he’s thirsty.”
You thought about that, and about the pan of water behind the cellar house where he drank. The cats drank there, too. You thought about the doghouse on the front porch, which was painted the same color as the real house. Sometimes the terrier slept in there and sometimes he didn’t. It was anybody’s guess. Then you thought about how if you pointed to something extremely directly—in other words, touched it—and said the terrier’s name with a certain urgency, he would eat whatever you were pointing at. Or attempt to eat it. He was four years old and you’d owned him since your sixth birthday and he was a cairn terrier approximately the color of old straw. His eyes hid behind a veil of hair but he didn’t seem to have any trouble seeing and sometimes for fun you would pull back his bangs and reveal his eyes and they were black.
If you were working in the garden, the terrier would join you because any kind of garden work involved edible things for him. True, if you were there, it might mean you would trick him into trying to eat a piece of wood or a grasshopper. But your mother would never trick him and if she was doing any kind of digging or weeding it meant that in all likelihood the terrier’s favorite delicacy would be unearthed. Grubs. White grubs. Fat white grubs. Why did he like those so much? They were somewhat see-through.
He also liked peas. Last year when the peas were ripe you would sometimes wander into the rows of peas in the afternoon and pick a few and shell them and eat them right there and usually the terrier would be right at your heels and he would eat the hulls you dropped but also he was hoping you would give him a whole pod—peas and all—because he liked that even better than the hulls. And who wouldn’t? You and Susan would give him a few whole pods, but not many. He also ate some kinds of cattle feed and occasionally poop, but that was hard to understand. Also, when the farrier came to trim the horses’ hooves, he would leave the trimmed bits of hoof in the barnyard and the terrier found these to be extremely enjoyable to chew on, especially after they had dried for a few days. When they dried, they shrank and curled. He didn’t eat them, he just chewed on them, but if you came too close to him when he was chewing on a horse hoof he would growl. Stay back, bucko. This is my horse hoof. So no monkey business.
He meant it. And who cared? You didn’t want the horse hooves.
“Hey,” you said. You had rolled onto your back and your eyes were closed.
“What?” Susan said from her bed. You could tell from her voice that she was close to sleep. Downstairs, the lights in the living room were off, but you could hear Dad in the kitchen.
“Do you remember,” you said, “how Teddy ate peas last summer?”
You waited awhile. “Yeah,” she said.
The peas would be ready again soon. In the garden.
“Do you think he’ll eat them this year?” you asked.
“Yeah . . .”
“I bet so,” you said. You opened your eyes and then you closed them again and then you thought of something and you opened them.
“Hey,” you said, “do you remember when Teddy ate that balloon once?”
“Yeah . . .”
You thought about it. “Me too,” you said.
And it was the last thing you said, because you were falling asleep.
Mulberries were a June thing. They went from white to pink to red to black, and then they were ready. They weren’t that good to eat and if you had more than a few your stomach got quarrelsome. You had to spit out the stems because they were unchewable and tasted like clover leaves. There were little bugs on the mulberries anyway. Bugs about the size of dust, but you could see them moving if you looked close. Mainly you thought about mulberries at the end of the night when you washed your feet. You went barefoot all summer and when you were running around the yard barefoot in June sometimes you weren’t really thinking about what you were doing, because apparently you ran under the mulberry tree a few times and crushed a lot of fallen mulberries with your feet without even realizing it. You saw the blotches when you washed your feet at night. You didn’t mind the blotches. They were kind of like a suntan; it was just something that happened in the course of the summer. You could still see the stains the next day. They didn’t wash off. You’d see them at breakfast as you sat cross-legged. They were a reminder. A reminder of themselves. You’d look at your feet and think to yourself, oh, mulberries. They’re no good to eat. You never even realized you’d been running under the mulberry tree until later. Oh, you’d think, mulberries.
Summertime breakfast. Certain regions of your hair were sticking up.
The day after school ended in late May, your shoes and socks came off. But your feet were tender. Walking in the grass felt like being tickled. If you stepped on a june bug it would buzz and you would shriek because of how it felt. The sidewalk was rough. And you couldn’t walk on the gravel of the driveway at all because it was just too much to take. The situation of having tender feet had no immediate remedy, but you were reminded by Mom that it wouldn’t last; your feet would get tougher, and in a couple of weeks you’d be running in the driveway, riding bikes, walking on the prickly hay in the barn, and so forth, without even realizing you didn’t have shoes on. You would start to lose track of your shoes. Shoes? Where are my shoes? I haven’t seen my shoes in days.
You stood in the garden with Susan, clasping each other by the shoulders, and dug your feet down into the loose soil until they disappeared and you were people without feet. You were ankle people.
The soil, for its part, was warm.
We. Us. Ours. We were five in number.
Our mother. She would cut our hair in the kitchen. We would sit with an old sheet pinned around our necks and she would snip away.
“How old were you when you married Dad?” we would prompt.
“I was nineteen. A teenage bride,” she’d tell us again. We’d laugh. “We were so poor we ate a lot of pancakes for dinner.”
Pancakes for dinner did not sound like deprivation.
Our mother. Whereas our father came from the plains of western Missouri, from tall people who worked the soil and didn’t have much to say about that, our mother came from the Ozarks of southern Missouri, from people who hunted the woods and hollows and had stories that led to more stories that led to even more stories. The time the schoolteacher was sprayed by a skunk. The time the buggy tipped over. The time the roof caught on fire. The rattlesnake story, the snowstorm story, the first radio story. These stories trickled from our grandmother’s generation to our mother and then to us.
Our mother who was a social worker who helped children, but whose other job was us. She did magical things: feeding us, growing food for us, sewing for us, baking bread for us, taking us to dance lessons and piano lessons and softball games. We’d walk in the door after coming home from school and smell gingerbread.
Our mother who stood by her husband in all his years of graduate school, in a time when the wives of the students joked that while their husbands got PhDs, the wives got PHTs, which stood for “Putting Hubby Through.” She’d been a faculty wife. She’d had a baby in Connecticut, a baby in North Carolina, a baby in Ohio. Tenure was an elusive thing, so our mother and father decided to return to Missouri to raise their family.
There were the horses. There were the cows. There were the ducks and there were the chickens. The baby chicks hatched in June. You would wait and wait and all the hens were sitting on their eggs, and you knew exactly how many eggs they each had and you knew when they were supposed to hatch, and usually when they were supposed to hatch, they did. You could hear them in there—inside the egg!—peeping, just before they hatched. You would wait for all the eggs to hatch, and most of the time one or two eggs per batch didn’t hatch and the mother hen would leave the nest with her new family, and we would take the abandoned eggs inside, and Mom would wrap them in a little towel and put them in a metal bowl on top of the stove’s pilot light and sometimes—just sometimes—one of these eggs would hatch. Then you had probably saved its life. You and Susan and Mom.