The Witch (25 page)

The checker put it all in two plastic sacks, and when Ellen got outside again she opened the box of cookies and gave the dog one, and then another. There was something you could enjoy about feeding a dog. They were so appreciative. “Let's get on home,” she told him, and the dog was ready for that, sure.

They were still a couple of blocks from the house when Ellen saw the boys. She could have crossed the street but then they would too. They were the kind of boys who picked on people, and Ellen was always right there for that, wasn't she, fat and slow and weird. They weren't that old, twelve or thirteen, but they egged each other on and their favorite thing in life was meanness. Sheila always said to pay them no mind.

Today there were four of them. They saw Ellen too, and they lined themselves up, two on either side of the sidewalk, so she'd have to pass through them. Ellen put her head down. She had a grocery sack in each hand and she tightened her grip. Sometimes they tried to take things from her. The dog looked up at her, asking a dog question. “Pay them no mind,” Ellen told him.

When she got closer, one of them said, “Hey, is that your dog?”

Ellen nodded. She kept putting one foot in front of the other.

“He sure is ugly. I guess that figures.”

“Hey, what's his name?”

They'd closed in around her on the sidewalk. There was no getting past them. “Prince,” Ellen said. She didn't know why she said it. It just seemed like his name.

“Prince!” They whistled and pretended to be impressed.

“So does that make you a princess?”

“I guess,” Ellen said.

The boys hooted. The one who had spoken was the biggest one. He had red hair and a flattened nose. He said, “Prince and Princess . . .” And you could see him trying to come up with the meanest, snottiest thing to say . . . “Of Butt-Ugly-landia!”

“That's stupid,” Ellen said.

They weren't expecting that. She usually didn't say much to them. “She just called you stupid, stupid,” one of the other boys said.

The red-haired boy took another step toward Ellen but stopped and looked down. The dog had lifted a back leg and was peeing in a steady stream down the boy's pants and sogging up his tennis shoe.

The boy yelped and shook his foot and said, “Fuck! What the fuck!” The other boys hooted. The red-haired boy whirled around and made as if to hit somebody, either Ellen or the dog or the boys laughing, and that's when the dog lunged at him, barking and showing his teeth and bristling so that the hair on his back stood straight up.

“I'll get you for this, bitch!” But they were running away and taking their nasty talk with them. And then they were gone. “Nice work, Prince,” Ellen said, and he sniffed at the sidewalk where the boys had been and peed some more on the same spot.

There was going to be a whole Sheila thing to get through, but she wasn't back from work yet. Ellen took two plastic dishes from the kitchen, one for water and one for food. She filled both
of these and put them in the back yard right next to the porch. Prince ate the food in the bowl and then ambled over to the farthest corner of the yard and hunched himself over and pooped.

“Well I guess we had to have some of that action,” Ellen said, and cleaned up the mess with a plastic bag and threw it in the garbage can in the alley. It wasn't such a big deal and you could see how people got used to doing it.

When Sheila got home, Ellen was sitting out on the back steps and Prince was resting on an old rug that Ellen had brought out for him. Ellen was wearing her winter coat, because it was getting cold and the wind had picked up. “What's this?” Sheila said. “Have you lost what's left of your mind?” She stayed in the house and didn't open the door all the way.

“He's a nice old dog,” Ellen said. “His name is Prince.”

“Oh is it. And what's that you're doing, exactly?”

Ellen had the small loom Sheila had bought her for making pot holders and was busy braiding yarn through it. “I'm making Prince a collar.”

Sheila closed the door and went back in the house. A little while later she opened it again. “Come inside so we can talk. Your friend stays out there.”

She waited while Ellen got up and dusted herself off and carried the loom in front of her so the yarn wouldn't come loose. Sheila said, “Have you considered that this dog is probably lost, that he has a family who misses him, and who's heartbroken with worry over him?”

“Families aren't always like that.”

“Have you even thought about looking in the lost and found?” Sheila folded her arms and waited. When she already knew the answer to a thing, there was a space right between her eyebrows that gleamed with happiness. Ellen shook her head,
no. “Well I'm going to do that right this minute. What if he has fleas? Do you want to start scratching fleas? Ellen! You have no idea where this dog came from, or if he's dangerous, or if he has some kind of dog disease.”

“I'll take him to the vet,” Ellen said. “I'll do all those things you're supposed to do.”

“Vets are expensive.”

“I'll use my Social Security money.”

Ellen's Social Security money went into a bank account and stayed there, except for what Sheila called “household expenses.” It was another one of those things that Sheila had put herself in charge of. Ellen kept her head down. She could feel Sheila looking at her, the beam coming out from that place between her eyes.

“We'll talk about that later,” Sheila said. “Meanwhile, I want it understood, I will not have a stray dog in my house.”

“It's my house really,” Ellen said, but only after Sheila had left the kitchen.

When it was time for bed, Ellen cooked a hamburger for Prince and gave him some extra dog cookies. She put an old blanket on top of the rug so he'd have a warmer bed. “I'm sorry you have to stay outside,” she told him. “It's because of Sheila. She's just that way.” Prince licked her hand and settled down in his bed. It was like he understood about Sheila, and he'd make the best of it.

In the middle of the night, Ellen woke up to hear the wind smacking against the windows, and rain coming down hard. Prince! She jumped out of bed, ran downstairs, and opened the back door. “Prince!” she called, but he wasn't there. Rain poured through the downspout and pooled around the bed she'd made
for him. “Prince! Where are you?” The air was black with cold rain. Her head and feet were already soaked. She started crying.

Then a dark shape came out from beneath the bushes along the alley fence. “Prince! Here boy!”

She held the door open for him and he trotted in, shaking himself. Water flew everywhere. Ellen knelt down and hugged him so that they were both wet. “I'm sorry sorry sorry,” she told him. “Are you all right? Oh, Prince.”

“Ellen?” Sheila was calling her from the top of the stairs. “You don't have that dog in here, do you?”

“If you make him go outside, I'm going with him,” Ellen said, and she waited for Sheila to do one thing or the other.

“Basement,” Sheila said. “And make sure he stays there.” Ellen heard her go back down the hall and shut the bedroom door.

“Come on,” Ellen told Prince. “It'll be okay now.” She flipped on the basement light and took his water bowl and some dog cookies downstairs with them. She used towels from the laundry to dry Prince off. She found an old nightgown of her mother's and changed into it from her wet pajamas. There were two couches in one corner from her growing-up days, the smelly kind the thrift shop wouldn't take.

Ellen patted one of them so that Prince knew it was for him, and he jumped right up. Ellen lay down on the other and covered herself with an afghan. The couch had all the same lumps and bumps she remembered from being a little girl. She burrowed into them so they fit better. She reached out and patted the top of Prince's head, which was still sort of damp.

“I'll fix things up a little better for you tomorrow,” she told him.

“Thank you,” Prince said.

“You're welcome,” Ellen said, and then because she didn't want to think about what had just happened, she squeezed her eyes shut until she fell asleep.

—

She didn't remember, at first, where she was, and why the dog was snuffling at her face, and then it all came back to her and she said, “Oh wow,” and sat up on the couch and tried to clear her head. It was morning, and sunlight was coming in sideways through the basement windows. “Hey Prince,” she said, and he wagged his tail and did a few of his sideways dance steps and looked at her inquiringly.

“Oh, I get it,” Ellen said, and took him upstairs and out the back door so he could do his thing. The rain had stripped the fall leaves from the trees; they lay in heaps of colors on the ground. She watched Prince nosing around, peeing on important places, then he came up to the door and waited for Ellen to let him in.

“You have this routine down already, don't you,” Ellen said, and waited to see if he had anything to say to that. But Prince only looked up at her with his openmouthed smile, wanting his breakfast. She was relieved, she guessed, but also a little disappointed.

It was late and Sheila had already gone to work. She hadn't bothered to wake Ellen up to say goodbye before she left, maybe because she was disgusted with her for sleeping in the basement with a dog. Ellen put food in Prince's bowl and watched him clean it up. When he was finished, she said, “How about I go upstairs and put some clothes on, and then I'll take you for a real walk.”

“Okay,” Prince said. “But hurry up.”

“Oh boy.” Ellen sighed, trudging upstairs. “Oh boy.”

She hadn't yet finished making his collar, and she didn't have a real leash, so she used a skinny belt from the thrift shop and looped it around his neck. “I don't think you're gonna run off, it's just a leash law thing,” she told him.

“Leashes, yup, I understand that.”

“I knew you were a smart dog. You should probably not say anything while we're outside, people might get upset.”

“Maintain radio silence,” Prince agreed, butting up against Ellen's hand to get his ears scratched.

They set off down the street, to a little park where Prince could do his business without anybody getting upset. Ellen wasn't worried about the boys, because they'd be in school now. She kind of hoped that the neighbors might see them walking and think how normal and responsible she was being, a lady walking her dog. When they got back home, Ellen said, “That went pretty well. Now what?”

“Maybe a nap,” Prince said, stretching out on the living room rug.

“I'm a little concerned about this talking business.”

Prince yawned and rolled over on his back so his stomach was in the air and his front paws dangled. “You mean, concerned about what other people are going to think.”

“If I have another bad spell of crazy, they can put me in the nuthouse again. That was a terrible place. It's like a dog pound except for humans. Were you ever in one of those, a pound?”

But Prince was already asleep. His breathing whiffed in and out through his big nose.

Ellen plopped down on the living room couch. Definitely concerned. She didn't want to go through all that again, getting
the shaky shakes and talking a mile a minute. She'd started having her troubles a long time ago, when she was first out of school and waiting tables at the Chuck Wagon. It was like her head was a balloon on a string that she carried along bobbing in the air, and all of a sudden it just popped. She got very excited about things that nobody else did, and she was convinced that the food at the Chuck Wagon was being poisoned (which was comical; it was just ordinary bad food), and she couldn't stop talking for love or money. The customers were alarmed when she told them about the poison, and the restaurant owner made her sit in his office with the door closed while he called her father. Her father had been alive then—of course!—and he came and got her and drove her to the hospital. Except she had not believed it was a hospital. It was a prison where they did unspeakable things to people. She'd been plenty crazy, sure, but she still didn't think she'd been wrong about that part.

Even when she was a little kid, Ellen had always been off in her own world, as her mother said, and while it wasn't true that nobody ever paid attention to her, there were times they seemed surprised to come across her. There had been five girls—a boy had died when he was just a baby—and when you counted them off on the fingers of one hand, Ellen was the one finger left wiggling that you couldn't remember. Ellen had not been the pretty one (Cecilia), or the smart one (Brigit), or the good one (Agnes), or even the snotty one (Sheila, duh). Finally she turned into the crazy one, and then at least she was easier to keep track of. There were so many brothers-in-law and nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles and cousins and cousins' families and out beyond that, like distant planets in the solar system, the second cousins and casually connected relatives whom
she might never meet, but now they had heard of her, Crazy Aunt Ellen.

Had she been possessed by demons? She used to think that. Was it her own fault for providing them with an opportunity, for having a flawed mind and soul that allowed them entry? No no no, Father Harvey had reassured her. No matter what Sister Mary Peter said, the Church nowadays was open to scientific as well as spiritual healing, and they understood that such things as brain chemistry and genetics must be given their due. Father Harvey spoke of compassion and relief from suffering and the soul's long journey to God. There was so much loneliness in the world, he understood that, because a priest was pledged to earthly loneliness. He knew that she had always been lonely. He wasn't young, and he wasn't what you'd call attractive, exactly, but Ellen was drawn to him, and when he said that they were now married in the eyes of God, she was joyful, she put shame aside and took him as her husband.