He closed up the kennel and walked to the house. The kitchen door key hung from a nail in the basement. He ate straight from the refrigerator, fog pouring over his feet. Bread and cheese and roast chicken off the bone, then walked through the house cradling a five-quart bucket of vanilla ice cream under his arm, spooning it up and looking around. The kitchen clock. The stove. The candle night-light. The living room furniture sitting petrified and ogrelike in the dusk. The clothes hanging in his mother’s closet. He walked up the stairs and sat on his bed. A puff of dust lifted into the air. Across the plank flooring, dead flies lay scattered, dry husks, blue and green, with cellophaned wings. He hadn’t imagined everyone would be gone. He hadn’t imagined saying hello to the place before seeing his mother. Before seeing Almondine most of all. He had imagined sleeping in that bed again, but looking at it now, he didn’t know how he could.
He put the ice cream back in the freezer and dropped the spoon into the sink. Essay scratched at the porch door. He walked out and pushed the door open and let her trot through the house, repeating his inspection. He was seated at the table, at his father’s place, when she returned. He sat for a long time, waiting. It was hard for him not to think about what things would be like. Finally, he decided to wash up. When he lifted his face from the towel in the bathroom he saw the green soap turtle sitting on the windowsill, complete and perfect except for one shriveled hind foot.
He walked into the kitchen and found a pencil and a scrap of paper and touched the lead to the paper and stopped and looked out the kitchen windows. The windows had been propped open on sticks and a night breeze, hot as an animal exhalation, ruffled the gingham curtains. Dark, ripe apples swung from the branches outside the window. He put the pencil to the paper again. I ate while you were gone, he wrote. I’ll come back tomorrow. Then he took the photograph of Claude and Forte from his pocket and set it beside the note.
He gave Essay the option of staying or coming along. She walked down the porch steps, calm now, curiosity satisfied. He pocketed the key and stood trying to decide where to sleep. The mow, on a night that hot, would be stifling. In the milk house he found a pile of burlap sacks. They walked into the field. It was full dark by that time but the faint reach of the yard light cast his shadow before him. At the narrow end of the trees by the whale-rock he snapped the dust from the sacks and threw them down. Essay circled and circled, solving again the everlasting riddle of lying down to sleep. She came to rest with her back to him, muzzle fitted high on her foreleg. Overhead the aurora flew, sheets of wild neon. He focused on the hovering seed of the yard light flickering through the hay and breathed the scent of pollen and decay that infused the night.
They’d slept for some time when the truck crested the hill. The moon was up. The field around them like salt and silver. He sat on the burlap and watched the truck back around and stop by the porch while the kennel dogs barked a frantic greeting. Essay stood and whined. Edgar lay a hand on her hip. She nosed him and turned back to watch.
The truck disgorged the figures of Claude and his mother. Claude lifted the gate on the topper and lifted out two bags of groceries while his mother paused to settle the dogs. The porch door creaked and slapped. The kitchen light appeared dimly through the broad windows in the living room. Twice more Claude walked between the back porch and the truck. On his last trip, he stood looking around the yard, then closed the topper and walked to the porch and turned out the light.
And sitting under the stars and the sky, Edgar waited to see Almondine. She had not jumped down from the bed of the truck. He had watched for that. I just missed her, he said to himself. He closed his eyes to see it again. But she would have scented him at once. He felt himself perfectly drawn and repelled, wishing to be done with that part of his life and wishing never to let it end, knowing that whatever came next would only reduce what had already happened until there was nothing but memory, a story eroded, a dream thinly recalled.
If she wasn’t at home, then she must have gone into town with them. It was one or the other. One or the other.
He looked at the stand of birches, alone in the center of the field. It was the middle of August and when he stood, the timothy almost reached his waist. He stumbled through it, striking at the heads with his splayed hands. The trunks of the birches tilted and blurred and the leaves in their canopy quavered whitely. Then he was standing in the broad circle of grass scythed away at the base of the trees. There was the familiar white cross for the stillborn baby and the newer one for his father. And next to them, as yet unmarked, an oblong of fresh, dark ground.
It blew the breath out of him. He fell like a puppet severed from its strings. He lay with his forehead pressed to the ground, the scent of iron and loam filling his nostrils, and he clutched the dirt and poured it out of his hands. An oceanic roar filled his head. All his memory, all his past, rose up to engulf him. Images of Almondine. How she liked peanut butter but not peanuts; how she preferred lima beans to corn but refused peas; how, best of all, she adored honey, any way she could get it, licked from his fingers, from his lips, dabbed on her nose. How she liked to snatch things from his hands and let him take them back. How if he cupped her chin she would lower and lower her head all the way to the ground to stay like that. How different it was to stroke her with his palm than with his fingertips. How he could lay a hand on her side while she slept and she wouldn’t open her eyes but nonetheless understood, and her breath came differently.
He remembered a time when he was small, when Almondine was young and rambunctious, more like a wild horse than a dog to him, when she could cross the yard faster than a swallow and catch him running across that same field. He liked to sneak away-make her chase, see her fly. When she reached him, they would turn and sprint into the field, heading for a thicket of raspberry canes, a place he liked simply because he was small enough to move through it unscathed. But when they arrived, something was standing there-an animal he had never seen before, with a broad face and pointed nose and great smooth black claws. They’d run up quickly and surprised it and it turned to face them with a hoarse cough, hissing and slashing the ground, mistaking their headlong rush for a charge. Gouts of dirt sprayed the air behind its haunches. He tried to step back, but the thing bounded equally forward, tethered to him by some unseen force, staring with black marble eyes as though beholding a monster, panting throatily and turning and snapping at its hind legs and whirling to face them again, a beard of gray foam lining its jaw.
How long Almondine stood beside him he didn’t know, transfixed by how the thing crabbed forward with each step back he took. Then she glided lengthwise between them, blocking his view and hipping him so hard he nearly fell. She didn’t run to do it, used none of the enchantments of play, nothing clever, no dancing grace. She just stepped between them and stood, tail unlashed. Then she turned and licked his face and he was stunned at what he understood her to be doing. If she moved she exposed him, and therefore she would not move. She was asking him to leave, saying it was he who could save her, not the other way around. She would not even risk a fight with the thing. She would leave only if he were gone and in such a way that it wouldn’t chase. She took her eyes off it just that one instant, to make things clear.
He watched her standing there for the longest time as he backed away. When he reached the barn, she crouched and sprang and materialized at his side. And he remembered how they’d seen the thing, dead and fly-strewn, on the road the next day.