
“Here we come,” I tell her.
The pups are tiny things, half the size of the rat I found, and lighter in color than their mother. Their heads are golden tan, their snouts dark and wrinkled. Their ears are the size of my thumbnails, small flaps on the sides of their heads, not even to their lips, though I know they will dangle to their shoulders once they’ve grown. They squirm and writhe in their pile, a crawling mass of need, hungry.
I carry them into the shed and set Maggie free. “They’re right in here.”
The doorway is large and open, the pups easy to see, but Maggie returns to the burrow, laying her body flat to edge back under. Marie once told me about particular birds that won’t accept their offspring once they’ve taken on the scent of humans. This surely can’t apply to bloodhounds, these animals we’ve bred to serve us, but I’m worried all the same.
Maggie scratches and paws under the shed. I hear her moving under there, the shuffle of her breath.
I know these pups won’t hold without her. I think of the chapters—“Orphaned Pups,” “Hand-Feeding Pups,” “Whelping Your Own Pups”—we will need goat’s milk and bottles. And even if we get them to eat, we will still lose several. That’s what the books say. I will not be able to tell Taylor it’s his fault, that we should’ve left the dogs alone. I’m fearing their deaths already, fearing the regret and guilt that is building in my stomach, in my back, in the cut on my head, the hardening blood in my hair.
But then Maggie emerges, the nape of a pup’s neck held tight in her teeth. She passes me without care or notice, returning the lost pup to the others in their pile. She digs at the blankets and encircles the pups, a wall of a house. They crawl to her teats and settle into eating — all seven. Alive, and their mother, too, this dog in all her transformations, she is still there, whole, and the thought makes me ache for Marie, going again to that Saturday morning in March when Gerald was born in our marriage bed, in our village house, the resident doctor there to catch him.
The boy was slippery and bloody, and the doctor handed him directly to me. “He’ll go to his mama soon enough. We just need to do a little cleanup here. Why don’t you take the child out to the kitchen, Roscoe?”
The babe’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was wrinkly as an old man. I dampened a rag at the sink and set to removing the junk from his face. It made him howl.
“Shush,” I whispered, trying to rock him in my arms. I didn’t know how to do it — how to soothe anything that small.
I worried about Marie hearing the noise and insisting on rushing through whatever the doctor had to do, so I took the baby outside into the clear spring day, a more fortunate time to be born than July. I stood on our small front porch, hoping for a woman to hear the baby’s noise and come to my aid.