The Truth of the Matter (6 page)

Bernice Dameron had phoned Lily from school to be sure someone would look in on Agnes, and, of course, when Lily Butler came over from next door, Agnes didn’t discuss anything about the anxious drama spinning through her thoughts. Nothing that Agnes might say along the lines of what she was thinking would be any surprise at all to Lily, and nothing Lily might reply would be the slightest help to Agnes. She and Lily knew instinctively never to admit the worst to each other. Lily was concerned and well intentioned but betrayed her impatience when it was clear there was nothing physically wrong with Agnes, that there was really nothing to be done to make Agnes feel better.

“Wouldn’t you like me to bring you some supper?” Lily asked, in the very way of asking that made it out of the question for Agnes to allow her to do so. But Agnes wasn’t hungry, anyway, and felt well enough to get something for herself if she wanted it. Lily could handle almost anything with flair. She organized bond rallies, the Ladies Aid Society, and Garden Club meetings with efficiency, and she presided over them with humor and an air of unruffled certainty. But she had very little talent for tolerating human weakness, and no patience at all if she suspected any sort of brewing sentimentality. She sat with Agnes for a little while, put a pitcher of water and a glass on the bedside table, then made her escape, and both women were relieved.

The next morning Agnes got up early and stepped back into the pattern of her days. She carried on as usual, teaching the second grade at Jesser Grammar School, eating lunch with Bernice Dameron, Will’s older sister, in the cloakroom, where they sat on the boot bench with their cheese sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, idly chatting and luxuriating in furtively smoking one of the few cigarettes a day they allowed themselves with the war on, fanning the smoke out of the high transom window so they wouldn’t be caught breaking the rules. The days passed uneventfully, and after a while no one gave any thought to that strange little spell that had overtaken Mrs. Scofield at school—no one but Nora Alexander, that is. She was in love with Mrs. Scofield and believed she had saved her teacher’s life. And Agnes moved through all the hours, working hard to make the time pass by.

Some days she stayed late in her classroom, reorganizing the supply closet, correcting workbooks, or just sitting unthinking at her desk, staring out the windows until she could scurry home too late to be expected to stop in at the Butlers’ as she had been in the habit of doing. She was stuck in a state of incuriosity, and even the energy to receive Robert’s courtly concern and Lily’s briskly assuring cheer escaped her. Agnes saw Will now and then, although she didn’t have the energy to display affection or feign interest in much he had to say. But sex was the one thing she did hunger for; she found herself dwelling on the idea of Will’s hands touching her, of his pale torso and his long, strong legs.

Once, while she was chopping vegetables in the kitchen, the thought crossed her mind that Will was burly in the muscular way of the big dray horses still to be found on some of the farms in the county, whereas, although Warren had been about the same height as Will, he’d been built more along the lines of a jumper, a sleek thoroughbred. Agnes had been efficiently chopping chunks of celery and onions but suddenly she laid the knife flat down, opening her hands and bracing herself against the low chopping block as she leaned forward in surprised embarrassment at her own wandering thoughts.

She straightened and instinctively covered her face as she felt herself blush, but her hands were moist from the onions and celery. “Ah! Oh, oh,” she said and made a small hissing sound of dismay. Finally she ran upstairs for the eyecup and flushed her eyes as best she could. She had always been sensitive to onions, and it was hours before her eyes stopped tearing. But she was helpless against her imagination, and if an image of Will came to mind at some odd time or other, she found that she literally salivated, and it became her greatest pleasure—in a tangle of bedclothes—to abandon, finally, every other thought of anything at all.

In late February, Ernie Mullins came to school with a note from his mother asking if Mrs. Scofield would tell the class that the family was moving and had a good dog that needed a home. Agnes explained that she had to check with the principal before she could announce it to the class. That evening, however, after putting together a quick supper of sardines on crackers, which she ate standing over the sink, she put on her coat and went out herself to the Mullinses’ house in a run-down neighborhood near the school, which looked all the more bleak with the last of the snow melted and windblown into yellowing patches that scabbed the stingy little yards like the end bits of soap floating in brackish bath water.

Mrs. Mullins didn’t invite Agnes in, and Ernie walked her around back, where the dog was tied. It let out a single, declaratory bark of greeting and came forward to meet them. Agnes took one look at the animal standing alert at the end of his chain and was taken aback by an immediate welling-up of admiration.

The dog was a reddish-brown, medium-size shepherd mix, with his ears cocked forward at their approach, his strength leaning into his shoulders as he stood absolutely still except for a quiver of the silky fringe of his sweepingly curved tail. He approached them almost as far as his chain would allow, but that slight though definite arc of the chain’s slackness—the dog’s dignified refusal to pull it taut—was a bit of restraint that won Agnes over in less than a minute. This was too good a dog, anyway, she thought, to be subjected to the whims of Ernie Mullins or anyone of his family.

“Why don’t I take him home with me, Ernie?” He merely shrugged his shoulders. Ernie was unnerved to have his teacher standing in his own yard.

Ernie’s mother wanted the collar for some other dog her family would eventually have when they had moved away from Washburn, Ohio, and settled in Illinois. She stood leaning against the door frame, making it clear from her stance that she had other things to do. “Unless you want to buy it. It’s good leather, and it might be hard to find one now. I just don’t have the heart to ask you to pay for King, even though my husband says he nearly ate us out of house and home. Well, King never went hungry. I’ll tell you that. Anyway, I said we should find him a home, though I don’t know if he’ll make a good watchdog for you or not.”

Agnes looked at the dog, who stood calmly between her and Ernie, and she stooped down to unfasten his collar. “I’m sure he’ll be just fine,” she said. “And especially grateful, since he’s going to cost me so much in groceries.”

Mrs. Mullins put her hand on her hip and relaxed even her pretense of goodwill. She looked tired and hostile. “My husband said we should just leave him behind. That he’d make do for himself. But it seemed to me we could try to find a place for him.”

Agnes searched through her purse, fishing out two dollars, which she handed over to Mrs. Mullins along with the collar. “I’d like to pay for him. I have a collar around someplace, I think. I’ll be glad to have him,” she said. “I’ll take good care of him.” She turned to Ernie, who was a scrawny little boy with a very round head too big for his body, and features so unassertive that Agnes was always unreasonably annoyed at him. “You can come visit your dog anytime you want to before you leave, Ernie. You can walk home from school with me tomorrow if you like.” But Ernie looked blank, and when Agnes turned away and slapped her hand against the skirt of her coat to signal the dog to follow, the dog came right along by her side.

She and the dog moved away from the Mullinses’ house and turned the corner onto Marshal Avenue, and still Agnes was floundering for the right thing to say. “Good boy! Good boy!” she said to the dog, finally, who moved along with her briskly. She was surprised to find that she was shy about addressing him at all, and she was especially embarrassed to think of calling him King, which seemed such a silly name for a dog, but she did want to encourage him. “Good boy! You’re a good boy, Pup!” And “Pup” was as much as she could impose on this amiable dog. She glanced at him and thought that she had no right to invent a name for him. He seemed to be a dog who was perfectly aware of who he was.

When Dwight and Claytor were six or seven years old, Warren had come home one day with two puppies. Agnes had been baffled, but the boys were delighted, and she didn’t say anything to Warren until that night when all the children were finally in bed. “I don’t understand why you bought two dogs, Warren,” she said. “They aren’t littermates.”

“Oh, no. I was at the Aldridge’s in Coshocton, and they have a nice hound of some kind or other who just had pups. They only had that one left.” Agnes eyed the puppy, and wondered what his father had been, because he already had coarse brown fur that stuck out all over. Not at all like any hound she’d ever seen. Maybe it wouldn’t have a hound’s personality, either.

“Hounds are hard to train, though,” Agnes said. The other dog was about three months old, Agnes would have guessed, and looked to her like it might be part collie. It had a sweet face and tipped ears.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Warren said to her, his voice suddenly nasal and sharp, “but you manage to throw cold water on every surprise I come up with!” He shook his head briefly in resigned disappointment. But then his tone fell back into its normal, amiable resonance as he recalled his day. “I had to search high and low to find another puppy. But when I was in the bank and happened to say I needed one, one of the clerks spoke up and said his brother’s dog had had pups a few months ago. I went on over there and there were three left, in fact. I thought that one was the best looking of the lot.”

“He does have a sweet face,” Agnes acknowledged. “But why two
males?
They might not get on together so well . . .”

“Agnes,” he said, explaining to her patiently, “can you imagine how bad either Dwight or Claytor would feel if there was just one puppy and it took to one of them more than the other? I remembered how I admired Robert’s dog when we were growing up. Ajax was devoted to Robert, of course. Sometimes I just couldn’t stand that idea. It was hard to feel that dog wouldn’t like me as much as he liked Robert. I was always with Robert. Always in and out of his house. Well, Ajax was really Mrs. Butler’s dog. She didn’t want him to roam. Robert and I would mark off twenty paces and then stand apart and both of us would call the dog to see who he would come to. ‘Jackie’ was what we called him. Mrs. Butler was the only one who called him Ajax.”

Agnes waited for him to go on, but his attention had wandered back to the newspaper. “And who did he go to?” she finally asked, in spite of herself.

Warren looked up, raising his eyebrows in a question, and then he remembered what they had been talking about. “Oh, he always went to Robert, of course. He was Robert’s dog. But with a dog for each boy . . .”

“But, Warren, you can’t be sure with dogs. The dogs won’t know who they belong to. You might buy two children two horses. One for each so they could ride together. That would make sense. But no one can tell who a dog’s going to decide he belongs to. Well, at least if the dog has a choice,” Agnes said, but she objected softly, because Warren’s mind was made up.

He remained pleased with his gift to the boys. Dwight and Claytor named the semi-hound Tunney and the collie mix Dempsey, and the boys played with them and fed them and cleaned up after those puppies for almost two weeks, which was much longer than Agnes had imagined they would remain interested. Eventually, of course, when the boys started school and Warren was traveling in the field, those two dogs followed Agnes everywhere. Sometimes it seemed to her that she spent most of the day rounding them up and getting them out of the house only to have someone let them in again. They nearly drove her crazy hustling one past the other alongside her as she went up the stairs, each dog trying to be first in such a tumble that Agnes had to hang on to the banister. But she didn’t really dislike them; she made sure they were fed and had water.

The two dogs were an odd pair from the start—the bristly hound had a squared-off terrier’s head but with long, floppy ears, and the collie mix had stumpy legs that didn’t match his body. And just as Agnes had expected, as those dogs matured, they became obsessed with one single desire: each one was bent upon killing off the other. She had to keep them outside and apart all day long, and she was constantly rushing out and dashing a pail of cold water over their backs, which usually broke up a fight if she caught it at the beginning. Finally she had Harold Ostrander, who helped around Scofields at all sorts of odd jobs, build separate pens for them out of sight of each other. Even so, Tunney, the hound, eventually very nearly killed Dempsey in a terrible, bloody battle. Agnes had done everything she could think of to try and break it up, but it continued in a moving, snarling, muscular tumult, and it was clearly a fight to the death.

The hair-raising yips and snarling that went on and on attracted everybody in the vicinity of Scofields, and Mr. Ostrander finally got the animals apart by smashing a wooden ladder down over their backs. Tunney let out a terrible sound—a dog shriek—and backed off but continued to circle Dempsey, who was down and bleeding. Harold Ostrander continued to yell at the dogs and wave the ladder at Tunney, so that his circle around Dempsey grew wider and wider until finally he raced out of the yard, crossing the street and then the park. The Scofields never saw him again, although when they came home from school Dwight and Claytor went out searching for him.

Agnes nursed Dempsey back to health, but then he, too, simply took his leave one day. He adopted for himself an older couple who lived a few streets away. Agnes only discovered where he’d disappeared to when she was downtown one afternoon and saw the couple walking him on a very fine leash. Dempsey was glossy with good health and didn’t so much as glance her way; he seemed quite pleased with his situation.

Dwight and Claytor didn’t appear to be unduly distressed over the abandonment, but Warren was amazed at such treachery. Agnes tried again and again to explain it to him, but he had never had a pet as a child, and this had happened before Agnes finally recognized a pattern to Warren’s moods. She hadn’t understood then that Warren’s initial enthusiasm about the whole business would have dissipated regardless of whatever happened to the dogs.