The Litter

HE WOKE THAT DAY TO AN EMPTY BEDROOM AND THE DISTANT recollection of Almondine jumping off the bed in the gray morning light. He’d meant to follow her but then he lay back, and when he opened his eyes again the sun was bright and the curtains billowing inward, carrying with them a volley of echo-doubled hammer strikes-Claude at work on the field side of the barn roof. He kicked off the covers and dressed and descended the stairs, sneakers in hand. Almondine lay sprawled in a parallelogram of sunlight on the porch. His father and mother were at the kitchen table sharing pages from the Mellen Weekly Record. Morning chores had been done and the two kennel dogs, brought to the house on the nightly rotation, were back in their runs.

Edgar ate toast on the porch, looking out at the field. Almondine rolled onto her back, splayed and crocodilian, and stared at his plate. He looked down at her and grinned.

Too bad, he signed, munching.

Almondine swabbed her tongue across her chops and swallowed.

“Edgar, when is school over?” his father called from the kitchen.

Edgar inspected the remaining square inch of his toast. Butter on the edges, the top heaped with red raspberry jam. He nibbled from the crust and smacked his lips. Almondine flexed on her backbone to get a better look. Finally he held the toast out, pinched between thumb and forefinger so her whiskers would brush his palm, an ancient habit. She scrambled to her feet and sniffed his offering, pretending to be unsure whether it would suit her, then lifted the toast daintily away with her small front teeth.

Edgar walked into the kitchen and set his plate on the table.

Friday is the last day, he signed.

“I checked Iris this morning. She’s carrying her pups pretty low,” his father said. Edgar looked at his father looking solemnly back at him. Was there a problem? Was this too early for Iris? He tried to remember if he had groomed her the day before, or even touched her.

“What would you think of making this litter yours?”

It took a second to register what his father was saying. He blinked and looked out at the barn. The lines in the red siding pulsed through a wave in the porch window glass. “You’d do the birth work. I’d be there, but it would be your responsibility. And you’d look after the pups,” his father said. “Every day. If any get sick, you’d take care of them, no matter what else you’d rather do. And you’d do the training, right up to placement, even when school starts.”

Edgar nodded. He was smiling, stupidly, but he couldn’t stop.

“With my help,” his mother said. “If you want it.”

She laughed a little and touched his arm and sat back. His father held the newspaper folded in his lap. They looked so satisfied just then, and suddenly he knew they’d been discussing this for a long time, watching him, trying to gauge whose litter would be best. He hadn’t asked for any such thing. Ordinarily his father oversaw the whelping. When the pups were old enough, they became his mother’s charges. While she trained them, his father arranged placements. Edgar already had endless chores around the kennel, divided between the two of them. He fed and watered the dogs, cleaned their pens, and groomed them-his specialty. He helped with training, too, crazywalking the pups, performing the shared-gaze exercises, creating distractions when his mother wanted to proof the dogs. But this was different. They wanted Edgar to handle a single litter from birth through placement.

“With a little luck, she’ll hold off whelping until school is out,” his father said. “We have to keep an eye on her, though. You never know.” He picked up his paper and folded it in the middle, then glanced over. “You look like you’re about to have puppies,” he said.

Then Edgar started laughing. Almondine came in from the porch to see what was happening, fanning her tail and holding her ears flat. She walked around the table pressing her nose into their hands.

Thank you, Edgar signed. He dropped his hands and lifted them again and put them down when he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He went to the refrigerator and poured milk into his glass and drank it with the door open. From the back of the refrigerator he retrieved a package of cheese curds. He ate one in plain sight, palmed the rest, and walked out into the brilliant summer daylight.

THE WHELPING ROOM, set near the back of the barn and enclosed by thick plank walls, was a warmer, darker, quieter place than any other in the kennel. The wood of the walls reeked with birth odors: blood, placenta, milk, sweat. The pens were half-sized, with no outside access, to keep the temperature steady. His father had to stoop under the dropped ceiling. Low-wattage bulbs cast a pale light that made puppies’ eyes glimmer, and an old-time wall thermometer hung in each pen-one backed by a Pepsi bottle, another a blue-and-white Valvoline label, both marked with a thick black line at eighty degrees. In the passageway, a battery wall clock with a sweep second hand ticked away quietly.

A mother and her month-old litter occupied the first pen, the pups just old enough to escape the whelping box. They tumbled over one another and pressed their blunt black muzzles through the wire and nibbled Edgar’s fingers, and then, for no reason he could see, spooked and scrambled away.

In the farthest pen, Iris lay quietly panting, her back to the whelping box in the corner. He knelt beside her while she tongue-stroked the back of his wrist. He placed one hand on the hot crepe of her belly and in the other a cheese curd appeared. Iris tongued it off his palm. She sniffed her belly where he’d touched her.

You’re going to have to work real hard soon, he signed. You know that, don’t you?

Iris swallowed and looked at him, eyes wet in the cave light. He reached into his pocket and held out another curd.

HE DREAMED HE WAS RUNNING, feet pounding beneath him, breath coming in gasps. Always he arrived too late. The third night he woke in a fit of anxiety and he was at the kitchen door, on his way to check Iris, before he decided it was a bad idea. At breakfast he peeled an egg and he and his father walked to the barn. He rehearsed in his mind the case for skipping school, but before his father even touched Iris, he said, “It won’t be today.”

Edgar squatted and stroked her face and broke the egg into pieces and fed it to her while his father tried to explain how he knew.

“Look at her eyes,” he said. “Are they teary? Is she walking in circles?” He felt the curve of Iris’s huge belly, her hindquarters, looked at her gums, took her temperature. He always had an explanation, but the truth, Edgar suspected, was that his father just knew, and didn’t know how he knew. They looked up Iris’s birthing history; she’d whelped on her sixty-second day with her first litter of six and at sixty-four days with her second litter of five. Friday would be day sixty-two.

When they were finished, Edgar collared Iris and snapped on a lead and let her walk wherever she liked. She headed for the tall grass behind the barn, then the Wolf River apple trees at the top of the orchard. Her hind legs rowed out to her sides when she walked. When Almondine approached, serious and respectful, Iris stood for inspection.

Edgar boarded the school bus in despair. Ten thousand hours later, it ground to a halt in front of their driveway. He felt weightless as he opened the whelping room door. Iris lay sleeping, solitary, enormous. When Friday passed, he barely noticed that school was over. It was just another day when Iris would surely whelp while he was away.

WHEN HE LOOKED IN on Saturday morning, the bedding in the whelping box had been scratched up into a pile. Instead of lying outstretched in her usual gestative pose, Iris was pacing and panting. She came forward with her ponderous gait. Once outside, she forged into the hayfield, aiming for the hazel stand.