Nop's Hope

  “Daddy,” Penny said, “I know I’m embarrassing you, hanging back like this, shunning your friends. I don’t have any thing to say.”

  “Uh-huh. I don’t know there is anything to say. It’s just words, that’s all: words.

  Lewis went back inside to sit beside his wife of thirty years beside the coffins of their son-in-law and their granddaughter.

  The evening of the accident, women had started arriving at the Burkeholder house, bearing casseroles to feed the family and their guests, dozens of plastic containers labeled with their owners’ names. They arrived swiftly, and those casseroles of tuna, and macaroni and cheese, and lasagna, and sloppy joe mix, and fish loaf became death too, as inevitable as sorrow.

  The mourners dropped by until eleven o’clock, awkward, the men standing on the front porch, caps in hand. “He was a good man, Lewis. And that poor little girl …” “I had a boy killed on the tractor myself, wasn’t much older’n Mark and I know how you must feel.”

  Caught up in the duties of greeting mourners, taking their coats, getting them coffee and cake, Lewis didn’t really feel like anything but a host, ushering those who’d come to comfort him. One of the Puffenbarger women manned the phone. “Burkeholder residence … Hello, Audrey. Yes, Beverly’s here.” Or “No, I’m sorry, Penny can’t take the phone right now, would you like to talk to Lewis?”

  After the last mourner left, Lewis took the phone off the hook and, for the first time since three years ago when they’d all gone to Virginia Beach on vacation, he bolted the front door. “Penny,” he said, “you might as well stay with us tonight.”

  Without a word, Penny went upstairs to her old bedroom at the head of the stairs.

  Neighbor men had done the chores, fed the stock, even put out food for Nop and Hope, the young dog Lewis was training.

  “Beverly,” Lewis said. “You must be exhausted.”

  She said, “Lewis, this is the worst day of my life.”

  “Yes. Come to bed.”

  Beverly didn’t sleep a wink all night, tossing and turning so bad she was up stoking the fires before dawn. Lewis slept like he was dead himself until ten o’clock, when he woke with a jerk, looked at the high white ceiling of what had been his parents’ bedroom and grandparents’ before, and wondered where he was, who he was, what day it was. It all came flooding back to him and his heart broke.

  That day, nobody walked the dogs or did any work with them, and Hope and Nop stayed beside the barn, where they could watch all the comings and goings. Usually Nop barked when strange cars arrived at the farm, he didn’t care for strangers, but he held his tongue today.

  Hope was worried. Whatever threatens the human household threatens the dog’s world tenfold.

  All these people dressed in their Sunday best.

  “It is death,” Nop said, because there is no mistaking death’s presence, and he knew that the trailer where Penny and Mark and Lisa lived was cold and empty.

  At noon, when nobody came to exercise them, the two dogs walked a half mile down to the river. The willows beside the river glistened with ice and the shoreline was rimed with ice and very far overhead a small flight of Canada geese headed south, its leader chanting er-whonk, er-whonk.

  Hope wanted to sniff after some deer that had visited the river, but Nop was looking back nervously at the house, half expecting Lewis’s whistle. He’d been stolen as a young dog, and ever after Nop had been uneasy away from Lewis. Nop set off resolutely home and the younger dog ran along beside, licking at his mouth, asking silly questions.

  Beverly and Lewis watched them from the screened-in back porch. She said, “It’s like nothing means anything.” She gestured at the farm, the fields they’d cultivated and preserved, the garden space that had fed her family and Lord knows how many families before them, the barn full of hay, the blue Harvestore topped with chopped corn for the winter to come, the woodshed crammed with dry oak, the racks of wood stacked against its end walls, even the dogs—Beverly’s gesture dismissed them all.

  Lewis’s mouth was dry. “Yeah,” he said. “We should go back inside.”

  Saturday morning, the graveside was bitter, with the wind skimming flecks of ice off the ground and the Preacher bundled up to the neck, wearing his black scarf, and topcoat, everybody hatless and their ears turning red. Preacher Shumway read the internment service for a husband and his daughter, the daughter he’d tried in vain to save. “Greater love hath no man,” he said.

  Penny stood with the family under the awning, before the two coffins, side by side, the mound of earth covered with AstroTurf. George Hansen kept the limousine running so it’d be warm for the mourners on the way home.

  Lisa and Mark Hilyer were buried in the old part of the White Post cemetary beside Burkeholders they’d never met, with space left for Penny and Lewis and Beverly when their time came.

  Penny was first away from the gravesite, first into the limousine, huddled in the far back, small as she could get.

  Beverly was stunned. Four days to wrap up lives that had taken years to nurture, and nothing left but dry eyes and grainy eyelids and the feeling that perhaps she ought to take a shower.

  Penny went to her trailer and for three days there was no sign of her, no tracks coming in or out, except the smoke from her chimney. The insurance man called Lewis when he couldn’t get through to Penny because she’d left the phone off the hook.

  “Look, Lewis,” he said, “we can pay off on Mark’s truck right away, but the driver of that semi, he was insured out in New Mexico, and they won’t pay any settlement until there’s a finding he was to blame. Yes, everybody knows that semi forced Mark off the road, but their lawyer…. Don’t worry, Lewis, I’ll see Penny gets taken care of, it’s just gonna take time. You know how these things are.”

  The insurance on Mark’s truck paid $600. Lewis took the check down to the trailer.

  “Daddy,” Penny said, “Mark wouldn’t have taken a thousand dollars for that truck. I didn’t want a new truck, I want Mark’s truck fixed.”

  Lewis shook his head. “Honey, you don’t want that old truck anymore, not now the water’s got into it.”

  “Where’d it go? Where’d they take it? How do I know there wasn’t something in it I wanted?”

  “Honey, the rescue squad went through the truck at the scene, emptied the glove compartment and behind the seat. I know six hundred isn’t much …”

  “I want a truck just like I had. There’s all that money I put away for Lisa’s college: a thousand two hundred forty-five dollars.”

  Back in his own kitchen, Lewis looked out at the falling snow and said, “Beverly, I don’t know how she can live in that mess. Clothes dropped wherever she took ’em off, sink full of dirty dishes.”

  Beverly touched her husband’s cheek. “Hush, Lewis. It’s just something she’s got to go through.”

  But the next morning, Lewis was back on his daughter’s doorstep, with Hope. The dog was muscular, stocky and calm. His eyes said he found the world good, and interesting, and “Howdy, stranger!”

  Although it was well past sunup, Penny came to the door in her bathrobe. Behind her the TV was playing one of those morning shows, the host murmuring sympathetically to some movie star, how hard it was, celebrity, how hard.

  “G’morning,” Lewis said. “I brought you this Hope dog.”

  Penny was puzzled. “That’s the dog you’re going to trial …”

  “Not anymore I’m not. Him and me, we had a falling out. He needs somebody else. You used to be fair shakes as a trainer. Here.” He passed her the dog’s lead.

  The dog looked up, puzzled. Some human ritual going on here, involving him, he wasn’t quite sure how. His eyebrows furrowed.

  “What am I supposed to do with a dog?”

  Lewis looked away over the fields. “Those maiden ewes are in the river pasture. You can work with them, you want to.”

  “I can’t even take care of myself. How can I take care of a dog?”

  Lewis shru
gged. “Train him up and sell him. Put a couple months into him, you can get a thousand, twelve hundred, give me four hundred for my share.”

  “Daddy, please.” She held the dog’s leash as slack as she could.

  “Supposed to be sunny tomorrow,” Lewis said. Crows flew over, cawing their way to the riverbank. “You know how it is—once you’ve fallen out with a dog there’s no use working with him. This fella might make a dog in the right hands.” And he jammed his hands deep into his pocket and walked away and the dog looked at Lewis, looked at the woman, wagged his tail once, stood still.

  “Oh you might as well come in. There’s been no dog here since Stink died.” She unfastened his leash and got a glass of Diet Pepsi from a liter on the countertop and sat down in the recliner right in front of the TV.

  The dog waited, seeking a cue, and when he didn’t get one, investigated his new habitat, room by room, yard by yard. What he smelled was the fading odors of two other people and this woman, a small leak where the gas line attached to the stove, the bitter stink of freon behind the refrigerator, the residual smell of the dog who’d been here years ago, who’d slept right behind the woodbox, marking the wall with her wet tail. He smelled the remnants of meals Penny had made for herself, some scorched. In the living room, he sniffed at a heap of woman’s clothes, pawed at them, much as his ancestors arranged the leaves and twigs of their night’s bedding, and flumped down.

  “Hey, who told you you could use my blue jeans for a bed?”

  Hope smiled in his most charming manner—and he was a dog of considerable charm.

  “Come on now, get off those.”

  Hope yawned hugely and moved to the corner where Penny’s funeral dress and slip lay where she’d dropped them.

  “Now don’t you lie on that. You know what it cost to take that to the cleaners?”

  Hope wagged at her, puzzled. If he wasn’t supposed to lie on that stuff, why was it on the floor?

  “Alright, alright,” she said and shed her robe and went to the dresser for clean underthings and put on the very jeans Hope’d been lying on (“How nice,” he thought, “she likes me”), and scooped up the dirty clothes, and carried them to the washer. Hope stood in the doorway, baffled.

  “Why are you in my way all the time?” she said, as she bustled back and forth. “Here, come over here.” She pointed at the space behind the woodbox where the other dog had lain so long ago, and Hope went there and looked at her. “Lie down,” she said, and Hope did.

  While the washer was running, Penny hung up her funeral dress and the bathrobe too. With the noise from the washing machine she couldn’t hear the TV so she turned it off; it shrank into a dot on the screen.

  Penny pushed dirty dishes aside and opened a can of Chunky Beef soup and heated it until it boiled, and ate it out of the pot with a spoon. Afterward, she took the can to the garbage pail. A milk jug fell out, and when she tried to cram everything there wasn’t any more room, so she lugged the can out beside the yard. Mark used to take the trash to the dump. All my life, she thought, I’ve had some man to take care of me, first Daddy then Mark and now Daddy again.

  Penny expected the dog to take off for the main house, to run back to Lewis, but he busied himself inspecting his new turf and, apparently satisfied, he rolled on his back, flipped over, and scooped up snow with his nose and lifted his head, a scruff of snow still on his nose, to see if she’d got the joke.

  “That’s all I need,” she said, “another fool dog.”

  That evening Penny came to the big house to borrow dog food, and when Lewis asked her was Hope settling in, she said, “That dog is a real piece of work.” Lewis asked Penny if she wanted to look through her mail, they’d been saving it. No, she didn’t. Would Beverly sort through and take out the bills, she didn’t want to read any of the letters.

  That was Thursday. Saturday, Lewis and Penny went into Winchester to see if they could find a truck.

  Penny was doing okay, even ate a small salad at Wendy’s. Lewis told her there was a vacancy—full time—at the elementary school. Billy Hess, the principal, had called. “I don’t want it,” she said.

  Lewis said, “But, honey, you got to do something.”

  She looked him right in the eye. “Why’s that?”

  He said, “If we don’t have any luck with the car dealers, maybe we can find something in the newspaper.”

  That evening, Penny took Hope out for training. The ewes were in a five-acre meadow beside the river. Hope sailed toward them, for no conscious reason except what his genetics told his muscles to do—he wouldn’t have heeded a command from Penny had she commanded him. He came around behind the sheep, and, when his genes said “stop,” he stopped.

  The sheep moved toward Penny, and Hope harried them, shifting from one side to the other until his brain clicked in: “Where is my master?” and he peered over the sheep to locate Penny, who’d moved, so Hope changed directions to keep the sheep coming straight to her.

  A sheepdog’s most basic instinct is to fetch sheep to his master, and it was this instinct Penny used. She walked backward, dodged from side to side, so the dog would learn where he had to be. Penny never uttered a command; she showed the dog what made sense. They kept at it for an hour as the winter light faded and went blue, before Penny called Hope off. “That’ll do, here,” and he was tired enough to quit and, truth be told, he was proud of himself too.

  In the trailer, Penny stoked the stove, set down a bowl of fresh water for Hope, washed one load of dishes, dried and put them away, washed a second load and left those in the rack.

  “That puts a dent in it,” she muttered. Hope went over to his dinner bowl and paused and looked up at her.

  Misreading it, she said, “It’s okay. You can eat.”

  He wagged his tail meaning, that’s not the problem.

  “Oh,” Penny said, “you’re one of those.” She carried his food into the bathroom and closed the door and moments later heard the crunching as he enjoyed his solitary meal.

  The next morning she trained Hope for an hour and cleaned up her trailer. At noon, when her parents came back from church Penny went to the big house to say, “I’m going to give Mark’s and Lisa’s clothes to the Salvation Army. Would you phone them up?” Beverly did, they’d come Saturday.

  Lewis said, “I told Billy you’d be coming to work at the school Thursday morning. If you don’t want the job, I should let him know.”

  Penny said, “Oh, alright.”

  That night Hope moved from the space behind the stove and slipped into Penny’s bedroom and clattered down on the floor, at her bedside. He liked the sound of her breathing and wished to be enfolded in her night smell.

  She said, “You sound like a bucket of bones,” and he thumped the floor with his tail.

  Wednesday morning, they were at it again. Young dogs usually want to get to their sheep, get as close as they can. It’s the trainer’s task to keep the dog back, to give the dog time and space to think. That magic realm between attack and indifference is where the trainer wants his dog. “Time,” Penny commanded. “Hope! Take time.”

  Wednesday night, Hope got it right, and Thursday morning, before dawn, when the raw wind came clipping down the fields and the sun was just a vague discoloration over the Blue Ridge, Hope got it right three times, and Penny was excited: not happy, just excited.

  In the kitchen of the big house, her father looked at his watch but didn’t say anything. He didn’t invite her to have a cup of breakfast coffee either. “That fellow down at Sunrise Texaco called last night. Said he had a Dodge truck his uncle used to run. It’s got high miles but his uncle was old-fashioned, changed the oil every two thousand miles. I’ve got to get some sheep wormer at the Coop. I’ll check over the Dodge if you want me to.”

  At school Principal Hess told Penny all the kids were getting revved up for Christmas, that some of her students were in the Christmas play, said she’d be paid the same rate as a substitute if she didn’t mind.

 
The kids knew Penny from times she’d substituted before and they’d known Lisa, so Thursday they were quiet, awed by the actual presence of their dead friend’s mother. Fourth grade had twenty-four students, more girls than boys. Represented were sons and daughters from sixteen marriages, six separations, and the Smith twins, who were the product of a union unblessed by state or clergy. Half the kids were eligible for the school’s free lunch program. Marsha MacKinney, age eight, weighed fifty pounds, stood four feet two, and worried she’d never get any bigger. Ralph Lawson weighed a hundred ten pounds, stood five foot six, and worried he would. Penny had bought groceries at Ewald’s Market (Billy Ewald), mineral salts and livestock supplies from Thunder Ridge Farm (Margaret Baxter). Penny stuck to her lesson plan, and when the bell rang at 3:05 she reminded them of their homework and they said yes ma’am or nodded their heads.

  Principal Hess stuck his head in the door as Penny was putting on her coat. “How’d it go? Anything I can do? Anything at all.”

  Lewis was parked behind the school buses, his exhaust pluming white smoke in the frosty air. He said the Dodge truck was worth a looksee. It had a camper with stickers on it: HUNTING: THE AMERICAN WAY and WHEN THE TAILGATE DROPS THE BS STOPS. The camper latch was busted and the owner said his uncle had lost the key when he was out fishing and had to break the lock to get in.

  “I got to have fourteen hundred for it,” he said. Penny wrote him a check for twelve fifty.

  When they got back to the farm, Lewis wanted her to wait in the truck while he brought Beverly out to see. “Dad,” she said, “it’s just an old pickup truck. Besides, Hope’s been locked up all day.”

  After dinner (Lean Cuisine: Fettucini Alfredo) Penny went into the front room to watch TV and once she’d settled on the couch, Hope cocked an eye, put one paw on the armchair, another, unlawfully flumped himself into the seat and grinned at her. She smiled at his joke. “Okay, I get it,” she said. “Now get down off there.”