Here he stopped. Father Gilman waited.
‘It has to do with that dog, Father.’
‘What dog?’
‘You know, the one here in the hospital. Every Tuesday and Thursday there’s that dog with the red bandanna that makes the rounds with Father Riordan, patrolling the first and second floors–around, up, down, in and out. The patients love that dog. It makes them happy.’
‘Ah, yes, I know the dog you mean,’ said Father Gilman. ‘What a gift it is to have animals like that in the hospital. But what is troubling you about this particular dog?’
‘Well,’ said Father Kelly. ‘Do you have a few minutes to come watch that dog, because he’s doing something very peculiar right now.’
‘Peculiar? How?’
‘Well, Father,’ said Father Kelly, ‘the dog has come back to the hospital twice this week already–on his own–and he’s here again now.’
‘Father Riordan isn’t with him?’
‘No, Father. That’s what I’m trying to get at. The dog is making his rounds, all on his own, without Father Riordan telling him where to go.’
Father Gilman chuckled. ‘Is that all? Clearly, he’s just a very smart dog. Like the horse that used to pull the milk wagon when I was a boy–it knew exactly which houses to stop and wait at without the milkman saying a word.’
‘No, no. He’s up to something. But, I’m not sure what, so I want you to come see for yourself.’
Sighing, Father Gilman rose and said, ‘All right, let’s go look at this most peculiar beast.’
‘This way, Father,’ said Father Kelly, and led him out into the hall and up the stairs to the second floor.
‘I think he’s somewhere here now, Father,’ said Father Kelly. ‘Ah, there.’
At which moment the dog with the red bandanna trotted out of room 17 and moved on, without looking at them, into room 18.
They stood outside the door and watched the dog who was sitting by the bed and seemed to be waiting.
The patient in the bed began to speak, and as Father Gilman and Father Kelly listened, they heard the man whispering while the dog sat there patiently.
Finally, the whispering stopped and the dog reached out a paw, touched the bed, waited a moment, and then came trotting out to move on to the next room.
Father Kelly looked at Father Gilman. ‘How does that strike you? What was he doing?’
‘Good Lord,’ said Father Gilman. ‘I think the dog was—’
‘What, Father?’
‘I think the dog was taking confession.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘Yes. Can’t be, but is.’
The two priests stood there in the semidarkness, listening to the voice of another patient whispering. They moved toward the door and looked in the room. The dog sat there quietly as the penitent unburdened his soul.
Finally they saw the dog reach out its paw to touch the bed, then turn and trot out of the room, hardly noticing them.
The two priests stood, riveted, and then silently followed.
At the next room the dog went to sit beside the bed. After a moment the patient saw the dog and smiled and said in a faint voice, ‘Oh, bless me.’
The dog sat quietly as the patient began to whisper.
They followed the dog along the hall, from room to room.
Along the way the young priest looked at the older one and noticed that Father Gilman’s face was beginning to contort and grow very red indeed, until the veins stood out on his brow.
Finally the dog finished its rounds and started down the stairs.
The two priests followed.
When they got to the hospital doors, the dog was starting out into the twilight; there was no one there to greet it or lead it away.
At which moment Father Gilman suddenly exploded and cried out: ‘You! You there! Dog! Don’t come back, you hear?! Come back and I’ll call damnation, hell, brimstone, and fire down on your head. You hear me, dog?! Go on, get out, go!’
The dog, startled, spun in a circle and bounded away.
The old priest stood there, his breathing heavy, eyes shut, and his face crimson.
Young Father Kelly gazed off into the dark.
Finally he gasped, ‘Father, what have you done?!’
‘Damnation,’ said the older priest. ‘That sinful, terrible, horrible beast!’
‘Horrible, Father?’ said Father Kelly. ‘Didn’t you hear what was said?’
‘I heard,’ said Father Gilman. ‘Taking it on himself to forgive, to offer penance, to hear the pleas of those poor patients!’
‘But, Father,’ cried Father Kelly. ‘Isn’t that what we do?’
‘And that’s our business,’ gasped Father Gilman. ‘Our business alone.’
‘Is that true, Father? Aren’t others like us?’ said Father Kelly. ‘I mean, in a good marriage, isn’t pillow talk in the middle of the night a kind of confession? Isn’t that the way young couples forgive and go on? Isn’t that somehow like us?’
‘Pillow talk!’ cried Father Gilman. ‘Pillow talk and dogs and sinful beasts!’
‘Father, he may not come back!’
‘Good riddance. I’ll not have such things in my hospital!’
‘My God, sir, didn’t you see? He’s a golden retriever. What a name. After an hour of listening to your penitents, to ask and forgive, wouldn’t you love to hear me call you that?’
‘Golden retriever?’
‘Yes. Think about it, Father,’ said the young priest. ‘Enough. Come. Let’s go back and see if that beast, as you call him, has done any harm.’
Father Kelly went back into the hospital. Moments later, the older priest followed. They walked along the hall and looked in the rooms at the patients in their beds. A peculiar sound of silence hung over the place.
In one room they saw a look of strange peace.
In another room they heard whispering. Father Gilman thought he caught the name Mary, though he could not be sure.
And so they roamed among the quiet rooms on this special night and as the older priest walked along he felt his skins fall away–a skin of ignorance, a layer of contempt, and then a subdermis of neglect–so that when he arrived back at his office he felt as if he had shed an invisible flesh.
Father Kelly said good night and left.
The old priest sat and covered his eyes, leaning against the desk.
After a few moments of silence, he heard a sound and looked up.
In the doorway the dog stood, waiting there quietly; it had come back on its own. The dog hardly breathed and did not whimper or bark or sigh. It came forward, very quietly, and sat across the desk from the priest.
The priest looked into that golden face and the dog looked back.
Finally the old priest said, ‘Bless me, what do I call you? I can think of nothing. But bless me, please, for I have sinned.’
The priest then spoke of his arrogance and the sin of pride and all the other sins he had committed that day.
And the dog, sitting there, listened.
Arrival and Departure
No day in all of time began with nobler heart or fresher spirit. No morn had ever chanced upon its greener self as did this morn discover spring in every aspect and every breath. Birds flew about, intoxicated, and moles and all things holed up in earth and stone ventured forth, forgetting that life itself might be forfeit. The sky was a Pacific, a Caribbean, an Indian sea, hung in a tidal outpouring over a town that now exhaled the dust of winter from a thousand windows. Doors slammed wide. Like a tide moving over a town that now exhaled the dust of winter from a thousand windows. Doors slammed wide. Like a tide moving into a shore, wave after wave of laundered curtains broke over the piano-wire lines behind the houses.
And at last the mild sweetness of this particular day summoned forth two souls, like wintry figures from a Swiss clock, hypnotized, upon their porch. Mr and Mrs Alexander, twenty-four months locked deep in their rusty house, felt long-forgotten wings stir in their shoulder blades
as the sun rekindled their bones.
‘Smell that!’
Mrs Alexander took a drink of air and spun to accuse the house. ‘Two years! One hundred sixty-five bottles of throat molasses! Ten pounds of sulfur! Twelve boxes of sleeping pills! Five yards of flannel for our chests! How much mustard grease? Get away!’ She pushed at the house. She turned to the spring day, opened her arms. The sun made teardrops jump from her eyes.
They waited, not yet ready to descend away from two years of nursing each other, falling ill time and again, accepting but never quite enjoying the prospect of another evening together after six hundred of seeing no other human face.
‘Why, we’re strangers here.’ The husband nodded to the shady streets.
And they remembered how they had stopped answering the door and kept the shades down, afraid that some abrupt encounter, some flash of bright sun, might shatter them to dusty ghosts.
But now, on this fountain-sparkling day, their health at last miraculously returned, old Mr and Mrs Alexander edged down the steps and into the town, like tourists from a land beneath the earth.
Reaching the main street, Mr Alexander said, ‘We’re not so old; we just felt old. Why I’m seventy-two, you’re only seventy. I’m out for some special shopping, Elma. Meet you here in two hours!’
They flew apart, rid of each other at last.
Not half a block away, passing a dress shop, Mr Alexander saw a mannequin in a window, and froze. There, ah, there! The sunlight warmed her pink cheeks, her berry-stained lips, her blue-lacquer eyes, her yellow-yarn hair. He stood at the window for an entire minute, until a live woman appeared suddenly, arranging the displays. When she glanced up, there was Mr Alexander, smiling like a youthful idiot. She smiled back.
What a day! he thought. I could punch a hole in a plank door. I could throw a cat over the courthouse! Get out of the way, old man! Wait! Was that a mirror? Never mind. Good God! I’m really alive!
Mr Alexander was inside the shop.
‘I want to buy something!’ he said.
‘What?’ asked the beautiful saleslady.
He glanced foolishly about. ‘Why, let me have a scarf. That’s it, a scarf.’
He blinked at the numerous scarves she brought, smiling at him so his heart roared and tilted like a gyroscope, throwing the world out of balance. ‘Pick the scarf you’d wear, yourself. That’s the scarf for me.’
She chose a scarf the color of her eyes.
‘Is it for your wife?’
He handed her a five-dollar bill. ‘Put the scarf on.’ She obeyed. He tried to imagine Elma’s head sticking out above it; failed. ‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘It’s yours.’ He drifted out the sunlit door, his veins singing.
‘Sir,’ she called, but he was gone.
What Mrs Alexander wanted most was shoes, and after leaving her husband she entered the very first shoe shop. But not, however, before she dropped a penny in a perfume machine and pumped great vaporous founts of verbena upon her sparrow chest. Then, with the spray clinging round her like morning mist, she plunged into the shoe store, where a fine young man with doe-brown eyes and black arched brows and hair with the sheen of patent leather pinched her ankles, feathered her instep, caressed her toes, and so entertained her feet that they blushed a soft, warm pink.
‘Madame has the smallest foot I’ve fitted this year. Extraordinarily small.’
Mrs Alexander was a great heart seated there, beating so loudly that the salesman had to shout over the sound:
‘If Madame will push down!’
‘Would the lady like another color?’
He shook her left hand as she departed with three pairs of shoes, giving her fingers what seemed to be a meaningful appraisal. She laughed a strange laugh, forgetting to say she had not worn her wedding band, her fingers had puffed with illness so many years that the ring now lay in dust. On the street, she confronted the verbena-squirting machine, another copper penny in her hand.
Mr Alexander strode with great bouncing strides up and down streets, doing a little jig of delight on meeting certain people, stopping at last, faintly tired, but not admitting it to anyone, before the United Cigar store. There, as if seven-hundred-odd noons had not vanished, stood Mr Bleak, Mr Grey, Samuel Spaulding, and the Wooden Indian. They seized and punched Mr Alexander in disbelief.
‘John, you’re back from the dead!’
‘Coming to the lodge tonight?’
‘Sure!’
‘Oddfellows meeting tomorrow night?’
‘I’ll be there!’ Invitations blew about him in a warm wind. ‘Old friends, I’ve missed you!’ He wanted to grab everyone, even the Indian. They lit his free cigar and bought him foamy beers next door in the jungle color of green-felt pool tables.
‘One week from tonight,’ cried Mr Alexander. ‘Open house. My wife and I invite you all, good friends. Barbecue! Drinks and fun!’
Spaulding crushed his hand. ‘Will your wife mind about tonight?’
‘Not Elma.’
‘I’ll come for you at eight o’clock.’
‘Fine!’
And Mr Alexander was off like a ball of Spanish moss blown on the wind.
After she left the store, Mrs Alexander was discovered in the streets of the town by a sea of women. She was the center of a bargain sale, ladies clustering in twos and threes, everyone talking, laughing, offering, accepting at once.
‘Tonight, Elma. The Thimble Club.’
‘Come pick me up!’
Breathless and flushed, she pushed through, made it to a far curb, looked back as one looks at the ocean for a last time before going inland, and hustled, lighting to herself, down the avenue, counting on her fingers the appointments she had in the next week at the Elm Street Society, the Women’s Patriotic League, the Sewing Basket, and the Elite Theatre Club.
The hours blazed to their finish. The courthouse clock rang once.
Mr Alexander stood on the street corner, glancing at his watch doubtfully and shaking it, muttering under his breath. A woman was standing on the opposite corner, and after ten minutes of waiting, Mr Alexander crossed over. ‘I beg your pardon, but I think my watch is wrong,’ he called, approaching. ‘Could you give me the correct time?’
‘John!’ she cried.
‘Elma!’ he cried.
‘I was standing here all the time,’ she said.
‘And I was standing over there!’
‘You’ve got a new suit!’
‘That’s a new dress!’
‘New hat.’
‘So is yours.’
‘New shoes.’
‘How do yours fit?’
‘Mine hurt.’
‘So do mine.’
‘I bought tickets for a play Saturday night for us, Elma! And made reservations for the Green Town picnic next month! What’s that perfume you’re wearing?’
‘What’s that cologne you’ve got on?’
‘No wonder we didn’t recognize each other!’
They looked at each other for a long time.
‘Well, let’s get home. Isn’t it a beautiful day?’
They squeaked along in their new shoes. ‘Yes, beautiful!’ they both agreed, smiling. But then they glanced at each other out of the corner of their eyes and suddenly looked away, nervously.
Their house was blue dark; it was like entering a cave after the fresh green spring afternoon.
‘How about a little lunch?’
‘Not hungry. You?’
‘Me neither.’
‘I sure do like my new shoes.’
‘Mine, too.’
‘Well, what’ll we do the rest of the day?’
‘Oh, go to a show, maybe.’
‘After we rest awhile.’
‘You’re not tired!’
‘No, no, no,’ she cried hastily. ‘You?’
‘No, no!’ he said quickly.
They sat down and felt the comfortable darkness and coolness of the room after the bright, glaring warm day.
‘I think
I’ll just loosen my shoelaces a bit,’ he said. ‘Just untie the knots a moment.’
‘I think I’ll do the same.’
They loosened the knots and the laces in their shoes.
‘Might as well get our hats off!’
Sitting there, they removed their hats.
He looked over at her and thought: Forty-five years. Married to her forty-five years. Why, I can remember…and that time in Mills Valley…and then there was that other day…forty years ago we drove to…yes…yes. His head shook. A long time.
‘Why don’t you take off your tie?’ she suggested.
‘Think I should, if we’re going right out again?’ he said.
‘Just for a moment.’
She watched him take off his tie and she thought: It’s been a good marriage. We’ve helped each other; he’s spoon-fed, washed, and dressed me when I was sick, taken good care…Forty-five years now, and the honeymoon in Mills Valley–seems like only the day before the day before yesterday.
‘Why don’t you get rid of your earrings?’ he suggested. ‘New, aren’t they? They look heavy.’
‘They are a bit.’ She laid them aside.
They sat in their comfortable soft chairs by the green baize tables where stood arnica bottles, pellet and tablet boxes, serums, cough remedies, pads, braces and foot rubs, greases, salves, lotions, inhalants, aspirin, quinine, powders, decks of worn playing cards from a million slow games of blackjack, and books they had murmured to each other across the dark small room in the single faint bulb light, their voices like the motion of dim moths through the shadows.
‘Perhaps I can slip my shoes off,’ he said. ‘For one hundred and twenty seconds, before we run out again.’
‘Isn’t right to keep your feet boxed up all the time.’
They both slipped off their shoes.
‘Elma?’
‘Yes?’ She looked up.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
They heard the mantel clock ticking. They caught each other peering at the clock. Two in the afternoon. Only six hours until eight tonight.
‘John?’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘Never mind,’ she said.
They sat.