Dog War (3 page)
Precious and Theophilus arrived home to find Maud standing in the doorway, waiting impatiently to collect her wages and go home. She had cooked dinner and left it sitting on the table, covered with a dishtowel against flies. Night was falling and the sinister dimness beginning to stain the bushlands and fields made Maud fretful and uneasy, for she was afraid of walking down the hill alone in the dark.
Precious paid Maud her wages and wished her a safe walk down to the main road. Maud sniffed and said she would be lucky if she made it to the bottom of the hill because it was already gloomier than usual for the time of the year and the road was dark and wicked. Gunman could hide behind any bush and she would see him only after she had suffered a fatal shot. Precious glanced expectantly at Theophilus, hoping that he would offer to drive the maid down to the bottom of the hill, but he was already at the table and facedown in his dinner.
“Well, do de best you can,” Precious advised helplessly.
“If you find me dead body on de road, ma’am,” Maud sniffled, “beg you tell me mother and see dat me get one Christian burial in Clarendon.”
“De gravy gone to sleep,” Theophilus growled, his mouth bulging full of food.
For Precious, Saturdays and Sundays on the mountaintop were days hollowed out with emptiness and boredom. The maid being off on weekends, there was no one to talk to, no passing pedestrians to ogle, no gossip to share and no rumor to monger. There was just nothing eyeball could see on these drab and wasted days but empty overgrown peak, and Precious could only putter about the house and garden and try her best to keep her mind occupied.
For the rest of the morning, she clopped around the house in floppy slippers making a stew for Theophilus who, as usual, had disappeared down to the corner bar to place a bet on the horse races, leaving her bouncing uselessly from one room to the next, straightening, dusting, sweeping here and there, fussing with doily and flower pot, while the seconds and minutes dripped interminably on her uncovered head. With the stew bubbling on the stove and cobweb routed out of every corner, she rattled down the porch steps and out into the garden to weed the flower beds and plant bulbs and seeds.
White Dog came loping over and sniffed her up and down-as she knelt and hunched over the garden soil with her trowel. Red Dog soon ambled over and tried to add his own friendly lick.
“Yuk!” Precious snapped. “Dog tongue! Go ’way, dog! Come back when you have dry tongue.”
Theophilus claimed that dog mouthwater was cleaner than a human’s, but Precious still could not abide a nasty dogtongue mopping, she was very sorry. She had seen with her own eyes dog nose skimming a hairbreadth above a cowpat. She had once seen White Dog jab his snout halfway up the crinkled pink batty of Red Dog and take a narcotic whiff that went straight to his head and made him giddy. That same nasty snout would brush against her skin over her dead body.
Precious was busily digging into the soil, kneeling on the edge of the flower bed and unwinding an endless worm from the roots of her gardenia bush, when suddenly she sensed a dog nose poised to spear deep into her own private batty. She turned quickly to see White Dog sniffing avidly at her nether parts with an excited quiver in his moist nostrils.
“Dog, you mad?” she asked, glaring at him over her shoulder.
White Dog guiltily backed up, ambled away, and slumped in the shade of a tree.
“Lawd, what a way you long!” Precious moaned, reeling the worm out of the soil.
Saturday night was Brutus’s night to ride. In the early years of their marriage when Brutus was young and frisky, he rode as avidly and often as a bus passenger with an unlimited transfer. But with advancing age, Brutus had gradually settled for longer, less frequent rides, until his schedule had dwindled to this one compulsory Saturday-night outing. Rain or moonshine, starlight or fog, Brutus wanted a ride on a Saturday night.
Romping in the moonlight, White Dog and Red Dog could hear scuffling noises drifting from the darkened house and rustling the cool mountain vapors that floated over the pastures, and somewhere deep inside their dog brain they might have puzzled over why every Saturday night sounds of squeaking bedsprings, thudding bedposts, and human muttering came purling out the curtained window.
On this particular night, as the two dogs slumped on the grass and occasionally got up to pace and peer quizzically in the direction of the mysterious sounds guttering from the house, they both suddenly jumped at a piercing female shriek—a jubilant wail of joy, born-again vision, Irish sweepstake winnings—that rang from the darkened bedroom.
White Dog looked at Red Dog as if to ask if that was the mistress.
Red Dog stood up and looked back as if to scoff that Christian women like the mistress didn’t make that kind of slack noise. Winding himself into tighter and tighter circles, Red Dog flopped wheezily on the grass.
A cool breeze wafted down the slopes, fanning the pastures with the sweet scents of wild mountain flowers.
Inside the dark bedroom, Theophilus was chuckling with manful triumph. “What dat noise you make, Precious? Brutus sweet you?”
There was an embarrassed silence, then a languid reply. “Theophilus, I believe you proper calling in life is pornography, you know dat?”
“Pornography, what! If Brutus sweet you, say dat Brutus sweet you! Nothing to be ashamed ’bout if Brutus sweet you.”
A flutter of wifely resignation. “All right. Brutus sweet me. You happy now?” Bedspring cracked and creaked from the sounds of middle-aged bodies settling down for the night’s sleep.
Theophilus chuckled. “Boy, Brutus! Middle age might reach you, but you can still do de job!”
And the whole domestic foofaraw was capped by a faint sigh of demure assent from Precious.
“Oh, yes!”
The Sabbath following was always devoted to hymning and praying off the effects of nasty carnality beastly Brutus schemed to provoke out of her every Saturday night, and that was exactly how Precious spent this Sunday. With a grumpy Theophilus in tow, she went to church determined to atone for her wanton squealing of yesterday.
Theophilus always looked sullen in church, and this Sunday he was no different. Church ached his back, aggravated his corn, gave him a buzzing in his ears, made his belly run. Not that he said or did anything disruptive or out of order during the ceremony. He just slumped in the pew looking woebegone and dejected.
The only time he would perk up was if a parishioner had dropped dead during the week and the minister had a few words of eulogy to say about the deceased. Theophilus would then instantly shed his gloominess and lean forward to listen. Afterwards, on the drive back up to their mountain house, he would moan about how only last week the faithful departed had been drawing breath and cussing bad word but now was dead and gone, carrying on quite as if no one in the parish was allowed to die without giving notice.
This Sunday they learned that an elderly gentleman who had lived in the parish for well over fifty years had suddenly died, and on the way back to their mountain home Theophilus as usual was carrying on as if the deceased had not well outlived his promised three score and ten.
“Safe and happy at last,” Precious opined solemnly.
Theophilus gritted his teeth and the gear of the car as he steered up the steep and narrow road.
“Precious! De man is not safe and happy. De man is dead and gone.”
“My faith tells me dat he is safe and happy,” Precious replied, cool as river rockstone.
“I suppose when I dead and gone you goin’ talk ’bout how I-safe and happy, too!”
“Theo, you not goin’ dead and gone for many, many years. And knowing your disposition, even when you safe and happy, you probably goin’ carry on miserable and cantankerous just to be contrary. But I not worried. My God know how to handle you.”
They drove the remainder of the way up the hill cobwebbed in the stolid silence of the long-married.
That very next day Theophilus, recklessly overtaking a van around a corner, collided headlong with a semi truck and instantly became safe and happy.
Or dead and gone.
Sudden death brings out the best in neighbors. It makes them boil soup and bake pies and brings them filing to the casket to mutter consolations and peer grimly at the deceased. Even acquaintances who had not particularly liked Theophilus in life, finding him too this or that for their taste, in his death were quite willing to drive up the hill and lament his passing, hanging head as if their best friend had been struck down.
Shirley, the Higginsons’ one and only daughter who was now a Miami police, came to Jamaica for her father’s funeral, bringing her gun but leaving behind her husband and children. She explained that she did not agree with children attending funerals, for she had had to undergo just such a trauma at the age of ten and it had given her a lifelong dose of the heebie jeebies. She would never permit her own flesh and blood to experience a similar shock.
The dentist son, Harold, attended the viewing and funeral with his wife, Mildred, and his two children, both of whom gambolled in the front yard, skipping and throwing stones and drawing occasional scolding from mournful adults. One of the children, the boy, was romping with White Dog when Red Dog snuck up and tried to nip him on the foot. But the boy was already schooled in the sneakiness of dog and as soon as he realized that Red Dog was out for a nip, he kicked him briskly on the snout. Red Dog yipped that he was not a football and scurried for the underbrush, tail between his legs, with the boy scampering gleefully after him, trying to punt him over the gully mouth.
The adults congregated solemnly in the wooden house on the hilltop, drinking fruit punch and rum and viewing Theophilus, who was laid out in a draped black coffin on the dining room table, braced against the burdensome weight. One woman remarked how well Theophilus looked and expressed the wish that she, too, would look as good at her own viewing. Another opined that the dead headmaster didn’t look a day over thirty-five. A third decried the waste of burying a man in such a good suit when so much ragamuffin abounded in Jamaica, but another declared that she intended not only to be buried in her best frock, but also in her pearl necklace, for she knew perfectly well that if she didn’t carry the necklace to her grave her husband would hand it over to another woman, and she damn well didn’t buy a necklace to hang from any other neck but her own.
Milling with swarms of black-garbed mourners, the gingerbreaded house looked like a rookery of fretful crows. Breeze blew, and low clouds scudded over the mountain ridge and frothed up a gray drizzle that edged the proceedings with a shudder of gloom.
Then the funeral procession of cars undulated down the rough mountain road like some disjointed beetle humping its sluggish path to a dreary burrow.
Precious was heartbroken. Caring for the throng of mourners, having to endure sympathetic scrutiny for days on end, was all that saved her from utter collapse under the weight of her grief. She could not cope with the idea that Theophilus was gone, really gone forever, and the one time the awful truth struck her was when she was thankfully shielded from prying eyes by the bathroom walls. She crumpled over the sink and wept inconsolably. Someone tapped softly on the door, and Precious muted her wild sobbing, dabbed her eyes with a towel, and regained her composure.
Just before Theophilus was hoisted on the shoulders of friends and neighbors and borne away in the hearse, Precious stole a quiet moment to whisper her final goodbye.
She was staring at the buffed body splayed out in the stylized pose of death and reeking of the undertaker’s powdered fondling when, on an impulse, she reached down and stroked for a last time the white gloved hands entwined in a mound of doughy fingers atop the unmoving chest and whispered, “Goodbye, Brutus.”
“Who’s Brutus?” she heard someone hiss in her neckback. She glanced behind and saw that her daughter had overheard.
“No one,” Precious said stonily, turning back to the coffin.
“But who’s Brutus? That’s not Daddy’s name! Tell me?”
“It’s private.”
“Private? I want to know who’s Brutus and why you calling me daddy Brutus when his name was Theophilus!”
Precious backed away from the table and stared helplessly as the pallbearers hoisted the coffin and shuffled with it toward the hearse parked on the front lawn.
“You goin’ tell me ’bout Brutus?” Precious felt the daughter’s breath pelting the crease of her neck.
“No,” she shot back over her shoulder.
The mourners slow-marched out of the house and across the creaking wooden porch.
“That’s why I turn police, you know dat!” the daughter whispered angrily. “Because you and Daddy always kept things from me. Always!”
Overcome by the senseless futility, the dizzying absurdity of the moment, Precious stumbled vainly after the coffin. Hands reached out and brushed at her with sympathy. Behind her sulked the fiery daughter, scowling with resentment and insistently hissing, “Why can’t you tell me
who
name Brutus?”
The first three or four nights after the burial were oppressive but bearable. Family and friends gathered around and filled the threatening emptiness of the mountain house with the patter and prattle of ordinary life. The daughter slept beside Precious. The son occupied the room next door and made the wooden house quiver with the healthy footfalls of a preoccupied man. Friends came and went, bringing with them a train of petty affairs, gossip, and neighborhood stories; and the unrelenting silence that stalks every widow was kept at bay for a week.
But then the friends drifted away, one by one, and the visitors dropping by with a cake or a pot of stew peas came less and less often. The son disappeared for longer and longer stretches, and finally one morning he packed up and returned to his own household in Kingston.
Shirley lingered in the mountain house for another week. She slept every night with her policewoman’s gun under the pillow, snoring and gnashing her teeth something fearful. One night she sat upright slowly like an uncoiling spring, extended her finger, took sinister aim, and cocked her thumb as if it were the hammer of a revolver. The dream gun went off noiselessly in the shadowy room, and each time it recoiled and jerked in her hand as if it had actually spat deadly bullets.