I battled an urge to collect her clothes and wash them, make them fresh for her. With a boy, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But she couldn’t be more than sixteen. I taught girls her age and knew how easily they could be harmed, how little it took to intrude. A particular kind of glance or standing an inch too close. Certain male teachers routinely pressed against those lines. While some girls shrank back, others played into it. Either way, it was a violation.
This girl, she’d be one to feign enjoyment. I saw it in the way she smiled on entering the kitchen. She let her eyes linger on my old face as if this was her currency and she was asking what I might be willing to offer for more of the same.
But I find myself preaching, getting downright biblical with my purifying and sacrilege, my dishevelments and violations. If Katherine were here, she’d frown and say, “Just talk, Isaac. Like a normal person. Please.”
And I’d say, “But thee loves me, right? No matter how I talk?” And she would hug me, because she knew in my world, “thee” was an endearment of the highest order.
But, of course, this isn’t true. If Katherine were here, there’d be no hug, and even if there were, it would be made in pity, consolation for the desire she knew I still held and what she could no longer give. Katherine had long suffered both my silence and my soliloquy, and while I can blame my Quaker father for the silence, I’m not sure where the latter comes from, though my mother’s maternal grandfather had been an evangelical preacher, so perhaps the battle of spiritual styles runs deep in my blood.
As for the girl’s filthy clothes, I would let her be. For now, she had Katherine’s deserted things. In the morning, I’d offer to do a load or, better yet, show her the laundry and let her decide how to proceed.
* * *
—
I WOKE AT SIX THE NEXT MORNING not the slightest bit tired. Rufus, who’d spent the night pressed against the girl’s door, lumbered upright when he saw me, stiff-legged from hours in the cold hall. After his bowl of kibble and a short trip outside, he curled into his overstuffed chair near the woodstove, his old bones needing the heat.
Peter was expecting me at school the following week, and I set up in the kitchen with my books and lesson plans. In truth, my purpose was to guard the door, prevent the girl from sneaking off. She was probably a runaway, and if she preferred hunger and cold and wild animals sniffing her at night, would rather claw at the dirt in hope of a wilted carrot than return home, she’d likely had good reason for leaving.
I tried to outline a new section on maritime habitats but found myself staring at Rufus. He’d begun to snore. He was nearly eleven, and while not ancient for his breed, he’d aged faster than most. His feet twitched at the air, and a bark dead-ended in his throat. As usual, snot ran from his nose and his black-spotted tongue swung out, wet and slurping even in his dreams.
I loved Rufus, and he had loved my son. But love didn’t dispel the strange disturbance that hung about him. The dog knew things. Not only the transitory sufferings of others but serious matters, matters of life and death. Rufus had known for over a decade how my son would die. He had prophesied it to me.
* * *
—
WHEN DANIEL TURNED SEVEN, he started begging for a puppy. We snuck out one June morning and drove to the local shelter. Katherine opposed the idea, but not so severely that we felt constrained. Once there, Daniel wanted all the animals, even a huge malamute that howled and thrashed against the walls of his kennel. I didn’t see any dog that seemed suitable, and we were about to leave over Daniel’s noisy protests when a young woman, a volunteer, pointed to a different section, to a black pup, probably six months old. She said he was scheduled to be put down later in the day. “He’s a good dog,” she said, “despite his looks.”
Sitting quietly on the concrete floor of his wire kennel, thin-haired and scabbed, with his own shit smeared on his muzzle, he was waiting for me. For Daniel too, apparently, because we agreed the dog was staring intently into only one pair of eyes. Only I would say mine and Daniel his. I’m not sure what Daniel saw, but I met something that knew me, had known me before I existed—a puzzling, formless knowing that had taken on a dog disguise and drawn me to it.
These words, as inadequate as they are, have only just come to me. Back then I would have credited the pick entirely to myself, my intuition, my judgment about animal natures and the fit of temperaments. Even so, I hesitated. The dog was part pit bull. You could see it in his blocky head and the depth of his chest, and I knew the neighbors would worry. It was likely this unfortunate heritage, more than his obvious poor health, that had left him homeless. As he was longer legged and narrower chested than most pit bulls—he probably had some black Lab in him as well—I hoped that would soothe any neighborly jitters.
But I would have chosen him even if he’d been pittie through and through. I’d grown up with a pit and believed the rising hostility toward the breed was more contagious polemic than a true reflection of their nature. When I was a boy, pit bulls were called nanny dogs. They were known for their good cheer and stability, their patience with the clumsy handling of children. Humans are forever picking their heroes and villains in waves of reversing fashion. Though at times—and this has happened not only with some pit bulls but with all manner of people and entire countries—we name our villains and then treat them in such a way that they prove us prophets.
But again I lecture, a trait Katherine came to loathe. She never understood that it was nearly always myself I was attempting to instruct. In any case, when we took the dog out to the shelter’s run, another dog, a rottweiler, lunged at him, and the pup did the strangest thing. He sat completely still, oddly serene, and watched with cool interest at the snapping and snarling of a crazed canine that grew increasingly furious at his lack of response. Finally a staff member yanked the other dog away.
On the ride home, Daniel and I teased each other about whom the dog had been waiting for, but it wasn’t long before his choice became clear. Once the dog was fed, he trotted after Daniel. Later I found them together, Daniel curled on his side on the living-room floor, the dog’s back to his belly, its head tucked under Daniel’s chin. Boy legs and pup legs were flopped together, and the image was that of a mythic creature, a boy-beast newly birthed in that patch of sun on a warm June morning.
Daniel named him Rufus. I told Katherine that he had wanted to honor Rufus Jones, a weighty Quaker. She gave me an amused look. “It’s a dog name, Isaac. Our seven-year-old is hardly a Quaker historian.”
From the first, the dog suffered not only the noxious emissions common to the breed but a chronic sinus condition that colonized his chest and made him wheeze. Yet by the time he reached the age of two, his coat glistened and he was coming into the full breadth of his chest, with a powerful neck and a muscled forehead that tensed when alarmed. He was tender and attentive with all of us, particularly Daniel, and that was a relief given the many well-intentioned warnings of friends.
One night, I arrived home late. Katherine had locked the back door, likely due to a recent burglary in the area. I didn’t have my key, so I tested the other doors and found the side one unlocked. As I entered that darkened room, an intensity of silence caught my attention, then a rush of air as a powerful beast went airborne, a demon flying. Light glinted off the creature’s eyes. In that moment, we recognized each other. Rufus twisted, taking the brunt of the impact against the closed door. But it was too late, because I’d seen what he could be.